William Shakespeare: The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
Performed at the Michigan Shakespeare Festival, July 13, 2019.
What is a gentleman? Are these two Veronese gentlemen true gentlemen? Why Veronese gentlemen, and not gentlemen from some other city? Why bring them to Milan?
And while we’re at it, Shakespeare concludes his comedy with a reconciliation scene that we now find utterly implausible, even for a comedy. What was he thinking? Is the fault in the stars, in the brilliant Shakespearean constellation, or in ourselves?
In the 1590s, when Shakespeare wrote, Verona was ruled by commercial-republican Venice. It may have been known as a city of romance; Shakespeare set Romeo and Juliet there, and it has surely been known as such ever since. So, gentlemen of Verona may be expected to be looking for love, for girls happily to wed. For gentlemen, marriage matters politically; aristocratic households not only possess wealth, they rule. Good marriages perpetuate aristocratic regimes, bad marriages ruin them. All regimes concern themselves with the problem of continuity, with the transfer of authority from one generation to the next. Monarchies see dynastic struggles and fear imbecile heirs to the throne, and in the American republic young Lincoln lectured schoolboys on “the perpetuation of our political institutions, as the founding generation passed from the scene.
Milan has another regime, under another imperial ruler. Conquered by the Romans in the third century BC, Milan served as capital of the Western Roman Empire, beginning in third century AD. There the Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan in 313, granting religious toleration throughout the empire and thereby enabling Christianity to spread unimpeded. The Roman aristocracy would need to adjust to the new religion, now, just as the modern European aristocracy would need to adjust to commerce and democracy, centuries later.
In modern times, the Christian ruler of Milan, Ludovico il Moro, committed a notorious mistake. Needing an ally against rival, ever-squabbling Italian city-states in the 1490s, when other enterprising Italians were sailing the ocean blue for the New World, he called the king of France Charles into Italy. In 1500, Charles VII returned, this time to stay and to rule—an example of misguided policy by a Christian Italian prince Machiavelli would later deplore. In 1525, Hapsburg Spain took over, and in Shakespeare’s time Milan was part of the Holy Roman Empire.
For centuries, Roman gentlemen knew exactly who they were, and what a gentleman was. But if the Empire becomes holy, at least in name, possibly in aspiration and even a bit in fact, what is a gentleman then, and who is one? ‘We democrats’ of later modernity miss the point of the play if we do not see that it’s about those questions, about aristocracy, the regime that claims to be the rule of the few who are best, men and women who claim the right to rule on the basis of their excellence—whether of virtue (as in Aristotle), ‘birth’ (social rank), wealth, or some combination thereof. In modernity, aristocracy often founds its claim on knowledge or expertise, calling itself ‘meritocracy’; traditionally, another sort of learning, learning in the liberal arts, enhanced a young man’s eligibility for positions of authority. Christians are numbered among ‘the elect’—a new sort of aristocracy, chosen not on the basis of virtues natural or conventional but by God, gratuitously.
Given these cross-cutting, sometimes contradictory claims to rule by self-styled aristocrats, what is a young gentleman of Verona to do, and to think? Proteus, named for the classical world’s legendary changeling, who wrestled with Odysseus, intends to stay in his native city, close to his honorable beloved. Valentine, whose name means “as one containing valor,” has no beloved. He prepares instead for an odyssey, intending to leave Verona, “To see the wonders of the world abroad” (I.i.6). Valentine criticizes love as a dubious investment of sentiment (“If haply won, perhaps a hapless gain”) and intellect (“a folly bought with wit, / Or else a wit by folly vanquished”) (I.i.32-35). If Valentine is an Odysseus and Proteus a Proteus, they will square off, someday (and Homer’s readers won’t put their money on Proteus). Now, however, they part as friends, agreeing to correspond. Proteus thinks Valentine seeks not so much the wonders of the world as honor, traditionally the aristocrat’s passion par excellence, the ruling passion of the noblest minds, as Publius would call it, nearly two centuries later. For the moment, Proteus’ mind is closed to wonder, his love for Julia having “metamorphis’d” him (he soliloquizes, recalling his Ovid), causing him to “neglect my studies, lose my time, / War with good counsel, set the world at nought,” making his “wit with musing weak, heart sick with thought” (I.i.63-69). His immediate worry is Julia’s failure to answer his most recent missive.
