“Were man but constant, he were perfect”: Constancy and Consistency in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1972)

In the early spring of 1855 George Eliot (still Marian Evans) read The Two Gentlemen of Verona and found that the play

disgusted me more than ever in the final scene where Valentine, on Proteus’s mere begging pardon when he has no longer any hope of gaining his ends, says: “All that was mine in Silvia I give thee”!—Silvia standing by. ¹

In itself there is nothing unusual about George Eliot’s reaction. Most critics of the play have felt that in this, his first, dramatization of romance narrative Shakespeare was tied and partly defeated by the conventions he was attempting to use. Such “disgust” as has been expressed has often focused on the last scene as typifying the play’s problems: in the unbelievable magnanimity of Valentine (at two girls’ expense), thematic considerations appear to override any thought of character development or psychological motivation. As an affirmation of male constancy it may have satisfied an Elizabethan audience; for, insofar as they believed with Geron, in Lyly’s Endimion, that friendship is “the image of eternitie in which there is nothing moveable, nothing mischeevous” and that there is as much difference between love and friendship as between “Beautie and Vertue, bodies and shadowes, colours and life,” they would have seen Valentine’s lines as a noble and universally valid climax to the action of the play. ² But this moment in the play has troubled audiences and readers ever since.