[In the following essay Rossky maintains that The Two Gentlemen of Verona, particularly the play's ending, is intended as a burlesque, rather than as a serious but ultimately failed attempt to portray the conventions of Renaissance thinking on ethics.]

Among the variety of critical approaches which attempt to explain why The Two Gentlemen of Verona is, or seems to our time to be, a Shakespearean failure, the most prevalent is the rationalization that the play is a serious dramatization of conventional Renaissance ethical thought, especially on the supremacy of friendship over love—ideas quite different from our own, meaningful to Elizabethans though hardly to us.¹ A few critics, however, have of late tentatively or fleetingly suggested that the play is essentially a burlesque.² The position of this essay is that the play is, indeed, a good-humored satirical lark, most of all in its controversial ending, and that this view is supported by examination not only of its comic patterns but also by Elizabethan attitudes toward friendship and love.

Paradoxically, a confirmation of this view appears in the comments of those who have attacked the play as a ridiculous failure. H. B. Charlton's denigrating comparison of scenes in the play to Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance³ turns out to be more penetrating than he knew. For on examination, The Two Gentlemen turns out to be the closest thing in Shakespeare to Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Are Shakespeare's outlaws ridiculous? Precisely. Just like Gilbert's pirates. And the parallels proliferate as one thinks about them. Like the Victorian pirates, Shakespeare's outlaws are, of course, revealed to be gentlemen only temporarily fallen on evil ways and times—some for “such … petty crimes”⁴ as murder and kidnapping—and are similarly forgiven by a Major General or, more precisely, a duke. In the comic exposure of foolishness and natural cowardice in community leaders, both Shakespeare are Gilbert and Sullivan display a comic touch, whether through Major General, Lord Admiral, police of Penzance, and Lord High Executioner, on the one hand, or, on the other, through aristocrats like the dense and pusillanimous Sir Thurio, or Sir Eglamour, the courageous and devoted knight of the ladies who abandons Silvia as soon as the brigands attack, or even the inflexible Duke of Milan, who becomes suddenly agreeable—once in Valentine's power. In both stories, we find the twitting of young love, of maidenly reserve and instant infatuation. The naive, sometimes stupid adolescent fatuity of lovers is a trait Valentine shares with a good many of the heroes of comic operettas and musical comedy in general. The familiar Gilbert and Sullivan farcical solution in which sudden recognitions or revelations produce happy endings appears in Julia's ring trick. Even the appearance of sentiment in the midst of hilarity is common to both. If Valentine had sung his lonely soliloquy about living among outlaws in the forest, it might well have resembled Frederic's about living among pirates.

But for burlesque nothing, not even the laughter inspired by Launce and Speed's exposure of the foibles of the courtly lovers,⁵ equals the ending. Like a parody of the villain in a nickelodeon melodrama, Proteus threatens the shrinking heroine (“O heaven!” she cries), “I'll force thee yield to my desire” (V. iv. 58-59), at which cue out stalks Hairbreadth Harry Valentine: “Ruffian! Let go that rude uncivil touch, / Thou friend of an ill fashion” (60-61). “Valentine!” exclaims the foiled villain. In the light of his discovery, Valentine's subsequent judgment, “Proteus, / I am sorry I must never trust thee more,” is positively bathetic, and his fatuous piety and offer of Silvia leave her comically speechless. Julia's clever swoon and astute confusion of the rings so that Proteus must recognize who she is (perhaps she even gives the audience a wink at this juncture?) caps the farce. Even though The Two Gentlemen is early Shakespeare, it is, as Francis Fergusson has pointed out, “sensible to give him credit for knowing just how silly his gentlemen would appear.”⁶

