[In the following essay, Jaarsma examines the father-daughter relationship in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, drawing a parallel with the relationship between King Lear and Cordelia.]

Certain intriguing parallels between the father-daughter confrontation in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and King Lear buttress the claims by psychological critics that Lear's violent reaction to Cordelia's “failure” to show her love for him stems from unconscious sexual motives. According to this reading, Lear's rage at what he sees to be Cordelia's “ingratitude” results from the fact that Lear “not only loves his daughters; he is also in love with them, especially with the youngest one.”¹ Consequently, he “expects his daughter to love him not only as a daughter but also as a lover.”² The relinquishing of his kingdom is based on the hope that by thus demonstrating his love, Lear will “ultimately retire to [Cordelia]”³ in a kind of infantile-sexual relationship indicated in his lines: “I loved her most, and thought to set my rest / On her kind nursery.”⁴ Goneril and Regan, moreover, “make it quite clear that the daughters know their father's true interests rather well and that they are, with the exception of the third daughter, also willing, at least ostensibly, to submit themselves to the wishes of the father”⁵ in pledging to Lear “all” of their love.

The relationship between the Duke of Milan and his daughter Sylvia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona is a vatic parallel to the Lear-Cordelia situation and is indicated not only in obvious verbal similarities but revealed in psychological analogies as well. Explaining Sylvia's refusal to marry whom he wishes, the Duke of Milan tells Valentine, her anonymous lover who has gained the Duke's confidence early in the play,

… she is peevish, sullen, froward,
Proud, disobedient, stubborn, lacking duty;
Neither regarding that she is my child
Nor fearing me as if I were her father.
And may I say to thee this pride of hers,
Upon advice, hath drawn my love fromher,
And where I thought the remnant of mine age
Should have been cherish'd by her child-like duty,
I am now full resolved to take a wife
And turn her out to who will take her in.
Then let her beauty be her wedding dow'r;
For me and my possessions she esteems not.

(III, i, 68-79)

The parallels to Lear's reaction toward Cordelia's supposed lack of love for him are striking. “And where I thought the remnant of mine age / Should have been cherish'd by her childlike duty” looks forward to Lear's “… and thought to set my rest / On her kind nursery”; while Milan's disenfranchising of Sylvia in the words “Then let her beauty be her wedding dow'r” is almost exactly repeated in Lear's similar action toward Cordelia in the phrase “Thy truth then be thy dow'r” (I, i, 110). When the Duke later discovers that Valentine, whom he had trusted as an ally against Sylvia's stubbornness, is in reality her lover, his anger takes the form of a hyperbolic sentence of banishment upon Valentine, just as Lear banishes Kent for coming to the defense of Cordelia. Milan says:

Why, Phaëton (for thou art Merops' son),
Wilt thou aspire to guide the heavenly car
And with thy daring folly burn the world?
Wilt thou reach stars, because they shine on thee?
Go, base intruder, overweening slave!
Bestow thy fawning smiles on equal mates,
And think my patience, more than thy desert,
Is privilege for thy departure hence.
Thank me for this more than for all the favours
Which (all too much) I have bestow'd on thee.
But if thou linger in my territories
Longer than swiftest expedition
Will give thee time to leave our royal court,
By heaven, my wrath shall far exceed the love
I ever bore my daughter or thyself.
Be gone! I will not hear thy vain excuse,
But, as thou lov'st thy life, make speed from hence.

(III, i, 153-169)

Lear rages at Kent:

Hear me, recreant!
On thine allegiance, hear me!
Since thou hast sought to make us break our vow—
Which we durst never yet—and with strain'd pride
To come between our sentence and our power,—
Which nor our nature nor our place can bear,—
Our potency made good, take thy reward.
Five days we do allot thee for provision
To shield thee from diseases of the world,
And on the sixth to turn thy hated back
Upon our kingdom. If, on the tenth day following,
Thy banish'd trunk be found in our dominions,
The moment is thy death.

(I, i, 169-181)

Beyond the fascinating superficial verbal and situational parallels in these two plays (which at least demonstrate the organic relationship among Shakespeare's works), lies a much more important psychological likeness. If we grant that such interpretations of King Lear as those afforded by Pauncz and Donnelly have a significant validity in revealing Shakespeare's knowledge of the human heart, then the parallel passages in The Two Gentlemen of Verona also deserve a close scrutiny from a psychological point-of-view.

To review the psychological argument concerning the Lear-Cordelia relationship briefly: Lear loves Cordelia, not as a father, but as a lover. He rejects her totally, like an anguished lover, when she denies him the lover-mistress relationship. He moreover banishes Kent since Kent's reasonable defense of Cordelia's action stands as a further barrier between Lear, the lover, and Cordelia, the intended mistress.

