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hutchhitched · 3 years ago

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Oh, Peeta Pie! I love him. Here are thoughts and musings on Chapter for @everlarkedalways THG reread.

Betrayal. Katniss takes it like a champ, except she really doesn’t. In spite of herself, she’s developed feelings—tiny glimmers of feelings that will grow from a spark into a full-fledged fire in the next book. (I did it again, didn’t I? Go me with the fire metaphors.) She spends a few paragraphs convincing herself that she didn’t really trust Peeta, that their fragile friendship is really more of them being enemies, and so on. In other words, methinks she doth protest too much.

For the bulk of the chapter, though, it’s not about Peeta at all. It’s about Katniss and who she is or isn’t. I’ll admit, I have trouble identifying with Katniss. I know myself very well. I have for a very long time. I’m very fortunate in that I had a very solid homelife with loving, supportive parents and an older sister who thinks I’m pretty great. Both sets of grandparents lived within a few miles of me (one set was my next door neighbor). I grew up in a small town, and everybody knew who I was. I enjoyed myself and had a lot of fun, but I was (and still am) introspective. I was (and am) equally comfortable in large groups and by myself reading or thinking about things. We didn’t have a lot of money, but we had enough. In other words, Katniss and I come from pretty different worlds.

Katniss spent her late childhood and adolescence being an adult. I spent mine planning to be an adult but being able to be a kid. Yes, I was always thinking about the future and planning for it, but I was allowed to be a kid and teenager. Maybe that’s why it’s hard for me to understand how someone like Katniss doesn’t really know who she is, but it’s abundantly clear she doesn’t. She knows she loves her sister, but the rest of her mind is concerned with keeping her family alive. Not a whole lot of time to sit down and think philosophically.

Katniss is an enigma—brave and frightened, surly and friendly, small with a huge training score. Haymitch has no idea what to do with her. He tells her she has the charm of a “dead slug.” Katniss claims at the end of the session “she is no one at all.”

It’s true. She’s not. She’s a nobody from an outlying district. She has no power, no allies, no real reason for anyone to want to help her. And yet… If this isn’t the best underdog story, I’m not sure what is. Katniss gives people hope, both those in Panem and readers. If she can do it, any of us can. We can all be heroes if we stand up for what’s right and find compassion and love for other humans. It’s inspiring, and it’s why I still root for her, despite wishing she’d get it together a little bit. (Yes, I know. She’s a teenager. I should be more patient with her.)

Besides her frustration that she doesn’t know how to get people to like her (movie dialogue, not book dialogue), she’s irritated that she can’t be her normal surly self. She makes a comment that Thresh is short and noncommittal during his interview. No one tells him to smile and pretend, but Katniss gets that advice quite a bit and from multiple people.

Did Collins mean to make it commentary? Was her intention to poke fun at the very real problem of men telling women to smile? It’s a problem, one (again) I don’t face too often because I’m normally very smiley and friendly, but I see it all the time in the media and with my friends. For some reason (let’s be honest, we all know what those are), women are supposed to look and be pleasant and attractive. It doesn’t matter why we’re upset. Our job is to grin and bear it and to look good while we’re doing it. That’s a historical fact, not just a current irritation.

Two examples:

The WASPS were women pilots during World War II and after. Some of them were picked to train as astronauts and were called the Mercury 13. Many of them logged more hours than their mail counterparts and were physically more ready to go into space, but they were overlooked because…well, sexism in the 1950s and 1960s. What does this have to do with looking good? One of the pilots took a flight and afterward, reporters were there to interview her. As she descended, she fixed her hair, changed into heels, and reapplied her makeup. She knew she wouldn’t be considered feminine if she didn’t, so she “fixed” herself to be what she was expected to be (a woman) rather than was she was (a pilot).

Gender roles for Christian men and women have undergone a number of trials and tribulations since the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Besides larger society’s traditional gender roles, evangelical leaders during the 1970s and 1980s encouraged Christian wives to “freshen up” before husbands returned home from work. The idea was that husbands didn’t want to see a work-weary woman. This overemphasis on looks hasn’t gone away, as evidenced by the southern Missouri pastor who said in February 2021, “Now look, I’m not saying every woman can be the epic, the epic trophy wife of all time like Melania Trump,” he said. “All I can say is not everybody looks like that, amen? …But you don’t need to look like a butch either.” Yeah, he’s not preaching anymore.

