Botticelli Boy Band: The Two Gentlemen of Verona
This is (probably) where it all begins for William Shakespeare, newly arrived in London in the late 1580s, a young man in his mid-20s from a small provincial town who has sought out something more, something bigger. He is already married (to Anne Hathaway, but not this one), but has left his wife back in Stratford. He knows he has a facility for language and this is where he can make his mark. He is familiar with players; his father had been chamberlain in Stratford and had the responsibility of paying the fees to visiting troupes of actors, such as the Queen’s Players and the Earl of Worcester’s Men. Maybe this can be a career for him.
Anthony Burgess, in his breezy biography of Shakespeare, describes London as an “overgrown village” in Elizabethan times:
The streets were narrow, cobbled, slippery with the slime of refuse. Houses were crammed together, and there were a lot of furtive alleys. Chamberpots, or jordans, were emptied out of windows. There was no drainage. Fleet ditch stank to make a man throw up his gorge…. It was a city of loud noises — hooves and raw coach-wheels on the cobbles, the yells of traders, the brawling of apprentices, scuffles to keep the wall and not be thrown into the oozy kennel. Even normal conversation must have been loud, since everybody was, by our standards, tipsy. Nobody drank water, and tea had not yet come in. Ale was the standard tipple, and it was strong. Ale for breakfast was a good means of starting the day in euphoria or truculence. Ale for dinner refocillated the wasted tissues of the morning. Ale for supper ensured a heavy snoring repose. The better sort drank wine, which promoted good fellowship and led to swordfights. It was not what we could call a sober city.
So, into this smelly, noisy, drunken place walks William Shakespeare, and he had some people to entertain. He decides that a play about Italians would be just the thing. The Italians are known for their passionate ways, and there was that fellow Petrarch who had written all those short poems called “sonnets” to a woman called Laura that he was apparently madly in love with. Something set in Italy, then. He’s heard about this place called Verona, not too far from Milan. That’ll do. And the plot can revolve around love. And there should be a role for the clown, and he can throw a dog in there as well.
This wasn’t quite my first encounter with The Two Gentlemen of Verona. I have a collection of Tales from Shakespeare, written by brother and sister team Charles and Mary Lamb in the early 19th Century. They were written for children, transforming the plays into easily digestible prose stories. I’ve read some of them to my son and he quite enjoys them, even though the plots are surely not the most interesting aspects of Shakespeare’s plays. They’re frequently ridiculous, cobbled together from different sources and when you read the Lamb versions you’re often left wondering why on earth people thought this Shakespeare guy was worth paying any attention to. It’s the language and the characterisation that bring the plays to life and even though the Lambs try to incorporate Shakespeare’s phrases where possible it’s just not the same. It’s like trying to appreciate Shakespeare’s sonnets by putting them through Google Translate into several different languages before coming back to English. Like Sonnet 18 via Spanish, Vietnamese, Turkish and Albanian:
I compare thee to a summer’s day?
You most beautiful and gentle:
Rough winds do shake the Darling Buds of May
And summer’s lease all too brief history;
Never too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often his skin yellow dimm’d;
Fairs and exhibitions in every moment sometimes reduced
Chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But eternal summer shall not fade me,
What do you get hold ow’st this exhibition;
Shade wander’st his death nothing to brag about,
When you grow’st time with endless stream:
For as long as men can breathe or eyes, as you can see,
Long and it gives you life.
It’s not quite right even if you can detect elements of the original there. And that was how I first encountered the play. I wasn’t much taken with it in the Lamb version.
I was quite pleased to find, then, that the BBC version of the play was pretty enjoyable. It was one of the later plays to be produced, broadcast in December 1983 as part of series 6 (of 7) and was directed by Don Taylor. The two lead actors, Tyler Butterworth as Proteus and John Hudson as Valentine, look like they’ve escaped from a boy band, although the hairstyles would have them in the Partridge Family rather than One Direction.
The slightly wobbly looking set features an excess of gold and silver paint and was evidently inspired by Botticelli.
The story, such as it is, centres on Proteus and Valentine, best buddies who live in Verona. Valentine is keen to travel and see the world and he’s off to join the court in Milan. Proteus, though, doesn’t want to go anywhere: he’s quite happy in Verona because it’s the city of love (see Romeo and Juliet for a continuation of this) and he’s got the hots for this woman called Julia. He’s the classic lovelorn fool.
Hold on, though. Surely Shakespeare’s got the names wrong then. Valentine should be the one in love and Proteus should be the one looking for a change, right? Well, Will’s one step ahead of you, because it turns out he’s got the names right after all. Valentine gets to Milan and promptly falls in love with Silvia, the Duke’s daughter. And he falls bad: can’t live without her, even though the Duke has promised her to this buffoon called Thurio, whom Valentine (and everyone else) relentlessly mocks. So Valentine is a courtly lover after all.
Proteus, meanwhile, gets told by his dad to stop lounging around the house all the time and make something of himself. So he ends up getting sent off to join Valentine in Milan, even though he desperately wants to stay and canoodle with Julia. But no sooner does he get to Milan and lay eyes on Valentine and Silvia than he falls madly in love with Silvia as well. The fickle bastard! Talk about your sea change. Not only does he completely throw over his love for Julia, though, he immediately goes all Iago (see Othello) on his friend Valentine, plotting to get rid of him so he can get Silvia for himself. What a prick.
Meanwhile, Julia has dressed as a boy and set of to Milan to find her lover Proteus because she can’t bear to be apart from him any longer. Of course, Shakespeare is always having women dress as men, isn’t he? But this is where he’s doing it for the very first time. So that’s something. Oh, and there’s also Proteus’ servant Launce, who has a dog called Crab, which makes more sense than having a crab called Dog, I guess. Launce is a fool, and gets words mixed up all the time (he thinks Valentine gets “vanished” rather than “banished”). He also talks to his dog a lot. As far as Shakespearean fools go I liked him. He has some pretty funny lines.
Anyway, thanks to Proteus’ nefarious plan, Valentine does get vanished, er, varnished, er, banished from Milan, but lo and behold Silvia sees right throughs him and knows that he’s an asshole, so her can’t get her anyway, even when he enlists “Sebastian,” a young man with suspiciously wide hips and large breasts who looks a little like his jilted Julia. And of course Valentine, as you’d expect, meets up with a band of merry outlaws in the forest and immediately gets elected their leader.
It all culminates with everyone in the forest and Proteus being exposed as a lecherous, traitorous son of a bitch. But then he says sorry and Valentine and Julia who have both been horribly betrayed by him immediately say, “Well that’s all right then. As long as you’re sorry.” And they all head off to get married to their respective lovers. Wait, what? That is a remarkably terrible ending. Surely the audience should get to see Proteus impaled on a stake or something? But no, this is a comedy, and it’s all got to end happily, preferably with a marriage.
Personally, I think the whole Verona fraught love thing works better as tragedy (see Romeo and Juliet, again).
Anthony Burgess opines that today the play “is liked for two things — the lyric ‘Who is Sylvia’ (though it is Schubert more than Shakespeare who has made it popular) and the servant Launce, faithful in the English way to his deplorable mongrel Crab. Launce’s master Proteus proclaims in his very name an inconstancy of character and affections which is in strong contrast to that simple fidelity. This is a very Shakespearean touch.”
I think I like it for a bit more than those two things, although it is still clearly an apprentice effort. There’s wit on display, and Shakespeare’s characteristic wordplay, but it doesn’t fit all that seemlessly into the story. And there’s no real psychological complexity to any of the characters. Still, it’s a promising beginning for the young man. I can’t wait to see what he’ll come up with next…
