1 00:00:00,210 --> 00:00:03,690 This is my first letter to say it's on the UN committee. 2 00:00:03,690 --> 00:00:07,320 Two gentlemen of Verona seem Shakespeare in love. 3 00:00:07,320 --> 00:00:12,600 You might know that the most popular plays in the film's imaginary Elizabethan world are Marlow's 4 00:00:12,600 --> 00:00:19,440 Dr. Fasters and an unnamed play represented by a scene with a clown and a dog wearing a rough. 5 00:00:19,440 --> 00:00:23,640 This pleases Queen Elizabeth mightily and is therefore a case for other to its 6 00:00:23,640 --> 00:00:28,260 melancholic playwright's disappointment that plays two gentlemen of Verona. 7 00:00:28,260 --> 00:00:33,880 And just about every 21st common first century country on this play has begun with Shakespeare in Love. 8 00:00:33,880 --> 00:00:48,420 So I'm no exception. The otherwise uncomplicated play is that it takes a large role in Shakespeare in Love and the dog there in the scene. 9 00:00:48,420 --> 00:00:56,610 It's called crab. The film's henslow, played by Geoffrey Rush, observes, Comedy is love and debate with the dog. 10 00:00:56,610 --> 00:01:06,870 That's what they want. Or don't try talk about in today's lecture is the realm of that dog within the themes and the performance of the play. 11 00:01:06,870 --> 00:01:16,650 So let's start with an outline of the plot of two gentlemen. The two gentlemen of the title are the close friends, Valentine and Proteus. 12 00:01:16,650 --> 00:01:23,100 The play opens with Valentine leaving Verona in brackets and thinking about the role of 13 00:01:23,100 --> 00:01:27,330 plants that I talked about a couple of weeks ago in relation to many wives of Windsor. 14 00:01:27,330 --> 00:01:32,140 Most of this play takes place in Milan with geographical specificity of five plays. 15 00:01:32,140 --> 00:01:36,330 Therefore, quite misleading, but that's probably a different lecture. 16 00:01:36,330 --> 00:01:42,840 Valentine lives Verona with his certain speed, leaving Proteus behind to be near his house. 17 00:01:42,840 --> 00:01:47,460 Proteus, his beloved Juliet against his will. 18 00:01:47,460 --> 00:01:58,200 Proteus, his father, sends him off to Milan, to Julia and Protea separate, vowing fidelity and exchanging rings. 19 00:01:58,200 --> 00:02:09,150 Meanwhile, in Milan, Valentine has fallen in love with Sylvia, whose father, the Duke, prefers another suitor for her, Thoraya, Valentine and Sylvia. 20 00:02:09,150 --> 00:02:16,290 Plan that elopement. But when Prentis arrives in Milan, he too falls in love with Sylvia. 21 00:02:16,290 --> 00:02:20,850 And so he betrays Ballantine's plan to her father. 22 00:02:20,850 --> 00:02:29,250 Valentine is caught in the act, banished and becomes the leader of a bunch of rather polite outlaws who live in the forest. 23 00:02:29,250 --> 00:02:38,700 But Julia is not willing to be left behind in Verona. She follows Proteus in the disguise of Sebastian not recognising her. 24 00:02:38,700 --> 00:02:46,590 Of course, Proteus sends Sebastian as a love envoy to Sylvia, of course, 25 00:02:46,590 --> 00:02:55,200 and gives Sebastian to give to Sylvia the very ring he had been given by Julia. 26 00:02:55,200 --> 00:03:04,420 Of course, Sylvia rejects Proteus and flees to the forest where she is captured by those outlaws. 27 00:03:04,420 --> 00:03:11,820 Now, the end of the play is deeply problematic, and you may feel that I'm avoiding the real issue of two gentlemen of Verona by trying to 28 00:03:11,820 --> 00:03:17,520 organise the lecture around the dog as if it's a kind of canine dramatic equivalent of the 29 00:03:17,520 --> 00:03:22,350 so-called dead cat strategy by which we distract attention from something we don't want to 30 00:03:22,350 --> 00:03:29,130 talk about with a diversionary tactic of throwing a dead cat metaphorically on the table. 31 00:03:29,130 --> 00:03:33,900 I want to try to discuss us how the presence of the dog helps us to interrogate 32 00:03:33,900 --> 00:03:38,610 the trouble in a morally compromised ending of two gentlemen of Verona Grimson. 33 00:03:38,610 --> 00:03:42,240 Different viewpoints. Here's what happens. 34 00:03:42,240 --> 00:03:53,910 Proteus frees Sylvia from the outlaws and then he tries to force himself on her while forced to yield to my desire. 35 00:03:53,910 --> 00:03:59,220 Valentine is watching and he intervenes to rescue her from Proteus. 36 00:03:59,220 --> 00:04:06,450 Attempted rape. Proteus is repentant, so it's in Kaffee. 37 00:04:06,450 --> 00:04:15,510 Valentine then agrees that he Proteus greatest protest can have Sylvia after all, since his repentance is genuine. 38 00:04:15,510 --> 00:04:19,260 Sylvia. Perhaps not surprisingly, does not speak. 39 00:04:19,260 --> 00:04:27,240 But Julia faints at the news that her own lover will marry someone else might before sisterly to do something a little earlier. 40 00:04:27,240 --> 00:04:32,040 But let's set that aside. And Julia's identity is discovered. 41 00:04:32,040 --> 00:04:39,330 Proteus relinquishes Sylvia and is reunited with Julia, the outdoors. 42 00:04:39,330 --> 00:04:42,960 The outlaws bring the captive Duke and Therriault, 43 00:04:42,960 --> 00:04:50,870 who withdraws his claim to Sylvia and her father consents to the marriage with Valentine and the pardons of the outlaws. 44 00:04:50,870 --> 00:04:55,350 So not quite love. And a bit with the dog, after all. 45 00:04:55,350 --> 00:04:59,970 Or at least not only that. So this is a troubling play. 46 00:04:59,970 --> 00:05:06,390 And in one sense, the dog may indeed be a diversion, particularly for modern audiences. 47 00:05:06,390 --> 00:05:10,890 If you look at the recent stage history of two gentlemen, these two gentlemen of Verona, 48 00:05:10,890 --> 00:05:16,950 the dog takes on a significant role looking at the RNC website, for instance. 49 00:05:16,950 --> 00:05:29,820 We can see Reah in 2005, Wolly in 1991, and the very youthful Patrick Stewart playing Lance with his own rescue dog, Blackie, in 1970. 50 00:05:29,820 --> 00:05:36,780 Reviews of the play on stage are usually bewildered by all kinds of aspects about it, particularly the ending. 