2026 Shakespeare Reading Project: Two Gentlemen of Verona

To continue:
Shakespeare Reading Project
Henry VI, parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III

Scholars have been trying to justify and/or explain or even make SENSE of the last two pages of Two Gentlemen of Verona for 400 years. You read it and go …. “Is there a page missing?” “Was a soliloquy cut?”

Proteus is a sociopath. He’s in love with a woman, he dearly loves his best friend Valentine. He goes to visit Valentine, and immediately forgets he even has a girlfriend. He goes after his best friend’s girl in truly nefarious ways, betraying everyone simultaneously. Meanwhile, his girlfriend back home puts on boys’ clothes and goes after her man. In the last scene of the play, Proteus literally tries to rape the new girl and is only stopped by Valentine, who then reads Proteus the riot act. Proteus – who has been nothing but diabolical throughout – listens to the speech and says, “You are right. I am sorry.” Valentine says, “I accept your apology my dear friend.”

And then …. they just go back to normal?

After the sexual assault … 10 SECONDS AGO … you’re good?

It’s funny to read scholars discuss this. They’re so connected to Shakespeare’s genius that they wrestle with his juvenilia. So they agonize about Two Gentlemen of Verona: Is Shakespeare being ironic? Is the “gentlemen” of the title … sarcastic? Harold Goddard’s two-volume book on the plays is good, but he definitely has a little bit of this over-justification at what is probably just a new-ish playwright imitating a Roman comedy, like, Harold, it’s not that deep. But Harold says something pretty funny: “If taken at face value, this play is inane”.

I feel like it’s “both/and”, Harold, and it’s okay. Taking this at face value doesn’t mean Hamlet is any less great.

So I say:

Take the play at face value AND it’s inane.

Shakespeare didn’t really do “farces” but this is a farce. He’s trying it out. Normally in farces, though, when all the disguises are revealed, and all the lies and misunderstandings are untangled, you are left with a feeling of relief, “oh thank goodness everything is all right now!”

But HERE, Proteus is SO bad that you end up feeling like “….. Ew.” No happy ending can include him!

Back in the mid-2000s, there was a musical version put on in Central Park, and I went with my high school boyfriend. Because this is just how my life works. I am still friends with my high school prom date. The person who introduced me to the Marx Brothers, WC Fields, Mae West. We joined a film noir “group” at the local college, and we would walk there to see The Big Sleep or whatever, because neither of us drove. Anyway. The music was written by the Hair guys, so the songs were good. Rosario Dawson played Julia (the scorned girl back home). I still remember her dancing across the stage in her cap and pants, hair tucked up, since she was a boy. She was delightful. And so there were big dance breaks, and ensemble numbers, and there was a conga line, plus an actor rolling around in a dog’s suit … in my opinion, this is the only valid way you could possibly play this thing! Lord help you if you try to JUSTIFY that last scene or make it make some kind of sense.

You CAN’T justify what happens in the last 10 minutes of this play. Don’t even try. (Don’t even try, CHiPS.)

I don’t know how you fix the problem that the following sequence of events …

1. Attempted rape
2. Accusation
3. Forgiveness
4. Double wedding

.. takes place in a 5-minute time period.

W.H. Auden gave a series of lectures in 1946 on Shakespeare’s plays, they’ve been compiled in a book and I love it. I loved this comment from his lecture on Two Gentlemen of Verona: “In a tragedy, a character would die in a deception such as Proteus’.”

Quotes on the play

 
 

“The prose of Launce, like that of Falstaff and Benedick later, seems to have been created by the character himself.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

“If there is anything in this ironic way of taking it, [Shakespeare] apparently decided that it should live up to its title and that there should be not one genuine gentleman in it — except Launce, who, by a stroke that seems almost to prove the poet’s sarcastic purpose, is chivalric to his dog.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“Either this is excellent burlesque of ‘gentlemanly’ manners and morals, or else the young author fooled himself as well as the rest of us by swallowing such silliness because it was sweetened by melodious verse. Take your choice.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

^^ See? He’s really wrestling with this play!

“Shakespeare is like Chaucer. He is so full of humanity, humor, and poetry that it is easy to miss the cutting edge of his condemnation.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“… mingle [fun and feeling] so that wit and emotion are wedded in an atmosphere which is as grave as it is smiling, as golden as it is bright. This atmosphere, so natural to men’s life, so easy to breathe, and so mellow in its hue, is uniquely Shakespeare’s, and it will be sufficient for his purposes in comedy; in its amber light he can go anywhere and consider everything, and his people can speak with the richest variety.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“The rhyme at the end is amateur, but Valentine has caught the tone which will be heard henceforth in the golden world of gentlemen where Shakesepeare’s comedy will occur. It is a world whose free and graceful movement finds a symbol for itself in the travel of young men.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“Friendship is one of the gods here, and he has given laws which Proteus will find it going against the grain to break; so that soliloquies will be necessary before he can comprehend the depth of his default.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“Of quibbles there are many in the play; too many, since they are the only device yet known by Shakespeare for securing the effect of wit and he must overwork them.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“There is in fact no gaiety in The Two Gentlemen of Verona outside of a few scenes dealing with the sensible Launce and his unwanted dog.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“I wish I had authority to leave [the second scene] out, but I have done all I could, set a mark of reprobation upon them, throughout this edition.”
— Alexander Pope, on the edition of Shakespeare’s plays he brought out. This is funny, his frank exasperation as an editor with Two Gentlemen of Verona

“Only farce is only comic.”
— W.H. Auden, lecture on Two Gents, 1946

“It is harder for the guilty to admit guilt and accept forgiveness than for the innocent to forgive. Many promising reconciliations have been wrecked because both sides were ready to forgive, but neither side was ready to be forgiven.”
— W.H. Auden, lecture on Two Gents, 1946

I had to re-read that ^^ multiple times for it to sink in. I’m going to need to remember it. It seems like it would be useful in all kinds of situations.

