Themes in The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Valentine and Proteus open the play as devoted friends. Valentine is about to leave Verona for Milan — to see the world, to become a proper gentleman, to have experiences that Proteus, stuck at home by his attachment to Julia, is missing. "Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits," Valentine tells him — meaning that staying put keeps a person ordinary, small, unsophisticated. The friends part affectionately. The rest of the play is about what happens when they meet again.

Proteus arrives in Milan, sees Silvia (Valentine's beloved), and immediately starts plotting to remove Valentine so he can pursue her himself. His soliloquy in Act 2 is startlingly frank: he knows he is betraying his friend, his girlfriend, and his own sense of who he is. He does it anyway. "In love / Who respects friend?" he asks in Act 5 — but this is not a genuine philosophical position, it is post-hoc rationalisation. He made his choice in Act 2 while fully aware it was wrong.

The play asks whether friendship between men is more important than romantic love, and it gives both a contradictory answer and a troubling one. For most of the play, the answer appears to be love — Proteus abandons friendship for it, Valentine is absorbed by it, Silvia and Julia are defined by it. But in Act 5 Scene 4, after Valentine rescues Silvia from Proteus, he turns to his friend and offers him Silvia as a gift. "All that was mine in Silvia I give thee."

This line has baffled and troubled readers for centuries. Valentine is offering the woman he loves to the man who just attempted to assault her, apparently in the name of restoring their friendship. It is the play's most notorious moment. Some scholars argue it is a gesture so extreme it was never meant to be taken literally — a formal declaration of friendship reclaiming its priority without any intention of actually transferring Silvia. Others read it as Shakespeare at his most naive, not yet able to write convincingly past the convention he has inherited from Italian novellas where male friendship trumps everything else.

Julia, who has followed Proteus to Milan in disguise and has been standing next to Silvia for this entire scene, faints — or pretends to faint. The practical effect of her collapse is to stop the transfer from actually happening. Whether this is Shakespeare finding a way out of a scene that has gone somewhere awful, or Julia exercising the only agency available to her, is impossible to settle. What is clear is that the play cannot quite make good on the offer it has just put on the table.

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Proteus betrays almost everyone he is attached to, and Shakespeare does not try to hide it. His name is the giveaway — Proteus is the shape-shifting sea god in Greek mythology who constantly changes form to avoid being held to anything. The name signals from the start that this character will not hold to his commitments. The only question is how far he will go.

The answer is: far. He tells the Duke where to find Valentine's rope ladder so that Valentine can be banished. He lies to Julia, who has come to Milan for him, by employing her as his messenger to Silvia without telling her who he is sending her to. He pursues Silvia by undermining Valentine's reputation with the Duke. Each betrayal enables the next one. By Act 5, he is willing to use force on Silvia — "I'll force thee yield to my desire," he says, in a line that has no parallel for directness in Shakespeare's romantic comedies.

Julia's loyalty runs against all of this. She follows Proteus to Milan — a woman travelling alone, which was genuinely dangerous in the period — in disguise as a boy. She enters his service without revealing who she is. She watches him pursue Silvia. She delivers his messages. She holds her knowledge of his betrayal largely in silence throughout Act 4, which is painful to watch. Her only real act of resistance before Act 5 is a small, sharp one: when asked to deliver Proteus's ring to Silvia (the ring Julia herself gave him), she gives the wrong ring, then immediately confesses to having done so. Even her deception is honest.

Launce, the comic servant, has his own loyalty subplot. His dog Crab is "the sourest-natured dog that lives" — Launce tells us this in Act 2 Scene 3 in what is probably the play's funniest speech. Crab does not love him back, does not miss him when he leaves, pees in the Duke's hall and lets Launce take the punishment. Launce is loyal to a dog that has no concept of loyalty. This is a comic mirror of Proteus-and-Julia: Launce serves faithfully something that cannot reciprocate. The dog does not betray him because the dog has no relationship to betrayal. Proteus is much worse than Crab.

The play's final movement asks whether Proteus's forgiveness is earned. He repents in a few lines in Act 5 — "O heaven! were man / But constant, he were perfect" — and is immediately forgiven by everyone. Whether this is satisfying depends entirely on how much weight the production gives to what came before it. Shakespeare's early comedies do not dwell in consequences. But the text still carries what Proteus did, and the speed of his forgiveness is notable.

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Julia's decision to disguise herself as a boy and follow Proteus to Milan is the play's most practical act of love. She has received a letter from Proteus, torn it up, reassembled it, kissed it, and realised she needs to be where he is rather than waiting in Verona. The disguise is not presented as a great adventure — it is presented as a solution to a logistical problem. Women travelling alone were unsafe and unwelcome. A boy could travel freely.

Once in Milan, Julia takes the name Sebastian — a name Shakespeare reused for the male twin in Twelfth Night, written a few years later, where the same device becomes more elaborate. As Sebastian, Julia enters Proteus's service. This puts her in the position of running errands for the man she loves while he pursues someone else, unable to say anything without revealing who she is. The disguise that enabled her journey now traps her inside it.

The ring scene in Act 4 Scene 4 is the disguise plot at its most acute. Proteus sends Sebastian/Julia to Silvia with a ring — the ring that Julia herself gave Proteus as a love token in Verona. She delivers it. Silvia refuses to take it, saying she knows Proteus has a previous girlfriend in Verona and she feels sorry for her. Julia-as-Sebastian then says she knows the girl in Verona and can describe her precisely, because they are the same height and build and once acted a part together. The self-description in the third person, maintaining the disguise while confessing everything through it, is the play's most emotionally sophisticated writing.