51 00:05:36,780 --> 00:05:44,130 And I think they fix on the dog as a thing about which we can all agree. Even the play's severest critics agree. 52 00:05:44,130 --> 00:05:51,870 Wrote Charles Spence of the Telegraph on one production that the clown and his beloved dog are redeeming feature. 53 00:05:51,870 --> 00:05:57,750 Many reviews called for W.C. Grace's oft quoted Never Work with children and animals 54 00:05:57,750 --> 00:06:03,170 to be reviewed in the light of what's so delightful about having a real dog on stage, 55 00:06:03,170 --> 00:06:12,130 a kind of amplified version of the pleasure of seeing real things in the ersatz environment of the theatre. 56 00:06:12,130 --> 00:06:17,200 What a survey of recent productions also gives us browsing through, say, 57 00:06:17,200 --> 00:06:23,890 John O'Conner's directly of Shakespeare in performance as an easy way to get a snapshot of newspaper reviews. 58 00:06:23,890 --> 00:06:30,300 What that survey gives us is the idea that two gentlemen of Verona is best understood as a preliminary play. 59 00:06:30,300 --> 00:06:35,920 It gives us certain things. Then we will get better and a more familiar form later. 60 00:06:35,920 --> 00:06:39,090 Julia is the first Shakespearean cross dressed heroine. 61 00:06:39,090 --> 00:06:49,930 For instance, or Proteus and Valentine are male friends of the sort we will see again in two comedies like Much in Defence. 62 00:06:49,930 --> 00:06:54,910 Much of the commentary on this play has been concerned with its early ness. 63 00:06:54,910 --> 00:06:59,740 I feel as if this alone explains how oddities. 64 00:06:59,740 --> 00:07:05,440 I hope, if nothing else, this whole series of lectures has brought up the oddness in the unevenness, 65 00:07:05,440 --> 00:07:10,390 which seems to be intrinsic to all Shakespeare's plays early or late. 66 00:07:10,390 --> 00:07:15,580 So I'm not sure that earliness is all that helpful. A horrific stick here. 67 00:07:15,580 --> 00:07:21,160 As with other of Shakespeare's early comedies, well, early plays more generally. 68 00:07:21,160 --> 00:07:28,060 The two gentlemen of Verona has suffered from the assumption that it's early and therefore must be immature or slight. 69 00:07:28,060 --> 00:07:33,820 Despite the fact that there's no really firm evidence about its date before Francis 70 00:07:33,820 --> 00:07:39,160 Miller is listed as first amongst the excellent plays written by Shakespeare. 71 00:07:39,160 --> 00:07:46,840 That's in a book published in 50 98. There are no records of early performance and no quarto publication. 72 00:07:46,840 --> 00:07:51,490 Nevertheless, despite the fact that there's no evidence about where it comes before 50 98, 73 00:07:51,490 --> 00:08:01,420 it has in all the most recent chronologies of Shakespeare's work being put right at the beginning, almost as if it is juvenilia or apprentice work. 74 00:08:01,420 --> 00:08:05,110 This has come to explain certain of its extensive features, 75 00:08:05,110 --> 00:08:11,410 and those aesthetic features have in turn been used to corroborate the fact that it is an early play. 76 00:08:11,410 --> 00:08:17,260 But since, as I say, there's no evidence about the date. It's not published until the 16th 23 folio. 77 00:08:17,260 --> 00:08:24,820 We might feel that the argument about dates and aesthetic value has become somewhat circular. 78 00:08:24,820 --> 00:08:32,140 In fact, it may be more appropriate and more useful to see this play as being about immaturity rather than 79 00:08:32,140 --> 00:08:39,580 being itself in the chair in presenting the swiftness of falling in love in this boy's own adventure. 80 00:08:39,580 --> 00:08:45,130 The outlaws living in the wood in the changeability of tempers and moods. 81 00:08:45,130 --> 00:08:50,170 The play seems to maximise the strength and the follies of youth. 82 00:08:50,170 --> 00:08:53,530 It presents itself as a journey towards maturation. 83 00:08:53,530 --> 00:09:01,320 Its characters more and more, I think, than the characters in other Shakespeare plays are negotiating their relationship with their parents. 84 00:09:01,320 --> 00:09:06,860 Protest is sent away by his father, Antonio, who doesn't have any choice about it. 85 00:09:06,860 --> 00:09:15,880 Sylvia and the Duke are. The Duke has control over Sylvia, who she will marry, even Lance. 86 00:09:15,880 --> 00:09:19,900 The clown describes his leave-taking of his family. 87 00:09:19,900 --> 00:09:25,960 Zane nearly illustrated by two shoes. Standing friends, mother and father. 88 00:09:25,960 --> 00:09:34,480 So the play understand herself as a kind of journey towards maturation, which it seems as a progress towards romantic partnerships, 89 00:09:34,480 --> 00:09:42,640 a kind of rites of passage play perhaps focussed on the social formation of adult males. 90 00:09:42,640 --> 00:09:48,550 Whereas we now, of course, think of romantic comedy as a genre that particularly appeals to women. 91 00:09:48,550 --> 00:09:56,350 It's clear that this play and the others. My kids were originally written with a largely male audience in mind. 92 00:09:56,350 --> 00:10:06,610 Rather like the role of the Senate tradition in Elizabethan culture, with which two gentlemen of Verona have some obvious structural affinities. 93 00:10:06,610 --> 00:10:14,520 The play, climatized, is the tensions between same sex and opposite sex relationships. 94 00:10:14,520 --> 00:10:20,280 The trauma for men in Shakespearean comedy always requires that they leave behind 95 00:10:20,280 --> 00:10:27,570 something often characterised as male friendship in order to form romantic partnerships. 96 00:10:27,570 --> 00:10:33,150 The melancholy Antonios of Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night are victims of this movement. 97 00:10:33,150 --> 00:10:39,150 The things the men must be left behind in order for men to take up with women. 98 00:10:39,150 --> 00:10:47,730 So too, we might think of the bromance between Benedict and Claudio, which is sacrificed in much ado about nothing. 99 00:10:47,730 --> 00:10:51,840 Now, two gentlemen, it's a play that really prioritises male friendship. 