This is my first letter to say it's on the UN committee. Two gentlemen of Verona seem Shakespeare in love. You might know that the most popular plays in the film's imaginary Elizabethan world are Marlow's Dr. Fasters and an unnamed play represented by a scene with a clown and a dog wearing a rough. This pleases Queen Elizabeth mightily and is therefore a case for other to its melancholic playwright's disappointment that plays two gentlemen of Verona.
And just about every 21st common first century country on this play has begun with Shakespeare in Love. 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. It's called crab. The film's henslow, played by Geoffrey Rush, observes, Comedy is love and debate with the dog. 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.
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. The play opens with Valentine leaving Verona in brackets and thinking about the role of plants that I talked about a couple of weeks ago in relation to many wives of Windsor. Most of this play takes place in Milan with geographical specificity of five plays. Therefore, quite misleading, but that's probably a different lecture.
Valentine lives Verona with his certain speed, leaving Proteus behind to be near his house. Proteus, his beloved Juliet against his will. Proteus, his father, sends him off to Milan, to Julia and Protea separate, vowing fidelity and exchanging rings. Meanwhile, in Milan, Valentine has fallen in love with Sylvia, whose father, the Duke, prefers another suitor for her, Thoraya, Valentine and Sylvia. Plan that elopement. But when Prentis arrives in Milan, he too falls in love with Sylvia.
And so he betrays Ballantine's plan to her father. Valentine is caught in the act, banished and becomes the leader of a bunch of rather polite outlaws who live in the forest. But Julia is not willing to be left behind in Verona. She follows Proteus in the disguise of Sebastian not recognising her. Of course, Proteus sends Sebastian as a love envoy to Sylvia, of course, and gives Sebastian to give to Sylvia the very ring he had been given by Julia.
Of course, Sylvia rejects Proteus and flees to the forest where she is captured by those outlaws.
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 organise the lecture around the dog as if it's a kind of canine dramatic equivalent of the so-called dead cat strategy by which we distract attention from something we don't want to talk about with a diversionary tactic of throwing a dead cat metaphorically on the table.
I want to try to discuss us how the presence of the dog helps us to interrogate the trouble in a morally compromised ending of two gentlemen of Verona Grimson. Different viewpoints. Here's what happens. Proteus frees Sylvia from the outlaws and then he tries to force himself on her while forced to yield to my desire. Valentine is watching and he intervenes to rescue her from Proteus. Attempted rape. Proteus is repentant, so it's in Kaffee.
Valentine then agrees that he Proteus greatest protest can have Sylvia after all, since his repentance is genuine. Sylvia. Perhaps not surprisingly, does not speak. But Julia faints at the news that her own lover will marry someone else might before sisterly to do something a little earlier. But let's set that aside. And Julia's identity is discovered. Proteus relinquishes Sylvia and is reunited with Julia, the outdoors.
The outlaws bring the captive Duke and Therriault, who withdraws his claim to Sylvia and her father consents to the marriage with Valentine and the pardons of the outlaws. So not quite love. And a bit with the dog, after all. Or at least not only that. So this is a troubling play. And in one sense, the dog may indeed be a diversion, particularly for modern audiences.
If you look at the recent stage history of two gentlemen, these two gentlemen of Verona, the dog takes on a significant role looking at the RNC website, for instance. 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. Reviews of the play on stage are usually bewildered by all kinds of aspects about it, particularly the ending.
And I think they fix on the dog as a thing about which we can all agree. Even the play's severest critics agree. Wrote Charles Spence of the Telegraph on one production that the clown and his beloved dog are redeeming feature.
Many reviews called for W.C. Grace's oft quoted Never Work with children and animals to be reviewed in the light of what's so delightful about having a real dog on stage, a kind of amplified version of the pleasure of seeing real things in the ersatz environment of the theatre. What a survey of recent productions also gives us browsing through, say, John O'Conner's directly of Shakespeare in performance as an easy way to get a snapshot of newspaper reviews.
What that survey gives us is the idea that two gentlemen of Verona is best understood as a preliminary play. It gives us certain things. Then we will get better and a more familiar form later. Julia is the first Shakespearean cross dressed heroine. For instance, or Proteus and Valentine are male friends of the sort we will see again in two comedies like Much in Defence. Much of the commentary on this play has been concerned with its early ness. I feel as if this alone explains how oddities.
