The Two Gentleman of Verona

THE TWO GENTLEMEN

OF VERONA

By WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Preface and Annotations by

HENRY N. HUDSON

Introduction by

CHARLES HAROLD HERFORD

The Two Gentleman of Verona

By William Shakespeare

Preface and Annotations by Henry N. Hudson

Introduction by Charles Harold Herford

Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-6263-5

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-6264-2

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Cover Image: a detail of William Shakespeare, The Two Gentleman Of Verona (colour litho), by Artus Scheiner (1863-1938) / Private Collection / © Look and Learn / Bridgeman Images.

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

THE TWO GENTLEMAN OF VERONA

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

ACT I.

SCENE I.

SCENE II.

SCENE III.

ACT II.

SCENE I.

SCENE II.

SCENE III.

SCENE IV.

SCENE V.

SCENE VI.

SCENE VII.

ACT III.

SCENE I.

SCENE II.

ACT IV.

SCENE I.

SCENE II.

ACT V.

SCENE I.

SCENE II.

SCENE III.

SCENE IV.

BIOGRAPHICAL AFTERWORD

PREFACE

First printed in the folio of 1623. Also mentioned by Meres, in his Palladis Tamia, 1598. Beyond this, we have no external indication as to the date of composition; though the internal evidence, of style, diction, dramatic structure, and delineation of character, is conclusive of its having been among the earliest-written of Shakespeare’s comedies.

No note has been discovered of the performance of this play during the author’s life. Doubtless it was put upon the stage, for Shakespeare had no thought of writing dramas merely for the closet; but, if it had been acted as often as his other plays, we should most likely have some record of the performance, as we have in the case of so many others. Notwithstanding its superiority to most of the plays then in use from other hands, its comparative excess of the rhetorical over the dramatic elements may have made it less popular in that most action-loving age than many far below it in all other respects.

No novel or romance has been found, to which the Poet could have been much indebted for the plot or matter of this play. In the part of Julia and her maid Lucetta there are indeed some points of resemblance to the Diana of George Montemayor, a Spanish romance at that time very popular in England, and of which an English translation by Bartholomew Yonge was published in 1598. The Diana is one of the books spared from the bonfire of Don Quixote’s library, because, in the words of the Priest who superintends the burning, They do not deserve to be burnt like the rest, for they cannot do the mischief that those of chivalry have done: they are works of genius and fancy, and do nobody any hurt. The part from which Shakespeare is thought to have borrowed is the story of Felismena, the heroine:

My father having early followed my mother to the tomb, I was left an orphan. Henceforth I resided with a distant relative; and, at the age of seventeen, fell in love with Don Felix, a young nobleman of the province where I lived. The object of my affections felt a reciprocal passion; but his father, having learned the attachment between us, sent his son to Court with a view to prevent our union. Soon after his departure, I followed him in the disguise of a page, and on the night of my arrival discovered, by a serenade I heard him give, that he had disposed of his affections. Not being recognized, I was taken into his service, and engaged to conduct the correspondence with the mistress who had supplanted me."

Though Yonge’s version of the Diana was not published till 1598, the story was generally well known before that time; parts of it were translated in Sidney’s Arcadia, which came out in 1590; and there is reason to think that the History of Felix and Philiomena, which was acted at Court as far back as 1582, was a play partly founded on the story of Felix and Felismena. So that, Shakespeare being admitted to have followed the tale in question, he might well enough have been familiar with it long before Yonge’s translation appeared. But, indeed, such and similar incidents were the common staple of romances in that age. And the same may be said touching the matter of Valentine’s becoming captain of the outlaws; for which the Poet has been written down as indebted to Sidney’s Arcadia.

HENRY N. HUDSON.

1880.

INTRODUCTION

The Two Gentlemen Of Verona was first printed in the Folio of 1623, as the second of the ‘Comedies.’ Meres mentioned it at the head of his list of Shakespeare’s ‘most excellent’ comedies (under the title The Gentlemen of Verona), but there is no other evidence of its having been performed in Elizabethan times. Its subsequent history is almost a blank. A generation of Shakespeare-allusion-hunting has not turned up a single undoubted reference to or reminiscence of this play in seventeenth-century literature. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it was performed, at long intervals (1762, 1784, 1790, 1808, 1821), usually with extensive farcical or operatic embellishments. Far superior in dramatic structure to Love’s Labour’s Lost, it certainly bears a fainter mark of Shakespeare’s hand. Rowe and Theobald even denied that it was Shakespeare’s at all.

Of external evidence for the date there is none, save the reference by Meres in 1598 already mentioned. But there can be no doubt that it belongs to the group of early comedies. The style, though far less persistently witty than that of Love’s Labour’s Lost, and probably less carefully elaborated, shows the same liking for verbal jingles, quibbles, antitheses, and parallelisms. The characters are arranged and manipulated with a still more obvious eye for symmetry: Proteus and Valentine have each a humorous serving-man; each is forced to leave his lady, each lady follows in disguise. And the comic business of Launce and Speed is still more obviously thrown in to provide ‘recreation’ than was that of Armado and Costard. A number of striking similarities in phrase and some in situation connect the play with the Midsummer-Night’s Dream as also with Romeo and Juliet, and it doubtless belongs to the years immediately preceding these two masterpieces, i.e. probably 1592-94. Some critics of rank have indeed placed it after, on the ground that it is better constructed than the fairy drama (Furnivall), and freer from lyrical artifice than the greater Veronese play (Sarrazin).{1} But the structure of the Dream, however apparently artless, is in reality controlled by a far subtler and more daring art than that which contrives the conventional plot of The Two Gentlemen; and the studied and sometimes bald simplicity of this play is distinguishable enough from the sovran ease and naturalness of manner which mark his verse in the later histories and comedies, where the high-wrought lyricism of Romeo and Juliet is definitely put by.

The story of The Two Gentlemen, like that of Love’s Labour’s Lost, was told by Shakespeare, so far as we know, for the first time. This does not prevent its being, save for the admirable creations of Launce and Speed, one of the least original of his plays. Both characters and incident belong by the clearest tokens to the family of Italian and Spanish intrigue stories which were already widely current in translated novels, and had begun, between 1580 and 1590, to compete with romantic histories, cumbrous Moralities and broad farce, for the favour of the more courtly and cultivated elements of the theatrical public. As early as 1566 Gascoigne had led the way with his excellent translation of Ariosto’s I Suppositi, the basis of the old Taming of a Shrew, and Giordano Bruno’s Candelajo (1582), written during or shortly after his residence in England, has been credited with an influence upon English playwrights to which its merits hardly entitle it. Four such stories seem to have contributed to the design of The Two Gentlemen.

(1) The Diana of Jorge de Montemayor, an English translation of which by Yonge, first published in 1598, had existed in MS. from 1582. A play founded on this story, The History of Felix and Philiomena (for Felismena), had also been performed at Court in 1584, ‘on the Sondaie next after newe yeares daie.’ Shakespeare certainly drew, either from the novel or the play, some situations in the