SOURCE: “The ‘Full Meaning’ of The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” in Comparative Drama, Vol. 23, No. 3, Fall 1989, pp. 201-27.

[In the essay below, Cole discusses the problems with dating The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and analyzes the sources from which Shakespeare may have drawn to craft the play. In his examination of the play's tone and themes, Cole contends that the comic scenes of the play do not simply satirize or criticize the ideals of love and friendship, but rather reveal these ideals “in a new light.”]

Speaking of Shakespeare's “continuous development,” T. S. Eliot once insisted that “the full meaning of any one of his plays is not in itself alone, but in that play in the order in which it was written, in its relation to all of Shakespeare's other plays, earlier and later: we must know all of Shakespeare's work in order to know any of it.”¹ We must also, of course, know as much as we can about the works upon which Shakespeare's work was based, and about the traditions that enriched and defined them, especially if we seek the full meaning of a very early play, whose awkwardness may obscure the meaning its young author intended as well as its significance in the shaping of his whole career. If we measure The Two Gentlemen of Verona in these three ways—against the other early plays, against its own sources, and against the traditions those sources bespeak—we shall see that it is probably Shakespeare's first comedy, that its tone is generally serious, and that however great its reliance upon traditions, its use of them is quite untraditional.

I

Dating. First, Two Gentlemen's dating, for whether we pursue its full meaning or simply its significance in Shakespeare's continuous development, our sequence must be rightly ordered, and nowhere does the problem of chronology loom larger than in the early comedies. Granted, almost everyone since T. W. Baldwin would rank Love's Labor's Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream as the fourth and fifth of five comedies composed between 1590 and 1595, and most critics still place The Comedy of Errors first, The Taming of the Shrew second, and Two Gentlemen third. For the placement of the first three comedies, however, there is no conclusive evidence, either external or internal, only inferred patterns of development. For example, since Two Gentlemen contains so many signposts to the increasingly romantic worlds ahead—Navarre, Belmont, Illyria—it is deemed unlikely to have preceded those anomalous, brusquer worlds of Errors and Shrew. But such Darwinian logic surely overlooks the fact that the forests of Athens and Arden are separated by that of Windsor as well as the likelihood that when the apprentice playwright first turned to comedy, he found the immediate theaters of Greene and Lyly more attractive than any academic re-creations of Plautus and Terence. Certainly by 1592, or whenever he plotted his first comedy, Shakespeare must already have seen many specimens of native romantic drama, if only the kind of stuff epitomized by the very popular Mucedorus. Yet another frequent assumption is that his first essay in comedy must have naturally drawn upon the classical schooling of more than a decade past, that he first needed to work that “small Latine” out of his system before experimenting with the readily available.

If such inferred patterns lead us everywhere and nowhere, so do poetic “style” and topicality, each in its own way vague or incomplete or ambiguous. Just as frustrating is our lack of relevant external criteria: only a passing reference to the Gray's Inn performance of Errors in December 1594 and Meres' notice in 1598 of Errors, Two Gentlemen, and probably Shrew (“Love Labours Wonne”). The least indefinite evidence we are left to work with is dramatic technique, skills as basic to Shakespeare's craft as the building of dialogue. Here the very critics who place Two Gentlemen third in the comic sequence also admit that it is, technically speaking, his least successful play. While E. K. Chambers eventually placed it after Errors and Shrew, for instance, in a separate essay he had already noticed that “no [other] play … bears upon it such obvious marks of immaturity,” including the “abuse of verbal ingenuities” throughout, the “sentimental bankruptcy” of the closing scene, and that “lack of adroitness which allows the characters … to fall into pairs.”² At the same time, critics who are reluctant to place Two Gentlemen first rightly celebrate Errors as “a work of some achievement”³ and seem to appreciate its technical superiority.

These technical comparisons point to Two Gentlemen as Shakespeare's first comedy, and so does our scheme of measuring the plays against their sources. Of the three works in question, it seems the least critical about (or most indifferent to) the artificiality of its sources' views and values, and it is therefore the least cautious in exploiting its sources' conventions. It is, in short, the most conventional and the most self-consciously conventional of these youthful exercises. Valentine sets the mood by carefully cataloguing love-books, Leander, and love's pains,⁴ Proteus counters with a predictable tribute to love's power (properly footnoted, of course: “Yet writers say …”), and Valentine caps the exchange with an equally predictable caveat for his “metamorphis'd” friend, that “votary to fond desire” (again, dutifully registered: “And writers say …”). We may wince at such apparently solemn rehearsals of clichés and truisms and look for signs of Shakespeare's impatience with simply following romantic-comic conventions (the kind of attitude signaled by the very title of Love's Labor's Lost) or for anticipations of the Puckish tone that surfaces in Lysander's careful charting of the never-smooth-running course of true love (especially as glossed by the indignant Hermia). If the playwright meant us to laugh here, however, the humorous touches are deft indeed, far subtler than in any comedy before As You Like It and oddly sorted with those tiresomely obvious jokes about “horns” and “lac'd mutton” which immediately follow.

Granted, there is no denying the comic potential in these young men's desire to show that they have been reading just the right books. But was their young creator himself so bent on reflecting the same fashionable knowledge that he took them as seriously as they take themselves? If a modern production emphasizes their self-conscious posturing, thereby implying that Shakespeare was having fun at their expense, it must rely on gestures, voice inflections, costuming, or whatever else the director decides to bring into the text. Before adding such seasoning, however, the same director should consider those technical deficiencies which cannot be explained as misunderstood comedy—static declamations, mechanical asides, dialogue that quickly degenerates into duologue—the very evidence that prevents Stanley Wells … from believing that Shakespeare had already plotted the last scenes of Errors, Shrew, and much of Richard III.

We shall later argue Two Gentlemen's essentially earnest tone. At this point we need only remain skeptical about equating what may be innocent awkwardness with deliberate mischief, lest we see in the young playwright's own lack of art a clever indictment of artifice. It is admittedly tempting to interpret the play's consistently formal, often self-consciously eloquent, and sometimes frigid lyricism as Shakespeare's case against lovers who confuse verbal cleverness with true emotion; such a case is in fact made in Love's Labor's Lost, when Petrarch and “painted rhetoric” retreat in the face of true love, sickness, and death. But given the artful yet obvious exposure of superficial codes and attitudes in that comedy, it seems more likely that the young poet of Two Gentlemen was simply not yet able to poetize dramatically, to adapt his flights to distinguish lovers true from false. After all, whether or not this play is his first comedy, it does represent Shakespeare's first attempt to order the wide-ranging episodes of romantic fiction, a task so taxing in itself that he might well have been forced to think much more about exploitable techniques (“how to make it play”) than about credible representation (“what does this really mean?”).

