The blunder is monstrous; not only is the friend prepared to sacrifice all he possesses, including his wife, to save his benefactor, but the friend's friend is content to sacrifice his wife too for the same object. Shakespeare then in early manhood was accustomed to put friendship before love; we must find some explanation of what seems to us so unnatural an attitude.
In the last scene of “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” which is due to a later revision, the sonnet-case is emphasized. And at this time Shakespeare has suffered Herbert's betrayal. As soon as the false friend Proteus says he is sorry and asks forgiveness, Valentine, another impersonation of Shakespeare, replies:
“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 the Eternal's wrath's appeased;
And that my love may appear plain and free,
All that was mine in Silvia I give thee.”
This incarnation of Shakespeare speaks of repentance in Shakespeare's most characteristic fashion, and then coolly surrenders the woman he loves to his friend without a moment's hesitation, and without even considering whether the woman would be satisfied with the transfer. The words admit of no misconstruction; they stand four-square, not to be shaken by any ingenuity of reason, and Shakespeare supplies us with further corroboration of them.
“Coriolanus” was written fully ten years after “The Merchant of Venice,” and long after the revision of “The Two Gentlemen of Verona.” And yet Shakespeare's attitude at forty-three is, in regard to this matter, just what it was at thirty-three. When Aufidius finds Coriolanus in his house, and learns that he has been banished from Rome and is now prepared to turn his army against his countrymen, he welcomes him as “more a friend than e'er an enemy,” and this is the way he takes to show his joy:
“Know thou first,
I loved the maid I married: never man
Sigh'd truer breath; but that I see thee here,
Thou noble thing! more dances my rapt heart
Than when I first my wedded mistress saw
Bestride my threshold.”
Here's the same attitude; the same extravagance; the same insistence on the fact that the man loves the maid and yet has more delight in the friend. What does it mean? When we first find it in “The Merchant of Venice” it must give the reader pause; in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” it surprises us; in the sonnets, accompanied as it is by every flattering expression of tender affection for the friend, it brings us to question; but its repetition in “Coriolanus” must assure us that it is a mere pose. Aufidius was not such a friend of Coriolanus that we can take his protestation seriously. The argument is evidently a stock argument to Shakespeare: a part of the ordinary furniture of his mind: it is like a fashionable dress of the period—the wearer does not notice its peculiarity.
The truth is, Shakespeare found in the literature of his time, and in the minds of his contemporaries, a fantastically high appreciation of friendship, coupled with a corresponding disdain for love as we moderns understand it. In “Wit's Commonwealth,” published in 1598, we find: “The love of men to women is a thing common and of course, but the friendship of man to man, infinite and immortal.” Passionate devotion to friendship is a sort of mark of the Renaissance, and the words “love” and “lover” in Elizabethan English were commonly used for “friend” and “friendship.” Moreover, one must not forget that Lyly, whose euphuistic speech affected Shakespeare for years, had handled this same incident in his “Campaspe,” where Alexander gives up his love to his rival, Apelles. Shakespeare, not to be outdone in any loyalty, sets forth the same fantastical devotion in the sonnets and plays. He does this, partly because the spirit of the time infected him, partly out of sincere admiration for Herbert, but oftener, I imagine, out of self-interest. It is pose, flunkeyism and the hope of benefits to come and not passion that inspired the first series of sonnets.
Whoever reads the scene carefully in “Much Ado About Nothing,” cannot avoid seeing that Shakespeare at his best not only does not minimize his friend's offence, but condemns it absolutely:
“The transgression is in the stealer.”