SOURCE: “Love Delights in Praises: A Reading of The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” in Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 13, No. 2, October 1989, pp. 231-47.

[In the following essay, Girard studies the role of mimetic desire in the relationships among the four lovers in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and argues that Proteus's desire for Silvia is generated by his predisposition to favor whatever Valentine desires.]

I

Valentine and Proteus have been friends since their earliest childhood in Verona, and their two fathers want to send them to Milan for their education. Because of his love for a girl named Julia, Proteus refuses to leave Verona; Valentine goes to Milan alone.

In spite of Julia, however, Proteus misses Valentine greatly and, after a while, he, too, goes to Milan. The two friends are reunited in the ducal palace; the duke's daughter, Silvia, is present and Valentine briefly introduces Proteus. After she departs, Valentine announces that he loves her and his hyperbolical passion irritates Proteus. Once alone, however, Proteus has his own announcement to make: he no longer loves Julia; he, too, has fallen in love with Silvia:

Even as one heat another heat expels,
Or as one nail by strength drives out another,
So the remembrance of my former love
Is by a newer object quite forgotten.(1)

If there ever was a “love at first sight,” this must be it, we think, but Proteus is not so sure: in three crucial lines, he suggests a different explanation:

Is it mine eye, or Valentinus' praise,
Her true perfection or my false transgression,
That makes me reasonless, to reason thus?

(II.iv.196-98)

The entire comedy massively confirms the crucial role of Valentine in the genesis of Proteus's sudden passion for Silvia. According to our romantic and individualistic ideology, a borrowed sentiment such as this one is not genuine enough to be really intense. This is not true in Shakespeare; Proteus's desire is so furious that he would actually rape Silvia if Valentine did not rescue her in extremis.

When Shakespeare wrote his plays, the second-hand desire he portrays had no name, no official existence, but this is no longer true. We call it mimetic or mediated desire. Valentine is the model or mediator of this desire. Proteus is its mediated subject and Silvia is their common object.

Mimetic desire can strike with the speed of lightning because it does not really depend upon the visual impact made by the object; it only seems to. Proteus desires Silvia not because their brief encounter made a decisive impression on him but because he is predisposed in favor of whatever Valentine desires.

Mimetic desire is not some modern idea that I would force upon an unwilling writer; it is Shakespeare's own idea and we can see this again in Proteus's soliloquy, which keeps minimizing the role of perception in the genesis of his desire for Silvia:

She is fair; and so is Julia that I love,
That I did love, …

(II.iv.199-200)

If Silvia is no more desirable objectively than Julia, her only advantage is that Valentine already desires her. Shakespeare undermines the predominance of sight in the expression love at first sight. In A Midsummer Night's Dream as well, the two girls are said to be equally beautiful, also for the purpose of reinforcing the case for mimetic desire.

II

The dramatic context of this first mimetic desire, and of many others in Shakespeare, is the close and ancient friendship of the two protagonists. When Proteus is about to arrive in Milan, Valentine describes this friendship to Silvia and her father:

I knew him as myself; for from our infancy
We have convers'd and spent our hours together.

(II.iv.62-63)

When two young men grow up together, they learn the same lessons, they read the same books, they play the same games, and they agree on just about everything. They also tend to desire the same objects. This perpetual convergence is not incidental but essential to the friendship; it occurs so regularly and inevitably that it seems preordained by some supernatural fate; it really depends on a mutual imitation so spontaneous and constant that it remains unconscious.

When we think of imitation, we imagine two people copying each other's manners, habits, accents, and even their likes and dislikes in the still childish and innocent manner of two childish friends. We never think of what Proteus's desire for Silvia reveals; we never think of conflictual imitation. The problem with Silvia is that Valentine desires her for himself alone and now so does Proteus. At some point, even the best of friends must come upon some object that they cannot share or do not want to share.

Eros cannot be shared in the same manner as a book, a bottle of wine, a piece of music, a beautiful landscape. Proteus is still doing what he has always done; he is imitating his friend, but the consequences, this time, are radically different. All of a sudden, with no advance warning, the attitude that has always nourished the friendship tears it apart. Imitation is a double-edged sword. At times it produces so much harmony that it can pass for the blandest and dullest of all human drives; at other times it produces so much strife that we refuse to recognize it as imitation.

