SOURCE: “Love and Courtesy in The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” in Shakespeare in his Context: The Constellated Globe, The Collected Papers of Muriel Bradbrook, Vol. IV, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989, pp. 44-57.

[In the following essay, Bradbrook explores the play as a comedy of manners, suggesting that it is more closely affiliated with Shakespeare's last romances than his later comedies of love.]

It is a great honour to be invited in this ancient city to celebrate a poet who wrote of this region with varying degrees of knowledge but always with reverence, as of a visionary country, a country of the heart. On the stage of his day, Italy was depicted either as very beautiful or very, very wicked. There was nothing in between a country full of lovers and a country full of murderous ducal feuds. No ordinary lives at all; the moonlight of the summer garden was heavenly or else the ‘smiler with the knife beneath the cloak’, Iago or Iachimo, trapped the unpractised alien. From the beginning to end of his career Shakespeare turned to Italy, and his last play celebrated a unification which had happened between parts of the British Isles; he shows the heiress of Milan betrothed to the heir of Naples.

Today I wish to look at his comedy of courtly love, named from this city—The Two Gentlemen of Verona, for him par excellence the City of Lovers. I would place it in 1593, the year when plague closed London theatres and the young writer (he was 29) retired to the country to write Venus and Adonis. It has not received as much attention as later comedies, but it is a beautiful and delicate piece of sprezzatura, that links it not with the later comedies of love, several of which are also set in Italy, such as Much Ado about Nothing, but rather with last romances, The Tempest particularly in which Shakespeare turned back to memories of earlier traditions. But Shakespeare's work, though so full of variety, is also deeply unified. The element of fantasy in his art struck his contemporaries.

The early morning freshness of The Two Gentlemen of Verona was very well caught visually in the BBC's television production. Many plays were given an Italian flavour—Antony and Cleopatra, in Renaissance style, was heavily flavoured with the opulence of Titian. The Two Gentlemen of Verona was based on Fra Angelico and the early Botticelli of Primavera. Lightness, innocence, delicacy and grace were embodied in the heroine, with her transparent draperies, her garden setting; her wooers also reminded me of Botticelli's young men.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona is built on a tale of love and friendship, not for the sake of developing characters, but for exploring moods embodied in manners; for displaying sentiments, not conflicts—sentiments in the psychological sense of habitual sets of feelings emerging from implanted disposition, not innate. This is the Italy of Petrarch and Castiglione, perhaps of Ariosto.

No supernatural beings hover in the summer air, but something like the music of Ariel is heard in the aubade procured by the two unworthiest of her suitors to be sung at Silvia's window—in Schubert's setting, the best known words of this play:

Who is Silvia? what is she
That all our swains commend her?
Holy, fair and wise is she:
The heaven such grace did lend her
That she might admired be.

(IV.ii.38-42)

‘Admired’—a wonder, like the ‘most admired’ Miranda; not a mortal but to her lover ‘the goddess on whom these airs attend’. Silvia indeed radiates the grace of heaven; she is ‘excelling’, sent from on high. Her father's courtiers are her servants in the sense of professing to love her, without daring to aspire to her hand, rendering the service of ‘fin amours’ like the trouvères.

England indeed knew such a divinity; although no longer either young or fair, Elizabeth now enjoyed the height of her literary cult among poets, all vying to assert her eternal beauty in terms often borrowed from the cult of the Virgin Mary. In Spenser, presented as Belphoebe

Her face so fair as flesh it seemed not,
But heavenly portrait of bright angel's hue …

to Ben Jonson she is a heavenly being from an older religion, Cynthia, still excelling.

Queen and huntress chaste and fair,
          Now the sun is laid to sleep,
Seated in thy silver chair,
          State in wonted manner keep.
                    Hesperus entreats thy light,
                    Goddess excellently bright.