Since such a reading of the play seems to depend upon our adopting a particular, modern imaginative stance, it may be objected that we have mistaken unintended absurdities for burlesque. The most reductionist as well as anti-comic view argues that we are contemporizing and thus distorting the play, construing as absured solemn Elizabethan conventions too distant from us to be wholly appreciated. This critical position is presumably based on evidence from Renaissance literature on love and friendship and from Shakespeare's own drama. That such views leave the play at best an elegant monotony perhaps should not trouble us. After all, there exists no proof that Shakespeare was incapable of writing a dull play—even though no other play of his is. One way of resolving the question is to examine in some detail sources and analogues treating the conventions of love and friendship which scholars have cited, as well as relevant Shakespearean practice, to see whether the dramatist does after all seriously follow the assumed conventions or whether, on the contrary, he may be mocking them.

Let us begin with what is probably the most frequently cited example of the supremacy of friendship over love, the story of Titus and Gissippus, and, because it was clearly accessible to Shakespeare (indeed he was almost certainly influenced by the book itself), with the version of the story that appears in Sir Thomas Elyot's The Governor.⁷ Elyot does move us to accept Gissippus' yielding of his lady to his friend Titus. But almost everything that Elyot does to prompt our acceptance of friendship over love, Shakespeare alters to create comic absurdity. Most obvious, of course, is the fact of Proteus' villainy. Unlike Proteus, Titus behaves honorably. He considers himself a “false traitor”⁸ to Gissippus merely for loving the lady and faithfully hides his feeling. Unlike Proteus, Titus cannot betray his friend. Such admirable behavior would alone make him more deserving than his counterpart in Shakespeare and thus makes Gissippus' offer less ridiculous than Valentine's. But equally important, unless Titus achieves his love, he will die—as Proteus assuredly will not—so that again Gissippus' sacrifice, to save a life, is more humanly acceptable to us than Valentine's. The proposed marriage of Gissippus is, moreover, an arranged one, and although he delights in his lady, he is not quite so fervidly stricken as Titus, who is “through pierced with the fiery dart of blind Cupid” (p. 137) and whose love is “in a much higher degree than his [Gissippus'] toward that lady.” Gissippus understandably, therefore, gives up to Titus “the interest that he [Gissippus] had in the damsel” (p. 144). The logic of Gissippus' sacrifice is also strengthened by the attitude of the lady Sophronia, who is wonderfully content with the new arrangement and lives with Titus “in joy inexplicable” (p. 146). Silvia, by contrast, abhors Proteus, and would rather have “been seized by a hungry lion” than rescued by “false Proteus” (V. iv. 33-34); she despises “false, perjur'd Proteus” (39). Though perhaps not altogether consistent with Elyot's emphasis on their different degrees of ardor, the complete identity of the two friends in body, thought, and feeling, which the tale repeatedly stresses, also makes inevitable Titus' falling in love with Sophronia. Unlike Proteus, therefore, Titus cannot possibly avoid being drawn to the lady once he has seen her. The friends' similarity, moreover, also makes more acceptable the lady's acquiescence. That Proteus and Valentine share no such mutual identity is clear from the beginning through Valentine's unsympathetic ridicule of Proteus' love for Julia. Titus, then, cannot help himself yet remains loyal; Proteus can, but betrays Valentine. The introduction of Julia into Shakespeare's play also makes even more ridiculous for the audience Valentine's offer of Silvia. Unlike Proteus, Titus has no other love, and has betrayed no other love; and since Proteus has shown his fickleness, he hardly deserves a heroine like Silvia, who in any event detests him. The presence of the lovely, rejected Julia makes us feel that the logical speech for Valentine would be an admonition to Proteus to return to Julia, not an offer of Silvia.

Finally Elyot reduces the possible absurdity of the affair by emphasizing how rare, how “incomparable” (p. 148), the friendship of his two heroes is. Indeed that such friendship and such behavior were exceptional, unconventionally rare, becomes evident in the reaction of friends and kinsmen of Gissippus and of the lady who upbraid him for “leaving her to Titus,” exclude him from “counsel” and “all honest company,” despoil him of his possessions, and expel him from the city (p. 146). With so little warrant for his more incredible abandonment of Silvia, Valentine would appear strikingly absurd to Shakespeare's audience.

