SOURCE: "Two Gentleman of Verona as Burlesque," in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 12, No. 2, Spring, 1982, pp. 210-19.

In the following essay, Rossky views The Two Gentlemen of Verona as a burlesque or satire of Renaissance attitudes toward friendship and love.

Among the variety of critical approaches which attempt to explain why The Two Gentlemen of Verona is, or seems to our time to be, a Shakespearean failure, the most prevalent is the rationalization that the play is a serious dramatization of conventional Renaissance ethical thought, especially on the supremacy of friendship over love—ideas quite different from our own, meaningful to Elizabethans though hardly to us.¹ A few critics, however, have of late tentatively or fleetingly suggested that the play is essentially a burlesque.² The position of this essay is that the play is, indeed, a good-humored satirical lark, most of all in its controversial ending, and that this...