The Two Gentlemen of Verona

The Two Gentlemen of Verona by William Shakespeare

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Authors: William Shakespeare
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that adapted the play to the concerns of council estates and favela (Brazilian shantytown) life. The English children wrote their own rap music, which they performed as a group Chorus, mediating the plot and using their bodies to create scenery on a bare stage. The Brazilian actors, meanwhile, used a Portuguese text to turn the play into a series of lyrical combats, with one memorable sequence involving Valentine and Turio performing a “sing-off” in a makeshift boxing ring. The play belonged to Diogo de Brito Sales, however, as a human Crab who bounded among the audience, pretending to lick faces.
    Similarly left field was Two Gents’ Productions’
Vakomana Vaviri Ve Zimbabwe
. This international two-man touring production, performed in the style of Zimbabwean township theater, was lively and informal, filled with audience participation. Simple items of clothing (a glove for Silvia; braces for Valentine) signified characters, with Tonderai Munyevu and Denton Chikura acting as storytellers—a character could literally be passed between the two. Julia visited a witch doctor in order to see a vision of Proteus wooing Silvia; and Crab was once more played by a human, though his bitter disdain of Lance had an edge to it. The frenetic comedy, however, gave way to a powerful closing image. Proteus and Valentine had reunited, while Julia and Silvia “lay” on the floor as discarded garments. While the men’s reunion was joyous, the women were visibly forgotten. As the lights faded to black and the two actors once more became the women. Julia moved to the sobbing Silvia, taking her head in her lap. In these stripped-back productions,
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
transcended its trivial reputation, and its translation into fresh culturalcontexts continues to unlock fresh potential in this neglected play.
AT THE RSC
    The Two Gentlemen of Verona
is an early Shakespeare play—perhaps the earliest. It is often argued that its main interest lies in a first glimpse of characters, conventions, and tropes which Shakespeare develops and deploys more successfully in later work:
    In innumerable ways
Two Gentlemen of Verona
looks forward to Shakespeare’s later comedies. The character of Julia and her masculine disguise, the central position of the women in the play, the serious use of the clowns as commentators, and of music, themes of travel, and the transformation of people through love, the greenwood as the place where pretences are dropped and characters appear for what they really are, the carefully calculated mixture of prose and verse, all of these motifs and devices were to be extended and developed in succeeding plays. Yet the
Two Gentlemen
has a freshness and lyrical charm all its own, an uncertain glory that is no more to be despised than that of the April day described by Proteus, wavering between brilliance and cloud. 30
Times and Spaces
    In 1960 in the newly refurbished Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (soon to be renamed the Royal Shakespeare Theatre) Peter Hall directed a sequence of six Shakespearean comedies suggesting in the program notes that “the early romantic comedy,
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
, first reveals Shakespeare’s flair for mixing romance, realism, lyricism and clowning. This matures in
The Merchant of Venice
and is at its best in
Twelfth Night
. But in each of these three plays there is a dark side that almost spoils the fun.”
    It was set in “that ‘ingenious Italy,’ rich in storytelling and the land of lyric love.” Renzo Mongiardino’s sets and Lila de Nobili’s Renaissance costumes looked lovely, but overall the production wasnot judged a success, due in large part to problems with the set, as described by A. Alvarez:
    The theatre now has a revolving stage, an apron jutting into the stalls and a new resident director. The opening production of
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
seemed designed chiefly to show off these assets. The stage twirled so constantly and fast that it seemed at times more

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