Unlike Shakespeare, then, Elyot carefully builds into his tale the unusual worthiness of Titus; his desperate need, since he is dying; and the exceptional identity of the heroes. Hence Titus is more deserving, his rescue more sensible, and his love of the lady more logical. To make the sacrifice even more acceptable, Elyot also adds the greater love of Titus and the acquiescence of the lady. While almost everything in Elyot makes us feel some logic in the behavior of his characters, almost everything in Shakespeare—even the introduction of Julia, as we have seen—produces absurdity. The consistency of his differences from Elyot argues that Shakespeare was following a deliberate plan.

Other Renaissance sources or analogues which have been regarded as examples of the serious treatment of the supremacy of friendship over love are Flaminio Scala's scenario, Flavio Tradito,⁹ Lyly's Euphues, The Anatomy of Wit and Endimion, and Peele's Old Wives' Tale. In each of these works the motivation and resolution of the conflict between love and friendship are more dramatically acceptable and less absurd than in The Two Gentlemen. Early in the Flavio Tradito, for example, Flavio (who parallels Valentine) yields his lady, Isabella, to Oratio; but he does so only because the latter has treacherously deceived him into believing that she is faithless to Flavio and intimate with Oratio. By contrast, Valentine is certain that Silvia loves him, which makes his surrender, by comparison to Flavio's, ridiculous. Indeed, when Flavio learns of Oratio's treachery, in contrast to Valentine's bathetically pious regret that he can never again trust Proteus, Flavio plausibly wants vengeance. Finally, and most significantly, after Flavio has rescued him from death, Oratio confesses his sin, repents, and is forgiven by both Flavio and Isabella, yet Flavio does not hand over Isabella. Scala's tale can hardly be said to exhibit “the same quixoticism of friendship” as Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen or “the victory of friendship over love.”¹⁰

Lyly's treatment of love and friendship also points up how extravagant the theme is in The Two Gentlemen. In Euphues, The Anatomy of Wyt,¹¹ somewhat as in Elyot's version of the story of Titus and Gissippus, Euphues and Philautus are so firmly bound in friendship that Euphues is the “shadow” of Philautus,¹² and they share “one boorde … one bed, one booke.”¹³ Theirs becomes the “inviolable league of friendship”;¹⁴ for Euphues, Philautus is “an other I … the expresse Image of myne owne person.”¹⁵ Lyly emphasizes the closeness of the friendship in a way that Shakespeare does not. In view of the intensity of their relationship, had either of Lyly's friends offered a lady to the other, the situation would at least have been more plausible. But, despite the strength of their amity, no such “victory of friendship over love” occurs. Philautus, the deceived, far from yielding Lucilla to Euphues, is even joyful when he learns that Lucilla has betrayed Euphues. In Euphues there is finally no love to sacrifice to friendship, since the lady is simply faithless to both friends, a conclusion which may be used to prove that friendship is stronger than love but is more likely to prove that friendship is superior to a faithless love.

In Endimion friendship does triumph over love. As a faithful lover, Eumenides is granted one wish at the magic fountain, and his anguish is over whether to ask for the love of Semele or remedy for the plight of Endimion, whom the enchantress Dipsas has cast into a deathlike, lifelong sleep. Unlike Valentine, Eumenides at least debates the merits of love and friendship before choosing friendship. His decision, moreover, does not require surrender of Semele, only a postponement of his pursuit of her love. Also, unlike Silvia, Semele is a disdainful mistress who deserves a lover's devotion less than Silvia. Thus, not only is Endimion's life at hazard, but Eumenides' decision to help Endimion never requires the same sort of outlandish sacrifice as that in The Two Gentlemen. Lyly also portrays the bonds between Eumenides and Endimion as extraordinarily strong and thus gives further dramatic warrant for Eumenides' behavior. (For Eumenides, “a needle to pricke his [Endimion's] finger is a dagger to wound my heart.”¹⁶) But, most important, there is simply no rivalry for the love of a lady and no deceitful betrayal by a friend to whom one then fatuously awards one's mistress. Eumenides simply never has to contemplate yielding Semele to Endimion, who is, of course, in love with Cynthia. If it does anything in respect to Shakespeare's play, Lyly's Endimion again exposes the matchless absurdity of The Two Gentlemen.