Shakespeare is fascinated by this ambivalence of imitation and he shows at length the disturbing continuity between the attitude that fosters friendship and the one that destroys it. When Valentine was still in Verona, Proteus made an effort to involve him in his relationship with Julia. He wanted to prevent this friend from going away and his first thought was Julia. Finding her attractive, he quite naturally felt that Valentine should share this attraction and he praised her beauty in the same manner as Valentine, in Milan, praises Silvia.

Whenever they do not see eye to eye, our two friends feel that something is wrong; each one tries to persuade the other that he should reorient his desire in such a way as to make it coincide with his own once again. Friendship is this perpetual coincidence of two desires. But envy and jealousy are exactly the same thing. The mimesis of desire is both the best of friendship and the worst of hatred. This transparent paradox plays an enormous role in the entire theater of Shakespeare.

Mutual imitation has served the two friends so well that they try to deal with Eros according to its law, in the spirit of their solid friendship. They do not suspect that perfect concord is about to turn into horrendous discord. The experience is so shattering that it permanently affects the behavior of the two friends.

When Proteus finally left Verona, he did so, he claimed, in obedience to his father, but he had disobeyed this father before. The example of a friend is more persuasive than a father's wishes. Proteus's pride is wounded and it needs an excuse that his father provides. This is a first illustration of something that we will see again and again in the play. Contrary to what many people believe, fathers as fathers count for very little in Shakespeare. Instead of being the object of the deepest desire, as they are in Freud, they serve as masks of mimetic desire.

When he arrives in Milan, Proteus cannot help but recall Valentine's indifference to Julia:

My tales of love were wont to weary you;
I know you joy not in a love-discourse.

(II.iv.126-27)

Proteus is a little resentful but full of grudging admiration for the independent spirit of his friend. This is the true reason why he left Verona after all. Valentine's indifference has already undermined his desire for Julia.

III

Proteus's voyage to Milan is a delayed imitation of Valentine. His sudden passion for Silvia is exactly the same thing. To surrender one's erotic choice to a friend is more spectacular than to change one's residence, but the imitative pattern is the same. If we examine the conversation that generates Proteus's desire, right after his brief encounter with Silvia, we will see that the two phenomena have the same profile; after trying for a while to be his own man, Proteus cannot sustain the effort and, all of a sudden, succumbs to the influence of Valentine:

Proteus: Was this the idol
that you worship so?
Valentine: Even she; is she not a
heavenly saint?
Proteus: No; but she is an earthly
paragon.
Valentine: Call her divine.
Proteus: I will not flatter her.
Valentine: O flatter me; for love
delights in praises.

(II.iv.144-48)

In a Christian context, to call someone an “idol” can be insulting. The word carries the connotation of false worship; a heavenly saint is justly honored rather than unjustly worshipped. Twice already Proteus has brought Silvia down to earth, but Valentine still wants her in heaven:

Valentine: Yet let her be
a principality
Sovereign to all the creatures of this world.
Proteus: Except my own mistress.

(II.iv.152-154)

The last words frankly recognize the true reason for Proteus's displeasure; too much praise of Silvia is an implicit rejection of Julia. Proteus wants a truce but Valentine demands unconditional surrender:

Valentine: Sweet, except not
any,
Except thou wilt except against my love.
Proteus: Have I not reason to prefer
mine own?
Valentine: And I will help thee to
prefer her too:
She shall be dignified with this high honor—
To bear my lady's train, lest the base earth
Should from her vesture chance to steal a kiss,
And of so great a favor growing proud,
Disdain to root the summer-swelling flow'r,
And make rough winter everlastingly.

(II.iv.154-163)

As he listens to this, Proteus must picture the dismal future that awaits him in the company of his pathetic Julia. He will be permanently overshadowed by the radiant couple to which humble homage will have to be paid. Silvia happens to be the daughter of the reigning duke. The fact should not be overstressed but it is worth mentioning.

In his praise of Silvia, Valentine resorts primarily to religious metaphors. The traditional critics condemn this language as artificial. It applies to all women indifferently, they say, and it describes none in particular. Rhetoric is now fashionable once again but for the very reason, curiously, that made our predecessors dislike it: its apparent contempt for truth flatters our current complacency; we want a total divorce between language and reality and the preferred insignificance of rhetoric reassures our nihilism.

