SOURCE: “Common Courtesy in The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” in Shakespeare's Comic Commonwealths, University of Toronto Press, 1993, pp. 57-73.

[In the following essay, Slights asserts that The Two Gentlemen of Verona explores not the theme of love versus friendship but rather the proper function and behavior of a gentleman in courtly society.]

                                        ‘he being understood
May make good Courtiers, but who Courtiers good?’

(John Donne, ‘Satyre V’)

Unlike The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew, which build on contrasts between the civilized and the uncivilized, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love's Labor's Lost explore the manners and values of courtly society. In The Comedy of Errors, the physical danger threatening anyone outside the social group frames and conditions all the dramatic action. The violence of the physical world that originally dispersed the family, the Ephesian law that threatens aliens with death, and the harsh ministrations of Doctor Pinch that isolate transgressors produce the farcical confusions that can end only when everyone is recognized as belonging to Ephesian society. In The Taming of the Shrew, the contrasts between the savage and the civilized—between the bestial Christopher Sly and the aristocratic Lord, the wild Kate and the domesticated Kate—both describe and motivate the action. With The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love's Labor's Lost our attention turns from the adventures of strangers and misfits in gaining a secure place in society to the activities, manners, and values of those securely at the top of the social hierarchy.

Although The Two Gentlemen of Verona has aroused little actual enthusiasm among critics, most commentators agree that by combining mockery of artificial conventions with lyric evocation of romantic love, The Two Gentlemen of Verona prepared the way for the great comedies to follow. Only the climatic final scene has presented an interpretative crux and provoked almost universal condemnation. In the last scene, immediately after saving his beloved Silvia from being raped by his treacherous friend Sir Proteus, Valentine accepts without question Proteus' protestations of remorse and offers to withdraw his own suit in favor of Proteus', saying:

And that my love may appear plain and free,
All that was mine in Silvia I give thee.

(V.iv.82-3)

Critics who see the play primarily as a celebration of romantic love are understandably perplexed when the romantic hero suddenly offers the heroine to his rival. From this point of view, Shakespeare has violently contradicted the premises of his own romantic comedy, transforming his young lover into an insensitive brute. Another standard approach places the play in the Renaissance tradition that exalts friendship over love. From this perspective, the scene, far from undermining the basic conventions of its own fictional world, is ‘the germ or core of the play’ and Valentine's offer to give up Silvia to Proteus is not boorish but generous, the magnanimous sacrifice of love to friendship.¹

From either point of view, the exchange between Proteus and Valentine is an artistic failure. If The Two Gentlemen of Verona is a celebration of the experience of falling in love—the absurdities and joys of youthful passion—the hero's cheerful offer of his mistress to the man who has just tried to rape her is certainly a blunder. On the other hand, if Valentine is intended as a model of selfless generosity according to Renaissance conceptions of ideal friendship, he is a remarkably weak exemplar of the tradition. In Sir Thomas Elyot's story of Titus and Gisippus, which apparently served as a source for the Valentine-Silvia-Proteus triangle, Gisippus relinquishes his betrothed to Titus, who marries her. Years later, when Gisippus is threatened with execution for murder, Titus confesses to the crime in an effort to die in his friend's place.² But in Shakespeare's play, neither Valentine nor Proteus actually sacrifices anything for friendship. After all, Valentine runs little risk that the repentant Proteus will take him up on his offer and even less that Silvia would accept him if he did.³

Without denying weaknesses and confusions in the early comedies, I think we should be suspicious of any critical position that convicts Shakespeare of inept bungling. It is not unthinking bardolatry to assume that even as an apprentice playwright Shakespeare would not construct a dramatic climax that signally fails to resolve and clarify any of the emotional or intellectual issues at stake. If the resolution of The Two Gentlemen of Verona does not illuminate the relationship of love to friendship, it is probable that interpretations emphasizing the triumph of one or the other are askew. Indeed, in the play itself only Proteus refers to a conflict between the claims of love and those of friendship, and he uses this formulation to justify betraying Julia's love as well as Valentine's friendship.

Although critics have been misled by Proteus' pat generalizations (‘In love / Who respects friend?’ [V.iv.53-4]), they have also responded to the ideas and values that recur throughout the play. For example, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch denounces Valentine's offer of Silvia to Sir Proteus in these terms: ‘there are, by this time, no gentlemen in Verona.’⁴ And M.C. Bradbrook defends the same action as ‘displaying in transcendent form the courtly virtue of Magnanimity, the first and greatest virtue of a gentleman.’⁵ While Quiller-Couch and Bradbrook obviously disagree over how a gentleman should act in Valentine's awkward situation, they both assume that the play directs us to evaluate Valentine's action in terms of the conduct appropriate to a gentleman. Valentine's gesture, like Averagus' offer of his wife to her suitor in Chaucer's The Franklin's Tale, expresses a particular conception of ‘gentilesse’ that has provoked variously admiration and censure.⁶The Two Gentlemen of Verona is less an evocation of what it feels like to fall in love than a comic exploration of the nature and function of a gentleman.