Milan's motives, like Lear's, hinge upon the confusion between “duty” and “love,” the latter unconsciously interpreted by both Lear and Milan as sexual love. Sylvia's “duty” according to Milan, is to obey her father in all things. This seems reasonable enough until we see this “duty” in terms of Milan's anarchic solution to his daughter's unwillingness to accept either his concept of duty or the performance of it. He states that he will revenge himself on her by marrying a “widow,” a traditional Elizabethan symbol of promiscuity and sexual abandon and throw Sylvia out of his home without a dowry. This substitution of the widow for the daughter gives Milan away. Recognizing that Sylvia will not fulfill the role of sexual partner (“the remnant of mine age” may itself suggest a phallic preoccupation), Milan, like Lear, is violent in his reaction to that refusal. The widow becomes for him the sexual alternative for Sylvia while he punishes his daughter by stripping her of her dowry and consequently her ability to enjoy the sexual attentions of anyone else beside her father. As long as Sylvia could be forced to marry Thurio, her father's choice, her continued presence in Milan, near her father, would insure at least a partial gratification of his “reverse erotic fixation,” or what Pauncz calls the “Lear Complex.” But the threat of her complete removal from the court and the city causes him to threaten her with perpetual chastity and to banish her lover, Valentine, who would take her away from him.

Milan's sentence of banishment upon Valentine seems more explicitly motivated by sexual rivalry than Lear's upon Kent, though the reason for the actions of both rulers is fundamentally the same. The difference, of course, lies in the degree of intimacy between Valentine and Sylvia and Kent and Cordelia, since Valentine is, after all, Sylvia's lover, while Kent is merely Cordelia's champion who nonetheless penetrates Lear's unconscious motives and reveals his knowledge of Lear's “hideous rashness” and “foul disease” (I, i, 153 and I, i, 167). Milan's reaction to his discovery that Valentine is the secret lover of Sylvia is ordinarily puzzling, since he has already revealed to Valentine and to the audience that he has decided to reject Sylvia and “turn her out to who will take her in.” But he cannot really let her go, so that like Lear he transfers his wrath at her obstinacy to the one who would allow her to enjoy a normal sexual life. Pauncz notes that Lear too is unable “to get rid of the hated being [Cordelia],” and almost “dissuades the suitors of his daughter from an alliance with her.”⁶ Clearly, Milan views Valentine as his specific sexual rival; his sentence of banishment itself makes reference to this assumed rivalry:

Why, Phaëton (for thou art Merops' son),
Wilt thou aspire to guide the heavenly car
And with thy daring folly burn the world?

(III, i, 153-155)

The comparison between Valentine as Phaëton and the Duke as Helios, his father, is doubly interesting in terms of the implicit sexual rivalry the Duke unconsciously sees between them. Having just discovered Valentine's plan to elope with Sylvia in the embroidery of Valentine's cloak, the Duke's rage is perfectly explicable psychologically. He reads Valentine's message to Sylvia as a statement of sexual intention (“This night I will enfranchise thee”) and is jealous of the “base intruder” who would entice his “mate” away from him (“Bestow thy fawning smiles on equal mates [my italics]”). His anger now is like the anger of the uxurious husband who regrets having allowed Valentine to enjoy imagined “favours.” His rage at Valentine's sexual competition is that of a man who has been cuckolded, and his reaction to that imagined loss of manhood characteristically far exceeds “the love / I ever bore my daughter or thyself.”

The Two Gentlemen of Verona is generally recognized as one of Shakespeare's most derivative plays. In all other respects plot and convention take their predictable comic courses, and the Duke's final blessings on Valentine and Sylvia's union satisfies the logic of Elizabethan comedy. Yet in his brief illumination of the darker motives of a character who at first glance seems little advanced beyond the pantalone of Italian Commedia dell' arte, Shakespeare reveals his profound knowledge of the psychological drives that move human beings and gives evidence of his creative development in applying that knowledge in such later and psychologically more satisfying plays as King Lear.

Notes

1. Arpad Pauncz, “Psychopathology of Shakespeare's King Lear,” American Imago, IX (1952), 57.

2. John Donnelly, “Incest, Ingratitude and Insanity: Aspects of the Psychopathology of King Lear,” The King Lear Perplex, ed. Helmut Bonheim (Belmont, Calif., 1960), p. 143. First published in Psychoanalytic Review, XL (1953), 149-155.

3. Donnelly, The King Lear Perplex, p. 143.

4. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Lear, I, i, 125-126, in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. George Lyman Kittredge (Boston, 1936). Subsequent references to both King Lear and The Two Gentlemen of Verona are from this edition and are cited in the text.

5. Pauncz, 58.

6. Pauncz, 58.