100 00:10:51,840 --> 00:10:59,530 So let's start with a reminder about how much friendship worked in Renaissance culture, as you already know. 101 00:10:59,530 --> 00:11:08,380 Renaissance thinkers idealise the kind of intellectual and spiritual communion that was particularly possible between men. 102 00:11:08,380 --> 00:11:16,780 It shifted the hopes and expectations of mutual understanding and sympathy that modern Western society places on sexual, 103 00:11:16,780 --> 00:11:22,240 particularly heterosexual relationships into the male male sphere. 104 00:11:22,240 --> 00:11:29,380 Prominent amongst these theorists is the S.A.S., Montane Montane writes in his essay of friendship. 105 00:11:29,380 --> 00:11:32,410 Describing the bond between friends. 106 00:11:32,410 --> 00:11:41,620 Our minds have jumped so unitedly together they have, with so fervent and affection considered of each other and with like affection, 107 00:11:41,620 --> 00:11:47,020 so discovered and sounded even to the very bottom of each other's heart and entrails. 108 00:11:47,020 --> 00:11:59,430 But I did not only know his as well as my own, but I would verily have rather trusted him concerning any matter of mine than my shelf. 109 00:11:59,430 --> 00:12:02,920 Sometimes essays are really useful source for this line of thinking, 110 00:12:02,920 --> 00:12:09,490 and we know that Shakespeare uses Montaigne's I say later in his career or her Montand post takes this play, 111 00:12:09,490 --> 00:12:12,100 which probably draws its ideas of male friendship. 112 00:12:12,100 --> 00:12:21,040 More from the Book of the governor and from the plays and prose writings of the influential writer John Lilly. 113 00:12:21,040 --> 00:12:27,820 So this view of friendship places male friendships above male female ones and incidentally, 114 00:12:27,820 --> 00:12:36,810 above female female demands for the power and depth of their effective. 115 00:12:36,810 --> 00:12:44,100 It's easy to see you. After all, how in an age where male and female education and experience was so different. 116 00:12:44,100 --> 00:12:48,720 You might well feel that your husband or wife had a very different worldview, 117 00:12:48,720 --> 00:12:55,020 a different kind of conversation, and therefore a different sympathy from yours. 118 00:12:55,020 --> 00:12:58,770 What the passionate description of male friendship in this period kind of clued, 119 00:12:58,770 --> 00:13:04,210 however, is the possibility of what in the modern period we call homosexuality. 120 00:13:04,210 --> 00:13:11,250 So it's a difficult line to draw between protestations of affection between men in Shakespearean plays, 121 00:13:11,250 --> 00:13:24,150 which seemed to draw on this doctrine of male friendship vs. ideas about sexuality, which we might want to bring to those plays. 122 00:13:24,150 --> 00:13:30,000 Let's look at the end. I think this is one of the themes that two gentlemen of Verona tussles with. 123 00:13:30,000 --> 00:13:37,080 Let's look at the first scene of the. The lights of this Valentine uncourteous, our parting and right from the start. 124 00:13:37,080 --> 00:13:40,820 That's the sort of structural scene which we associate with lovers, 125 00:13:40,820 --> 00:13:46,650 is lovers who participate in the language of affection and separation reach to modern day, 126 00:13:46,650 --> 00:13:58,530 if I could particularly intense passing this telexes of affection, calling each other loving, tender on love, sweet glances, sweet valentine. 127 00:13:58,530 --> 00:14:05,180 This wanders between the two men and the description of the absent and unnamed love of Proteus. 128 00:14:05,180 --> 00:14:09,690 Proteus is likened to Leander swimming the hapless fund for the love of Hero. 129 00:14:09,690 --> 00:14:15,840 Perhaps a reference to modernist poem probably written around the same time the two men in 130 00:14:15,840 --> 00:14:21,550 this opening scene moved from describing their love for each other to joshing about protest, 131 00:14:21,550 --> 00:14:31,430 his love for a woman. And it's interesting that the same terms seemed to circulate across both homosocial and heterosexual bonds. 132 00:14:31,430 --> 00:14:35,220 That seems potentially interesting. It may suggest that this play doesn't, in fact, 133 00:14:35,220 --> 00:14:41,290 correspond to that trauma view of male maturation from same to opposite sex bonds 134 00:14:41,290 --> 00:14:45,540 that I described a minute ago as one of the movements of Shakespearean comedy. 135 00:14:45,540 --> 00:14:55,650 Perhaps instead it wants to allow male friendship to exist alongside or be reconciled within heterosexual marriage. 136 00:14:55,650 --> 00:15:07,290 At the end of the play, Valentine points to the fact that he and his friend have been paid off with women stating Our day of marriage shall be yours. 137 00:15:07,290 --> 00:15:12,900 One features one house, one mutual happiness. Our day of marriage shall be yours. 138 00:15:12,900 --> 00:15:16,230 One feast, one house on mutual happiness. 139 00:15:16,230 --> 00:15:22,590 Slightly difficult to know what Valentine has in mind, but whatever the marital domestic arrangements that are being proposed here, 140 00:15:22,590 --> 00:15:29,100 they don't seem to suggest the emotional and physical separation the two men experience at the beginning of the play. 141 00:15:29,100 --> 00:15:37,530 Valentine seems to emphasise the rejoining of the two friends as much as he does their marriages with Julia and Sylvia. 142 00:15:37,530 --> 00:15:45,330 Perhaps these heterosexual marriages are just a pretext or the beard for the ultimate and lasting union of the men. 143 00:15:45,330 --> 00:15:50,580 I like to think of them as the Hampton deck of the early Modern Theatre. 144 00:15:50,580 --> 00:15:56,880 Jeffrey Marston argues that our modern reliance on the mutually exclusive category of hetero and 145 00:15:56,880 --> 00:16:04,380 homosexuality makes it difficult to see how they actually simultaneously evoked in this play. 146 00:16:04,380 --> 00:16:11,340 The play confounds the categories or insists that they coexist, that people are not in this business. 