I hope, if nothing else, this whole series of lectures has brought up the oddness in the unevenness, which seems to be intrinsic to all Shakespeare's plays early or late. So I'm not sure that earliness is all that helpful. A horrific stick here. As with other of Shakespeare's early comedies, well, early plays more generally. The two gentlemen of Verona has suffered from the assumption that it's early and therefore must be immature or slight.
Despite the fact that there's no really firm evidence about its date before Francis Miller is listed as first amongst the excellent plays written by Shakespeare. That's in a book published in 50 98. There are no records of early performance and no quarto publication.
Nevertheless, despite the fact that there's no evidence about where it comes before 50 98, 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. This has come to explain certain of its extensive features, and those aesthetic features have in turn been used to corroborate the fact that it is an early play.
But since, as I say, there's no evidence about the date. It's not published until the 16th 23 folio. We might feel that the argument about dates and aesthetic value has become somewhat circular. In fact, it may be more appropriate and more useful to see this play as being about immaturity rather than being itself in the chair in presenting the swiftness of falling in love in this boy's own adventure. The outlaws living in the wood in the changeability of tempers and moods.
The play seems to maximise the strength and the follies of youth. It presents itself as a journey towards maturation. Its characters more and more, I think, than the characters in other Shakespeare plays are negotiating their relationship with their parents. Protest is sent away by his father, Antonio, who doesn't have any choice about it. Sylvia and the Duke are. The Duke has control over Sylvia, who she will marry, even Lance. The clown describes his leave-taking of his family.
Zane nearly illustrated by two shoes. Standing friends, mother and father. So the play understand herself as a kind of journey towards maturation, which it seems as a progress towards romantic partnerships, a kind of rites of passage play perhaps focussed on the social formation of adult males. Whereas we now, of course, think of romantic comedy as a genre that particularly appeals to women.
It's clear that this play and the others. My kids were originally written with a largely male audience in mind. Rather like the role of the Senate tradition in Elizabethan culture, with which two gentlemen of Verona have some obvious structural affinities. The play, climatized, is the tensions between same sex and opposite sex relationships.
The trauma for men in Shakespearean comedy always requires that they leave behind something often characterised as male friendship in order to form romantic partnerships. The melancholy Antonios of Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night are victims of this movement. The things the men must be left behind in order for men to take up with women. So too, we might think of the bromance between Benedict and Claudio, which is sacrificed in much ado about nothing.
Now, two gentlemen, it's a play that really prioritises male friendship. So let's start with a reminder about how much friendship worked in Renaissance culture, as you already know. Renaissance thinkers idealise the kind of intellectual and spiritual communion that was particularly possible between men. It shifted the hopes and expectations of mutual understanding and sympathy that modern Western society places on sexual, particularly heterosexual relationships into the male male sphere.
Prominent amongst these theorists is the S.A.S., Montane Montane writes in his essay of friendship. Describing the bond between friends. Our minds have jumped so unitedly together they have, with so fervent and affection considered of each other and with like affection, so discovered and sounded even to the very bottom of each other's heart and entrails. 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.
Sometimes essays are really useful source for this line of thinking, and we know that Shakespeare uses Montaigne's I say later in his career or her Montand post takes this play, which probably draws its ideas of male friendship. More from the Book of the governor and from the plays and prose writings of the influential writer John Lilly.
So this view of friendship places male friendships above male female ones and incidentally, above female female demands for the power and depth of their effective. It's easy to see you. After all, how in an age where male and female education and experience was so different. You might well feel that your husband or wife had a very different worldview, a different kind of conversation, and therefore a different sympathy from yours.
What the passionate description of male friendship in this period kind of clued, however, is the possibility of what in the modern period we call homosexuality. So it's a difficult line to draw between protestations of affection between men in Shakespearean plays, which seemed to draw on this doctrine of male friendship vs. ideas about sexuality, which we might want to bring to those plays. Let's look at the end. I think this is one of the themes that two gentlemen of Verona tussles with.
Let's look at the first scene of the. The lights of this Valentine uncourteous, our parting and right from the start. That's the sort of structural scene which we associate with lovers, is lovers who participate in the language of affection and separation reach to modern day, if I could particularly intense passing this telexes of affection, calling each other loving, tender on love, sweet glances, sweet valentine.
