The first three comedies, “Love's Labour's Lost,” “The Comedy of Errors,” and “The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” are all noteworthy for the light they throw on Shakespeare's early life.
In “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” Shakespeare makes similar youthful mistakes in portraiture to those we noticed in “Love's Labour's Lost”; mistakes which show that he is thinking of himself and his own circumstances. At the beginning of the play the only difference between Proteus and Valentine is that one is in love, and the other, heart-free, is leaving home to go to Milan. In this first scene Shakespeare speaks frankly through both Proteus and Valentine, just as he spoke through both the King and Biron in the first scene of “Love's Labour's Lost,” and through both AEgeon and Antipholus of Syracuse in “The Comedy of Errors.” But whilst the circumstances in the earliest comedy are imaginary and fantastic, the circumstances in “The Two Gentlemen of Verona” are manifestly, I think, taken from the poet's own experience. In the dialogue between Valentine and Proteus I hear Shakespeare persuading himself that he should leave Stratford. Some readers may regard this assumption as far-fetched, but it will appear the more plausible, I think, the more the dialogue is studied. Valentine begins the argument:
“Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits,”—
he will “see the wonders of the world abroad” rather than live “dully sluggardiz'd at home,” wearing out “youth with shapeless idleness.” But all these reasons are at once superfluous and peculiar. The audience needs no persuasion to believe that a young man is eager to travel and go to Court. Shakespeare's quick mounting spirit is in the lines, and the needlessness of the argument shows that we have here a personal confession. Valentine, then, mocks at love, because it was love that held Shakespeare so long in Stratford, and when Proteus defends it, he replies:
“Even so by Love the young and tender wit
Is turned to folly; blasting in the bud,
Losing his verdure even in the prime,
And all the fair effects of future hopes.”
Here is Shakespeare's confession that his marriage had been a failure, not only because of his wife's mad jealousy and violent temper, which we have been forced to realize in “The Comedy of Errors,” but also because love and its home-keeping ways threatened to dull and imprison the eager artist spirit. In the last charming line I find not only the music of Shakespeare's voice, but also one of the reasons—perhaps, indeed, the chief because the highest reason—which drew him from Stratford to London. And what the “future hope” was, he told us in the very first line of “Love's Labour's Lost.” The King begins the play with”
“Let Fame, that all hunt after in their lives.”
Now all men don't hunt after fame; it was Shakespeare who felt that Fame pieced out Life's span and made us “heirs of all eternity”; it was young Shakespeare who desired fame so passionately that he believed all other men must share his immortal longing, the desire in him being a forecast of capacity, as, indeed, it usually is. If any one is inclined to think that I am here abusing conjecture let him remember that Proteus, too, tells us that Valentine is hunting after honour.
When Proteus defends love we hear Shakespeare just as clearly as when Valentine inveighs against it:
“Yet writers say, as in the sweetest bud
The eating canker dwells, so eating love
Inhabits in the finest wits of all.”