Chapter 9 opens and closes with betrayal. Katniss reacts to Peeta wanting to train alone at the beginning of the chapter and finds out he’s harbored a crush on her at the end of it. All I can say is that Peeta knows how to work a crowd, and he does it well. (I’m not totally convinced he meant to announce it since he blushed beet red, but I’m sure he’d told Haymitch by that point.)

I have other thoughts, but I’ll save them for another day. Onto “The Games” tomorrow, although it seems like Peeta’s been playing them already. Sneaky, that one.

#thgagain #the hunger games #the hunger games meta

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terriblygrimm · 4 years ago

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ohmygod finally someone who shares my views. my sister and I loved fatws for what they did w sam’s character but aside from that the writing was very bad. we really could not understand wtf was bucky’s purpose to the main plot and what new side of bucky did we see. when the action wasnt happening he kept whining about steve and being rude to sam and then marvel thrust sambucky onto us and basically told us to move onto this Brand New Duo. sam and bucky were not on equal footing here and their personal struggles did not hold equal weight at all (i will give credits to anthony and seb here for making their friendship look believable) mcu keeps sidelining bucky and i thought they would do him some justice in this show but they didnt. after reading the articles and interviews post the show it was evident the writers did not understand bucky’s character at all. his whole character development was moving on from steve and now becoming sam’s sidekick? (also im really hoping and praying these writers dont go through with sarahbucky in the future because…no..absolutely not). and i do hope that what you said about a future steve bucky reunion comes true because so far mcu has been very hellbent on erasing their friendship and its just pathetic that they try to undermine their friendship so much, while weirdly enough also emphasizing that yes it has deep emotional value.

yeah like, i’m gonna try to make this as succinct and short (lol) as i possibly can without going off on tangents but tf.atws should’ve been SAM’S show. sam alone. he should’ve been the only title character, and they could’ve properly focused on his arc and the sociopolitical weight of it. that is MORE than enough content to fill up 6 hours. i absolutely love cap!sam and i think he’s gonna be a great captain america. i’m very much looking forward to his future.

but virtually everything else about this show from conception to film was a miss.

the flag smashers? (really marvel? your military propaganda perked its ugly ass head with this one. within the first five minutes of the show they were condemning ppl who believed in a world without borders lmfao. i legit almost stopped watching right then i’m not kidding) and the storyline itself wasn’t even coherent. they had WAY too many characters and arcs to focus on and it just.. didn’t work. didn’t do any one of them justice. not even their title characters - especially their title characers. the whole thing felt very hollow and emotionally remiss. the barely existent dialogue was clunky and awkward, and i’m sorry but.. to me, sam and bucky do not organically get along lol. the chemistry between the actors is undeniable which is why so many ppl ate it up, (and do i think they could eventually get along? yes) but the buddybuddy thing was pretty forced imo. very sudden and based on very little.

their stories were at odds, with not one common goal between them all the way to the end. they fought for screen time and it caused both of their stories to suffer and not carry the weight they should have. they both had VERY heavy content to work with (a black captain america / a trauma/abuse/pow survivor) but somehow marvel - in true marvel fashion - did not commit to either and tried to tread lightly on both.

bucky and sam only had the thin thread of steve woven between them & even that was done poorly because the writers themselves admittedly weren’t told what happened to steve, therefore they couldn’t write a definitive arc about it. and instead of actually committing to the deep bond between he and bucky, they took the no homo route and had bucky express anger over who holds property of the shield, rather than admitting it was steve himself that he emotionally and physically missed. but again, they couldn’t really do that, could they? they didn’t know if steve was alive or if bucky knew of his whereabouts.

i’ll admit i did enjoy the peripheral concept of bucky helping steve pass along the shield, like he was its watcher, making sure steve’s legacy fell in good hands, and was there to basically coach sam along the way. in THAT regard alone, it did feel like he and steve were still a team post-endgame. that, on top of saying that he and steve discussed the future of the shield together was a sweet touch. loved that, but it was executed poorly like everything else.