“[Two Gentlemen of Verona is] an anthology of bits and pieces waiting to be crafted into more compelling drama.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“The play is kind of a love cartoon, with a plethora of dominating fathers.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Proteus does not fully appreciate, as the audience will, the determinative function of his name (the ‘changeable one’).”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Maleness and femaleness are roles on the Shakespearean stage.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“No one is serious here — or, alternatively, everyone is serious.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“[Launce’s] inadvertent language seems to know more ‘truth’ than he does.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Launce’s swipe at Jews cannot be wished away; here and elsewhere in the plays the social caricature of the hard-hearted or mercenary Jew is casually invoked with the implication that most in the audience would recognize this characterization and agree with it.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“The partialness of this sense of plenitude is perfectly ‘Shakespearean’; any play that ends with so firm a claim to ‘happiness’ is balanced on the edge of the disasters — that-did-not-happen, rewarding the characters for the moment, but cautioning the audience, at the same time, that such perfect satisfaction is indeed a matter of fortune as well as desert, and that its completion, as always, lies offstage.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

Quotes from the play

VALENTINE:
And yet —
SILVIA:
A pretty period! Well — I guess the sequel
And yet I will not name it — and yet I care not —
Ands yet take this again — and yet I thank you —
Meaning henceforth to trouble you no more.
SPEED:
And yet you will, and yet another ‘yet’.
— Act II, sc i, 115-120

What, gone without a word?
Ay, so true love should do: it cannot speak
For truth hath better deeds than words to grace it.
— PROTEUS, Act II, sc ii, 16-18

O! the dog is me, and I am myself, ay, so, so.
— LAUNCE, Act II, sc iii, 22-23

She is fair, and so is Julia that I love
(That I did love, for now my love is thaw’d,
Which like a waxen image ‘gainst a fire
Bears no impression of the thing it was)
— PROTEUS, Act II, sc iv, 199-202

He is such a sociopath! I love how he changes the tense – “that I love / that I did love” – correcting himself. This puts thought literally into words and makes characters seem more alive: they talk in fits and starts, just like we do. We will see more and more of this but this is an early example.

JULIA
O, know’st thou not his looks are my soul’s food?
Pity the dearth that I have pinèd in
By longing for that food so long a time.
Didst thou but know the inly touch of love,
Thou wouldst as soon go kindle fire with snow
As seek to quench the fire of love with words.
LUCETTA
I do not seek to quench your love’s hot fire,
But qualify the fire’s extreme rage,
Lest it should burn above the bounds of reason.
JULIA
The more thou damm’st it up, the more it burns.
The current that with gentle murmur glides,
Thou know’st, being stopped, impatiently doth rage,
But when his fair course is not hinderèd,
He makes sweet music with th’ enameled stones,
Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge
He overtaketh in his pilgrimage;
And so by many winding nooks he strays
With willing sport to the wild ocean.
Then let me go and hinder not my course.
— Act II, sc vi, 16-33

JULIA
But tell me, wench, how will the world repute me
For undertaking so unstaid a journey?
I fear me it will make me scandalized.
LUCETTA
If you think so, then stay at home and go not.
JULIA
Nay, that I will not.
LUCETTA
Then never dream on infamy, but go.
Act II, sc vi, 59-64

Ay, ay, and she hath offered to the doom—
Which unreversed stands in effectual force—
A sea of melting pearl, which some call tears;
Those at her father’s churlish feet she tendered,
With them, upon her knees, her humble self,
Wringing her hands, whose whiteness so became
them
As if but now they waxèd pale for woe.
— PROTEUS, Act III, sc i, 224-230

SPEED:
“Item: She is proud.”
LAUNCE:
Out with that too; it was Eve’s legacy, and cannot be ta’en from her.”
— Act III, sc i, 337-339

You tell ’em, Launce!

This week impress of love is as a figure
Trenched in ice, which with an hour’s heat
Dissolves in water, and doth lose his form.
— DUKE, Act III, sc ii, 6-8

For Orpheus’ lute was strung with poets’ sinews,
Whose golden touch could soften steel and stones,
Make tigers tame, and huge leviathans
Forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands.
— PROTEUS, Act III, sc ii, 77-88

Are you content to be our general?
To make a virtue of necessity.
— OUTLAW 2, Act IV, sc i, 59-60

SILVIA:
What’s your will?
PROTEUS:
That I may compass yours.
— Act IV, sc ii, 92

… to worship shadows and adore false shapes …
— SILVIA, Act IV, sc ii, 130