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    The Two Gentleman of Verona
    The Two Gentleman of Verona
    The Two Gentleman of Verona
    Ebook144 pages2 hours

    The Two Gentleman of Verona

    By William Shakespeare

    3.5/5

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    “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” is one of the Shakespeare’s classic romantic plays and considered by some scholars to possibly be the playwright’s first play. It is the story of two young gentlemen from Verona, Valentine and Proteus, who travel to Milan so that they may learn to be “perfect gentlemen”. Valentine is eager to begin this new adventure, but Proteus is reluctant to go as he has fallen in love with the beautiful Julia and she returns his devotion. However, Proteus’s father forces him to leave and he pledges his love to Julia before they part. In Milan, both Valentine and Proteus fall in love with the Duke’s daughter, Silvia, and Proteus is quick to forget Julia. She has not forgotten about Proteus and disguises herself as a boy so that she may follow him to Milan. Silvia does not return Proteus’s regard and has herself fallen in love with Valentine, though her father does not approve of the match. Much confusion and comical misadventures ensue before each of the gentlemen end up with the right lady and all misunderstandings are resolved. This enduring classic by the Bard is a tale of love, romance, happy endings, and the importance of friendship. This edition is annotated by Henry N. Hudson, includes an introduction by Charles Harold Herford, and a biographical afterword.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDigireads.com Publishing
    Release dateJun 24, 2019
    ISBN9781420962642
    Author

    William Shakespeare

    William Shakespeare is the world's greatest ever playwright. Born in 1564, he split his time between Stratford-upon-Avon and London, where he worked as a playwright, poet and actor. In 1582 he married Anne Hathaway. Shakespeare died in 1616 at the age of fifty-two, leaving three children—Susanna, Hamnet and Judith. The rest is silence.

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    Reviews for The Two Gentleman of Verona

    3.5/5

    289 ratings9 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Essential scholarly edition of this early Shakespeare play.
    • 4/5
      One of my favorite comedies.
    • 4/5
      It’s easy to see it’s one of Shakespeare’s earliest. The prose and poetry aren’t as polished, and it prefigured many of his later, better plays in some of the phrasing, and the cross-dressing of a female character in love. Its ending is neatly tied up, though surprising in some of the particulars, like a threat of rape and an overquick, overgenerous forgiveness. For completists, or in anticipation of a production, which is why I read it.
    • 4/5
      Not your usual Shakespeare play, but worthy.
    • 3/5
      Though it seems rather presumptuous to criticize Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona is not one of the Bard's greatest works. Though an enjoyable read with some truly humorous moments and one particularly beautiful bit of verse (III.i.170-187), the end is hastily tied together and the characters very unbelievable. Still, as one of Shakespeare's earliest works, it is an interesting look at his development as a playwright.
    • 4/5
      When I taught Shakespeare, I would often start with TGV, on the second class myself doing
      Launce and his dog Crab, along with removable shoes, a cane--and for a couple years, our English Sheepdog Ugo. The first year he did okay, the second year he headed fro the classroom door, to leave
      for a treat from my wife who drove him there.
      The Launce scenes really take a pro with the props and the stage business: taking off one's shoes,
      demonstrating the sad scene of parting by designating one of the shoes for each parent etc, meanwhile reprimanding the dog fro being unsentimental.
      An added tincture of interest for me was the play's MIlan references: Ugo came from Milan,
      where my daughter has lived for many years.
    • 3/5
      One rates Shakespeare plays to acknowledge that in art, there are varying responses to the same work.
      For the drama, "Is this the right director and cast, are the costumes correct, did the spirit of the author's original intent come through?"
      there's a different set of criteria for single poems, or paintings. Some modest thoughts follow.
      This is early Shakespeare, and quite readable, but a test bed for a lot of better stuff that came later. Not many famous quotes/clichés in this one, but a workable script.
      Read seven times.
    • 3/5
      While "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" is not considered one of William Shakespeare's greatest works, I still found it to be a pretty enjoyable play. It was one of the bard's earlier comedies so much of it is used again later in this other, stronger works.

      The story follows Proteus and Valentine, two gentlemen who fall in love with ladies and troubles ensue. There is the typical Shakespeare disguise thrown in for good measure too.

      This play is pretty readable and was fairly amusing. The ending was kind of forced and wrapped everything up a little too prettily, but other wise I liked this one.
    • 4/5
      This is an interesting play in the world of Shakespeare, though not one of his strongest. It is assumed to be one of his first plays. It has one of his smallest casts and it contains one of the biggest jerks in the whole of Shakespearean literature.

      The two gentlemen of the title are Valentine and Proteus, best friends living in Verona. One of the two, Proteus, is deeply in love with a woman named Julia. The other, Valentine, is sent to Milan at his father’s bidding, where he falls in love with the Duke’s daughter, Silvia.

      The horrid Proteus follows Valentine and despite swearing his undying love to Julia, he quickly falls in love with Silvia. Not only is he betraying Julia with this infatuation, he is betrays his best friend. He is a selfish and horrible man and it’s hard to understand why Julia would remain true to him.

      My favorite scene in the play is between Julia and Silvia. The women find common ground where Silvia expresses her disgust with Proteus for abandoning the woman he swore to love. She had no idea that she was telling this to that same woman and it touches Julia deeply.

      The play shares a dozen similarities with Shakespeare’s later work. It has a woman following the man she loves and meeting him in disguise when he falls for someone new from All’s Well That Ends Well. It has Thurio, a useless lover picked by the girl’s family ala Paris from Romeo and Juliet. It also has a bit from Twelfth Night with a woman pretending to be the male servant of the man she loves. These elements don’t work well together to make a great play, but each bit is an interesting plot point that is used more successfully in a later play.

      BOTTOM LINE: This play is definitely a precursor to some of the great work that came later, but it doesn’t have the strongest plot. It contains hilarious puns and beautiful lines. Unfortunately the flip-flopping Proteus’ happy ending is not satisfying to audiences and the play is rarely preformed live.

      “She is mine own,
      And I as rich in having such a jewel
      As twenty seas, if all their sand were pearl,
      The water nectar, and the rocks pure gold.” 

    Book preview

    The Two Gentleman of Verona - William Shakespeare

    cover.jpg

    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

    This edition copyright © 2019. Digireads.com Publishing.

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

    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.

    Please visit www.digireads.com

    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

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