Julia asks her lady-in-waiting, Lucetta (“light”), if she would “counsel me to fall in love” and, if so, with which of her suitors. Lucetta recommends Proteus but has “no reasons” for her recommendation “but a woman’s reason; I think him so because I think him so” (I.ii.23-24). This unilluminating counsel fails to impress Julia; Proteus “has never moved me” because in “little speaking [he] shows his love but small” (I.ii.29). Lucetta then produces the letter, which Julia pretends to scorn but delights in, tears up, then attempts to reassemble. Lucetta isn’t fooled, knowing that her mistress has made up her mind. But Julia’s initial concern will prove just.
Proteus’s father, Antonio, also receives advice from a servant, or rather from his brother, a priest, who conveys it through his servant. Why does his lordship allow Proteus to stay at home, “While other men, of slender reputation, / Put forth their sons to seek preferment out,” whether to war, to voyages of discovery, or to “the studious universities” (I.iii.5-10). Antonio confesses to having thought the same thing: His son “cannot be a perfect man,” a man with a just claim to rule, without “being tried and tutor’d in the world: / Experience is by industry achiev’d, / And perfected by the swift course of time,” which his son is now wasting in Verona, Venice’s subordinate, while his friend Valentine is off (as servant Panthino reminds him) to the Holy Roman Emperor’s court in Milan (I.ii.20-23). When Proteus enters, reading Julia’s return letter, he lies to his father about its sender, telling him it’s from Valentine. This only confirms Antonio’s intention to send Proteus to the imperial city; after all, he will be reuniting the young man with his friend. In lying, Proteus tells himself, “I shunn’d the fire for fear of burning,” only to drench himself “in the sea, where I am drown’d” (I.iii.78-79). This hard lesson will not prevent him from lying many more times, however, with Protean abandon.
At the Duke’s palace in Milan, Valentine’s servant, Speed, baits his master, who has reversed his opinion of love, having fallen for the Duke’s daughter, Silvia. Valentine has been so profoundly “metamorphosis’d” by love that “I can hardly think you my master” (II.i.26-27). For his own sport, Speed takes up Valentine’s former critique: “If you love her, you cannot see her” because “Love is blind” (II.i.61-63). With both Lucetta and Speed, the servant attempts to moderate a young boss. Valentine differs from Julia, however, because he makes no attempt to deceive him respecting his correspondence with Silvia; he chaffs Speed right back. Having no need of maidenly modesty, he has no need of maidenly secrecy. The crucial question will be whether an ‘Ovidian’ metamorphosis effected by love is merely ‘Protean,’ or does it instead bring out the nature of the lover, a nature that can remain faithful, unchanging?
Being a maid, Silvia does have need of a ruse. Valentine has been gazing at her at table, and no woman in the world who isn’t blind as Love wouldn’t notice such behavior. She has charged him with writing a letter to her (supposed) beloved, and she has come to tell him that “I would have had them writ more movingly” (II.i.117). She will permit him to revise and resubmit. “O excellent device!” Speed exclaims (II.i.128); the lady flirts well, having “taught her love himself to write unto her lover,” whom he now sees to be Valentine (II.i.156)—as he explains to his uncomprehending, disbelieving, love-tortured master. Is his servant in earnest but wrong, in earnest and right, or deliberately wrong and still baiting him, as his wont? Love is a chameleon, as Speed now and Valentine soon will remark, living on air (as chameleons were said to do)—that is to say, on hope—and changing colors in its blushes, its excitation, its jealous rages.
