Love's Labour's Lost is fantasy. The Two Gentlemen of Verona deals with real human relationships. It is a better play than the fantasy, though the fantasy has moments of better poetry. It carries on one of the problems raised in Love's Labour's Lost. It is the work of a troubled mind. It comes from the mood in which the sonnets were written.
Twice in Love's Labour's Lost the act of oath-breaking, of being forsworn, is important to the play's structure. Though the vows broken in that play are fantastic, the characters feel real dishonour at the breaking of them. The play shows that though the idea of vow-breaking was in Shakespeare's mind, he had not then the power, or the human experience, or the mental peace, to grapple with it fairly, or see it truly. The idea, that the person for whom the vows are broken brings with her the punishment of the sin of vow-breaking, haunts the mind of Biron (in Act IV, sc. iii)—
"Sow'd cockle reap'd no corn:
And justice always whirls in equal measure:
Light wenches may prove plagues to men forsworn."
In the Two Gentlemen of Verona, this idea, the idea that treachery caused by some [obsession] is at the root of most tragedy, was treated by him at length, perhaps for the first time.
That it haunted him then, and remained all through his life as the pole-star of dramatic action is evident to all who read his works as poetry should be read. It is the law of his imagination.
Passion, not weakness of will, but strength of will blinded, is the commonest cause of treachery among us. The great poets have agreed that anything that distorts the mental vision, anything thought of too much, is a danger to us. Passion that with the glimmer of a new drunkenness blinds the mature to the life and death memories of marriage, and kills in the immature the memory of love, friendship, and past benefits, is a form of destruction. In its action as a destroyer, it is the subject of Shakespeare's greatest plays. In the Two Gentlemen of Verona he is interested less in the destruction than in the moral blindness that leads to it.
Shakespeare's method is simple. He shows us two charming young men becoming morally blind with passion, in a company not so blinded. The only other "inconstant" person in the play (Sir Thurio) is inconstant from that water-like quality in the mind that floods with the full moon, and ebbs like a neap soon after. Even the members of the sub-plot, the two servants, are constant, the one to his master, who beats him, the other to the dog that gets him beaten. A lesser mind would sit in judgment in such a play. The task of genius is not to sit in judgment.
"Our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together."
Shakespeare neither praises nor blames. His task is to see justly. It is we who conclude that treachery looks ugly beside its opposite.
Of the fine scenes in the play, sc. iv in Act II, where Valentine and Sir Thurio walk with Silvia, with whom they are both in love, is the liveliest. The two men bicker across the lady, as though the next word would bring blows. The demure pleasure of Silvia in being quarrelled for, is indicated most masterly in less than thirty words. Act III, sc. i, where the Duke discovers Valentine's plot to escape with Silvia, is a passage of noble dramatic power, doubly interesting because it shows the justice of Shakespeare's vision. Valentine, the constant friend and lover, is exposed in an act of treachery to his benefactor. The scenes in which the disguised Julia witnesses her lover's falseness, and the scene in which the play is brought to an end, are deeply and nobly affecting. Theatre managers play Shakespeare as though he were an old fashion of the mind instead of the seer of the eternal in life. They should play this play as a vision of something that is eternally treacherous, bringing misery to the faithful, the noble, and the feeling. One of the noblest things in the play is the forgiveness at the end. Passion has taken Proteus into strange byways of treachery. He has been false to Julia, to Valentine, to the Duke, to Thurio, one falseness leading to another, till he is in a wood of the soul, tangled in sin. It only wants that he be false to Silvia, too. Passion makes his eyes a little blinder for an instant. He adds that treachery to the others. Power to see clearly is the only cure for passion. Discovery gives that power. Valentine's words—