Wait… what?!

Get the hell away from her, you utter madman.

Let’s put this first one to bed, shall we? One play, two weeks in the blogging. This doesn’t bode well.

Anyway. Silvia runs off to Mantua to find Valentine, and, as she’s not a degenerate like that cross-dressing maniac Julia, she does the decent thing and asks a chaste male friend of hers to accompany her – the dashing Sir Eglamour. In the meantime, said cross-dressing maniac offers her services (oh, matron) to Proteus in the guise of a page called Sebastian. With sexy results.

In the last act they all pile into the forest outside Mantua. Some more geographical and character anomalies get thrown into the mix about now – young Will forgets where he is and calls Mantua Verona at one point; and a Friar Patrick mysteriously becomes a Friar Laurence in the next scene. Actually, I like to think this means Romeo and Juliet is really just a spin-off of Two Gentlemen, and that R&J was originally intended as a Friar Laurence vehicle that got out of hand when his character got overshadowed. Maybe Rob Lowe played him.

After some foppery in the forest, everything comes to a head. Valentine, happy enough breeding habit out of use in the woods while still missing Silvia, looks on as she and Proteus show up nearby and Proteus tries one last time to woo her. There follows this delightful exchange as Valentine watches unseen:

PROTEUS: Nay, if the gentle spirit of moving words
Can no way change you to a milder form
I’ll woo you like a soldier, at arm’s end
And love you ‘gainst the nature of love: force ye.

SILVIA: Oh heaven!

PROTEUS [assailing her]: I’ll force thee yield to my desire.

Yes, that’s right boys and girls, he tries to rape her. But it’s alright, because surely now he’ll get what’s coming to him.

No? Really? Not even now? Oh. Okay.

Valentine stops him, rescues Silvia, and abjures their friendship. Fair enough. Not five lines later he completely forgives Proteus and – and this is the best part – gives him Silvia. Like, to have. Julia whips out her phone and tweets a quick FML before fainting*, which somehow rekindles Proteus’ love for her. The Duke shows up, dismisses Thurio (remember him?) as a coward, and our Veronese heroes live happily ever after with their presumably terrified new wives.

My god. By all means have conflicted and flawed protagonists, but these two are just horrible people. At least Valentine was fairly decent for most of the play, but that only makes it worse when he nonchalantly hands over Silvia to her would-be rapist. Taking bros before hoes a little far, are we Wills?

Apparently 18th-century scholars used to cut the passage out entirely as it jarred so wildly with their image of the playwright. Some modern critics think that the offer of Silvia to Proteus is a later addition, added in performance over the years. Even for the time it’s a fairly abhorrent depiction of gender politics, and surely in a modern production this could only be staged with the female leads utterly appalled by their pairing off with these lunatics.

But there we leave Verona for the time being and head off to Padua, where there are shrews to be tamed.

*only partially true.