SOURCE: “Jealous Gentlemen: A Reappraisal of The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” in Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Vol. 131, 1995, pp. 116-27.

[In the following essay, Østergaard analyzes the dynamics of the relationships of Valentine, Proteus, Julia, and Silvia, and observes that the women may be viewed as the “displaced representations” of the love between the two men.]

Valentine and Proteus are the The Two Gentlemen of Verona, fast friends since childhood. Valentine leaves for Milan, where he falls in love with Silvia, but Proteus prefers to stay at home with his Julia. So the friends must part. The play opens with the fact of this separation and with their respective attempts to persuade the other to come along or stay at home—whereupon both resolve to go their separate ways. An emblem, so far, of childhood which cannot last forever and of the onset of manhood which enforces a separation between friends. However, since the gentlemen claim their respective loves, at home and abroad, the leave-taking promises not to disturb their friendship but to continue it in a state of mutual, if distant, harmony. Nevertheless, this harmony is not the end of the play, but the beginning of what is to follow: an introduction of love as something you desire over and above friendship. It gradually becomes clear that if you have love, friendship is precluded and vice versa. So being in love with a woman becomes equal to experiencing the loss of a male companion you cannot also have. Thus, TGV presents a dilemma, which may be paraphrased in the following way: to have love you must disclaim friendship; but the love you desire is dependent on the friendship you alienate; love is therefore equally dependent on recapturing the friendship that was lost; however, this is possible only by denying your newly acquired love.

TGV has never ranked high among Shakespeare critics.¹ The present article is an attempt to vindicate the play. Apart from the technology of textual philology the critical interest has largely consisted in framing it within the Shakespeare canon and in patching it up with excuses—such as the inexperience of the author—coupled with references to what is done better in the maturer works. To top it all, TGV contains a short surprising passage which no one (save René Girard²) has been able to explain satisfactorily. The passage in question follows as a climax to what, in other respects, is a conventional string of episodic intrigue: Proteus' father disapproves of his son's wish to stay at home in Verona and dispatches him to Milan after his friend Valentine. Valentine greets Proteus with an outburst of praise of Silvia, daughter of the Duke of Milan. Proteus protests that his friend must be overstating his love, but when he sees Silvia falls in love with her head over heels and decides to win the girl for himself. She rejects him repeatedly, however, and finally convinced that the love she feels is for Valentine alone, he slanders his friend to the girl's father and fools him by making it look as if he represents Thurio, a third lover favoured by the Duke. As for the girl, she makes for the greenwood, hoping to reunite with banished Valentine. Proteus and Thurio follow fast at their heels in the company of the father. Proteus now happens to have the good (or, indeed, bad) luck to come across Silvia, and he decides to have his way by force. Valentine intervenes just in time to prevent the rape—but only to be faced now with the ugly fact of his friend caught red-handed.

Proteus is unmasked and (it would seem) irreparably disgraced—to Valentine, the father, the girl and other witnesses, including Julia who turns up in the thick of things in pursuit of her former lover. It is obvious, both conventionally and otherwise, that there is nothing left but to kill off the blackguard. But Valentine, to the dismay of all critics (save Girard), forgives Proteus and offers him Silvia as a token of their friendship:

Proteus: My shame and guilt
confounds me.
Forgive me Valentine: if hearty sorrow
Be a sufficient ransom for offence,
I tender't here; I do as truly suffer,
As e'er I did commit.
Valentine: Then am I paid;
And once again I do receive thee honest.
Who by repentance is not satisfied,
Is nor of heaven, nor of earth; for these are pleas'd:
By penitence th'Eternal's wrath's appeas'd.
And that my love may appear plain and free,
All that was mine in Silvia I give thee.
Julia: O me unhappy! [She Swoons]

(V.4.73-84)

