DIS SHAKESPEARE BLUNDER? I was curious to see how the final scene in Two Gentlemen of Verona would be performed by Shakespeare on the Sound because many critics think it contains a blunder by Shakespeare. Ann Barton in her essay on the play in the Riverside Shakespeare says that: “Shakespeare’s blunder in the final scene…is…disastrous….[The blunder]…is an intolerable clumsiness for which Shakespeare must take the blame.”
Did Shakespeare blunder? Tony Tanner raises the issue at the beginning of his essay on the play, noting that George Eliot described this moment in the play as “disgusting”. He says: “…there’s no doing anything with…[those two lines]. Either they have to be explained away….or allowed to stand as a scandal and disgrace—either as a sign of the playwright’s callowness, or as a whiff of a more barbaric age.”