Post by Roy Batty's Pet Dove on Jan 19, 2015 1:16:14 GMT -5
Hey everyone, so I started my Reading All of Shakespeare Project a couple of weeks back with The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and now that I've had the chance to collect them, here are my thoughts on the play.
First off, here's a quick synopsis for anyone who read this a while ago and who might be a bit hazy on exactly what happened in the plays, as it's one of Shakespeare's early, lesser works. Anyway, our two titular gentlemen of Verona are Valentine and Proteus. These two young men are best of friends; at the play's outset they are parting as Valentine is set to depart for Milan as a sort of gentleman's education in the ways of the wider world, and he teases Proteus, who remains in Verona due to his love for the lady Julia. Unfortunately for Proteus and Julia's romance, Proteus' father is convinced that it would best suit his son's development as a gentleman to follow Valentine's example and head to Verona and attend the Duke there. In a final meeting with Julia before Proteus is to set sail for Milan, the two lovers get engaged, exchanging rings and a kiss. Meanwhile in Milan, Valentine has fallen in love with the lady Silvia, who reciprocates his sentiments, although Silvia's father the Duke does not know this, hoping that his daughter will marry the dull but wealthy Turio, whom Silvia does not care for. Now enter Proteus, who in addition to being reunited with his best friend, becomes immediately enamored of Silvia, and upon Valentine's confiding his intentions to elope with Silvia, decides that he will betray Valentine to the Duke and pursue Silvia for himself. Meanwhile, back in Verona, Julia takes it upon herself to travel to Milan in the disguise of a male page in order that she may be with Proteus. Proteus manages to betray Valentine to the Duke, who banishes Valentine from Milan for his social overreaching in setting his sights on his daughter. On Valentine's return to Verona he is waylaid by a gang of outlaws, who, upon learning that Valentine is a gentleman banished from Milan like they apparently are, decide to make him their leader. Back in Milan, Proteus decides to help Turio court Silvia as a means of being able to secretly court her himself. One night, Proteus accompanies Turio to the tower wherein Julia lives and attempts to woo her with music. After Turio leaves, a conversation between Silvia and Proteus makes it clear that Silvia despises Proteus for his betrayal of Valentine, but she agrees to give him a portrait of her in an attempt to get him to leave her alone. Julia, disguised as a page named Sebastian watches on, and learns that her betrothed is being untrue, but still being in love with Proteus, decides that she will enter into his service as "Sebastian". Proteus sends "Sebastian" to retrieve Silvia's portrait, and the two meet as Silvia is set to flee Milan to be with Valentine. The Duke, Turio, Proteus, and "Sebastian" all head after Silvia, each with their own motives. Silvia is captured by the outlaws, who are bringing her to Valentine (who watches the proceedings out of sight) when Proteus scares off the captors, and proceeds to exaggerate the valor of his "rescue". When Silvia still remains disgusted by Proteus, the latter becomes impatient and attempts to rape her. Valentine now enters, stops the rape, and yells at Proteus a bit. Proteus offers a five-line apology, which is apparently so convincing to Valentine that he not only forgives his friend, but actually tells Proteus that he can have Silvia if he likes. This leads to Julia revealing herself, and she and Proteus make up and partner off again. Now the Duke and Turio show up and when Turio concedes Silvia to Valentine upon the latter's threat to fight him for her, the Duke realizes that Valentine is a better suitor to Silvia, and unbanishes Valentine and the outlaws. Speed, Lance (who has a dog named Crab with deadpan comedic sensibilities), and Lucetta, the servants, respectively, of Valentine, Proteus, and Julia aren't critical to a synopsis of the plot but get quite a bit to do of comic and thematic significance to the play. (And oh shit, this was not nearly as brief a synopsis as I was hoping it would be, sorry about that, everyone).