& his winter soldier arc... lordy, was that handled horribly. bucky is a charming, gentle, burdened, lover-not-a-fighter (since the 40s) victim and they turned him macho, carrying the burden of his abusers and guilted into making amends? and that his problems were his fault because he couldn’t trust people? say what now? bucky is a pissed off, good-hearted war vet with a LOT of baggage- he’s not just some dude. the effort to butch up and patch up bucky in a quick fix was apparent, from the short hair, to the list of names, to the “man up” approach everybody came at him with, to the really out of place heterosexual flirting. i mean honest to god who the has time to flirt? apparently bucky! none of the other characters even passed a sideways glance to another during the entire series aside from the one character who audiences have been vocal about being queer for 10 years. hmmm.... (and then the writers actually CAME OUT & MADE A POINT TO SAY that they did not intend for his bisexuality lmfao i mean please dear god put us out of this misery. that writer/director need to stop talking because nobody cares about their personal opinions or headcanons. media is for the viewer to interpret so please shut up.)

overall the actors did what they could w that script, that much was obvious- and they certainly tried to stay as true to their visions/versions of the characters as they could but it just didn’t end up matching up.

but yeah, on a lighter note, i sincerely don’t think they’ll continue bucky in sam’s sphere. i think that was a one off. i don’t think they actually wanted to sell them as a “new partnership” but they just didn’t know how to write the dynamic properly. i think tf.atws was just a sad, sad attempt to place them somewhere post-endgame so they can continue on in bigger marvel films. sam’s got his cap4 and his new team (torres, sharon, walker), and i think i read he’s gonna make an appearance in black panther? which will be sooooo awesome!!

and bucky? his ending was very open, what with him miraculously “feeling better” yet not quite the white wolf, and not permanent in any place. and on top of that, he was instructed to stay away from wakanda so he can’t make future appearances there, so methinks he and steve will cross paths again as nomad and white wolf for sure (once it’s revealed what steve’s been doing, etc). maybe in space?

the power that holds anon.... i get so excited even thinking about it.

#ask #anon #i always enjoy commiserating w others 😂#but truly aside from how bad tf.atws was i think both sam and bucky are onto bigger and better things #i just think it was a really awkward placeholder / the development they needed to push so they can serve other future purposes

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wordsmith-storyweaver · 7 years ago

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Once Upon a Season

Okay, so a very smart friend of mine said something rather brilliant the other day related to the last season of Once. For those of you who love the current season, I want you to know that I am in no way mocking your faves or trying to convince you to NOT dig whatever you’re digging. But if you are in any way easily offended, you might not want to continue reading...

So, @xhookswenchx said that because of how things ended in season 6 and how disconnected from the rest of the seasons 7 felt, she’s basically treating it as a spin-off. And I thought that, in a lot of ways, each season (or half season) is kind of like its own “spin-off”. So, I have decided that we should refer to them as such from now on, conveniently ignoring the sections of canon that we don’t really like. (Because if A&E can pull all of their rule-breaking and fuckery on us, we should be able to do whatever the hell we feel like to canon.)

Season 1: Once Upon a Time in Storybrooke. Yes, we do see a lot of the Enchanted Forest, or rather, Misthaven, during flashbacks, but a lot of the present storyline happens in our world in Storybrooke.

Season 2: Once Upon a Time in Misthaven. Again, most of the action takes place in Storybrooke, or the Land Without Magic, but we do get a lot of EF action thanks to Emma and Snow getting sucked into the Hat. We also see Wonderland, Victorian England, and Neverland, but we don’t stay there for anything longer than an episode.

Season 3A: Once Upon a Time in Neverland. Thanks to the pod format they introduced during this season, the names are fairly self-explanatory from here on out.

Once Upon a Time in Wonderland. Alas, we knew ye so little, and have yet to get you on DVD and Blu-Ray!

Season 3B: Once Upon a Time in Oz. Okay, so we really don’t spend a lot of time in Oz, but it has a better ring than OUAT: Mommy Issues Edition. Or OUAT: Let’s Throw Out the Established Rules Edition. Or OUAT: What Happened To Emma’s Character Development...

