SOURCE: Leech, Clifford. Introduction to The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, edited by Clifford Leech, pp. lii-lxxv. London: Methuen and Co., 1969.

[In the following excerpt, Leech presents a critical evaluation of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, including an analysis of plot and characters, as well as an evaluation of the play's place among Shakespeare's other works.]

VI. THE COMEDY

The Two Gentlemen of Verona has been the recipient of indulgence rather than praise. Rowe, noting that it immediately follows The Tempest in the Folio, was sure that it was written long before that play: ‘if his Fire may be suppos'd to abate in his Age, yet certainly his Judgment increas'd, but most of the Faults of this Play are Faults of Judgment more than Fancy.’¹ He added that ‘Silvia and the rest’ do not behave themselves ‘like Princes, Noblemen or the Sons and Daughters of such’.² Pope praised the style as ‘less figurative, and more natural and unaffected, than the greater Part of this Author's, though suppos'd to be one of the first he wrote’, yet took exception to ‘the lowest and most trifling conceits’ in it, which he attributed to ‘the gross taste of the age he liv'd in’.³ For Theobald, it was simply ‘One of the very worst’ of Shakespeare's.⁴ Hanmer thought ‘It may well be doubted whether Shakespeare had any other hand in this play than the enlivening it with some speeches and lines thrown in here and there.’⁵ Johnson conjectured that the text had escaped corruption ‘only because being seldom played, it was less exposed to the hazards of transcription’.⁶ Malone was kinder, thinking that, as perhaps the earliest of Shakespeare's plays, it ‘may surely be pronounced a very elegant and extraordinary performance’.⁷

On the whole, as we should expect, the nineteenth century was more sympathetic. Coleridge thought the play only doubtfully Shakespeare's,⁸ and in Dowden's view the play's worst feature, its carelessness in the last act, was due to Shakespeare's handing over his manuscript to the actors ‘while a portion of it still remained a hasty sketch’,⁹ but at least he admired the symmetry in the arrangement of the characters—Proteus balancing Valentine, Silvia Julia, and Launce Speed.¹⁰ R. G. Moulton looked further than this and noted how each of the three journeys (Valentine's, Proteus', and Julia's) added to the complication of the action, and how the outlaws' encounters with a series of the play's characters (Valentine, Silvia, Proteus, and Julia) constituted the ‘Resolving Accident’. Moreover, he saw the sub-plot (Launce and Speed) and the lighter exchanges of the dialogue as constituting a contrasting pattern to that of the romantic main plot.¹¹ Critics more concerned with characters praised Launce and Julia and Silvia: Ulrici wrote of ‘the inimitable Launce, one of those delightfully amusing characters which we meet nowhere else but in Shakespeare’,¹² and Brandes drew attention to ‘the beauty and clearness with which the two young women are outlined’ and to ‘the true English humour’ that Launce brings to the play.¹³ Yet Ulrici also found in The Two Gentlemen a strong satiric element, presenting love as ‘the foundation and ruling spring of life’ but a foundation marred by ‘instability and rottenness’: ‘love is presented under the most diversified forms, but in all equally weak, foolish, perverse, and self-indulgent.’¹⁴ We may think this a rather heavy-handed presentation of the play, but the emphasis on satire is notable. Warwick Bond in his Arden edition (1906) and Quiller-Couch in his introduction to the New Cambridge edition (1921) represent a commoner and less bold approach. For Bond the play is worthy of praise for its key position in the development of romantic comedy, as constituting the ‘earliest positive achievement surviving’ in this form in English—only Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and James IV having comparable status.¹⁵ For ‘Q’ it is ‘a light and jocund Italianate comedy’, with ‘notable promise, too, in the characters’.¹⁶ Both Bond and ‘Q’ were worried about Valentine's renunciation of Silvia, but Bond convinced himself that Valentine only meant that his love was as much Proteus' as Silvia's (Julia unfortunately misunderstanding his words and therefore swooning)¹⁷ and ‘Q’ fell back on a belief that the text had been tampered with by another hand.¹⁸

Commentators of the last forty years have come nearer to a recognition that the play—sketch as it is for fuller development in the years that lay ahead for Shakespeare—has its own degree of complexity. They are not so inclined to take refuge in the state of the text or to explain away Valentine's renunciation by a disregard of its palpable sense. And they are not so ready to praise Launce and Julia without considering the significance of their co-existence within the play. Miss M. C. Bradbrook has insisted that we must recognize the force of the Friendship Cult, must see Valentine as ‘displaying in transcendent form the courtly virtue of Magnanimity, the first and greatest virtue of a gentleman’.¹⁹ The stress, she argues, is on the young men, with the young women merely materials for demonstration of the great virtue:

At this point the two young men may be well down on the forestage, but with Valentine's forgiveness and proffer, Silvia and Julia are brought into the action again. It has been asked how Silvia should be expected to react to this summary disposal of her favour. Clearly she should not react at all. She is the prize, for the purpose of argument, and must not call attention to herself, but stand like the ‘mistress’ in Cynthia's Revels before whom the courtiers conduct their amorous verbal duels, a lay figure. Leading ladies may not relish this, but leading boys would have been more tractable.²⁰

It is wrong, she thinks, to imagine that Julia swoons with calculation, such an idea being ‘part of the modern vulgar search for “personality” at all costs’: we must think of that incident as merely the dramatist's device for precipitating the dénouement.²¹ She argues, consistently if dubiously, that the parodic elements—as when ‘Launce's “parting” from his family completely kills Proteus' parting with Julia’—are used merely as contrasts with the romantic elements: ‘the high style and the low were used in contrast, as black and white, and not allowed to blend.’²² This view of things is not quite received doctrine, but certainly it has been influential on the general view of the play. ‘We would not see, or present, things in that way’, is frequently the reader's sentiment, ‘but of course Shakespeare with the Friendship Cult working powerfully on him could do it.’ Stanley Wells, while accepting the theoretical basis of it all, suggests that Shakespeare fails here in an attempt at synthesis: he did not manage to fit his characters convincingly into the pattern that his friendship-plot demanded.²³ Wells sees more danger in juxtaposition than Miss Bradbrook suspected: Speed's mockery of Valentine in II. i makes ‘the tenderness … in great danger of being lost in the absurdity’; but the comic commentary can sometimes be wholly successful in providing ‘a perfectly legitimate comic counterpoint’.²⁴ It is not clear why Wells makes this distinction, but his discussion of the play seems rightly to refuse the escape dependent on suggesting a simple dichotomy between the Elizabethan and the twentieth-century consciousness. Moreover, he has most usefully indicated the play's general reliance on soliloquies and duologues, a reliance which indeed makes the juxtapositions too starkly apparent—so starkly that their relationship has been looked at with incredulity, or merely disregarded, by most of the play's critics. The fullest, and I think most perceptive, account of these juxtapositions is given in an article by Harold F. Brooks.²⁵ Taking up H. B. Charlton's round assertion, ‘Launce … has no real right within the play except that gentlemen must have servants, and Elizabethan audiences must have clowns’,²⁶ he insists on the way that many small details in the play have their echoes in other details. Even the famous song's praise of Silvia (‘Love doth to her eyes repair / To help him of his blindness’) links with Speed's insistence to Valentine in II. i that he cannot properly see Silvia because he loves her. In the same way, Launce's refusal to tell Speed the name of his love contrasts with Valentine's readiness to tell all to Proteus, and Brooks goes so far as to ‘hint’ a comparison between Proteus and Crab:

I am hinting a comparison of Proteus with Crab; and I do not think it extravagant, provided one is not too serious about it, to see reflected in Crab, comically and a little pathetically, the transgressor in Proteus. The want of sensibility to old ties and to his friend Launce's feelings which Crab is alleged to show at parting from home, is ominous as a parallel to Proteus' parting from Julia and impending reunion with Valentine. As a present for Silvia, Crab resembles the love that Proteus proffers her. He is a sorry changeling for the true love gift Proteus meant to bestow. He is unfit for Silvia (persecuting her with most objectionable attentions!), and offensive where true courtliness should rule. Like Proteus, he gets his friend into trouble. And as Crab is only saved by Launce's quixotic, self-sacrificial affection, so Proteus is only saved by the extremes to which Valentine is ready to carry his friendship and Julia her love.²⁷

Though Brooks is evidently aware of the danger, the tone of this comment may suggest that the effect is more ponderous than it is. Nevertheless, we are at least taken in a direction which is in general true to the play. Less thorough-going, but thoroughly useful, is Bertrand Evans' introduction to his Signet edition of the play²⁸: he shows that the romantic-comedy line that Shakespeare followed after writing The Two Gentlemen was one in which the comic aspect of a sympathetically drawn hero (Valentine) was rarely overlooked for long, and that the moral imperfections of Proteus firmly anticipate traits of which we are all conscious in Claudio and Bertram. He is able to exhibit, too, the vivid existence of Julia in her own right and not merely as a preliminary sketch for Rosalind and Viola. Evans' account is too heavily weighted on the side of character to let the complications of this play's writing emerge fully, but he does excellently bring out the adult nature of Shakespeare's attitude towards the figures he uses. Much as we owe to Miss Bradbrook's demonstration of the play's link with the Friendship Cult, Evans makes it plain that this is no simple cult-play but a play in which human beings are thought about as such.

In an attempt to look at The Two Gentlemen afresh, it seems worth while to begin by noting one of its strongest peculiarities. Shakespeare's seventeen comedies (the fourteen in the Comedies section of the Folio, together with Cymbeline in the Tragedies section, Troilus and Cressida originally there too but transferred to a no-man's-land between Histories and Tragedies, and Pericles omitted from the Folio) show three main ways in which locality is employed. Eight of them (The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, Love's Labour's Lost, Much Ado about Nothing, Twelfth Night, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Measure for Measure, The Tempest) have the whole of the action presented in or near a single place. To this place, in every instance but Measure for Measure, strangers come, and the action depends primarily on the impact of the strangers (who generally bring with them a sense of another locality, which is not presented on the stage) on the normal inhabitants of the locality. Shakespeare thus in these plays adheres, sometimes in a strict and sometimes in a fairly free way, to the notion of Unity of Place. On occasion (The Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Tempest) there is adherence also, again to a greater or lesser extent, to the notion of Unity of Time. This, for all the romantic admixture that is frequently present, is comedy in a direct line of development from the classics, most obviously in The Comedy of Errors but evident enough too even in The Tempest. It is a comic mode that lends itself to elaborate incident, to a contrasting of events and of characters, and to a pattern of action that depends on the Terentian formula—an encounter leading to a plot, the working out of that plot to a point of epitasis where complication coexists with impasse, and then a new movement that leads to resolution.²⁹ Its English predecessors are to be found in, for example, Ralph Roister Doister, Gammer Gurton's Needle, Damon and Pithias, Campaspe, Mother Bombie. But we have noticed that in using this kind of action Shakespeare generally implies a second locality, and he gives to it a much greater place in the play's economy than Plautus, for example, gave in The Menaechmi to the Syracuse from which one of his twins came to find the other in the play's Epidamnum. The royal court of France in Love's Labour's Lost, the war from which Don Pedro and the rest came to Messina in Much Ado, the world of Prince Hal which Falstaff had abandoned for love-making in Windsor, the Italy which was home for almost all the characters that met on the island in The Tempest—these unseen localities contribute something important to the plays, and to some extent we find the unseen locality being played off against the locality presented. Not surprisingly, therefore, in five comedies Shakespeare alternated his scene between two localities, whose interrelations are of major importance to their plays' economies: A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Troilus and Cressida, The Winter's Tale. In A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Winter's Tale we begin in one place, move to another, and then return to the first. In The Merchant of Venice and Troilus and Cressida there is repeated alternation between the two localities. In As You Like It Act I belongs to the court, Acts II-V almost wholly to the Forest (with three short moments of return to the court); yet here we may note that there is to be at the end of the play a general return to the court, bringing this play nearer to the pattern of A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Winter's Tale. Court and forest, Sicilia and Bohemia, Venice and Belmont, Troy and the Greek camp: in each pair of localities, there is reciprocal comment, both overt and implied. It was a comic mode that may have developed out of Shakespeare's interest in locality-contrast already seen in the plays of the first group, but it nevertheless seems to be a kind of writing of his own invention. Certainly it is non-classical, but may take its rise ultimately from the court-country antithesis that underlies pastoral writing. It is noticeable that a forest is of major importance in two of the plays, that in The Winter's Tale a pastoral element is strong, and that the Belmont of The Merchant of Venice is felt as non-urban. Particularly suitable for satire, this pattern of comedy is much less naturally fitted for comedy of incident than the first type, and its characters are likely to be presented in the light of a contrast with corresponding figures in the juxtaposed locality. Plays written in this way may well embody thought of the more serious kind.

Four Shakespeare comedies belong to neither of these types. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, All's Well that Ends Well, Pericles and Cymbeline are wandering plays, changing their locality more than once, not usually for the sake of a special significance in the fresh locality (the forest in The Two Gentlemen being a place of convenient meeting rather than the place where magic is done in A Midsummer Night's Dream or the place where the wind blows and people mature in As You Like It, and even the Welsh hills in Cymbeline being only incidentally contrasted with the royal court), but in order that the characters may ultimately find their way to a sorting out of their tangled patterns of life. We may note that, if my conjectures are justified concerning the stages of composition that The Two Gentlemen of Verona went through, this play may have originally been a two-setting play, with a gradual move from town to forest as there was to be later in As You Like It. Without question, however, the re-writing, if such it was, was an improvement, for this play is stronger as a play of wandering than it would have been as a play where localities are in an important way contrasted. We should note, too, that The Two Gentlemen is the only early play of this type, and that its mode was not one that Shakespeare was ever to make frequent use of. Doubtless Cymbeline grew out of the example of Pericles, its close predecessor; doubtless the reversion to other modes apparent in the later romances, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, indicate that the dramatist felt a need for tighter organization than the wandering play gave him. Nevertheless, we have the four experiments with it, and one of them, the play we are immediately concerned with, came at or near the beginning of his career.