As for what I thought of the play, well, first off I guess I should start with my thoughts on that ending, which is apparently one of the most controversial scenes in all of Shakespeare. And it's definitely really fucked up; not only is Valentine's easy forgiveness of Proteus super-troubling, but the sloppily-constructed happy ending is made all the creepier by the fact that Silvia gets no lines after an "O heaven!" in reaction to Proteus' attack. Also stupid is the fact that the Duke will apparently ultimately be angrier with Turio for his cowardice than with Proteus for attempting to rape his daughter. However, the introduction I read to the version of the play that I read (the Third Edition Arden Shakespeare, introduction by William C. Carroll), devoted quite a few pages to attempting to put the ending into its socio-historical context, and while I still find what Shakespeare is asserted to have been trying to do far from entirely successful, at least I'm no longer disgusted by the final scene and utterly baffled that as skilled an author of Shakespeare could have found it a remotely satisfying conclusion. I'm massively oversimplifying this, possibly to the point of misrepresenting some of the points being made, but the intro gave some insight into the literature on male friendship that existed at the time, particularly the idea of a man's best friend as being almost a second self, and the idea that these friendships in fiction frequently involve some sort of conflict between the friends both falling in love with the same woman. One important source material for The Two Gentlemen of Verona was the play Titus and Gissipus, in which the the titular best friends are both in love with the same woman, Sophronia, and while Gissipus is to marry her, Titus fears that he will die if he cannot be with her, so he and Gissipus arrange things such that Titus will be able to take his friend's place in Gissipus and Sophronia's bed on the night of their wedding, unbeknownst to Sophronia. So I guess if Valentine's offer of Silvia is meant to be some sort of farcical exaggeration of this kind of ludicrous and rather misogynistic manifestation of the ideal of male friendship, or if at the very least Shakespeare was trying to present this kind of stuff in a somewhat ambivalent fashion, and the way that Silvia's thoughts on what has happened aren't taken into account at all in the resolution of the play's conflicts are meant as an at least somewhat critical reflection of a misogynistic society that saw women as little better than property, then at least I can see where he's coming from. If this is meant in some way as a critique as what I'm imagining as sort of like a 16th Century "bros before hoes" mindset, then I still don't think the final scene makes for a very successful conclusion to the play, and it doesn't remove all problematic elements from the scene, but it does make it a lot less infuriating to me. (Also, I feel like this whole post in general is pretty unfocused, this paragraph in particular, so I'm sorry if this came across as incoherently scattershot rambling.)
There was some stuff in the play that I thought was pretty cool, too, though. For example, there's an early example of Shakepeare's metadramatic plays-within-plays kind of stuff, when Julia-as-Sebastian meets Silvia, and when Silvia is talking with "Sebastian" about Julia and Silvia asks how tall Julia is, "Sebastian" responds with "About my stature; for at Pentecost/When all our pageants of delight were played/Our youth got me to play the woman's part/And I was trimmed in Madam Julia's gown/Which served me as fit, by all men's judgements/As if the garment had been made for me/Therefore I know she is about my height/And at that time I made her weep a-good/For I did play a lamentable part/Madam, 'twas Ariadne, passioning/For Theseus' perjury and unjust flight/Which I so lively acted with my tears/That my poor mistress, moved therewithal/Wept bitterly; and would I might be dead/If I in thought felt not her very sorrow." Which I at first would have thought was just pretty cool, including a passing reference to a play within the play about another woman abandoned by her lover, but, as a footnote and a couple of pages of the introduction pointed out, it's considerably more layered than that, as a boy actor would have been dressed up as a woman to play Julia in the play, who in turn dresses up as a boy, who in turn pretends to have dressed as a woman in another play, and that there's some pretty insightful and clever commentary here about the interplay between between the emotions caused by events in real life and fiction's ability to inspire those same emotions (in that Julia is said to have been brought to tears by the acted tears of a character who has experienced the same kind of betrayal which Julia has been exposed to, and that Julia herself is just a character played by an actor whose distress at her betrayal is meant to inspire sympathy in the play's real-world audience). And while it's certainly not as nuanced a metafictional exploration as, say A Midsummer Night's Dream, it was still one of my favorite moments in the play.
