Valentine begins
the argument:
"Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits,"--
he will "see the wonders of the world abroad" rather than live "dully
sluggardiz'd at home," wearing out "youth with shapeless idleness." But
all these reasons are at once superfluous and peculiar. The audience
needs no persuasion to believe that a young man is eager to travel and
go to Court. Shakespeare's quick mounting spirit is in the lines, and
the needlessness of the argument shows that we have here a personal
confession. Valentine, then, mocks at love, because it was love that
held Shakespeare so long in Stratford, and when Proteus defends it, he
replies:
"Even so by Love the young and tender wit
Is turned to folly; blasting in the bud,
Losing his verdure even in the prime,
And all the fair effects of future hopes."
Here is Shakespeare's confession that his marriage had been a failure,
not only because of his wife's mad jealousy and violent temper, which we
have been forced to realize in "The Comedy of Errors," but also because
love and its home-keeping ways threatened to dull and imprison the eager
artist spirit.
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