SOURCE: “Patriarchy Rescued in The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” in Anxious Pleasures: Shakespearean Comedy and the Nation-State, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995, pp. 116-26.

[In the following essay, Hall contends that the female characters in The Two Gentlemen of Verona have a redemptive role, in that they help their male counterparts to restore patriarchal order by the play's end.]

A remarkable number of Shakespeare's comedies focus on the contrast between male inconstancy and female constancy. Indeed, with the single exception of Troilus and Cressida, it seems possible to assert that there are no inconstant heroines, although the comedies which feature the lovers' debates (The Taming of the Shrew and the Beatrice-Benedick plot in Much Ado about Nothing), might be said to make the constant/inconstant opposition irrelevant. Still, the generalization seems valid. In the comedies, the evil of inconstancy to the given word is a male failing. It does not affect the heroines except insofar as they may be bewildered by the changeability of the men (e.g., The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and A Midsummer Night's Dream).

The romances frequently make the constant heroine a redemptive figure in the fallen male world, and this enables us to grasp what is at stake. In this drama, male changeability is not just an unfortunate proclivity of the sex. It is a source of cultural dislocation, for the order that is betrayed is patriarchal, and therefore has a strong investment in reasserting male self-possession. I have argued earlier how the resistance of the heroines to male rhetoric in Love's Labour's Lost enables them to restore the lords to their “truth.” The ladies are the defenders of the patriarchal order and agents of its restabilization. The romances, like The Two Gentlemen of Verona, All's Well That Ends Well, The Winter's Tale, and Pericles, take this further. They all pick up this redemptive role of the heroine, and endow her with a physical mobility, in addition to a verbal one, to combat the mobility of signs threatening the patriarchal order. The paradox is that it is the women who rescue the patriarchy.

Studies of influence easily place the Proteus-Valentine relationship in The Two Gentlemen of Verona firmly within the tradition of “friendship literature,” particularly Boccaccio's story of Titus and Gisippus in the Decameron, and Sir Thomas Elyot's retelling of it in The Governour (1531). Boccaccio's story is a celebration of competitive male generosity. It tells of one friend (Gisippus) yielding his betrothed to the other (Titus), who loves her more passionately. Then Titus returns to Rome with his bride, while Gisippus remains in Athens. Gisippus is then bankrupted and goes to Rome to seek his friend. In Rome, he witnesses a crime, and makes a false confession to it, as a way of ending his wretched life. At the moment of execution, Titus, who is in secure possession of both fortune and wife, steps forward and also makes a false confession. In other words, he generously attempts to pay all debts of friendship. Such a display of generosity makes the real criminal volunteer a confession. And the agents of the law are so impressed that they are all pardoned. Thus, an idealized competitive male generosity replaces the law as the basis of social harmony.¹ The story elaborates an aristocratic topos that exalts male friendship above heterosexual love. The transferable wife is a highly valued but alienable possession. She functions like the valued “gift” in Mauss's account of the potlatch, which is a means of establishing male bonding within a clan structure through competitive generosity.² One can easily understand why the “cult of friendship,” when it is affirmed through such male “generosity,” would come into conflict with the Petrarchan “cult of love” which enjoins a posture of male subordination to the mistress, to whom it grants sovereign sway. For the gift of a person is the most emphatic assertion of sovereign ownership. From this point of view, the “cult of friendship” must be seen as a discursive defense of aristocratic patriarchy, and the “cult of love” as a disruptive challenge to male sovereignty, and even self-possession.

Shakespeare's play makes a mockery of the topos of “the two friends,” but there are serious issues at stake too. At first the constant Valentine mocks Proteus for being susceptible to love for Julia, but then, having moved from Verona to Padua, he falls in love himself with Silvia. Proteus, true to his name, changes and also falls in love with Silvia, who rejects him. The betrayal of Julia is doubled by a betrayal of his friend to Silvia's father, who intends to marry her to the ridiculous suitor, Sir Thurio. Thus, under pressure of his love for Silvia, Proteus has betrayed his former love, his friend, and importantly, his former self. This culminates in his intention to rape the unyielding Silvia in a desolate spot. At this moment Valentine appears on the scene and, after the most perfunctory of apologies from Proteus, he dumbfounds everybody (including generations of critics and, it seems, Silvia too, since she never speaks for the rest of the play), by the transformation of the adored lady into the transferable potlach gift of the traditional story:

Valentine. And that my love may appear plain and free,
All that was mine in Silvia I give thee.

(The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 5.4.82 ff.)

