Why a Dog? A Late Date for The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Abstract

The date of Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen Of Verona is one of the most uncertain in the canon. The only text we have is that in the Folio of 1623, there is no record of a performance until the eighteenth century, and no topical allusions have been found within the text. The only indisputable fact about dating is that the play is mentioned in Francis Meres's Palladis Tamia: Wit's Treasury, dedicated 19 October 1598, and entered in the Stationers' Register on 7 September of that year. It is generally believed that the play is 'early', but in the absence of hard evidence for a date of composition, editors have ranged between 1588 and 1595 in their dating, and recent editors candidly admit that whatever the date chosen 'the actual dating and placing remain more or less informed guesswork' 1 and 'the play could belong to any year in the decade before Meres mentioned it' 2 .

Ben Jonson's; 'Villanous Guy'

“…Dekker says that Jonson's turning 'ban-dog' was in response to satire on the Isle of Dogs affair, so if Guy of Warwick is, in fact, Jonson's response to previous satire by Shakespeare, then there must have been a Shakespeare play specifically satirising the Isle of Dogs affair. Tradition tells us that there is no such play, but I have argued in another paper in this journal that The Two Gentlemen of Verona is precisely such a play, Shakespeare using Lance and his dog Crab to satirise Nashe and Jonson for their roles in the Isle of Dogs affair 30 . This hypothesis is, of course, unproven at this stage, but it does mean that Two Gentlemen is the obvious -indeed, the only -candidate for the play that Guy of Warwick is a response to.…”