This divorce is less total than it seems. I readily agree that to call a woman “divine” does not describe her “as she really is.” Religious metaphors do not faithfully portray the beauty of a woman, but that is not their real purpose. We already learned that the mimetic context makes physical appearance irrelevant.

The debate is competitive and the metaphors are perfectly appropriate to their purpose. We can see that they are arranged on an ascending scale, suggesting higher and lower degrees of seductiveness. Julia is not really “a twinkling star”; Silvia is not “a celestial sun”; the rhetorical inflation is extreme but it does not make these images less referential than a thermometer would be if the numbers on it were multiplied by one hundred, or one hundred thousand. Even if she is not sovereign to all creatures of this world, Silvia may well be a more desirable match than Julia. Even if Valentine does not really become on Olympian god after marrying her, he may tower high above the unfortunate Proteus and his mediocre mistress.

Valentine uses this language so effectively that Proteus sounds more and more depressed. Whereas the former uses longer and longer sentences, the latter keeps speaking in brief and sullen outbursts. Earlier in Verona, he had felt as glorious as Valentine does now; his love for Julia made him rich and other people poor. Now Valentine alone is rich, so rich that his enormous wealth turns his friend into a comparative pauper.

Before he gives in to the magnetic attraction of Valentine's desire, Proteus makes a last effort to save his own independent desire; but Valentine is implacable:

Valentine: Pardon me, Proteus,
all I can is nothing
To her, whose worth makes other worthies nothing:
She is alone.
Proteus: Then let her alone.
Valentine: Why, man, she is mine
own,
And I as rich in having such a jewel
As twenty seas, if all their sand were pearl,
The water nectar, and the rocks pure gold.

(II.iv.165-171)

If we feel too painfully ostracized, the inaccessible world of our persecutors acquires a transcendental quality reminiscent of a specific religious experience, simultaneously archaic and modern, the kind in which the gods are more malevolent than benevolent. In plain language this time, Proteus hears that he has lost all importance in the eyes of his friend:

Valentine: Forgive me, that
I do not dream on thee,
Because thou seest me dote upon my love.

(II.iv.172-173)

Love takes precedence over friendship. A devastated Proteus now feels dispossessed not only of his beloved, Julia, and of his best friend, Valentine, but, ultimately, of his very self. The unconscious cruelty of Valentine has transformed him into something like a medieval leper, an absolute pariah.

A bottomless pit opens under his feet and, far above, the beautiful Silvia stands, in the company of an ecstatic Valentine. Were she willing to extend a helping hand to Proteus, she could bring him back to the shore of the living. Valentine has annihilated his friend but he has also suggested the path of resurrection. Proteus is irresistibly led to reorient his own desire toward the higher divinity. The language of heaven and hell is the only pertinent one for what is happening to Proteus. At first, Valentine resorted to it a little mechanically but, in the course of the conversation, it acquires a formidable significance. The discussion dies down when Proteus is fully convinced by the idolatrous language of Valentine. He has been converted to the cult of Silvia.

IV

Unlike Proteus, Valentine seems immune to mimetic desire. In Verona, he resists the desire of his friend and then in Milan, as far as we can tell, he falls in love with no outside help. His desire for Silvia has no visible model or intermediary of any kind. This autonomous desire is a deceptive appearance, another mimetic illusion, paradoxically. Valentine is more complex than he seems; we just saw him praise Silvia most compulsively for the “benefit” of Proteus and, a little earlier, he has praised Proteus no less compulsively for the benefit of Silvia and her father. If he had been as effective with her as he is with his friend, the two of them would have ended in each other's arms.

The final result would be a disaster even worse than the one that Valentine manages to bring about, the kind of disaster that actually comes to pass in some later plays, notably Troilus and Cressida. Valentine is an involuntary go-between who prefigures the deliberate go-between of the late comedies. He works so feverishly against his own interest that we wonder where his real desire lies.

Does Valentine secretly relish the prospect of an amorous conjunction between his mistress and his best friend? This speculation is legitimate, even indispensable, but it must not lead us to substitute some psychoanalytical theory for the text of Shakespeare. The tool at our disposal can liberate us from the false dichotomy between normal and abnormal desire.

We must never forget that Valentine and Proteus have a perfectly normal reason for trying to influence each other in favor of their respective mistresses: their childhood friendship. Choosing a wife is so important that a negative or even a lukewarm response on the part of a close friend makes us doubt the wisdom of our choice. We are not satisfied with his perfunctory approval; we demand his enthusiastic support.