Critics who find this merely ludicrous, or crude on Shakespeare's part (as Tillyard does), tend to ignore Valentine's extreme concern, expressed a few lines earlier, with a general historical crisis in values, which he sees in the disappearance of the bond of aristocratic male friendship. When Valentine moralizes Proteus's betrayal in terms of the “o tempora, o mores” theme, he prepares the ground for his own heroic generosity as a means to mend both a psychological and a historical rift:

Valentine. Thou common friend, that's without faith or love,
For such is a friend now. Treacherous man,
Thou hast beguiled 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, when one's right hand
Is perjured to the bosom? Proteus,
I am sorry but I must never trust thee more,
But count the world a stranger for thy sake.
The private wound is deepest. O time most accursed,
'Mongst all the foes that a friend should be the worst

[emphases added] (5.4.62ff.)

It does not follow that Shakespeare's dramatic discourse endorses the role of restorative culture hero that Valentine constructs for himself here. On the contrary, there is a monstrous narcissistic theatricality, which continues even in his very “generous” refusal to question Proteus's quick repentance. For Proteus's confession of guilt gives to Valentine the gratifying role of an earthly God:

Valentine. Then I am paid,
And once again I do receive thee honest.
Who by repentance is not satisfied
Is nor of heaven nor earth. For these are pleased;
By penitence th'Eternal's wrath's appeased.

(5.4.77ff.)

What could be more gratifying to a patriarchal culture hero than this assumption of divinity? If an audience identifies with its triumphant note, it could never be without embarrassment or mocking reservations. But, however crude the psychological construction of character may appear now, the issues within this comic posturing are serious enough. What is at stake within the attempt to live by the standards of the literature of “friendship” is a newly intensified regressive desire to restore a purely male world. And Valentine is a little absolute monarch of that world.

The narrative of The Two Gentlemen of Verona is in some respects similar to that of Love's Labour's Lost. There the lords move from an initial oath to maintain a strongly narcissistic male bonding into heterosexual involvements which entail betrayal of their former “selves.” Yet this loss of self remains unacceptable, engendering a nostalgia channeled into reinvented feudal rituals where the male warrior can prove his truth. In these courtly plays, a new nostalgia for a male-centered order arises within (and against) the pleasures of a discourse given over to wit and the seductive power of signs. This nostalgia, which is sometimes grotesque and sometimes violent, takes the form of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called “homosocial” bonding, which overlaps with homosexuality but is not always exactly coterminous with it.³

The imperviousness of the women to the seductive strategies of language also links this play with Love's Labour's Lost, for it does not imply an absence of sexual desire. On the contrary, the heroines are active in the pursuit of their desires. The issue concerns resistance to the rhetoric of intended mastery mobilized by the males, and hidden within the postures of Petrarchan subordination. In this play, all the males (including Silvia's father) are seen to be totally deluded in their belief that “wailful sonnets” and the “force of heaven-bred poesy” can be strategically deployed to sway or construct the desires of women. Indeed, in the requisite attempt at seduction by love letter, Silvia actually composes the letter to herself on Valentine's behalf (2.1), and Julia, while pretending to reject Proteus by tearing up his letter, actually recomposes it in accordance with her desires:

Julia. Lo here in one line is his name twice writ;
“Poor forlorn Proteus”, “passionate Proteus”,
“To the sweet Julia”: that I'll tear away.
And yet I will not, sith so prettily
He couples it to his complaining names.
Thus I will fold them, one upon another;
Now kiss, embrace, contend, do what you will.

(1.2.124ff.)

Julia is not a passive or manipulated reader. She physically rends Proteus's written text, and undoes its claims to control. But then, she becomes another author and rewrites it as a scene of copulating signs! Clearly she responds to the text, but equally clearly her active desires effect a transformation. Similarly, Valentine's foolish and misdirected lesson in seduction to Silvia's father, the duke, is a satire on overconfident male investment in the phallic power of speech, particularly when it concludes with the wooden and indecent lines:

Valentine. That man that hath a tongue I say is no man
If with his tongue he cannot win a woman.

(3.1.104ff.)

In this respect, the play might be said to satirize courtly Petrarchanism. But in another much more far reaching sense, it relies on the Petrarchan, and very Elizabethan, concept of the sovereign lady, unmoved by the strategems of the poet, to bring about the closure and the restoration of male identities lost in the decentering language of erotic desire. Here the constancy of Julia to Proteus is even more important than Silvia's constancy to Valentine, since it is through Julia's active search that Proteus is restored to “the truth” of his former self. Thus she is a redemptive figure, as powerful in her way as the more conventionally Petrarchan, inaccessible Silvia.