Quiller-Couch's outraged denunciation of fictional characters of whom he disapproves as ‘no gentlemen’ may strike us today as a quaint expression of his own Edwardian values, but we should remember that the scanty biographical knowledge we have suggests that the status of a gentleman was a subject Shakespeare personally took seriously enough. In the sixteenth century, moreover, the education, qualities, and functions of the gentleman were issues of considerable political and cultural importance.⁷ Works as popular and significant as Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, Sir Thomas Elyot's The Book Named the Governor, and Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene demonstrate the lasting interest and significance of Renaissance discussions on how to fashion a gentleman. The Two Gentlemen of Verona draws on and contributes to this tradition.

The opening scene introduces us to the play's unifying theme—the question of the proper behavior for a young gentleman—and to its dominant verbal mode—the indirections of polite discourse. Valentine, excited by his imminent departure ‘To see the wonders of the world abroad’ (I.i.6), and Proteus, ‘over boots in love’ (I.i.25) with Julia, are engaged in conventional activities for two young gentlemen of Verona, or of London. They debate the merits of their respective choices—foreign travel and love—with the verbal wit of the young gallant. For example, Valentine's taunting of Proteus with the follies of love leads to the following exchange:

pro. Yet writers say: as
in the sweetest bud
The eating canker dwells, so eating love
Inhabits in the finest wits of all.
val. And writers say: as the most
forward bud
Is eaten by the canker ere it blow,
Even so by love the young and tender wit
Is turn'd to folly, blasting in the bud,
Losing his verdure, even in the prime,
And all the fair effects of future hopes.

(I.i.42-50)

Valentine might have been reading in Castiglione's The Courtier of the ‘merry conceites and jestes’ that may appropriately grace the conversation of the perfect courtier: ‘among other merry sayings, they have a verie good grace, that arise when a man at the nipping talke of his fellow, taketh the verie same words in the self same sense, and returneth them backe againe, pricking him with his owne weapon … Also merry sayinges are much to the purpose to nippe a man … so the metaphors be well applyed, and especially if they be answered, and he that maketh answere continue in the self same metaphor spoken by the other.’⁸ Although the form of their speech, nipping and pricking at each other, implies opposition, Valentine and Proteus are actually in total agreement. For all his scorn at love's folly, Valentine does not seriously attempt to dissuade Proteus from loving; he wishes his friend well in love, acknowledging that in time he too expects to fall in love:

But since thou lov'st, love still, and thrive therein,
Even as I would, when I to love begin.

(I.i.9-10)

And Proteus expects a friend's feelings of vicarious pleasure and protective concern from Valentine's travels:

Wish me partaker in thy happiness
When thou dost meet good hap; and in thy danger
(If ever danger do environ thee)
Commend thy grievance to my holy prayers.

(I.i.14-17)

Privately he concedes Valentine's point: love has made his ‘wit with musing weak’ (I.i.69). Ostensibly denoting rivalry, their wit actually expresses affectionate concord.

The wordplay that signals the young men's pretensions to courtly elegance also indicates their youth and inexperience. Valentine and Proteus, like Romeo and Mercutio or Beatrice and Benedick, use puns and ripostes and ironies to impress others with their mental and verbal agility and to give themselves a sense of control over their world as well as to express their high-spirited exuberance and to exercise their developing powers for sheer enjoyment. Their linguistic ingenuity is not the effortless command of language that expresses unselfconscious ease and assurance in a social situation but rather the ostentatious display of wit that indicates vulnerability and insecurity. When Valentine and Proteus are together, like-minded friends who understand and respect each other, mocking repartee is subsumed within the context of frank and open talk, and their conversation has some claim to grace as well as to vitality. In other situations, they are less able to balance rhetorical indirections with straightforward communication and consequently appear noticeably more awkward.

In the dialogue between Proteus and Speed that follows Valentine's exit, for example, repeated quibbles on ‘ship,’ ‘sheep,’ and ‘mutton’ grow tiresome. Since Proteus fails to get a clear report of the delivery of his message to Julia, while Speed does succeed in exacting his tip, Proteus emerges the loser in this contest of wits with his friend's servant. In his next appearance Proteus' language is even more completely at variance from literal truth, and his ingenuity is utilized to more disastrous—and comic—effect. In scene three, Proteus is exulting in a letter from Julia—‘her oath for love’ (I.iii.47)—when his father interrupts to ask what he is reading. Proteus replies that his letter is from Valentine:

                                        he writes
How happily he lives, how well-belov'd
And daily graced by the Emperor;
Wishing me with him, partner of his fortune.

(I.ii.56-9)

Ironically, the lie designed to hide and protect his relationship with Julia precipitates his separation from her by reinforcing his father's decision that Proteus should join Valentine to complete his education. The adolescent's instinctive impulse to hide his love letter from his all-too-solicitous parent should not be interpreted as evidence of a basically duplicitous character, but the spectacle of Proteus blundering into a trap he has set for himself certainly provokes amusement at his expense.