147 00:16:11,340 --> 00:16:19,080 It fits in with a modern ideas of sexuality and that is the thing you do rather than a thing you are. 148 00:16:19,080 --> 00:16:25,050 After all, since Proteus and Valentine are so like each other and like each other so much. 149 00:16:25,050 --> 00:16:34,870 Isn't it obvious that they would decide the same woman? And we might want to see this larger structural or thematic equivalence between same and 150 00:16:34,870 --> 00:16:41,410 opposite sex relationships writ small in the way the plays characteristic language works. 151 00:16:41,410 --> 00:16:45,910 One of the reasons that two gentlemen is associated with very early Shakespeare is because it seems 152 00:16:45,910 --> 00:16:51,300 to be very patterned and rhetorical on one of our two theologies about Shakespeare's writing, 153 00:16:51,300 --> 00:16:53,440 which may or may not be true. 154 00:16:53,440 --> 00:17:02,530 One of the teleology is, is that Shakespeare moves from a more artificial in modern times, conceited or over flowery practically. 155 00:17:02,530 --> 00:17:13,650 I think form of writing early on in his career does something which is more natural, conversational, flexible later on. 156 00:17:13,650 --> 00:17:26,970 So part of the reason the two gentlemen seem to be so early is because of its very particular pattern of artificial decorative verst forms. 157 00:17:26,970 --> 00:17:31,590 The play makes lots of use of two particular rhetorical devices. 158 00:17:31,590 --> 00:17:41,680 I was going to give you those now. They are anaphora. So anaphora, the repetition of the same word for words at the beginning of a sentence, a lie. 159 00:17:41,680 --> 00:17:49,390 And the device I saw Koloff. I saw Kolon phrases of equal length and corresponding structure. 160 00:17:49,390 --> 00:17:53,640 So enough for the repetition of the same word or words at the beginning of a sentence or line. 161 00:17:53,640 --> 00:17:57,580 I icicle on these phrases of equal length and corresponding structure. 162 00:17:57,580 --> 00:18:07,030 We can see that is a both rhetorical because that repetition and similitude or mirror imaging in some kind of rhetorical way. 163 00:18:07,030 --> 00:18:13,190 And this obviously got implications for models of sexuality and desire here. 164 00:18:13,190 --> 00:18:19,210 Purchase gives a really good example of both in this parallel formulae to leave my junior. 165 00:18:19,210 --> 00:18:25,960 Shall I be sworn to love Sylvia? Shall I be sworn to wrong, my friend? 166 00:18:25,960 --> 00:18:38,110 I shall be much sworn. We can see that the echoing structure of these lines, repetition at the beginning and the asako on the equal structure. 167 00:18:38,110 --> 00:18:45,040 The parallel structures make purchases betrayals of Juliet, Sylvia and Valentine metrically. 168 00:18:45,040 --> 00:18:49,620 And perhaps emotionally or socially equivalent. 169 00:18:49,620 --> 00:18:59,290 And what's interesting about the play named for two gentlemen, is that it constantly triangulates their relationship with the desire for women. 170 00:18:59,290 --> 00:19:08,130 As the structuralist anthropologist Claude Lacky Strauss famously observed, kinship alliances between men are secured by women, 171 00:19:08,130 --> 00:19:15,930 and women exist in those systems as tokens or intercessors, rather than as agents or even as desired objects. 172 00:19:15,930 --> 00:19:21,300 So they're not the thing. Me, Strauss's analysis of marriage, customs. 173 00:19:21,300 --> 00:19:29,610 Women are not the things that men desire. They desire the relationships with other men that women enable them to have. 174 00:19:29,610 --> 00:19:39,730 As the feminist Gail Rubin put it in the classic argument, heterosexual society is built on, quote, the traffic women. 175 00:19:39,730 --> 00:19:47,800 Now, in part, the shifts of the play result from a thoroughgoing idealisation of women. 176 00:19:47,800 --> 00:19:59,590 Sylvia, the object of both Valentine and Practises and Florio's affections is like the mistress in a sonnet sequence or troubadour song. 177 00:19:59,590 --> 00:20:04,150 Distant and perfect Proteus. This song suggests the same. 178 00:20:04,150 --> 00:20:09,370 It's interesting that this has been perhaps the most famous quotation from the play. 179 00:20:09,370 --> 00:20:15,600 Who is still who is Sylvia? What is she? But all our swains commend her wholly fair and wise. 180 00:20:15,600 --> 00:20:22,690 Is she the having such great said lend her that she might have admired it to be. 181 00:20:22,690 --> 00:20:26,650 Now Julia is more assertive in in, in, 182 00:20:26,650 --> 00:20:35,320 in stressing her own activity and her own desires that she doesn't want to be left behind by cosiest she dresses as a man and gets to follow him. 183 00:20:35,320 --> 00:20:39,760 She too is constrained by male expectations of female behaviour. 184 00:20:39,760 --> 00:20:45,880 Only when dressed as Sebastian does Protea see that she is competent and useful. 185 00:20:45,880 --> 00:20:55,660 But like Violet in Twelfth Night. Julia finds herself undertaking the same self sabotaging role of go between in her own betrayal. 186 00:20:55,660 --> 00:21:04,510 She is the person who has to go and prosecute practice's suit to another woman. 187 00:21:04,510 --> 00:21:07,930 In part, the role of junior in maths and science. And again, 188 00:21:07,930 --> 00:21:17,990 we see this develop in the character of violent and Twelfth Night seems to be an attempt by the play to square the circle of male homosocial desire, 189 00:21:17,990 --> 00:21:26,230 just as at the end of Twelfth Night, or Seno does not have to choose between his male competence desario and the female love object. 190 00:21:26,230 --> 00:21:36,370 Viler because they're the same person. So to Proteus gets her version of male male friendship that he's so idealises at the beginning of the play, 191 00:21:36,370 --> 00:21:42,580 when Junior dressed as Sebastiaan reveals herself in the forest at its conclusion, 192 00:21:42,580 --> 00:21:47,500 even heterosexual marriage starts to say looks like male friendship, 193 00:21:47,500 --> 00:21:54,660 not least because Julia remains like all Shakespeare's cross-dressing heroines in the immodest Raymonds, 194 00:21:54,660 --> 00:21:58,750 as she calls it, immodest fragment of male male disguise. 