William Shakespeare, _Two Gentlemen of Verona_

EVERY SUMMER I make vague plans to read the Shakespearean or partly-Shakespearean plays I have never read--King John, King Henry VIII, Two Noble Kinsmen, and this one--and every summer I fail to do so. This year, though, our local Shakespeare company is doing Two Gentlemen, so I have knocked that one, at least, off the list.

It did not seem all that remarkable upon reading it--it dates from early in his career and seems like apprentice work in spots. It does have a famous song--"Who is Silvia, what is she / that all our swains commend her?"--and some devices that he drew heavily on later (a young woman cross-dressing in order to accomplish her ends). The production was brisk and fun, though, a good night out.

Key to the plot is a love rivalry between two young men, Valentine and Proteus, best friends since childhood and both in love with Silvia, a circumstance made more painful by Proteus' having thrown over his former beloved, Julia (the cross-dressing one), once he saw Silvia.

Two men pursuing the same woman is so familiar a plot engine that it surprised me to realize that Shakespeare did not use it much after Two Gentlemen. Demetrius and Lysander are (for a while) both in love with Hermia, and Troilus and Diomedes are both hot for Cressida, but other examples do not occur to me. Shakespeare actually does a lot more with male characters who think that another man is pursuing their erotic object (Othello, Leontes in Winter's Tale, Claudio in Much Ado), but turn out to be woefully mistaken. (There's a lot of love rivalry in the sonnets, but that's another matter.)

René Girard has a great chapter on this play in A Theater of Envy (which I am in the middle of), touching on this very situation.

If you know anything about Girard, you likely know about his theory of mimetic desire--that the main way we discern what we desire is not by consulting our own intuitions, but by seeing what is desired by other people, especially those we respect or admire. We want to want what they want.

Mimetic desire readily serves as basis for friendship. Two people who both like to bowl, say, or to fix cars, or have the same favorite team or favorite band, have a sturdy, enduring platform for enacting their friendship. Indeed, if I am your friend, I may begin to like Scooby Doo, or Kurt Vonnegut, or the Pixies just because you do, and you may by the same token start wearing Vans because I do.

There is an important no-go zone, however. If I follow your example in liking your girlfriend or wife, we are on course for tragedy.

As Girard puts it:

We can always trace all symptoms back to the traumatic experience of the mimetic double bind, the simultaneous discovery by Valentine and Proteus that, in addition two the usual imperative of friendship--imitate me--another imperative has mysteriously appeared: do not imitate me. All "pathological symptoms" are reactions to the friends' inability to free themselves from the double bind or even to perceive it clearly.

Interesting, no? Furthermore, Girard sees Two Gentlemen as inaugurating mimetic desire as the core idea in Shakespeare's work. If I finish the Girard this summer, we will be looking further at this. I may even get around to King John.