The same type of youthful gaucherie is the source of humor in both the preceding and the following scenes. In the preceding scene Julia indignantly scolds her maid, Lucetta, first for delivering Proteus' letter and then for interpreting her angry words literally instead of understanding them as conventional expressions of maidenly modesty:

What ‘fool is she, that knows I am a maid,
And would not force the letter to my view!
Since maids, in modesty, say ‘no’ to that
Which they would have the profferer construe ‘ay.’

(I.ii.53-6)

After another round of verbal sparring with Lucetta, Julia histrionically tears the letter in pieces and finally is reduced to searching the ground for the precious fragments to piece together. Although subsequently Proteus' fickleness contrasts with Julia's constancy, in Act I it is their similarity that is most striking. Both feel the need to protect the privacy of their new, tender emotions, and both are comically inept in their attempts at dissimulation.⁹

Valentine too finds himself out of his depth in the emotional subtleties and linguistic indirections of polite society. While Proteus and Julia betray their naïveté through their bungling attempt at dissimulation, Valentine displays his through his literal-minded incomprehension. When the scene shifts to Milan we discover that Valentine, the scoffer at love, has fallen in love with Silvia, the Duke's daughter, and is suffering all the paradoxical pain and ecstasy, exaltation and humiliation of the conventional courtly lover. He has even complied with Silvia's request that he write a letter for her to ‘one she loves’ (II.i.88). Silvia then feigns anger at Valentine's reluctance to send her love to another and tells him to keep the lines of love he has written for himself:

But I will none of them; they are for you.
I would have had them writ more movingly.

(II.i.127-8)

And, to Valentine's offer to repeat his effort:

And when it's writ, for my sake read it over,
And if it please you, so; if not, why, so.

(II.i.130-1)

Although Silvia's jest, as Speed says, is as ‘unseen, inscrutable; invisible, / As a nose on a man's face’ (II.i.135-6), Valentine fails to understand that she is teaching him to court her in earnest.

Silvia, in fact, is instructing Valentine in just the kind of courtly wit and elegant discourse the young gentlemen from Verona have come to Milan to learn. When Proteus' father and uncle worry that he is wasting his time at home, they canvas the alternatives open to a well-born young man:

Some to the wars, to try their fortune there;
Some to discover islands far away;
Some to the studious universities.

(II.iii.8-10)

Apparently on the basis of the paramount importance of acquiring the social graces, they decide to send Proteus to court where he will be able to

practice tilts and tournaments,
Hear sweet discourse, converse with noblemen,
And be in eye of every exercise
Worthy his youth and nobleness of birth.

(I.iii.30-3)

Several critics have condemned this courtly behavior as trivial or even corrupt, an unworthy goal that Valentine and Proteus must discard before real education can take place.¹⁰ J.A. Mazzeo's defense of Castiglione's The Courtier from similar criticism illuminates, I think, the attitude to courtly sophistication in Shakespeare's play. Mazzeo acknowledges that the ‘attention Castiglione gives to gesture, manner, games, jokes, and anecdotes might seem to some of his readers an extraordinary trivialization of the ideals of true education.’ But, he argues, by neglecting these ‘non-verbal modes of communication and expression, or the non-referential uses of language,’ modern education often produces narrow specialists,

‘experts’ with extraordinary capacities in certain well-defined areas and no grasp of the meaning of human actions, activities, gestures, or of the varieties of emotional expression. Such are those who cannot distinguish between what men say and do and what they mean by what they say and do, who cannot truly understand speech because speech is much more than the words it uses. What the modern reader may see as trivia in Castiglione's program of education are after all the vehicles of those subtle and feeling interchanges between people which do as much as anything to give them the sense that they are really alive.¹¹

Castiglione's emphasis on style and gesture, on jokes and games, is essential to his subject, ‘the creation of the self as a work of art through education’ (Mazzeo, 149), and to his concept of individual perfection as a balance and harmony of all important human capacities without excessive development or suppression of any. This attempt to delineate human perfection in an ideal courtier links The Courtier to the important cultural impulse in the Renaissance that produced so much utopian literature and so many books outlining ideal social forms of various kinds (Mazzeo, 134-5). In addition, the popularity of The Courtier and other courtesy books reflects concern with social cohesion as well as with individual development. The courtesy books all agree that public service is the gentleman's primary function and that the end of his education in the ways of society is his ability to advise his ruler effectively.¹² The qualities of behavior that characterize the gentleman are those that bind people together in social harmony.¹³ Thus, according to Edmund Spenser, the courtly virtue of courtesy is the source of all ‘goodly manners’ and ‘civill conversation’ (The Faerie Queene, VI.i.1).¹⁴ It includes not only personal appearance and manner—‘all gracious gifts … / Which decke the body or adorne the mynde’—but also ‘friendly offices that bynde’ and correct social behavior:

how to each degree and kynde
We should our selves demeane, to low, to hie;
To friends, to foes, which skill men call Civility.