Valentine's indifference for Julia first weakened, then destroyed Proteus's desire for her. Understandably, Valentine seeks to avoid a parallel experience and this is why he tries to persuade Proteus that Silvia is superior to Julia. Valentine's faith in Silvia would be just as undermined as Proteus's faith in Julia if the latter's reaction in Milan turned out to be the same as his own reaction earlier in Verona. Valentine's excessive praise of Silvia is an effort to exorcise this peril.

In order to wrench from Proteus the highest possible evaluation of Silvia, Valentine displays more confidence than he really possesses. This does not mean that he is indifferent to Silvia; he is genuinely attracted to this pretty girl, but from this attraction to the fanatical cult that he publicly professes there is a distance that could not be bridged without the paradoxical help of Proteus. Although Valentine's choice of Silvia is not mimetically determined in the sense that Proteus's is, his desire has a mimetic dimension that his excessive praise of the girl reveals.

Valentine makes his desire more real than it is in order to contaminate Proteus with it and turn this friend into an a posteriori mimetic model. We can see plainly the role of Valentine in convincing Proteus that Silvia is divine; the role of Proteus in convincing Valentine of the same idea is a little less visible but just as unquestionable. As the desire of Proteus for Silvia increases, so does Valentine's own desire and his rhetoric becomes livelier.

Valentine's strategy is far from exceptional; we are all able to observe other people practicing it around us and, if we are not too allergic to self-examination, we can even catch ourselves doing the same thing. Our desires are not really convincing until they are mirrored by the desires of others. Just below our fully explicit consciousness, we anticipate the reactions of our friends and we try to channel them in the direction of our own uncertain choosing, the direction that our desire should steadfastly maintain in order not to seem mimetic at all. Such steadfastness is not the preordained affair that everybody assumes. With the help of his mimetically conditioned model, Valentine reinforces his still wobbling desire, thus turning into a “complete truth” the half-truth of his love of Silvia. Valentine's appetite for the mimetic desire of Proteus is itself mimetic and the asymmetrical posture of the two friends does not destroy but accomplishes the fundamental symmetry of their mimetic partnership.

V

An observer with an interest in psychopathology will diagnose all sorts of “symptoms” in Valentine and Proteus that are still only faintly visible. These symptoms are far from imaginary since they will reappear in sharper outline in many later plays of Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, Othello, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, etc.

We can see something sadistic in Valentine when he excites Proteus's envy, and something masochistic when he suffers from the backlash of that envy. We can call him an “exhibitionist” when he displays Silvia in front of Proteus; we can also diagnose in him the “latent homosexuality” of Freud. None of this is irrelevant, but our intellectual grasp of the play will be harmed rather than helped if we let this psychiatric vocabulary detract us from the Shakespearean source of intelligibility, mimetic desire.

A man cannot give a greater proof that a woman is desirable than by actually desiring her. It would be excessive to say that Proteus in Verona or Valentine in Milan, actually want their friend to fall in love with the woman they love. It is a fine line, however, between seeking the encouragement of a friend and pushing him into the woman's arms or pushing her into his arms.

When this line is visibly crossed we feel that we are beyond a certain “perverse” or pathological threshold, but the fundamental situation has not changed and the precise definition is in the eyes of the beholder. All that I want to show, for the time being, is that it is always possible to bring the more or less “perverse” structure back to the very normal urge of the two childhood friends who imitate each other's desires because they have always done so and it has always reinforced both their respective desires and their common friendship.

The same individual who does all he can to communicate his own desire to his friend will become insane with jealousy at the slightest sign of success. This will be true in the later Shakespeare even of the most deliberate and most perverse go-between, Pandarus. We can already understand why: once the subject's desire has been invigorated by the desire transplanted into the friend, this vigorous desire truly dreads the competition for which it yearned as long as it still lacked the vigor provided by the rivalry.

Contrary to general belief, the presence of legible symptoms is no guarantee that a pathological interpretation is its own source of light. At all stages of the diachronic development, the mimetic perspective makes the greater sense. We can always trace all symptoms back to the traumatic experience of the mimetic double bind, the simultaneous discovery by Valentine and Proteus that, in addition to the usual imperative of friendship: imitate me, another imperative has mysteriously appeared: do not imitate me. The “pathological symptoms” are all reactions to the friends' inability to free themselves from this double bind or even to perceive it clearly.