John Lyly wrote plays in her praise, as he also wrote wittily to provide models of conversation for the Court. His plays were given by the choristers of her chapel and these have the most powerful and refining influence on Shakespeare's court comedies of love, although he outgrew Lyly. Here is the praise of Cynthia by Endimion in a play upon which Shakespeare closely depended:

Such a difference hath the gods set between our states that all must be duty, loyalty, reverence; nothing (without it please your highness) be termed love. My spotted thoughts, my languishing body, my discontented life, let them obtain by princely favour that which to challenge they must not presume, only wishing of impossibilities; with imagination of which, I will spend my spirits, and softly to myself, that no creature may hear, call it love. And if any urge to utter what I whisper, then I will term it honour.

Shakespeare's first sixteen sonnets exhort marriage on the model of the early pleas to the Queen; but in this comedy wooing instruction, whether the First Gentleman's to the Duke or the Second's to his rival, are farcical and lead to entrapment.

The first of the two Gentlemen to be sent from Verona to Milan is a professed mocker of his lovelorn friend but his role as true lover is proclaimed in his name, Valentine, named for the patron saint of lovers, on whose feast not only men but birds chose their mates. He falls instantly into worship of the heiress of Milan, the divine Silvia, but does not aspire to woo her; she instead asks him to write a love letter for her to one she loves, which she then tells him to keep. His witty page has to enlighten him that this modest device is to make him aware of her favour. For the little love god blinds his votaries; the engagingly silly infatuation of first love was to receive affectionate banter and very clear demonstration in Shakespeare's later comedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream, where the Duke describes the lover's frenzy that can

see Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.

The Duke of Milan, with his own blindness, is encouraging the rich but stupid Thurio to court his daughter, and Valentine engages in a sharp duel of wits with him. But when the second Gentleman arrives and is generously introduced by Valentine with the request that he be enrolled [as] Silvia's courtly servant, Proteus, though now betrothed by a ring to Julia, keeps neither friendship nor vows, although he has not been given any magic love juice by a fairy; but he has already termed himself metamorphosed by love, and now proves his name from the great shape-changer Proteus to be fitting. He debates quite sharply within himself: for he has been told by Valentine that his own love for Silvia is of the heart.

To leave my Julia, shall I be forsworn:
To love fair Silvia, shall I be forsworn:
To wrong my friend I shall be much forsworn.
And e'en that power which gave me first my oath
Provokes me to this threefold perjury:
Love bade me swear and love bids me forswear.
O sweet-suggesting love, if thou hast sinn'd,
Teach me, thy tempted subject, to excuse it.

(II.vi.1-8)

Wronging his friend is the worst sin. But prompted by love, he puts the counterplea, as in a later play, ‘some salve for perjury’ had to be found at another court.

At first I did adore a twinkling star,
But now I worship a celestial sun.

(9-10)

With the same wit that earlier he had defended himself against Valentine's mocks he crowns his sophistry:

Julia I lose and Valentine I lose.
If I keep them I needs must lose myself:
If I lose them, thus find I by their loss:
For Valentine, myself; for Julia, Silvia.

(19-22)

This is but wordplay; in the last scene, when Valentine discovers the depths to which Proteus has been brought, he feels a loss which is not that of self-sufficiency but of the vulnerable self that is invested in honourable trust. Valentine, like a later hero, is ‘most generous and free from all contriving’; in fact his contriving to elope with Silvia had been deftly uncovered by the Duke, prompted by Proteus. Finally, he witnesses Proteus' threat of force towards his lady

                                                  Treacherous man,
Thou hast beguil'd my hopes; naught but mine eye
Could have persuaded me. Now I dare not say
I have one friend alive; thou wouldst disprove me.
Who should be trusted now, when one's right hand
Is perjured to the bosom? …
The private wound is deepest. O most accurst!
'Mongst all foes that a friend should be the worst!

(V.iv.63-72)

Confronted with depth of grief, Proteus is immediately struck into deep remorse; and then comes the turn of events which is universally misunderstood, universally considered to destroy the play. I think the lines are misconstrued and they do not destroy it at all, but depend on the contrast between private and courtly status.