195 00:21:58,750 --> 00:22:12,040 At the conclusion. So when I hear you ask, does crap tape, the first argument about crap has to be that he exists in order to be funny. 196 00:22:12,040 --> 00:22:17,980 This reading sees the scenes with Lance and Krab as episodic comic turns, 197 00:22:17,980 --> 00:22:22,430 perhaps associated with the memory of the top Elizabethan clown Richard Tolton, 198 00:22:22,430 --> 00:22:31,580 who often performed with a dog or providing a showcase for his successor with the Chamberlains, men will can. 199 00:22:31,580 --> 00:22:35,560 There were no stage directions in Lance's long monologues, 200 00:22:35,560 --> 00:22:42,910 but we could imagine them being punctuated with physical comedy as in their representation in Shakespeare in Love. 201 00:22:42,910 --> 00:22:48,360 There's probably a whole subtextual history of lost comic gesture, 202 00:22:48,360 --> 00:22:56,020 a lost genealogy or physical comedy that gets missed out of modern editions and get miss out generally of our stress on Shakespeare. 203 00:22:56,020 --> 00:23:02,630 As a wordsmith, textual artist rather than a performed one. 204 00:23:02,630 --> 00:23:06,080 The influence of Italian physical comedy techniques from chemically. 205 00:23:06,080 --> 00:23:13,010 De la Torre, for instance, is just starting to be explored in relation to Shakespeare's comedies. 206 00:23:13,010 --> 00:23:20,250 It's hard for us as critics to not quite know how to talk about humour without deadening it into depth. 207 00:23:20,250 --> 00:23:24,500 I know it doesn't help be exempt from that. Later in the lecture, DeWinter floodgates up. 208 00:23:24,500 --> 00:23:30,220 Now that sometimes things may be just funny, maybe part of the dog, 209 00:23:30,220 --> 00:23:36,320 part of the point of the dog is to be funny quite separately from the rest of the plan. 210 00:23:36,320 --> 00:23:41,360 The dog works as an effective antidote to that carefully patterned Petrarch language. 211 00:23:41,360 --> 00:23:48,730 Not least because it can't speak. He's a break from it's patterned and decorative rhetorical structure. 212 00:23:48,730 --> 00:23:57,680 Now, there must be some truth in this reading of crap as a as a complete ambassador or outsider to the plot, 213 00:23:57,680 --> 00:24:02,780 but it's also true that we don't seem to get a repeat of this scenario in other planes. 214 00:24:02,780 --> 00:24:11,800 If Kemp and his staff were a show stopper or crowd pleaser, we might well expect them to recap this routine and other plans or to see a ripple effect, 215 00:24:11,800 --> 00:24:16,670 whereas where other dramatists try to get some of this canine magic. 216 00:24:16,670 --> 00:24:22,460 After all, we know that Shakespeare is not averse to reusing tropes and techniques that have been successful, 217 00:24:22,460 --> 00:24:29,210 and it's not averse to allowing performers to do their thing on the dog, though we don't. 218 00:24:29,210 --> 00:24:38,190 If lunch was played by Will Camp, we might expect are looking for this canine straight man in the role of, say, Bottum or Dogberry camp. 219 00:24:38,190 --> 00:24:48,380 Some of camp's later comic roles, but we don't krab is in fact the only named animal role only named animal who comes on stage in Shakespeare. 220 00:24:48,380 --> 00:24:56,600 The only other onstage animal definitely present, I think, is the famous pursuing band that I discuss in my lecture on Winter's Tale. 221 00:24:56,600 --> 00:25:03,470 So that absence or that specificity Krombach is a phenomenon of this play, not at the theatre. 222 00:25:03,470 --> 00:25:08,780 More generally seems to suggest that it's worth thinking about Krampus in some way more specific 223 00:25:08,780 --> 00:25:18,240 to or integrated with two gentlemen of Verona than the comedy trope that tends to allow. 224 00:25:18,240 --> 00:25:25,010 Now, Trump himself, not incidentally, rather, resists being thematically integrated into two gentlemen, Verona. 225 00:25:25,010 --> 00:25:29,660 His whole demeanour is to be unmoved and unresponsive. 226 00:25:29,660 --> 00:25:35,840 Part of the funniness of the technique is perhaps that the dog fails to do any trace. 227 00:25:35,840 --> 00:25:42,680 That's what we expect when we see a dog on stage. It's going to do clever things. Crowd actually seems surprised. 228 00:25:42,680 --> 00:25:46,970 You can tell it to do nothing. We expect that Trump will perform in some humorous way. 229 00:25:46,970 --> 00:25:52,520 But in fact, his part is conceit is constructed through inaction. 230 00:25:52,520 --> 00:25:58,630 Luntz acknowledges that perhaps with a knowing nod to the unreliability of animal performers. 231 00:25:58,630 --> 00:26:05,530 Ask my dog if you say I. It will. If you say no, it will if you shake his tail and say nothing. 232 00:26:05,530 --> 00:26:18,920 It will. So crap is a dog who refuses to be a performer, an actor who repeatedly ignores his cues, craft turns potential dialogue into soliloquy. 233 00:26:18,920 --> 00:26:25,580 Now the dog. All this while sheds not a tear nor speaks a word. 234 00:26:25,580 --> 00:26:32,870 For some critics, that makes Crab a parody of the cruel hearted and unresponsive Petrovka mistress. 235 00:26:32,870 --> 00:26:42,090 The person to whom the man keeps addressing requests for affection or for a response and who never replies for others, 236 00:26:42,090 --> 00:26:51,740 Krabbe is a model of constancy and loyalty that the friends fail to be one literary aspect of two gentlemen. 237 00:26:51,740 --> 00:27:01,010 Is it submerged relationship to the great urtext of emotional and sexual relations in this period of its metamorphosis? 238 00:27:01,010 --> 00:27:07,670 We used to think of it as a source for many plays, including Titus Andronicus, A Midsummer Night's Dream. 239 00:27:07,670 --> 00:27:19,600 But here, the repeated verb metamorphosed, which comes twice in two gentlemen of Verona about both Valentine unpractised signals the indebtedness to. 240 00:27:19,600 --> 00:27:22,940 Of it, perhaps, too, it presages the rape narrative. 