The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works

by William Shakespeare

That day that made my sister thirteen years.

  VIOLA If nothing lets to make us happy both,

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  But this my masculine usurp’d attire,

  Do not embrace me, till each circumstance

  Of place, time, fortune, do cohere and jump

  That I am Viola; which to confirm,

  I’ll bring you to a captain in this town,

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  Where lie my maiden weeds; by whose gentle help

  I was preserv’d to serve this noble count:

  All the occurrence of my fortune since

  Hath been between this lady and this lord.

  SEBASTIAN [to Olivia] So comes it, lady, you have been mistook.

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  But nature to her bias drew in that.

  You would have been contracted to a maid;

  Nor are you therein, by my life, deceiv’d:

  You are betroth’d both to a maid and man.

  ORSINO Be not amaz’d, right noble is his blood.

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  If this be so, as yet the glass seems true,

  I shall have share in this most happy wreck.

  [to Viola] Boy, thou hast said to me a thousand times

  Thou never should’st love woman like to me.

  VIOLA And all those sayings will I over-swear,

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  And all those swearings keep as true in soul

  As doth that orbed continent the fire

  That severs day from night.

  ORSINO Give me thy hand,

  And let me see thee in thy woman’s weeds.

  VIOLA The captain that did bring me first on shore

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  Hath my maid’s garments; he upon some action

  Is now in durance, at Malvolio’s suit,

  A gentleman and follower of my lady’s.

  OLIVIA He shall enlarge him: fetch Malvolio hither.

  And yet alas! now I remember me,

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  They say, poor gentleman, he’s much distract.

  Enter Clown with a letter, and FABIAN.

  A most extracting frenzy of mine own

  From my remembrance clearly banish’d his.

  How does he, sirrah?

  CLOWN Truly, Madam, he holds Belzebub at the

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  stave’s end as well as a man in his case may do; ’has

  here writ a letter to you. I should have given’t you

  to-day morning, but as a madman’s epistles are no

  gospels, so it skills not much when they are

  delivered.

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  OLIVIA Open’t, and read it.

  CLOWN Look then to be well edified, when the fool

  delivers the madman. [Reads.] By the Lord, madam, –

  OLIVIA How now, art thou mad?

  CLOWN No, madam, I do but read madness: and your

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  ladyship will have it as it ought to be, you must allow vox.

  OLIVIA Prithee, read i’thy right wits.

  CLOWN So I do, madonna. But to read his right wits is to

  read thus: therefore, perpend, my princess, and give ear.

  OLIVIA [to Fabian] Read it you, sirrah.

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  FABIAN [Reads.] By the Lord, madam, you wrong me, and

  the world shall know it. Though you have put me into

  darkness, and given your drunken cousin rule over me, yet

  have I the benefit of my senses as well as your ladyship. I

  have your own letter, that induced me to the semblance I put

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  on; with the which I doubt not but to do myself much right,

  or you much shame. Think of me as you please. I leave my

  duty a little unthought of, and speak out of my injury.

  The madly-used Malvolio.

  OLIVIA Did he write this?

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  CLOWN Ay, madam.

  ORSINO This savours not much of distraction.

  OLIVIA See him deliver’d, Fabian, bring him hither.

  Exit Fabian.

  My lord, so please you, these things further thought on,

  To think me as well a sister, as a wife,

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  One day shall crown th’alliance on’t, so please you,

  Here at my house, and at my proper cost.

  ORSINO Madam, I am most apt t’embrace your offer.

  [to Viola] Your master quits you; and for your service done him,

  So much against the mettle of your sex,

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  So far beneath your soft and tender breeding,

  And since you call’d me master for so long,

  Here is my hand; you shall from this time be

  Your master’s mistress.

  OLIVIA A sister! you are she.

  Enter FABIAN with MALVOLIO.

  ORSINO Is this the madman?

  OLIVIA Ay, my lord, this same.

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  How now, Malvolio?

  MALVOLIO Madam, you have done me wrong,

  Notorious wrong.

  OLIVIA Have I, Malvolio? No.

  MALVOLIO Lady, you have. Pray you, peruse that letter.

  You must not now deny it is your hand:

  Write from it, if you can, in hand, or phrase,

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  Or say ’tis not your seal, not your invention:

  You can say none of this. Well, grant it then,

  And tell me, in the modesty of honour,

  Why you have given me such clear lights of favour,

  Bade me come smiling and cross-garter’d to you,

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  To put on yellow stockings, and to frown

  Upon Sir Toby, and the lighter people;

  And acting this in an obedient hope,

  Why have you suffer’d me to be imprison’d,

  Kept in a dark house, visited by the priest,

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  And made the most notorious geck and gull

  That e’er invention play’d on? Tell me, why?

  OLIVIA Alas, Malvolio, this is not my writing,

  Though I confess much like the character:

  But, out of question, ’tis Maria’s hand.

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  And now I do bethink me, it was she

  First told me thou wast mad; then cam’st in smiling,

  And in such forms which here were presuppos’d

  Upon thee in the letter. Prithee, be content;

  This practice hath most shrewdly pass’d upon thee.

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  But when we know the grounds and authors of it,

  Thou shalt be both the plaintiff and the judge

  Of thine own cause.

  FABIAN Good madam, hear me speak,

  And let no quarrel, nor no brawl to come,

  Taint the condition of this present hour,

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  Which I have wonder’d at. In hope it shall not,

  Most freely I confess, myself and Toby

  Set this device against Malvolio here,

  Upon some stubborn and uncourteous parts

  We had conceiv’d against him. Maria writ

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  The letter, at Sir Toby’s great importance,

  In recompense whereof he hath married her.