The innocent friendship and the mimetic paradox that destroys it are the most important truth; Pandarus himself is only a mimetic caricature of that fundamental truth. Psychopathological considerations are legitimate as long as they do not take precedence. The perversion of desire is never its own origin in Shakespeare; it is mimetically derived from the initial double bind, the real source at the beginning and at the end of the diachronic trajectory described by mimetic desire.

The only way to escape from the mimetic double bind, the only radical solution would be for both friends to renounce all possessive desire once and for all. The real choice is between tragic conflict and total renunciation, the Kingdom of God, the golden rule of the gospels. This alternative is so frightening that the Shakespearean heroes try to elude it, and that is the reason they are condemned to the distortions and perversions of ever renewed mimetic duplications. The search for a compromise produces an unhealthy combination of things that are not supposed to be combined; renunciation becomes a parody of itself, tinged with the slipperiness of sexual perversion. Values and meanings that should remain separate contaminate each other: friendship and Eros, possessiveness and generosity, peace and war, love and hatred, etc.

Close to the end of the play, a most remarkable line of Valentine illustrates this fundamental ambiguity. It occurs just after Proteus attempts to rape Silvia. After her rescue, a general reconciliation follows during which the victorious Valentine, just reunited to his beloved, literally offers her to the would-be rapist:

All that was mine in Silvia I give thee.

(V.iv.83)

This largesse of Valentine not only disregards the sentiments of Silvia but it rewards criminal behavior. Always inclined to believe that villains should be severely punished, the traditional critics are scandalized by Valentine's excessive generosity.

This severity does not understand that Valentine must share part of the blame for the treachery of his friend. At first, Valentine himself did not understand what his own mimetic teasing did to Proteus, but now he does and he is in no mood for self-righteous indignation. The only peaceful solution is to let the rival have the disputed object. Silvia is this object and Valentine declares himself ready, Abraham-like, to sacrifice his love on the altar of friendship.

A repentant Valentine is trying to atone for his sin. In the context of selfless friendship, no ambiguity should remain. But our malaise persists; we want to interpret Valentine's “excessive generosity” in terms of pure friendship, but it inevitably recalls his too effective job of advertising the beauty of Silvia.

The two interpretations contradict each other and yet no choice is possible between them and no choice should be made. This Gordian knot is its own explanation in the sense that any effort to bypass the mimetic double bind, short of total renunciation, must produce some kind of “monster,” a false reconciliation of entities that should remain irreconcilable. This ambivalence is quintessentially Shakespearean and it becomes more pronounced with time. The double bind of mimetic love/hate is the Shakespearean trauma par excellence and it perverts the human relations that it does not violently destroy.

Shakespearean ambivalence could be defined as a contamination of tragedy by the Golden Rule and of the Golden Rule by tragedy, an unholy mixture of the two. If we trust in the pseudo-science of sexual drives and instincts, we not only lose the tragic dimension of all Shakespearean plays, but the sexual aspect itself becomes opaque and unintelligible.

VI

This double bind of mimetic desire is essential not only to The Two Gentlemen of Verona but to the entire work of Shakespeare and, in my judgment, the critics' blindness to it decisively vitiates their entire interpretation. It is the intellectual equivalent of the perverse desire in Shakespeare which is never openly discussed. Even those interpreters who ask sharp questions about the relationship of Valentine and Proteus finally dissolve the paradox instead of confronting it explicitly.

This is the case with Anne Barton, I believe, whom I find unusually perceptive but who defines the conflict of the two friends as one of “friendship” versus “love.”² This is exactly what it is not. The problem cannot be reduced to an opposition of concepts. Let us suppose that both Valentine and Proteus give up love for the sake of friendship. It really means that they are free to imitate each other once again and, sooner or later, they will desire the same woman or some other object that they will not be able to share. Once again, the friendship will be destroyed.

Valentine and Proteus can be friends only by desiring alike and, if they do, they are enemies. Neither one can sacrifice friendship to love or love to friendship without sacrificing what he wants to retain and retaining what he wants to sacrifice. The conflict between friendship and love is a verbal swindle that falsely unravels the inextricable mimetic entanglement of the two. It reminds me of the French “classical” critics, great experts at hiding the nakedness of mimetic rivalry behind the noble draperies of fake ethical debates, honor versus love, passion against duty, etc.

