The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Summary

The Two Gentlemen of Verona is probably among the first comedies Shakespeare wrote, and it reads like a workshop in which he tries out devices he would later perfect: the heroine who follows her beloved in a page's clothes, the green world outside the city where wrongs are sorted out, the clown whose prose undercuts the lovers' verse. Its subject is the old Renaissance debate between the claims of friendship and the claims of love. Valentine and Proteus are boyhood friends in Verona. Valentine sets out for the Duke's court at Milan to see the world, teasing Proteus for staying home to court Julia. Proteus's father soon sends him after Valentine, and the two lovers part with exchanged rings and vows. In Milan Valentine has fallen for Silvia, the Duke's daughter, whom her father intends for the wealthy, foolish Thurio. The moment Proteus sees Silvia he forgets Julia, and in a soliloquy of startling candour he argues himself out of both his vow and his friendship. He betrays Valentine's plan to elope by rope ladder to the Duke, who banishes Valentine; then Proteus pretends to help Thurio while courting Silvia himself. Valentine, wandering toward Mantua, is captured by outlaws who make him their captain. Meanwhile Julia, disguised as the page Sebastian, arrives in Milan in time to hear Proteus serenade Silvia, takes service with him, and is sent to woo Silvia on his behalf with the very ring she once gave him. Silvia, loyal to the absent Valentine, scorns Proteus and flees to the forest. The last scene gathers everyone among the outlaws. Proteus rescues Silvia, is again refused, and threatens to take her by force; Valentine, who has overheard, steps out and rebukes him. Proteus confesses, Valentine forgives him at once and, in the line that has troubled readers for centuries, offers to yield Silvia to him. Julia swoons, the rings reveal her identity, Proteus turns back to her, the Duke accepts Valentine as a son-in-law, and the outlaws are pardoned. Alongside this plot run the scenes of Launce and his dog Crab, the best-loved parts of the play on stage. Launce's monologues about his family's tears at parting and about the dog's disgrace under the Duke's table are a comic mirror of the gentlemen: a servant who suffers for his unworthy companion with a loyalty the gentlemen fail to show each other. Speed, Valentine's quick page, supplies the wordplay. The play is short, the verse often plain, and the ending abrupt. Those weaknesses are part of what makes it useful in a classroom. Students can see the materials of Shakespearean comedy before they are fully fused, and they are pressed to decide what forgiveness requires, whether Proteus's repentance is real, and why Julia, not either gentleman, is the steadiest person in the play. Teachers should note that the final scene includes Proteus's attempted assault on Silvia, which is stopped before it happens but should be discussed plainly.

Plot or Argument

• Act 1: Verona, a departure and a torn letter

  Valentine leaves for Milan and mocks Proteus's lovesick idleness. Julia, pretending indifference before her maid Lucetta, tears up Proteus's letter and then tries to piece the fragments together. Proteus's father Antonio, advised that a young man should see the world, orders him to follow Valentine to the Emperor's court at Milan.

• Act 2: Rings exchanged, a friend forgotten

  In Milan Valentine is in love with Silvia, who makes him write a love letter on her behalf and then hands it back to him. Proteus and Julia exchange rings; Launce weeps over leaving home while his dog sheds no tear. Proteus arrives, sees Silvia, and in a soliloquy (2.6) resolves to betray both Julia and Valentine. Julia decides to follow him dressed as a boy.

• Act 3: The rope ladder and the banishment

  Proteus reveals Valentine's planned elopement to the Duke, who exposes the rope ladder hidden under Valentine's cloak and banishes him. Proteus consoles his friend with false sympathy, then agrees to help Thurio by slandering Valentine to Silvia. Launce reads out the virtues and vices of the milkmaid he means to marry.

• Act 4: Outlaws, a serenade and a messenger in disguise

  Outlaws in the forest take Valentine as their captain. Julia, as Sebastian, hears Proteus serenade Silvia with the song Who is Silvia? Silvia rebukes Proteus and asks Sir Eglamour to help her escape. Launce reports how he took a whipping for Crab's misconduct. Proteus hires Sebastian and sends the page to Silvia with Julia's own ring; Silvia refuses it in pity for the abandoned Julia.

• Act 5: The forest reckoning

  Silvia flees and is caught by the outlaws; the Duke, Thurio and Proteus pursue. Proteus rescues her and, when refused, attempts force; Valentine intervenes. Proteus confesses, Valentine forgives him and offers him Silvia, Julia faints and is revealed, Proteus returns to her, Thurio gives up his claim, and the Duke pardons the outlaws and blesses a double wedding.