The play's least credible moments, of course, come in the last quixotic scene, beginning with Proteus' infamous “In love / Who respects friend?” (V.iv.53-54). If we have been assuming mischief throughout the play, an author gently mocking the very codes his dim-witted gentlemen invoke, Proteus' question looks rhetorical, a coup de grâce for high-minded theorizing and people who expect life to be just like literature. But Sylvia, up to now quite sensible and certainly free-spirited, immediately and unrealistically retorts, “All men but Proteus,” and we find no suggestion that her answer came too easily or that it should have been qualified. A far more realistic treatment of love versus friendship appears later in Much Ado about Nothing, beginning with Beatrice's “Kill Claudio” (IV.i.289), but Two Gentlemen points in the other direction, back to the Warwickshire country boy, anxious at the outset to advertise his own knowledge of fashionable writers, to prove with the entrance of Speed on line 70 that he also knew his Lyly, and finally, with Julia's complaint about her maid's docility some 130 lines later, to demonstrate his mastery of Montemayor.

Conspicuous in Two Gentlemen's uncritical acceptance of its sources' views and values, then, is what Geoffrey Bullough terms “a somewhat jejeune absence of self-criticism.”⁵ Either that or an absence of self-confidence, a Shakespeare who finally made “a nervous recourse to tradition, to the practice of older dramatists”⁶ by having Valentine offer Sylvia to Proteus. The latter explanation is probably more logical, but if we measure this early comedy against the choices of treatments its models offered, we sense the brash amateur more often than the nervous novice.

II

Crafting. Which sources (or which of their respective traditions) exerted the greatest influence in the crafting of Two Gentlemen, and was there a single work which provided its seminal idea? Perhaps the artist himself could not have answered these questions, for inchoate musings often alternate rapidly, even involuntarily, between unlike things. Stories of the magnanimous friend and of the inconstant lover could have shaped one another from the very outset, unless, of course, Shakespeare's original goal was merely to revise an old play, now lost, which apparently followed Montemayor's Diana in dealing only with inconstant love: “The history of felix & philiomena.”⁷ But the playwright is not likely to have known about a play evidently performed only once at court in 1585.

The few critics who have addressed the issue of precedence seem evenly divided between the inconstant lover strain (the germ of the Julia-Proteus-Silvia triangle, whose source is almost always identified as Diana) and the magnanimous friend strain (the germ of the Valentine-Silvia-Proteus triangle, whose source is usually identified as Eliot's The Governor but sometimes as Lyly's Euphues or Boccaccio's Decameron or even Flaminio Scala's Flavio Tradito).⁸ But whichever strain first attracted the young playwright's attention, he must have soon realized that the problems of molding his two triangles into a quadrilateral were not entirely structural. The conventions each tradition appeals to, as well as its final moral, are mutually exclusive: the virtue of constancy in love (with Julia as long-suffering heroine and Silvia merely the “other woman”) must inevitably clash with the virtue of friendship over love (with Valentine as selfless hero and Proteus the favored friend). As Berners Jackson wryly notes, the result is that the “hero and heroine … in what seems to be a love story, do not meet until the end, and do not fall in love. What we have, in fact, is a conflict between the claims of two conventions.”⁹

Even more interesting is that Two Gentlemen reveals no attempt to cushion the obviously inevitable clash by adapting one story's events, characters, and meanings to the other's. For the original audience, dramatic suspense must have centered not in whether but in how all would be made to go well; the conflicting conventions were equally popular, and the contrary expectations they raise seem equally encouraged well into the last scene. Indeed, the longer Shakespeare postponed the climax (in this play, a final turning point in the fortunes of the conventions as well as of the characters), the less credible his gentlemen were bound to become. Forced into the alien world of inconstant love, Valentine must serve as a foil to Proteus, yet his new role of loyal lover jeopardizes his old role of true friend who sacrifices his betrothed. Conversely, the introduction of Julia into the friendship story makes Proteus, the favored friend, seem worthless as both friend and lover.

It is Julia's swoon—genuine or feigned? the mistaken ring certainly appears deliberate—which initiates the triumph of love over friendship, of good sense over high-flown theory, of romance over the stuff of academic theses. A few awkward moments admittedly remain. Thurio, for example, is dismissed as “degenerate and base” for relinquishing his claim to Silvia upon “such slight conditions” as her contempt for him. But the apprentice is now going in the right direction, toward worlds in which clear heads complement loving hearts. Another sign of better things ahead, a weakness that will become a strength, is Shakespeare's clumsy attempt to blend disparate sources. We shall never know why, so early in his career, he was not content to essay only one tradition at a time; as we shall see, each offered more than enough material. Perhaps it was the same “two is bound to be better than one” principle which inspired the surplus of Senecan revenge machinery in the early chronicles and the twins' twin servants in Errors. But there is some good in the tendency of young artists to begin by taking on too much: every choice they are thereby forced to make throws additional light on their goals and techniques.

Whichever story line Shakespeare initially recalled or happened upon, his memory or search must have first of all been stimulated by dramatic considerations, for no entertainer anxious to succeed dares ignore what is currently successful. And if the reader turned playwright began not with a story to dramatize but kinds of drama to imitate, to find stories for, he probably had greater inspiration for long-suffering Julia than magnanimous Valentine. The persecuted heroines in the romantic comedies of Shakespeare's boyhood—Sir Clyomon and Clamydes (c. 1570) and Common Conditions (=1576)¹⁰ are two which have survived—had become the more delicate but equally oppressed ladies in Fair Em (c.1590) and Mucedorus (=1598), and especially those lovely women—all wronged within highly moral frames of reference—whose misfortunes Greene plots in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c.1589) and James IV (c.1591), Margaret, Dorothea, and Ida.

Granted, native drama had also drawn upon and developed the widely popular friendship literature but rarely along the lines of romantic comedy. It is significant that the only extant play focusing solely on love versus friendship, the Tragaedia Von Julio und Hyppolyta, ends tragically, even though nearly every narrative handling, including Boccaccio's and Elyot's, concludes happily.¹¹ It is likely that Richard Edwardes' lost Palamon and Arcite (1566) also opposed friendship to love and ended unhappily. Comedy does survive in Fedele and Fortunio: The deceites in Love … of two Italian Gentlemen (c.1584), but it is basically the comedy of its source, Pasqualigo's Il Fedele (1576), the comedy of intrigue, whose main interest is not love but the deceits sexual desire inspires. Flavio Tradito is even more brusque and less personal; its characters seem incapable of introspection, and its soul lies in its ingenious plotting. The only dramatizing of the love-friendship conflict which could be considered romantic comedy, in fact, is the only version we can be reasonably certain Shakespeare knew, an episode in Lyly's Endimion (1588) in which Eumenides rightly prefers the welfare of his friend Endimion to the winning of his love, Semele. But even here the differences are as significant as the similarities, for Shakespeare added to Lyly's cerebral, intricately patterned debates what G. K. Hunter aptly characterizes as the “sense of the beating heart beneath the word-play.”¹² That phrase may remind us of O. J. Campbell's point about Shakespeare's “creative sympathy with youthful emotion,”¹³ his freeing the love story not from witty word-play but from a surplus of incident, the intrigue that dominated the commedia dell'arte. It would therefore appear that if Shakespeare began his career in comedy by surveying the kinds of successful plays he could imitate, he either followed Greene's long-suffering heroines into Monte-mayor's narrative or revised one of the comedic forms of friendship literature—knockabout Italian or rarefied Lylian—along Greene's gentler yet more vital lines.

