**This post is Part 9 of an ongoing series in which I’ll be reading various Shakespeare plays, along with the Harold Bloom commentary from his book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and providing my thoughts/reactions.**

Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona follows the friendship of Valentine and Proteus as it crumbles under the weight of romantic rivalry. When both men fall in love with Silvia, Proteus abandons his own beloved Julia and systematically betrays Valentine—first by pursuing Silvia behind his friend’s back, then by revealing Valentine’s secret elopement plans to her father, resulting in Valentine’s banishment from Milan. Yet even this treachery pales beside the play’s most disturbing moment: Proteus’s attempted sexual assault of Silvia in the forest.

What follows is one of Shakespeare’s most morally troubling scenes. Valentine arrives just in time to stop the assault, confronts his former friend, and then—upon hearing Proteus express remorse—not only forgives him completely but offers to surrender his own claim to Silvia. The reconciliation is immediate, total, and seemingly genuine.

Forgiveness of a romantic betrayal is one thing, forgiveness of attempted sexual assault is another. And yet, the play hardly acknowledges this unforgivable forgiveness, leaving readers and viewers with a puzzle. How should we, as readers, understand it?

Common Readings

It is easy enough, and perhaps more comfortable, to side with Bloom and other critics in regarding Two Gentlemen of Verona as an apprentice work or a learning exercise. Generally dated 1592 or 1593, it is certainly one of Shakespeare’s earliest works, and perhaps it is the case that the Young Bard, through some mixture of sensationalism and naivete, underestimated the incompatibility of the two friends’ reconciliation with the severity of Proteus’ offenses.

Yet I share Bloom’s intuition that “one ought never to underestimate Shakespeare, and I uneasily sense that we have yet to understand The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a very experimental comedy. So what if we decide to give the Bard his due and presume that the play is not simply an accident?

Credible schools of thought seem to cluster around two (related) critiques:

1. The Feminist Critique – Any reasonable reader of the play will note that Silvia receives zero lines after being assaulted (you can call it an “attempted assault” in the context if you’d like, but it’s clear she was violated, regardless of the specifics). The play silences her, diminishes her violation, and commoditizes her when Valentine–her supposed protector–goes so far as to offer Silvia to Proteus as a gesture of their reconciliation.
   
   Put simply, Valentine’s forgiveness of Proteus is not a novel problem in the play but rather a symptom of a much larger problem, which is Renaissance Europe’s pervasive subjugation and mistreatment of women. This reading dissolves the mystery of the reconciliation, but it does seem to leave Shakespeare holding the bag for unquestioningly codifying a brutish and immoral set of norms.
   
   To be fair, much of the feminist scholarship on the play seems to reject the idea that Shakespeare is definitively endorsing these norms simply by portraying them in the play, but we’ll discuss that more in the Straussian Reading below.
   
   
   
2. The Genre Critique – Renaissance literature consistently privileged male friendship as the highest form of love, often explicitly above romantic or marital bonds. From this view, Valentine’s gesture represents the ultimate test of friendship loyalty—precisely because it seems to ask too much, it proves the friendship’s transcendent value.
   
   Again, this reading absolves Shakespeare of the artistic oversight but puts him in a morally compromised position, particularly by today’s standards.

Two Alternate Readings

The challenge with the two critiques above (at least as I’ve positioned them) is that they treat Shakespeare as a product of his time and a follower of literary traditions, which seems like a strange stance to take on an artist that is so consistently lauded for being ahead of his time and innovative. So without attempting to justify the likelihood of either of these alternate readings, I’d nevertheless like to suggest them as plausible.

1. The Straussian Reading – Start from the premise that Shakespeare was well aware of the gender norms and genre conventions of his time, whether or not he dissented or agreed, approved or disdained. I have suggested in my recent post on Coriolanus and elsewhere that Shakespeare often seems to be quite intentionally subverting the surface-level meanings of his plays. Whether for political or artistic reasons, I have in my head a rather crafty image of the Bard, one who liked to use tropes and norms in a challenging, rather than merely passive, way.
   