Characters

• Valentine, one of the two gentlemen

  A cheerful young man who mocks love until he falls for Silvia; banished by the Duke, he leads outlaws in the forest and ends the play with an instant, sweeping forgiveness of his friend.

• Proteus, the other gentleman

  Named for the shape-changing sea god; Julia's sworn lover who abandons her for Silvia, betrays Valentine, and is stopped only at the edge of violence. His repentance is sudden and its sincerity is the play's central question.

• Julia, Proteus's beloved, disguised as the page Sebastian

  Witty and self-aware in Verona, constant in Milan; she serves the man who has abandoned her, carries his suit to her rival, and recovers him by her steadiness rather than by reproach alone.

• Silvia, the Duke of Milan's daughter

  Clear-sighted and loyal to Valentine; she rebukes Proteus for his falsehood to Julia and risks flight to reach her banished lover.

• Launce, Proteus's clownish servant (spelled Lance in the Gutenberg text)

  Owner of the dog Crab; his prose monologues about parting, courtship and loyalty parody the gentlemen's high sentiments.

• Crab, Launce's dog

  A silent, stony-hearted cur whose bad manners at the Duke's dinner Launce takes upon himself.

• Speed, Valentine's page

  A quick-tongued servant who reads his master's lovesickness and Silvia's stratagem before Valentine does.

• The Duke of Milan, Silvia's father

  A suspicious ruler who traps Valentine with feigned confidences and favours Thurio's wealth until the final scene.

• Thurio, Silvia's suitor

  A rich, foolish rival who backs away from Silvia as soon as Valentine threatens him.

• Lucetta, Julia's waiting-woman

  Teases Julia about her suitors and helps her prepare the boy's disguise.

• Sir Eglamour, a gentleman of Milan

  Agrees to escort Silvia to Valentine but runs away when the outlaws appear.

• Antonio and Panthino, Proteus's father and his servant

  Their brief conversation about sending young men abroad for education sets the plot moving.

Lessons

• Constancy is the virtue Proteus lacks

  Proteus's name announces his flaw, and the play treats inconstancy as the root that grows into other sins: perjury to Julia, treachery to Valentine, lies to the Duke and Thurio, and finally an attempt at force. His own late confession says that one error fills a man with faults. The comedy shows that small breaches of a promise rarely stay small.

  • Trace Proteus's steps from the soliloquy in 2.6 to the forest in 5.4. At which point could he most easily have turned back?
  • Proteus argues that he is dearer to himself than a friend. Which of his premises would you challenge first, and why?
  • How does the play use Julia's ring to make his inconstancy visible?

• Forgiveness, restitution and the rash gift in the forest

  Valentine accepts Proteus's repentance at once, citing the principle that heaven is satisfied by penitence. Christian readers will recognise the logic, yet his next line, yielding Silvia, treats her as a token in a reconciliation between men. The scene lets students separate genuine forgiveness, which Valentine is right to offer, from the hasty disposal of another person's will, which he has no right to make.

  • What does Proteus actually say or do that shows repentance? Is it enough?
  • Is Valentine's forgiveness admirable, naive, or both? Support your answer from 5.4.
  • Silvia says nothing after Valentine's offer. How might a director stage her silence, and what would each choice imply?

• Julia's disguise as faithful service

  Julia follows Proteus not to trap him but because she loves him, and in Milan she endures the humiliation of carrying his suit to her rival. Her soliloquy over Silvia's portrait and her refusal to rail against Silvia show charity in a hard place. She is the moral centre of the play, and her constancy is what finally recalls Proteus to himself.

  • Why does Julia agree to deliver Proteus's ring and letter to Silvia instead of revealing herself at once?
  • Compare Julia in 1.2, tearing the letter, with Julia in 4.4. How has she changed?
  • Julia's last argument is that it is a lesser fault for women to change their clothes than for men to change their minds. Is the comparison fair?

• Launce, Crab and the comedy of loyalty

  Launce weeps for a family and is ignored by a dog; he takes Crab's beating at the Duke's table as his own. The clown's loyalty to an unworthy companion parodies and quietly judges the gentlemen's quarrel. Shakespeare already uses prose comedy to say something the verse plot cannot.

  • Launce casts his shoes, staff and dog as members of his family in 2.3. What does this comic staging say about the scene of parting just before it?
  • Why does Launce take punishment for Crab? Is this foolishness, loyalty, or both?
  • Which character would Launce's loyalty most embarrass if they were watching?