The French are not the only culprits; everybody is doing the same thing and, as long as the fundamental role of mimetic rivalry remains unacknowledged, all interpretation of tragedy is bound to relapse into some version of the conceptual illusion. All critics finally camouflage tragedy behind irrelevant “values.” Tragedy is irreducible to conceptual differentiation, and no one shows this as powerfully as Shakespeare. He displays the mimetic double bind so conspicuously that he makes it difficult for his readers to elude it, and he arouses red-hot anger in the critics who come too close to understanding what he is doing. When Rhymer complained that Othello was about nothing or almost nothing, he told the truth.³ Shakespeare's work lends itself less easily than most others to the concealment of human evil behind the conventions of cultural and humanistic chatter.

Tragic antagonists do not fight about “values”; they desire the same objects and they think the same thoughts. They do not select these objects fortuitously; it is not a matter of chance, or caprice, or some inconsequential reason; it is not the fault of an economic system in which too few people must compete for too few objects; these heroes think alike and they desire alike because they are dear friends and brothers in all senses of the word brother.

The intellectual, ethical, cultural criticism of tragedy has never been able to acknowledge the fundamental similarity, even identity, of tragic antagonists; it fabricates differences where there are none. Mimetic rivalry alone goes to the heart of the question.

When Aristotle defines tragedy as the conflict of those closely related to one another, we must not interpret this statement from a narrowly familial standpoint. Deep in the human psyche, mimetic rivalry reaches the identical essence of concord and discord in human affairs.

Tragic inspiration, which is not limited to the writing of tragedy, begins with an acknowledgment of this stark reality. This is what we have in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. In the precious soliloquy of Proteus from which I have already abundantly quoted, we also find the following lines:

Methinks my zeal to Valentine is cold,
And that I love him not as I was wont:
O, but I love his lady too too much
And that's the reason I love him so little.

(II.iv.203-206)

This passage is not particularly beautiful or striking; our appetite for subtlety and opacity finds this message too simple and obvious. It outlines a genesis of human conflict that is certainly present “in real life”; it is also the substance not only of Shakespeare's theater but of all great theater.

The mimetic rivalry of Valentine and Proteus provides the comedy with its plot; it is the staple of dramatic and novelistic literature. The only people who give it its due are the great creative writers, the tragic poets of Greece, Shakespeare and Cervantes, Molière and Racine, Dostoevsky and Proust, and very few others. Only the great masterpieces of the Western theater and of Western fiction acknowledge the primacy of mimetic rivalry.

Most curiously, literary critics never pay the slightest attention to this; they take it for granted. Their theoretical disquisitions are less influenced by literary texts than by philosophers and social scientists systematically blind to what really interests Shakespeare, which seems commonplace in their eyes. Mimetic rivalry has never appeared in the conceptual schemes of philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, psychoanalysts, and even polemologists, specialists of conflict. And all theoreticians of imitation, from Plato and Aristotle to Gabriel Tarde, all the modern experimental students of imitative behavior have missed the transparent but essential paradox of conflictual mimesis.

The students of conflict devise many theories about the nature and origin of human discord without ever taking mimetic rivalry into account. If no human being is the culprit, then it must be an idea, or perhaps some chemical substance—something fundamentally alien to what the friendship and the friends intrinsically are. They look for some principle of human aggression that would be buried deep in our genes; they consult our hormones; they invoke Mars, Oedipus, and the unconscious; they curse the repressiveness of families and other social institutions; they never mention mimetic rivalry. This is the scandal of human relations which most of us elude because if offends our optimistic view of human relations. We take for granted that such conflict is the exception and harmony the rule among men, especially among such excellent friends as Proteus and Valentine.

A tragic writer sees things differently. Instead of avoiding what most of us studiously avoid, he focuses obsessively on it; even this early comedy already contains many lines that indirectly define the tragic paradox. When he catches Proteus in the act of raping Silvia, Valentine exclaims:

                                        O times most accurst!
’Mongst all foes that a friend should be the worst!

(V.iv.71-72)

This is not a rhetorical hyperbole but a thinly veiled formulation of what the play is really about, the uncanny proximity, even identity, of mimetic friendship and mimetic hatred.

During his entire career, Shakespeare will go on portraying friends and brothers who turn enemies for no reason visible to a nonmimetic observer, and the reverse is also true; deadly enemies become intimate friends for no visible reason either.