What is so surprising is the obviousness of the disgrace of what, in context, must be understood as a graceful offer on the part of an embattled and noble hero. Neglecting the girl for the friend, Valentine disfigures his character and casts doubts on the set of values he supposedly represents. The offensive line in fact constitutes an astonishing reversal of guilt between the two gentlemen: Proteus is morally cleared (as a proof of which he turns down the proffered gift), but in the process shame is conferred on Valentine. At the same time, the girl, for whose love they both contend, is translated into a mere token. However, Valentine's gesture of forgiveness cannot be restricted to the dubiousness of its inverted nobility or to the reflection on his character entailed by this gesture. From bad to worse, Valentine's fault, if it is one, is perforce also Shakespeare's, since nothing else in the play appears to provide a clue. The sacrifice, in short, represents a difficulty which is damaging to the extent of rendering the drama self-defeating: the scene is too significant to be overlooked and too strange to accommodate. It is not surprising, therefore, that critics have suggested ways to mend what nobody has doubted to be either a textual error or a severe dramatic blackout. Even if Valentine remains the hero, he has, if only for a brief moment, become ‘Valentine’—a different person arrogating the persona of the protagonist to reveal a dramatic gap down into which the meaning of the play vanishes.

But Girard thinks differently. The sacrifice is not an error of either text or character. Neither, therefore, is it a slip, a fault or a youthful weakness on Shakespeare's part. Quite the contrary, confirming the hegemony of friendship over love, it reveals the basic intention of the play. Girard's main contention is that Valentine's and Proteus' rivalry for Silvia is defined long before Proteus claps eyes on the girl and commits his treachery. Valentine and Proteus are friends, indeed, but as such they are also at each other's throats and mercy. Both friends claim woman as their object of love. But only as a symbol to accommodate their relationship to each other; Silvia and Julia are displaced representations of the love between the friends, providing a stage on which the males act out in symbolic terms what they cannot achieve in real terms. As long as they are able to love the same objects, i.e. read the same books, listen to the same poetry or whatever, they may copy each other and see this as evidence of their friendship. But woman is an object they cannot both share. Valentine's praise of Silvia generates her as the symbolic third term to Proteus on his arrival in Milan; Valentine manages to convince his friend that he, Valentine, is in love with Silvia, and the proof of his success is that Proteus, in a expression of love for Valentine, falls in love with her. In fact, he is left with no choice. He first claims his own object and praises Julia. But Valentine is not impressed and leaves for Milan. Not recognised by Valentine, Julia is left with no value to Proteus. Consequently, he leaves her and proceeds to Milan to win his friend for himself. But when Valentine claims his love for Silvia Proteus loses a desired object for the second time. Left of both his love and his friend, Proteus is dispossessed of himself also. Only Silvia remains as a symbol to escape annihilation. Girard has now explained Proteus' attempt at rape as a dimension of the friendship it violates. This also explains why Valentine forgives him and offers him Silvia. Valentine in fact ‘knows’ what has taken place. He recognises the attempt at rape as a symbol of love for himself, and he responds to it.

This is the logic of the triangle. However, to succeed in this triangle you must fail in love. Desire is negative. It negates the object it posits. To re-establish his love for his friend, Valentine negates Silvia, the symbol of his desire. Desire includes a negation not only of the object, but of itself as desire. The sacrifice of Silvia is such a gesture of absolute renunciation. First the meaning of Silvia is that she is someone to be had for her token value. But, by the same logic, she subsequently becomes someone not to be had. Valentine deletes her name in the symbolic triangle where she is represented as a desired object for him. But in so doing he constructs an obligation, conferring on Silvia the same position as third term in the triangle which he tried to rid her of, only this time as desired by Proteus, etc.