(FQ, VI.x.23)

In this context, we can see that when Antonio worries that his son Proteus ‘cannot be a perfect man’ (I.iii.20) without more experience in the world, he is not identifying himself as a Neo-Platonic philosopher striving towards perfection, but neither is he betraying hopelessly superficial values. He endorses an educational program similar to Castiglione's when he chooses life at court as most suitable to his son's ‘youth and nobleness of birth.’ The play's early scenes have demonstrated clearly that young gentlemen need social tact, verbal dexterity, even some adeptness at polite dissimulation in order to get along harmoniously with servants, fathers, and women. In the first court scene, Silvia uses the letter as an ‘excellent device’ (II.i.139) to express her own desires and to help Valentine overcome his timidity without violating social decorum. By calling on the ‘clerkly’ skills of her ‘gentle servant’ (II.i.108), she utilizes Valentine's gentlemanly accomplishments of the most artificial and conventional kind—courtly love conventions and literary skills—in order to liberate real feelings.¹⁵ The grace and wit with which she employs the artifices of sophisticated society in order to circumvent the obstacles erected by conventions of rank and sex role are no mean accomplishments.

While The Two Gentlemen of Verona presents courtly elegance as a positive value, it also shows how fragile and easily corrupted this ideal is. Superficially trivial manners are the necessary texture of a humane society that encourages people to develop their full potential and that fosters a variety of subtle feelings and relationships among people, yet these same manners may degenerate into hypocrisy or cynical intrigue. The courtly ideal is a precarious balance of self-enhancement and social responsibility. The aristocratic code blends strict devotion to truth (so that proverbially a gentleman's word is his bond) with an elegant grace of manner that involves artifice and pretense, the art of concealing art.¹⁶ Sir Calidore, Spenser's knight of courtesy, for example, ‘loved simple truth and stedfast honesty’ (FQ, VI.i.3), but the ‘friendly offices’ he performed sometimes required deception.¹⁷Sprezzatura, the graceful nonchalance that Castiglione recommends for the ideal courtier, may degenerate into the disdain and contempt that, according to Mazzeo, are ‘vaguely present’ in the concept.¹⁸ Gentlemanly dignity may degenerate into cold arrogance or ostentatious self-display, and playful wit into either irresponsible frivolity or malicious deceit.¹⁹

The plot of The Two Gentlemen of Verona unfolds out of Valentine's and Proteus' acquisition of courtly values and style. Not surprisingly, superficial manners prove to be more easily learned than the ability to use them to develop well-rounded individuality and social harmony. Valentine, who initially cannot distinguish between what Silvia says and what she means, readily picks up the art of courtly circuitousness and dissimulation. The next time he appears he courts Silvia indirectly by bandying insults with another suitor. His language in this scene demonstrates both the social utility and the danger of courtly linguistic conventions. By rejecting Speed's advice that his hated rival Sir Thurio should be ‘knock'd’ (II.iv.7) and instead expressing his hostility in what Silvia commends as ‘A fine volley of words’ (II.iv.33), Valentine acts out sexual rivalry with wit and gaiety rather than brutality. But when he adopts the language of courtly love without Silvia's ironic detachment from it, his perceptions are blunted rather than refined by the conventions. By acknowledging that ‘Love's a mighty lord’ (II.iv.136) and by confessing the sorrow and joy of love's service, Valentine joins in civilized humanity's transformation of sexual appetite into love. But he betrays self-deceit and insensitivity when he insists that Proteus acknowledge Silvia as ‘divine,’ not earthly, and when he refers to Julia, Proteus's beloved, with gratuitous contempt:

She shall be dignified with this high honor—
To bear my lady's train.

(II.iv.158-9)

The contradictory tensions inherent in the sixteenth-century idea of gentlemanly behavior become even more evident in Valentine's scheme to elope with Silvia. By planning to release Silvia from the tower where her father locks her and from marriage to the rich but doltish Sir Thurio, Valentine is rescuing a damsel-in-distress in the best chivalric tradition and insisting on the dignity and delicacy of love and marriage. Yet he is also violating the Duke's parental right and abusing his hospitality. When Valentine first confides his plan to Proteus, considerations of the first sort combine with the conventional comic endorsement of youth and love against age and law to direct the sympathy of the audience towards the lovers. The irresponsibility of the plot comes more forcibly to mind later, when the Duke, under the guise of seeking love-advice himself, tricks Valentine into revealing his plan. In this scene, Valentine hypocritically praises Thurio as a match for Silvia, cynically explains that women reject men's advances only in order to egg them on and that any woman can be won with gifts and flattery, and proposes a rope ladder to gain access to a woman whose friends have promised her to someone else. The Duke's reply,

Now as thou art a gentleman of blood,
Advise me where I may have such a ladder,

(III.i.121-2)

reminds us that Valentine is fulfilling his gentleman's duty to advise and serve his ruler in a particularly tawdry way. In this context, we watch with amusement rather than anxiety as the Duke outwits Valentine, discovering the ladder and the incriminating letter to Silvia hidden under his cloak.