Another interesting I guess sort of theme that I noticed a lot (probably mostly informed by the introduction and footnotes of the edition I was reading), was the meaninglessness and inconstancy that the characters' words have in the play, and those same characters' frequent inability to recognize this. At one point early in the play, when Julia and Proteus meet for the last time before the latter's departure for Verona, Julia leaves without a word after Proteus bids her farewell, and Proteus remarks "What, gone without a word?/Ay, so true love should do: it cannot speak/For truth hath better deeds than words to grace it." It's a quote in light of which you can sort of view the words and actions of almost everyone in the play. Julia's misplaced trust in Proteus as she plots to travel to Milan is clearly tied to trust in his words, as she says "His words are bonds, his oaths are oracles" in response to her maid Lucetta's misgivings about her plans. When early in the play Julia tears Proteus' letter to her in impetuous anger toward Lucetta, it seems like that could be foreshadowing the fact that, unbeknownst to her, Proteus' word is worthless (Silvia later in the play also tears up a letter from Proteus, though she does so knowing full well that Proteus' oaths are pretty much the opposite of oracular). Valentine becomes the leader of the gang of outlaws in large part because of his false claims to have been banished because he killed a man. The Duke's pronouncements are incredibly fickle, as he banishes Valentine, cursing him for an overreaching Phaeton, but at the end of the play will hastily unbanish not only Valentine (in addition to the three outlaws, at least one of whom has killed a man, and whose crimes its unclear the Duke is ever aware of when he welcomes them back to Milan) and praise this man who (albeit unbeknownst to him) moments before had offered his (the Duke's) daughter to the man who had just attempted to rape her as a man (meaning Valentine) worthy to marry that selfsame daughter. Proteus proves his words of love to Silvia are as worthless as those to Julia as he discards them in favor of forcing her to submit to his desires, telling her just before the attempted rape "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 arms' end/And love you 'gainst the nature of love - force ye." And although one could argue that Proteus' apology must have been incredibly sincere to appease Valentine, if one interprets the final scene as a heightening of the male friendship trope to farcically absurd levels, then there are no words in the play more worthless than the inane conversation between two 16th Century "bros" who view a brief apology as sufficient to warrant forgiveness for an attempted rape and who think that the best way to reciprocate renewed friendship is to offer the target of said rape to the attempted rapist. Additionally, just about the closest to a satisfactory rationale to me for why Silvia doesn't speak at all in the play after the attempted rape is that she's just realized that people's words in the play have become worthless, and that nothing that anyone says through the rest of the play will be utterly meaningless, thus making saying nothing a far more substantive statement than anything she could actually say (and in an adaptation of the play that I watched on Youtube, Silvia is the last character to exit the stage in the final scene, silently conveying her resigned exasperation with the whole proceedings through a look to the audience before following the rest of the characters offstage, which seemed a more sincere commentary than any resolution in the play reached by discussion between Proteus, Valentine, and the Duke). On the other hand, I feel like a lot of this could be me overthinking the not-terribly profound idea that sometimes in books some characters are liars, and the plot is propelled in part by the fact that some characters believe those lies. So yeah, I mostly have no clue what the fuck I'm talking about.
And to cap off my shitty analysis of this comedy, I guess I should probably mention a few of the things that I found funny in the play, since, as I just mentioned earlier in the sentence, it is one of Shakespeare's comedies. I enjoyed the first scene between Valentine and Silvia, in which Silvia gives a letter which she had requested Valentine write for her to a man she harbored feelings for back to Valentine himself, and all but tells Valentine that she had him write himself love letters from her, but Valentine remains oblivious to this fact until his servant Speed points it out to him. I also liked what I interpreted to be the kinda charming haplessness of the banished gentlemen outlaws, whom I never really thought of as particularly threatening figures. There was also the moment where, in a conversation between Proteus and Silvia, after Proteus falsely claims that Julia has died, and this is why he no longer feels obligated to be faithful to her, and after Silvia says that then he ought to be faithful to Valentine, his friend, Proteus responds "I likewise hear that Valentine is dead," which I found to be a pretty hilariously pathetic response. Additionally, while I didn't necessarily follow the wordplay, with it's reliance on a familiarity on the 16th Century English lexicon, without the footnotes, I did laugh at Turio (who, consistent with his being a dull and uninteresting suitor to Silvia is comically anti-adept at wordplay) when, upon being told to next meet Proteus at a well, replies with the incredibly lame pun of "Farewell" (although again, I needed a footnote to point out to me that Turio probably means this as a pun).