241 00:27:22,940 --> 00:27:34,040 Since one of its major plots is a rape, Proteus is a man who is named for being changeable, for being protean. 242 00:27:34,040 --> 00:27:45,560 He explains himself, explains his own changeability even as one heat, another heating spouse or as one nail by strength drags out another. 243 00:27:45,560 --> 00:27:50,870 So the remembrance of my former love is by a newer option. 244 00:27:50,870 --> 00:27:59,380 Sorry, a new object quite forgotten. So prejudice is defined by named for changeability. 245 00:27:59,380 --> 00:28:03,780 He's a version of the fickle young man we meet again in Midsummer Night's Dream. 246 00:28:03,780 --> 00:28:10,490 But by contrast, krab is firmly, constantly. You might even say doggedly himself. 247 00:28:10,490 --> 00:28:15,510 The Dobias himself remark's lance decisively, 248 00:28:15,510 --> 00:28:23,070 but in being himself crumbles her parodies some of that language of male friendship that we've heard earlier in the play. 249 00:28:23,070 --> 00:28:27,700 Lance says, I am the dog. No, the dog is himself and I am the dog. 250 00:28:27,700 --> 00:28:40,560 Oh, the dog is me. And I am myself. I so. So this is a comic deflated version of the idealised rhetoric of platonic union amongst male companions. 251 00:28:40,560 --> 00:28:44,250 Part of Lance's role and crap, too, 252 00:28:44,250 --> 00:28:53,820 is to puncture the inflated tendency of the play towards the idiom of Courtney Love and to bring out itself regarding absurdity. 253 00:28:53,820 --> 00:28:58,470 The scene in which Lance discusses Crap's misbehaviour pissing a while. 254 00:28:58,470 --> 00:29:07,170 But all the chamber smelting is well-placed to undermine the courtly pretensions either side of it. 255 00:29:07,170 --> 00:29:13,320 So far that I've been implying that crab is a kind of focus for a. petrochem or a. platonic 256 00:29:13,320 --> 00:29:19,890 idealised Asians that challenge the governing pieties of two gentlemen of Verona. 257 00:29:19,890 --> 00:29:23,460 What I want to try and do in the last part of the lecture is to do this in a more 258 00:29:23,460 --> 00:29:31,270 sustained and critically informed way via the discipline of animal studies. 259 00:29:31,270 --> 00:29:37,150 I don't know, studies offers a theoretical framework for understanding how animals are used in literary texts. 260 00:29:37,150 --> 00:29:45,220 And it focuses in particular on ways their presence disrupts some assumptions about human exceptionalism. 261 00:29:45,220 --> 00:29:51,880 Animals construct and problematise the question of what it means to be human. 262 00:29:51,880 --> 00:29:58,690 Erica Futch writes that, quote, Without the app, without the animal, there would be no human. 263 00:29:58,690 --> 00:30:02,700 Without the animal. There would be no human spirit. Grateful. 264 00:30:02,700 --> 00:30:08,910 So animals are active participants in culture rather than passive recipients of it. 265 00:30:08,910 --> 00:30:14,230 And we can see this methodology as a more radical development of the interest in the other. 266 00:30:14,230 --> 00:30:20,400 In Renaissance studies over the past decades, Catholics, which is racial and ethnic others, 267 00:30:20,400 --> 00:30:25,530 these have all been particular focuses of interest, partly as liminal. 268 00:30:25,530 --> 00:30:37,900 Low threshold cases which allow categories to come into being and animal studies is also drawing on the urgency of political environmentalism. 269 00:30:37,900 --> 00:30:42,310 In thinking about the interconnected ecologies of animal and human. 270 00:30:42,310 --> 00:30:51,280 The current idea of post humanism post humanism is a philosophical counter to the human centred ideologies that have 271 00:30:51,280 --> 00:31:01,390 done such damage to our shared planet by moving the human to the margin and emphasising other elements of the ecology. 272 00:31:01,390 --> 00:31:11,980 We can see we can see things differently and we can see how Shakespeare, the literary architect of humanism, most explicitly, 273 00:31:11,980 --> 00:31:15,580 but not only perhaps in the title of Harold Bloom's famous book, 274 00:31:15,580 --> 00:31:21,820 Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human Eye, can see how Shakespeare is so critical investment. 275 00:31:21,820 --> 00:31:28,240 The critical investment we have in Shakespeare as a humanist might open up his world 276 00:31:28,240 --> 00:31:38,380 to this really reappropriation of reassessment from the point of view of animals. 277 00:31:38,380 --> 00:31:40,730 As with lots of rules and codification, 278 00:31:40,730 --> 00:31:49,370 we can often see in the culture of the late 16th century the effort to establish philosophical or category distinctions between, 279 00:31:49,370 --> 00:31:53,120 say, species or races or genres. 280 00:31:53,120 --> 00:32:03,260 These are attempts to categorise which get rarified over the intervening centuries and which broadly postmodernism is trying to undo. 281 00:32:03,260 --> 00:32:13,760 That's why there are often unexpected resonances between pre 60, 70 century and post late 20th of 21st modern culture. 282 00:32:13,760 --> 00:32:20,720 So resonances between pre and post modern culture. So animal studies is applied itself to numerous Shakespearean plays. 283 00:32:20,720 --> 00:32:26,000 Typically with a literal attention to battlefield imagery, which is the third as a toad or a spider, 284 00:32:26,000 --> 00:32:33,740 for instance, or the presence of animals such as sheep in the pastoral imagination of Winter's Tale. 285 00:32:33,740 --> 00:32:40,580 Whereas similarly, the use of animal similes in Shakespeare maintains the animal human boundary. 286 00:32:40,580 --> 00:32:49,280 Humans are like animal species. The urge towards metaphor in Shakespeare's works tends to blur that boundary at the micro level. 287 00:32:49,280 --> 00:32:51,980 Humans are animals. 