The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Two Gentlemen of Verona by Angelica Kauffman (1789).

## Production Details

### Sourcematerial

Spanish prose romance Los Siete Libros de la Diana (The Seven Books of the Diana) by the Portuguese writer Jorge de Montemayor.

### When written

Believed by many to have been between 1589 and 1593

### Episode(s)

I Did Adore a Twinkling Star
(Title reference)

Source

## Background

***The Two Gentlemen of Verona*** is a comedy by William Shakespeare, . It is considered by some to be Shakespeare's first play, and is often seen as showing his first tentative steps in laying out some of the themes and motifs with which he would later deal in more detail; for example, it is the first of his plays in which a heroine dresses as a boy. The play deals with the themes of friendship and infidelity, the conflict between friendship and love, and the foolish behaviour of people in love. The highlight of the play is considered by some to be Launce, the clownish servant of Proteus, and his dog Crab, to whom "the most scene-stealing non-speaking role in the canon" has been attributed.

*Two Gentlemen* is often regarded as one of Shakespeare's weakest plays. It has the smallest named cast of any play by Shakespeare.

## Notes

1. ↑ *Diana* was published in Spanish in 1559 and translated into French by Nicholas Collin in 1578. An English translation was made by Bartholomew Young and published in 1598, though Young claims in his preface to have finished the translation sixteen years earlier (c. 1582). Shakespeare could have read a manuscript of Young's English translation, or encountered the story in French, or learned of it from an anonymous English play, *The History of Felix and Philiomena*, which may have been based on *Diana*, and which was performed for the court at Greenwich Palace by the Queen's Men on 3 January 1585. *The History of Felix and Philiomena* is now lost. 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).
2. ↑ It is placed first in both *The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works* (1986 and 2005), *The Norton Shakespeare* (1997 and 2008) and *The Complete Pelican Shakespeare* (2002); see also Leech (1969: xxx), Wells and Taylor (1997: 109), Carroll (2004: 130) and Warren (2008: 26–27)

## Sources

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Schlueter, Kurt, ed. (1990). The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521181693. Page 1
2. ↑ Carroll, William C., ed. (2004). The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series. London: Thompson Learning. ISBN 978-1903436950. Page 128
3. ↑ Warren, Roger, ed. (2008). The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0192831422. Pages 15–16
4. ↑ Wells, Stanley; Taylor, Gary; Jowett, John; Montgomery, William, eds. (2005) [1986]. The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0199267187. Page 1
5. ↑ Carroll, William C., ed. (2004). The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series. London: Thompson Learning. ISBN 978-1903436950. Page 110
6. ↑ Greenblatt, Stephen; Cohen, Walter; Howard, Jean E.; Maus, Katharine Eisaman, eds. (2008) [1997]. The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Shakespeare (Second ed.). London: Norton. ISBN 978-0393111354. Page 103