Sacrificing Parts in Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona

Abstract

ABSTRACTTwo Gentlemen of Verona, Shakespeare's early comedy, reverses the question of affective influence in the professional theatre. While the anti-theatricalists fear the actors’ corrupting power over spectators, Two Gentlemen poses the problem of the character whose self-sacrifices are ignored or misinterpreted by their own onstage spectators. When Silvia misunderstands Julia's performative grief, when Crab ignores Lance's sacrifices, and when the male lovers respond incorrectly to self-abnegating gestures, the play suggests that it is a risky business to count on the sympathies of others. In the play's religious rhetoric of devotion, penance, pilgrimage and idolatry, self-sacrifice is designed to be seen and shown. When this system of mutually constitutive affective transference fails, both the broadly comic characters and the noble lovers find themselves in jeopardy, with their functional performances defeated by false hearing, unfeeling props and destructive indifference. Beyond the play's homosocial rivalries or metaphors of emergent adulthood, Two Gentlemen suggests that the anti-theatricalists have seen the wrong danger in the social sympathies of the Elizabethan theatre.