The Two Gentlemen of Verona in Shakespeare in Love: Intertextual Relations and their Role in Meaning-Making

Abstract

This paper seeks to explore the relationship between Shakespeare’s early comedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona and John Madden’s film Shakespeare in Love. To this end, first of all, it will examine the role played by direct quotations of text from The Two Gentlemen and the significance of the fictional staging of the comedy in the film. Moreover, it will identify themes, imagery and elements of characterisation from The Two Gentlemen exploited by the film and explain how they contribute to the latter’s dramatic development. Further, it will highlight situational parallelism between play and film and attempt an explanation of its functions. Finally, it will seek to integrate the above-mentioned aspects with a view to illustrating the picture of The Two Gentlemen as emerging from Shakespeare in Love: a highly mediated picture, where romantic love and comical excess are foregrounded at the expense of other equally important features of the play, such as risqué eroticism and highly refined wordplay.