In Valentine, then, we can discern the danger that aristocratic self-assurance will become pride and that delicacy and subtlety will become duplicity. Proteus perverts the gentlemanly ideal even more radically. As we have seen, his family encourages him to strive to perfect himself. Valentine, who gracefully apologizes for his own failure to achieve ‘angel-like perfection’ (II.iv.66), praises his friend as a model gentleman:

He is complete in feature and in mind
With all good grace to grace a gentleman.

(II.iv.73-4)

When Proteus joins Valentine at the court of Milan, this exemplar of the art of self-cultivation becomes the apologist for sheer selfishness. No sooner does he learn of Valentine's love than he determines to win Silvia himself, consoling himself for the loss of Valentine's friendship with the thought ‘I to myself am dearer than a friend’ (II.vi.23), and justifying the plot he immediately formulates to betray Valentine to the Duke and subsequently to slander him to Silvia:

I cannot now prove constant to myself,
Without some treachery us'd to Valentine.

(II.vi.31-2)

While Valentine becomes guilty of disdain and deceit, it remains for Proteus to stoop to the even more contemptible practice of detraction and slander.²⁰ His attempts at self-justification are so absurdly sophistical, however, and his machinations to win Silvia so obviously self-defeating that the audience is again not so much morally outraged by his perfidy as amused by the mess he is getting himself into.

Thus, aristocratic values contain the seeds of their own destruction. In the process of developing the qualities of a gentleman both Valentine and Proteus lose their status as gentlemen: the Duke denounces Valentine for aspiring to his daughter as a ‘base intruder, overweening slave’ (III.i.157), and Proteus, even as he undertakes to destroy Silvia's love for Valentine by accusing him of ‘falsehood, cowardice, and poor descent’ (III.ii.32), admits that slandering his friend is ‘an ill office for a gentleman’ (III.ii.40). This breakdown of civilized manners extends even to Launce's dog Crab, who ‘thrusts … himself into the company of three or four gentleman-like dogs, under the Duke's table’ and there disgraces himself (IV.iv.16-18).

The elegant courtly society that draws all the young people to it through the first two acts begins, in Act III, to self-destruct, literally and physically as well as figuratively and spiritually. Valentine's introduction to courtly love and dissimulation culminates in his banishment from court. His exile precipitates Silvia's flight, which in turn causes the Duke, Proteus, and Thurio to pursue her, while Julia, disguised as a page boy, follows Proteus. By the end of Act IV, all the major characters have abandoned the court of Milan with its dangers and frustrations and have fled to the lawless and dangerous forest.

This contrary motion towards and away from the court suggests that the very qualities that bind people together in civilized society also threaten to fragment and dissolve those bonds. The aristocratic insistence on excellence as a standard and on perfection as a goal encourages individual fulfillment in a complex and humane society, but it is also inherently competitive. This paradox underlies the pattern in Shakespeare's portrayal of love discerned by René Girard, in which imitative desire produces increasing violence. Girard argues that the confusions of A Midsummer Night's Dream arise out of the young lovers' aspirations for sexual dominance deriving from an erotic ideal:

they all worship the same erotic absolute, the same ideal image of seduction which each girl and boy in turn appears to embody in the eyes of the others. This absolute has nothing to do with concrete qualities; it is properly metaphysical. Even though obsessed with the flesh, desire is divorced from it; it is not instinctive and spontaneous; it never seems to know directly and immediately where its object lies; in order to locate that object, it cannot rely on such things as the pleasure of the eyes and the other senses. In its perpetual noche oscura, metaphysical desire must therefore trust in another and supposedly more enlightened desire on which it patterns itself.²¹

Thus, Helena, Hermia, Lysander, and Demetrius all ‘choose love by another's eyes’ (MND, I.i.140), according to Girard. The ‘crucial point’ about this mimetic desire is ‘the necessarily jealous and conflictual nature of mimetic convergence on a single object. If we keep borrowing each other's desires, if we allow our respective desires to agree on the same object, we, as individuals, are bound to disagree … Metaphysical desire is mimetic, and mimetic desire cannot be let loose without breeding a midsummer night of jealousy and strife’ (191-2).

Conflicts arising from this kind of romantic passion that is not a spontaneous response to a desirable and desired other but primarily an imitation of a model are more clearly evident in The Two Gentlemen of Verona than in A Midsummer Night's Dream. When Valentine insists that Silvia is the ideal woman ‘whose worth makes other worthies nothing’ (II.iv.166), he teaches Proteus to forsake Julia and make Silvia the object of his desire. Even Proteus admits that ‘Valentinus' praise’ has as much to do with his passion as his own perception of Silvia's perfections (II.iv.196-8). And we realize that for him Silvia ‘excels each mortal thing’ (IV.ii.51) primarily because ‘all our swains commend her’ (IV.ii.40). Proteus' sudden desire for Silvia destroys the social group through betrayal and banishment and also undermines his sense of his own identity. As Girard explains, a metaphysical, mimetic passion is necessarily self-destructive: it is ‘destructive not only because of its sterile rivalries but because it dissolves reality: it tends to the abstract, the merely representational’ (193). It feeds on rejection and failure: ‘The impossible is always preferred to the possible, the unreal to the real, the hostile and unwilling to the willing and available’ (195). Although the aspiration to an erotic ideal is basically self-elevating, the worship of an unattainable idol results in the lover's self-abasement expressed in animal images: ‘far from raising himself to the state of a superman, a god, as he seeks to do, the subject of mimetic desire sinks to the level of animality. The animal images are the price the self has to pay for its idolatrous worship of otherness’ (197).