Although it has been cited for that purpose,¹⁷ perhaps the strangest work to use as an example of a serious Renaissance treatment of the love-friendship theme before Shakespeare is Peele's Old Wives' Tale. Peele has been described as a “humorist and ironist,”¹⁸ capable of burlesquing Robin Hood in Edward the First or the romantic excesses of the knight Huanebango, who swears by ten gods in the Old Wives' Tale and praises the power of love and beauty to incite “silly fellows” to foolish adventures.¹⁹ Thus the situation of love and friendship in the latter play is even more patently ludicrous than in any of the examples already examined. The Ghost of Jack, having been promised half of what Eumenides receives from their adventure, demands half of the lady Delia. Jack insists on the letter of his agreement and Eumenides is even ready to cut his lady in half until he is released from his promise. The episode is clearly comic. For what could a ghost do with a half, or even a whole, lady? That question and Eumenides' willingness to divide his lady tell us that Peele is burlesquing Eumenides' strained idealism. For that matter, Peele seems to be satirizing excessive oaths and irrational literal interpretation as much as he is the supremacy of friendship over love. In one respect, the situation resembles that in The Two Gentlemen more closely than has usually been noted. Both Peele and Shakespeare burlesque the convention of friendship over love²⁰.

But perhaps The Merchant of Venice offers a better parallel? After all, in the trial scene Bassanio seems to go even beyond Valentine. He would give up to Shylock not only his life but “a wife / Which is as dear to me as life itself” in order “to deliver” Antonio (IV. i. 282-87)²¹. But the first—and, to be sure, perhaps least—of the questions which arise here is how the audience is meant to take this noble offer. Earlier (IV. i. 112-13) Bassanio offered only his own life; now, curiously, with Portia in disguise at Bassanio's side, Shakespeare gives him a speech making an even more extravagant offer. Yes, Bassanio's offer is a cry out of grief and hopelessness—although it is also worth noting that it is meaningless under the circumstances, for Shylock is not interested, as Bassanio knows. But that Shakespeare also intended us to laugh at the offer at this juncture is made clear by the disguised Portia's remark: “Your wife would give you little thanks for that / If she were by to hear you make the offer.” (288-89) That it is a joke is further verified when Gratiano repeats essentially the same gambit, with the disguised Nerissa nearby to comment in exactly the same vein as Portia. For that matter, even giving away a ring for the sake of a friend is a questionable enough practice to provide Bassanio some humorously uncomfortable moments later when Portia exacts a little revenge for Bassanio's generosity to Bellario. That Antonio unhesitatingly “equips Bassanio, already deep in his debt for like services,” hardly seems, as Neilson and Hill suggest, proof of the Renaissance exaltation of friendship “over the love of man for a woman.”²² Indeed the evidence might as well be used to prove that Antonio recognizes the supremacy of love over friendship, since he gives way to Bassanio's heterosexual interests. The familiar argument that Antonio's early melancholy stems from his fear of losing Bassanio's friendship also does not incontestably suggest the supremacy of friendship. It might as well suggest that Antonio, perhaps selfishly, values his male friendship with Bassanio over Bassanio's achieving heterosexual love—hardly the ideal presented by Titus and Gissippus. No one can doubt that male friendship is extolled in the play, but that it is valued over heterosexual love is clearly, from the evidence, doubtful.