I've also decided, in consideration of advice from people on this thread when I first announced my plans to undertake this whole project, to try and watch an adaptation of each play after I've read them. With The Two Gentlemen of Verona, that proved kinda tough, as I wasn't really sure if there were any film adaptations of it out there, so I ended up doing a Youtube search for the play and found two filmed stage adaptions uploaded. Both were pretty lofi recordings, so the audio quality was pretty poor at times, and neither seemed like a particularly big budget, prominent production (hence why I decided to watch both of them in case one of them was truly awful), but I definitely appreciated getting to see how people actually go about performing the material. I don't think I've ever seen any stage adaptation of any of Shakespeare's plays, and I'm honestly no great judge of acting skills or whatever, and I have little experience with watching stage adaptions of plays in general, so I'm fairly uncertain about how to go about judging these plays, especially as I wasn't going in expecting something on par with world-class theater companies adapting the play in either of these adaptations. But anyway, the first adaptation I watched was from 2007 by some group called GreenStage Shakespeare in Seattle. You can find the video here, if you're curious. I thought that for what was apparently a free production of the play by some group that I probably would never have heard of if I hadn't stumbled across it on Youtube unless I lived in Seattle, that it was pretty good. It was a pretty lighthearted adaptation, that while set in centuries past would occasionally eschew historical accuracy in favor of a more modern take on a line reading, and I feel that this mostly worked. The actors and actresses playing Valentine, Proteus, Silvia, and Julia were all pretty good, as was the actress who played Speed. Given that I expect a decent part of their audience wasn't going to be familiar with the play, or may not have read it in quite some time, they did a good job of reading their lines such that I feel even those who hadn't read the play would get what was going on, and would understand the wordplay that was going on, without needing to take time to parse out the archaic Shakespearean English. The actor playing Lance and the actress playing Lucetta weren't quite as good though, I didn't think, and probably my least favorite part of the play was the outlaw gentlemen talking like pirates, which was just annoying (I guess it makes sense that this would happen since I feel like 2007 was pretty much the height of the insufferable "pirates and ninjas" craze amongst the same types of people-who-feel-the-need-to-self-identify-as-nerds who would get really insufferable about zombies a couple of years later). But for the most part it was a pretty fun adaptation. If I were suddenly transported to Seattle in 2007 and I had the chance to go and see the play, I'd go and watch it and probably have a good time, as it seemed like most of the audience was. (This is also the adaptation that I mentioned above wherein Silvia exchanges an exasperated look with the audience at the end of the play before heading off stage.) The second adaptation I watched was from the Syracuse Shakespeare Festival (presumably a 2014 performance, as that's when the video, which I'll link here, was uploaded). It was decidedly not as good as the first adaptation I watched. The setting was The Old West, and the actors' fake accents were mostly kinda grating. Also, they just weren't as successful at conveying the meaning of what they were saying to the audience; I frequently found myself thinking things like "If I hadn't already read this pun, I'd have no idea what this guy was talking about and why it's supposed to be funny, regardless of body language and whatnot". And the audience didn't really seem to be into it either, and in fact one of the biggest reactions I heard from them was when they laughed in recognition of the fact that the actor playing the Duke was doing his lines in a passable John Wayne impression. And I don't think it's a coincidence that I felt the strongest performance was from the actor playing Valentine, the only actor who didn't seem to be putting on an accent.