Let me return to Julia after this brief summary. Julia is done away with even more completely than Silvia not only by the two gents, but by Girard, who hardly mentions her at all. Like Silvia, Julia is a mere token, says Girard. But he overlooks the fact that the position as desired object is only accorded to Silvia by denying it to Julia. There is something which Silvia gets which is identical with what Julia loses. Julia is like Silvia in being emasculated. But she is emasculated even more than Silvia, since the latter attains her position as third term by deleting the name of her sister. In other words: instead of the nothing claimed by Girard there is something which defines the relation between the women as one of distinction in TGV. This something is a dialectic of identity and difference which generates a content matter of play and playacting in TGV. In fact, Shakespeare's play may itself be viewed as a dramatic form providing the frame for the playact it stages between the two sexes. The women are as active in this game as the men. But they also differ from them in essential respects, just as they differ from each other. What is the meaning of this dialectic of difference and identity and how is it expressed in dramatic terms?

I suggest that a simple answer may be found if we reverse Girard's perspective on the sexes and focus the symbolic interplay between the women. In other words: the women are rivals; they complete for love, and they act out their relationship by way of symbolic representation in the form of the two gents who court them. Unlike the men, they are not directly confronted with each other and they do not even for a moment become open enemies. But it is evident both to the women and the audience that they, like the men, compete for love. They are defined in relation to each other no less than the gents. That we are invited by Shakespeare to see things this way becomes clear if an early scene (I.2) between Julia and Lucetta, her waiting-woman, is viewed in the light of symbolic displacement, as adumbrating the main conflict. In other words, what happens later in the play has already been performed both in emblematic and real terms by Julia and Lucetta. The scene between Lucetta and Julia has an allegorical dimension providing the play with a reading which includes what Girard has to say. But it also casts an additional ironic light on the whole question of symbolic displacement ruling the desire between the sexes—and therefore on Girard's interpretation.

In the following except, the two women discuss Julia's potential lovers. Listing their names and remarking pertly on their lacking qualities, they gradually focus on Proteus and a love letter he has sent via Speed (Valentine's page) and Lucetta.

Julia: What think'st
thou of the fair sir Eglamour?
Lucetta: As of a knight well-spoken,
neat, and fine;
But were I you, he never should be mine.
Julia: What think'st thou of
the rich Mercatio?
Lucetta: Well of his wealth; but
of himself, so so.
Julia: What think'st thou of
the gentle Proteus?
Lucetta: Lord, Lord! To see what
folly reigns in us!

(I.2.9-15)

The names have representational value in the obvious sense of referring to the corresponding persons, of course. At the same time, the act of naming the lovers is a way of loosening the representational tie and of (ab)using the names in the token game of to be and not to be. Lucetta is asked to name a name, and then the name is crossed out and replaced by another name. The meaning of the name in the game is the fact of its separation from the person it mentions. It is listed to be deleted. Playing games with names, the women invent a symbolic structure of presences and absences. The act of naming constitutes the presence of the symbol by deleting the referent, destroying its own representational status. Between them Julia and Lucetta create a complementary relation between the name in its representational function and the name as pure token value. Thus, the name is proper (inalienable); but it is also improper (alienable). The game consists in translating from the former value to the latter, from the referential dimension of the name to the exchange relation it acquires, from propriety to impropriety, from an inalienable to an alienable property.

The name therefore refers to the game in which it functions. In linguistic terms: it is a performative, naming both its own form and content. At the same time it introduces a semiotic field of pure presence: the name possesses its performative value for as long as the game lasts. It cannot last long, but as long as it does it rules the game completely and there exists nothing but the absolute value of the moment. The proper designation of the name, by way of contrast, is ousted from this ludic presence where it projects a semantic field of absence. In this way the women create a complementary relation between the exchange value of the name defining a temporal presence on the one hand, and its original value temporarily lost in the preterite and the future tense on the other hand. The charm and sweetness of the moment springs from this displacement of temporal relations. However, if its validity is entirely of the moment, the above scene nevertheless points effectively to the central thematics of TGV: the symbolic exchange and the redistribution of rôles resulting from this. In this way the triangular game of naming between present Julia and Lucetta and absent ‘Proteus’ foreshadows the main triangle between present Valentine and Proteus and absent ‘Silvia’ (and later between present ‘Sebastian’ and Silvia and absent ‘Julia’: or, indeed: present Silvia and Julia and absent Proteus). These triangles repeat and refer to each other. Thus there is established a reciprocal relation between otherwise distinct relations. By virtue of their similarity the triangles constitute one scene and set of relations as exchangeable with another scene and another set of relations in an internal allegory. In other words, the respective scenes and relations are translated into names of the play's own referential game with names.