What has happened is that after betraying the lovers to the Duke, Proteus follows Silvia in her flight to the banished Valentine. Meeting her in a wood, where Valentine had earlier been turned into the captain of a band of outlaws, he begins to woo her, and on repulse, attempts to rape her. Valentine who has overheard it all, has heard his lady declare her love of himself:

O heaven be judge how I love Valentine
Whose life's as tender to me as my soul

(V.iv.36-7)

and the words with which he delivers her are those of courtly decorum, very restrained (but presumably he has drawn his sword):

Ruffian, let go that rude, uncivil touch,
Thou friend of an ill fashion.

(60-1)

After Proteus' repentance, his ‘forgive me’, he proceeds:

                                        Then I am paid;
And once again I do receive thee honest.
Who by repentance is not satisfied
Is not of heaven nor earth, for these are pleased.
By penitence th'Eternal's wrath's appeased.
And that my love may appear plain and free,
All that was mine in Silvia I give thee.

(77-83)

The outcry is all but universal. ‘By this time, there are no gentlemen in Verona!’ exclaimed Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. But the verb is all important: ‘was’ is not ‘is’, as another wise character was to remark. (See above p. 35.) Proteus, who is on his knees before Valentine, may be invited, kneeling, to kiss the lady's other hand. What is offered to Proteus is public reinstatement to the position they had formerly shared and Valentine had procured; what had been theirs was the position of courtly servant to the lady but Valentine is now speaking as Silvia's betrothed lover (II.iv.176) and protector—a generous but not preposterous act. Valentine in the wood assumes an authority which enables him, when the Duke arrives as captive to the outlaws, to defy Thurio with a physical directness which comes from the new relation that his rescue and Silvia's declaration of love had conferred:

I dare thee but to breathe upon my love!

(V.iv.132)

He ends with great assurance, though in the Duke's presence, by inviting Proteus and his restored Julia to be married on the day he marries Silvia. Proteus never addresses Silvia. And Silvia says nothing at all. Outside the charmed circle of the court, she does not now speak to Proteus, or to her father. In the opening scenes Julia had nothing to say by way of farewell to Proteus. And now, at this point, present in disguise as Proteus' page, she swoons. It may be thought that this confirms the modern idea that Valentine is relinquishing Silvia to Proteus, but is it not the hand-in-hand postures of the lovers that recalls to her betrothal-ring (and Proteus' ring) both now in her keeping?

Valentine had first, after entreating Proteus' admission as ‘fellow servant to your ladyship’, exalted her to Proteus ‘a heavenly saint’ to which Proteus replies ‘No, but she is an earthly paragon’; and in his new feelings, the grosser level is stressed ‘'Tis but her picture I have yet beheld’ (II.iv.207). His stupid servant Launce presents the divine Silvia instead of Proteus' toy dog with a rough cur of his own, who befouls her farthingale; and the animal level of Proteus comes out in the wood. Valentine is re-educating him, using that line of the Paternoster that echoes down to the epilogue of The Tempest: Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

Julia's first acts are Protean; she tears up the letter that her lover sends her, then picks up the torn pieces and puts them together. Her maid is well versed in the feminine perversity that ‘says nay and takes it’: her resolution to follow her lover in disguise is a familiar romance complication. He employs her as a page. It is not necessary to stress on the stage the very intimate attendance this implies, helping her master to dress and undress. In Love's Labour's Lost Don Armado's page knows him in this way. This it is which makes her apologise not to, but on behalf of Proteus when she recovers from her swoon:

O Proteus, let this habit make thee blush!
Be thou asham'd that I have took upon me
Such an immodest raiment, if shame live
In a disguise of love.
It is the lesser blot, modesty finds,
Women to change their shapes, than men their minds.

(V.iv.105-10)

The shock for Proteus, as in Twelfth Night for Orsino, is to discover that it is a woman who enjoyed such intimacy ‘so far beneath your soft and tender breeding’.