Thus Proteus complains that:

spaniel-like, the more she spurns my love,
The more it grows, and fawneth on her still.

(IV.ii.14-15)

He begs for a picture of Silvia, announcing that since he cannot possess ‘the substance of [her] perfect self,’

                                        I am but a shadow;
And to your shadow will I make true love.

(IV.ii.123-5)

And Silvia agrees that it is entirely appropriate for false Proteus ‘To worship shadows and adore false shapes’ (IV.ii.130). Even for Valentine the consequence of worshipping a human idol is dissolution of a sense of self-integrity:

To die is to be banish's from myself,
And Silvia is myself: banish'd from her
Is self from self, a deadly banishment.
She is my essence, and I leave to be,
If I be not by her fair influence
Foster'd, illumin'd, cherish'd, kept alive.

(III.i.171-3, 182-4)

Sending Valentine and Proteus to court to learn to act like perfect gentlemen by observing the best models ironically results in loss of a sense of self and destruction of social cohesion, but the play also makes clear that refusal to emulate models of decorum can have equally disastrous consequences, as Launce complains to Crab: ‘I remember the trick you serv'd me, when I took my leave of Madam Silvia. Did not I bid thee still mark me, and do as I do? When didst thou see me heave up my leg and make water against a gentlewoman's farthingale? Didst thou ever see me do such a trick?’ (IV.iv.34-9)

The genteel lovers experience the disadvantages of life without the restraints of civilization when they flee from court to the lawless wilderness. By escaping from the capricious dangers of courtly hypocrisy and ducal tyranny, they become vulnerable to physical brutality, threatened with robbery, murder, and rape. In the woods outside Milan they learn the worth and limitations of their conception of gentility.

In this first example in Shakespearean comedy of a rural retreat where courtly lovers overcome their difficulties and adjust their values before returning to civilization, the sylvan setting is far from being a pastoral world of innocence and peace. The woods are inhabited by society's outcasts, outlaws banished for murder and ‘such like petty crimes’ (IV.i.50), who live by terrorizing and robbing hapless travelers. In this setting, Proteus' frustrations erupt in violence. When Silvia continues to reject him and to condemn him after he rescues her from the outlaws, he tries to rape her.

But if the woods are a setting for violence and uncontrolled passion, they do not represent a state of nature free from social distinctions and hierarchy. The outlaws are absurdly proud that some of them are gentlemen by birth and feel acutely the need for a leader to command them. Rather than the possibility of an egalitarian society they embody an alternate and older idea of the gentleman, that is, the aristocrat as armed warrior. Fiercely loyal to their own band, sensitive to slights on their honor, they recognize no authority or social obligation beyond the immediate group. Their recognition of Valentine as their natural leader on the basis of his general deportment and linguistic ability is Shakespeare's comic rendition of actual historical process. The chivalric armed warrior, though romantically appealing, makes way for the educated, accomplished courtier.²² Given the choice of joining the outlaws as their leader or of being killed for insulting them with his refusal, Valentine accepts an offer he cannot very well refuse. But he soon understands the undesirability of living with men who ‘make their wills their law’ (V.iv.14). He finds the ‘unfrequented woods’ a better place to lament his loss of Silvia than ‘flourishing peopled towns’ V.iv.2-3), but he knows that total isolation is not possible. He must perforce relate to other people in some kind of social structure, if not as lawful subject in a civilized community, then as a member of a faction of outlaws whose ‘uncivil outrages’ (V.iv.17) he can restrain only with difficulty.

In this situation, when Valentine witnesses Proteus' solicitation and attack on Silvia, his response reflects his developed understanding of the individual's relation to society as well as his personal hurt:

Ruffian! let go that rude uncivil touch,
Thou friend of an ill fashion!
.....Thou common friend, that's without faith or love,
For such is a friend now!

(V.iv.60-3)

Proteus' treachery epitomizes the point at which the selfishness and shallow hypocrisy of courtly fashion are indistinguishable from uncivilized savagery, a paradox expressed in the ambiguous epithet ‘common’: by adopting the debased manners of the fashionable world, Proteus forfeits his claim to being a true gentleman. Betrayal by his most trusted friend forces Valentine to see feelingly that total disillusionment both with the manners of society and with their rejection, instead of allowing him a superior position of intellectual detachment, leads to the terrifying isolation of complete alienation:

Who should be trusted, when one's right hand
Is perjured to the bosom? Proteus,
I am sorry I must never trust thee more,
But count the world a stranger for thy sake.