288 00:32:51,980 --> 00:33:01,160 These are critical arguments and that bring to the fore meat eating and the hunt in Titus or the slain deer in the forest of Afnan as we like it, 289 00:33:01,160 --> 00:33:06,650 or the imagery of falconry in The Taming of the Shrew. So why would this work? 290 00:33:06,650 --> 00:33:10,670 Take two gentlemen of her own? Well, 291 00:33:10,670 --> 00:33:16,490 crumps resistance to the patriarchal social order that's so limiting in the play world may seem to 292 00:33:16,490 --> 00:33:23,750 valorise physical experience over the decorative linguistic constraints of this Petrarch world. 293 00:33:23,750 --> 00:33:32,450 But the body, the physical is a dangerous engine in the play as the sexual violence at its conclusion shows us. 294 00:33:32,450 --> 00:33:36,890 Lance describes how I was sent to deliver him crap. 295 00:33:36,890 --> 00:33:44,420 I was sent to deliver him as a present to Mr. Cylvia from my master, and I came no sooner into the dining chamber. 296 00:33:44,420 --> 00:33:50,460 But he steps me to her trencher and steals her capons leg. 297 00:33:50,460 --> 00:34:00,450 In bringing that crab as a present from Proteus and showing him stealing the meat from her plate, 298 00:34:00,450 --> 00:34:06,210 we can see that the dog preamps the queasy transaction of Sylvere between Valentine and Proteus. 299 00:34:06,210 --> 00:34:13,770 At the play's conclusion, Lunts explains he was supposed to deliver a more suitable canine gift, a lucky dog. 300 00:34:13,770 --> 00:34:17,610 But he lost it and so offered crab instead. 301 00:34:17,610 --> 00:34:25,830 We could see this as much as shadowing Proteus himself as the rough surrogate for the more housetrained suitor. 302 00:34:25,830 --> 00:34:33,220 Valentine. So krab is an appropriate Go-Between for Proteus and Sylvia in the key highlights, 303 00:34:33,220 --> 00:34:38,000 the cardinal desires that underpaid approaches its rhetoric of romantic love. 304 00:34:38,000 --> 00:34:45,100 He's a figure, then approaches protests later likens his own desires to a dog spaniel. 305 00:34:45,100 --> 00:34:50,140 Mike. The more she spends my love, the more it grows and fallen off on her. 306 00:34:50,140 --> 00:34:55,640 Still, the idea of his love as it is an interesting distancing of agents. 307 00:34:55,640 --> 00:35:05,850 And he makes his designs into an animal with their own with its own separate being. 308 00:35:05,850 --> 00:35:11,100 So if Krabbe is linked with Proteus, he's also linked with other characters in the play. 309 00:35:11,100 --> 00:35:16,370 As I've said, he has some parallels with Sylvia as the unmoved Petrarch and mistress. 310 00:35:16,370 --> 00:35:26,550 And he's also linked with the character of Julia. When Sylvia rejects proteases gift of crab, he sends another entreaty. 311 00:35:26,550 --> 00:35:33,060 The ring that Julia gave him crab is a prop them to materialise that trafficking women. 312 00:35:33,060 --> 00:35:41,460 That's the flip side of romantic Courtney Love. So these comparisons between Crumps behaviour and that of the other characters 313 00:35:41,460 --> 00:35:46,320 are small examples of a larger philosophical or ontological distinction. 314 00:35:46,320 --> 00:35:50,420 Are humans and animals different? That's the question, I guess. The play asks. 315 00:35:50,420 --> 00:35:57,930 At this point, Lance makes an explicit comparison between his own behaviour and that of the dog. 316 00:35:57,930 --> 00:36:08,050 Did not I beg the still mark me and do as I do when they still see me heave up my leg and make water against a gentlewoman's farthingale. 317 00:36:08,050 --> 00:36:11,530 Fitow, ever see me do such a trick? 318 00:36:11,530 --> 00:36:20,990 So Crab serves here to maintain an idea of civilised conduct and its limitations even or especially in the act of debating those conventions. 319 00:36:20,990 --> 00:36:30,910 And it's interesting to think why or to what effect this engaging, dramatic scene where craft steals the cape on leg and pieces on the furniture. 320 00:36:30,910 --> 00:36:37,210 Why this scene is reported by Lance rather than being shown on the stage. 321 00:36:37,210 --> 00:36:42,010 Lance's description punctuates to decorous romantic scenes. 322 00:36:42,010 --> 00:36:44,330 It's really good to see how Shakespeare's structures, 323 00:36:44,330 --> 00:36:51,810 his plays and the structural positioning of the last in two gentlemen is really, really interesting. 324 00:36:51,810 --> 00:36:59,200 So if the description serves either as behavioural contrast or as a subversive diagnostic, 325 00:36:59,200 --> 00:37:06,460 the physical world of the animal body underpins and undermines the play's mere platonic aspirations. 326 00:37:06,460 --> 00:37:16,900 Perhaps this makes the violent, nonconsensual scene of protesters attack on Cylvia less an aberration, less of a break from the world of the play. 327 00:37:16,900 --> 00:37:28,860 And more it's inevitable. Bestilo conclusion. So animal studies also help us to animate the imagery elsewhere in the play in the first scene. 328 00:37:28,860 --> 00:37:36,770 Proteus and Speed have an extended exchange about how Proteus is the shepherd and speed the sheep in Act five. 329 00:37:36,770 --> 00:37:40,860 Sylvia likens Proteus to a dangerous, wild animal. 330 00:37:40,860 --> 00:37:45,300 She says she would rather be breakfast to a hungry lion than have false. 331 00:37:45,300 --> 00:37:57,360 Proteus rescued me. It helps us to see the potential conceptual overlap of categories such as the dog and the cue in Lance's description of crops. 332 00:37:57,360 --> 00:38:04,200 Cruel heartedness. It's an equivalence which is developed in the extended dog imagery of the Merchant of Venice. 333 00:38:04,200 --> 00:38:08,520 This is Lance, I think crap. My dog with a serious nature dog that lives. 334 00:38:08,520 --> 00:38:13,140 My mother weeping. My father wailing. My sister crying. Made howling. 335 00:38:13,140 --> 00:38:17,910 Our cat wringing her hands and all our house in a great perplexity. 