Ideal love and practical women: The Two Gentlemen of Verona: (Discussion)

Dear members,

I hope that you will join us in closing the year with two comedies very much in keeping with the sonnets’ renunciation of ideal love!
Indeed, idealized love and the practicalities of romance are heavily contrasted in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (April) and The Two Gentlemen of Verona (June 13th). In very different ways, both plays challenge romantic posturing and expose the distance between lofty declarations of love and the actual conduct of men.
Maryama Antoine

About the Play:
The Two Gentlemen of Verona is a comedy by William Shakespeare, usually believed to have been written early in his career, sometime between 1589 and 1593. It is sometimes considered one of his very first plays, and already contains many elements that Shakespeare would later return to with greater sophistication: friendship tested by love, women disguised as men, constancy and betrayal, romantic foolishness, and the comic exposure of male self-importance.

Like The Merry Wives of Windsor, this play is deeply suspicious of romantic posturing. Proteus, who begins the play declaring his love for Julia, quickly abandons both his beloved and his friend when he sees Sylvia. The comedy lies not only in disguise, letters, servants, outlaws, and confused wooing, but also in the uncomfortable contrast between what men say about love and loyalty, and how badly they often behave when tested by them.

The Plot:
Valentine, a gentleman of Verona, is preparing to leave for Milan, accompanied by his servant, Speed, in order to expand his horizons at the Duke of Milan's court. He hopes that his best friend, Proteus, will come, but Proteus is unwilling to leave his love, Julia. Disappointed, Valentine departs alone.
Proteus's father, however, has been persuaded that Proteus too needs to further his gentlemanly education, and he orders his son to leave for Milan the very next day, prompting a tearful farewell with Julia, to whom Proteus swears eternal love. The couple exchange rings and vows. Proteus sets off accompanied by his own servant, Launce, and Launce's dog, Crab.

In Milan, Valentine has fallen in love with the Duke's daughter, Silvia, who clearly prefers this suitor to the wealthy but foppish Thurio who her father intends she should marry. As soon as Proteus arrives, he too falls in love with Silvia. Determined to win her, and agonising only briefly about betraying both his friend and his lover, Proteus slyly tells the Duke that Valentine plans to elope with Silvia, using a corded ladder to rescue her from the tower room in which she is imprisoned each night.

The Duke banishes Valentine. Wandering in the forest, Valentine runs into a band of outlaws, who elect him their leader...

Sources:
Shakespeare’s principal source for The Two Gentlemen of Verona appears to have been Los Siete Libros de la Diana (The Seven Books of the Diana) a Spanish prose romance by the Portuguese writer Jorge de Montemayor. In that story, as in Shakespeare’s play, a faithful woman follows her lover in male disguise and becomes his page, only to discover that he has transferred his affections elsewhere.

Another major influence on Shakespeare was the story of the intimate friendship of Titus and Gisippus as told in Thomas Elyot's The Boke Named the Governour in 1531 (the same story is told in The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, but verbal similarities between The Two Gentlemen and The Governor suggest it was Elyot's work Shakespeare used as his primary source, not Boccaccio's).