The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Acts 4 and 5

Or, “Let go that rude uncivil touch”

Everything has gone to hell. Three acts of rising tension, and then Shakespeare decides to just blow it up real good.

I’d been thinking about all these clever items to discuss in Act 4, but I just can’t now. This play ends in a bizarre and hideous fashion. Yes, hideous. And the more I think about it, the worse it gets.

Act 4 veers immediately into the strange, though it holds off on the offensiveness at first. Valentine, on the lam from Padua, runs into a cadre of outlaws. Is our protagonist in peril amongst these fearsome brigands? Of course not! He tells them quite calmly that he has nothing worth stealing, having been recently banished, and furthermore claims to have been banished for having killed a man.

The outlaws respond by making him their leader.

FIRST OUTLAW
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 much want —
SECOND OUTLAW
Indeed because you are a banish’d man,
Therefore, above the rest, we parley to you:
Are you content to be our general?
To make a virtue of necessity
And live as we do in this wilderness?
THIRD OUTLAW
What say’st thou? wilt thou be of our consort?
Say “ay” and be the captain of us all:
We’ll do thee homage and be rul’d by thee,
Love thee as our commander and our king.

I wish I’d known this trick the day I was jumped on the subway fifteen years ago. “Hey fellas, I may look like a dude you want to punch in the face multiple times, but I’m good-looking, I killed a guy once, and I claim to be a linguist; THUS I AM YOUR KING.”

These outlaws really give Valentine the hard sell, too. Before he even says yes, Valentine is offered the full disposition of the outlaws’ entire cache of treasures. Padua deserves a better class of criminal.

The rest of Act 4 proceeds apace. Not for one moment does Sylvia even entertain the notion of returning Proteus’ favors. It’s comforting to see this creepy jerk treated like an obviously creepy jerk.

PROTEUS
When I protest true loyalty to her,
She twits me with my falsehood to my friend;
When to her beauty I commend my vows,
She bids me think how I have been forsworn
In breaking faith with Julia whom I lov’d;

Even worse, Proteus has taken on a new page named Sebastian, and Sebastian is JULIA IN DISGUISE! And he tasks him (her) to send a gift to Sylvia, and the gift is THE RING WITH WHICH HE PROPOSED TO JULIA BACK IN VERONA! Proteus keeps getting more horrible with every scene.

Sylvia, fed up with both Sir Thurio, her doofus suitor, and Proteus, the entitled douchebag who refuses to take no for an answer, decides to flee Padua in search of Valentine. This may be the wisest decision that any character makes in the entire play. She does so with the aid of good Sir Eglamour, a character first introduced in Act 4, Scene 3, and described thus:

SYLVIA
O Eglamour, thou art a gentleman —
Think not I flatter, for I swear I do not —
Valiant, wise, remorseful, well accomplished;

I’m fairly certain Sir Eglamour is gay. He is honorable and brave, and Sylvia clearly believes she would be completely safe alone in the woods with him. Plus, his name is mostly “glamour”. He’ll be played by David Hyde Pierce.

Act 5 is a blur. Sylvia and Eglamour flee to the woods to find Valentine, with Proteus, Thurio, and the Emperduke in hot pursuit. How do the men know where to look for the runaways? Funny you should ask…

DUKE
Why then
She’s fled unto that peasant Valentine;
And Eglamour is in her company.
’Tis true; for Friar Laurence met them both,
As he in penance wander’d through the forest;

A friar named Laurence who lives in the woods between Verona and Padua? Could this be the same Friar Lawrence (note the “w” swapped for “u”) who later marries Romeo and Juliet? Or does this play perhaps take place soon after the events of R&J, and the friar is wandering in penance for his role in the Montague/Capulet double suicide? Can a case be made for an extended fictional universe containing all the characters and plots from the complete works of Shakespeare? I think I may now have a secondary goal for this blog.

Anyhow, Sylvia is captured by the very same outlaws who recently proclaimed Valentine as their king, and is immediately rescued by Proteus and his cross-dressed page. Unbeknownst to the three of them, Valentine is hiding nearby, spying upon their conversation.

And here is where the floor drops out. Proteus again presses his case for Sylvia’s love, saying that his rescuing her owes him at least a smile. Isn’t that just like a guy? “Smile for me, lady. You owe me that much.” Sylvia is having none of it.

