Shakespeare Hid the Real Protagonist in Men's Clothes

Shakespeare is a strange playwright. Reading his plays, I sometimes feel there's something odd.

Take The Two Gentlemen of Verona. It's from early in Shakespeare's career, but the first four acts have an unusually good rhythm and create several characters I remember vividly.

The first is Proteus, one of the two gentlemen. At the start, he falls in love with Julia, and they love each other, swept up in a river of love.

The second is Valentine, the other gentleman. At the start, he advises Proteus not to fall into the mire of love, then turns around and falls in love with Silvia himself, becoming just like Proteus.

The third is Silvia, the Duke's daughter. Valentine is her servant, but she loves Valentine, and they love each other.

The fourth is Julia, a woman who loves Proteus.

When Proteus sees Silvia, he falls madly in love with her. He completely forgets the vows he made to Julia, and uses vicious schemes to get his friend Valentine banished from the Duke's land, then begins to court Silvia himself.

Julia, missing Proteus after he leaves, disguises herself as a man, goes to the Duke's land under the name Sebastian, and serves Proteus.

Up to here, the whole story flows smoothly with clear conflict. It's a very thought-provoking play.

But Shakespeare gives the play a hurried ending, and that's what I find strange.

At the end, Silvia slips out to be with Valentine, heading to find him, now an outlaw, to pledge herself to him in secret. But Proteus catches her. When his courtship fails, he tries to rape her, and Valentine bursts in and saves her.

If the story ended here, it would be a satisfying rescue. But the Bard doesn't stop.

When Valentine learns how Proteus betrayed him, he is furious.

Thou common friend, that's without faith or love, / For such is a friend now; treacherous man! / Thou hast beguil'd my hopes; nought but mine eye / Could have persuaded me: now I dare not say / I have one friend alive; thou wouldst disprove me. / Who should be trusted, when one's own right hand / Is perjured to the bosom?

Then Proteus says a few words of repentance, and Valentine, unbelievably, forgives him.

Who by repentance is not satisfied, / Is nor of heaven nor earth, for these are pleased; / 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.

Forgive me, but I can't accept this outrageous plot.

When Valentine says this, Silvia is right there. She has just narrowly escaped harm.

And in the earlier acts, Silvia has been a character who dares to act.

She knows she loves Valentine and not the suitor her father picked. Through Proteus's pursuit, she always knows what she wants. In the end she even dares to break out of the limits of her position and flee for the one she loves.

Yet this woman who dares to love and dares to act says nothing when Valentine offers to hand her over like a gift. She becomes voiceless.

That's the strangeness of Shakespeare's plays.

From what came before, even if this is an early work, his skill already shows. A female character with such strong agency in the earlier acts becomes voiceless at the climax. I can't help asking: couldn't Shakespeare write a better plot, or was there some other reason he had to write it this way?

The strangeness of The Two Gentlemen of Verona doesn't stop there. From the title, I know Proteus and Valentine are meant to be the leads. But from where I stand, they aren't the real protagonists at all, because of the choices they make in the face of conflict.

Proteus loved Julia, then fell for Silvia. He doesn't examine what he's doing. After a moment's hesitation, he talks himself into it and finds a pile of reasons for his betrayal. He is avoiding the contradiction.

Valentine shows no struggle at all when he forgives Proteus and gives Silvia away. He is skipping past the contradiction.

And who is actually facing the contradiction? Julia.

When Julia, disguised as Sebastian, is sent by Proteus to deliver a ring to Silvia, it's the ring Julia herself gave Proteus when they parted.

Facing the conflict inside her, Julia says the line that struck me most in the whole play.

I am my master's true-confirmed love; but cannot be true servant to my master, unless I prove false traitor to myself.

Julia is not lost in the river of love. In her struggle, she sees clearly where she stands. This is self-sacrifice in a fully lucid state, completely different from someone muddled and carried away by love.

That's what sets Julia apart from Proteus and Valentine. She doesn't choose to avoid the contradiction. She stands in the middle of it and says to herself: "I know that doing this betrays myself, but I choose to bear it."

She is the only one in the play who truly sees her own situation.

That gives Julia the feel of the play's real protagonist.

But turn it around: is the protagonist Julia, or Sebastian, the figure she becomes? She is certainly lucid, certainly proactive. But she is also the only person in the play who hides her identity.

Is that a coincidence? The clearer Julia is about her situation, the less she can leave the Sebastian identity.

And why can characters like Proteus and Valentine, with no inner core, show their real faces, while Julia has to put on a layer of male identity and erase her name and status to stay in the story?

I have to admit the only answer I can think of is that Julia is a woman.

Proteus and Valentine keep choosing whom to love throughout the play, while women are mostly in the position of being chosen. Even Silvia, who is proactive at first, can't escape the fate of being promised to someone else by her father.

In this play's world, active choice is a male privilege, so a woman who wants to choose actively must first take on a man's form.

And when Julia puts on men's clothes and takes a man's identity, she gains more than freedom to act. When she works for Proteus as Sebastian, Sebastian is the one doing the work, but Julia is the one observing. She sees with her own eyes how Proteus courts Silvia, and hears with her own ears the lies he tells.

Men's clothes gave Julia not only freedom to act but a vantage point she never had as a woman.

As Julia, she would never have seen Proteus courting another woman. All she could ever see was sweet talk.

If all this is true, can I still say Shakespeare isn't a great writer?

Whether Shakespeare intended what I've written above doesn't matter. What matters is that the play holds up under this kind of close reading.

And suppose he did intend it. Why would the Shakespeare who could write characters with such depth, such sharp contrasts, and such a good story have to bring the play to an ending that looks broken to a modern reader? Valentine forgives the friend who betrayed him, Proteus falls back in love with Julia, and the Duke approves of Valentine and decides to marry Silvia to him.

Seen from today, isn't that a wrap-everyone-up dumpling of an ending? (In Chinese slang, "wrapping dumplings" means tying everyone up in one tidy, forced finish.)

If my ideas above about the characters and the plot are right, I can't think why Shakespeare would design the ending this way.

The answer is easy to look up, though.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona is a comedy, and it's an early work. Shakespeare wasn't yet a famous name.

And in playwriting circles back then, there was an unwritten rule: comedies must end with marriage and reconciliation, and tragedies with death.

I think that's why Shakespeare wrote this ending.

Because of the limits of his time, however hard it is for me to understand such an ending, I can only accept it.

All I can say is that the Bard, though already a fine writer, hadn't yet found a way to satisfy the comedy's rule of reunion without sacrificing his characters' inner logic.