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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified 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.