Changeling Proteus implausibly pledges his constancy to Julia and then heads to Milan, where Valentine lauds his character to the Duke when told of his impending arrival. Proteus, Valentine avers, is a man of ripe judgment and “all good grace to grace a gentleman” (II.iv.70). So trusting, he does not hesitate to tell Proteus of his beloved, to extol her beauty and saintliness, and to introduce her to him. Between now and the flirtation over the letter, Speed has been proven correct; the couple are betrothed, and plan their elopement. Proteus now has other plans, having instantly conceived a passion for Silvia. His love, “like a waxen image ‘gainst a fire / Bears no impression of the thing it was. / Methinks my zeal to Valentine is cold, / And that I love him not as I was wont. / O! but I love his lady too much…” (II.iv.197-201). As for Julia, he has “quite forgotten her” (II.iv.191)—a Proteus of love, indeed. “If I can check my erring love, I will; / If not, to compass her I’ll use my skill” (II.iv.209-210). It doesn’t take him long to logic-chop his way to the latter course. He even concludes his ‘reasoning’ with a prayer, a prayer to Love: “Love, lend me wings to make my purpose swift, / As thou has lent me with to plot this drift” (IV.vi.42-43). Back in Verona, meanwhile, Julia tells Lucetta that Proteus’s “words are bonds, his oaths are oracles, / His love sincere, his thoughts immaculate,” and so on (II.vii.75-76). She plans to disguise herself as a man and run off to Milan to be with him. Sensible Lucetta doubts her mistress’s faith to be well-placed but, loyal herself, will not betray her plan.
Proteus easily frustrates the elopement by disclosing Valentine’s plot to the Duke, who banishes the plotter. The Duke would marry his daughter to the wealthy Thurio, a Thor in name only—vain, cowardly, and blustering, a Thor of big thunder and small hammer, despised by prudent Silvia. For his part, Proteus offers ‘friend’ Valentine mock-moderate advice: “Cease to lament for that thou canst not keep” (III.i.241); trust to time. Write to Silvia and send your letters through me, as I shall deliver them faithfully. As it happens, Proteus’s servant, Launce, has formed a better estimate of Proteus than Valentine has done; “I am but a fool, look you, and yet I have the wit to think my master is a kind of a knave” (III.i.261-262). He suspects his master of being willing to launce, a lot.
In this comedy, then, it is usually the case that the servants are smarter than their masters and mistresses. Even Launce’s dog, subordinate of a subordinate, routinely outwits his master, puts him to shame, induces his master to serve him. [1] This is Christianity ill-conceived, a Christianity in comical abdication of political responsibility, mock-Christian misrule. Who, then, are the true aristocrats? How will the aristocrats-by-convention improve themselves, become worthy of the authority they claim?
The Duke isn’t doing so well, in that regard. His purpose as an aristocratic father with an eligible daughter is to choose a worthy suitor and so to continue his line, assuring that his family will continue to rule in the next generation. He too trusts Proteus, asking him his counsel on how to make Silvia forget Valentine and love Thurio. Proteus is more than happy to oblige, and to use what there is of the Duke’s prudence for his own advantage and against the Duke’s intention. Slander Valentine, the would-be Machiavel thoughtfully advises, “with falsehood, cowardice, and poor descent— / Three things that women highly hold in hate” (III.ii.32-33). Yes, but I cannot deliver such a message, the Duke calculates; it must come from the one “she esteemeth as his friend” (III.ii.37). Needless to say, Proteus promises to undertake the task, adding that he shall praise Thurio in the bargain, as Thurio himself is the first to suggest. The Duke and Thurio can trust Proteus, the Duke explains, because Proteus is “already Love’s firm votary / And cannot soon revolt and change [his] mind” concerning his lovely Julia (III.ii.58-59). That Proteus has already revolted and changed his mind, that his quick betrayal of Valentine proves him capable of doing just that, does not occur to the Duke or to Thurio. Milan’s rulers are misfits, aristocrats in name only. As for Proteus, he puts his faith in the power of poetry to persuade Silvia, and again the Duke concurs: “Much is the force of heaven-bred poesy” (III.ii.72). Proteus knows that not all poesy need be heaven-bred, but he does trust in its power; he trusts in what he knows to be human artifice, not in nature and not in God. Shakespeare also knows that not all poesy is heaven-sent, and wants his hearers to know it. He also knows the power of some poetry, but prefers to use it to illuminate and not to deceive. Hilariously, he has dolt Thurio choose to write the sonnet.
