LITERARY/HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The Two Gentlemen of Verona, one of Shakespeare's earlier comedies, was printed in the First Folio in 1623, probably from a transcript of a prompt-book. It is the first of Shakespeare's plays mentioned by Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia: Wit's Treasury (1598). Though the date for the composition of the Two Gentlemen of Verona cannot be given with certainly, on stylistic grounds it is judged as one of his earliest plays. It is perhaps based indirectly on a section of Jorge de Montemayor's Diana (1542), a Spanish prose romance. Montemayor's Diana was translated into French by Nicholas Colin (1578) and into English by Bartholomew Yonge in 1592, but was not published until 1598. The first recorded performance of Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona was at Covent Garden in 1784.

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