This was probably way too long, so I apologize to anyone who actually made it this far, as this should have been way more concise. Anyway, I'm planning to read Titus Andronicus in a couple of weeks, and I hope to post my thoughts on it here sometime in February.
First off, here's a quick synopsis for anyone who read this a while ago and who might be a bit hazy on exactly what happened in the plays, as it's one of Shakespeare's early, lesser works. Anyway, our two titular gentlemen of Verona are Valentine and Proteus. These two young men are best of friends; at the play's outset they are parting as Valentine is set to depart for Milan as a sort of gentleman's education in the ways of the wider world, and he teases Proteus, who remains in Verona due to his love for the lady Julia. Unfortunately for Proteus and Julia's romance, Proteus' father is convinced that it would best suit his son's development as a gentleman to follow Valentine's example and head to Verona and attend the Duke there. In a final meeting with Julia before Proteus is to set sail for Milan, the two lovers get engaged, exchanging rings and a kiss. Meanwhile in Milan, Valentine has fallen in love with the lady Silvia, who reciprocates his sentiments, although Silvia's father the Duke does not know this, hoping that his daughter will marry the dull but wealthy Turio, whom Silvia does not care for. Now enter Proteus, who in addition to being reunited with his best friend, becomes immediately enamored of Silvia, and upon Valentine's confiding his intentions to elope with Silvia, decides that he will betray Valentine to the Duke and pursue Silvia for himself. Meanwhile, back in Verona, Julia takes it upon herself to travel to Milan in the disguise of a male page in order that she may be with Proteus. Proteus manages to betray Valentine to the Duke, who banishes Valentine from Milan for his social overreaching in setting his sights on his daughter. On Valentine's return to Verona he is waylaid by a gang of outlaws, who, upon learning that Valentine is a gentleman banished from Milan like they apparently are, decide to make him their leader. Back in Milan, Proteus decides to help Turio court Silvia as a means of being able to secretly court her himself. One night, Proteus accompanies Turio to the tower wherein Julia lives and attempts to woo her with music. After Turio leaves, a conversation between Silvia and Proteus makes it clear that Silvia despises Proteus for his betrayal of Valentine, but she agrees to give him a portrait of her in an attempt to get him to leave her alone. Julia, disguised as a page named Sebastian watches on, and learns that her betrothed is being untrue, but still being in love with Proteus, decides that she will enter into his service as "Sebastian". Proteus sends "Sebastian" to retrieve Silvia's portrait, and the two meet as Silvia is set to flee Milan to be with Valentine. The Duke, Turio, Proteus, and "Sebastian" all head after Silvia, each with their own motives. Silvia is captured by the outlaws, who are bringing her to Valentine (who watches the proceedings out of sight) when Proteus scares off the captors, and proceeds to exaggerate the valor of his "rescue". When Silvia still remains disgusted by Proteus, the latter becomes impatient and attempts to rape her. Valentine now enters, stops the rape, and yells at Proteus a bit. Proteus offers a five-line apology, which is apparently so convincing to Valentine that he not only forgives his friend, but actually tells Proteus that he can have Silvia if he likes. This leads to Julia revealing herself, and she and Proteus make up and partner off again. Now the Duke and Turio show up and when Turio concedes Silvia to Valentine upon the latter's threat to fight him for her, the Duke realizes that Valentine is a better suitor to Silvia, and unbanishes Valentine and the outlaws. Speed, Lance (who has a dog named Crab with deadpan comedic sensibilities), and Lucetta, the servants, respectively, of Valentine, Proteus, and Julia aren't critical to a synopsis of the plot but get quite a bit to do of comic and thematic significance to the play. (And oh shit, this was not nearly as brief a synopsis as I was hoping it would be, sorry about that, everyone).