But even if one could possibly take Bassanio's offer seriously and even as a sign of the supremacy of friendship, the example would not make Valentine's offer any the less hilarious. For at that moment in The Merchant of Venice when Bassanio makes his impossible offer, Antonio's life is in danger—as, of course, Proteus' is not—so that there is infinitely greater justification for Bassanio's hypothetical sacrifice. But, in addition, far from having betrayed Bassanio as Proteus has Valentine, Antonio has acted the true friend. His jeopardy is the result of his generous friendship. Of course, there is no question of Bassanio's surrender of Portia to Antonio to parallel the situation in The Two Gentlemen. But, most important, despite Bassanio's hysterical offers, he and the audience know that there is not the slightest chance that Portia will be sacrificed for Antonio.

All this is not to say that the sole effect is the laughter of burlesque. Perhaps because we wish to see loyal love rewarded, no matter how silly the behavior of the protagonists, or perhaps because others are more mistaken, rigid, villainous or foolish and by contrast create sympathetic attachment to hero and heroine, we both laugh at the characters' folly and wish them good fortune. And we may also warm to the protagonists who appeal to our buried sense of our own foolishness which makes us want to see fools succeed. The major pattern of The Two Gentlemen of Verona remains, however, burlesque.

Finally, this brief exploration reminds us once more of a danger in historical criticism of Shakespearean drama. If it is myopic to read Shakespeare only in terms of our own time and conventions, it is just as blind to read him as inevitably illustrating any single Renaissance convention. It is doubtful that the drama of a complex society in flux, as Elizabethan society was, can be so much more easily explained than our own. In scholarship, the result of unscrutinized assumptions about Elizabethan acceptance of a particular idea or convention has sometimes been to make Shakespeare appear inaccessible to our time and to dehumanize his drama. In this context, it is important to point out how ridiculous Valentine's adherence to a false code is, even in Elizabethan terms.

Notes

1. See, for example, W. W. Lawrence, Shakespeare's Problem Comedies (New York, 1931), p. 24; W. A. Neilson and C. J. Hill, eds., The Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare (Boston, 1942), p. 26; Ralph M. Sargent, “Sir Thomas Elyot and the Integrity of The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, 65 (1950), 1166-80; John F. Danby, “Shakespeare Criticism and The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” Critical Quarterly, 2 (1960), 309-21; John Vyvyan, Shakespeare and the Rose of Love: A Study of the Early Plays in Relation to the Medieval Philosophy of Love (London, 1960), pp. 99-135; J. D. Wilson, Shakespeare's Happy Comedies (London, 1962), pp. 43-46; R. G. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness (New York, 1965), pp. 85-87; Karl F. Thompson, Modesty and Cunning: Shakespeare's Use of Literary Tradition (Ann Arbor, 1971), pp. 61-66; H. Craig and D. Bevington, eds., The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Glenview, Ill., 1973), pp. 131-32. In “The Mature Comedies,” Early Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 3 (New York, 1961), Frank Kermode implies that the moral of TGV is the supremacy of friendship over love when he calls the play a “legend of friendship” for which Spenser's Faerie Queene IV. ix.2-3 “could be a prologue” (pp. 220-21). However, Spenser does not really offer a conflict of love and friendship between friends.

2. See H. C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago, 1949), I, 44-47; G. B. Harrison, ed., Shakespeare: The Complete Works (New York, 1952), p. 366; Robert Weimann, “Laughing with the Audience: The Two Gentlemen of Verona and the Popular Tradition of Comedy,” Shakespeare Survey, 22 (1969), 40; Clifford Leech, ed., The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Arden Shakespeare (London, 1969), pp. lxi-lxxi; L. S. Champion, The Evolution of Shakespeare's Comedy: A Study in Dramatic Perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), pp. 26-38. Of this group, Champion is most direct and unequivocal in seeing the play as something “Shakespeare would have us laugh at” (p. 38).