Season 4A: Once Upon a Time (with Frozen). While I wasn’t a fan of how the writers didn’t really do anything different with the characters from Arendelle (except give them a homicidal aunt), I really missed them as additional cast on the show because the friendship between Elsa and Emma was just so well done. For all that the writers kept trying to convince us (unsuccessfully, imo) that Regina and Emma could be and are friends, JMo and Georgina had really great chemistry and their characters’ friendship felt so much more natural.

Season 4B: Once Upon a Time in Villain-Brooke. It’s the same old Storybrooke, but with more villains. In fact, let’s just dump on the pairing that we relegated to the background and then were surprised when people lost interest in them, but now we want to make them seem “edgier” and “more realistic”, so we’ll make them do something Eeee-vil in the name of spicing things up. And we’ll throw in a really bad writer and make his super villain name The Author, because we’re obviously mature adults who are in no way threatened by the superior writing talent of unpaid fan fiction writers.

Season 5A: Once Upon a Time in Camelot, or How I Became the Dark One and Learned To Love Psychotic Dark Hook.

Season 5B: Once Upon a Time in The Underworld. Also known as the story arc that had the greatest potential and tripped over the writers’ ineptitude and fell the hardest. Keeper of the simultaneously the worst and best two CS episodes perfectly designed to break shippers’ hearts in twain.

Season 6A: Once Upon a Time in The Land of Untold Stories. Also known as the vaguest Realm name ever, and runner up for the title of most wasted potential for a storyline. The concept was great, but when an entire realm is predicated on the Author’s characters basically staging a mutiny and leaving their own stories behind?? Methinks there be a metaphor in here somewhere.

Season 6B: Once Upon a Time in The Looney Bin. Because really, at this point, it’s like the writers took every insane idea to be shared in the writers’ room and put it into play, and zero fucks were given.

Season 7: Once Upon a Time in Seattle. Again, the “present” story takes place primarily in the suburb Hyperion Heights. But really, by this point, zero fucks were given by most of the core, dedicated audience and not much of a general or new audience was generated thanks to the incomprehensible acrobatics of the writers’ logic.

#ouat humor #the real OUAT titles

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projectshakespearia · 7 years ago

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Two Gentlemen of Verona: World of the Play Part III

Valentine rescuing Sylvia from Proteus depicted by Angelica Kauffmann in 1789.

Introduction While it may be easy to dwell upon some of the inherent weaknesses in Two Gentlemen of Verona, there are also many merits in this comic caper. Multiple devices, plot strands, and character personalities seem to be templates for Shakespeare’s later (and greater) works. In the oft disputed timeline of the Shakespeare canon, this may have well been his first play. Examining the text as the work of a budding writer experimenting with this craft (I’m imagining my beginning playwriting students here) I can see a talented kid with a lot of great ideas, but not always a strong sense of how to put them together. I’ll say it again, even Shakespeare had to start somewhere! This post will explore some of the stronger attributes of Two Gents and suggest where creative seeds were sown only to bloom fully later in his career.

What Characters! It’s difficult to quantify exactly why Shakespeare remains so adored, so produced, so revered centuries after his death. As a director, I love the possibilities in a Shakespeare play. His plays are playful. The fact that they were initially written to be performed in relatively minimalist conditions with language used to describe setting provides limitless open worlds to interpret and conceptualize. Shakespeare is demanding of actors and demanding of his audiences to imagine and embrace the “theatrical” rather than consume naturalistic representations of “life” as we do in watching film or television. But within these highly fantastical spaces that knit together history, mythology, folk stories, poetry, and romances live characters that breathe. Shakespeare’s characters range from the lowliest of “foolish fools” to the loftiest Kings and Sorcerers from magical sprites to abandoned princesses, but they all share a common thread of humanity and humor. Shakespeare’s characters all possess some spark of the universal which makes them intriguing companions for audiences to join on a two hour journey. (Or, in many cases, four hours.)

In Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, he posits that in writing before Shakespeare, literary character was relatively unchanging. The likes of Classical figures such as Agamemnon or Oedipus might encounter a revelation for which they suffer and die, but their change occurs due to their relationship to fate or the gods. “In Shakespeare, characters develop rather than unfold, and they develop because they recognize themselves.” He asserts in his collection of essays that Shakespeare essentially “invents” the human in a very humanist sense. Shakespearean characters are capable of growth, change, self-discovery, and self-reflection. This is perhaps one reason actors enjoy playing Shakespeare so much - even when the sense of reality is heightened and theatrical, characters respond to each other and the world around them in relatable ways.

Proteus and Valentine Shakespeare reveals truth about human character and foibles, and heightens these quirks to comic effect. Consider the way in which Proteus instantly shifts his affections from one woman to the next and back again. Proteus draws attention to his own fickle failings: “O heaven, were man but constant, he were perfect!” After everything that Proteus has done at this late point in the play including lying, manipulation, trickery, abandonment, breaking promises, and attempted rape, this underwhelming self-assessment is very funny. Proteus’ journey is one of being repeatedly “metamorphosed” each time he encounters something new: losing Valentine, his journey to Milan, encountering Sylvia, his re-discovery of Julia. Proteus lives up to his name embodying a “protean” man, elastic and possessing many dimensions. While he may represent an extreme plastic and pliable personality, he is nonetheless, perfectly human: flawed, resilient, and capable of change.

Proteus’ absurdly lovesick behaviors are echoed and more developed in later comic and dramatic works. Consider Romeo’s painful infatuation with Rosalind, instantly transformed the moment we sets eyes upon Juliet: “Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight! For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.” Even Romeo and Juliet’s first “tender kiss” is reminiscent of Julia and Proteus’ pledge to “seal the bargain with a holy kiss.” Proteus is a first draft of the besotted Orsino being taught the very nature of love and devotion by a page in disguise or the naively charming Orlando undergoing a similar transformation under the tutelage of Rosalind. Shakespeare loves depicting foolish young men blundering their way in and out of relationships with less foolish young women.

Valentine, too, undergoes great change throughout the play. In the first scene, he eschews the idea of love and chides Proteus: “Love is your master, for he masters you; and he that is so yoked by a fool, methinks should not be chronicled for wise.” But, as his cleverly observant servant, Speed, points out that he, too, has transformed because of love. Valentine admits to Proteus when their reunite in Milan his, “life is altered now.”

Love causes the deeply-rooted friendship to completely alter the objectives of the nascent young lovers. While Valentine turns his newly discovered romantic vigor towards wooing and wedding Sylvia, most of Proteus’ energy goes into undermining both Valentine and Thurio for the sake of winning Sylvia’s heart. Valentine’s sole purpose becomes Sylvia, so much that when he thinks he has lost her, he is no longer “Valentine” but has been reduced to “nothing.”

Neither of these young men are sophisticated enough to understand love or women and Shakespeare pokes fun at their inability to figure it out without the prodding of those around them, whether it be their servants or the objects of their affection.

Syliva and Julia The female counterparts to the male protagonists are typical of many of other Shakespearean heroines in their cleverness, grit, and maturity. Shakespeare writes his females, whether they are sisters, cousins, or devoted friends in pairs; one wide-eyed and plucky and one slightly sadder and wiser. This template is evident in duos including Helena/Hermia, Rosalind/Celia, Beatrice/Hero, and even Kate/Bianca. In every case, the young female lovers possess wisdom and determination in matters of love and devotion where the male lovers lack these qualities. Even more often do the women teach the likes of Orlando, Orsino, and Claudio how to properly woo a woman and love a woman.

Sylvia and Julia are both delightful constructs of Shakespeare’s imagination, and in many ways better developed that Valentine or Proteus. Both are proactive, although Julia more so, and exercise their own agency to either get what they want or avoid something they don’t want. Both, in her own way, teaches her love interest lessons on love.