As for what I thought of the play, well, first off I guess I should start with my thoughts on that ending, which is apparently one of the most controversial scenes in all of Shakespeare. And it's definitely really fucked up; not only is Valentine's easy forgiveness of Proteus super-troubling, but the sloppily-constructed happy ending is made all the creepier by the fact that Silvia gets no lines after an "O heaven!" in reaction to Proteus' attack. Also stupid is the fact that the Duke will apparently ultimately be angrier with Turio for his cowardice than with Proteus for attempting to rape his daughter. However, the introduction I read to the version of the play that I read (the Third Edition Arden Shakespeare, introduction by William C. Carroll), devoted quite a few pages to attempting to put the ending into its socio-historical context, and while I still find what Shakespeare is asserted to have been trying to do far from entirely successful, at least I'm no longer disgusted by the final scene and utterly baffled that as skilled an author of Shakespeare could have found it a remotely satisfying conclusion. I'm massively oversimplifying this, possibly to the point of misrepresenting some of the points being made, but the intro gave some insight into the literature on male friendship that existed at the time, particularly the idea of a man's best friend as being almost a second self, and the idea that these friendships in fiction frequently involve some sort of conflict between the friends both falling in love with the same woman. One important source material for The Two Gentlemen of Verona was the play Titus and Gissipus, in which the the titular best friends are both in love with the same woman, Sophronia, and while Gissipus is to marry her, Titus fears that he will die if he cannot be with her, so he and Gissipus arrange things such that Titus will be able to take his friend's place in Gissipus and Sophronia's bed on the night of their wedding, unbeknownst to Sophronia. So I guess if Valentine's offer of Silvia is meant to be some sort of farcical exaggeration of this kind of ludicrous and rather misogynistic manifestation of the ideal of male friendship, or if at the very least Shakespeare was trying to present this kind of stuff in a somewhat ambivalent fashion, and the way that Silvia's thoughts on what has happened aren't taken into account at all in the resolution of the play's conflicts are meant as an at least somewhat critical reflection of a misogynistic society that saw women as little better than property, then at least I can see where he's coming from. If this is meant in some way as a critique as what I'm imagining as sort of like a 16th Century "bros before hoes" mindset, then I still don't think the final scene makes for a very successful conclusion to the play, and it doesn't remove all problematic elements from the scene, but it does make it a lot less infuriating to me. (Also, I feel like this whole post in general is pretty unfocused, this paragraph in particular, so I'm sorry if this came across as incoherently scattershot rambling.)
There was some stuff in the play that I thought was pretty cool, too, though. For example, there's an early example of Shakepeare's metadramatic plays-within-plays kind of stuff, when Julia-as-Sebastian meets Silvia, and when Silvia is talking with "Sebastian" about Julia and Silvia asks how tall Julia is, "Sebastian" responds with "About my stature; for at Pentecost/When all our pageants of delight were played/Our youth got me to play the woman's part/And I was trimmed in Madam Julia's gown/Which served me as fit, by all men's judgements/As if the garment had been made for me/Therefore I know she is about my height/And at that time I made her weep a-good/For I did play a lamentable part/Madam, 'twas Ariadne, passioning/For Theseus' perjury and unjust flight/Which I so lively acted with my tears/That my poor mistress, moved therewithal/Wept bitterly; and would I might be dead/If I in thought felt not her very sorrow." Which I at first would have thought was just pretty cool, including a passing reference to a play within the play about another woman abandoned by her lover, but, as a footnote and a couple of pages of the introduction pointed out, it's considerably more layered than that, as a boy actor would have been dressed up as a woman to play Julia in the play, who in turn dresses up as a boy, who in turn pretends to have dressed as a woman in another play, and that there's some pretty insightful and clever commentary here about the interplay between between the emotions caused by events in real life and fiction's ability to inspire those same emotions (in that Julia is said to have been brought to tears by the acted tears of a character who has experienced the same kind of betrayal which Julia has been exposed to, and that Julia herself is just a character played by an actor whose distress at her betrayal is meant to inspire sympathy in the play's real-world audience). And while it's certainly not as nuanced a metafictional exploration as, say A Midsummer Night's Dream, it was still one of my favorite moments in the play.