Context

The play belongs to the late 1580s or early 1590s, when Shakespeare was establishing himself in London. It draws on the cult of male friendship that Renaissance humanists inherited from Cicero and Aristotle and on the prose romances that dramatised the clash between friendship and love. It was set not in England but in an Italy of dukes and courts that English audiences knew mainly from books and travellers.

Composition

No record fixes the date; editors usually place it between about 1589 and 1593, and some treat it as Shakespeare's first comedy. Francis Meres names it among Shakespeare's comedies in Palladis Tamia (1598). The Julia plot derives ultimately from the story of Felismena in Jorge de Montemayor's Spanish pastoral romance Diana (c. 1559); whether Shakespeare used a translation or a lost English play on the same story is debated. The friendship-and-rivalry pattern recalls the tale of Titus and Gisippus, retold in Sir Thomas Elyot's The Governour (1531).

Reception

First printed in the 1623 First Folio. Recorded performances are rare before the eighteenth century, and the play has generally been ranked among Shakespeare's slighter works, chiefly because of the abrupt reconciliation and Valentine's offer of Silvia. Launce and Crab have consistently been the stage favourites, and the song Who is Silvia? gained a separate life in Schubert's setting (1826).

Comparisons

• Twelfth Night

  Viola, like Julia, serves as a page the man she loves and carries his suit to another woman; Twelfth Night refines the device into sustained irony and gives the disguised heroine far more room to speak, where Julia's suffering is compressed into a few scenes.

• As You Like It

  Both comedies move the action from a corrupt court to a forest where exiles regroup, but Arden is a place of education and conversation, while the Milan-Mantua forest of outlaws exists mainly to stage the final reckoning.

• A Midsummer Night's Dream

  Proteus's sudden switch from Julia to Silvia anticipates Lysander and Demetrius changing beloveds in the wood; the later play blames a flower's juice, which lets Shakespeare treat male inconstancy as comedy without having to account for a guilty will.

• Romeo and Juliet

  Both plays use Verona, a planned night-time meeting by rope ladder and a banishment; what produces a reconciliation in the comedy produces deaths in the tragedy, a useful pair for discussing how genre shapes consequence.

• On Friendship

  Montaigne's essay describes a friendship so complete that the two souls are mingled; Valentine's offer of Silvia is a stage version of that ideal pushed past the point where it respects a third person, and the essay helps students see what the play is drawing on and where it strains.

• The Canterbury Tales

  Chaucer's Knight's Tale sets two sworn brothers, Palamon and Arcite, against each other over one woman; its solemn chivalric resolution through combat and death contrasts with Shakespeare's comic resolution through confession and pardon.

Quotes

Medical Lens

The play has no physicians, diseases or deaths. Its one point of medical-historical interest is the conventional portrait of lovesickness, which Renaissance physicians and writers (later systematised in Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621) treated as a form of melancholy with recognisable signs. Speed's comic list of Valentine's symptoms reproduces those signs for laughs. Julia's swoon in the last scene is a stage device rather than a medical episode.

• Act 2, Scene 1

  Speed lists the outward signs by which he knows Valentine is in love: folded arms, sighing, walking alone, loss of appetite and sleep, a catalogue of the love-melancholy conventional in Elizabethan writing.

  Melancholia Depression

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Write Julia's letter to Lucetta from Milan on the night she first hears Proteus serenade Silvia, in which she explains why she has decided to stay in his service.

• Dialogue

  Script a conversation between Silvia and Julia a week after the double wedding, in which Silvia says what she thought when Valentine offered her to Proteus.

• Essay

  Argue whether Proteus's repentance in 5.4 is believable, using his soliloquy in 2.6 as evidence for or against a change of heart.

• Adaptation

  Rewrite Launce's farewell monologue (2.3) for a modern student leaving for college, keeping the joke that the most important companion feels nothing.

• Classroom

  Stage the last sixty lines of 5.4 twice, once with Silvia silent and still, once with Silvia visibly protesting; then discuss which staging the text better supports.

Further Reading

• Diana, Jorge de Montemayor

  Spanish pastoral romance whose Felismena episode supplies the Julia plot.

• The Book Named the Governor, Sir Thomas Elyot

  Contains the tale of Titus and Gisippus, a Renaissance touchstone for friendship tested by love.

• Laelius on Friendship (De Amicitia), Marcus Tullius Cicero

  The classical source of the friendship ideal the play debates.

• Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, C. L. Barber

• Shakespeare's Early Comedies, E. M. W. Tillyard