Three Early Comedies by William Shakespeare

Author:William Shakespeare [Shakespeare, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-42454-9
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

Text based on Diana of George of Montemayor. Translated out of Spanish into English by Bartholomew Yonge of the Middle Temple, Gentleman. At London, Printed by Edm. Bollifant, Impensis G.B. 1598.

FURTHER READING

Berry, Ralph. “Love and Friendship.” Shakespeare’s Comedies: Explorations in Form. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972. The Two Gentlemen, writes Berry, purposefully turns the conventions of romance into comedy, allowing the “fantastic code of conventional behavior” to reveal its “inner contradictions.” Women, Berry argues, are the “center of sanity” in this play where male action too often is self-absorbed and self-deceived.

Brooks, Harold F. “Two Clowns in a Comedy (to Say Nothing of the Dog): Speed, Launce (and Crab) in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.” English Association Essays and Studies n.s. 16 (1963): 91–100. Brooks focuses on Shakespeare’s use of the clowns (and dog) as comic foils that extend and clarify the action of the play. Lance, in particular, in his burlesque of the themes of friendship and love, is carefully integrated into the structure of the play, enforcing our sense of The Two Gentlemen as a drama of education in and through love.

Champion, Larry S. The Evolution of Shakespeare’s Comedy: A Study in Dramatic Perspective, pp. 25–38. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970. The Two Gentlemen of Verona is an experimental play focusing on plot rather than on credible actions and motivations. Champion examines the ways in which plot, character, and rhetoric control the audience’s perspective, ensuring that it not respond “sentimentally to what Shakespeare would have us laugh at.”

Evans, Bertrand. Shakespeare’s Comedies, pp. 9–19. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960. Evans finds the comic effects in The Two Gentlemen of Verona determined by a sophisticated handling of discrepancies between different characters’ and the audience’s understanding of the action. As in other romantic comedies, the heroines and clowns occupy a privileged position of awareness, just below that of the audience itself. The scheming Proteus believes himself fully aware, but the gap between his understanding and ours renders him harmless and subject to humiliation.

Ewbank, Inga-Stina. “ ‘Were Man but Constant, He Were Perfect’: Constancy and Consistency in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.” Shakespearean Comedy, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer. Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 14. London: Edward Arnold; New York: Crane, Russak, 1972. Ewbank holds that though the play is not entirely successful it nonetheless represents an effort to be “truthful to troubled, complex human relationships.” In the play’s insistently conventionalized language and behavior she finds the source of “many of the play’s inconsistencies but also much of its sense of life.”

Johnson, Samuel. “Two Gentlemen of Verona.” Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 7. New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1968. Johnson discovers in The Two Gentlemen “a strange mixture of knowledge and ignorance, of care and negligence.” He praises the “eminently beautiful” lines and passages the play abounds in but finds troubling its dramatic inconsistencies and confusions. Nonetheless, he deems the play unquestionably Shakespeare’s, for it is more credible that Shakespeare “might sometimes sink below his highest than that any other should rise up to his lowest.

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