If it proves true that amongst all foes, a friend must be the worst, it should follow that amongst all friends, a foe should be the best. If this last paradox sounds like an exaggeration, then listen to what happens in Coriolanus, the last of Shakespeare's great tragedies. Instead of two close friends becoming enemies, then friends once again, Coriolanus and Aufidius are two fierce warriors and two deadly rivals who become close friends for a while. When his exasperated fellow citizens finally banish the invincible but overbearing Coriolanus, this hero turns for help to Aufidius, the military leader of the Volces, with whom he has been fighting for years. In a soliloquy, he justifies his daring appeal to his archenemy on the ground that extreme love and extreme hatred are unstable sentiments, always likely to change into one another:

O world, thy slippery turns! Friends now fast sworn,
Whose double bosoms seem to wear one heart,
Whose hours, whose bed, whose meal and exercise
Are still together, who twin, as ’twere, in love
Unseparable, shall within this hour,
On a dissension of a doit, break out
To bitterest enmity; so fellest foes,
Whose passions and whose plots have broke their sleep
To take the one the other, by some chance,
Some trick not worth an egg, shall grow dear friends
And interjoin their issues.

(Iv.iv.12-22)

The event confirms the speculation of Coriolanus; seeing that they are very much alike and that they love exactly the same things, the two enemies fall into each other's arms. Aufidius entrusts to Coriolanus the commandment of a military expedition against Rome. And very quickly, of course, the rival ambitions reawaken and Aufidius ends up murdering his mimetic rival whom he loves and hates with equal intensity.

The structure of conflict is the same in the comedies and in the tragedies. The only differences lie in the mode of resolution which can be violent or nonviolent for reasons of dramatic convenience. All our theories of conflict and even our language reflect the commonsense view that the more intense the conflict, the wider the separation must be between the antagonists. The tragic spirit operates on the opposite principle. The more intense the conflict, the less room for difference there is in it. Shakespeare formulates this central mimetic truth in many diverse ways and, as soon as we read them in a mimetic light, their rationality becomes evident. What is true of Valentine and Proteus, or of Coriolanus and Aufidius, is also true of Caesar and Mark Antony:

… that which is the strength of their amity shall
prove the immediate author of their variance.

(Antony and Cleopatra, II.vi.125-27)

VII

In order to satisfy us, our interpretation of The Two Gentlemen of Verona needs a slight rectification. For the sake of my demonstration, I exaggerated somewhat the mimetic symmetry of the two protagonists, which is not always perfect—far from it—and a more balanced view must prevail.

The symmetry is not imaginary but it has not yet triumphed in this early play to the extent that it will in the later Shakespeare. It manifests itself powerfully, but in an uneasy combination with its own opposite, which is an asymmetrical conception of the two heroes. The author seems to vacillate between two diametrically opposed ideas of his own comedy. At certain moments we feel that the two protagonists are equally affected by mimetic desire and their reciprocity or symmetry is perfect. At other moments, the “bad” mimetic desire seems to belong to Proteus exclusively, and its badness provides the dark background upon which the unsubstantial goodness of Valentine seems to acquire being. When this happens, Proteus becomes a conventional villain and Valentine a conventional hero.

A more mature Shakespeare would undermine more resolutely this conventional dissymmetry of Valentine and Proteus; he would deconstruct the hero/villain dichotomy more thoroughly than he does in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. This early work still hesitates between, on the one hand, a traditional comedy in which envy, jealousy, and the other bad (mimetic) sentiments belong exclusively to Proteus and, on the other hand, a more radically Shakespearean play in which Valentine's mimetic teasing of Proteus is the exact equivalent of Proteus's treachery.

The existing play partakes of both the old comic pattern that hides the mimetic reciprocity behind scapegoats and the radically mimetic conception that will triumph in A Midsummer Night's Dream. I have emphasized what belongs to the Shakespearean future in this play, rather than what it retains of a theatrical tradition that a more experienced Shakespeare will later discard resolutely and completely.

Notes

1. The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: 1974), II.iv.192-95. Future references are parenthetically inserted.

2. Ibid., p. 144.

3. Thomas Rhymer, “Against Othello,” A Short View of Tragedy (1693), in J. Frank Kermode, ed., Four Centuries of Shakespearean Criticism (New York: Avon, 1965), pp. 461-68.