Lest this choice of Greene first or Greene last seem forced, consider Bacon and Bungay III.i, a scene which probably points backward to Campaspe (1584) and possibly forward to Two Gentlemen. Desperately in lust with Margaret yet fearful it will be “marriage or no market with the mayd,” Prince Edward has posted to Oxford to enlist Bacon's “nigromaticke spels” and has left his friend Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, to woo for him.¹⁴ By the time Edward reaches the Friar's cell, of course, Margaret and Lacy are deeply in love, and Bacon's magic is used instead to prevent their marriage. The Prince now returns to confront the couple, “poinard in his hand,” but he soon finds it difficult to keep afloat in young love's sea of virtue and self-sacrifice. His first charge, treason, elicits Lacy's confession that only Love taught him why “the louely maid of Fresingfield / Was fitter to be Lacies wedded wife, / Than concubine vnto the prince of Wales” (ll. 944-46). Edward next advances the code of male friendship—“Iniurious Lacie, did I loue thee more / Than Alexander his Hephestion?”—but Peggy replies with a more realistic question, whether heterosexual love “Is not of force to bury thoughts of friendes.” The Prince then falls to high-flown verbiage, and she returns him god for god to underline the emptiness of splendid rhetoric. He finally appropriates academic logic—“Ablata causa, tollitur effectus”—only to have Peggy assure him that she would shortly “meet her Lacie in the heauens.” Between her plea—“Rid me, and keepe a friend worth many loues”—and his—“Nay, Edward, keepe a loue worth many friends”—the beleaguered Prince is virtually forced into “subduing fancies passion, / Conquering [him]selfe” (ll. 1043-44).

Margaret's closing moral, “Then lordly sir, [thy] conquest is as great, / In conquering loue, as Caesars victories” (ll. 1060-61), as well as Edward's own comparison of himself to Alexander (l. 948), will recall Campaspe, which ends with Hephestion's compliment, “The conquering of Thebes was not so honourable as the subdueing of these thoughts,” and Alexander's quizzical response, “either find me out an other [world] to subdue, or of my word I wil fall in loue.”¹⁵ As in our comparison of Lyly to Shakespeare, however, the differences here are again at least as significant as the similarities. Margaret's moral closes a scene in the middle of the play; the code of male friendship or “honor” is but the first of many obstacles in the course of true love. Edward's lust will be followed by the jealous rivalry of Lambert and Serlsby, Lacy's supposed disloyalty, and Margaret's own last-minute rescue from the convent at Framlingham. Hephestion's moral, on the other hand, is the play's moral, its concluding statement. For all of Lyly's talk about love, the heroine (and the love story that might have been) will turn out to be but one obstacle in the hero's course of true honor. Those scenes which would have been central in Greene, Apelles' growing love for Campaspe (or, in Endimion, the longings of Eumenides for Semele and of Corsites for Tellus), are in Lyly merely means to a more comprehensive end, Alexander's perfect magnanimity (or Endimion's perfect possession of Perfect Beauty).

As in Greene, so almost always in early Shakespeare. Their lyricism creates an atmosphere that engenders belief in youthful love and courtship, in heroines who feel as well as think, in heroes who are more interested in the women they pursue than in the ideas their courtships are intended to suggest. Lyly keeps before us the artifice of balance and design, characters who obviously represent some point of view, episodes that are steps in a delicate thesis-dance. Greene and Shakespeare, however, give us lovers in action, and since these lovers do not seem to “stand for” anything, it is hard not to take their courtships as ends in themselves; only after a major crisis has been resolved do we find ourselves reflecting on the meanings that have been advanced. The authors of Bacon and Bungay and Two Gentlemen point forward to soap opera, while he who measures Alexander is looking back to medieval and early Tudor disputations. Greene and Shakespeare would have envied a modern director's freedom to assign the heroine's part to a woman; Lyly would probably have continued to use a bright little boy, lest emotion blur wit or empathy with any dancer obscure the dance.

It is unlikely that Greene's romantic playwrighting instilled in Shakespeare a penchant wholly new, but what an encouraging precedent for a novice whose skills were just developing! What Shakespeare discovered only in the crafting of Two Gentlemen, however, was a problem Greene faced in Bacon and Bungay and did not completely solve until James IV, the difficulty of making five acts' worth of incidents all relate to the quiet heroism of the long-suffering heroine(s). In Bacon and Bungay, Bacon's spectacular magic is introduced by way of Edward's lust, and it is further defined as that which “worketh manie woes” when the sons of Lambert and Serlsby, seeing their father dueling over Peggy in the “glasse prospectiue,” kill one another. But much of Bacon's magic advances themes irrelevant to Peggy's plight, matters of patriotism, repentence, and sheer display. In James IV, on the other hand, every scene provides some comment on the perils and purity of Ida or Dorothea.

Shakespeare also used two heroines to flesh out his plot, and he probably drew from other popular plays for the theme of forgiveness (for example, The Rare Triumphes of Love and Fortune, c. 1582, which later served as a source for Cymbeline) and for some merry greenwood scenes (any of the numerous plays from Robin Hood, = 1560, to Peele's Edward I, = 1593). All this and much more could have been worked in without endangering unity of mood or consistency of characterization. But less than half way through the play the apprentice playwright suddenly switched traditions, appropriating what seemed to him the most attractive features within the private theater of ideas. Supposedly smitten by Silvia's beauty, Proteus registers his passion formally, as a thesis-problem:

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.203-06)

At this point an entirely human situation of “all for love” begins competing against the academic abstraction of “friendship over love.” As Hunter notes, this latter “Lylian kind of structure will … only work when the characters are as simple as are Lyly's,” and Proteus has by now become much too real in his passion and knavery to be reduced to the idea of love sacrificing honor. … If Shakespeare was aware of such mixed moods engendering contrary expectations, however, his juxtaposing of II.vi and II.vii (formal restatement of thesis-problem; winsome illustration of all for love) suggests that he was quite indifferent to the risks.

III

Unconventionality. As Hunter implies, then, Two Gentlemen's main fault is a structure too suddenly Lylian, a “debate theme too central”. … Yet the fault seems to have been deliberately committed, for in both the magnanimous friend and the inconstant lover strains Shakespeare had ample encouragement to humanize absolutes or to soften dichotomies. However widespread, geographically and chronologically, the authors who opposed love and friendship—from Hans Sachs to Lope de Vega, from Boccaccio and Chaucer through at least six of the most popular novellieri to Elyot and Lyly¹⁶—none was so radically “conventional” as to anticipate Valentine's quixotic offer, for the magnanimous friend is usually no real lover and the recipient is always unquestionably worthy of the gift. Indeed, to judge from Louis Sorieri's study of the Titus and Gisippus story in European literature which examines more than one hundred twenty versions of the rival friends theme, writers of the classical, medieval, and Renaissance periods all stressed the central situation's human dimensions, not its potential as a topic to inspire debate.¹⁷