SYLVIA
Had I been seized by a hungry lion,
I would have been a breakfast to the beast
Rather than have false Proteus rescue me.

I’m starting to really like this girl.

Which is what makes what happens next so terrible. He demands her love. She refuses again. And then…

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.
SYLVIA
O heaven!
PROTEUS
I’ll force thee yield to my desire.

Let’s spare a moment here to take stock.

Years ago there was a feminist political blog named Pandagon. I had never really explicitly considered myself a “feminist” or thought much about what the concept of “feminism” truly meant until I encountered Pandagon. Reading and thinking about feminism, first inspired by the writing on that blog, ultimately made me a better person, and for that, I will always be grateful. (Patriarchy hurts men, too, after all.)

The main writer there was a woman named Amanda Marcotte, who currently writes at Salon, and whose writing I heartily recommend. Though I’m not sure if it was she who invented the term, it was definitely she who introduced me to the term “Nice Guy (tm)”. A “Nice Guy (tm)” is a guy who acts nicely towards a woman he is attracted to in the hopes that she will eventually have sex with him. When it turns out that she isn’t attracted to him in that way, he gets angry and rants about the “friend zone”, or that “chicks dig jerks”, because it turns out he isn’t actually a nice guy — he’s just a guy who uses niceness as a strategy to get women, as if simply “not being awful” weren’t literally the lowest possible bar to clear. (See here for more.)

Proteus is a Nice Guy (tm). And he’s the villain, so that makes this play almost a kind of feminist statement.

That is, until the very next few lines.

Valentine, remember, is hiding in the woods nearby. Overhearing the attempted rape of his fiancee by his erstwhile best friend, he leaps into action. Forgive the extended quote here, but this needs to be seen in whole to be believed.

VALENTINE
Proteus,
I am sorry I must never trust thee more,
But count the world a stranger for thy sake.
The private wound is deepest: O time most accurst!
‘Most all foes that a friend should be the worst!
PROTEUS
My shame and guilt confounds me.
Forgive me, Valentine; if hearty sorrow
Be a sufficient ransom for offense,
I tender’t here: I do as truly suffer
As e’er I did commit.
VALENTINE
Then I am paid;
And once again receive thee honest.
Who by repentance is not satisfied
Is nor of heaven nor earth, for these are pleas’d;
By penitence th’ Eternal’s wrath’s appeas’d:
And that my love may appear plain and free,
All that was mine in Silvia I give thee.

AAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!

Proteus tries to rape Sylvia. Valentine stops him. Proteus apologizes to Valentine, but NOT TO SYLVIA. Valentine accepts the apology without pause and OFFERS SYLVIA TO PROTEUS as proof of his forgiveness.

Then Sebastian cries out and reveals herself as Julia in disguise, at which point Proteus instantly casts off his love for Sylvia and determines to love Julia again. Valentine suggests the two be married, and they both agree. Lucky Julia, to be finally wedded to the unfaithful rapist she’s always wanted!

The Emperduke arrives and sees that Valentine is now king of the outlaws, which impresses him, for some reason. In fact, he is impressed enough that he relents in the face of Valentine’s love for his daughter.

DUKE
Now, by the honor of my ancestry,
I do applaud thy spirit, Valentine,
And think thee worthy of an empress’ love.
…
Take thou thy Sylvia, for thou hast deserv’d her.

Sylvia, meanwhile, has not one single line for the remainder of the play. After her attempted rape, even as she is offered as a prize to Proteus by Valentine and as a bride to Valentine by the Emperduke, she is utterly silent.

This is what we call “rape culture”, in a nutshell.

I don’t want to trivialize the Stanford rape case by bringing it into my silly little blog (though if you haven’t read the victim’s heartbreakingly brave statement at sentencing, you really must) but that’s all I can think about after reading the end of “The Two Gentlemen of Verona”. I wish a world where a woman’s consent is barely worth consideration, where a violent rapist gets absolution from other men after only the most cursory of apologies, could be safely consigned to fiction, but sadly, no. That “Two Gentlemen” is a comedy only makes things worse.

I can’t wait to get started on the next play: “The Taming of the Shrew”.

Ugh.