Both women are constrained by their social structure not to actively pursue men they are interested in and both, at times, use letters as a means of expressing emotion. In the Elizabethan world, and as Shakespeare points out through Helena in Midsummer, that the idea of a woman wooing a man was against nature and that women were “not made to woo.” In Julia’s first scene with Lucetta, she tries to get around vocally expressing her interest in Proteus, by subtly prodding Lucetta to talk about his qualities instead. When Lucetta delivers a letter from Proteus, Julia denies that she wants to see it. But she, of course, does want the letter. She chides Lucetta in hopes that she will “for the letter to [her] view” because she is a maid. Here Shakespeare emphasizes the complexities of love games and how everyone must play their part appropriately. Lucetta should know better that Julia’s status prevents her from overtly expressing attraction and Julia should know enough to find a way around social convention to get what she wants. In the end, after some teasing and clever wordplay, Lucetta delivers the letter and expresses her approval of Proteus over Julia’s other potential suitors.

Julia is very preoccupied with her status and modesty, which is at odds with her attraction to Proteus. She is the one, after all, who asks to seal their bond physically upon his parting. After Proteus’ prolonged absence, Julia decides to take matters into her own hands and asks Lucetta: “fit me with such weeds as may beseem some well-reputed page.” She knows she has to cast off her gender in order to enter the world of men and she speaks of Proteus using language echoing Speed’s regard of Valentine as a “hot lover.” Julia, being denied Proteus, only wants him more:

O, know’st though not his looks are my soul’s food? Pity the dearth that I have pined in, By longing for that food so long a time. Didst thou but know the inly touch of love, Thou wouldst as soon go kindle fire with snow As seek to quench the fire of love with words.

Julia, to put it bluntly, is hot for Proteus, and is willing to risk her reputation in order to see him again. Desire wins out over social convention and thus she departs to Milan where she finds herself part of a complex love triangle. As part of Proteus’ convoluted plot to win over Sylvia by outwitting his two rivals, he has Thurio perform a romantic song for Sylvia and then claim the credit for himself. Julia, now donning the identity of Sebastian, watches the performance, heartbroken at the notion that Proteus is now actively pursing another woman. To add insult to injury, Proteus then enlists the help of Sebastian to deliver a letter and ring, the very ring that Julia had given Proteus back in Verona, to the hands of Sylvia. Julia, tormented by the decision to aid Proteus in getting what he wants even if it is at odds with her desires, soliloquizes in a manner echoing Proteus’ self-assessment earlier in the play. When first confronted with the decision to betray Valentine and pursue Sylvia, Proteus laments:

I cannot leave to love, and yet I do; But there I have to love where I should love. Julia I lose and Valentine I lose: If I keep them, I needs must lost myself; If I lose them, thus find I by their loss For Valentine myself, for Julia, Sylvia. I to myself am dearer than a friend, For love it still most precious in itself.

Proteus, once again, has been transformed by love to identify himself only by the love he feels. There is nothing else. He cannot be friend to Valentine and true to himself. He cannot be devoted to Julia and true to himself. Valuing his own self more than Valentine or Julia, he chooses this Proteus over previous iterations.

Julia responds differently to a similar romantically-charged identity crisis:

How many women would do such a message? Alas, poor Proteus, thou has entertained A fox to be the shepherd of thy lambs! Alas, poor fool, why do I pity him That with his heart despiseth me? Because he loves her, he despiseth me. Because I love him, I must pity him. This ring I gave him when he parted from me To bind him to remember my good will; And now am I, unhappy messenger, To plead for that which I would not obtain, To carry that which I would have refused, To praise his faith which I would have dispraised. I am my master’s true-confirmed love, But cannot be true servant to my master Unless I prove false traitor to myself. Yet I will woo for him, yet so coldly As, heaven it knows, I would not have him speed.

In this passage, rich with imagery, Julia grapples with which persona to embrace. She is simultaneously all of these things, a fox, an unhappy messenger, a servant, and none of these things as she has layered disguise upon disguise in her pursuit of Proteus. Underneath the page’s clothing, she is a young woman in love with a man and in order to fulfill her duty as servant to her unwitting master, she must betray her true self. In the end, both she and Proteus choose to honor the power of love, but in different ways. Proteus does so by honoring the love that will please himself and Julia honors to love that will please the one she loves.

Luckily for Julia, Sylvia remains steadfastly devoted to Valentine. Sylvia’s behavior towards her beloved, while perhaps slightly more restrained than Julia’s, bears certain similarities. Julia has Lucetta serving as go-between, but Sylvia relies on her own crafty device to express her interest in Valentine. Rather than tell him directly, which would be unseemly for a woman of her station, she enlists Valentine as servant to write letters in her name for a supposed lover. Valentine, as Julia later does for Proteus, agrees to aid the one he loves and composes letters and delivers them to Sylvia for her to distribute. Sylvia then hands the letters back to an extremely befuddled Valentine.