Granted, the medieval moralists' tendency to highlight a particular virtue occasionally pushed friendship to absurd limits—a man sacrifices his only son to save his friend's child, for example—but the tales which test love for friend against love for lady, the tradition which defines the better known contributions of Boccaccio and Elyot, all aim at psychological credibility. Boccaccio himself is careful never to mention Gisippo's and Sofronia's feelings for one another until Tito, desperately lovesick, confesses his passion; only then are we told that Gisippo “too, had been captivated by [her] charms, though in a lesser degree,” and that therefore “it was not long before he concluded that [Tito's] life should be dearer to him than the girl.”¹⁸ He convinces Tito, in fact, that since he can always “lightly bend [his own] heart to another,” his generosity is actually self-serving: “Doubtless I'd not be so magnanimous if wives were as scarce and as hard to find as friends”. … The same spirit of practicality and efficiency surrounds the bed switch. Gisippo justifies the deceit by explaining that if he withdrew from the marriage, Sofronia's “people would immediately marry her off to someone else”. … Long after the wedding, when Tito is recalled to Rome and truth must out, he becomes just as practical. In one of the Decameron's longest orations, … he not only argues from theory (“the ties of friendship are more binding than those of blood or kin”) but from fact, emphasizing the advantages of his higher rank, greater riches and power, and far greater love for her. His equally amazing display of friendship in the second half of the story, moreover, is made to appear as credible as Gisippo's in the first half.

If Boccaccio attempts to square romance with psychological probability, Elyot is content with nothing less than what his chapter heading calls a “wonderful history … whereby is fully declared the figure of perfect amity,”¹⁹ a love story in which love is nearly rationalized out of existence. “Tito e Gisippo,” after all, needed to be true only to the last Day's theme of generosity and the eighth narrator's interest in generosity's humbler models, but “Titus and Gisippus” had to advance The Governor's principal goal of illustrating those virtues most appropriate for successful rulers. The Humanist's hand is everywhere apparent, from the initial etymologizing of amicitia to amor to God, and the insistence that “friendship cannot be but in good men,” to ideas that would later undergird Book IV of The Faerie Queene, especially the dictum that friends must be alike in manners, morals, and lack of self-interest. …

Equally idealistic are the changes Elyot makes in his source. Each of the friends is much more “rational” than his prototype. Advised “to take a wife, to … increase his lineage,” Gisippus defers, “fearing that marriage should … sever him” from “Titus and the study of philosophy”. … At last he dutifully visits “the maiden” his friends have selected for him (she is mentioned by name only once, much later), finds her pleasing “in every form and condition … and became of her amorous.” Titus' love is a little more warm-blooded, of course, though even he seems no more attracted by the maiden's “beauty inexplicable” than by “the rare and sober words, and well couched, which issued out of her pretty mouth.” Not surprisingly, Elyot has little patience with Tito's lovesick soliloquizing, preferring instead to focus on the young men's debate over the responsibilities of friendship, and especially on Gisippus' argument that since no friend of his could be capable of “wanton lust or sudden appetite,” Titus' desires must be owing to a “celestial influence preordinate by providence divine,” against which it would be wrong as well as fruitless to struggle. …

As Elyot, and later Shakespeare, must have realized, “perfect amity” requires perfect self-denial: the greater the sacrifice, the greater the display of friendship. But the older moralist also clearly saw what may have later escaped the young playwright: the more convincing the sacrificer's love, the less likely the credibility of his sacrifice. Precisely because Valentine's love for Silvia is so believable, we find it hard to understand his withdrawal: “All that was mine in Silvia I give thee.” More convincing is the passage that inspired it, Gisippus' “Here I renounce to you clearly all my title and interest that I now have or might have in that fair maiden”, … convincing because Elyot has qualified the donor's love: “I confess to you, Titus, I love that maiden as much as any wise man might possible” (… italics mine). That single word which I have italicized signals the difference between the worlds of Greene and Montemayor, where constant love is supreme, and those of the Humanists and their sons, even unto Lyly, where love is—or obviously should be—regulated by wisdom, and friendship must therefore take precedence. To the extent that Elyot is at all dramatic, his work is akin to the morality play, not romantic comedy. Whereas circumstances finally force Boccaccio's friends to identify Sofronia's real husband, for example, highminded Gisippus determines that “the truth should be discovered” on the first morning after the wedding. Concerning this imbroglio the fair maiden ventures no opinion, but Titus responds with an oration emphasizing how Gisippus “by his wisdom soon perceived … that it was the very provision of God, that she should be my wife”. …

Throughout the Renaissance new meanings were given to the rival friends theme, from the seldom creative imitations of Edward Lewicke, William Walter, and Edward Jenynges, who all tend to sentimentalize Boccaccio's or Elyot's version, to the incidental yet influential allusions of Pettie, Lyly, and Spenser, in which Titus serves as a model of gentleness and loyalty or of lust and deceit.²⁰ But given all possible permutations and combinations of influences upon the crafting of Two Gentlemen, it would seem that the play is unique in its uncompromising opposition of pure love and perfect friendship and therefore is radical in its very conventionality. One might argue that such an opposition, however exceptional, was unavoidable once Shakespeare began linking tales drawn from mutually exclusive traditions. In very different ways Boccaccio and Elyot each attempt to render the generous offer, as well as the noble acceptance, credible, but their Valentine had not already been established as a true lover, nor had the affections of their Proteus been previously engaged elsewhere.

Equally significant, perhaps, is that nothing like the predicament of Valentine and Proteus can be found in the richly illustrative courtesy books of Shakespeare's two greatest contemporaries, Sidney and Spenser. Here stories of loyal lovers alternate with those of exemplary friends, enriching rather than conflicting with one another, for the virtues they celebrate are always portrayed as complementary. The episode in The Arcadia closest to Two Gentlemen, for instance, is Pyrocles' account of Zelmane's selfless devotion, extracted by Bullough as an analogue since this “English parallel to the sex disguise of Felismena may have come to Shakespeare's mind” as he read Montemayor (I, 207). Regardless of whether Shakespeare recalled Sidney, their different uses of a common source are instructive. Shakespeare is the more rigid by far, forcing his Felismena (Julia) to endure not only her lover's inconstancy but also his friend's magnanimity. Zelmane, on the other hand, while the themes of love and friendship are articulated through her, actually suffers neither misfortune, for until her dying moments the young princes know her only as the faithful page, Daiphantus; only in retrospect does Pyrocles, considering her diligence, realize that “there is no service like his that serves because he loves.”²¹ When Pyrocles vows to honor her last request, and she then asks him to stand her father's champion “for this once,” he worries about leaving his cousin, Musidorus, “whom better than myself I loved,” exposed to certain peril. This dilemma of conflicting loyalties is easily resolved, however, as Sidney returns to one of his favorite themes, loving faithfulness in order to love faithfully: “But my promise given … to Zelmane dying, prevailed more with me than my friendship to Musidorus. … But my promise carried me the easier, because Musidorus himself would not suffer me to break it”. …

Spenser's own “Legend … of Friendship,” Book IV of The Faerie Queene, spells out the same idea, first negatively, in the fragile, pragmatic alliance of Blandamour and Paridell, and then positively, in the Book's official champions, Cambell and Triamond, whose friendship is only strengthened by the trials of fortune in Cantos i-iv. Hence also the testing of true love as one form of true friendship in Cantos v-xii, in which Cambell and Triamond are replaced by faithful Artegall and Britomart, jealous Scudamour and Amoret, wayward Timias and Belphoebe. As in Sidney, however, illustrations of love and of friendship eventually lead to an instance of love and friendship as Placidas tells Arthur how he tried to rescue his friend and fellow squire, Amyas, from lustful Corflambo and his wanton daughter, Poeana. But before the story is resolved—Arthur has slain Corflambo and will soon restore Amyas to his lady and arrange the marriage of Placidas and Poeana (viii.45-ix.15)—Spenser begins to gloss its function, to show which of “three kinds of love” takes precedence, the “deare affection unto kindred sweet, / Or raging fire of love to woman kind, / Or zeale of friends combyned with vertues meet.”²² These “kinds” have of course been ranked in ascending order, as any reader will find “approved plaine”: just as Poeana's “naturall affection” for her father was “quenched … with Cupids greater flame,” her desire first for Amyas and then Placidas, so the two squires' love for one another proved stronger than “care of parents … / Or love of fairest ladie.”