Ancestry in this case presents no problem. We are dealing here with a derivative from romantic narrative, remotely from Hellenistic and medieval exemplars, and finding its place in the drama at an understandably early date. Sidney in An Apology for Poetry mocked at plays that were liberal both with place and time, ‘where you shall have Asia of the one side, and Affricke of the other, and so manie other under-Kingdomes, that the Player when he comes in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will not be conceived’,³⁰ thus clearly indicating the prevalence of the wandering play in the 1570s. As we have seen, surviving examples from these years and the following decade are not numerous, but Sir Clyomon and Clamydes (c. 1570) and Common Conditions (before 1576) give us a notion of what this type of dramatic romance was like before the University Wits improved it.³¹ Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and James IV and Lyly's Endimion are obviously more sophisticated, but equally depend on a series of journeys to bring things into order. And all the time, of course, prose romance was being written, where a writer most frequently took his characters from place to place as they worked out their patterns of adventure and misadventure. Here the Arcadia was of course the great exemplar in England: its progeny was numerous, but its influence was strengthened by the availability of Italian and French prose stories of wandering, Shakespeare going to Montemayor for The Two Gentlemen of Verona and to Boccaccio for All's Well that Ends Well.³²

Part of the attraction is in the wandering itself, for the continuing novelty of setting emphasizes a separateness from everyday life. The reader of a romance and the spectator of a ‘wandering’ romantic comedy are taken on holiday into far places which, even if they existed in the form that the writing gives them, would be normally inaccessible. It was therefore appropriate that such writing should present a code of conduct aspired after but not realized in the course of everyday life. The popular romance of the twentieth century still adheres to this, making its characters behave either according to a notion of correct behaviour that is no longer current or directly contrary to this. The writers of prose romance in the late sixteenth century could exalt the friendship idea which they had inherited from antiquity and the Middle Ages just as they could pay homage to courtly love: both had become a little out of key, but no one would be uneasy about this if the setting were remote—even less if the narrative took one with easy mobility from place to place. Not that the prose romance always presented the traditional attachments without mockery. Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) had great fun with the Earl of Surrey's alleged devotion to ‘Geraldine’, and the sexual relations of this piece of writing were generally rooted in a commoner kind of satisfaction. And the wandering drama too could burlesque itself. Peele's The Old Wives' Tale (?1591-4) gives us the supreme example of a thorough-going burlesque, not only of the wandering play as such, but of its high-minded assertion of the debt of friend to friend. Eumenides, the romantic hero whose quest is the freeing of his love Delia from the power of the magician Sacrapant, has entered into a bargain with the cheerful ghost Jack: they are to share equally whatever each gains in his adventures. Finally Delia is released from enchantment, Eumenides has her love, and Jack makes his demand:

JACK.
So, master, now ye think you have done; but I must have a saying to you: you know you and I were partners, I to have half in all you got.
EUM.
Why, so thou shalt, Jack.
JACK.
Why, then, master, draw your sword, part your lady, let me have half of her presently.
EUM.
Why, I hope, Jack, thou dost but jest: I promised thee half I got, but not half my lady.
JACK.
But what else, master? have you not gotten her? therefore divide her straight, for I will have half—there is no remedy.
EUM.
Well, ere I will falsify my word unto my friend, take her all: here, Jack, I'll give her thee.
JACK.
Nay, neither more nor less, master, but even just half.
EUM.
Before I will falsify my faith unto my friend, I will divide her: Jack thou shalt have half.
1ST Bro.
Be not so cruel unto our sister, gentle knight.
2ND Bro.
O, spare fair Delia! she deserves no death.
EUM.
Content yourselves; my word is passed to him. Therefore prepare thyself, Delia, for thou must die.
DEL.
Then farewell, world! adieu, Eumenides!
                              He offers to strike, and Jack stays him.(33)

The burlesque here goes quite far, for the angel's intervention at the sacrifice of Isaac seems remembered. But so too is the belief that in the interest of friendship one must do anything, even the slicing of one's love. Though we do not know whether or not The Old Wives' Tale preceded The Two Gentlemen, it is manifest that there is some relationship between them. Is Peele burlesquing a convention that Shakespeare accepted, or is Peele doing more obviously what Shakespeare did more discreetly? An examination of the general conduct of Shakespeare's play, with help from the observations of Harold F. Brooks, will suggest that the dramatist, accepting the data of the wandering play and responding to them with some sympathy, nevertheless made fun of the normal asseverations of romance.³⁴

It quickly becomes evident that Shakespeare uses parody again and again in the juxtaposition of scenes. We begin in I. i with Proteus and Valentine, Proteus being presented as the lover and Valentine as the man immune to love, but immediately after we see Proteus and Speed together, with Speed's comic comments making Proteus' devotion seem a little less than important. The next scene shows Julia both as genuinely in love and as comic in her behaviour, anxious to hide her love from Lucetta yet thoroughly human in her anxiety to read the message from the suitor she favours. In the last scene of the first act Proteus contrives to conceal from his father that he is reading a letter from Julia, thus paralleling his love's behaviour immediately before: this does not suggest insincerity in either lover, but does underline the comedy of their relationship. Valentine's dullness of wit in II. i, as he fails to see Silvia's signs of love for him, has already been commented on.³⁵ This is quickly followed by Proteus' farewell to Julia and the immediate burlesque offered by Launce on his first appearance: the parallelism of these scenes is emphasized by their both ending in the entry of Panthino, Antonio's servant, who comes to tell Proteus and Launce they must hurry to embark. Julia has hardly a word to say as Proteus leaves her, and is totally silent after their kiss (‘What, gone without a word?’). The dog Crab is reproached for his silence when Launce has been taking leave of his noisily affected family. That Julia is staying while Crab is going is a fitting antithesis, for after all Julia is human and charming while Crab is what he is; that there is a similarity in their behaviour is a linking that goes along with the antithesis and retrospectively brings Julia within the orbit of mockery that Crab, because of his animal immunity, escapes. II. iv opens with some indifferent exchanges between Valentine, now Silvia's accepted lover, and Thurio, her father's choice, but soon the Duke announces Proteus' arrival and Valentine pours forth his praise of his friend. Proteus sees Silvia and is entangled at once, but he is able to make Valentine's hyperboles look silly when they are alone together:

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

(II. iv. 139-43)

For the moment Valentine is ready to accept the idea that the praise he demands is flattery, and Proteus reminds him that once their positions were reversed and Valentine then gave him ‘bitter pills’ in his talk of love. The transposition may suggest that neither young man may be entirely discreet in his devotion, or at least that words as used by Valentine go beyond their proper scope. And in a moment he loses again his sense of decorum.

VAL.
Then speak the truth by her: if not divine,
Yet let her be a principality,
Sovereign to all the creatures on the earth.
PRO.
Except my mistress.
VAL.
                                                                                Sweet, except not any,
Except thou wilt except against my love.
PRO.
Have I not reason to prefer mine own?
VAL.
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.
PRO.
Why, Valentine, what braggardism is this?
VAL.
Pardon me, Proteus, all I can is nothing
To her whose worth makes other worthies nothing:
She is alone.