This wanders between the two men and the description of the absent and unnamed love of Proteus. Proteus is likened to Leander swimming the hapless fund for the love of Hero. Perhaps a reference to modernist poem probably written around the same time the two men in this opening scene moved from describing their love for each other to joshing about protest, his love for a woman. And it's interesting that the same terms seemed to circulate across both homosocial and heterosexual bonds.
That seems potentially interesting. It may suggest that this play doesn't, in fact, correspond to that trauma view of male maturation from same to opposite sex bonds that I described a minute ago as one of the movements of Shakespearean comedy. Perhaps instead it wants to allow male friendship to exist alongside or be reconciled within heterosexual marriage.
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. One features one house, one mutual happiness. Our day of marriage shall be yours. One feast, one house on mutual happiness.
Slightly difficult to know what Valentine has in mind, but whatever the marital domestic arrangements that are being proposed here, they don't seem to suggest the emotional and physical separation the two men experience at the beginning of the play. Valentine seems to emphasise the rejoining of the two friends as much as he does their marriages with Julia and Sylvia. Perhaps these heterosexual marriages are just a pretext or the beard for the ultimate and lasting union of the men.
I like to think of them as the Hampton deck of the early Modern Theatre. Jeffrey Marston argues that our modern reliance on the mutually exclusive category of hetero and homosexuality makes it difficult to see how they actually simultaneously evoked in this play. The play confounds the categories or insists that they coexist, that people are not in this business. It fits in with a modern ideas of sexuality and that is the thing you do rather than a thing you are.
After all, since Proteus and Valentine are so like each other and like each other so much. 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 opposite sex relationships writ small in the way the plays characteristic language works.
One of the reasons that two gentlemen is associated with very early Shakespeare is because it seems to be very patterned and rhetorical on one of our two theologies about Shakespeare's writing, which may or may not be true. One of the teleology is, is that Shakespeare moves from a more artificial in modern times, conceited or over flowery practically. I think form of writing early on in his career does something which is more natural, conversational, flexible later on.
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. The play makes lots of use of two particular rhetorical devices. 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. And the device I saw Koloff. I saw Kolon phrases of equal length and corresponding structure.
So enough for the repetition of the same word or words at the beginning of a sentence or line. I icicle on these phrases of equal length and corresponding structure. We can see that is a both rhetorical because that repetition and similitude or mirror imaging in some kind of rhetorical way. And this obviously got implications for models of sexuality and desire here. Purchase gives a really good example of both in this parallel formulae to leave my junior.
Shall I be sworn to love Sylvia? Shall I be sworn to wrong, my friend? 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. The parallel structures make purchases betrayals of Juliet, Sylvia and Valentine metrically. And perhaps emotionally or socially equivalent. And what's interesting about the play named for two gentlemen, is that it constantly triangulates their relationship with the desire for women.
As the structuralist anthropologist Claude Lacky Strauss famously observed, kinship alliances between men are secured by women, and women exist in those systems as tokens or intercessors, rather than as agents or even as desired objects. So they're not the thing. Me, Strauss's analysis of marriage, customs. Women are not the things that men desire. They desire the relationships with other men that women enable them to have.
As the feminist Gail Rubin put it in the classic argument, heterosexual society is built on, quote, the traffic women. Now, in part, the shifts of the play result from a thoroughgoing idealisation of women. Sylvia, the object of both Valentine and Practises and Florio's affections is like the mistress in a sonnet sequence or troubadour song. Distant and perfect Proteus. This song suggests the same. It's interesting that this has been perhaps the most famous quotation from the play.
Who is still who is Sylvia? What is she? But all our swains commend her wholly fair and wise. Is she the having such great said lend her that she might have admired it to be. Now Julia is more assertive in in, in, 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. She too is constrained by male expectations of female behaviour.
Only when dressed as Sebastian does Protea see that she is competent and useful. But like Violet in Twelfth Night. Julia finds herself undertaking the same self sabotaging role of go between in her own betrayal. She is the person who has to go and prosecute practice's suit to another woman.
In part, the role of junior in maths and science. And again, 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, 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.