It is essential to the resolution of the crisis of this plot, which allegorizes an underlying historical crisis of values, that the erring Proteus has an “original” loved one to whom he can be restored. The restoration of Proteus to Julia is represented as identical with a restoration to his former self and to friendship with Valentine. In this perspective, his numerous monologues, in which he claims to be pursuing the true interests of his self by betraying his friend and his word, are finally to be construed as casuistical products of “error.”

Julia's active pursuit of Proteus in male guise assumes great importance here. Her story is a romance quest through the world of male aberrations. (Silvia learns to imitate her, because of the total, and always ridiculous, failure of Valentine's initiatives.) Now, this romance plot of female initiative is potentially shocking, as Julia herself is very aware. Its impropriety is underlined in a series of jokes, in which her maid, Lucetta asks her about her trousers and advises her that she must wear a fashionable codpiece. Similar jokes occur in virtually identical situations in The Merchant of Venice, All's Well That Ends Well, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. One cannot maintain that the romance plot of active female desire was simply acceptable at the time. It requires a strategy of legitimation to make it acceptable.

Shakespeare's solution in this play is to fall back on the very poetic myths that in a certain sense are also being demystified. Petrarchan conventions allow a conflation of human love and divine adoration, in an endless series of metaphoric transformations. Accordingly, in this play, passionate self-abandonment by the heroine is unlike the male loss of self-hood. Her defiance of formal propriety, through her potentially dishonoring flight from the paternal home in pursuit of her erotic goal, are rewritten via dramatic metaphors as Christian devotion and scorn of worldly goods. Metaphorically, the erotic flight becomes the quest of the pilgrim:

Julia. A true devoted pilgrim is not weary
To measure kingdoms with his feeble steps.
Much less shall she that hath love's wings to fly,
And when the flight is made to one so dear,
Of such divine perfection as Sir Proteus.

(2.7.9ff.)

Although Julia's faith in the constancy of Proteus is misplaced, to say the least, it is the constancy of her passion that guarantees the (nonetheless precarious) validity of the religious metaphor. Lucetta, who has earlier displayed a worldly knowingness about sexual desire in contrast to Julia's modest resistance, now maintains an equally worldly posture, but in an opposite sense. She is now the worldly-wise, even cynical, opponent of Julia's pilgrim-like wholeheartedness. Against her words enjoining restraint, Julia argues that the fury of frustrated desire can become the sweet journey of the pilgrim, by being permitted to seek its goal:

Julia. The more thou damm'st it up, the more it burns.
The current that with gentle murmur glides,
Thou know'st, being stopped, impatiently doth rage.
But when his fair course is not hindered
He makes sweet music with th'enamelled stones,
Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge
He overtaketh in his pilgrimage.

(2.7.24ff.)

This metaphorical pilgrimage, however, is also legitimized by a traditionally virtuous abandonment of worldly goods and status, as she gives up all she has to follow her lord. (It is also worth noting that, whether it is violent in its rebellion or harmonious in its pilgrimage, Julia ascribes the active river of her passion to the masculine gender.) Thus, the rebellious overthrowing of maidenly restraint becomes musical and harmonious as it is equated with a supreme act of faith in Proteus:

Julia. Now, as thou lov'st me, do him not that wrong
To bear a hard opinion of his truth.
Only deserve my love by loving him,
And presently go with me to my chamber
To take a note of what I stand in need of
To furnish me upon my longing journey.
All that is mine I leave at thy dispose,
My goods, my lands, my reputation,
Only in lieu thereof dispatch me hence.

(2.7.80ff.)

Since the two previous scenes have dealt with Proteus's abandonment of Julia and his faithlessness to his friend, Julia's self-abandonment and passionate “pilgrimage” acquire connotations of active spiritual rescue, no matter how far Proteus sinks. The disciple redeems the lord when she sets out to rescue “his truth.” There could be no more powerful legitimation of active and mobile female desire than this plot, but its gratifications are nonetheless permissible only because they lead to the restoration of the male self to its supposedly preexisting essential “truth.”

But we should also ask: what is it that divided Proteus from his “truth” in the first place? The obvious answer would be the invasion of heterosexuality into a purely “homosocial” relationship, on the pattern of Love's Labour's Lost. But, while this is correct, it requires careful discrimination. A common sense view of the play, which is not incorrect but merely insensitive to the submerged side of the overt dialogue between the two heroes, has it that the mutable Proteus betrays the constant Valentine. And yet, it is the constant Valentine, in his absorption in thoughts of Silvia, who first announces to Proteus that heterosexual love breaks the bonds of male friendship:

Valentine. Pardon me, Proteus, all I can is nothing
To her whose worth makes other worthies nothing.
She is alone.
Proteus. Then let her alone.
Valentine. Not for the world. Why man, she is mine own,
And I as rich in having such a jewel
As twenty seas, if all their sand were pearl,
The water nectar, and the rocks pure gold.
Forgive me that I do not dream on thee
Because thou seest me dote upon my love.