(V.iv.67-70)

Shocked into realizing what he has become, Proteus repents. Valentine accepts his apology both because he believes that forgiveness is at once naturally human and imitative of divinity and because for him the alternative to trusting Proteus is to trust no one. Valentine and Proteus have glimpsed a world of sheer brutality and total cynicism, and together they draw back from the abyss. Their reconciliation fills personal emotional needs and indicates their renewed acceptance of their place in civilized society where men are bound together by mutual trust as well as by civil authority. Valentine's speech accepting Proteus' repentance marks his return to a world where a gentleman's word is his bond but where gentlemen characteristically communicate through indirection. It modulates from the plain statement of the terms of their relationship—‘Then I am paid; / And once again I do receive thee honest’ (V.iv.77-8)—to the elegant indirection of offering to give up Silvia. Because he accepts Proteus as honestly repentant, he has faith that his friend will not renew his pursuit of Silvia. His offer is a courteous gesture that will give Proteus a chance to be his best self.

At this point, the play averts the threatened bathos of repeated, elaborate gestures of repentance and forgiveness and re-establishes the prevailing comic tone by having Valentine's attempt at sophisticated indirection miscarry once again. Although his gesture demonstrates love and trust in Proteus with considerable tact and subtlety, he has no way of considering the effect on the disguised Julia. For her it is the last straw: she faints, revives, and immediately reveals her identity and her claim to Proteus' love and fidelity. Indeed, the happy ending is possible not only because Valentine and Proteus have gained a more complex understanding of themselves and their relation to other people, but because Julia and Silvia have always had a more balanced view. Both women defy convention and abandon society's protection in pursuit of love, but they struggle to preserve whatever decorum is possible. They do not choose love by others' eyes. Silvia is impervious to slander against Valentine and to praise of Proteus and Thurio. Julia justly resents Proteus' eulogizing of Silvia without learning to despise herself. Because they are confident of their own worth and their own judgment of the men they love, without claiming perfection for either, they can meet the situation that pushes them toward rivalry and conflict with mutual sympathy.

The re-establishment of the bonds of civilization begun with the reconciliation of the friends and lovers is completed by the entry of the Duke and by Valentine's deference to him. The Duke confirms the ‘new state’ of things, announcing, ‘Sir Valentine, / Thou art a gentleman and well deriv'd’ (V.iv.144, 145-6) and blessing his union with Silvia.²³

The play has not, however, merely come full circle back to a celebration of courtliness and conventionality. If the outlaws and Proteus have discredited the image of the noble brigand, the gentleman simply as courtier and courtly lover has also proved inadequate. Silvia has trusted to the protection of Sir Eglamour on the grounds that he is a gentleman (IV.iii.11-13) and suffered for her folly when he is unable to save her from the outlaws. Thurio, the Duke's choice for son-in-law, proves to be a coward. Valentine no longer relies on indirection and subterfuge to win Silvia but directly warns off Thurio with violent threats. He wins the Duke's favor and reappraisal of his social rank, not by his obedience, but by his high spirit. And for the first time Valentine explicitly mentions serving the state as the gentleman's true vocation, urging the Duke to pardon the outlaws for they are ‘fit for great employment’ (V.iv.157). Indeed, the secret of Valentine's success is his flexibility—witty and courtly with Silvia, respectful to the Duke, contemptuous and then trustful of Proteus. Valentine's flexibility is the benign counterpart of Proteus' inconsistency; together they demonstrate contrasting possibilities inherent in human adaptability and potential for shaping individual identity.²⁴

The Two Gentlemen of Verona ridicules the inadequacies of the elegant courtly lover, reckless adventurer, and sycophantic courtier, but the ideas of the gentleman current in the sixteenth century—as polished courtier, scholar, soldier, and statesman—all contribute to the unattainable ideal it suggests. By the end of the play, we feel that Valentine has proved himself a gentleman through an elusive combination of courtliness, high-spirited courage, social responsibility, and faithful love and friendship. If the play hints darkly that both pursuit of an external standard of perfection and lawless self-will are destructive of social cohesion and civilized life, it also celebrates the communal happiness possible when people combine idealism with realistic understanding of human imperfection and join self-cultivation and self-assertion with respect for other people. Proteus may be right that ‘were man / But constant, he were perfect’ (V.iv.110-11), but in a world of imperfect men the play prescribes a virtue closer to what Spenser calls courtesy:

how to each degree and kynde
We should our selves demeane, to low, to hie;
To friends, to foes, which skill men call Civility.

(FQ, VI.x.23)

Notes

1. M. C. Bradbrook, Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1951), 151.

2. Thomas Elyot, The Book Named the Governor, ed. S. E. Lehmberg (London: Dent, 1962), 136-51.

3. Ralph M. Sargent makes this point in ‘Sir Thomas Elyot and the Integrity of The Two Gentlemen of Verona,’ PMLA, 65 (1950), 1166-80.

4. ‘Introduction,’ The Two Gentlemen of Verona (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), xiv.

5. Bradbrook, 151.

6. A. C. Hamilton suggests a parallel with The Franklin's Tale in The Early Shakespeare (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library Press, 1967), 126.

7. See J. H. Hexter, ‘The Education of the Aristocracy in the Renaissance’ in his Reappraisals in History (London: Longmans, 1961), 45-70; Ruth Kelso, The Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1929); Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965).

8. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby, in Three Renaissance Classics, ed. Burton A. Milligan (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953), 388, 408, 413.

9. Proteus' subsequent behavior suggests that the particular lie he fabricates may well express a subconscious desire for just what happens—avoidance of the emotional responsibility of his new relationship with Julia and a chance to join in his friend's adventures. If so, it does not mean that his feelings for Julia are feigned but that he finds the confusing intensity of a new kind of emotional experience difficult to deal with and intuitively recognizes that he is not ready to make that relationship public.

10. For example, Peter Lindenbaum points out that in Act I ‘the perfect man’ envisioned by Proteus' guardians, and presumably by those of Valentine as well, is merely a gentleman adept in the social arts' (232). The significant dramatic action, he argues, is the education of the characters to redefine the ‘perfect man’ in religious rather than social terms. ‘Education in The Two Gentlemen of Verona,’ Studies in English Literature, 15 (1975), 229-44.

11. ‘Castiglione's Courtier: The Self as a Work of Art’ in Renaissance and Revolution (New York: Pantheon, 1965), 147.

12. See Castiglione, The Courtier, 542; Elyot, The Governor, passim.

13. Like Frank Whigham's examination of conventions of courtly behavior in Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), The Two Gentlemen of Verona reveals how courtly discourse excludes the powerless while unifying the elite. But while Whigham stresses how the articulation of codes of courtly behavior ironically provides access to power for the socially mobile, The Two Gentlemen examines the social consequences of an ethic of self-fulfillment among the elite.

14. I quote from The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J. C. Smith and E. De Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1912). In quoting from old spelling texts I have silently modernized i/j, u/v, and long s.

15. The Courtier explains the courtly lover's duty to serve his mistress. English courtesy books place less emphasis on love, but they insist ‘that all gentlemen worthy of the name must be clerks’ (Hexter, 49). On the distrust of love in English courtesy books, see Kelso, 85.

16. See Kelso, 78; Elyot, 172. According to Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), ‘Courtly grace, to the extent that it can be prescribed, is shown to rely on tactics of dissimulation … For instance, sprezzatura, one of the chief sources of such grace, always entails deliberate subterfuge’ (36).

17. He equivocates, for example, to protect Priscilla's reputation (FQ, VI.iii.16, 18). On this and other instances of innocent duplicity in FQ, VI, see William Nelson, The Poetry of Edmund Spenser (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 283.

18. ‘The root of the word is from the verb sprezzare, “to disdain” or “to hold in contempt,” and this sense is vaguely present in Castiglione's concept, although without pejorative connotations’ (Mazzeo, 145).

19. In Spenser's ‘Legend of Courtesy,’ Despotto, Decetto, and Defetto (disdain, deceit, and detraction) appear as villains both because they are negators of courtesy and because they are the dangers courtesy or civility is most susceptible to.

20. Again, Shakespeare is dramatizing problems of behavior strikingly similar to those Spenser treats in the nearly contemporary Book VI of The Faerie Queene: Proteus' willingness to slander Valentine demonstrates the absoluteness of his betrayal of his friend and the completeness of his degradation; the quest of Sir Calidore, the knight of courtesy, is to subdue the Blatant Beast, a monster embodying slander and calumny.

21. ‘Myth and Ritual in Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream,’ in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 191.

22. On the gradual disappearance of the aristocratic warrior, see Stone, Crisis, especially 199-270.

23. A. C. Hamilton argues that until this point Proteus is the only gentleman of Verona, Valentine being lowly born and becoming a gentleman by merit (120-1). The Duke's reasoning—Valentine has merit and is therefore well-derived—may well parody the Elizabethans' penchant for constructing genealogies appropriate to their sense of their own dignity. Hexter, for example, mentions William Cecil's attempt ‘to provide his grandfather … with a fancier set of ancestors’ (‘The Myth of the Middle Class in Tudor England’ in Reappraisals, 102), and Stone comments on the virtuosity of those ‘imaginative creative writers, the Tudor heralds’ who could provide family trees beginning with the Trojans or Old Testament figures such as Noah (Crisis, 23-4). I think, however, that Valentine's lineage is not as significant a factor as, say, Helena's in All's Well That Ends Well. Although the play is vague about Valentine's antecedents, it does not make a point of any social disparity between Valentine and Proteus. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Shakespeare is not interested in how the governing class is recruited but in the qualities desirable in its members.

24. For the importance of these ideas in Renaissance culture, see Thomas Greene, ‘The Flexibility of the Self in Renaissance Literature,’ 241-64; A. Bartlett Giametti, ‘Proteus Unbound: Some Versions of the Sea God in the Renaissance,’ 437-75, in The Disciplines of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation, and History, ed. Peter Demetz, Thomas Greene, and Lowry Nelson, Jr. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968); Stephen J. Greenblatt, Sir Walter Raleigh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), especially 31-41, and Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980). Greene and Giametti stress the socially benign effects of flexibility, while Greenblatt is more interested in its darker aspects.