Present in the above scene, then, are two women, a list of names and a letter. One of these names, Proteus, is fatal precisely in the sense discussed by Girard, as third term, only with a reversal of the position of the sexes. But the meaning of Proteus, as a name in the game, is that he brings an end to it—in yet another transformation. But this time the change works the other way: from the symbolic to the real, from the improper to the proper value of the name. Proteus' name disrupts the play in which Julia and Lucetta accommodate their token objects to each other in order to continue what is going on. The letter, of course, like the name, represents absent Proteus. It is there because he is not there, and its meaning for the women is representational on one level. But as soon as his name crops up, there is an end to the game and it becomes important for Julia to read the letter and see if Proteus is in earnest. In fact, she believes him. But the letter really un-names her, since she only gains him to lose him to Silvia. Having ousted all other's names, ‘Proteus’ ends up by proving to be other than himself. In fact, he turns out to be true only to his protean name—a metaphor for any name and in contrast, therefore, to the unique and contrastive function it performs in the game. Julia has been led to believe that she loves the person represented by the words of the letter. As it turns out, she has loved ‘Proteus’, not Proteus. The conventional claims of the love letter turn out to represent a reality where both Julia and Proteus alienate themselves first in each other's names—and then, subsequently, in a combination of other names, including several purely fictitious names, as we shall see. Thus, the game expands its reach to the play in its entirety.

In a further perspective, the above scene between Lucetta and Julia demonstrates that love has always been displaced. The letter is a sign of this non-presence. There is no love before it is signified as such. But signifying love is equal to substituting the name for the person, introducing the possibility of gaming with that same name. The letter, as a name for love, claims on one page what it hides away on the opposite: love ties what is absent in real terms to what is present in symbolic terms. The sad fact of this knot is that it cannot be untied into the clear demarcation of its parts, in a distinction between the symbolic and the real components. The amalgamation persists, as indeed demonstrated in the play, and presents so much confusion that unravelling one dimension from the other is only possible because of the conventions of genre and the saving grace of beginnings and endings. A purely mechanic force, in other words, and outside the logic of theme and plot in a proper sense (if only to a certain degree, as I shall argue presently).

One meaning of the letter is its representational value: it represents absent Proteus to loving Julia, even if it turns out that he is false. However, another meaning of the letter emerges from the plot, i.e. that it signifies difference in an absolute sense, and that it is false in any case. Letters between lovers may be treated with no less affection than the loved one in person, of course. Julia cherishes Proteus' words in the belief that it is in his absence she loves what he writes. Like everyone else she trusts in the letter's representational value. But pouring her emotions over the written word, she transforms the message into the medium and the word becomes an object in its own right. The meaning of love is now the love letter it has become. In the game with Lucetta she stages a form of ironic knowledge she disclaims verbally, when she claims her true love. Performing differently in the game from what she protests, her rôle in the game provides the ironic comment.

First the meaning of Proteus' name is the end to the game it performs in: his name is here identified with its proper value. But, as it turns out, the proper name is just a cover-up for the impropriety its owner signs his declarations with. The game is not over yet, it has only become more complicated, since the referential value of the terms now work in unforeseen directions. Julia believes Proteus, however, and the plot in TGV is acted out on the basis of this belief in a play which introduces a whole series of shifts between essences and appearances. Thus, having deleted the other names in the game, Proteus' name is unique in representing its etymological meaning: to be true against the fact of its own lie. ‘Proteus’ is a name both of a contradiction and of a tautology. His name designates the essence of any name: its universal mutability.