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, when Junior dressed as Sebastiaan reveals herself in the forest at its conclusion, even heterosexual marriage starts to say looks like male friendship, not least because Julia remains like all Shakespeare's cross-dressing heroines in the immodest Raymonds, as she calls it, immodest fragment of male male disguise.
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. This reading sees the scenes with Lance and Krab as episodic comic turns, perhaps associated with the memory of the top Elizabethan clown Richard Tolton, who often performed with a dog or providing a showcase for his successor with the Chamberlains, men will can.
There were no stage directions in Lance's long monologues, but we could imagine them being punctuated with physical comedy as in their representation in Shakespeare in Love. There's probably a whole subtextual history of lost comic gesture, a lost genealogy or physical comedy that gets missed out of modern editions and get miss out generally of our stress on Shakespeare. As a wordsmith, textual artist rather than a performed one.
The influence of Italian physical comedy techniques from chemically. De la Torre, for instance, is just starting to be explored in relation to Shakespeare's comedies. It's hard for us as critics to not quite know how to talk about humour without deadening it into depth. I know it doesn't help be exempt from that. Later in the lecture, DeWinter floodgates up.
Now that sometimes things may be just funny, maybe part of the dog, part of the point of the dog is to be funny quite separately from the rest of the plan. The dog works as an effective antidote to that carefully patterned Petrarch language. Not least because it can't speak. He's a break from it's patterned and decorative rhetorical structure.
Now, there must be some truth in this reading of crap as a as a complete ambassador or outsider to the plot, but it's also true that we don't seem to get a repeat of this scenario in other planes. 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, whereas where other dramatists try to get some of this canine magic.
After all, we know that Shakespeare is not averse to reusing tropes and techniques that have been successful, and it's not averse to allowing performers to do their thing on the dog, though we don't. 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. 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.
The only other onstage animal definitely present, I think, is the famous pursuing band that I discuss in my lecture on Winter's Tale. So that absence or that specificity Krombach is a phenomenon of this play, not at the theatre. More generally seems to suggest that it's worth thinking about Krampus in some way more specific to or integrated with two gentlemen of Verona than the comedy trope that tends to allow.
Now, Trump himself, not incidentally, rather, resists being thematically integrated into two gentlemen, Verona. His whole demeanour is to be unmoved and unresponsive. Part of the funniness of the technique is perhaps that the dog fails to do any trace. That's what we expect when we see a dog on stage. It's going to do clever things. Crowd actually seems surprised. You can tell it to do nothing. We expect that Trump will perform in some humorous way.
But in fact, his part is conceit is constructed through inaction. Luntz acknowledges that perhaps with a knowing nod to the unreliability of animal performers. Ask my dog if you say I. It will. If you say no, it will if you shake his tail and say nothing. 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. Now the dog. All this while sheds not a tear nor speaks a word.
For some critics, that makes Crab a parody of the cruel hearted and unresponsive Petrovka mistress. The person to whom the man keeps addressing requests for affection or for a response and who never replies for others, Krabbe is a model of constancy and loyalty that the friends fail to be one literary aspect of two gentlemen. Is it submerged relationship to the great urtext of emotional and sexual relations in this period of its metamorphosis?
We used to think of it as a source for many plays, including Titus Andronicus, A Midsummer Night's Dream. But here, the repeated verb metamorphosed, which comes twice in two gentlemen of Verona about both Valentine unpractised signals the indebtedness to. Of it, perhaps, too, it presages the rape narrative. Since one of its major plots is a rape, Proteus is a man who is named for being changeable, for being protean.
He explains himself, explains his own changeability even as one heat, another heating spouse or as one nail by strength drags out another. So the remembrance of my former love is by a newer option. Sorry, a new object quite forgotten. So prejudice is defined by named for changeability. He's a version of the fickle young man we meet again in Midsummer Night's Dream. But by contrast, krab is firmly, constantly. You might even say doggedly himself.
The Dobias himself remark's lance decisively, but in being himself crumbles her parodies some of that language of male friendship that we've heard earlier in the play. Lance says, I am the dog. No, the dog is himself and I am the dog. 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.
Part of Lance's role and crap, too, is to puncture the inflated tendency of the play towards the idiom of Courtney Love and to bring out itself regarding absurdity. The scene in which Lance discusses Crap's misbehaviour pissing a while. But all the chamber smelting is well-placed to undermine the courtly pretensions either side of it.