Julia and Proteus are the more interesting couple to modern readers since they seem, because more changeable and more physically expressive, to be individuals. The difference between the two levels may be illustrated from the life and poetry of Sir Walter Ralegh, who at this time (1592) had incurred the Queen's displeasure and imprisonment for first seducing and afterwards secretly marrying one of her maids of honour. (Shakespeare's patron was to do the same.) He wrote an ingenious poem in which he adopted one of the regular defences of a courtly lover (one which appears in the discussion of love between Julia and her maid, (I.ii.29-30) as well as in the opening discussions in Castiglione Il Cortegiano, that the truest lover does not declare his love). In the lyric ‘Wrong not, dear Empress of my heart’ Ralegh writes

For knowing that I sue to serve
          A saint of such perfection
As all desire, but none deserve
           A place in her affection …

He anticipates that kind of humility which adopts a disguise of poverty, which Castiglione thinks may enhance the nobility of a knight, and which in Silvia's aubade describes her wooers as ‘swains’ and their offering a pastoral ‘garland’.

The sentiments, tone and mood of Castiglione are to my mind more relevant and more illuminating than the narrative sources which are so carefully collected in such works as Geoffrey Bullough's eight learned volumes. The narrative lines are all of romance commonplaces, even the story of Julia's disguise which is the closest and comes from the Spanish Diana Enamorada of Jorge de Montemayor, a work beloved of Sir Philip Sidney's Mistress, the heroine of his beautiful sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, first printed in 1591, the most powerful set of love sonnets before Shakespeare's own. But I think the mood, sentiments and tone are more important than the narrative line, and these come from Castiglione through Sidney—who stole away to the wars, where he met his untimely death in October 1586, with a copy of Castiglione. The chivalrous treatment of wars as jousting, forbade him to put on his thigh pieces because a friend had ridden out without them. He received his death wound and England mourned one who was a model of chivalry.

Il Cortegiano had first appeared in print in 1527, two years before Castiglione's death at the court of Spain where the Emperor Charles V exclaimed ‘I tell you that one of the best caballeros of the world is dead’. Sir Thomas Hoby's translation, The Courtyer was published in 1561.

In this book the courtly games played at Urbino in the presence of the Duchess are moderated by her deputy, the Lady Emilia Pia. The Duchess herself is Surrogate for her lord, the highly judicious and watchful though crippled Duke. In the preliminary choice of the game, questions of love like those of ancient Provençal Courts of Love, are proposed and laid aside; such as which are the greater, the joys of love or its sorrows? Which lover shall a lady take, one who confesses his love or one who does not dare to do so? A question as we have seen posed between Julia and her maid in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (I.ii.29-30) and the basis of Ralegh's plea to his Queen. However, the game chosen at Urbino, the definition of the perfect Courtier, is not of this kind; it leads to deeper self-examination. Every barbed and searching point is made with ‘laughter’. The most realistic and even shameless opportunism is concealed under exquisite refinement; and the facts of history are dexterously rearranged for the most favourable construction. When the Duchess asks Ottaviano what he would do if he won the Prince's favour so completely that he could tell him anything, he laughs and replies that if he were able to tell the Prince what he thinks ‘I fear I should soon lose that favour’ (IV.26). The final hymn to Platonic love from Pietro Bembo stuns the company into silence, because it goes beyond the game into the realm of Petrarch's Laura and Dante's Beatrice, and the Lady Emilia Pia, taking Bembo gently by the sleeve, says ‘Takes care, Messer Pietro’ (IV.71).

The limitations of the charmed circle are well understood; grace and sprezzatura—those key words of the definition—were absorbed by Sidney; Beauty can be attained only by ease and cannot be reached by directly taking pains; it emanates from the graceful negligence that conceals art after long practice, the irony and self-depreciation that Sidney practised with such wit. He ridiculed false Petrarchism: so later did Shakespeare: ‘My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun’ (Sonnet 130).