I have said that the scene between Julia and Lucetta has an anticipatory function, creating a set of internal correspondences with what follows in TGV. However, the scene also comes to stand in relation to itself as its own double. How? In fact, the scene is itself, as tableau, a performative utterance copying the function of the name it has as content matter. The scene is about being serious or playful in love. Thus it contains two levels where being playful is staged as ‘form’ for being in earnest as ‘content’. In this way the dialectic between the two values of the name—the content matter of the scene, in fact—is reintroduced in the form in which it is staged. Copying itself, the scene introduces a set of terms, values and names that keep changing place and prevents any value or name from being identical with itself. The scene itself is protean—like the letter it contains. The meaning of the letter, then, is the ambiguity it introduces between symbolic presence and factual absence. Indeed, the meaning of the letter is difference in a general way. Difference between signifier and signified, between the value represented by the name and the (ab)uses it comes to in the game, between love and desire, between essence and appearance. But difference, also, as we have just seen, between two different levels in the same scene, one level reflecting a relation to outside Proteus, the other reflecting upon the reflection, if indirectly and from an ironic distance. This scenic division reflects a property of the letter, i.e. that it is an object whose meaning is ruled by displacement between the word from the thing. As an object, the letter is a word. As a word, it is an object. It is never what it is designated as, but always a mask itself.

The letter is a love letter. Love is ‘content’ and the letter is ‘form’. But the content of the letter is not the same before and after reading it. As soon as the letter reveals its secret it is no longer a letter. The meaning of the letter, then, is to introduce the logic of something which differs from itself. Surprisingly, this something, in another representation in TGV, is also love. Love is a representation in a symbol of a feeling—the symbol is form and the feeling is content. However, when love is expressed as a symbol, it not only represents a feeling but is, indeed, like a letter in being something more than what it claims. Being in love is equal to being caught in Julia's and Lucetta's kind of game, if unwittingly. This curious fact emerges from a scene where Speed comments to Valentine on his infatuation with Silvia:

Speed: You never saw her since
she was deformed.
Valentine: How long has she been
deformed?
Speed: Ever since you loved her.
Valentine: I have loved her ever
since I saw her, and still I see her beautiful.
Speed: If you love her, you cannot
see her.
Valentine: Why?
Speed: Because love is blind. O that
you had mine eyes, or your own eyes had the lights they were wont to have …

(II.1.60-67)

Speed makes fun of his master who believes that love, represented in the form of Silvia, represents the corresponding feeling as content. But love is only form, says Speed, there is no content to correspond to it; Silvia is deformed for the eye that sees her as beautiful is love's eye; love is not able to perceive the object, but merely stares upon its own projection. Speed, like Girard, wants to say the truth about love. But to tell the truth about love, he must himself be unaffected by it since, according to his own argument, he would otherwise be biased. Speed may be able to understand how love works to trap the lover. But he has no eye for love's charm, for to see love in this way you must, like Valentine, be blinded by it. Being himself outside love, Speed has an eye for love's relativity, its alienability. Valentine, by way of contrast, is ‘inside’ love, and consequently he never doubts what he sees. Thus, love's outside (its code, its form, its exchange value, its impropriety, its name in the game) is related to its inside (its truth, its feeling, its proper name, its inalienability) as Speed is related to Valentine. Together the servant and the master represent the dislocation between the two terms of the sign: an outside and an inside that never conform to each other. Standing always in the mode of love, Silvia is never Silvia to Speed, but always ‘Silvia’. She only exists inside the inverted commas love has captivated her name in. A subjective projection to Speed, Silvia is an objective miracle to Valentine. While Speed only sees the frame around the name, Valentine only has an eye for the object behind the name. Both claim to see the truth; neither perceives the name, which shifts ‘Silvia’ from object to symbol and back again. However, as the play surely shows, Silvia is equally deformed in both the rival perceptions of her, and oscillating between the inside and the outside of her nominal encasement she vanishes in the empty space between two pairs of eyes that fail to notice her. There is no third position to see her as she is—if not the play itself. However, what the play shows is all in the ironic mode: she is not as she is, but only how she appears. If there is a being behind appearances, it must be found in a different perception of her—Julia's, as we shall see presently. Indeed, being dispossessed from oneself is not her fate only, but true also both of Julia and the gents. Moreover, it is not restricted to one or several of the characters, but is a dimension that organises both theme and plot in TGV.