So far that I've been implying that crab is a kind of focus for a. petrochem or a. platonic idealised Asians that challenge the governing pieties of two gentlemen of Verona. What I want to try and do in the last part of the lecture is to do this in a more sustained and critically informed way via the discipline of animal studies. I don't know, studies offers a theoretical framework for understanding how animals are used in literary texts.
And it focuses in particular on ways their presence disrupts some assumptions about human exceptionalism. Animals construct and problematise the question of what it means to be human. Erica Futch writes that, quote, Without the app, without the animal, there would be no human. Without the animal. There would be no human spirit. Grateful. So animals are active participants in culture rather than passive recipients of it.
And we can see this methodology as a more radical development of the interest in the other. In Renaissance studies over the past decades, Catholics, which is racial and ethnic others, these have all been particular focuses of interest, partly as liminal. Low threshold cases which allow categories to come into being and animal studies is also drawing on the urgency of political environmentalism. In thinking about the interconnected ecologies of animal and human.
The current idea of post humanism post humanism is a philosophical counter to the human centred ideologies that have done such damage to our shared planet by moving the human to the margin and emphasising other elements of the ecology.
We can see we can see things differently and we can see how Shakespeare, the literary architect of humanism, most explicitly, but not only perhaps in the title of Harold Bloom's famous book, Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human Eye, can see how Shakespeare is so critical investment. The critical investment we have in Shakespeare as a humanist might open up his world to this really reappropriation of reassessment from the point of view of animals.
As with lots of rules and codification, we can often see in the culture of the late 16th century the effort to establish philosophical or category distinctions between, say, species or races or genres. These are attempts to categorise which get rarified over the intervening centuries and which broadly postmodernism is trying to undo. That's why there are often unexpected resonances between pre 60, 70 century and post late 20th of 21st modern culture.
So resonances between pre and post modern culture. So animal studies is applied itself to numerous Shakespearean plays. Typically with a literal attention to battlefield imagery, which is the third as a toad or a spider, for instance, or the presence of animals such as sheep in the pastoral imagination of Winter's Tale. Whereas similarly, the use of animal similes in Shakespeare maintains the animal human boundary.
Humans are like animal species. The urge towards metaphor in Shakespeare's works tends to blur that boundary at the micro level. Humans are animals. 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, or the imagery of falconry in The Taming of the Shrew. So why would this work?
Take two gentlemen of her own? Well, crumps resistance to the patriarchal social order that's so limiting in the play world may seem to valorise physical experience over the decorative linguistic constraints of this Petrarch world. But the body, the physical is a dangerous engine in the play as the sexual violence at its conclusion shows us. Lance describes how I was sent to deliver him crap.
I was sent to deliver him as a present to Mr. Cylvia from my master, and I came no sooner into the dining chamber. But he steps me to her trencher and steals her capons leg. In bringing that crab as a present from Proteus and showing him stealing the meat from her plate, we can see that the dog preamps the queasy transaction of Sylvere between Valentine and Proteus. At the play's conclusion, Lunts explains he was supposed to deliver a more suitable canine gift, a lucky dog.
But he lost it and so offered crab instead. We could see this as much as shadowing Proteus himself as the rough surrogate for the more housetrained suitor. Valentine. So krab is an appropriate Go-Between for Proteus and Sylvia in the key highlights, the cardinal desires that underpaid approaches its rhetoric of romantic love. He's a figure, then approaches protests later likens his own desires to a dog spaniel. Mike. The more she spends my love, the more it grows and fallen off on her.
Still, the idea of his love as it is an interesting distancing of agents. And he makes his designs into an animal with their own with its own separate being. So if Krabbe is linked with Proteus, he's also linked with other characters in the play. As I've said, he has some parallels with Sylvia as the unmoved Petrarch and mistress. And he's also linked with the character of Julia. When Sylvia rejects proteases gift of crab, he sends another entreaty.
The ring that Julia gave him crab is a prop them to materialise that trafficking women. That's the flip side of romantic Courtney Love. So these comparisons between Crumps behaviour and that of the other characters are small examples of a larger philosophical or ontological distinction. Are humans and animals different? That's the question, I guess. The play asks. At this point, Lance makes an explicit comparison between his own behaviour and that of the dog.