A natural aristocrat will find his way to rule in nature itself. So we see when Valentine, self-exiled from Verona and banished from Milan, meets a gang of outlaws in a forest on the frontiers of Mantua. To win their esteem, along with his own and his servant’s safety, he tells them a prudent if not noble lie—that he was banished for killing a man, although “without false vantage or base treachery,” there being honor among killers as well as thieves (IV.i.29). Suitably impressed, upon learning that Valentine also possesses a useful knowledge (foreign languages) as well as the requisite virtù, they will have him for their king. “Some of us are gentleman,” one of their number explains, outlaws only because they committed murder and “such-like petty crimes” in “the fury of ungovern’d youth” (IV.i.44-45). It should be remarked that aristocratic regimes that fail to govern their youth, whether in love or in anger, cannot last long. Valentine agrees “to make a virtue of necessity” (as one outlaw puts it); in return, they will “do thee homage, and be rul’d by thee, / Love thee as our commander and our king,” albeit upon pain of death if he demurs (IV.i.62, 66-67). Judging that these new outlaw-allies may be more honest than some of those he has known in civil society, Valentine consents, “Provided that you do no outrages / On silly women or poor passengers” (IV.i.71-72). Of course not. Being gentlemen manqué, “We detest such vile base practices” (IV.i.73).
As Proteus’s servant serves, doglike, a dog, so (Proteus admits), “spaniel-like,” the more Silvia “spurns my love / The more it grows and fawneth on her still” (IV.ii.14-15). Thurio arrives beneath Silvia’s room, where the Duke has confined her, with sonnet in hand and musicians in his train. Julia is there, too, disguised as a boy, listening to the preposterous serenade. Proteus’s betrayal stands exposed after Thurio gives up and Proteus makes another try at winning Silvia. More lies follow: Julia is dead, so he’s free to court another; Valentine is, too, so Silvia is equally free. After her scornful rejection, he begs for her picture as a consolation, which she promises to send in the morning, “loath” though she is “to be your idol” (IV.ii.124).
Rid of him, she spins a counterplot with her friend Eglamour, whose name Shakespeare has borrowed from a hero of a medieval romance. Sir Eglamour of Artois is a Christian Hercules, performing heroic deeds in a story of courtly love that, counter to convention, leads to marriage and family. A good name, indeed, and Silvia knows him as “a gentleman”—”valiant, wise, remorseful [i.e., compassionate], well accomplished” (IV.iii.11-13). Like Julia, she would escape her father’s injustice and seek her beloved. She will need no protective disguise, as Julia did, because Eglamour consents to accompany her, although this will put him at odds with the Duke. His compassion or pity, consonant with both nature and Christianity, brings him to agree to guard her. Apart from Valentine, he is the only real gentleman in the play, although, being human and no demi-god, he will defend her in a less-than-Herculean way.
Disguised Julia calls herself “Sebastian,” recalling the saint martyred after attempting to persuade the Roman Emperor Diocletian from persecuting Christians. “Sebastian” means “be ashamed,” and Proteus, who doesn’t recognize her in disguise, shows no more shame at his betrayals than the Emperor did at killing saints. Having judged his own dog-serving servant unreliable, he asks her to deliver a ring to Silvia, which of course is the same ring Julia had given to him at the time they pledged mutual fidelity. Unlike Proteus, who uses deception to betray his friend, Julia will faithfully offer the ring to Silvia. “I am my master’s true confirmed love, / But cannot be true servant to my master / Unless I prove false traitor to myself. / Yet will I woo for him but yet so coldly / As, heaven it knows, I would not have him speed” (IV.iv. 98-102). Silvia unwitting proves more faithful to Julia than Proteus, plotting, saying, “Tell him from me, / One Julia, that his changing,” Protean, “thoughts forget, / Would better fit his chamber than this shadow,” the picture of herself that he wants her to exchange for the ring, which Silvia rejects because her finger “would not do his Julia so much wrong” (IV.iv.133). “Sebastian” reveals herself not as Julia but as Julia’s servant, whom Silvia accordingly rewards with a token of respect for her loyalty. Having proved herself good and faithful, Julia also proves vulnerable to a touch of jealousy; left with the picture of Silvia, she supposes herself no less lovely than her rival, concluding that Love is indeed “a blinded god” (IV.iv.193). In judging, justice is blind to persons; in pursuing, Love is blind to judgment. To found a just regime, men and women will need to learn to love prudently and to judge justly, forming families aristocratic in the natural sense of the word, the rule of those best by nature, as guided by God. Before leaving in search of Valentine, Silvia goes to confession.
