Love in The Two Gentlemen of Verona Sara Manlowe College

Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona is, if not a love story, then a story about love as represented through various characters, primarily Proteus, Valentine, and Julia. The reader sees their attitudes towards love change throughout the plot, and unfold with the help of other characters off of which their words can reflect them back to themselves. As a comedy, the darker elements inherent in these loves and lovers can only be glimpsed behind the lighter surface, and of darker elements there are many: ‘when we first meet Proteus and Valentine…love is already a force which threatens to pull their friendship apart: Proteus will stay at home because of it, losing the chance of adventure, and finding himself separated from his friend’ (Smith, 49). Love in the play is primarily a destructive force, a force that unwinds, rather than binds together, thus the plot itself is an unwinding of the structures present from the beginning: Proteus and Valentine’s friendship, Proteus’s love of Julia, Valentine’s love of Silvia. ‘All will work out well by a series of surprising coincidences, to which rivals and brigands are somehow contributory; and this fact is the setting and the story of The Two Gentlemen of Verona’ (Charlton, 36); if the...