THE ULTIMATE SOURCE of the play was Diana by J. de Montemayor, which Shakespeare could have read in a French translation (1578), or possibly in B. Yonge’s English version, not published until 1598, but made some sixteen years previously.1 The central situation is similar to that of The Two Gentlemen: Felismena dresses as a man, finds that her lover Felix is wooing Celia, becomes his page, and is sent with a letter to Celia, who falls in love with the messenger. Celia dies and Felix and Felismena eventually marry. Here we have the germ of the Julia-Silvia-Proteus triangle; but there is no equivalent of Valentine, no conflict between love and friendship, and Silvia does not fall in love with the messenger, as Olivia in Twelfth Night was later to do. A play was performed in 1585 entitled, no doubt inaccurately, Felix and Philiomena,2 and this may well have been Shakespeare’s model, although there is nothing to suggest that it contained the sex-rivalry of two friends. There are numerous analogues of the conflict between love and friendship. In one of the most famous, the story of Titus and Gisippus in The Governour of Sir Thomas Elyot (1531), friendship triumphs over love, Gisippus relinquishing Sophronia to his friend: ‘Here I renounce to you clerely all my title and interest that I nowe haue or mought haue in that faire mayden’. The lady is not consulted, Titus taking his friend’s place on the wedding night, without her knowing it. Elyot has to predicate a close resemblance between the two friends. Titus does not act treacherously as Proteus does and he is not guilty of attempted rape, so that Gisippus’ conduct is not as absurd as that of Valentine when he offers to relinquish Sylvia. Sophronia does not seem to mind which man she has; but both Julia and Sylvia have reason to be outraged by Valentine’s offer. Presumably Shakespeare was aware of the absurdity, despite parallels in the Sonnets – which may have been written afterwards. There the Dark Lady seduces the poet’s friend, and the poet in any case condemns his own enslavement to a woman he despises. There is another analogy in Lyly’s Euphues, where the hero betrays his friendship for Philautus by wooing Lucilla, who is quite willing to respond for a while, afterwards jilting Euphues and marrying another man ‘of little wealth and lesse wit’ (Bullough, I. 221 ff.).
Whether Shakespeare derived his variations on Montemayor’s tale from an unknown source, dramatic or otherwise,3 or invented them himself does not greatly matter. It is clear, not merely from the last scene of the play, but also from the portrait of the knight-errant, Eglamour, and from the comments of Speed and Launce, that Shakespeare was satirizing romantic ideas of love and friendship. Moreover, his two heroines are very unlike their reputed models. Julia is not Amazonian like Felismena, Silvia is not the sort of woman to die of an unrequited passion like Celia – or like Viola’s imaginary sister – nor could she change partners like Lucilla, or meekly accept a substitution in bed like Sophronia. By giving his women identities, minds of their own, morals, and common sense, Shakespeare torpedoes the pseudoromantic attitudes of his heroes. Yet Julia’s tearing of Proteus’ letter, which she afterwards pieces together, was obviously suggested by the devious behaviour of Felismena on receiving a letter from Felix.