Another interesting I guess sort of theme that I noticed a lot (probably mostly informed by the introduction and footnotes of the edition I was reading), was the meaninglessness and inconstancy that the characters' words have in the play, and those same characters' frequent inability to recognize this. At one point early in the play, when Julia and Proteus meet for the last time before the latter's departure for Verona, Julia leaves without a word after Proteus bids her farewell, and Proteus remarks "What, gone without a word?/Ay, so true love should do: it cannot speak/For truth hath better deeds than words to grace it." It's a quote in light of which you can sort of view the words and actions of almost everyone in the play. Julia's misplaced trust in Proteus as she plots to travel to Milan is clearly tied to trust in his words, as she says "His words are bonds, his oaths are oracles" in response to her maid Lucetta's misgivings about her plans. When early in the play Julia tears Proteus' letter to her in impetuous anger toward Lucetta, it seems like that could be foreshadowing the fact that, unbeknownst to her, Proteus' word is worthless (Silvia later in the play also tears up a letter from Proteus, though she does so knowing full well that Proteus' oaths are pretty much the opposite of oracular). Valentine becomes the leader of the gang of outlaws in large part because of his false claims to have been banished because he killed a man. The Duke's pronouncements are incredibly fickle, as he banishes Valentine, cursing him for an overreaching Phaeton, but at the end of the play will hastily unbanish not only Valentine (in addition to the three outlaws, at least one of whom has killed a man, and whose crimes its unclear the Duke is ever aware of when he welcomes them back to Milan) and praise this man who (albeit unbeknownst to him) moments before had offered his (the Duke's) daughter to the man who had just attempted to rape her as a man (meaning Valentine) worthy to marry that selfsame daughter. Proteus proves his words of love to Silvia are as worthless as those to Julia as he discards them in favor of forcing her to submit to his desires, telling her just before the attempted rape "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 arms' end/And love you 'gainst the nature of love - force ye." And although one could argue that Proteus' apology must have been incredibly sincere to appease Valentine, if one interprets the final scene as a heightening of the male friendship trope to farcically absurd levels, then there are no words in the play more worthless than the inane conversation between two 16th Century "bros" who view a brief apology as sufficient to warrant forgiveness for an attempted rape and who think that the best way to reciprocate renewed friendship is to offer the target of said rape to the attempted rapist. Additionally, just about the closest to a satisfactory rationale to me for why Silvia doesn't speak at all in the play after the attempted rape is that she's just realized that people's words in the play have become worthless, and that nothing that anyone says through the rest of the play will be utterly meaningless, thus making saying nothing a far more substantive statement than anything she could actually say (and in an adaptation of the play that I watched on Youtube, Silvia is the last character to exit the stage in the final scene, silently conveying her resigned exasperation with the whole proceedings through a look to the audience before following the rest of the characters offstage, which seemed a more sincere commentary than any resolution in the play reached by discussion between Proteus, Valentine, and the Duke). On the other hand, I feel like a lot of this could be me overthinking the not-terribly profound idea that sometimes in books some characters are liars, and the plot is propelled in part by the fact that some characters believe those lies. So yeah, I mostly have no clue what the fuck I'm talking about.
And to cap off my shitty analysis of this comedy, I guess I should probably mention a few of the things that I found funny in the play, since, as I just mentioned earlier in the sentence, it is one of Shakespeare's comedies. I enjoyed the first scene between Valentine and Silvia, in which Silvia gives a letter which she had requested Valentine write for her to a man she harbored feelings for back to Valentine himself, and all but tells Valentine that she had him write himself love letters from her, but Valentine remains oblivious to this fact until his servant Speed points it out to him. I also liked what I interpreted to be the kinda charming haplessness of the banished gentlemen outlaws, whom I never really thought of as particularly threatening figures. There was also the moment where, in a conversation between Proteus and Silvia, after Proteus falsely claims that Julia has died, and this is why he no longer feels obligated to be faithful to her, and after Silvia says that then he ought to be faithful to Valentine, his friend, Proteus responds "I likewise hear that Valentine is dead," which I found to be a pretty hilariously pathetic response. Additionally, while I didn't necessarily follow the wordplay, with it's reliance on a familiarity on the 16th Century English lexicon, without the footnotes, I did laugh at Turio (who, consistent with his being a dull and uninteresting suitor to Silvia is comically anti-adept at wordplay) when, upon being told to next meet Proteus at a well, replies with the incredibly lame pun of "Farewell" (although again, I needed a footnote to point out to me that Turio probably means this as a pun).
