Paradoxically, it is the play actor who is truly sincere: “Sebastian” is really Julia, passioning not for Theseus’ but for Proteus’ perjury and unjust flight.

Painters can achieve tricks of the eye—perspectival illusions of depth, anamorphic representations that vary in appearance according to where the viewer stands—but the theatrical imagination can do much more: the imagined performance of Sebastian as Ariadne is mapped onto the achieved performance of both Julia as Sebastian in the world of the play and the boy actor as Julia on the stage where the drama was first brought to life. Throughout his career, Shakespeare will return to such complex layered effects of illusion and reality, in accordance with his core belief that we are all players in the great theater of the world.

Having gone emotionally deep in the fourth act, Shakespeare speeds toward a conventional comic conclusion in the fifth. The forest of the jolly Outlaws is his device for doing so. It is not a psychologically complex environment, like the wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Rather, it is a place where the polished veneer of civil society is stripped away, allowing people to act impulsively on their desires. Proteus wants Silvia, so he threatens to rape her. Proteus asks forgiveness, so Valentine seeks to demonstrate that he values friendship above love by offering him Silvia. Sebastian reveals that s/he is Julia, so Proteus recognizes that he really loved her all along. Turio comes on to claim Silvia but instantly recognizes that only a fool “will endanger / His body for a girl that loves him not.” The father is won round and the play is over. This is the ending we expect and desire, but the abruptness with which it comes about is a sign of impatience or immaturity on Shakespeare’s part—but then again, his mind was so restlessly inventive that he never really cared for endings.

ABOUT THE TEXT

Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).

Because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, with some plays there are major editorial difficulties. Decisions have to be made as to the relative authority of the early printed editions, the pocket format “Quartos” published in Shakespeare’s lifetime and the elaborately produced “First Folio” text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press after his death by Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, however, exists only in a Folio text that is generally well printed so there is little textual debate about this play.

The following notes highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition:

Lists of Parts are supplied in the First Folio for only six plays, one of which is The Two Gentlemen of Verona, so the list here is based on “Names of all the Actors” at the end of the play. Capitals indicate that part of the name used for speech headings in the script (thus “SPEED, a clownish servant to Valentine”).

Locations are provided by Folio for only two plays, of which The Two Gentlemen of Verona is not one. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations (“another part of the forest”). Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes at the foot of the page, where they are given at the beginning of each scene where the imaginary location is different from the one before. In the case of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the action moves between the Italian cities of Verona and Milan and the countryside round about.

Act and Scene Divisions were provided in Folio in a much more thoroughgoing way than in the Quartos. Sometimes, however, they were erroneous or omitted; corrections and additions supplied by editorial tradition are indicated by square brackets. Five-act division is based on a classical model, and act breaks provided the opportunity to replace the candles in the indoor Blackfriars playhouse, which the King’s Men used after 1608, but Shakespeare did not necessarily think in terms of a five-part structure of dramatic composition. The Folio convention is that a scene ends when the stage is empty. Nowadays, partly under the influence of film, we tend to consider a scene to be a dramatic unit that ends with either a change of imaginary location or a significant passage of time within the narrative. Shakespeare’s fluidity of composition accords well with this convention, so in addition to act and scene numbers we provide a running scene count in the right margin at the beginning of each new scene, in the typeface used for editorial directions. Where there is a scene break caused by a momentary bare stage, but the location does not change and extra time does not pass, we use the convention running scene continues. There is inevitably a degree of editorial judgment in making such calls, but the system is very valuable in suggesting the pace of the plays.

Speakers’ Names are often inconsistent in Folio. We have regularized speech headings, but retained an element of deliberate inconsistency in entry directions, in order to give the flavor of Folio.

Verse is indicated by lines that do not run to the right margin and by capitalization of each line.