Silvia asks what happened to Proteus's original girlfriend. Sebastian says she died of grief for him. "Alas," says Silvia. She does not know she is talking to that girlfriend. Julia does not correct her. The scene has three layers: what is said, what Julia knows, and what the audience knows that neither character is acknowledging. The disguise is not just practical costume — it is a way of saying true things that cannot be said directly.

Valentine's disguise is less successful and less interesting. Banished from Milan, he becomes the leader of a band of outlaws in a forest. The forest-outlaws subplot is the play's weakest material, but it sets up the final act. When Silvia tries to flee to Valentine through the forest and is captured by Proteus, the disguise plots converge: Sebastian/Julia is with Proteus when he finds Silvia, and it is Julia who ultimately unmasks by producing the wrong ring at the right moment. She removes her own disguise by the evidence of what she is carrying.

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The play's central question about love is not whether it is possible but whether it is stable. Every character who loves in Two Gentlemen of Verona is tested for constancy — for whether their love holds under pressure. The results are not encouraging for the men.

Valentine falls in love with Silvia the moment he arrives in Milan and is completely converted. Before Milan, he was mocking Proteus for being held in Verona by love. Within a scene of seeing Silvia, he has abandoned everything else. "What light is light, if Silvia be not seen? / What joy is joy, if Silvia be not by?" he says in Act 3 Scene 1 — a fairly standard Petrarchan love lyric (Petrarchan meaning in the style of the Italian poet Petrarch, whose sonnets about an idealised woman became the template for love poetry across Europe). Valentine's love is constant from the moment it starts. He has no prior attachment to test him.

Proteus has Julia. He was constant to her in Verona — constant enough that she decided to follow him. The moment he sees Silvia, he is no longer constant to Julia, nor to Valentine. He cannot be constant to Silvia either, because Silvia rejects him, which means his pursuit of her is a series of escalating impositions rather than a relationship. He is inconstant in sequence: Julia first, then Silvia, then (in the last scene) Julia again when she is revealed.

"O heaven! were man / But constant, he were perfect," Proteus says in Act 5 Scene 4 — the play's most self-aware line, delivered in the middle of a repentance speech. It is also the play's argument in condensed form: inconstancy is the male failing. Constancy is what would redeem it. Julia has been constant throughout. She is the measure against which Proteus's behaviour is judged, and she is the one who has to do the forgiving.

The Duke's speech in Act 3 Scene 1 — "That man that hath a tongue, I say, is no man, / If with his tongue he cannot win a woman" — presents love as a competitive skill, something a gentleman is supposed to be competent at. This is the play's other model of love: not constant attachment but rhetorical conquest. The Duke is talking about general principle while Valentine is about to be exposed and banished for an entirely non-rhetorical plan (rope ladder, elopement). The gap between the Duke's theory of love and what Valentine is actually doing makes the speech unintentionally comic.

Silvia herself is constant in her own way: she is constant against. She consistently refuses Proteus, consistently maintains loyalty to the banished Valentine, and consistently treats Proteus's advances as exactly what they are — unwanted and escalating. Her constancy is the play's most straightforward, and it receives the least attention.

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"Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits" — Valentine says this to Proteus in Act 1, sending himself off to Milan with a theory of self-improvement. The argument is that a man who never leaves home never grows up. Travel is education. The court at Milan is where real gentlemen are made. Valentine is going to become one.

The play is partly a comedy of this idea. Valentine arrives in Milan and immediately falls in love and starts planning an elopement involving a rope ladder. He becomes the leader of a band of forest outlaws. He nearly gets his best friend's almost-assault forgiven by offering that friend his girlfriend. His education in gentlemanliness has not gone exactly as planned.

The phrase "gentlemen" in the title is significant. In Elizabethan England, a gentleman was a specific social rank — above merchant, below nobleman — defined partly by birth and partly by behaviour. The behaviour expected of a gentleman included loyalty, honour in relations with women, skill in rhetoric and arms, and the cultivation of friendships with men of equal rank. The play tests every single one of these requirements and shows Valentine and Proteus failing several of them comprehensively.

Proteus fails most obviously. The Duke of Milan, in Act 3 Scene 1, offers what might be called the official curriculum: "That man that hath a tongue, I say, is no man, / If with his tongue he cannot win a woman." Rhetoric, approach, artful persuasion. Proteus has all of these and uses them for coercion. Valentine has genuine love and no strategy. Neither conforms to the Duke's model.

Launce's scenes provide a comic counterpoint. He is a servant, not a gentleman — no pretension to the education of the aristocracy. His loyalty to his dog Crab is absurd and absolute and entirely devoid of any philosophical framework. He does not think about whether his love for Crab is worth it, whether Crab reciprocates it, whether it conflicts with his duty to his master. He simply loves Crab, takes punishments meant for Crab, and carries Crab everywhere. Speed, the other servant, is clever and verbal in the way that Launce is not. Between them, they suggest that the qualities the education of gentlemen is supposed to produce — constancy, loyalty, articulate feeling — are distributed by temperament rather than rank.

By Act 5, both Valentine and Proteus have been educated, though not in the ways Milan advertised. Valentine has learned that banishment is survivable and that authority in the forest is a different thing from authority at court. Proteus has learned — if the repentance speech is genuine — that constancy is harder than he thought and that he is worse at it than he believed. These are not the lessons in rhetoric and bearing that the Duke described. They are lessons in how badly a person can fail when the situations they encounter are not covered in the curriculum.

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