336 00:38:17,910 --> 00:38:26,460 Yet did not this cruel hearted curse shed one tear? He is a stone, a very pivotal stone, and has no more pitying him than a dog. 337 00:38:26,460 --> 00:38:34,320 A Jew would have wept to have seen our party. We can see, though, that the simile is already collapsed here. 338 00:38:34,320 --> 00:38:42,490 The poorest animal human boundary again in the notion that crap has no more pity than the dog. 339 00:38:42,490 --> 00:38:52,000 Problem is the dog. I think Krupp's presence in two gentlemen of Verona makes more visible some of the other contested boundaries in the play. 340 00:38:52,000 --> 00:39:03,400 And here we might link him with the role of the outlaws. For instance, the outlaws are a curious anticipation, perhaps, of the Duke. 341 00:39:03,400 --> 00:39:11,110 Think the exiled caught in as you like it. They, too, are likened to Robin Hood and his merry men. 342 00:39:11,110 --> 00:39:21,130 They're both uncivilised, barbarous, outside the sphere of the court and the repository of proper values. 343 00:39:21,130 --> 00:39:27,030 Valentine. When they meet Valentine, they asked him to be their general hierarchical. 344 00:39:27,030 --> 00:39:32,260 They want a general, I contend, to be our general, 345 00:39:32,260 --> 00:39:41,800 to make a virtue of necessity and live as we do in this wilderness of the wilderness would look to be the absolute location of the modern civilised. 346 00:39:41,800 --> 00:39:46,420 But here it's something slightly different. The outlaws are not the threat to Sylvia. 347 00:39:46,420 --> 00:39:49,540 In fact, Proteus is. 348 00:39:49,540 --> 00:39:59,590 Valentine agrees that he will become the captain to the Outlaws, quote, provided that you do no outrages on stilli women for poor passengers. 349 00:39:59,590 --> 00:40:07,720 So he agrees that he will be the general of the outlaws so long as they are not to outlaw Ayesh and the outlaws are racial. 350 00:40:07,720 --> 00:40:18,250 You know, we detest such vile based practises so the outlaws to look like a kind of boundary condition between the civil rights and the partners. 351 00:40:18,250 --> 00:40:26,620 A bit like the dog, but turn out to undermine that boundary by their own unexpected behaviour. 352 00:40:26,620 --> 00:40:35,980 So one feature of these kind of readings is that they resonate with different aspects of two gentlemen veremis far fetched plot. 353 00:40:35,980 --> 00:40:45,090 They serve to clarify and unify. It seems the play looks more interesting as a result of its encounter with animal studies. 354 00:40:45,090 --> 00:40:54,580 And we might argue that that's absurd and methodological justification as any animal studies, that's to say, make two gentlemen look more interesting. 355 00:40:54,580 --> 00:40:59,200 And that has a role in those questions of dating and chronology. 356 00:40:59,200 --> 00:41:03,200 But I mentioned a few minutes ago. 357 00:41:03,200 --> 00:41:12,380 So I've been arguing that the dog cried in two gentlemen of Verona has a crucial role in destabilising tropes of romantic and courtly love, 358 00:41:12,380 --> 00:41:17,960 in challenging boundaries of civilise barbarous and bestial behaviour, 359 00:41:17,960 --> 00:41:24,190 in pointing out that the worst behaviour in the play is human, not animal, 360 00:41:24,190 --> 00:41:31,940 and thereby undermining the distinctiveness of human emotion and behaviour in the play to be human in two gentlemen of Verona. 361 00:41:31,940 --> 00:41:39,870 By contrast, the crowd is not to be in physical control and behaving well. 362 00:41:39,870 --> 00:41:50,420 That's what the end of the play shows us, that the failure of that crowd is a parody of ideals of platonic male friendship. 363 00:41:50,420 --> 00:41:57,380 It's a parody of the trope of the unresponsive, haughty Sonnet Mistress. 364 00:41:57,380 --> 00:42:05,780 His liveliness and presence on the stage substitutes authenticity for the affectation of courtly love, 365 00:42:05,780 --> 00:42:14,300 even as his conduct gives a glimpse of the darker carnal side of that physical authenticity. 366 00:42:14,300 --> 00:42:18,200 I think Crap's presence in the play makes legible. 367 00:42:18,200 --> 00:42:26,120 Though it does not explain away or excuse the animalistic behaviour of Proteus at the end of the play. 368 00:42:26,120 --> 00:42:31,010 Thinking about some of these plays just in our own contemporary world, 369 00:42:31,010 --> 00:42:42,140 I feel that the language of the political theory of consent is a really pressing framework for thinking about Shakespeare's plays. 370 00:42:42,140 --> 00:42:48,350 A production of Two Gentlemen of Verona at Greenwich Theatre in 2004, 371 00:42:48,350 --> 00:42:53,900 directed by Stuart Draper, took on for some important modern ideological reasons. 372 00:42:53,900 --> 00:42:59,210 The relationship between Valentine and Proteus as explicitly gay in modern terms. 373 00:42:59,210 --> 00:43:10,100 The production began arrestingly with Valentine reciting Mahler's amorous love lyric Come Live With Me and Be My Love. 374 00:43:10,100 --> 00:43:18,480 This production says something about the delicacy of Shakespeare's own presentation of hetero and homo, 375 00:43:18,480 --> 00:43:24,490 social or sexual desire and of animal behaviours in two gentlemen of Verona, 376 00:43:24,490 --> 00:43:31,600 that the productions crap was Travis Steed as a toy dog on wheels with a handler. 377 00:43:31,600 --> 00:43:38,330 I think that was a way of making Crabill a less complicated and less resonant figure on the stage. 378 00:43:38,330 --> 00:43:44,370 And I actually feel, although I can understand the political impetus behind making Valentino's process, 379 00:43:44,370 --> 00:43:53,580 modern gay figures also think that possibly undermines the challenge that the play 380 00:43:53,580 --> 00:44:00,830 structure of trying to reconcile intense male male passions with heterosexual marriage, 381 00:44:00,830 --> 00:44:18,840 which gives us. So in presenting Vallentine in protest, ask clearly gay and krab as clearly a toy dog were both practical and understandable, 382 00:44:18,840 --> 00:44:24,270 but I think rather bloodless and inadequate interpretations of the complexities. 383 00:44:24,270 --> 00:44:31,770 I've tried to point out in two gentlemen of four. So that's the end of this Approaching Shakespeare series. 384 00:44:31,770 --> 00:44:36,150 There are now 32 lectures. This is the 30 second, the 32. 385 00:44:36,150 --> 00:44:47,033 You'll have to petition very hard if you want me to do the last ones. 306 did not.