When Placidas deserts desirable Poeana to seek help for Amyas, then, he is rightly placing friendship before love or, less anachronistically, preferring a higher form of love to a lower (and here Spenser brings in the Neo-Platonic notion that “love of soule doth love of bodie passe”). But this is far from Two Gentlemen's love versus friendship, where two men desire the same woman; it is closer to Endimion's Eumenides, correctly preferring his love for Endimion to his desire for Semele and thereby gaining both. Spenser is also careful to have everything fall into place once the right priorities have been decided upon. Given Spenser's priorities, in fact, true love could no more oppose true friendship than any inferior manifestation its ultimate reality. The final comment on love's hierarchy is Scudamour's description of the Temple of Venus, where the “thousand payres” of his fellow heterosexual lovers receive scant attention. The focus is rather on “another sort,” who “on chast vertue grounded their desire” and to “noble deedes did evermore aspire”: David and Jonathan, Damon and Pithias, “Myld Titus and Gesippus without pryde”—all these and many more, “tyde / In bands of friendship,” wholly “free from feare and gealosye,” enviably happy and far more secure than those heterosexual lovers we later see complaining to Venus or agonizing over Florimell (x.25ff, 43, xi-xii).

There was of course one way of reconciling the claims of love and of friendship without Neo-Platonic glosses, a way suggested, appropriately enough, by Robert Greene. Philomela, not published until 1592 but allegedly “writen long since,”²³ is the story of Count Philippo Medici's jealous persecution of his wife, Philomela Celli (like Silvia, “only daughter of the Duke of Millain”…, and his former friend, Giovanni Lutesio, one of Venice's most respected gentlemen. Most of the novella expands upon The Winter's Tale's opening situation (or, more accurately, upon the source of that situation, Greene's own Pandosto, 1588), but into this mixture of romantic devices (some not even in Montemayor: the indignant heroine, for instance, tears up, pieces together, and finally reads her love letter …) Greene also works some humanistic reflections on friendship. Suspicious of his wife's honesty, Philippo argues Lutesio into tempting her, yet when Lutesio makes his first overtures, claiming that the woman he loves is married to a man he “almost as tenderly loued as he did … her husband,” Philomela warns him that “in winning her loue, thou loosest a friend: than which, there is nothing more pretious, as there is nothing more rare”. … When Lutesio later reports that Philomela is as virtuous as she is fair, Philippo protests in a public trial that they have both betrayed him, especially he who “was my second selfe,” whose “bosome … hid … my secrets,” whose “mouth … derected my actions,” while Philomela, accepting her divorce, insists that “Philippo haste … lost more in loosing Lutesio, than in forsaking me, for thou mayest haue manye honest wiues, but neuer so faithful a frend”. … And though these fine sentiments may at first seem irrelevant to what is essentially a reshaping of the Griselda motif, we eventually discover that Greene has been anticipating his conclusion, in which Philomela assumes the role of Tito/Titus in the second half of the story of male magnanimity. Like Gisippo/Gisippus, Philippo, far from home, is wrongly accused of murder and so out of love with life that he confesses to the charge, whereupon Philomela, both divorced wife and “best friend,” accuses herself to save him.

Such a reconciliation of love and friendship is close in plot and spirit to Montemayor's conclusion, in which Felismena saves her inconstant and ungrateful Don Felix from certain death, and, like Don Felix, Greene's erring hero is so overcome with emotion that he falls into a swoon before his aggrieved lady. A more mature Shakespeare, had he still been bent on incorporating friendship with love, would likely have worked along Greene's lines, allowing the “friend” to offer her life and goods but never to surrender her love. Julia, for instance, having arrived disguised in Milan, could have been quickly recognized by Proteus, already in love with Silvia. Proteus, like Philippo, could then have used his best friend (Valentine/Lutesio) in an attempt to discredit Julia, thereby creating different (and perhaps better) opportunities for Valentine and Silvia to reveal their faith in one another (constant love) and for Proteus to betray Valentine (imperfect friendship). Moreover, when Proteus' (not Valentine's) designs were discovered by the Duke and he had been banished, perfect friendship would have been far more credibly illustrated as Julia (Philomela/Felismena) rescued Proteus from some Mantuan judge or cutthroats. At this very early point in his career, however, Shakespeare was content simply to connect the plots of his contradictory sources and allow their antithetical values to shift for themselves. Fortunately, he would soon realize that not even the chancy world of romance could excuse all kinds of improbabilities.

IV

Tone. Conspicuously absent in Two Gentlemen is not only Philomela's reconciliation of opposites but also Diana's genial laughter. If Montemayor never achieves Sidney's high seriousness or Spenser's Neo-Platonic idealism, he does maintain a sympathetic, amused involvement in his lovers' many misadventures, and he therefore anticipates Twelfth Night's complex high-comic spirit as well as Two Gentlemen's simple plot. What Shakespeare may have missed in Montemayor raises once again the vexing question of tone. Inga-Stina Ewbank, for example, has recently noted how Shakespeare somehow passed over the “eloquent argument” through which Felix rationalizes his inconstancy, thus allowing Proteus, “in response to Silvia's reproaches … only … two identical, and identically feeble, excuses”:²⁴ “I grant, sweet love, that I did love a lady; / But she is dead,” only to be followed by “I likewise hear that Valentine is dead” (IV.ii.105-06). While Leech glosses Valentine's “likewise” dying an “excuse … so feeble that it reflects from the incompetence of Proteus to that of the dramatist”, … Ewbank uses Proteus' ineloquence as evidence of Shakespeare's clever unmasking of a “wickedly clever” wooer, rendered inarticulate by his lady's “genuine human reactions”. … Certainly Shakespeare had read Diana carefully. To the “chief points of resemblance” between the plots of source and play which R. Warwick Bond listed long ago,²⁵ Kennedy has added some very detailed indebtednesses registered in I.ii and IV.iv. In a play that elsewhere reveals an apprentice's hand, however, Shakespeare's failure to exploit a good lead does not necessarily indicate a deliberate rejection of that lead to achieve a new meaning. Proteus is no less unconvincing in his villainy than Valentine in his later magnanimity, and the feebleness of the excuse here may well be a harbinger of that abstract thesis which, however feebly applied, triumphs in the final scene.

