The Fall of a Gentleman: Structural Parallelism between the Myth of the Fall and Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Abstract

[eng] Disregarded as an early experimentation of themes further treated in his mature plays, Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1623) portrays a preliminary view of the bases that lay at the heart of the Renaissance society: the sworn brotherhood oath and the principles of courtly love. Critics have been harsh with Shakespeare’s early comedy during the centuries, probably on accounts of the play’s lack of depth and the various theories surrounding Valentine’s words in the last scene. Therefore, this paper aims at analysing The Two Gentlemen of Verona’s structural verisimilitude to the biblical Myth of The Fall as an attempt to solve the general animadversion this comedy originates among its readers. The analysis provides a parallelism between the events concerning the fall of humankind and the proposed Renaissance equivalent, the violation of the gentleman’s principles.