The Two Gentlemen of Verona

The RSC Shakespeare
Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen
Chief Associate Editors: Jan Sewell and Will Sharpe
Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro,
Dee Anna Phares, Héloïse Sénéchal

The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Textual editing: Eric Rasmussen
Introduction and Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater: Jonathan Bate
Commentary: Héloïse Sénéchal
Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Jan Sewell
In Performance: Jan Sewell (RSC stagings) and Peter Kirwan (overview)
The Director’s Cut (interviews by Jan Sewell and Kevin Wright):
David Thacker and Edward Hall

Editorial Advisory Board
Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Director, Royal Shakespeare Company
Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK
Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University,
Western Australia
Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature,
Université de Genève, Switzerland
Jacqui O’Hanlon, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company
Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, Japan
Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA
James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature,
Columbia University, USA
Tiffany Stern, Professor and Tutor in English, University of Oxford, UK

2011 Modern Library Paperback Edition

Copyright © 2007, 2011 by The Royal Shakespeare Company

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of
The Random House Publishing Group, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York.

MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.

“Royal Shakespeare Company,” “RSC,” and the RSC logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of The Royal Shakespeare Company.

The version of The Two Gentlemen of Verona and the corresponding footnotes that appear in this volume were originally published in William Shakespeare: Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, published in 2007 by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-1-58836-885-0

www.BookishMall.com

Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin
Cover photograph: © Roberto Mettifogo/Getty Images

v3.1

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Origins

Debates

Lovers

About the Text

Key Facts

The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Act 1

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Act 2

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Scene 6

Scene 7

Act 3

Scene 1

Scene 2

Act 4

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Act 5

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Textual Notes

Scene-by-Scene Analysis

The Two Gentlemen of Verona in Performance:
The RSC and Beyond

Four Centuries of The Two Gentlemen: An Overview

At the RSC

The Director’s Cut: Interviews with David Thacker and Edward Hall

Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater

Beginnings

Playhouses

The Ensemble at Work

The King’s Man

Shakespeare’s Works: A Chronology

Further Reading and Viewing

References

Acknowledgments and Picture Credits

INTRODUCTION

ORIGINS

The Two Gentlemen of Verona is one of Shakespeare’s early plays, perhaps even his first. We do not know exactly when it was written or first performed, but its stylistic and dramatic features mark it out as early work: a small cast, a preponderance of end-stopped verse lines, a degree of simplicity in both language and characterization. Though the play has the relative superficiality of youth, it also has the virtues of that time of life: freshness, energy, pace, wholeheartedness, a desire to get to the point and to speak its mind. It is about the things that matter most urgently to young people: themselves, their friendships and their love affairs. It makes its drama out of the conflicts between these things: how can you be simultaneously true to yourself, to your best friend, and to the object of your sexual desire? Especially if the person you’ve fallen in love with happens to be your best friend’s girlfriend.

Shakespeare and his contemporaries inherited their idea of stage comedy from the ancient Roman masters Terence and Plautus. According to the classical model, whereas tragedy concerned itself with heroes and kings, with wars and affairs of state, comedy was about ordinary people—people like us. Elizabethan audiences expected to be stirred to amazement by the matter of tragedy, but to see images of themselves in a comedy.

Classical comedy wove a set of variations on a common theme. Boy meets girl. Girl’s father is not amused: he has another suitor in mind, a richer, older, or better-connected man. But, often thanks to the assistance of an ingenious servant, the young lovers overcome all obstacles and are united. Confusion, disguises, and mistaken identity abound along the way. Stories of this kind recur throughout European Renaissance culture, in both prose romance and stage comedy. Thus in The Two Gentlemen the Duke intends to marry his daughter Silvia to the foolish Turio, so Valentine arrives with a letter, a rope ladder, and the intention to elope with her by night. The Shakespearean twist in the tale is that the person who has tipped off the Duke about Valentine’s intentions is the latter’s best friend Proteus, who has also fallen in love with Silvia.

One of the plays in the repertoire of the Queen’s Men, the leading acting company of the 1580s, was recorded under the title The History of Felix and Feliomena (probably a transcription error for Felismena). It was a dramatization of a story in the Portuguese writer Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana, a multiply plotted prose romance of the 1540s that was read and imitated across Europe. A French translation was published in the 1570s and an English one undertaken in the 1580s, though not published until 1598. The Queen’s Men play is lost, but it presumably followed the basic outline of Montemayor’s plot. On seeing the beautiful Celia, Don Felix deserts his lover Felismena. The latter disguises herself as a page boy and follows him. Celia then falls in love with the page. She is rejected and dies. Felismena’s identity is revealed and she is reunited with Don Felix.

Shakespeare clearly knew this story. He is unlikely to have had enough Spanish or even French to have read it in published form, so his knowledge was probably based on a script or a viewing of the Queen’s Men play, or even on having acted in it himself. It is just possible that he saw the manuscript of the English version of Montemayor—perhaps whoever wrote the play for the Queen’s Men possessed a copy of the Don Felix section.

The mark of Shakespeare’s originality was his gift of combining disparate sources. He created The Two Gentlemen of Verona by turning Felix, Felismena, and Celia into Proteus, Julia, and Silvia while simultaneously mapping this love triangle onto another one, namely the plot of two friends falling out with each other by falling in love with the same girl.

One of the most influential prose romances—one might say protonovels—in Elizabethan England was John Lyly’s Euphues, published in 1578. It told the story of two close male friends who fall in love with the same girl. The narrative serves as the field for a debate about the conflicting demands of friendship and erotic desire. At the same time, Lyly established a dichotomy between two kinds of education, the intellectual (symbolized by Athens, ancient Greece being the seat of wisdom) and the sentimental (symbolized by Naples, Italy being the playground of lovers). One character stays home in Athens, while the other travels to Naples.

The story line of Euphues had innumerable precedents, going back through the Middle Ages to ancient times. Some were tragic, some comic.