The Two Gentlemen of Verona is founded upon the courtly assumptions of the ‘game’, which includes a good deal of parody. Valentine and Proteus open with a sharp bout of wit about the folly of love; later Valentine and Thurio attack each other with unbaited rapiers of wit and are separated by Silvia. Of course the assumptions are tested and parodied, this gives a frame to the romance. The true lover is given the malicious and witty page Speed; the dissembling Proteus is given the clown Launce, a character of immense vigour whose parting from his family to accompany Proteus is a parody of the previous scene, the parting of Proteus and Julia. Launce's dog is theatrically a winner, and often steals the show as outrageously as ever he stole a pudding. Animals are utterly natural and do not play a game with the audience as the actors do. Launce's catalogue of his mistress's charms parodies those of the divine Silvia. She is black as ink, but ‘she hath more hair than wit, more faults than hairs, and more wealth than faults’ (III.i.343-4). He is the Sancho Panza to Valentine's Quixote; while Speed explains to Valentine the riddle of Silvia's letter and advises joining the outlaws ‘Master, be one of them; it's an honourable kind of thievery’ (IV.i.39). Launce, having lost the toy dog Proteus was sending to Sylvia, gives her Crab; and just such an ill-mannered animal does Proteus himself become. For throughout the play we are conscious of that freedom of man to ascend and become a god or descend to a beast which was the theme of Pico della Mirandola's oration on the Dignity of Man.

Of course the story is comic, in the way that in Ariosto the knights are comic, when two mounting one horse in pursuit of their lady, urge the horse by the pricking of four spurs instead of two, to an unwonted pace. But in the last Act the clown and the page both disappear, for the final scene must maintain the courtly game against the counterpoint of the outlaws and the wood, and the important servant is the page, Julia in disguise—other servants must fade. This use of the wild wood was to be much further worked into the action in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The comedies of Lyly included pages, and sometimes clowns; early wit combats do not give much more skill to courtiers than to their pages.

Silvia: Servant, you are sad.
Val.: Indeed, madam, I seem so.
Thurio: Seem you that you are not?
Val.: Haply I do.
Thurio: So do counterfeits.
Val.: So do you.
Thurio: What seem I that I am not?
Val.: Wise.

(II.iv.8-15)

The deeper feelings are given in soliloquy and when called for in the dialogue, they simply are not there. Courtship is always in another's presence; so much is obliquely done by letters, tokens, gifts. Unlike other great ladies, Silvia has not even a waiting gentlewoman for confidante; moving only among courtiers or priests. The most poignant and self-revelatory of her scenes is when Julia, disguised as a page, brings Silvia as a love token the very ring she had given Proteus. Silvia knows its history and returns it; Julia, speaking out of part, gives her thanks.

Silvia: She is beholding to thee, gentle youth.
Alas, poor lady, desolate and left!
I weep myself to think upon thy words.
Here, youth; there is my purse; I give this thee
For thy sweet mistress' sake, because thou lov'st her

(IV.iv.170-4)

‘Pity runneth soon in gentle heart’, as Chaucer said more than once. If this were an allegory, Silvia would stand for the Divine Imagination and she appeals to the highest level of the audience's response. In this, she anticipates again the divine Miranda of Shakespeare's last play, The Tempest, who wept to see the shipwreck, suffered with those she saw suffer; ‘O, the cry did knock against my very heart’. To which her father replies:

tell your piteous heart
There's no harm done.

(I.ii.15-16)

Silvia and Julia's mutual sympathy delicately balances the friendship of the two gentlemen. Julia has been sent to get Silvia's picture, but this decorous mode of worship is not what Proteus has in mind; for he said before ‘’Tis but her picture I have yet beheld’ (II.iv.207)—he hopes to look on her ‘perfections’ later. Valentine uses this word in his poignant soliloquy upon his own banishment, engineered by Proteus.

What light is light if Silvia be not seen?
What joy is joy, if Silvia be not by?
Unless it be to think that she is by
And feed upon the shadow of perfection?
Except I be by Silvia in the night,
There is no music in the nightingale;
Unless I look on Silvia in the day,
There is no day for me to look upon.
She is my essence, and I leave to be,
If I be not by her fair influence
Foster'd, illumin'd, cherish'd, kept alive.

(III.i.174-84)

This is almost in that realm of high constancy which Pietro Bembo celebrated; the most beautiful lines given to Proteus celebrate, again, the world as mirrored in the beloved.

