SOURCE: “Love and Courtesy in The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” in Shakespeare in his Context: The Constellated Globe, The Collected Papers of Muriel Bradbrook, Vol. IV, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989, pp. 44-57.

In the following essay, Bradbrook explores the play as a comedy of manners, suggesting that it is more closely affiliated with Shakespeare's last romances than his later comedies of love.

It is a great honour to be invited in this ancient city to celebrate a poet who wrote of this region with varying degrees of knowledge but always with reverence, as of a visionary country, a country of the heart. On the stage of his day, Italy was depicted either as very beautiful or very, very wicked. There was nothing in between a country full of lovers and a country full of murderous ducal feuds. No ordinary lives at all; the moonlight of the summer garden was heavenly...