Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Marvin Felheim and Philip Traci

Critical Essay by Marvin Felheim and Philip Traci

SOURCE: “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” in Realism in Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies: “O Heavenly Mingle,” University Press of America, 1980, pp. 51-65.

In the following essay, Felheim and Traci discuss The Two Gentlemen of Verona as a comedy based on realism, characterizing it as a play about change and growth.

Proteus: Yet writers say: as in the sweetest bud The eating canker dwells, so eating Love Inhabits in the finest wits of all

(I. i. 42-44).

I

The theme of The Two Gentlemen of Verona centers in the idea of change, a concept embodied in the very name, Proteus, of one of the two gentlemen. When we first meet the young men, they are provincials, “… living dully sluggardiz'd at home” (I. i. 7), in Verona. And, as Valentine asserts, “Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits” (l. 2). His thesis is almost immediately demonstrated in the scene between Proteus and...
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