Twenty-nine collected essays represent a critical history of Shakespeare's play as text and as theater, beginning with Samuel Johnson in 1765, and ending with a review of the Royal Shakespeare Company production in 1991. The criticism centers on three aspects of the play: the love/friendship debate.

June Schlueter Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Lafayette College, holds a Ph.D from Columbia University. She is the author of Metafictional Characters in Modern Drama (1979), The Plays and Novels of Peter Handke (1981), Arthur Miller (1987) (with James K. Flannagan), King Lear (1991), and Dramatic Closure: Reading the end.

I: Criticism; Excerpt from His Edition of The Plays of William Shakespeare (1765); Excerpt from Characters of Shakespear's Plays (1817); Excerpt from A Study of Shakespeare (1880); "The Female Page" from Disguise Plots in Elizabethan Drama (1915); The Ending of The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1933); Sir Thomas Elyot and the Integrity of The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1950); Proteus, Wry-Transformed Traveller (1954); Excerpt from Shakespeare's Comedies (1960); Two Clowns in a Comedy (to say nothing of the Dog): Speed, Launce (and Crab) in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1963); Laughing with the Audience: The Two Gentlemen of Verona and the Popular Tradition of Comedy (1969); "Were man but constant, he were perfect": Constancy and Consistency in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1972); The Two Gentlemen of Verona and the Courtesy Book Tradition (1983); Love Letters in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1986); "Metamorphising" Proteus: Reversal Strategies in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1996); Shakespeare's Actors as Collaborators: Will Kempe and The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1996); "I am but a foole, looke you": Launce and the Social Functions of Humor (1996); "To be slow in words is a woman's only virtue": Silence and Satire in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1994); Feminine "Depth" on the Nineteenth-Century Stage (1996); II: Theatre Reviews; European Magazine: 1821, Covent Garden, London; 1895, Daly's Theatre, London; 1904, Court Theatre, London; 1910, His Majesty's Theatre, London; 1956, The Old Vic, London; 1970, Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon; 1975, Stratford, Ontario; 1983, BBC TV/Time Life Productions; 1984, The Young Company, Stratford, Ontario; 1990, The Acting Company; 1991, Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon