The Two Gentlemen of Verona

1. The Two Gentlemen of Verona Performance and Adaptation

2. Prologue: You want to know who said that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5OqIV9B1GY Cease to persuade, my loving Proteus; Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits Were’t not affection chains thy tender days To the sweet glances of thy honoured love, I rather would entreat thy company To see the wonders of the world abroad Than, living dully sluggardised at home, Wear out thy youth with shapeless idleness. (1.1.1-8) (= Mind unblown) Cf. Men are merriest when they are from home (Henry V, 1.2.298)

3. The Two Gentlemen of Verona:Performance and Adaptation • Challenges: resources / tonalities / the world of the play / mimetic desire / the dog • Adaptation: - Casting - Framing - Musicalisation - Reduction • The Ending

4. (Non-human) Resources required: • Letters • Rings • Glove • A cloak • Some rope • At least one musical instrument • An above space • A picture of Sylvia • A dog

5. Fiasco Theatre for Theatre for a New Audience, New York City, 2015 (n.b. sameness)

6. Challenges: tonality • The world of the play is one of • Knights errant, distracted lovers, and as preposterous a band of brigands [the outlaws] who ever strode a stage. This is an Italy of true romance, where Milan is reached from Verona from sea…

8. Proteus abandons Julia, betrays Valentine, abducts Silvia, and when his career of complicated treachery is finally unmasked, apologizes as casually as though he had just sneezed. Whereupon our hero, Valentine, is so overcome that he promptly offers to hand over his beloved to the man who, not three minutes before, had meant to rape her. • Hilary Spurling, programme note to RSC production, 1970.

9. The play’s ‘originality’ 1 • Shakespeare’s first essay at originality, at fashioning for himself the outlines of that romantic or tragicomic formula in which so many of his most characteristic dramas were afterwards to be cast. Something which is neither quite tragedy nor quite comedy, something which touches the heights of sentiment and reveals the dark places of the human heart without lingering long enough there to crystallize the painful impression, a love story broken for a moment into passionate chords by absence and inconstancy and intrigue, and then reunited to the music of wedding-bells; such is the kind of dramatic scheme which floated before him, when he first set pen to paper in making a play of his very own. • (E.K. Chambers, introduction to Red Letter Shakespeare edition, 1905).

10. Uneven tonalities PROTEUS: Oh how this spring of love resembleth The uncertain glory of an April day, Which now shows all the beauty of the sun, And by and by a cloud takes all away. (1.3.84-7) The Outlaws: first two admit that they have been banished for abduction and murder, then third says: And I, for suchlike petty crimes as these. But to the purpose, for we cite our faults That they may hold excused our lawless lives; And partly seeing you are beautified With goodly shape, and by your own report A linguist, and a man of such perfection As we do in our quality want. (4.1.50-6)

11. The Play’s ‘originality’: 2 Two Gents is one of the least critically discussed of Shakespeare’s comedies ‘Criticism of the play has too often been based on the assumption that the author intended, or should have intended, to write something like Twelfth Night or As You Like It but, being young and newly apprenticed to the playwright’s trade, had not known how to achieve this and had therefore failed’ Kurt Schlueter, intro to Cambridge edition (1990), p.2

12. The Play’s ‘originality’: 2 In terms of originality – meaning both something new and something which stands at the origin of Shakespeare’s career – we might briefly consider Rene Girard’s book A Theatre of Envy. Girard is one of the few critics to see Two Gents as a genuinely original and important play When Proteus falls in love ‘at first sight’ with Sylvia: Is it mine eye, or Valentine’s praise, Her true perfections or my false transgression That makes me reasonless to reason thus? (2.4.189-91)

13. The entire comedy massively confirms the crucial role of Valentine in the genesis of Proteus’s sudden passion for Silvia. According to our romantic and individualistic ideology, a borrowed sentiment such as this one is not genuine enough to be really intense. This is not true in Shakespeare… This is mimetic or mediated desire. Valentine is its model or mediator; Proteus is its mediated subject, and Silvia is their common object… Mimetic desire is Shakespeare’s own idea… The dramatic context of this first mimetic desire and of many others in Shakespeare is the close and ancient friendship of the two protagonists. (Girard, A Theatre of Envy (1991), pp.8-9) 

14. The World of the Play Also possible to identify other mimetic moments in the play: VALENTINE: Why, how know you that I am in love? SPEED: Marry, by these special marks: first, you have learned, like Sir Proteus, to wreath your arms, like a malcontent [etc, etc] Now you are metamorphosed with a mistress. (2.1.15-28) Mimetic desire is aspirational and works upwards – we want what people of a higher or similar status than us want. If not, everyone in this play would follow Launce’s lead and love the dog.

15. Performance History Patchy and infrequent; earliest recorded performance was at Drury Lane in 1762; very few notable revivals before 1970 (i.e. depended on rise of subsidised theatres like RSC or Stratford, Ontario) Absence of canonical productions or an influential film or TV version is liberating? This is a story that can be told / remade by students, amateurs, rebels.

16. Casting: The Dog • 50secs into this, after audience has been coughing/consumptive, finally the clown comes on: • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-NfmLEq9kI • C.f. The Queen and The Dog The Queen ‘bade them take away the knave [the clown Richard Tarlton] for making her to laugh so excessively as he fought against her little dog Perrico de Faldas with his sword and long staff’ (State Papers, cited in E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford, 1923): ii. 342. • But this isn’t how Crab is written…

18. Whenever dogs in Renaissance drama have anything more difficult to do than walking at the end of a stringand then stopping, they get played by human actors […] • What is unusual about [Crab] is the way in which Shakespeare drawsattention to, and thinks through, his sheer lack of a performance. On his first entrance he is immediatelymade the centre of Shakespeare's first play-within-a-play, in which Lance finds it impossible satisfactorily to cast him ('I am the dog. No, the dog is himself, and I am the dog. 0, the dog is me, and I am myself', 2.3.21-3). Almost alone in this early play, Shakespeare has here managed to produce afigure who exists primarily to be rather than to do. In performance, the less Crab actually does, indeedthe less he even seems to understand what is happening, the better.

19. Uncompanionable and unhygienic, Crab is visibly irreducibleto the roles the play requires of him, serving neither as a sympathetic confidant to Lancenor as an acceptable present to Silvia, but just wonderfullybeing 'as it were, a dog at all things' (4.4.13). Crab doesn't become a performing dog until longafter Shakespeare's death […] the 1762revival of The Two Gentlemen of Verona marks adecisive break from the earlier notion of the theatricaldog as mere dog. From this production we candate the misguided practice of casting professionalized,over-achieving show-offs in the role of Crab(compare here, for example, the beruffed, pedigreecreature visible in the part during Shakespeare inLove). (120) •  Michael Dobson, “‘A Dog at All Things”: The Transformation of the Onstage Canine, 1550-1850’, Performance Research, 5:2, pp.116-124

21. LAUNCE Marry, sir, I carried Mistress Silvia the dog you bade me. PROTEUS And what says she to my little jewel? LAUNCE Marry, she says your dog was a cur, and tells you currish thanks is good enough for such a present. PROTEUS But she received my dog? LAUNCE No, indeed, she did not. I have brought him back again. PROTEUS What, didst thou offer her this from me? LAUNCE Ay, sir; the other squirrel was stolen from my by the hangman’s boys in the market-place. [4.4.38-46]

23. PS: you want to know who hated dogs? Critic Caroline Spurgeon noted in 1935 that words relating to flattery and fawning were often associated throughout Shakespeare’s works with DOGS, as were images of licking and melting. E.g. PROTEUS: spaniel-like, the more she spurns my love, The more it grows and fawneth on her still (4.1.15-16)

25. #mindblownCaroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What it Tells Us, 1935, p.197

26. Adaptation: Casting Casting—arguably the most important act of theatre-making, all too often executed without creativity, imagination or risk. The stage must be peopled and what those people look and sound like, where they come from, and what they represent has implications for the audience experience, and for the reputation of Shakespeare within wider culture. In short: the question of who gets to speak Shakespeare is a political issue. Clichéd casting fulfils audience expectations and often results from unexamined conventions

27. All-female Two ‘Gents’ at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ashland, USA, 2014

28. Adaptation: Casting and Framing Framing—situating the performance of a Shakespeare play within a specific historical moment or cultural space so that it becomes, in effect, a play-within-a-play. There is at least half a precedent for this in Shakespeare: The Taming of the Shrew begins with a lengthy Induction but the text that survives, for whatever reason, fails to return us to the framing world at the play’s conclusion.

31. Dir. Robin Phillips, RSC, 1970

33. Adaptation: Musicalisation the introduction of music where it is not explicitly called for in the text, or the wholesale musicalisation of Shakespeare’s plays. This is an honourable tradition stretching back to Middleton’s musical additions to Macbeth and such notable adaptations as Thomas Shadwell’s 1674 operatic Tempest.

34. "[Thacker] has set it among the Bright Young Things of the Thirties, a world of co-respondant shoes, tennis togs, pencil moustaches and an agreeable spot of lunchington on the lawn. There's a nifty little band on stage and a singer (Hilary Cromie) who crones her way through a wonderful selection of romantic hits by the likes of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and the Gershwins." Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph 19.4.91

36. Listen to original Broadway cast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7DLIK-D4Nk

37. Opening song concludes: ‘You can’t love another without loving your self’ (c.f.) Girard Valentine twits Proteus in their duet: ‘Twenty days of wooing / For one night of cooing.’ Opposition set up between monogamy and Valentine’s desire for a kind of free love: ‘There’s a million wonderful people in the world / I want to know them all…’ • I’m sorry we don’t agree / We’ve been best friends since we were three • Julia set up as independently minded, Women’s Lib, and anti-love I find love alarming / I’m happier farming • Julia discovers that she is pregnant after Proteus’s departure to Milan: ‘If I were a young man / I wouldn’t be pregnant’

38. Adaptation: Reduction or Down-sizing Definition: producing Shakespeare with fewer resources than obtained in original performances and/or are found in standard contemporary mainstream productions. Characterised by inexpensive costuming, minimal sets and scenery, and small casts. Can stem from economic necessity, aesthetic preference or both. Inventive doubling, trebling, quadrupling can draw attention to patterning across the play, creating echoes unimagined by the author, as well as generating audience pleasure at the actor’s art and labour.

39. The Q Gents (2016) Two-man (and one DJ) show devised and performed by the Q Brothers (Chicago) – others ad-rap-tations include The Bombity of Errors, Funk It Up About Nothing, Othello: The Remix Set in a US high school https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyF23X9sm6s

40. Two Gentlemen of Verona; or, Vakomana Vaviri ve Zimbabwe (Two Gents Productions) Dir. Arne Pohlmeier 2009-

41. Further reading: Collette Gordon, “‘Mind the Gap”: Globalism, Postcolonialism, and Making Up Africa in the Cultural Olympiad’, in Shakespeare on the Global Stage (eds. Prescott and Sullivan, Arden, 2015): 191-226 Sonia Massai, ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona for/by Zimbabwean diasporic communities’, in Shakespeare Beyond English (eds. Bennett and Carson, Cambridge, 2013): pp.157-160 Peter Kirwan, online review: http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/bardathon/2009/12/13/two-gentlemen-of-verona-or-vakomana-vaviri-ve-zimbabwe-two-gents-productions-north-wall-oxford/

42. The Ending (‘There are, by this time, no gentlemen left in Verona’, Arthur Quiller-Couch)

43. PROTEUS: Nay, if the gentle spirit of moving words Can no way change you to a milder form I’ll woo you like a soldier, at arm’s end, And love you ‘’gainst the nature of love: force ye. SILVIA: O heaven! PROTEUS: I’ll force thee yield to my desire. […] PROTEUS: My shame and guilt confounds me. Forgive me, Valentine. If hearty sorrow Be a sufficient ransom for offence, I tender’t here. I do as truly suffer As e’er I did commit. [♯Me Too] VALENTINE: Then I am paid, And once again I do receive thee honest. Who by repentance is not satisfied Is nor of heaven nor earth, for these are pleased; By penitence th’Eternal’s wrath’s appeased. And that my love may appear plain and free, All that was mine in Silvia I give thee. JULIA: O me unhappy!

44. Dir. Ed Hall, RSC, 1998 • The journey of the play was marked by two single-gender, non-sexual embraces: at the end of the first scene by a valedictory hug of separation, expected all through the scene, between the leading men…; at the end of the last scene, by an embrace of welcome and of union, expected all through the scene, between the leading women… The embraces framed the intervening account of the awkwardnesses and inadequacies of the play’s heterosexual relationships. • Robert Smallwood, Shakespeare Survey 52, Cambridge, 1999.

45. Dir. Cary Mazer, University of Pennsylvania, 1999,

46. See: Cary Mazer, Double Shakespeares: Emotional-Realist Acting and Contemporary Performance, 2015, pp.174-8.

47. Dir. Arne Pohlmeier for Two Gents Productions, 2009- • Munyevu threw Chikura’s Silvia to the ground and advanced threatening on her as she cowered, slowly but deliberately forcing her legs apart and lowering himself. At this point, and with no laughter, Chikura removed the glove, left it at Munyevu’s feet and made his way to the other side of the stage to ‘appear’ as Valentine, interrupting the rape. Valentine’s anger at Proteus was manifest, and their reaffirmation of friendship was anything but; the offer of Silvia was made with deep sarcasm and loathing, a furious and scathing damnation of Proteus’s actions; and Proteus’s acceptance of Julia shortly thereafter was a shamefaced step-down on Proteus’s part, the only way out of the predicament into which he had put himself.

48. Throughout this, the women lay on the floor as objects; yet after the Duke’s closing words, the play had its final trick to play. The actors resumed the sarong and glove of Julia and Silvia, and the latter was discovered, weeping and bruised on the floor. Julia moved to her, took her head in her lap and began comforting her, the lights (which had been set to a single state throughout) fading on their embrace of solidarity.  • Peter Kirwan, online review: http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/bardathon/2009/12/13/two-gentlemen-of-verona-or-vakomana-vaviri-ve-zimbabwe-two-gents-productions-north-wall-oxford/