At this point, the play reaches its highest point of sophistication and self-conscious artfulness. The audience is offered two images: a portrait of Silvia and a description of Sebastian, dressed in Julia's clothes, playing the part of a rejected lover, Ariadne deserted by Theseus in a famous story from classical mythology. The contrast between the two images effectively turns the scene into a Shakespearean claim for the superiority not only of the player's art to the portrait painter's but also of his own dramatization of love to the static vision of courtly romance. The painting, like the lady of romance, is but a "senseless form" to be "worshipped, kissed, loved and adored." The actor, by contrast, can evoke the real pain of passion so convincingly ("so lively acted") that the audience may be moved to tears. No one is better than Proteus at expressing eternal adoration in the artful language--all sighs and poetic hyperbole--of the courtly lover, but his fickleness reveals the essential insincerity of the code. 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. The Folio printers sometimes set verse as prose, and vice versa (either out of misunderstanding or for reasons of space). We have silently corrected in such cases, although in some instances there is ambiguity, in which case we have leaned toward the preservation of Folio layout. Folio sometimes uses contraction ("turnd" rather than "turned") to indicate whether or not the final "-ed" of a past participle is sounded, an area where there is variation for the sake of the five-beat iambic pentameter rhythm. We use the convention of a grave accent to indicate sounding (thus "turned" would be two syllables), but would urge actors not to overstress. In cases where one speaker ends with a verse half-line and the next begins with the other half of the pentameter, editors since the late eighteenth century have indented the second line. We have abandoned this convention, since Folio does not use it, nor did actors' cues in the Shakespearean theater. An exception is made when the second speaker actively interrupts or completes the first speaker's sentence.
Spelling is modernized, but older forms are very occasionally maintained where necessary for rhythm or aural effect.
Punctuation in Shakespeare's time was as much rhetorical as grammatical. "Colon" was originally a term for a unit of thought in an argument. The semicolon was a new unit of punctuation (some of the Quartos lack them altogether). We have modernized punctuation throughout, but have given more weight to Folio punctuation than many editors, since, though not Shakespearean, it reflects the usage of his period. In particular, we have used t
he colon far more than many editors: it is exceptionally useful as a way of indicating how many Shakespearean speeches unfold clause by clause in a developing argument that gives the illusion of enacting the process of thinking in the moment. We have also kept in mind the origin of punctuation in classical times as a way of assisting the actor and orator: the comma suggests the briefest of pauses for breath, the colon a middling one, and a full stop or period a longer pause. Semicolons, by contrast, belong to an era of punctuation that was only just coming in during Shakespeare's time and that is coming to an end now: we have accordingly only used them where they occur in our copy texts (and not always then). Dashes are sometimes used for parenthetical interjections where the Folio has brackets. They are also used for interruptions and changes in train of thought. Where a change of addressee occurs within a speech, we have used a dash preceded by a period (or occasionally another form of punctuation). Often the identity of the respective addressees is obvious from the context. When it is not, this has been indicated in a marginal stage direction.
Entrances and Exits are fairly thorough in Folio, which has accordingly been followed as faithfully as possible. Where characters are omitted or corrections are necessary, this is indicated by square brackets (e.g. "[and Attendants]"). Exit is sometimes silently normalized to Exeunt and Manet anglicized to "remains." We trust Folio positioning of entrances and exits to a greater degree than most editors.
Editorial Stage Directions such as stage business, asides, indications of addressee and of characters' position on the gallery stage are only used sparingly in Folio. Other editions mingle directions of this kind with original Folio and Quarto directions, sometimes marking them by means of square brackets. We have sought to distinguish what could be described as directorial interventions of this kind from Folio-style directions (either original or supplied) by placing them in the right margin in a different typeface. There is a degree of subjectivity about which directions are of which kind, but the procedure is intended as a reminder to the reader and the actor that Shakespearean stage directions are often dependent upon editorial inference alone and are not set in stone. We also depart from editorial tradition in sometimes admitting uncertainty and thus printing permissive stage directions, such as an Aside? (often a line may be equally effective as an aside or a direct address--it is for each production or reading to make its own decision) or a may exit or a piece of business placed between arrows to indicate that it may occur at various moments within a scene.
Line Numbers in the left margin are editorial, for reference and to key the explanatory and textual notes.
Explanatory Notes at the foot of each page explain allusions and gloss obsolete and difficult words, confusing phraseology, occasional major textual cruces, and so on. Particular attention is given to non-standard usage, bawdy innuendo, and technical terms (e.g. legal and military language). Where more than one sense is given, commas indicate shades of related meaning, slashes alternative or double meanings.
Textual Notes at the end of the play indicate major departures from Folio. They take the following form: the reading of our text is given in bold and its source given after an equals sign with "Q" indicating a reading from the First Quarto of 1602, "Q3" a correction introduced in the Third Quarto of 1630, "F2" a correction that derives from the Second Folio of 1632, and "Ed" one that derives from the subsequent editorial tradition. The rejected Folio ("F") reading is then given. Thus for Act 4 Scene 2 line 114: "4.2.114 his = F2. F = her" means that we have adopted the correction of the Second Folio, when Silvia is discussing being buried in Valentine's grave.
