SOURCE: "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," in The Shattered Glass: A Dramatic Pattern in Shakespeare's Early Plays, Wayne State University Press, 1968, pp. 34-42.

In the following essay, Cutts examines the lack of self-understanding on the part of the characters in Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona begins to exploit the protean situations love will put man through in his quest for true, unMuscovited, unvizarded, and unshamable love. "Who is Silvia? What is she," the delicious touchstone lyric of the play, is deliberately enigmatical. Who is Silvia? What is she? She is really Julia to Proteus, when, his protean journey over and unmasked in the green woods' episode (a foretaste of many such episodes to follow in Shakespeare), he apparently recognizes his true love, his "wish for ever" (V.iv.119). She is Silvia when in his sea-change into something not rich but certainly strange he...