3. Shakespearian Comedy (New York, 1938), p. 40.

4. TGV IV. i. 52. All references to TGV in the text are to Leech's edition.

5. This function of Launce and Speed has become a cliché of criticism. See, for example, E. C. Pettet, Shakespeare and the Romance Tradition (London, 1949), pp. 102-03; C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton, 1959), p. 14; Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (London, 1960), pp. 10-17; H. F. Brooks, “Two Clowns in a Comedy (To Say Nothing of the Dog): Speed, Launce (and Crab) in The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” Essays and Studies, 16 (1963), 91-100; E. W. Talbert, Elizabethan Drama and Shakespeare's Early Plays: An Essay in Historical Criticism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1963), pp. 153-56; Richard Cody, The Landscape of the Mind: Pastoralism and Platonic Theory in Tasso's Aminta and Shakespeare's Early Comedies (Oxford, 1969), pp. 84-88; A. C. Hamilton, The Early Shakespeare (San Marino, Cal., 1967), p. 120; Weimann, pp. 37-42; Champion, pp. 35-38.

6. Shakespeare: The Pattern in His Carpet (New York, 1958), p. 45. Goddard similarly prefers to believe that “one of the greatest geniuses of the age was not quite a fool even as a young man” (p. 46).

7. Sargent (p. 1173) sees Elyot's version as a primary source, even to providing Shakespeare's denouement, but he neglects significant differences. For Elyot's influence on Shakespeare, see also D. T. Starnes, “Shakespeare and Elyot's Governor,” University of Texas Studies in English, No. 7 (1927), 112-32.

8. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Book Named The Governor, ed. S. E. Lemberg (London, 1962), p. 139. All references in the text to The Governor are to this edition.

9. Though not printed until 1611, the scenario had probably been “used on the stage long before,” points out Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (New York, 1964), I, 208.

10. Neilson and Hill, p. 26.

11. Bullough believes that Euphues may have provided suggestions for Shakespeare's play and lists it among the analogues of TGV (pp. 204, 217).

12. Bullough, p. 220.

13. Bullough, p. 219.

14. Bullough, p. 217.

15. Bullough, p. 218.

16. III. i. 22-23, in R. W. Bond, ed., The Complete Works of John Lyly, Vol. III (Oxford, 1902).

17. See Sargent, p. 1169, and Anne Barton, introd. to Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. B. Evans (Boston, 1974), pp. 144-45. E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Early Comedies (New York, 1965), p. 24, and Leech, p. lx, regard Peele's tale as burlesque.

18. H. W. Wells, “Introd. to 1966 Reissue,” The Works of George Peele, ed. A. H. Bullen (Port Washington, N.Y., 1966, rpt. of 1885 ed.), Vol. I.

19. Works of George Peele, I, 314.

20. Wells (“Introd. to Reissue”) believes Shakespeare was more influenced by Peele's Edward I “than has generally been acknowledged.” Why not, then, also by the burlesque in The Old Wives' Tale?

21. References to The Merchant of Venice in the text are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. B. Evans (Boston, 1974). Antonio, of course, also places his life in jeopardy for his friend Bassanio, even though he does not appear to take the danger very seriously. This aspect of the plot, although it illustrates the Elizabethan belief in the virtue of friendship, provides no real parallel with TGV since Antonio is not placing friendship for Bassanio above love for a woman. For Antonio, who is not in love with a woman, the conflict between friendship and heterosexual love simply does not exist.

22. P. 116. See also R. F. Hill, “Merchant of Venice and the Pattern of Romantic Comedy,” Shakespeare Survey, 28 (1975), 75-87, who sees no conflict between heterosexual love and friendship in the play, although he takes Bassanio's offer seriously; and Lawrence Hyman, “Antonio in The Merchant of Venice,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 82 (1967), 649-50, who argues the primacy of heterosexual love over any other relationship in the play.