(II. iv. 146-62)

There is something almost touching in this last admission, as the lover's sense of his lady's rareness makes him feel the inadequacy of his soaring speech. But Proteus' response is sharp (‘Then let her alone’), and Valentine escapes from the implication that the paragon is of its nature not for human enjoyment by at once confessing, and delighting in, his plan to win possession. Proteus, left alone, reveals his new love to us and his determination to reject the claims of friendship. Again the effect is retroactive, and we are conscious of Valentine's rashness in telling all. The Friendship Cult is manifestly a dangerous game to play at when friends, as necessarily, are the flesh and blood that Valentine does not credit his mistress with being.³⁶ And then Launce and Speed appear, Launce refusing to make a plain statement about the future of the Proteus-Julia love-affair. These two friends exchange abuse and make jests at each other's expense, but they go off to drink ale together. Proteus then returns to speak another soliloquy, reaffirming his decision to betray Valentine and announcing his plans in detail. The second act ends ironically with Julia planning to set out in disguise, to find the Proteus whose fidelity she makes no question of:

JUL.
… A thousand oaths, an ocean of his tears,
And instances of infinite of love,
Warrant me welcome to my Proteus.
LUC.
All these are servants to deceitful men.
JUL.
Base men, that use them to so base effect;
But truer stars did govern Proteus' birth,
His words are bonds, his oaths are oracles,
His love sincere, his thoughts immaculate,
His tears, pure messengers sent from his heart,
His heart, as far from fraud as heaven from earth.
LUC.
Pray heav'n he prove so when you come to him.
JUL.
Now, as thou lov'st me, do him not that wrong,
To bear a hard opinion of his truth.

(II. vii. 69-81)

The girl's situation is of course one that she herself recognizes as comic:

LUC.
What fashion, madam, shall I make your breeches?
JUL.
That fits as well as ‘Tell me, good my lord,
What compass will you wear your farthingale?’

(II. vii. 49-51)

Our knowledge of Proteus' loss of love makes her situation poignant, but her over-confidence in the man simultaneously makes her comically vulnerable. She joins Valentine and the Proteus of the early scenes in believing that liking is necessarily for ever and that oaths carry weight. In The Two Gentlemen we have no oaths that the swearer meant to break when swearing them, but the play's oaths are still fragile.

Act III begins with Proteus' disclosure of Valentine's plans to the Duke. He extracts a promise of secrecy, so when Valentine opportunely appears the Duke sets up as amateur detective. He pretends he wants advice on how to pursue a love affair, and Valentine falls into the trap by recommending the use of a rope-ladder concealed beneath a cloak. The Duke insists on removing Valentine's own cloak, and discovers not only the rope-ladder that was to be used for the elopement but also a verse-letter addressed to Silvia. Throughout the Duke has behaved with scant dignity in talking of his alleged love-predicament, and Valentine's worldly-wise advice shows the younger man at his most callow. Moreover, the pose Valentine here adopts reflects on the ‘braggardism’ of his claims for Silvia in II. iv: this young man can talk any language, it seems, that he believes appropriate to the moment. When the Duke denounces him as a Phaëton, the image is manifestly disproportionate, as is Valentine's burst of lamentation at his sentence of banishment. Launce, coming with Proteus, increases the difficulty of our taking this with full seriousness, and then we see Valentine's quick acceptance of Proteus' assurance of help. When the gentlemen have left the stage, Launce tells us of his own love and deliberates with Speed on whether or not he should proceed with his wooing. If his final determination is caused by the girl's money, we are at least ready to see this as a kind of rough wisdom: if we retain some involvement with Valentine's emotional condition, we nevertheless see it as vulnerable in its irrationality. And Launce's pleasure in Speed's discomfiture at the end of the scene (‘an unmannerly slave, that will thrust himself into secrets’) again reflects on Valentine's over-easy confiding in his friend. Next we see Proteus deceiving the Duke and Thurio as he has deceived Valentine: he undertakes to conduct Thurio's wooing, and his advocacy of poetry brings the processes of romantic love into further ridicule, just as the Duke's admiring comment (‘Ay, much is the force of heavenbred poesy’) brings him within the same sort of absurdity as Marlowe contrived for Mycetes King of Persia (‘And 'tis a pretty toy to be a poet’, 1 Tamburlaine, II. ii. 54).

The forest-setting is introduced at the beginning of Act IV. The outlaws who offer Valentine the choice between death and kingship over them are frank in confessing their offences:

3 OUT.
Know, then, that some of us are gentlemen,
Such as the fury of ungovern'd youth
Thrust from the company of awful men.
Myself was from Verona banished,
For practising to steal away a lady,
An heir, and near allied unto the Duke.
2 OUT.
And I from Mantua, for a gentleman,
Who, in my mood, I stabb'd unto the heart.
1 OUT.
And I, for such like petty crimes as these.

(IV. i. 44-52)

It is odd that the Third Outlaw's reason for banishment is similar to Valentine's, and the Second Outlaw's similar to the offence that Valentine claims was his (ll. 27-9): fighting and eloping, being thus by implication multiplied, seem to become minor and ordinary happenings, and Valentine's love and predicament are the less involving for us. There is, however, an oddity about the whole scene, especially in the outlaws' reasons for choosing Valentine as their king (he is handsome and he is a ‘linguist’) and in their ready promise, so at odds with their account of past practices, to do ‘no outrages / On silly women or poor passengers’. If ‘No, we detest such vile base practices’ were ironic, it would make Valentine's new position intolerable: we must rather take it as an indication that these outlaws are meant to be figures of fun, despite their threats, are meant indeed to appear as pasteboard figures like the Duke himself.

The rest of Act IV reintroduces us to Julia (her first appearance since II. vii), and the degree of concentration on her distress makes the immediately preceding light treatment of Valentine's story appropriate. We are the readier to feel with Julia because Valentine's story has moved into a world of mock-fantasy. IV. ii is one of the play's most successful scenes, incorporating the song ‘Who is Silvia?’, which is sung to Silvia apparently by Proteus, accompanied by musicians hired by him, nominally on behalf of Thurio. Julia and the Host of the inn where she lodges are unnoticed watchers and listeners, and it is during this scene that Julia learns of Proteus' falseness to Valentine and Thurio and herself. The quiet exchanges between her and the Host are in prose, thus effectively differentiated from both the song and the blank verse dialogue of the other characters. Julia, who in the earlier scenes was merely excited and enterprising, is here for the first time made deeply acquainted with distress. We can see that it was dramatically sound to have her almost silent at the moment of Proteus' leave-taking in II. ii, for her previous control makes the present strain altogether stronger. And her prose makes her seem genuine and the other figures all tainted with affectation: it was perhaps in line with this that Shakespeare allowed Silvia to agree that Proteus should have her picture, even Silvia thus entering into the love game that Proteus now dominates. Yet Julia's prose is not merely quiet and gentle. In playing upon the Host's meanings, she shows a wit that co-exists with, sets off, grows out of, and deepens her sadness (ll. 54-69).³⁷ During the talk between Proteus and Silvia the Host falls asleep: it is good to have Julia alone here, freed from the need to comment (except sparsely aside) and with her isolation emphasized. It is also appropriate that the good-natured Host, like any plain man, is kept by sleep from any full involvement in the romantic action. Then in IV. iii we see Silvia's plans for her escape, with a highly romanticized portrait of Eglamour which may be a little difficult to credit after the previous scene's deflation of high romance. With IV. iv, however, we have Launce (on his last appearance in the play) complaining about the way his dog has made him suffer for his devotion to it. This suggests a kind of parallel to Julia's suffering through Proteus' behaviour, this Launce-Julia relation being perhaps more cogent than the Crab-Proteus relation that Harold F. Brooks has suggested.³⁸ The effect is to prevent our taking Julia too seriously, and we are made to respond lightheartedly to Silvia too when we hear of Crab's behaviour with her farthingale and of her indignant rejection of Crab as a gift. When Proteus and Julia are alone together, and when Julia approaches Silvia as Proteus' envoy, Julia's situation is again pathetic—though the situation is presented with more obvious contrivance than her overhearing of the serenade in IV. ii. She is, after all, in a position of advantage in her disguise, and she sees to it that a remembrance of Julia is forced into both of these conversations. She shows some power of invention in the account of the playing of Ariadne in the Pentecostal pageant (ll. 156-70), for the incident, if not totally fictitious, has obviously been ingeniously transposed: she, as a woman, could not have taken part in such a performance; yet the boy playing the part of Julia could have done so: the play-world and the world of the actors playing in it have become subtly intertwined. The scene ends with a soliloquy in which Julia, expressing gratitude for Silvia's kindness, admits that she has an impulse to scratch out the eyes of the picture she is to take to Proteus: it is a reminder of the Julia who tore up Proteus' letter in I. ii, and in thus binding the later Julia with the earlier it brings her again within the compass of light comedy. Moreover, her conduct here shows her gradually winning mastery over the other figures: clearly we do not have to worry about her ultimate success.

