10 Tough Questions about The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Answer: Valentine and Proteus

It is tempting to say that only one of the two - Valentine - is truly a "gentleman" (at least in today's terms) and that his friend, the mercurial and aptly-named Proteus, behaves badly almost from start to finish. Andrew Dickson - always a good critic to turn to when looking for ways into Shakespeare - describes the two young men as "youthful best friends at an emotional crossroads", who find themselves, as the story unfolds, irresistibly attracted to the same woman.

Dickson calls the play "a comedy about what it feels like to be young" - and although it is the men who are dignified in the title, the two young women in the main story are covered by this description too. The well-bred women in Shakespeare's comedies are usually more admirable than the men: it scarcely feels as though the Bard is flattering women in this respect, for partly he is following a convention of romantic comedy and partly, perhaps, registering his own perception that well-brought-up young women tend to have a much more mature attitude to life than their male counterparts.

In writing of Julia, Edward Dowden in the nineteenth century saluted Shakespeare's first assay into recording "the tender and passionate history of a woman's heart", and Julia always expresses herself with great conviction: "Didst thou but know the inly touch of love,/Thou would'st as soon go kindle fire with snow/As seek to quench the fire of love with words," she says to her waiting-woman.

Answer: a dog

No quiz on this play would be complete without paying tribute to what is certainly the most demanding non-speaking role in the entire Shakespearean canon - that of Crab, the irrepressible canine companion of Proteus's clownish servant Lance (or Launce) - "this miserable cur", Lance calls him in affectionate exasperation. If we can believe the owner's account, he has actually on one occasion allowed himself to be whipped for his dog's misdemeanours under the Duke's table, and indeed often finds himself the worse-off dog of the two.

Nothing is known, unfortunately, of Shakespeare's original Crab, but it was surely a brilliant wheeze of the young apprentice playwright to introduce, into what may have been his first work for the theatre, such a singular and memorable gimmick. (Lance, by the way, drops a hint or two during the course of the play about the approximate size of his dog, but these have usually been happily ignored in theatrical productions, in which various Crabs have ranged in appearance - in the words of Norman Sanders, the editor of my New Penguin edition of the play - "from a small wretched animal to something resembling the Hound of the Baskervilles".)

Answer: he is in love with Julia

The mutual love between Julia and Proteus is very convincingly portrayed, down to Julia's little tricks and feignings which do not deceive either herself or her maid, Lucetta. Having dramatically torn up a love-letter from Proteus in front of her maid, she then - as soon as she is alone - kisses the torn pieces and tries to put them together again. Her feelings for Proteus are soon enough admitted to him, but unfortunately for the loving pair, Proteus is then ordered by his father to leave his love and follow Valentine to Milan. He expresses his frustration in quintessentially naive early Shakespearean verse:

"O 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."

Proteus, a fascinating sketch of an unstable and unreliable hero whose weaknesses are potentially tragic, is given more soliloquy time than anyone else in this play, and also much of its finest poetry:

"For Orpheus' lute was strung with poets' sinews,
Whose golden touch could soften steel and stones,
Make tigers tame, and huge leviathans
Forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sounds."

The young Shakespeare's debt to the lyrical blank verse of Christopher Marlowe's plays is obvious in passages like this.

Answer: "metamorphosed with a mistress"

"Why, how know you that I am in love?" demands Valentine. "Marry," replies Speed, "first, you have learned, like Sir Proteus, to wreath your arms like a malcontent; to relish a love-song, like a robin redbreast; to walk along like one that had the pestilence; to sigh, like a schoolboy that had lost his ABC; to weep, like a young wench that had buried her grandam; to fast, like one that takes diet; to watch, like one that fears robbing...you are metamorphosed with a mistress, that when I look on you I can hardly think you my master." (Speed is unconsciously echoing Proteus in the play's first scene: "Thou, Julia, thou hast metamorphosed me,/Made me neglect my studies, lose my time,/War with good counsel, set the world at naught." But there is surely something beautiful in Valentine's naive and idealistic love ("Except I be by Silvia in the night/There is no music in the nightingale", and so on) that Speed's cynicism cannot reach.

The most wonderful aspect of Valentine's love, which he cannot at first believe, is that it is fully reciprocated. Silvia plays him a pretty trick in order to show him this by first asking him to write her a love-letter to the man she secretly favours, and then presenting this letter back to its author. The sky darkens, however, when Proteus arrives, for - putting thoughts of Julia out of his mind - he immediately covets Silvia for himself, and starts to plot against his friend in order to win her.

Answer: by throwing a rope-ladder up to her window

Valentine's plan is thwarted by the treacherous Proteus, who immediately reveals it to the Duke, with the result that poor Valentine is banished from Milan, with death awaiting him if he does not leave. Having gained the Duke's trust, Proteus is then asked by him to speak to Silvia in order to put in a word for a foolish but wealthy suitor called Thurio, who has the Duke's support. Proteus agrees, but of course with no intention of praising the stolid, slow-witted Thurio: he wants to win Silvia for himself. Having already been "false to Valentine," as he admits to himself, he must now "be as unjust to Thurio."

