ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the play's ending becomes more legible once people take into account its critical engagement with contemporary tropes of courtly love. It also argues that the prominence of the empathic exchange between Silvia and Julia creates a critical distance between the audience and the phenomenon it is experiencing. Julia's voice is fictionally lost yet theatrically privileged, and her performance as Sebastian remains focus of the audience's attention throughout the scene. In the case of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the play repeatedly interrupts Valentine's attempt to exercise his poetic imagination over Silvia, first with Speed's taunts and then with Silvia's intervention. In Julia's monologue the painting, like the blazon, is construed as shallow flattery, especially because it focuses on richness of Silvia's dress. Act of The Two Gentlemen of Verona thus engages the very terms used to identify the theater's supposedly immoral practices in order to highlight the exceptional nature of the performance offered by cross-dressed actors.