Act V begins with Silvia and Eglamour setting out for the forest, and then the Duke's discovery of her absence and his laborious working out of what it signifies (V. ii. 34-47). The baiting of Thurio by Proteus and Julia at the beginning of V. ii relaxes the tension, such as it is, notably. In scene iii the outlaws are on their best behaviour with Silvia, but Eglamour has taken to his heels with astonishing rapidity—or at least with a rapidity that would astonish us if the romantic picture of this knight in IV. iii had not already been brought within the bounds of suspicion. The play's last scene first presents Valentine remembering his love and commenting on his difficulty in making the outlaws accept his high code:

These are my mates, that make their wills their law,
Have some unhappy passenger in chase.
They love me well; yet I have much to do
To keep them from uncivil outrages.

(V. iv. 14-17)

He withdraws to watch Proteus, who has rescued Silvia, renewing his suit and then deciding on rape. Reprehensible as this is, we cannot help noticing that Silvia is a little churlish about her rescue:

Had I been seized by a hungry lion,
I would have been a breakfast to the beast,
Rather than have false Proteus rescue me.

(V. iv. 33-5)

This does switch our sympathy a little in Proteus' direction, and the girl's choice of image has a touch of the ludicrous. When the shocked Valentine intervenes, there is something risible in his first cry:

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

(V. iv. 60-1)

And he goes on with his speeches to Proteus without a word to his twice-rescued love. And so we proceed to the famous renunciation. Surely by now we can be in little doubt as to its intended effect. We have seen Valentine made fun of as a lover (mocking the god in I. i and being the god's faithful but unperceptive servant in II. i), as a credulous friend (so much less discreet than Launce), as a man helpless under the sentence of exile, as a sanguine teacher of good behaviour to outlaws. Now his continued preoccupation with the demands of friendship makes him ready to hand over his love to the man who has just been trying to rape her. The absurdity is pointed by Julia's well-timed swoon: that this is a deliberate one is suggested by the equally well-timed producing of the wrong ring immediately after.³⁹ Of course these matters lead to her revealing her identity and to Proteus' remorse. At first sight it looks odd that Julia, coming to herself, speaks in prose, and yet this is highly effective: common day breaks, and Julia's plain attachment to it (despite her earlier sentence-capping with Lucetta) is evidenced here as with her prose in IV. ii. It is appropriate too that on recovering from her ‘swoon’ she should speak in a disordered fashion. The elaborate masquerade in which all here have been playing is momentarily dissolved, paradoxically, in Julia's fresh practice of deceit. Silvia, on the other hand, says no further word in the scene, and Valentine never addresses her from the moment of his entry. This need not be attributed to a faulty state of the text, or to the necessary subordination of women (as Miss Bradbrook suggested) in a play of friendship, but rather can be taken as a further incursion of reality: Valentine is no longer the almost hopelessly aspiring lover but is the dispenser of magnanimity and, before the play is done, the Duke's accepted son-in-law. It is a transformation he hardly notices: friendship is maintained, his love is securely won, and never in the play has he shown any recognition of his own folly or excess. There are, however, touches of final absurdity. Valentine is ready to threaten Thurio if he does not abandon his claim to Silvia, showing a formal violence hardly called for; the Duke is ready to accept Valentine as Silvia's betrothed and goes so far as to think him ‘worthy of an empress' love’—a volte-face which only Valentine's position of power in the forest might ironically explain; Valentine asks the Duke to find employment for the outlaws, as men ‘full of good, / And fit for great employment’—a description hardly accordant with his account of them in V. iv. 14-17; the Duke at once agrees.⁴⁰ Valentine looks forward to a double wedding for himself, Silvia, Proteus, Julia, and apparently also to a shared household: ‘our day of marriage shall be yours, / One feast, one house, one mutual happiness.’

The antitheses come thus throughout the play. Shakespeare has used no character directly as a commentator, and has let the comic light play on Valentine, Silvia, Proteus, Julia while at the same time getting us interested in a double romantic story. In this respect, as in so many details, he anticipates his later romantic manner. Readers of As You Like It, Much Ado, and Twelfth Night frequently argue about how this character or that is to be taken, and attempt to impose a simple pattern of assertion on these plays so much more complex than The Two Gentlemen. Jaques represents a point of view to be rejected, Claudio is a wholly admirable though mistaken young man, Orsino is a proper enough duke—these are judgements of the kind we have come to expect from readers allegedly qualified to know. There is indeed an insufficient recognition that in his ‘romantic’ writings Shakespeare could simultaneously induce concernment and a sense of friendly mockery. That he did this as early as The Two Gentlemen of Verona should not surprise us when we can see it happening much more obviously in Love's Labour's Lost, which cannot have been written much later. It will be well to remember, moreover, the close relationship of The Two Gentlemen and The Comedy of Errors: in the neo-Plautine affair he wrote with extreme economy, and achieved a sense of distance through the multiplying of farcical event; in the earliest of his romantic comedies he has a similar economy in his composition and a not altogether dissimilar sense of remoteness. We may observe in passing that the appearance of condensation in the last scene of The Two Gentlemen may be due, not to abridgement as Dover Wilson suggested,⁴¹ but to Shakespeare's purpose of reducing involvement by the very speed with which incident followed incident. Seen in this way, the play's mockery comes into focus as a more subtle thing than the sharp merriment of Peele when he ridicules the Friendship Cult in The Old Wives' Tale.

Yet it is possible to take another view of the play's antitheses. Attention has been drawn to Harold Brooks' discussion of them,⁴² but in a private communication he has assured me he does not see them as ironic at the expense of the friends and the lovers. They are in his view chiefly to be seen as ‘lightning-conductors, allowing the audience to laugh at the extremes of the convention, so that laughter shall not disturb our response when we are required to accept the convention, extremes and all’. Remembering that in all probability The Two Gentlemen of Verona was written about the time when Shakespeare was at work on some at least of the Sonnets, he cannot believe that the dramatist could stand as far outside the experience of either love or friendship in the way that I have suggested.