I've also decided, in consideration of advice from people on this thread when I first announced my plans to undertake this whole project, to try and watch an adaptation of each play after I've read them. With The Two Gentlemen of Verona, that proved kinda tough, as I wasn't really sure if there were any film adaptations of it out there, so I ended up doing a Youtube search for the play and found two filmed stage adaptions uploaded. Both were pretty lofi recordings, so the audio quality was pretty poor at times, and neither seemed like a particularly big budget, prominent production (hence why I decided to watch both of them in case one of them was truly awful), but I definitely appreciated getting to see how people actually go about performing the material. I don't think I've ever seen any stage adaptation of any of Shakespeare's plays, and I'm honestly no great judge of acting skills or whatever, and I have little experience with watching stage adaptions of plays in general, so I'm fairly uncertain about how to go about judging these plays, especially as I wasn't going in expecting something on par with world-class theater companies adapting the play in either of these adaptations. But anyway, the first adaptation I watched was from 2007 by some group called GreenStage Shakespeare in Seattle. You can find the video here, if you're curious. I thought that for what was apparently a free production of the play by some group that I probably would never have heard of if I hadn't stumbled across it on Youtube unless I lived in Seattle, that it was pretty good. It was a pretty lighthearted adaptation, that while set in centuries past would occasionally eschew historical accuracy in favor of a more modern take on a line reading, and I feel that this mostly worked. The actors and actresses playing Valentine, Proteus, Silvia, and Julia were all pretty good, as was the actress who played Speed. Given that I expect a decent part of their audience wasn't going to be familiar with the play, or may not have read it in quite some time, they did a good job of reading their lines such that I feel even those who hadn't read the play would get what was going on, and would understand the wordplay that was going on, without needing to take time to parse out the archaic Shakespearean English. The actor playing Lance and the actress playing Lucetta weren't quite as good though, I didn't think, and probably my least favorite part of the play was the outlaw gentlemen talking like pirates, which was just annoying (I guess it makes sense that this would happen since I feel like 2007 was pretty much the height of the insufferable "pirates and ninjas" craze amongst the same types of people-who-feel-the-need-to-self-identify-as-nerds who would get really insufferable about zombies a couple of years later). But for the most part it was a pretty fun adaptation. If I were suddenly transported to Seattle in 2007 and I had the chance to go and see the play, I'd go and watch it and probably have a good time, as it seemed like most of the audience was. (This is also the adaptation that I mentioned above wherein Silvia exchanges an exasperated look with the audience at the end of the play before heading off stage.) The second adaptation I watched was from the Syracuse Shakespeare Festival (presumably a 2014 performance, as that's when the video, which I'll link here, was uploaded). It was decidedly not as good as the first adaptation I watched. The setting was The Old West, and the actors' fake accents were mostly kinda grating. Also, they just weren't as successful at conveying the meaning of what they were saying to the audience; I frequently found myself thinking things like "If I hadn't already read this pun, I'd have no idea what this guy was talking about and why it's supposed to be funny, regardless of body language and whatnot". And the audience didn't really seem to be into it either, and in fact one of the biggest reactions I heard from them was when they laughed in recognition of the fact that the actor playing the Duke was doing his lines in a passable John Wayne impression. And I don't think it's a coincidence that I felt the strongest performance was from the actor playing Valentine, the only actor who didn't seem to be putting on an accent.
This was probably way too long, so I apologize to anyone who actually made it this far, as this should have been way more concise. Anyway, I'm planning to read Titus Andronicus in a couple of weeks, and I hope to post my thoughts on it here sometime in February.
