Of Flowers and Weeds. Veering Towards Comedy in Benjamin Victor’s Adaptation of 'The Two Gentlemen of Verona' (1762)

Lisanna Calvi

doi:10.13135/2036-5624/216

Autori

Lisanna Calvi Università di Verona https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4409-6927

Lisanna Calvi is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Verona. Her main research interests have focussed on Restoration and early modern drama and literary culture. She wrote a book on Restoration and early eighteenth-century tragedy (QuiEdit 2015) and on James II’s devotional papers and Imago Regis (ETS 2009). She also authored articles on John Dryden (2000), Robert Browning (2002, 2010), Thomas Otway (2007), Edmund Gosse (2009), The Tempest and the commedia dell’arte (Routledge 2012), madness and autobiography in seventeenth-century England (2012 and 2013), and Romeo and Juliet on the nineteenth-century Italian stage (2013 and 2017). She co-edited a miscellany on The Tempest (Palgrave 2014) and on Romeo and Juliet (Routledge 2016). She has recently edited a collection on Romeo and Juliet and its afterlife (ETS 2018). She is currently working on a project on Italian nineteenth-century Shakespearean actors.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13135/2036-5624/216

Parole chiave:

Shakespeare, Victor, Two Gentlemen, Comedy, Adaptation

Abstract

No record of performance of The Two Gentlemen of Verona during Shakespeare’s lifetime exists and the play was apparently ignored by Restoration playwrights too; its first known staging is Benjamin Victor’s adaptation, which premiered at Drury Lane Theatre in 1762. Victor presented the play as Shakespeare’s, although announcing the introduction of a few «alterations and additions». These were meant primarily at straightening out the plot and at polishing up the script. Nevertheless, the «addition» of a few lines and short scenes throughout the play and some limited, but significant excisions, including Valentine’s (in)famous offer of his fiancée to his friend, produce a rather momentous swerve of the play’s conceptual route towards a more decidedly comedic track. Indeed, Victor’s adaptation appears to match perfectly Northrop Frye’s inclusion of The Two Gentlemen into the «drama of the green world» category, in which the «green world», typically a forest, is where conflicts are resolved and characters undergo some kind of metamorphosis, which bears in Victor an interestingly original and historically suggestive capacity.