   In Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Straussian reading weaponizes the absurdity of Valentine’s reconciliation with Proteus. By invoking the gravity of an attempted sexual assault and then mollifying it, Shakespeare creates a reductio ad absurdum for both the treatment of Silvia as a Renaissance woman and the genre trope of the Renaissance friendship. How, Shakespeare’s contemporaries might have thought, could such well-entrenched norms lead us to such an uncomfortable and undesirable ending?
   
   As my friend Nathan put it, had Proteus simply fallen for Silvia–or even if he tried to murder her–we might understand a certain willingness to reconcile once cooler heads prevail. But by heightening his unforgivability through the intensity of attempted sexual crime, we are forced to confront the reconciliation as a mistake. We must, then, retrace our steps to find the norm that needs revision so that we will not be led to this dreadful conclusion again.
   
   
   
   
2. The Strindbergian Reading – I won’t waste the time of my readers here to defend whether or not this reading should be called by Strindberg’s name, but in an earlier post reviewing Strindberg’s work, I suggested that one of the interesting features of his play is a certain style of determinism in which his characters acknowledge larger forces at play (Fate, Death, Love, etc.) than human will.
   
   My Strindbergian Reading of the play begins with Valentine mocking Proteus in the opening scene for the way “affection chains thy tender days,” suggesting that he “would rather entreat thy company / To see the wonders of the world abroad” (Act I, Scene I, 3-6). Full of young ambition and foreign to love, Valentine is unable to understand the affection which binds his friend to the Verona, where his love Julia lives.
   
   Yet Valentine’s character arc leads him to Milan, where he falls in love with Silvia, the power of which makes him think better of his earlier judgment of Proteus. Reunited in Milan, he tells his friend, “that life is alter’d now: / I have done penance for contemning Love, / whose high imperious thoughts have punish’d me […] O gentle Proteus, Love’s a mighty lord / And hath so humbled me as I confess / There is no woe to his correction / Nor to his service no such joy on earth” (Act II, Scene IV, 128-139).
   
   What follows is a series of acknowledgments by both Proteus and Valentine alike that loss of anything–friend, integrity, or even life–is preferable to loss of love. First Proteus: “Julia I lose and Valentine I lose: / If I keep them, I needs must lose myself; / If I l lose them, thus find I by their loss / For Valentine myself, for Julia Silvia. / I to myself am dearer than a friend, / For love is still most precious itself” (Act II, Scene VI, 19-24).
   
   Then Valentine, on hearing he will be banished from Milan and thus separated from Silvia forever: “And why not death rather than living torment? / To die is to be banish’d from myself; / And Silvia is myself: banish’d from her / Is self from self: a deadly banishment!” (Act III, Scene I, 170-173).
   
   The recurring theme is not just that love is more important than any other relationship or virtue, but that Love, as a force of nature, is more powerful than any lover. There is a growing sense in the play that being true to oneself (or, to be more precise, to one’s Nature) might require one to act unreasonably, immorally, and that this cannot be avoided. One gets the echo of the Captain’s lament from Strindberg’s The Father: “How beautiful life was! And now it has become like this. You didn’t want it to be like this, I didn’t want it, and yet it happened. Who rules our lives?” (Act III, Scene VII).
   
   If Valentine was “humbled” in anything, it was in his understanding of a person’s moral ability to resist the pulls and pushes that Love exerts. All mortals, in this view, are diminished in their freedom by the power of Love.
   It may be, in the Strindbergian reading, this newfound humility that prompts Valentine to forgive the unforgivable Proteus. Perhaps, in some sense, Proteus was not the ruler of his life, and thus his moral responsibility may have been diminished.

Conclusion

The point here is not whether or not Proteus is culpable–that much is clear. The point is that his forgiveness by Valentine makes very little sense and thus spawns a riddle to be answered. The simple explanation, “Shakespeare made an obvious mistake,” may be the correct one; but what I enjoyed about The Two Gentlemen of Verona was the opportunity it presented to consider alternate readings. As with many of the best Shakespeare plays, it gets more complicated the more you think about it. Perhaps that is enough to merit a recommendation from me.

That said, it’s hard to entirely dissent from the general consensus that this is one of Shakespeare’s lesser works, though it might be fair to say it’s somewhat underrated.

Rating: 6.5/10