Will you walk in to see their gossiping? Dro. E. That's a question: how shall we try it? Dro. S. We'll draw cuts for the senior: till then lead thou first. Dro. E. Nay, then, thus: We came into the world like brother and brother; And now let's go hand in hand, not one before another. [Exeunt. 420 INTRODUCTION A History. THE TWO GENtlemen of VeRONA was first printed Literary 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. 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, Date of Composisave the reference by Meres in 1598 already men- tion." tioned. 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 Sources and Structure of the Plot. 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 Jahrbuch, Bd. xxxii. 149 f. 1 |