O how this spring of love resembleth
          The uncertain glory of an April day,
Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,
          And by and by a cloud takes all away

(I.iii.84-87)

The Two Gentlemen of Verona belongs (one might say) to the State of Innocence. The delicate acquarelle tints cannot be fully appreciated if Launce and his dog are taken for the more real, the more developed characters, although in the present culture they appear more ‘rounded’. Nothing could well be further removed from the Court of Urbino than the sentimental animal lovers of today, but they would welcome the self-sacrifice of Launce. The first great clown, Richard Tarlton, had a man-and-dog act; he fought a combat with Queen Elizabeth's lap dog. Launce's dog represents all that is excluded from Royal Courts; as the horse and jennet, the little hunted hare in Venus and Adonis represent in animal shapes the love-making of Venus, the hunt that destroys Adonis; the monstrous animal form of the boar appears only in vision. Here is Crab:

He thrusts me himself into the company of three or four gentlemen-like dogs under the Duke's table; but he had not been there, bless the mark, a pissing while but all the chamber smelt him. ‘Out with the dog!’ says one; ‘What cur is that?’ saith another; ‘Whip him out’ says a third: ‘Hang him up’ says the Duke. I having been acquainted with the smell before, knew it was Crab, and goes me to the fellow that whips the dogs. ‘Friend’, quoth I ‘you mean to whip the dog?’ ‘Ay, marry do I’ quoth he. ‘You do the more wrong’ quoth I; ‘'Twas I did the thing you wot of.’ He makes me no more ado but whips me out of the chamber. How many masters would do this for his servant?

(IV.iv.15-28)

This breaks right out of the frame and addresses the audience directly, like an epilogue, and marks the grand exit of Launce (and Crab) immediately preceding the scene between Silvia and Julia, the high note in selflessness and sympathy. I do not think the collocation is an accident. But one of the most experienced editors, Clifford Leech, thinks that the play was rewritten and that Launce belongs to a later stage than the rest of the play.

The text that has come down to us is a bad one—it seems to have been torn in pieces like Proteus' love letter and put together by the playhouse scribe, Ralph Crane, from Shakespeare's rough papers. Yet his old friends, who collected his plays seven years after his death, put it second in the volume, immediately after The Tempest, his last play, given at Court as a wedding play. A lifetime of experience lay between these two. I shall end by trying to suggest something about its place of Courtesy in the context of its time.

I have already mentioned that I would place it in 1593, the time of plague, when London theatres were closed and the actors disappeared; many companies broke up. The best refuge was in some noble household in the country. At this time Shakespeare published his first poem with a dedication to the Earl of Southampton, whom most people identify with the fair youth of the Sonnets that circulated privately and which are most probably belonging to the years 1594-6.

As the courtly figures of the opening to the Decameron retreated into an enclosed garden in the time of plague, Shakespeare took to the rich woodland scene of Venus and Adonis; its country sports, the deep woodlands of Hampshire and a frank eroticism which is fleshly enough. Venus sweats, pants almost overpowers the boy. Love is ‘deaf and cruel when he means to prey’ as the poet who was probably Shakespeare's rival, Christopher Marlowe had commented in his own erotic masterpiece of Hero and Leander, the very poem Proteus is reading at the opening of The Two Gentlemen of Verona (I.i.21-2).

In this Court, however, we are in the realm not of Venus but of Cupid, the innocent world—well, very nearly innocent—of Lyly's courtly elegance. Our poet's epigraph to Venus and Adonis would better fit the comedy:

Vilia miretur vulgus: mihi flavus Apollo
Pocula Castalia plena ministret acqua.

which Marlowe translated

Let base-conceited wits admire vile things,
Fair Phoebus lead me to the Muses' springs

(Elegy XV.35-36)

To live within a noble household would give a unique opportunity for a sensitive receptive poet to absorb the finer nuances of courtly life, as they could never be learnt from outside. The young Earl was nineteen years of age, handsome and self-willed, decidedly a Proteus in matters of love and frustrated of his wish to visit Italy by the Queen's refusal to allow it. Perhaps she feared the influence of the Roman church, for the family were Catholics, and so the young man had been first brought up. Among his retinue was John Florio, the most famous Italian teacher in England. Shakespeare showed himself acquainted with Florio's works before he published the translation of Montaigne which so pervasively influenced the writing of Hamlet.

