A famous example was the tale of bosom friends and fellow warriors Palamon and Arcite. Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale tells of how they both fall for a lady named Emilia, with tragic consequences. At the very end of his career, Shakespeare would dramatize their story in a play cowritten with John Fletcher: The Two Noble Kinsmen. As the similarity in title suggests, this is a revisiting of The Two Gentlemen in a different key, testimony to the endurance of Shakespeare’s interest in the motif of male bonding versus heterosexual desire—which he also explored in works as diverse as Othello, The Winter’s Tale, and the Sonnets.

DEBATES

In all sorts of ways, The Two Gentlemen is a prototype for later Shakespearean developments. The cross-dressed heroine recurs in the more renowned comedies of the late 1590s and early 1600s. The outlaw scenes introduce a movement out from “civil” society into a “wilderness” or green world, where surprising developments take place, anticipating the enchanted wood of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Forest of Arden in As You Like It. The soliloquies of Proteus, meanwhile, offer an early example of a Shakespearean character undergoing a crisis of personal identity, of consciousness—already we are moving into the territory that will be taken in very different (and of course much more complex) directions in the self-communion of Richard III, Richard II, and eventually Hamlet.

The play begins by establishing the friendship between the two gentlemen. Valentine’s name suggests the patron saint of lovers in the Christian tradition, while that of Proteus evokes the shape-changing god of the classical tradition. The names are enough to suggest that Valentine will be the constant lover, Proteus the fickle one. Initially, though, Valentine is associated with the pursuit of “honour” rather than sexual desire. He intends to seek his fortune in the city of Milan instead of “living dully sluggardized at home.” His plan would immediately have pricked the interest of many members of the play’s original London audience, who would themselves have made the journey from the provinces to the capital—as indeed Shakespeare had done himself not long before writing the play.

Proteus, meanwhile, has undergone a psychological rather than a physical journey: he has left himself, his friends, and all, for love. His desire for Julia has “metamorphosed” him and made him neglect his studies, waste his time, and go to “War with good counsel.” The didactic literature of the age was full of admonitions against such self-abuse. Young gentlemen were supposed to study the arts of good behavior and good citizenship, not to be distracted by affairs of the heart and effeminizing influences. Stage plays came into the latter category, which partially accounts for the anti-theatrical diatribes of Elizabethan “puritans.”

The notion of drama as debate, developed in large measure from the plays of Lyly, led Shakespeare to write his opening scenes as a series of two-handers. First we have Valentine and Proteus, debating the relative merits of erotic desire and civic honor. Then Julia and her knowing maid Lucetta debate how a girl should respond to a proposition of love. And then the representatives of the older generation, Proteus’ father, Antonio, and the servant Pantino, discuss the need for a young man to be tested in the world before he can achieve maturity.

As well as establishing oppositions between generations and genders, Shakespeare also sets up a dialogue across the barrier of class by means of witty banter between master and servant. Valentine goes to Milan in pursuit of honor, but once he gets there he finds himself in the same situation as Proteus back in Verona: “metamorphosed with a mistress.” His mockery of lovers’ affectation in the first scene comes back to haunt him. Meanwhile his servant Speed is there to anatomize the characteristics of the mooning courtly lover: he observes his master folding his arms like a melancholy malcontent, relishing love songs, walking alone, sighing like a schoolboy who knows he’s going to be in trouble for losing his spelling book, weeping, speaking in a whining voice, and rejecting food like someone on a diet. Much as the play celebrates the transforming energies of young love—and indeed engages with its destructive potential—it also mocks the courtly idiom of love language, not least through the contrast between the artificial poeticisms of the genteel characters and the robust prose voice of their servants.

The name “Speed” suggests the quickness of wit that is confirmed by this servant’s linguistic facility and awareness of the gentlemen’s foibles. He always seems to be one step ahead of Valentine, anticipating what his master’s going to do next in an aside shared with the audience. Proteus’ servant Lance also has a name that suggests mental sharpness: Shakespeare himself was often praised by his contemporaries for having a wit that was as sharp as the spear in his name. Ironically, though, Lance’s way of proceeding is anything but pointed: his role is that of the clown for whom everything goes wrong and who confuses his words (“the prodigious son” for “the prodigal son,” “a notable lover” misheard as “A notable lubber”). When he tries to use his shoe, his staff, his hat, and his dog to act out the scene of his farewell from his family, he gets into a terrible tangle. The joke is that this should be as a result of the unpredictability of the live dog onstage, but actually it is due to Lance’s own incompetence. At the end of the fourth act, Lance has a second two-hander with his dog, Crab, a riff on the theme of a servant’s obedience to his master. As Lance makes a mess of the demands of Proteus, so Crab fails to do the will of Lance: “did not I bid thee still mark me and do as I do? When didst thou see me heave up my leg and make water against a gentlewoman’s farthingale?”

While Speed mocks Valentine’s transformation into a lover, Lance succumbs to desire in the manner of his master. He falls in love with a milkmaid, the unseen prototype of the hoyden character type that will be incarnated in the fat kitchen maid of The Comedy of Errors and As You Like It’s goatherd Audrey. Lance’s catalogue of the milkmaid’s down-to-earth virtues and vices parodies the courtly lover’s enumeration of the beauties of his mistress.

LOVERS

In the world of Shakespearean comedy, young women are usually seen in one of three settings. With their parents, where they are expected to be obedient, which ultimately means marrying the man of the parents’ choice.