Certainly one must recognize links between this play and the Sonnets. Valentine's verses at III. i. 140-51 constitute a sonnet minus one quatrain (as do Beatrice's in Much Ado about Nothing at III. i. 107-16 and Orlando's in As You Like It at III. ii. 1-10). Moreover, the ‘sonnet-story’ presents two friends, a woman loved by both, and the narrator's renunciation of the woman for the sake of friendship. The friend's infidelity to the narrator is seen as a worse thing than the loss of the woman (Sonnet 42), and the claims of friendship can be carried to a point of quixotry (Sonnet 88). And in both the play and the poems we get the use of themes common in sixteenth-century sonneteering: sight and blindness (e.g., II. i. 60 ff., II. iv. 87 ff., 192 ff.), shadow and substance (e.g., II. iv. 205, III. i. 177, IV. ii. 117-24, IV. iv. 182 ff., 199), appearance and reality (passim, necessarily, in a play where the arch-intriguer is named Proteus). Neo-platonism goes along with a frank recognition of sensual appetite in the Sonnets; in the play the attitudes are simpler, never I think being so strenuously aspired to or so dangerously brought into association with the body's urges. When one is considering the effect of what Shakespeare did in the play, it seems to me important that he was writing in very different circumstances from those that governed the Sonnets. In them he was contributing to that store of semi-private literature that abounded in the last years of the sixteenth century: they did not—apart from the doubtless fortuitous publication of two sonnets in The Passionate Pilgrim of 1599—encounter the press until 1609. But, though we know nothing of the play's early staging, we can be sure it was written to be acted, to be made immediately into a public thing. Moreover, the dramatist was experimenting with different types of comedy in these earliest years of his career: Plautus and Lyly and Greene were all being drawn upon in what we may call his search for a comic mode in which he would feel most at home. In that situation he would not be likely to wear his heart upon his sleeve (even if we assume he came nearer to doing that in the Sonnets), and he could be more frankly concerned with the comic side of a situation which at another time he might find painful.

That it was possible for a writer in the early 1590s to mock at love is evident from Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller; that he could find the friendship cult amusing we have seen from Peele's The Old Wives' Tale. Moreover, it seems illuminating to compare The Two Gentlemen with another play with which we have seen it to have close relations: Romeo and Juliet. There too Shakespeare can make Romeo's love-sickness amusing, and not only when he is in love with Rosaline. Moreover, his lamentations at his sentence of banishment are as extreme as Valentine's, and he has to be firmly handled by the Friar. The love of Romeo and Juliet is juxtaposed with the ordinary current of life and with the special dangers in Verona: it is exposed to a kind of testing in our eyes, and we come, as Nicholas Brooke has pointed out, to accept its validity as an important contribution to human experience—but only just.⁴³ The testing takes place also in The Two Gentlemen, and there I believe the effect is different. The relations between Valentine and Silvia, between Proteus and Julia, are too fragile a thing to stand up to the play's ironic implications through parallel and antithesis, or to the frequent absurdity of the romantic characters' own conduct and of the play's total atmosphere (as felt both in the ducal court and in the forest). That Shakespeare intended it in this way seems to me probable, though no one can prove that the play did not get out of hand and away from his first image of it. Still, when he decided to put Launce in, he must have realized that romance was being given a most powerful competitor.

No one is likely to claim that The Two Gentlemen of Verona is a masterpiece, or anything like it. But its seminal nature for Shakespeare—anticipating The Merchant of Venice in the account of Julia's suitors in I. ii, Romeo and Juliet in the planned elopement, the rope-ladder, the banishment of the lover and his extravagant response to it, Twelfth Night in Julia's employment as Proteus' messenger to Silvia, As You Like It in the use of a forest-setting, and a whole group of Shakespeare's plays in Julia's disguise—indicates that this was a play he did not readily put from his mind. If it were as poor a thing as has been commonly thought, he would have been less likely to take so many hints from it in the eight years or so subsequent to its writing. But there are signs that the play is beginning to be seen in proper perspective. We have noted Harold F. Brooks' sketching of the play's ironic parallels, and Hereward T. Price has commented on the critical presentation of the characters through the giving to them of over-elaborate speech and has expressed himself forcibly on the subject of renunciation:

Then Valentine gives Sylvia to Proteus. It ought to be clear that by this action Shakespeare is wringing the last drop of silliness out of Valentine's conventions. With the idea of smashing a particularly ridiculous convention, Shakespeare has set out to prove Valentine a fool. Any explanation of this scene that implies that Shakespeare was serious does rather less than justice to Shakespeare's sense of humor. It is like Shakespeare to make Valentine at once noble and silly; indeed the nature of his folly is allied to his nobility and may be said to spring from it. The heroes of these romantic comedies usually have their two sides; they have their follies, of which they are cured, and their fineness which persists.⁴⁴

Valentine is not cured, though Julia's swoon saves him from the effects of his folly. Nevertheless, Price's insistence on a doubleness of impression seems right. Other commentators, of course, have taken some steps in the same direction, as when Franklin M. Dickey wonders whether ‘Shakespeare is burlesquing himself’ in the last scene, with its ‘downright silliness’.⁴⁵ Not self-burlesque but a rather too direct kind of comic counterpoint is likely to be a considered verdict.

Such a notion of careful and, within its limits, subtle dramaturgy is consonant with the obvious care that has ultimately been given to the play's general shape. Certainly in its present form The Two Gentlemen of Verona suggests that Shakespeare made one or two false starts and that he did not, as far as we know, get rid of inconsistencies resulting from changes of plan;⁴⁶ nevertheless, the play as we have it has achieved neatness of outline. There are three journeys (Valentine's, Proteus', Julia's) to the place of the main action, all accomplished in Acts I and II, and three localities nicely correlated with act-division:

Act I. First locality.