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. Fitow, ever see me do such a trick? So Crab serves here to maintain an idea of civilised conduct and its limitations even or especially in the act of debating those conventions. 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.
Why this scene is reported by Lance rather than being shown on the stage. Lance's description punctuates to decorous romantic scenes. It's really good to see how Shakespeare's structures, his plays and the structural positioning of the last in two gentlemen is really, really interesting. So if the description serves either as behavioural contrast or as a subversive diagnostic, the physical world of the animal body underpins and undermines the play's mere platonic aspirations.
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. 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. Proteus and Speed have an extended exchange about how Proteus is the shepherd and speed the sheep in Act five. Sylvia likens Proteus to a dangerous, wild animal.
She says she would rather be breakfast to a hungry lion than have false. 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. Cruel heartedness. It's an equivalence which is developed in the extended dog imagery of the Merchant of Venice. This is Lance, I think crap. My dog with a serious nature dog that lives. My mother weeping. My father wailing. My sister crying. Made howling.
Our cat wringing her hands and all our house in a great perplexity. 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. A Jew would have wept to have seen our party. We can see, though, that the simile is already collapsed here. The poorest animal human boundary again in the notion that crap has no more pity than the dog.
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. And here we might link him with the role of the outlaws. For instance, the outlaws are a curious anticipation, perhaps, of the Duke. Think the exiled caught in as you like it. They, too, are likened to Robin Hood and his merry men. They're both uncivilised, barbarous, outside the sphere of the court and the repository of proper values.
Valentine. When they meet Valentine, they asked him to be their general hierarchical. They want a general, I contend, to be our general, 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. But here it's something slightly different. The outlaws are not the threat to Sylvia. In fact, Proteus is.
Valentine agrees that he will become the captain to the Outlaws, quote, provided that you do no outrages on stilli women for poor passengers. 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. 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.
A bit like the dog, but turn out to undermine that boundary by their own unexpected behaviour. So one feature of these kind of readings is that they resonate with different aspects of two gentlemen veremis far fetched plot. They serve to clarify and unify. It seems the play looks more interesting as a result of its encounter with animal studies. 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.
And that has a role in those questions of dating and chronology. But I mentioned a few minutes ago.
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, in challenging boundaries of civilise barbarous and bestial behaviour, in pointing out that the worst behaviour in the play is human, not animal, and thereby undermining the distinctiveness of human emotion and behaviour in the play to be human in two gentlemen of Verona. By contrast, the crowd is not to be in physical control and behaving well.
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. It's a parody of the trope of the unresponsive, haughty Sonnet Mistress. His liveliness and presence on the stage substitutes authenticity for the affectation of courtly love, even as his conduct gives a glimpse of the darker carnal side of that physical authenticity. I think Crap's presence in the play makes legible.
Though it does not explain away or excuse the animalistic behaviour of Proteus at the end of the play. Thinking about some of these plays just in our own contemporary world, I feel that the language of the political theory of consent is a really pressing framework for thinking about Shakespeare's plays. A production of Two Gentlemen of Verona at Greenwich Theatre in 2004, directed by Stuart Draper, took on for some important modern ideological reasons.
The relationship between Valentine and Proteus as explicitly gay in modern terms. The production began arrestingly with Valentine reciting Mahler's amorous love lyric Come Live With Me and Be My Love. This production says something about the delicacy of Shakespeare's own presentation of hetero and homo, social or sexual desire and of animal behaviours in two gentlemen of Verona, that the productions crap was Travis Steed as a toy dog on wheels with a handler.
I think that was a way of making Crabill a less complicated and less resonant figure on the stage. And I actually feel, although I can understand the political impetus behind making Valentino's process, modern gay figures also think that possibly undermines the challenge that the play structure of trying to reconcile intense male male passions with heterosexual marriage,
which gives us. So in presenting Vallentine in protest, ask clearly gay and krab as clearly a toy dog were both practical and understandable, but I think rather bloodless and inadequate interpretations of the complexities. I've tried to point out in two gentlemen of four. So that's the end of this Approaching Shakespeare series. There are now 32 lectures. This is the 30 second, the 32. You'll have to petition very hard if you want me to do the last ones. 306 did not.