The likelihood that Shakespeare simply bungled Felix's eloquent argument is borne out by other instances of the young playwright's overlooking or at least oversimplifying Montemayor's rich variety of moods and complex human responses. Diana may have been written by a man who took love seriously—“he grew up in an atmosphere of love-affairs, … threw himself into them, … extolled them, … wrote of them, and died for them” (in a duel, no less, and evidently at the hand of a friend!)²⁶—but the romance itself glances quite whimsically upon lovers who fail the tests of time and fortune. Felismena's story (Books II and VII), with its illustration of male inconstancy, is actually but one of several sub-stories (including constant Selvagia's in I and V, and inconstant Belisa's in III and V) which are all introduced by the central, though unresolved, account of faithless Diana (I-VII) and indirectly commented on in the discussions at Felicia's palace halfway through (IV). The theme uniting these four stories is obviously loyalty in love—over the marble portal to Felicia's stately palace stands a “polished table of smooth Jeat with golden letters,” forbidding the inconstant to enter. … But while Felismena's history, regarded alone, yields a moral much like the repentant Proteus' “O heaven, were man / But constant, he were perfect” (V.iv.110-11), in its larger context it suggests something closer to “Frailty, thy name is humanity,” for fickleness abounds, and the spirit of high comedy respects neither sex nor social rank. Kennedy in fact notes that “there is such a wealth of examples of trifling and inconstant love in the first story, that even Selvagia, in the midst of her suffering, seems to find the situation amusing,” and she eventually proposes that the main plot of A Midsummer Night's Dream is as indebted to Book I as the main plot of Two Gentlemen is to Book II. …

It is significant, though, that while Kennedy sees Montemayor's Puckish spirit infecting A Midsummer Night's Dream and the New Arcadia …, she apparently finds no trace of that spirit in Two Gentlemen. Surely Shakespeare at least skimmed Book I on his way to Felismena's story, but he was not yet prepared to dramatize its “strange cousinage of love … to heare how Alanius sighing saide, Ah my Ismenia; and how Ismenia saide, Ah my Montanus; and how Montanus said, Ah my Selvagia; and how Selvagia saide, Ah my Alanius”. … “Pray you no more of this,” Rosalind will eventually beg, “’tis like the howling of Irish wolves against the moon” (AYL, V.iii.109-10). The same attitude is registered as early as Berowne's “four woodcocks in a dish” (LLL IV.iii.80) and A Midsummer Night's Dream's mischievous cross- and counter-wooings. Granted, Two Gentlemen admits the irony in such tangled affections, but the irony inspires pathos, not laughter, as in “Sebastian's” explanation to Proteus of why “he” pities Julia:

Because methinks that she lov'd you as well
As you do love your lady Silvia:
She dreams on him that has forgot her love;
You dote on her that cares not for your love.
’Tis pity love should be so contrary.

(IV.iv.79-83)

Within Montemayor's ever-shifting, ever-teasing atmosphere, even a love song can conclude in self-mockery—witness Montanus' moral that if Selvagia entertain his love, “So shalt thou make me (to my woe) / To be a foolish lover, / And such a foole for loving thee as thou art for another”. … The difference in mood between Montanus' and “Sebastian's” responses to love's contrary ways is as great as that between Lysander's rehearsal of love's never-smooth-running course (a series of clichés underlined as clichés, MND, I.i.132ff) and Proteus' genuine astonishment over “how this spring of love resembleth / The uncertain glory of an April day” (I.iii.84-85). Like Lysander, Felismena can sometimes look upon her situation with a partly self-pitying, partly amused world-weariness, summing up the pains and dangers of her twenty-day journey to Augusta Caesarina's court, for example, as “passing by the way many accidents, which (if time would give me leave to tell them) woulde not make you laugh a little to heare them”. … Kennedy offers an even more helpful comparison when she notes that “Felismena combines the youthful fire and spirit of Julia with the sense of humour and capacity for feeling of Viola”. … Felismena's (and Viola's) ability to laugh reminiscently at a still painful and unresolved predicament gives them far greater depth than Julia, whose sense of humor can be read only in “Sebastian's” slight, sad smile.

In what was probably his first attempt to imitate Greene's long-suffering heroines, Shakespeare did aim at flesh-and-blood vitality—Julia's reference to scratching out the “unseeing eyes” of Silvia's picture (IV.iv.204-05) certainly indicates that. But he was not yet attempting high comedy (if the Host's falling asleep in IV.ii is not an apprentice's excuse for Julia's continuous asides, it is at best an unsuccessful attempt at satire). We are especially reminded of the Viola Julia falls short of when Felix's new love, Celia, falls in love with his messenger, Felismena/“Valerius”. … The high-comic potential of Montemayor's next five pages would eventually be brilliantly exploited in Twelfth Night I.v. For the time being, however, Silvia could not be allowed a new lover of either sex, perhaps because Shakespeare, recalling an earlier decision to end with a magnanimous forgiveness scene, realized that she would have to be reserved as an offering to friendship, or perhaps because Shakespeare, having started with Montemayor, at this point flinched from high comedy and began looking in Boccaccio or Elyot for supplementary material.

In either case, consider one example of the promising stuff Shakespeare was not yet willing or able to turn to his advantage, a series of “reasons” for Felix's mysterious inconstancy. That lady Don Felix once “loved and served in our owne country,” his page Fabius explains to a tearful “Valerius,” “in beautie farre excelled this, and [she] loved and favoured him more than ever this did. But this mischievous absence doth violate and dissolve those things, which men thinke to be most strong and firme”. … Shortly thereafter, however, when Felix uses an eloquent version of the same excuse, “Valerius” argues that “that love, which is subject to the power of absence, cannot be termed love, and none can perswade me that it hath beene love”. … But after Celia dies for lack of her own love, Felismena is the readier to believe sage Felicia's nymph, Doria, that “cruell love is of so strange a condition, that he bestoweth his contents without any good order and rule, and giveth there greatest favours, where they are least esteemed”. … Much later, Felismena also accepts the observation of Felicia herself that “in true and honest love excessive and strange effects are oftentimes founde,” since love, having reason only “for his mother, is not therefore limited or governed by it”. … And at the very end, because neither his “yoong age,” “Celias beautie,” “change of time” nor “trayterous absence” could really excuse “this fault” of fickleness, Felix is forgiven simply because the love which Felismena “had ever borne him, would suffer her to do no lesse”. …

How humorless and wooden in comparison are Proteus' struggles: “Methinks my zeal to Valentine is cold, / And that I love him not as I was wont” (II.iv.203-04). And how mechanical his final reconversion: “What is in Silvia's face, but I may spy / More fresh in Julia's with a constant eye?” (V.iv.114-15). So formal, formulaic, and cliché-ridden is his soliloquy in II.vi that we may at first suspect a parodist's wink. But forty-three lines is a mighty space to wink through, and if we take clumsy Proteus as a burlesque of a courtly lover, are we also willing to accept his cardboard contemporary, “bunch-back'd” Richard III (“And if King Edward be as true and just / As I am subtle, false, and treacherous,” R3, I.i.36-37), as a burlesque of a Machiavellian villain? Given the risible matter Shakespeare bypassed in Montemayor, the wink seems less likely than an earnest, amateurish frown. Conversely, while Montemayor never directly opposes love and friendship, his shrewd yet sympathetic treatment of other human frailties indicates that he would have handled Proteus far less harshly.