Here, then, if he were in the Earl's country house, Shakespeare would be under new and excellent literary influences. He would find a library. But he would also find a household and a patron to whom he might modestly hope to show the ideal courtly life. The growth of Shakespeare's art was phenomenal, under any consideration; he was famous as a writer already, with the plays on King Henry VI. But The Two Gentlemen of Verona, I think, was written for boy players, with one part for a professional actor, that of Launce; a regular clown's role, as Tarlton and Kempe had created it on the public stage. In a noble household the children of the private chapel, or of a local school, or the household pages might be recruited; in this same plague time Thomas Nashe wrote such a play for the Archbishop of Canterbury's country house, with a part for one mature actor as jester.

The air of modest but lofty exclusiveness implies an audience who savoured the cult of fine manners. Boys can be sharply satiric, mimicking absurdity and affectation, and they can sing with piercing purity of tone impossible to the adult voice. Their range however is limited. There are no duels and no ensemble scenes; as Stanley Wells noted, the dialogue consists of duets, solos, soliloquies; even if more than two people are together on stage they do not engage as a group.¹ This is surely not incapacity in the writer but in the actors; they are amateurs, and cannot manage anything complicated—technically complicated. Apart from its perfect song, the play has achieved no great fame. The vision of an enchanted enclosure, a world whose reticences and limitations define its beauty, the fragility of first love, a violet in the youth of primy nature, the perfume and suppliance of a minute are found in the first tentative Sonnets of Shakespeare's sequence (1-17)

Music to hear, why hear'st thou music sadly?
Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy

(8.1-2)

or

Thou art thy mother's glass and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime

(3.9-10)

or

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate

(18.1-2)

Valentine's admission of idolatry (II.iv.142) is rebutted later with words that chime with the praises of Silvia, who is kind as she is fair:

Let not my love be call'd idolatry …
Fair, kind and true is all my argument

(105.1.9)

That very perceptive critic, Inga-Stina Ewbank, comparing this play with the Sonnets, thinks its dependence on verbal techniques fails to reach the fully dramatic terms, the truth to complex human relationships that is achieved in the Sonnets—for perhaps the contribution of the Veneto to Shakespeare's work, represented by the advent of the Dark Lady, had not yet appeared.² Was she Emilia Bassano? I am not so sure as A. L. Rowse.

Roger Prior has made out a strong case for identifying the whole group of the Bassano family with this region; they were Jewish musicians who came to the royal court in the reign of Henry VIII, where they formed a compact little enclave. By tracing their wills, he has unravelled their history.³ If Emilia Bassano, the mistress of the Lord Chamberlain, whom Shakespeare would have encountered in that household when he joined the Lord Chamberlain's company in 1594, is indeed the dark lady, as Rowse and others have considered her, the deeper knowledge of The Merchant of Venice, the distancing of the magic garden of Belmont, would be explained. The tragic notes of Romeo and Juliet followed The Two Gentlemen of Verona very quickly, indeed Shakespeare may already have read the English poem from which he took this story; but its form and the depth of its passion belong to the public theatres, to which he returned. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, with the bloom of dawning that is not quite full day, has its own particular magic—a magic which Wordsworth echoes in his line on first love:

Earth moved in one great presence of the spring.

In the future lie the passions of Venice, but in the garden of Belmont the arrival of Bassanio's messenger brings hope of what is to come:

                    Yet I have not seen
So likely an Ambassador of love,
A day in April never came so sweet
To show how costly summer was at hand,
Than his forespurrer comes before his lord.

(Merchant of Venice II.ix.91-5)

Such a forespurrer is this comedy, which I do not think was ever clapper clawed with the palms of the vulgar.⁴

Notes

1. Shakespeare Jahrbuch XCIX, 1963.

2. Shakespearean Comedy (London, Stratford upon Avon Studies, 14, 1972).

3. His article appeared in The Literary Supplement of The Jewish Chronicle for June 1979; see also ‘Jewish musicians at the Tudor Court’ The Musical Quarterly Spring 1983, 258-65.

4. In a later study I suggested that the modern reading might have been that of the popular stages, where ordeals in the last minutes were the custom. (‘Castiglione, Lyly and Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona’, listed p. 211).