Before Thurio left Silvia, Proteus told him to meet him the next morning at St. Gregory’s well. It is an unwittingly ironical choice, as St. Gregory was the man who sent Christian missionaries to England, where they led the Anglo-Saxons to conversion. Proteus intends no such holy purpose, but his mission will soon come to an end. By the next day, the Duke has discovered Silvia’s escape, correctly guessing that she’s left in search of Valentine. All parties will soon converge in the forest, in nature, outside the city and its conventions, where a re-founding of the Milanese regime may occur rightly, by the light of natural justice.
An outlaw intercepts Silvia; Eglamour’s disappearance will remain unexplained, and he will not return. However things may have gone, the outlaw faithfully brings the lady to his captain, even assuring her: “Fear not, he bears an honorable mind, / And will not use a woman lawlessly” (V.iii.12-14). His fidelity to his promise not to harm women will serve him well, in the end. Valentine already knows that his men “love me well; yet I have much to do / To keep them from uncivil outrages” (V.iv.16-17). But he hides, seeing intruders in the forest.
They are not strangers. Proteus, Julia/Sebastian are with Silvia, whom Proteus has seized from the outlaws; hoping to put her in his debt, he insists that they “would have forc’d your honor and your love” (V.iv.21). “How like a dream is this I see and hear!” Valentine thinks; like Proteus, he prays to Love, not for swiftness in the execution of a plot, as Proteus had done, but for exactly the opposite, for the “patience to forbear awhile” (V.iv.26-27). Valentine’s love is Christian, agapic not erotic: “Agape suffereth long and is kind; agape envieth not, agape vaunteth not itself” (I Corinthians 13:4). Christian love is patient, not protean,. Christian love enables not only the innocence of doves but the prudence of serpents. In terms of the names in the play, “Speed” is a servant for Valentine, a person under his rule; Proteus imagines speed a virtue, and his servant is a clown.
Fortified with this loving patience, Valentine listens as Silvia laments her misery in having been rescued by “false Proteus,” exactly the sort of man to whom she would never want to be obliged (V.iv.35). He listens as she adds, “O, heaven be judge how I love Valentine, / Whose life’s as tender to me as my soul!” (V.iv.36-37). And he hears his beloved reveal not only her faithful heart but her clear mind, as when Proteus complains of “the curse in love” (Love’s final answer to his evil, impatient prayer), that “women cannot love where they’re beloved,” she rejoins with crushing logic that “Proteus cannot love where he’s beloved!”—in Verona, by Julia (V.iv.43-45). The Protean soul contradicts itself by rending its faith “into a thousand oaths,” by committing perjury, by saying two opposite things at once (V.iv.48). “Thou has no faith left now, unless thou’st two, / And that’s far worse than one,” making him a “counterfeit,” a false double, “to thy true friend!” (V.iv.50-53). This reduces Proteus first to appealing to convention masquerading as nature (“In love, / Who respects friend?”); when Silvia refutes this (“All men but Proteus”) he threatens to “love [her] ‘gainst the nature of love—force ye”—the very act he had begun by praising himself for saving her from (V.iv.50-54). Unblessed or even cursed by nature, or by the goddess Love, he would treat her as Machiavelli urges the prince to treat the protean, faithless lady Fortuna, to master her by force. “I’ll force thee to yield to my desire” (V.iv.59). The source of Proteus’s proteanism is the disorder of his soul, which he has turned in precise contradiction to its natural order. His reason serves his desires, and when reasoning fails to get him what his desires want, he resorts to spiritedness, to angry threats of force. Since (as Socrates observes in the Republic) the desires or appetites are foolish and inconstant counselors, he constantly bends himself out of shape.