But if Two Gentlemen's rude techniques, self-conscious conventionality, and antithetical values all suggest an inexperienced yet essentially earnest playwright, what are we to make of the often adroit burlesque of its subplot? While agreeing with H. B. Charlton that Shakespeare was not in complete control of his materials—this “first attempt to make romantic comedy had only succeeded so far that it had … inadvertently made romance comic”²⁷—historical critics have examined Two Gentlemen's most romantic scenes and generally concluded that romance never becomes comic except in anachronistic overreadings.²⁸ But they have had much less to say about scenes quite unlike Elyot's or Montemayor's, those low scenes which feature the gentlemen's clownish servants and which, according to Charlton, inadvertently prove Valentine a fool. As Speed laboriously explains to his master Silvia's “jest … invisible / As a nose on a man's face” (II.i.135-36), for instance, or as Launce qualifies his folly—“I am but a fool, … and yet I have the wit to think my master is a kind of a knave” (III.i.263-64)—Charlton begins “to feel that it will be extremely difficult to make a hero of a man who is proved to be duller of wit than the patent idiots of the piece”. … Indeed, Charlton's case for mischief—albeit unintentional mischief—in the subplot is so persuasive that many of the critics who followed him have noted additional comic parallelisms and ruled them all deliberate; the latest consensus is that “the laughter inspired by Launce and Speed's exposure of the foibles of the courtly lovers” has become “a cliché of criticism.”²⁹

To reconcile Two Gentlemen's obvious and obviously intentional comedy with all of its apparent earnestness, we must first distinguish between burlesque as deliberate and destructive and burlesque as deliberate and supportive. Although the destructive variety is more congenial to our modern “bottom line” or “factor-out-and-cancel-through” mentality, and therefore would seem more “natural,” there are many late medieval and early Renaissance works in which the seriousness of the main event is enhanced by the comedy of a secondary action, whether the parallelism involves grotesque farce (for instance, The Second Shepherds' Play or Doctor Faustus) or humanist wit (Fulgens and Lucrece, Endimion). The possibility of such supportive burlesque in Shakespeare should warn us against dangerous oversimplifications. Both Ralph Berry, who views Two Gentlemen as basically “a satiric demolition of gentlemanly poses,” and Alexander Leggatt, who comments at length about Shakespeare's “use of the clowns to provide a satiric perspective on the lovers,” see the Launce-Crab relationship as primarily destructive burlesque; through it “the romantic ideal, or illusion … is derided analogously” (Berry), for “to watch similar events causing emotional crises in one case, and casual laughter in the other, trivializes the events by removing their uniqueness” (Leggatt).³⁰ Yet both critics refer the reader approvingly to Harold F. Brooks' classic study, “Two Clowns in a Comedy (to say nothing of the Dog),” which, even as it examines “the principle of comic parallelism,” wisely cautions that “one has of course to bear in mind that in Elizabethan as in medieval work, burlesque need not mean belittlement of what is burlesqued.”³¹

Perhaps the wisest course is to recognize, with Clifford Leech, that in all of “his ‘romantic’ writings Shakespeare could simultaneously induce concernment and a sense of friendly mockery,” or to realize, with Norman Sanders, that even in this very early comedy “the comic scenes do not simply satirize and belittle the love and friendship codes … but reveal them in a new light,” a perspective that combines and transcends the “real” and fictive world of audience and characters.³² Certainly the scenes that most troubled Charlton do not necessarily ridicule the codes or their adherents. If Speed's wit (or half-wit) is not simply the best the young playwright can manage—his entrance puns on ship, sheep, mutton, and noddy are nearly on a par with the Syracusian Dromio's “bald conclusion” (Errors, II.ii)—his satirical analysis of the lover's “special marks” (II.i.18) is no less conventional than the code behind them, and his labored explanation of Silvia's obvious “jest” (l. 135) suggests not necessarily his master's dullness but any true lover's modest disbelief in his own good fortune, a winsome humility eventually underscored in Valentine's “I would it were no worse” (l. 163). Similarly, the point behind Valentine's lacking enough of Launce's “wit” to suspect Proteus is not that friendship is for fools but that some good men are often too trusting.

Not being gentlemen, Launce and Speed are not subject to, aware of, or therefore likely to be tempted to exaggerate gentlemanly codes. Crab runs even less of a risk. Between Two Gentlemen's overwrought, ultra-refined moments (scenes which, incidentally, the sensible heroines help to create³³), these creatures offer a breath of fresh air, but the air is from the stable, and it no more trivializes uniqueness than Mak's fraudulent son belittles the Lamb of God. Shakespeare has taken some pains to alternate the misadventures of lovers and “lubbers”—only for honest Launce are the terms synonymous (II.v.45)—but is Proteus' taking the “tide” or Julia's consequent “tide of tears” in any way derided by Launce's immediately thereafter bewailing the currishness of “the unkindest tied that ever any man tied” (II.ii.14, iii.38)? Or is Julia's later fetching and carrying for perjured Proteus—“How many women would do such a message?”—really ridiculed by Launce's rescue of feckless Crab—“How many masters would do this for his servant” (IV.iv.29-30, 90)? The scene in which Valentine's heroism probably suffers the most is III.i, where he is trapped by the Duke in a device more palpable than the rope ladder and anchoring hooks he somehow conceals under his cloak, and this folly is not nourished by any comic parallelism in the subplot. The point here seems to be much like Sidney's concerning Tydeus and Telenor: the right codes avail little if not rightly grounded in reality; trust must not be naively extended.³⁴

As in the comedies which follow, experience eventually begets a wiser perspective and an ability to come to terms with social codes or conventions. Valentine will be shocked by the weakness of man's friendship and Proteus, equally amazed by the strength of woman's love. When Launce offers to strike at “nothing,” that “nothing” which Valentine without Silvia has already become (III.i.199), however, we see burlesque supporting the code of love, despite its adherents' emotional ups and downs. Granted, the romantic-comic protagonists who succeed Valentine will have an easier time deciding whether men were created for codes or codes for men, but none will face a plot with codes so irreconcilable. Read as destructive burlesque, that plot offers a few amusing moments over an otherwise dull passage. But read as an earnest effort of an apprentice, anxious to succeed, we can enjoy the uncertain glory of its lyrical flights and romantic excursions, and profit particularly by those places where he took on too much. If Two Gentlemen was Shakespeare's very first comedy, its awkward moments are not too difficult to understand, especially those technical deficiencies which no amount of critical ingenuity can explain as misunderstood satire.

Notes

1. See his essay on “John Ford” (1932), in Essays on Elizabethan Drama (1932; rpt. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956), pp. 125-26.