VALENTINE: Madam, they are for you. SYLVIA: Ay, ay, you writ them, sir, at my request; But I will none of them; they are for you; I would have had them writ more movingly.

It takes Valentine the witty explanation of Speed to understand Sylvia’s meaning. I want to write you romantic letters, get it? Eventually, of course Valentine does get it and the pair of lovers finds themselves on the happy path towards a union, but for the Duke’s disapproval and Proteus’ meddling.

Love in the Space Between When Valentine is banished by the Duke, Sylvia takes a familiar proactive course of action by following him into the wilderness. While Julia literally changes herself into a male form to protect her virtue, Sylvia shields herself by enlisting the honorable Sir Eglamour to guide her to Mantua. This begins a series of “chases” of one lover in pursuit of another, in a way prefiguring the chaotic and comic quartet that ventures into the woods outside of Athens in Midsummer. Sylvia pursues Valentine for love. The Duke pursues Sylvia in a rage. Thurio pursues Sylvia for the sake of proving his honor. Proteus then pursues to win Sylvia for love. Finally, Julia chases after Proteus chasing after Sylvia.

Once all the characters enter the green space, outside the strictures of city society, all hell breaks loose and subversions are allowed to play out. The Duke is captured by a ragtag group of banished men, Proteus “rescues” Sylvia from the same bandits only to attempt to “love [her] ‘gainst the nature of love,” and Julia is finally free to reveal her true identity, honor be damned. Only once every “rule” is essentially broken, are things allowed to be repaired to a “happy close.” Valentine admonishes Proteus for his betrayal of friendship and Julia, in her final courageous act holds Proteus accountable for what he put her through:

O Proteus, let this habit make thee blush! Be thou ashamed that I have took upon me Such an immodest rainment, it shame live In a disguise of love: It is the lesser blot, modesty finds, Women to change their shapes than men their minds.

Proteus, thoroughly shamed, begs forgiveness all around. And, of course, it is granted. In addition, the bandits are forgiven by the Duke and allowed to return to civilized life, Thurio gives up his claim to Sylvia, the Duke recognizes Valentine’s worthiness and approves the match to his daughter, and Proteus and Julia are reconciled. In this scene of “mutual happiness,” the one much-maligned seemingly strange point is Valentine’s initial forgiveness of Proteus where he essentially “gives” Sylvia away to his friend. Granted, it is weirdly misogynistic and difficult to rationalize in a modern world. But, considered within the context of the green space, it may make more sense as a first attempt to “right” the subverted world. Proteus has upended their friendship, Valentine calls him out, Proteus begs for forgiveness, and joyously because of his own love for Proteus, Valentine acts as Julia does - putting the desires of the person he loves most (in this case, Proteus) before his own desires.

This arrangement, is of course, very short-lived as it serves as catalyst for Julia’s reveal and Proteus’ final realization: “What is in Sylvia’s face, but I may spy more fresh in Julia’s with a constant eye?” Proteus has, chameleon-like, altered himself repeatedly in this play, and not yet found happiness. In observing the devotion and love Sylvia, Julia, and Valentine perform for him (even Sylvia warns him multiple times to rediscover his “first best love” in Julia Proteus) realizes that perhaps he would do best to be a devoted lover.

While by no means a perfect play and certainly not progressive in terms of gender roles, Two Gents is rich with humor and complex characterizations. In essence, this is an exploration of a common Shakespearean theme he revisits countless times: the tension between the devotion of women and the inconstancy of men in matters of the heart. In the end, the clever and passionate women succeed where the men fail by temporarily upending convention in order to become active wooers. The men learn from this experience and the “natural” order restored.

Two Gents is not without its charms and while some transitions and motivations may have been improved by the addition of a couple lines of dialogue, it does overall contain the essential elements for a crowd-pleasing romantic comedy: misunderstandings, conflict, music, chase scenes, and ultimately happiness for all involved.

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