If the meaning of the letter is the displacement it effects, there is a contrastive symbol to counterbalance it, the ring. Here, as everywhere, the ring represents constancy in love. As it turns out, the men and the women in TGV stand in a complementary relation to these two symbols, as I shall briefly indicate below. If the letter represents the alienable aspect of the name, the ring reintroduces its propriety and truth's triumph over deceit. Or so it seems. Julia, it will be recalled, does not give up hope when she hears that Proteus is in love with Silvia, but dresses up as a man and courageously heads directly for her opponent. Re-entering the game as an agent of love for Proteus (to whom she has become someone else a second time), she is ‘Sebastian’ to Silvia, whom she approaches seemingly to promote the relationship between Silvia and Proteus she abhors, but from under the cover of which she in fact hopes to return things to the state they were in before the introduction of the letter of displacement. In other words: truth will and must out, but it is remarkable that Julia's tactics to recover lost ground are based on deceiving deceit:

And now am I (unhappy messenger)
To plead for that which I would not obtain;
To praise his faith which I would have dispraised.
I am my master's true confirmed love,
But cannot be true servant to my master,
Unless I prove false traitor to myself

(IV.4.99–105).

The idea of deceit—its ambiguousness, its seductive potency and its proximity to desire, rivalry and identity—is focused by bringing the ring and the letter into contact with each other in a scene between Julia and Silvia. As she herself makes clear, Julia only acts as procuress between Proteus and Silvia because she is also a procuress between herself and Proteus and, in a further perspective, between truth and deceit. So Julia transforms Silvia-Proteus into reversed representatives of Julia-Proteus, purposely inventing a symbolic context in order to retrieve the reality that was lost and the essence of true love.

Why is the path from deceit to truth itself so crooked? The obvious answer is that there is something in deceit which must be retained in truth. The truth about truth is that deceit must be added to it. In the terms of the play we may say that the ring, as inalienable, cannot be what it is without the letter, as alienable. In fact, when Proteus has Julia (dressed up as Sebastian) mediate between himself and Silvia, he himself becomes a mediator between the two women, if unwittingly. Consequently he is an instrument in re-establishing that true love from which he otherwise signally errs. Or, indeed: the true love represented by Julia and Silvia is nothing without Proteus as a go-between. Even the ring, prime symbol of constancy, functions as a go-between in TGV. Thus, it performs the function of a letter, its semiotic opposite. First Julia gives Proteus a ring when he departs from Verona. Proteus then later gives it, and a letter, to ‘Sebastian’ to have him carry it to Silvia. In a previous scene (IV.2) where Proteus approaches Silvia (formally ‘representing’ Thurio—to further complicate matters), she spots the ring on his finger and ‘reads’ its message, i.e. that there is a ‘Julia’ who has been forsaken. In fact, we here see the play itself point to the necessity between two lovers of inventing a third party—a both real and symbolic ‘Julia’. However, Proteus does not want to discuss this real phantom, and he manages to obtain from Silvia a promise of her portrait, her ‘shadow’, which she lets him have to get rid of him. He thereupon sends Sebastian-Julia to collect the picture and plead his case by letter and ring. When they meet in IV.4, Silvia exchanges her portrait for Julia's ring and letter and at some length they discuss ‘absent’ Julia whom they both venerate and pity. Julia even enters upon a comparison between ‘herself’ (Sebastian) and her mistress (absent Julia) whom, she says, she has in fact on a previous occasion represented via likeness:

                                        … for at Pentecost,
When all our pageants of delight were play'd,
Our youth got me to play the woman's part,
And I was trimm'd in Madam Julia's gown,
Which served me as fit, by all men's judgments,
As if the garment had been made for me

(IV.4.156–161).