Answer: follow her lover to Milan disguised as a page

Julia is the first of many Shakespearean heroines who disguise themselves as young men in order to further their aims in life. When she arrives in Milan, calling herself Sebastian, she quickly finds out what Proteus is up to, and how quickly he has lost interest in her - "It is the lesser blot, modesty finds,/Women to change their shapes than men their minds," as she later remarks - but with great calmness and resolution she allows herself (unrecognised by Proteus, of course) to be employed as her former lover's letter-bearer to Silvia.

This enables the two young women to establish a warm friendship with each other, since Silvia still loves Valentine and wants nothing to do with Proteus. (This does not discourage him, however: "Yet, spaniel-like," as he soliloquises, "the more she spurns my love/The more it grows and fawneth on her still.")

Answer: he becomes leader of the outlaw gang

The outlaws are impressed by Valentine's aristocratic bearing and by the convincing lie he tells them about having been banished from Milan for killing a man in a fair fight. It has to be said that the scenes involving this troupe of renegades scarcely show Shakespeare at his most inspired, but since this play is, after all, a comedy, the lack of originality in the writing can arguably be turned to advantage by some judicious overacting and audience-pleasing on the part of these improbable and implausible brigands.

It is a good opportunity for comic relief before the more serious matter of the main love plot returns.

Answer: we have no idea

The three English composers listed were all small boys around 1590, when the play was written - although some twenty years later Robert Johnson collaborated musically with Shakespeare to great creative effect in "Cymbeline" and "The Tempest". The original music to "Who is Silvia?" has, like that of various other Shakespearean songs, been lost - a victim, no doubt, of the neglect this play seems to have fallen into during Shakespeare's lifetime and afterwards. Franz Schubert famously set a German translation of the words to music in the early 1800s, and the original English words actually fit his setting delightfully. Some might think that the classical Viennese idiom is scarcely suitable for Shakespeare in general, but anyone who listens to what the renowned King's Singers from Cambridge have done with Schubert's version (it is easy to find on youtube) should be able to imagine how this kind of arrangement could go with a zing in many a performance of the play.

The lyrics of "Who is Silvia?" are so lovely that they surely become part of the meaning of this play, and should certainly be regarded as one of the principal highlights of any self-respecting production. They are sung on behalf of the foolish suitor Thurio, but I see them as a kind of eternal justification for the idealistic, youthful romantic longings of Valentine:

"Then to Silvia let us sing
That Silvia is excelling;
She excels each mortal thing
Upon the dull earth dwelling.
To her let us garlands bring."

Artificial, yes, but resonating with romantic idealism. The medieval courtly traditions of chivalry towards high-born women are evidently somewhere behind this feeling, and certain commentators, taking their cue from H.B.Charlton's book "Shakespearian Comedy" (1930), have suggested that Shakespeare is satirising the unreality of such traditions throughout this play, even in the song. Perhaps, but I would prefer to think that - even if, as seems unlikely, the young playwright did set out with purely satirical intentions - there was so much else going on in his head as he was writing the play that much of the force of the satire is lost.

Answer: he tries to rape her

It is an electric moment in the theatre, shocking even when one knows it is coming and can appreciate how Shakespeare has been subtly leading up to it in the preceding action. (One suddenly remembers with a start that this young playwright wrote the sexually cruel and sadistic tragedy "Titus Andronicus", too.) Hidden from the others on stage, Valentine - now a Robin Hood figure in his role of King of the Outlaws - witnesses his frightened mistress fiercely rejecting the advances of the importunate Proteus, who ends by announcing "I'll woo you like a soldier at arms' end,/And love you 'gainst the nature of love - force ye." "O heaven!" cries Silvia, and Valentine has his cue to rush forward and rescue his lady from her previous rescuer.

Answer: his unconvincing portrayal of women characters

Most commentators would agree that the young playwright's sensitive portrayal of all three female characters in this play is both psychologically satisfying and emotionally convincing. It is pleasant to speculate that Shakespeare's trained boy actors, especially the one who played Julia, must hugely have relished the opportunity to bring these women's characters to vibrant life on the stage.

The Bard's grasp of European geography, on the other hand - not for the last time in his writing career - is exposed as pitifully weak when Valentine, for example, travels from Verona to Milan by ship! A number of directors have also noticed over the years that (even though the play has the shortest of all Shakespearean cast lists) the young author's perceived inexperience in stagecraft is still evidenced, in scenes involving more than four actors, by a lack of adequate distribution of lines, so that some key characters are at times left standing about on stage for long periods with nothing to say.

The most serious and potentially damaging criticism of this play, however, revolves around Valentine's notorious line to Proteus as the final dénouement unfolds: "All that was mine in Silvia I give thee." This has traditionally been interpreted as the speaker's relinquishment, in the spirit of male friendship, of the woman he loves to the man who has just a few minutes before tried to violate her honour. (George Eliot, for one, expressed "disgust" at this line. "It's hard to understand what Shakespeare means us to think here," comments Andrew Dickson, with admirable understatement.) It is possible, though, that the words do not mean exactly what they seem to mean - even though there is support for this meaning in two of Shakespeare's sources for the play - and can be got round to some extent, since both Silvia and Julia end up with the future husbands they have been in love with all along. We are not perhaps supposed to think too hard about this while watching a typically lightning-fast Shakespearean performance, whereas when we read the play we can't help but feel that the dastardly Proteus has been let off much too lightly.