[Emphasis added] (2.4.163ff.)

The treason to male bonding, therefore, starts with Valentine and his overvaluation of Silvia as possessable riches. And it is this very exclusivity that takes the ritual joking combat of boasting about the qualities of their respective mistresses (in itself an established topos, cf. Love's Labour's Lost 4.3), beyond its normal bounds and into a competitive aggression of rival owners:

Proteus. Have I not reason to prefer mine own?
Valentine. And I will help thee to prefer her, too.
She shall be dignified with this high honour,
To bear my lady's train, lest the base earth
Should from her vesture chance to steal a kiss
And, of so great a favour growing proud,
Disdain to root the summer-swelling flower,
And make rough winter everlastingly.
Proteus. Why, Valentine, what braggartism is this?

(2.4.154ff.)

Here Valentine's rhetorical “braggartism” produces a rivalry for possession of the same object, even where that is obviously not his conscious intention. His utterance is a provocation, of which only he seems to be truly oblivious. It is contrary to common sense that he should actually want Proteus to recognize that Silvia is preferable to Julia. And yet that desire, that Proteus too should desire Silvia, is present and active, however much it is formally contradicted by Valentine's statements of exclusive possession, which in this context become provocative. It is as though Silvia's desirability for Valentine depends upon her being desired by others. So that her triumph in the little beauty contest being constructed here is in a covert way the triumph of her owner over his rival. It is no accident that Proteus is the cleverer of the two. His mutability is inseparable from his interpretive sensitivity to the nuances of Valentine's utterance, so that in a very real sense he is correct to wonder whether his passion for Silvia is not in fact produced by Valentine. But he is unable to say how much his new position is constructed by Valentine or how much by Silvia as a desirable object in herself. He becomes a spectator of himself, caught guilty and bewildered in the power of signs:

Proteus. Even as one heat another expels,
Or as one nail by strength drives out another,
So the remembrance of my former love
Is by a newer object quite forgotten. [sic]
Is it mine eye, or Valentine's praise,
Her true perfection, or my false transgression
That makes me, reasonless, to reason thus?

(2.4.190ff.)

Valentine's very success in constructing his friend's desires on the pattern of his own is the cause of all the trouble. But it is an unconscious success, inseparable from his own impenetrable confidence and stupid blindness to the meanings of his own words and gestures.

I have borrowed the term “homosocial” from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who introduces it precisely because it permits a space of possible difference between “homosocial” bonding and homosexual attachments. It may be that homosocial and homosexual sometimes coincide or overlap, but they may also be violently opposed. For example, modern patriarchal discourse is homosocial in seeking to preserve male solidarity in dominance, whereas it is also violently homophobic, probably negating its homosexual tendencies in its desire to be completely nonfeminized. But this relationship is historically variable, and is moreover gender specific. Looking at Shakespeare's sonnets in this light, she is able to say that the modern projection of “homosexuality,” as that which excludes the heterosexual, is anachronistic, for in fact we are dealing with a continuum comparable to Greek attitudes. Thus, the “fair youth” sonnets, though obviously homosexual to many modern readers, are also heterosexual, for it is through the woman that males relate to each other:

My point is … not that we are here in the presence of homosexuality (which would be anachronistic) but rather (risking anachronism) that we are in the presence of male heterosexual desire, in the form of a desire to consolidate partnership with authoritative males in and through the bodies of females.⁴

Sedgwick cites René Girard's structure of mediated or “triangular” desire and Lévi-Strauss' “traffic in women,” where I have preferred to cite Mauss's potlach gift for its inherent competitiveness and its assertion of direct ownership of the mediating “other.” But the arguments are similar.⁵ She argues from this position, that in the early sonnets, where the woman functions as a medium for a mutual relationship between the poet and the fair youth, there is no sense of crisis. Crisis only emerges when the relationship with a woman threatens male identity:

The heterosexuality that succeeded in eclipsing women [in the earlier poems—J. H.] was also, as we have seen, relatively unthreatened by the feminization of one man in relation to another. To be feminized or suffer gender confusion within a framework that includes a woman is, however, dire; and, as we shall see, any erotic involvement with an actual woman threatens to be unmanning. Lust itself (meaning, in this context, desire for women) is a machine for depriving males of self-identity (Sonnet 129).⁶

The notion of “an actual woman” is perhaps a weak point here, but the argument is clear and persuasive enough. Insofar as the woman, even as discursive construct, resists the role of mere structural medium within patriarchal relations, she is dangerous. But we have noted already how the dangerous woman, mobile and not subject to male discursive strategies, becomes the source of salvation through Shakespeare's miraculous comic plot.