  How with a sportful malice it was follow’d

  May rather pluck on laughter than revenge,

  If that the injuries be justly weigh’d

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  That have on both sides pass’d.

  OLIVIA Alas, poor fool, how have they baffled thee!

  CLOWN Why, ‘Some are born great, some achieve

  greatness, and some have greatness thrown upon

  them’. I was one, sir, in this interlude, one Sir Topas,

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  sir, but that’s all one. ‘By the Lord, fool, I am not mad.’

  But do you remember, ‘Madam, why laugh you at such

  a barren rascal, and you smile not, he’s gagged’? And

  thus the whirlig
ig of time brings in his revenges.

  MALVOLIO I’ll be reveng’d on the whole pack of you!

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  Exit.

  OLIVIA He hath been most notoriously abus’d.

  ORSINO Pursue him, and entreat him to a peace:

  He hath not told us of the captain yet. Exit Fabian.

  When that is known, and golden time convents,

  A solemn combination shall be made

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  Of our dear souls. Meantime, sweet sister,

  We will not part from hence. Cesario, come;

  For so you shall be while you are a man;

  But when in other habits you are seen,

  ORSINO’s mistress, and his fancy’s queen.

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  Exeunt all except Clown.

  CLOWN [Sings.]

  When that I was and a little tiny boy,

  With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

  A foolish thing was but a toy,

  For the rain it raineth every day.

  But when I came to man’s estate,

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  With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

  ’Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,

  For the rain it raineth every day.

  But when I came, alas, to wive,

  With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

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  By swaggering could I never thrive,

  For the rain it raineth every day.

  But when I came unto my beds,

  With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

  With toss-pots still ’had drunken heads,

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  For the rain it raineth every day.

  A great while ago the world begun,

  With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

  But that’s all one, our play is done,

  And we’ll strive to please you every day. Exit.

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  The Two Gentlemen of Verona

  Although first printed in 1623 as the second (after The Tempest) of the comedies in the First Folio, The Two Gentlemen of Verona is thought to be among the earliest of Shakespeare’s plays, perhaps even his first comedy, and to have been written no later than 1594. Details in it may come from Arthur Brooke’s Romeus and Juliet (1562) but its plot is adapted from the Spanish romance Diana by George of Montemayor, translated into English by Bartholomew Yong, whose version Shakespeare must have read some years before its publication in 1598.

  Shakespeare opened Montemayor’s tragicomic love-triangle of two women and a faithless man out into a rectangle: his addition of Valentine allowed for a formal comic ending with a double wedding in prospect. His other illuminating change – germane to the play’s comic scrutiny of the myth of the Petrarchan lover as servant to a cruel mistress – was the invention of the servants Speed and Launce, and of Launce’s scapegrace dog, Crab, the only animal role in Shakespeare and an important source of the play’s theatrical appeal. Julia is the first of Shakespeare’s heroines in male disguise, a device whose usefulness to boy players Shakespeare would continue to exploit in later plays. Julia’s predicament as the servant of the man she loves, employed by him to woo another woman, anticipates that of Viola in Twelfth Night, and the name she adopts in disguise, ‘Sebastian’, is that of Viola’s twin brother.

  The psychological implausibility of Proteus’ sudden reform and, still more, of Valentine’s real or apparent offer to cede Silvia to the penitent friend who has just attempted to rape her, has been a stumbling-block to appreciation of the play and has motivated attempts to rewrite the ending for performance, or to read it as a sustained satire on the stock Renaissance debate between the rival claims of love and friendship (which Shakespeare would later treat more obliquely in The Merchant of Venice and more directly in The Two Noble Kinsmen). The ending may as likely be perfunctory as satirical: at least it is evident that the major interest of the play lies in creating and complicating the predicaments of its characters rather than in resolving them. The open-eyed duplicity of Proteus is an adolescent premonition of the more dangerous insincerities of later lovers equally devoid of self-knowledge such as Bertram in All’s Well that Ends Well or Angelo in Measure for Measure.

  Franz Schubert’s setting of ‘Who is Silvia?’ (1826) and Holman Hunt’s painting of the play’s dénouement (1851) testify to its favour in the nineteenth century. Revivals have taken place with some regularity since middle of the eighteenth century, but seldom with marked success. Although among the least performed of the comedies in recent times, The Two Gentlemen of Verona was chosen, in the summer of 1996, as the first play to be staged at the reconstructed Globe in London, and it has succeeded as a musical with additional songs imported from the 1920s and 1930s.

  The Arden text is based on the 1623 First Folio.

  LIST OF ROLES

  DUKE

  father to Silvia

  two gentlemen

  ANTONIO

  father to Proteus

  THURIO

  a foolish rival to Valentine

  EGLAMOUR

  agent for Silvia in her escape

  HOST

  where Julia lodges

  OUTLAWS

  with Valentine

  SPEED

  page to Valentine

  LAUNCE

  a clownish servant to Proteus

  PANTHINO

  servant to Antonio

  JULIA

  beloved of Proteus

  SILVIA

  beloved of Valentine

  LUCETTA

  waiting-woman to Julia

  SERVANT

  attending the Duke

  Musicians

  The Two Gentlemen of Verona

  1.1 Enter VALENTINE and PROTEUS.

  VALENTINE Cease to persuade, my loving Proteus;

  Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits.

  Were’t not affection chains thy tender days