Valentine, whose soul is so ordered that his reason contains his valor, now puts that virtue to use, commanding Proteus to “let go that rude uncivil touch” (V.iv.60). In the wild, natural forest, outside civil society, his mind and heart command civility, speech over touch. Machiavelli teaches that one learns best not through hearing or faith, not through seeing or reason, but through the sense of touch—touch, which caresses or annihilates, mastering Fortuna. Valentine doesn’t need force to defeat the astonished Proteus; he need only address him as “Thou common friend, that’s without faith or love” (V.iv.63). Common: That is to say, he reveals Proteus as a commoner, not an aristocrat at all, unworthy of ruling anyone because incapable of ruling himself as a human being should do, if fully human. “Proteus, / I am sorry I must never trust thee more, / But count the world a stranger for thy sake. / The private wound is deepest” (V.iv.68-71). Valentine’s own status as a ruler crumbles if civil and even personal friendship disintegrates. Aristocracy requires the virtues of courage, moderation, justice, prudence, fidelity in friendship and in love. For an aristocrat to be a counterfeit, aristocratic in convention, in title or appearance only, ruins aristocracy, makes the world itself a stranger, which is to say a foreigner, not merely an illegal but a natural alien. Machiavellianism alienates nature, and in so doing destroys not only conventional aristocracy, the political balance-wheel between ‘the one,’ the prince, and ‘the many,’ the commoners, but destroys the real, natural aristocracy upon which every conventional aristocracy must finally rely.
Here is where ‘we democrats’ misunderstand the ending of the play. Proteus, for all his faults, retains an element of aristocracy in his soul. He has attempted to play the leonine and vulpine prince, but he still has a core of virtue that his would-be virtù cannot quite smother. He can still feel shame, the reverse side of the honor that is the ruling passion of the true aristocrat’s mind. Confronted by the outraged friend he has betrayed, he admits that “My shame and guilt confounds me” (V.iv.74). Instead of offering battle he asks for forgiveness. Only in a soul formed and informed by natural right and Christian or agapic love can this response make sense. The same is true of Valentine’s response:
Then I am paid;
And once again I do receive thee honest.
Who by repentance is not satisfied
Is nor of heaven nor earth, for these are pleas’d;
By penitence th’ Eternal’s wrath’s appeas’d.
And, that my love may appear plain and free,
All that was mine in Silvia I give thee. (V.iv.78-83)
If God forgives penitent sinners, and if nature does, too, why should humans not forgive? Is Proteus’s sudden show of shame and guilt, along with his repentance and humble request for forgiveness, only another shape-shifting, soon to be forgotten by him? Is Valentine’s immediate reversal of his distrust, his natural (that is, rational) and Christian forgiveness implausible, or even a ruse, a deeper Machiavellianism? Unlikely: This is a comedy, and Shakespeare does not intend to appeal to the supposed realism of Machiavellians or democrats, but to the realities of natural right and Christian grace, which Tocqueville identified as the democratizing gift of an aristocratic society. The resulting democratic society yet stands in need of aristocratic guidance, Tocqueville added.
But what of Julia, still disguised as Sebastian? Overwhelmed by all of this, she covers and reveals herself by stepping out of the shadow of her disguise, as Valentine had stepped out of the shadows of the forest. She too rebukes Proteus, invoking his shame at his own commonness, baseness, vulgarity. Behold the woman:
Behold her that gave aim to all thy oaths,
And entertain’d ’em deeply in her heart.
How oft has thou with perjury cleft the root!
O Proteus, let this habit make thee blush!
Be thou asham’d that I have took upon me
Such an immodest raiment—if shame live
In a disguise of love.
It is the lesser blot, modesty finds,
Women to change their shapes than men their minds. (V.iv.101-110)
The root of nature, the heart, will be cleft by the many-minded, self-contradictory man. The relation of heart to mind, of morality to reason, deranged, ought to shame not only an aristocrat but a man as such.
And so it does. Proteus admits “’tis true” (V.iv.110). Inconstancy is the original sin, the “one error that fills [man] with faults,” making him “run through all th’ sins” (V.iv.111-112). To run: to be impatient, to hasten, to change senselessly, to be ruled by the desires. “What is in Silvia’s face but I may spy / More fresh in Julia’s with a constant eye?” (V.iv.114-115). That is, constancy of heart is the indispensable condition of clarity of mind, of the reasoning mind whose exercise shows men human, and makes aristocrats just. At this, Valentine again intervenes. With right relations restored, he proposes reconciliation of both the friends and the lovers. Proteus and, crucially, Julia agree to the covenant. What Christian aristocrats of the Tudors’ English regime once understood and accepted as plausible, at least in an instructive stage comedy, we modern democrats, we petty Machiavels, do not. Were they the deluded ones, or are we?