2. E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), I, 270, 329-31, and Shakespeare: A Survey (1904-08; rpt. New York: Hill and Wang, 1958), pp. 49, 51-52. Many of Chambers' complaints are anticipated by Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1872; rpt. New York: Capricorn, 1962), pp. 57, 59. See also Stanley Wells, “The Failure of The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 99 (1963), 163-65.

3. See R. A. Foakes' introduction to the Arden edition of The Comedy of Errors (London: Methuen, 1962), pp. xliiff.

4. I.i.19ff. All citations are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

5. Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, I (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 203.

6. Anne Barton, in The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 146.

7. See E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (1923; rpt. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1951), IV, 160.

8. Kenneth Muir credits Diana as “the ultimate source” of TGV, into which Shakespeare inserted Valentine and the love-friendship conflict, for which there were “numerous analogues”; see The Sources of Shakespeare's Plays (London: Methuen, 1977), pp. 17-18. So, also, E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Early Comedies (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), pp. 117-18: since “the greater part of the love theme” was derived from an episode in Montemayor, while none of the many treatments of the friendship theme was used “as a direct original,” it is “more likely than not that Shakespeare took off from Montemayor and then adapted the theme of friendship to what he considered the needs of the theme of love.” Clifford Leech, on the other hand, reasons that “from the name of the play, with its echo of the ‘two Gentlemen of Greece’ in Damon and Pithias, we can assume that the friendship-literature was the starting-point … that the Diana (immediately or via the lost play) and Brooke's poem Romeus and Juliet came in at some stage, and that behind the total concept of the play were the romantic drama of the preceding years, brought to a point of some maturity by Greene, and the patterned love-arrangements of Lyly (with his use of song)”; see his introduction to the Arden edition (London: Methuen, 1969), p. xliv. Apparently sharing Leech's opinion of friendship-literature having taken precedence are A. C. Hamilton, The Early Shakespeare (San Marino: Huntington, 1967), p. 115, and Wells, “Failure,” p. 170.

9. Berners A. W. Jackson, ed., The Two Gentlemen of Verona (Baltimore: Penguin, 1964), p. 17. Also see David Bevington, ed., The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 3rd ed. (Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman, 1980), p. 161.

10. All dates of first performances follow Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, III and IV.

11. Since Bullough (I, 260-66) furnishes only extracts from the first two acts, one should consult the translation of Georgina Archer in Shakespeare in Germany, ed. Albert Cohn (London: Asher, 1865), pp. 113-56. The fourth and final act certainly suggests the influence of Seneca and Kyd: having returned from Rome to find that Julius has betrayed his trust and married his fiancée, Romulus engages the bride and groom in a “tragedy dance,” then throws off his disguise and stabs Julius; ignorant of her husband's guilt, Hyppolita kills herself with the same dagger; now realizing her innocence, Romulus bears her company, leaving the Prince her father, the only noble survivor, to forswear the little that is left of his world and become a hermit.

12. G. K. Hunter, John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 338.

13. O. J. Campbell, “The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Italian Comedy,” in Studies in Shakespeare, Milton and Donne (1925; rpt. New York, Haskell House, 1964), p. 63.

14. The Honorable Historie of Frier Bacon and Frier Bongay, ll. 124-25, in The Plays and Poems of Robert Greene, ed. J. Churton Collins (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), Vol. II.

15. Campaspe, V.iv.148ff, in The Complete Works of John Lyly, 3 vols., ed. R. Warwick Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902).

16. See Louis Sorieri, Boccaccio's Story of Tito e Gisippo in European Literature (New York: Institute of French Studies, 1937).

17. See Sorieri, especially pp. 12-23. Also see A. C. Lee, The Decameron: Its Sources and Analogues (London: David Nutt, 1909), pp. 330-43, and the Index to borrowings from Decameron, X, 8, in Herbert G. Wright, Boccaccio in England from Chaucer to Tennyson (London: Athlone Press, 1957), p. 495.

18. The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio, trans. Frances Winwar (New York: Random House, 1955), p. 620.

19. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Book named The Governor, ed. S. E. Lehmberg (London: J. M. Dent, 1966), p. 136.

20. For discussions of Lewicke, Walter, and Jenynges, see Wright, Boccaccio in England, as well as his earlier study, Early English Versions of the Tales of Guiscardo and Ghismonda and Titus and Gisippus from the Decameron (London: Humphrey Milford, 1937). Spenser's “Myld Titus and Gesippus without pryde” is discussed below. It was George Pettie's pleasure to make the story mean whatever his own tales required; one allusion emphasizes Gisippus' loyalty, another Titus' lust. See A Petite Pallace of Pettie His Pleasure, ed. Herbert Hartman (1938; rpt. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970), pp. 47, 111. Lyly is similarly contradictory; see Complete Works, ed. Bond, I, 198, and II, 102.

21. The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 359-60.

22. The Faerie Queene IV.ix.1, in The Complete Poetical Works of Spenser, ed. R. E. Neil Dodge (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1936).

23. Robert Greene, the Epistle Dedicatory to Philomela: The Lady Fitzwaters Nightingale, in the Life and Works of Robert Greene, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (London: Hazell, Watson, and Viney, 1881-83), XI, 109.

24. Inga-Stina Ewbank, “‘Were man but constant, he were perfect’: Constancy and Consistency in The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” in Shakespearian Comedy, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 14 (London: Edward Arnold, 1972), pp. 48-49. The “eloquent argument” is included in that part of Diana extracted by Bullough (Sources, I, 241-42), but I follow the complete text, ed. Judith M. Kennedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968); see pp. 96-97.

25. R. Warwick Bond, introduction to the old Arden edition of TGV (London: Methuen, 1906), pp. xvii-xviii.

26. The witness is Fray Bartolomé Ponce, as cited and trans. by Kennedy, pp. xv-xvi.

27. H. B. Charlton, Shakespearian Comedy (1938; rpt. London: Methuen, 1966), p. 43.

28. A good example of the historical critics' responses is Ralph M. Sargent's use of Elyot to argue that although “Valentine's gesture comes as shock,” Shakespeare has carefully anticipated it “in terms of a code which he assumed his audience would recognize,” and that Silvia's momentous silence similarly betokens her own “peak of propriety,” another example of a “rigorous devotion to accepted codes,” shockingly admirable, like the forgiveness Valentine offers, but hardly ludicrous. See “Sir Thomas Elyot and the Integrity of The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” PMLA, 65 (1950), 1179.

29. William Rossky, “The Two Gentlemen of Verona as Burlesque,” English Literary Renaissance, 12 (1982), 211.

30. Ralph Berry, Shakespeare's Comedies: Explorations in Form (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 20, 51-52; Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London: Methuen, 1974), p. 22.

31. Harold 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), 96.

32. Leech, introduction to the Arden edition, p. lxix; Norman Sanders, ed., The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1968; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), pp. 34-37.

33. The self-conscious conventionality we have noticed in the men's conversations is also found in their ladies' speeches. Consider, for example, Silvia's “A fine volley of words, gentlemen, and quickly shot off” (II.iv.33-34) and Julia's extremely trite praise of love's “true-devoted pilgrim” (II.vii.9ff).

34. See Arcadia, ed. Evans, p. 363; Plexirtus tricked these good men into killing one another.