Wild about the dog

What does anyone readily recall of the Two Gents other than the servant Launce and his magnificent dog Crab? Maybe that’s all you need to remember, for it’s really only in Launce’s observations on Crab that the unmistakeable voice of Shakespeare surfaces from the dross of a comedy that may well have been his first. Who but Shakespeare would have had Launce boast that when Crab farted under the Duke’s table he himself owned up and took the punishment on his own back? Hard to escape the feeling that the apprentice Bard was so bored with injecting a semblance of life into a stock tale of lovesick heroes and their ladies that, in a couple of scenes, he mischievously allows a dog to upstage the lot of them. The safe cop-out is to make do with a stuffed toy on wheels, but better by far with the real thing. And, in a superlatively languid Irish wolfhound named Ria, the RSC’s touring company couldn’t have improved upon the casting.