SOURCE: "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" in Friends and Lovers: The Phenomenology of Desire in Shakespearean Comedy, Columbia University Press, 1985, pp. 91-109.

In the following essay, MacCary examines Shakespeare 's treatment in Two Gentlemen of Verona of themes of friendship, familial relationships, and love relationships (including both worthy and unworthy objects of true devotion).

Readers of The Two Gentlemen of Verona might well feel discomfort throughout the play, moving forward as they do under a burden of ignorance about all the issues involved in the developing situation, but this feeling becomes a certainty when, at the climax, they reach the passage:

Proteus My shame and guilt confounds me.
 Forgive me, Valentine: if hearty sorrow
 Be a sufficient ransom for offence,
 I tender 't here; I do as truly suffer,
 As e'er I did commit.

Valentine Then I am paid;
 And once again I do receive thee honest.
 Who...