This week is another lesser-known Antonio, who continues to break one mold (sad, queer-coded singletons) while seeming to fall into a pattern with last week’s fatherly Antonio— Dadtonios, if you will. We’re dialing all the way back to the beginning of Shakespeare’s career with The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which begins with a brief but thematically important cameo by Antonio, the father of one of the titular gentlemen.
(You will not be surprised to learn that the above is not actually, specifically an illustration of Antonio, just of a generic gentleman.)
Let’s get our gentlemen in order: Valentine and Proteus are best friends. Valentine is leaving to travel the world; Proteus doesn’t want to, because he wants to stay home to be close to his secret lover, Julia. Valentine, abroad in Milan, falls in love with Silvia— and when Valentine gets sent abroad after him, he falls in love with Silvia, too. But that second part isn’t our problem for now. Antonio is Proteus’s father, and his big role in the proceedings is to shove his son out of the nest.
In his single scene, Antonio confesses that, in spite of his son’s reluctance to leave home, “I have considered well his loss of time / And how he cannot be a perfect man, / Not being tried and tutored in the world' “ (1.3.20-2). Once that’s decided, he moves quickly, ordering Proteus to leave without delay. After being easily persuaded to this course of action by his friend Pantino, he’s strict and unyielding with his son.
In this, Antonio plays the role of so many other fathers in Shakespeare’s comedies, though somewhat more inadvertently: the force that separates young lovers. Antonio doesn’t even know Proteus has a lover, so he’s not doing it on purpose. His only concern is with Proteus’s education, and the implicit idea—somewhat different from the norm in Shakespeare’s work—that the way to become ‘a perfect man’ is perhaps not to fall in love, but to gain other types of experiences first. Proteus certainly goes on to prove that his judgement and gentlemanly ethics are, perhaps, not yet fully mature. While Antonio may err in unknowingly separating Proteus and Julia, unlike in something like Romeo and Juliet or even The Merry Wives of Windsor, where the older generation fails to understand the younger, the most profound mistakes are Proteus’s own. Antonio seems to be proven correct in his sense that his son needs to go learn a thing or two before he can settle down.
Maybe, we can argue, Shakespeare’s writing isn’t fully mature here, either… but the argument that the name ‘Antonio’ carries any kind of consistent and deliberate meaning really seems to be falling apart. In fact, we seem to be on the fully opposite side of the coin from the lonely, isolated Antonios we began with. This Antonio is the voice of society, of striving to live up to the social ideal of a gentleman—and the role a young man’s family must play in providing that education. Maybe even against said young man’s will.