By this time the confusion of sex, person, occasion and value of the symbols employed by the two women is considerable. But the meaning of the confusion is the order it reintroduces. By giving Proteus a portrait of herself while denying him her love, Silvia makes explicit a platonic distinction between reality and symbol—there is Silvia herself and her ‘shadow’. We find the same distinction in Sebastian who, as Julia's shadow, discusses the relative proximity between himself and ‘his mistress’ Julia. In other words, the relation between Silvia and her copy is copied in the relation between Julia and her copy. As long as there is a distance between the true person and the portrait a semiotic space will exist where deceit may operate. But, at the same time, deceit is a shadow in the further sense that it is basically secondary and dependent on the truth from which it derives. There is a teleological urge in the copy to overcome the split and to reunite with the original from which it has erred. As in Plato, the copy desires to undo itself as copy. “Come shadow, come and take this shadow up, / For 'tis thy rival”, says Julia, addressing herself as shadow, i.e. Sebastian as copy of Julia, asking herself to appropriate Silvia's picture in both a literal and symbolic sense. (The portrait is in fact lying on the floor, and as Julia bends to pick it up her movement becomes an image of the copy's transformation to its original).

Represented as a shadow to Julia, Silvia at the same time represents the original Julia wants to copy. Curiously, her desire to copy the other is motivated in a collateral desire to become her own original, essential Julia. To overcome the split between herself as copy and the original which she is not (yet), she models herself on someone else, on Silvia, who has not only emasculated her but who has, in the process, become the name she sees as a possible point of identity between exchange value and representation of oneself. This identity between self and self and self and other is in fact explicitly stated toward the end of the scene, where Silvia is on the point of leaving Julia—leaving her to muse on what has taken place between them while they discussed absent ‘Julia’:

Silvia: She is beholding to
thee, gentle youth.
Alas, poor lady, desolate, and left;
I weep myself to think upon thy words.
Here, youth: there is my purse; I give thee this
For thy sweet mistress' sake, because thou lov'st her.
[She gives her a purse]
Farewell.
Julia: And she shall thank you for't,
if e'er you know her.
A virtuous gentlewoman, mild, and beautiful.
I hope my master's suit will be but cold,
Since she respects my mistress' love so much.

(IV.4.171–180)

It is clear that the “she” referred to in line 171 is Julia, the subject of their conversation and pity. But the laudable qualities Silvia has conferred on absent Julia in fact appear to be identical expressions of the praise Sebastian (who is now alone, and therefore, once more, Julia) wants to bestow on Silvia. The reference then becomes less certain, and in line 178 (“A virtuous gentlewoman, mild, and beautiful”) it is not clear whether ‘Sebastian’ speaks of ‘Julia’, the she of the above line, or of Silvia, the she of line 180. Furthermore, it is not clear whether this case of mixed identities, if ‘intentional’ at all, should be ascribed to Shakespeare or to Julia. So, over and above the question of identity and difference as the subject matter of the conversation and, indeed, of the play, we here see, if but for a brief moment, a referential mixing up of textual levels that are otherwise kept apart, since the meaning would break down if they were not.

Notes

1. D. J. Palmer offers the following representative view: “Of the five early comedies, The Two Gentlemen of Verona is the one unanimously declared a failure. Opinions differ only on the reasons for the disaster. …” (Shakespeare. A Bibliographical Guide [new ed. by Stanley Wells], p. 91). Clifford Leech does not choose to differ from this view: “No one is likely to claim that TGV is a masterpiece, or anything like it …” (Introduction to the new Arden edition of TGV, p. lxxi)—which may be why he has so little of interest to offer in his introduction.

2. René Girard in The Theater of Envy: Shakespeare (Oxford, 1989).