II. Second locality (i, iv, v, vi); first locality (ii, iii, vii).

III. Second locality.

IV. Third locality (i); second locality (ii, iii, iv).

V. Second locality (i, ii); third locality (iii, iv).

The introduction of a fresh locality in the fourth act is in line with Shakespeare's frequent practice (as in The Taming of the Shrew, Coriolanus, Titus, Timon, Julius Caesar, Macbeth),⁴⁷ and the use of a locality for Act I which will not be the play's main locality is something he returned to in A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, All's Well, and Othello. Moreover, T. W. Baldwin seems right in suggesting that the play fits quite well into the typical Terentian pattern as interpreted by Landino in 1482 and Willichius in 1539: the love-friendship theme is introduced in Act I and brought to a point of crisis in Act II (the two acts together constituting the protasis); Act III shows the epitasis or point of maximum complication, as Proteus' intrigue leads to the exile of Valentine; Act IV introduces two counter-actions when Valentine becomes king of the outlaws and when Julia arrives to oversee Proteus' conduct. The failure of Proteus' wooing of Silvia in Act IV indicates that the plans of both young men have come to nothing: the initiative now passes to the girls. The general movement to the forest in Act V (movement to in scenes i and ii, movement in in scenes iii and iv) induces the catastrophe or resolution.⁴⁸ Moreover, the alternation of locality in Act II increases suspense and shows all the four main characters at their points of maximum initiative. It contrasts with the use of a single locality in Act III and most of Act IV: in this central block of the play we have the collisions prepared for in Act II.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona is not a play where detailed comment on the characters is a worth-while occupation. Valentine and Silvia are graceful, a little impercipient, though Silvia (for all her readiness to give Proteus her picture and her unnecessary sharpness of tongue when he rescues her in the forest) is the more attractive and the more intelligent of the two. The Duke is what we expect of a ducal figure in the early Shakespeare. Speed is the pert boy of Lylyan comedy. Thurio is in line with Lyly's Sir Thopas in Endimion. Proteus is the worried victim of plotting, his own and the dramatist's. The rest are lay-figures, except for Launce and Julia. Launce, though he appears only four times in the play, has justifiably acquired fame for his enjoyment of his own appearance of naïveté and for his ability to get the better of any of the people we see him meeting in the play. Even his dog has, in the nature of things, no reply to his master's reproaches. Because he is without the briskness of Speed or of the Dromios in The Comedy of Errors, he can slacken the tempo of The Two Gentlemen of Verona and make us think with amusement of the romantic way of existence that is totally foreign to him. If we ask why Shakespeare omitted to bring either Launce or Speed into Act V, we may answer that he wanted the high-mindedness of Valentine and the remorse of Proteus to speak for themselves: a glance from Launce to Crab or a pert comment from Speed would have too obviously deflated the romancing of the two gentlemen, too deeply underlined Julia's ability to make herself mistress of the ultimate situation. And Julia, of course, though she is not given many words to speak, is indeed the voice of common day in the last scene. ‘Q’ quoted Sir George Young's view that Julia is, ‘in comparison with Silvia, something of an ordinary wench; that she and Proteus together are portrayed as “lovers of common clay, of less than second-rate refinement”, meant to be a foil to chivalrous Valentine and Silvia’. ‘Q’ would not have it so: it is the abridger's fault if we find Julia a bit ‘common’.⁴⁹ But a mid-twentieth-century reader or spectator is likely to find Julia in need of no such excuse. She is alive and enterprising and ready to swoon and reveal her identity if that is the only way of countering Valentine's absurd offer of Silvia to Proteus. Afterwards she may blush (V. iv. 163), but it is she who has exhibited wit in difficult circumstances in her talk with the Host in IV. ii and has conducted her embassy to Silvia in IV. iv with a careful contrivance of pathos. We are on her side if Sir George Young is not, and are glad that Shakespeare gave her successor Rosalind a more obviously active part in the working out of the resolution in As You Like It.

Perhaps more important is a comment on the use of prose and verse in this play. Prose of course for the servants, but prose more subtly for Julia and the Host during and after the serenading of Silvia in IV. ii, and for Julia when she discovers herself in V. iv. On the whole it is very good prose, though we may weary of the dialogue about Launce's love in III. ii. The verse varies from the mechanical to the deliberately high-flown to the pathetic to (on rare occasions) the truly eloquent. At its best, it is fully assured though over-sweet, as in Valentine's lines already quoted (V. iv. 7-10) or in these of Proteus:

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. 84-7)

At its worst the verse, like the prose, is a mechanical capping of sentence with sentence or of manifest absurdity with obvious comment.

With The Two Gentlemen of Verona we are near the beginning of Shakespeare's career, and it is one of his first comedies—perhaps, as already conjectured, even his very first. Nevertheless, it shows his readiness to see things simultaneously from more than one point of view. It exhibits his mockery, though also his partially sympathetic understanding, of the Friendship Cult; it presents his robust deflating, through Launce, of the ideas that men, of the sixteenth century and later times, like to persuade themselves they live by; it expresses an admiration for the type of young woman who pursues the young man who has shown an interest in her. John Masefield once said of Twelfth Night that ‘one can see it played night after night, week after week, without weariness, even in a London theatre’.⁵⁰ That is a large claim for any play, and certainly more than one can say for The Two Gentlemen of Verona: nevertheless, students of Shakespeare have to keep this comedy in mind. Not only does it anticipate in all sorts of ways the ‘romantic’ plays that followed: it also gives us a clue to the interpretation of Shakespeare's writing as a whole. We have to recognize the double nature of the apparently plain statement, we have to see his characters as coming beneath his gaze and within the orbit of his (here good-humoured) merriment. In some ways The Two Gentlemen appears to take its place among his most artificial plays, as a play on the débat-theme of love versus friendship, but on a deeper inspection it exhibits the fragility, the minor quality, of both love and friendship. It is not merely that men fall in and out of love, and may betray their friends: the very idea of attachment is in this play presented as a small thing, however large its claim, however high its dignity, for the human beings involved. That does not mean that Julia or Silvia or Valentine or even Proteus is outside the range of our, or the playwright's, sympathy. It does suggest, however, that our involvement is slighter than in some of the later comedies, though even in them there remains always a doubleness of view. Here Julia gets her Proteus, for what he is worth; Valentine gets his Silvia, and all she is worth. The two gentlemen reassume the positions of gentility. Back in the play's second locality, ‘One feast, one house, one mutual happiness’. Perhaps Proteus and Julia, taking a long look at each other, might decide to return to the play's first locality. In this instance, with the accumulation of ironies, we are not wrong to speculate about what was to happen when the characters had left the stage. And in that respect too The Two Gentlemen of Verona points forward. Julia, though not Silvia, has taken on the kind of life that we rightly associate with the later romantic comedies. We are bound to wonder about the future of Proteus and Julia, though we know that Valentine and Silvia are story-book figures, whose existence stops with the play.

Notes

1. Rowe, vii (1710), 274.

2. Ibid., p. 275.

3. Pope, i. 155, 157.

4. Theobald, i. 153, n. 1.

5. Hanmer, i. 145.

6. Johnson, i. 180.

7. Malone, iv. 7.

8. T. M. Raysor (ed.), Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism, 1930, ii. 308, n. 2.

9. Shakspere: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art, 3rd edition [1881], p. 51.

10. Ibid., pp. 52-3.

11. Shakespeare as a Dramatic Thinker, New York, 1907 (2nd edition), pp. 222-8, 341.

12. Hermann Ulrici, Shakespeare's Dramatic Art: and his Relation to Calderon and Goethe, 1846, p. 286.

13. George Brandes, William Shakespeare: A Critical Study, 1898, i. 62-4.

14. Op. cit., pp. 285-7.

15. Bond, p. xxxv.

16. N.C.S., pp. vii, xi.

17. Bond, p. xxxviii.

18. N.C.S., pp. xvii-xviii.

19. Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry, 1951, p. 151.

20. Ibid., p. 152.

21. Ibid., p. 153.

22. Loc. cit.

23. ‘The Failure of The Two Gentlemen of Verona’, Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, xcix (1963), 161-73; p. 170.

24. Ibid., pp. 167, 171.

25. ‘Two Clowns in a Comedy (to say nothing of the Dog): Speed, Launce (and Crab) in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona”’, Essays and Studies, 1963, 1963, pp. 91-100.

26. Shakespearian Comedy, 1938, p. 41.

27. Op. cit., p. 99.

28. New York and London, 1964.

29. Cf. T. W. Baldwin, Shakspere's Five-Act Structure, Urbana, Illinois, 1947, especially pp. 112, 231-2.

30. The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat, reprinted 1963, iii. 38.

31. See above, p. xli [in Leech, Clifford. Introduction to The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, edited by Clifford Leach].

32. I have discussed Shakespeare's varying use of locality, in similar terms, in ‘Ephesus, Troy, Athens: Shakespeare's Use of Locality’, Stratford Papers on Shakespeare 1963, Toronto, 1964, pp. 151-69, and in Twelfth Night and Shakespearian Comedy, Toronto, 1965, pp. 5-7.

33. Text from Five Elizabethan Comedies, ed. A. K. McIlwraith (World's Classics), 1934.

34. A study of the relation between All's Well and earlier examples of comedies with a multiplicity of scene would, I think, help to bring out the special character of that play.