KEY FACTS
MAJOR PARTS: (with number of speeches/scenes on stage) Proteus (20%/147/11), Valentine (17%/149/6), Julia (14%/107/7), Speed (9%/117/6), Lance (9%/68/4), Duke (9%/48/5), Silvia (7%/58/6), Lucetta (3%/48/2), Turio (3%/36/5).
LINGUISTIC MEDIUM: 80% verse, 20% prose. High frequency of rhyme.
DATE: Early 1590s. Mentioned by Francis Meres in 1598. Presumed on stylistic grounds to be one of the earliest plays, but no firm evidence for any particular year.
SOURCES: Main plot based on a story in Jorge de Montemayor, Diana Enamorada (originally in Spanish--English translation by Bartholomew Yong published 1598, but circulated in manuscript several years earlier); plot may be mediated via a lost Queen's Men play of the 1580s, Felix and Feliomena. Other literary influences seem to include Arthur Brooke, Romeus and Juliet (1562) and John Lyly, Euphues (1578), and perhaps Midas (c.1589).
TEXT: First Folio of 1623 is the only early printed text. Based on a transcript by Ralph Crane, professional scribe working for the King's Men. Generally good quality of printing.
THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA
LIST OF PARTS
the two gentlemen
VALENTINE
PROTEUS
SPEED a clownish servant to Valentine LANCE the like to Proteus DUKE of Milan, father to Silvia SILVIA beloved of Valentine EGLAMOUR agent for Silvia in her escape ANTONIO father to Proteus PANTINO servant to Antonio TURIO a foolish rival to Valentine JULIA beloved of Proteus LUCETTA waiting-woman to Julia HOST where Julia lodges OUTLAWS with Valentine Servants, Musicians, Lance's dog Crab
Act 1 Scene 1
running scene 1
Enter Valentine [and] Proteus
VALENTINE Cease to persuade, my loving Proteus:
Home-keeping youth have ever homely2 wits.
Were't not affection chains thy tender3 days
To the sweet glances of thy honoured love,
I rather would entreat thy company
To see the wonders of the world abroad,
Than -- living dully sluggardized7 at home--
Wear out thy youth with shapeless8 idleness.
But since thou lov'st, love still9, and thrive therein,
Even as I would, when I to love begin.
PROTEUS Wilt thou be gone? Sweet Valentine, adieu.
Think on thy Proteus, when thou haply12 see'st
Some rare noteworthy object in thy travel.
Wish me partaker in thy happiness
When thou dost meet good hap15: and in thy danger--
If ever danger do environ16 thee--
Commend thy grievance17 to my holy prayers,
For I will be thy beadsman18, Valentine.
VALENTINE And on a love-book19 pray for my success?
PROTEUS Upon some book I love, I'll pray for thee.
VALENTINE That's on some shallow story of deep love:
How young Leander crossed the Hellespont.22
PROTEUS That's a deep story, of a deeper love,
For he was more than over-shoes in love.24
VALENTINE 'Tis true: for you are over-boots in love,
And yet you never swam the Hellespont.
PROTEUS Over the boots? Nay, give me not the boots.27
VALENTINE No, I will not, for it boots28 thee not.
PROTEUS What?
VALENTINE To be in love, where scorn is bought with groans:
Coy31 looks with heart-sore sighs, one fading moment's mirth,
With twenty watchful32, weary, tedious nights;
If haply won, perhaps a hapless33 gain,
If lost, why then a grievous labour won;34
However, but a folly35 bought with wit,
Or else a wit by folly vanquished.
PROTEUS So, by your circumstance37, you call me fool.
VALENTINE So, by your circumstance38, I fear you'll prove.
PROTEUS 'Tis Love you cavil39 at: I am not Love.
VALENTINE Love is your master, for he masters you:
And he that is so yoked41 by a fool,
Methinks should not be chronicled for42 wise.
PROTEUS Yet writers say: as in the sweetest bud
The eating canker44 dwells, so eating love
Inhabits in the finest wits of all.
VALENTINE And writers say: as the most forward46 bud
Is eaten by the canker ere it blow,47
Even so by love, the young
and tender wit
Is turned to folly, blasting49 in the bud,
Losing his verdure, even in the prime,50
And all the fair effects51 of future hopes.
But wherefore waste I time to counsel52 thee
That art a votary to fond53 desire?
Once more, adieu. My father at the road54
Expects my coming, there to see me shipped.55
PROTEUS And thither will I bring thee, Valentine.
VALENTINE Sweet Proteus, no: now let us take our leave.
To Milan58 let me hear from thee by letters
Of thy success59 in love, and what news else
Betideth60 here in absence of thy friend:
And I likewise will visit thee with mine.61
PROTEUS All happiness bechance62 to thee in Milan.
VALENTINE As much to you at home: and so, farewell.
Exit
PROTEUS He after honour hunts, I after love;
He leaves his friends to dignify65 them more;
I leave66 myself, my friends and all, for love.
Thou, Julia67, thou hast metamorphosed me:
Made me neglect my studies, lose my time,
War69 with good counsel, set the world at nought;
Made wit with musing70 weak, heart sick with thought.