There is another aspect to Sedgwick's reading of the sonnets which casts light on the comic strategies of this play. As long as criticism treats Proteus and Valentine as opposed but morally distinct “characters,” it cannot really address the nature of the polarization which produces them and the hidden matrix which links them. But Sedgwick, writing of the demonization of the “dark lady” in the sonnets, observes that the poetic voice attributes doubleness and deceit to her in order to preserve some undivided masculine purity of image in the beloved male. And she adds:

In the sonnets addressed to the fair youth, there is plenty of dissonance, doubleness, and self-division, but it is all described as located outside the youth himself, and wherever possible, within the speaker. [emphasis added]⁷

In contrast to the inwardly divided speaker, there is something of the “dumb blonde” in the fair youth:

Like Marilyn Monroe, the youth makes the man viewing him feel old, vitiated, and responsible, even as the man luxuriates in the presence (the almost promise) of youth and self-possession.⁸

The construction of a unified, ideal self in the representation of the male beloved is not simply a feminization of the fair youth but almost the opposite:

If anything, the fair youth, “woman's face” and all, is presented as exaggeratedly phallic—unitary, straightforward, unreflective, pink, and dense.⁹

The polarization here means that the older speaker assumes all the duplicity and deviousness of language, of which the desired and ideal alter-ego is free. Sedgwick summarizes this polarization as follows:

I am sense; you are animal ease and sweetness and authenticity, I am guilt and self-subversion and ambivalence.

These qualities, she says, are what makes the older man somewhat “feminine” in this discourse (p. 44). To this I would only add that it is this self-divided decentered “femininity” that also makes him the poet.

This division of homosocial roles, through the invasion of heterosexual rivalry, is exactly what characterizes the Proteus-Valentine relationship. Valentine is the male “dumb blonde” who is also the unified phallic ideal from which Proteus falls guiltily away. Valentine's unreflecting impenetrability (his “stupidity” is undeniable, but that commonly used term is inadequate), is part of that superior ideal. Proteus, on the other hand, is the one who is afflicted by a linguistic consciousness so alert to duplicity that he even detects it in what Valentine fails to know about himself.

Valentine is not the only male “dumb blonde” in Shakespeare's comedy. Claudio, in Much Ado About Nothing, is another; “unitary, straightforward, unreflective, pink, and dense” all seem fitting terms for him. But, as we will see in chapter 10, things have changed by then. Claudio is a potential murderer in his pursuit of unitary truth, because, unlike Valentine, he is penetrated with anxiety. Instead of being the ideal image of regressive male desire, he is displaced and caught up in the desire himself.

Notes

1. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, X, 8, [c. 1350], translated by Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella (New York and London: Norton, 1982), 640-655; Sir Thomas Elyot, The Governour, II. 12 [1531], in The Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, volume 1, Geoffrey Bullough ed. (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 212-217. For the Arabic sources, and the Latin and vernacular versions of this tale, see Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce, Deslindes Cervantinos (Madrid: Edhigar, 1961), 121ff.

2. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Cohen and West, 1954).

3. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

4. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men, 38.

5. However, I feel that Sedgwick's recourse to Girard's structure of mimetic desire does not fully serve her argument. Girard's view of the competitive mutual conditioning of the desires of the two friends is certainly based on a structure which resembles what Sedgwick calls homosociality, but Girard is not concerned with either gender positioning or historical shifts in discourse. Thus he emphatically denies that the Two Gentlemen of Verona has anything to do with the conflict of “friendship” and “love”: A Theatre of Envy (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1991), 17. But, after explaining that two men brought up together unconsciously imitate each other in everything, he adds: “All of a sudden, with no advance warning, the attitude that has always nourished friendship tears it apart. Thus imitation is a double-edged sword.” (A Theatre of Envy, 9) For Girard, it is not heterosexuality but mutual male imitation that “suddenly” (Girard's untheorized moment) produces rivalry out of bonding. And yet, the effect is still a conflict of “friendship” and “love.” Girard's own narrative goes beyond his structural explanation.

6. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men, 36.

7. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men, 41.

8. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men, 43.

9. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men, 44.