Except it wasn't called stealing in Shakespeare's day, and everyone did it. No copyright laws! Piracy meant the real thing - on the high seas. And much of that was government-approved :)
Jorge de Montemayor’s Los Siete Libros de la Diana (pub.1559?) – the first “pastoral” novel published in Spain – set off a huge fad for literature set in a highly romanticized countryside. Virtuous shepherds and beautiful shepherdesses frolicked with the occasional (often disguised) noble in a rural Arcadia where real-life farm chores never interrupted the songs, dances and… other activities. The pastoral genre had a huge influence on Shakespeare which can be seen in early (2Gents), middle (As You Like It) and late (The Winter’s Tale) comedies.
Some of the specific parallels between Diana and 2Gents are:
- Felix (Proteus) sends a love letter to Felismena (Julia)
- Felismena pretends not to want the letter, and is annoyed with her maid for bringing it
- Felix is sent away by his father
- Felismena follows him dressed as a boy, and becomes his page
- Felix falls in love with Celia and sends Felismena to her as a messenger
- The climax of the story is a fight in the woods, after which Felix and Felismena are reconciled
Although Shakespeare’s story of Proteus and Julia follows this model quite closely, it was only in later plays that he made use of additional Diana plot elements. There was no Valentine equivalent in Montemayor’s story: Celia (Silvia) falls in love with the disguised Felismena (sound familiar?) but, unusually, given this is a comedy, she dies of unrequited love when Felismena turns out to be a girl.
(Trivia: the ‘magic juice’ Oberon uses on Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is another tidbit probably stolen from Diana.)
Shakespeare added Valentine to the character mix because he was interested in exploring another popular theme of Renaissance literature: the conflict between love and friendship. (This deserves a post all to itself.)
John Lyly’s Endymion, the Man in the Moon (acted at Court by the Children of Paul's, most likely on Candlemas, February 2, 1588) brought the pastoral genre to England, and may also have suggested the love/friendship conflict to Shakespeare.
In this story, the hero loves the moon goddess Cynthia. His girlfriend Tellus finds out and hires a sorceress to enchant Endymion into a never-ending sleep. Meanwhile, Eumenides – Endymion’s best friend - is in love with a girl who doesn’t love him back. Eumenides travels to a magic fountain which will answer one question – just one… Should he solve his own problem or his friend’s? Friendship wins out over self-interest in the end (as it almost does in that weird plot twist at the end of 2Gents) and he discovers that Endymion’s magic sleep can be ended by a kiss from Cynthia.
Eumenides wins his chosen girl anyway (the rewards of virtue) and by the end of the story there’s a new boyfriend for the jilted Tellus. Endymion doesn’t get Cynthia, however: as a goddess (standing in for Queen Elizabeth, apparently) she’s unattainable. Sigh.
Lyly’s Euphues: the Anatomy of Wit (1579) adds the element of deception into the friendship/love conflict as the hero meets and secretly woos his best friend’s girl.
In Elyot’s Boke Named The Governour (1531) we may find the seed of the remarkable offer Valentine makes to Proteus at the climax of 2Gents. Gisippus gives up any claim to his fair (yet unnamed) fiancée, handing her over to his friend Titus when he learns of the latter’s desperate, unconfessed (and potentially fatal) attraction to the same girl: “Here I renounce to you clerely al my title and interest, that I now haue or mought haue in the faire maieden.” In order to make good on this offer the two friends (who look like identical twins, apparently) develop a scheme that is a male version of the “bed trick” Shakespeare uses at the end of All’s Well That Ends Well.
Other possible sources for plot and character element in 2Gents include:
The Excellent Comedie of Two the Moste Faithfullest Friendes, Damon and Pithias, Richard Edwards, 1565
The Knight’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer (which some of you may remember was also the source of the love/friendship conflict in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen)
The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, Sir Philip Sidney, 1590 [Book II]
Flavio Traditio, F. Scala, 1611
Tragedia von Julio und Hyppolita, tr. Georgina Archer
Flavio Traditio, F. Scala, 1611
Tragedia von Julio und Hyppolita, tr. Georgina Archer
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