As for Valentine and Silvia, there remains the matter of her father, the Duke, who now blunders in, accompanied by thundering arch-blunderer Thurio. Upon seeing Silvia, Thurio claims her as his own, but Valentine proves the more valorous of the two (no hard thing), threatening to thrash him if he touches her, and the false Thor instantly decides that only a fool “will endanger / His body for a girl that loves him not” (V.iv.133-134). The Duke has prudence enough to recognize the obvious: “The more degenerate and base art thou / To make such means for her as thou hast done / And leave her on such slight conditions.” (V.iv.136-138) No true aristocrat, Thurio. Therefore “by the honour of my ancestry”—in the name of his aristocratic lineage—”I do applaud thy spirit, Valentine, / And think thee worthy of an empress’ love” (V.iv.139-141). Valor is the spirit of the true aristocrat, and the Duke now sees that he needs to re-found his regime by ending Valentine’s banishment but much more, to “Plead a new state in thy unrivall’d merit” (V.iv.144). This new state, this new regime, will find support in the man he now addresses as Sir Valentine. “Thou art a gentleman, and well-deriv’d; / Take thou thy Silvia, for thou has deserv’d her.” (V.iv.146-147). The Duke of Milan has clearly stated what a gentleman really is, and it is on this true perception, made possible by a reformed because dis-illusioned heart, that the renewed and more truly aristocratic regime will rest.
Valentine’s first act as a co-ruler of that regime is to reincorporate its remaining repentant scapegraces, the outlaws who preceded him in banishment. They are, he tells the Duke, “men endu’d with worthy qualities,” deserving now of forgiveness, having become “reformed, civil, full of good, / And fit for great employment, worthy lord” (V.iv.154-157). The Duke immediately pardons both them and Valentine, telling his future son-in-law to “Dispose of them as thou know’st their deserts” (V.iv.158-159). Clear-sighted, because virtuous, Valentine knows them because he is clear-sighted, and will then be able to exercise the virtue of justice wisely—justice and wisdom being the virtues of the ruler par excellence, the virtues needed in politics. The Duke then proposes an extraordinary ‘royal progress’ back to Milan—extraordinary because they shall proceed “with triumphs, mirth, and rare solemnity” (V.iv.161). The circumstance makes celebration of victory understandable enough, but how can mirth and solemnity combine? Only in comedy: the high seriousness of tragedy has no mirth, but comedy treats of “high” or noble things with a happy ending, an ending whereby all the elements that might make for tragedy are harmonized as a graceful spirit and the rule of reason over hearts corrected by grace take hold among the rulers of the political community. Comedy is aristocracy gone right, tragedy aristocracy gone wrong. Too much democracy will form souls that blink uncomprehendingly at both.
There is even a hint of philosophy to come. Valentino introduces the Duke to Julia, still in boy-disguise. “I think the boy hath grace in him; he blushes,” the Duke observes, happily noting an aristocratic sense of shame in the supposed lad (V.iv.165). Valentine warrants him “more grace than boy,” and when the Duke asks what that could mean he promises to tell the story in the return, triumphant, trip (V.iv.166), promising in addition that the Duke will “wonder” at the tale (V.iv.169). Before embarking on his odyssey, Valentine had said he intended to see the wonders of the world abroad; Proteus had supposed Valentine’s motive to have been the quest for honor. Valentine has seen the wonders and found honor, as well. As for Proteus, it will be, just Valentine remarks in his final act of justice, Proteus’s act of penance will be to hear “the story of your loves discovered” (V.iv.171).
After that, Valentine promises, the regime will be re-founded on the two marriages, re-founded on “One feast, one house, one mutual happiness!” (V.iv.174). Love and friendship, sundered by the chaotic soul of Proteus, and a sundered aristocratic regime, nearly ruined by the overbearing and imprudent father-Duke, will both achieve reunion on the only stable foundation for private and public good, fidelity. Henceforth the private fidelity of marriage and the public fidelity of justice will reinforce one another, securing the truly human purpose, happiness.
Note
- See II.iii.1-29 and IV.1-36.
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