35. See above, p. xxvi [in Leech, Clifford. Introduction to The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, edited by Clifford Leach].

36. In Jean de Meun's section of The Romance of the Rose, both Reason and The Friend insist on the propriety of revealing one's love to a ‘faithful friend’ (cf. the translation by Harry W. Robbins, New York, 1962, pp. 103-4, 199).

37. I cannot agree with Stanley Wells (op. cit., p. 172) in thinking that her replies are ‘misunderstandings.’

38. See above, pp. lv-lvi [in Leech, Clifford. Introduction to The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, edited by Clifford Leach].

39. It should be emphasized that neither of the General Editors of this series has been persuaded that the swoon is other than genuine. One doubt expressed is that a performer cannot make an audience aware that a swoon is deliberate: surely, however, it is not beyond compassing?

40. For a consideration of this Duke along with others of his rank in Shakespeare's comedies, see the editor's article ‘Shakespeare's Comic Dukes’, Review of English Literature, v (April 1964), 101-14.

41. N.C.S., p. 81.

42. Cf. above, pp. lv-lvi [in Leech, Clifford. Introduction to The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, edited by Clifford Leach].

43. ‘The Tragic Spectacle in Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet’, Shakespeare: The Tragedies: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. C. Leech, Chicago and London, 1965, pp. 243-56; cf. especially pp. 252-5.

44. ‘Shakespeare as a Critic’, P.Q., xx (1941), 390-9.

45. Not Wisely But Too Well: Shakespeare's Love Tragedies, San Marino, 1957, p. 70, n. 7.

46. See above, pp. xxx-xxxi [in Leech, Clifford. Introduction to The Arden Edition of the Works of William Shakespeare: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, edited by Clifford Leach].

47. Cf. the editor's article ‘Shakespeare's Use of a Five-Act Structure’, Die Neueren Sprachen, Neue Folge, vi (January 1957), 249-63.

48. T. W. Baldwin, op. cit., pp. 719-41. Cf. also Leech, ‘Shakespeare's Use of a Five-Act Structure’, loc. cit., p. 251.

49. N.C.S., pp. xviii-xix.

50. William Shakespeare, n.d. (Home University Library), p. 139.

Abbreviations and Usages

Quotations from other Shakespeare plays, except where otherwise indicated, are from the Globe edition, edited by W. G. Clark and W. A. Wright (1865). In collation and notes Shakespeare's plays and poems are referred to by the abbreviations listed in C. T. Onions' A Shakespeare Glossary (1911, revised edition 1946).

The following abbreviations are used for editions of Shakespeare, and for other sources of readings, referred to in introduction, collation, and notes:

F: The First Folio (1623).

F2: The Second Folio (1632).

F3: The Third Folio (1663-4).

F4: The Fourth Folio (1685).

Rowe: Works, ed. Nicholas Rowe (1709).

Pope: Works, ed. Alexander Pope (1725).

Theobald: Works, ed. Lewis Theobald (1733).

Hanmer: Works, ed. Sir Thomas Hanmer (1743-4).

Warburton: Works, ed. Alexander Pope and Thomas Warburton (1747).

Victor: The Two Gentlemen of Verona … With Alterations and Additions, by Benjamin Victor (1763).

Johnson: Plays, ed. Samuel Johnson (1765).

Capell: Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, ed. Edward Capell (1767-8).

Steevens: Plays, ed. Samuel Johnson and George Steevens (1773).

Steevens ii: 2nd edition of preceding (1778).

Rann: Works, ed. J. Rann (1787).

Malone: Plays and Poems, ed. Edmund Malone (1790).

Malone ii: Plays and Poems, ed. Edmund Malone (1821) [‘Third Variorum’].

Singer: Dramatic Works, ed. S. W. Singer (1826).

Knight: Pictorial Edition, ed. Charles Knight (1838-43).

Collier: Works, ed. J. Payne Collier (1842-4).

Sargent: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in Modern Standard Drama, ed. E. Sargent (New York, 1846).

Halliwell: Works, ed. J. O. Halliwell[-Phillipps] (1853-65).

Halliwell MS.: Readings quoted by Halliwell in the above edition from ‘a Manuscript Common-place-book of the seventeenth century’: Halliwell saw these readings as ‘unauthorized alterations’.

Collier (MS.): Readings allegedly found in a manuscript-corrected copy of F2, published in Collier's Notes and Emendations to the Text of Shakespeare's Plays (1853).

Delius: Shakespeares Werke, ed. N. Delius (Elberfeld, 1854-65).

Dyce: Works, ed. Alexander Dyce (1857).

Grant: White Works, ed. R. Grant White (Boston, 1857).

Collier ii: Comedies, Histories, Tragedies, and Poems, ed. J. Payne Collier (1858).

Staunton: Plays, ed. Howard Staunton (1858-64).

Camb: Works, ed. W. G. Clark and J. Glover (1863-6) [‘Old Cambridge’].

Keightley: Plays, ed. Thomas Keightley (1864).

Chambers: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, in Plays (Falcon edition, 1886-91).

Marshall: Works, ed. Henry Irving and F. A. Marshall (1888-90).

Craig: Complete Works, ed. W. J. Craig (1904) [‘Oxford edition’].

Bond: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, ed. R. Warwick Bond (1906) [‘Old Arden’].

N.C.S., NCS: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, ed. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and J. Dover Wilson (1921) [‘New Cambridge’].

Alexander: Complete Works, ed. Peter Alexander (1951) [‘Tudor Shakespeare’].

Sisson: Complete Works, ed. C. J. Sisson (1954).

Munro: The London Shakespeare, ed. John Munro (1958).

Other references to readings and annotations are quoted from the notes to editions listed above.

Other Abbreviations:

Abbott: E. A. Abbott, A Shakespearian Grammar (1879).

Bullough: Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, Vol. 1 (1957).

Chambers, E.S.: E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (1923).

Franz: W. Franz, Die Sprache Shakespeares (Halle, 1939).

J.E.G.P.: Journal of English and Germanic Philology.

Kennedy: A Critical Edition of Yong's Translation of George of Montemayor's Diana and Gil Polo's Enamoured Diana, ed. Judith M. Kennedy (Oxford, 1968).

Kökeritz: Helge Kökeritz, Shakespeare's Pronunciation (1953).

Long: John H. Long, Shakespeare's Use of Music (Gainesville, Florida, 1955).

Marlowe: Works (general editor R. H. Case), 6 vols. (1930-3).

M.L.N.: Modern Language Notes.

M.S.R.: Malone Society Reprints.

O.E.D.: Oxford English Dictionary.

Onions: C. T. Onions, A Shakespeare Glossary (1911, revised edition 1946).

Partridge: Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy (1955).

P.M.L.A.: Publications of the Modern Languages Association of America.

P.Q.: Philological Quarterly.

Romeus: The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (in Bullough, pp. 284-363).

Sisson: C. J. Sisson, New Readings in Shakespeare, 2 vols. (1956).

Schmidt: Alexander Schmidt, Shakespeare-Lexicon, 2 vols. (1874-5).

S.P. Studies in Philology.

Tannenbaum: S. A. Tannenbaum, The New Cambridge Shakespeare and The Two Gentlemen of Verona (New York, 1939).

Tilley: M. P. Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1950).