Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
Two Gentlemen of Verona is very likely Shakespeare's first play. (source: Jean E. Howard, Introduction to the Norton Shakespeare edition of Two Gentlemen of Verona, 2008)
If Two Gentlemen is Shakespeare's very first play, then it follows that "Julia" is Shakespeare's very first cross-dressing heroine.
The 1998 film Shakespeare in Love uses speeches, scenes, themes, and the "bit with the dog" from Two Gentlemen of Verona, including Valentine's big "What light is light, if Silvia be not seen?" speech in Act 3, Scene 1. Check out this clip from the film. About four minutes in, a cross-dressed Viola (Gwyneth Paltrow) auditions for Will Shakespeare's (Joseph Fiennes) new play and recites Valentine's lines from Two Gentlemen of Verona.
In July 2007, BBC radio aired Two Gentlemen of Valasna, an adaptation set in mid-seventeenth-century India "in the weeks leading up to the Indian Mutiny of 1857." (source)
Soon after the release of the 2009 film I Love You Man Time magazine came out with a list of the "Top Ten Movie Bromances." We can't believe Two Gentlemen of Verona didn't make it. (source)
In 1971, Two Gentlemen of Verona was adapted into a Tony Award winning rock musical featuring songs like "Love Drove Me Sane" and "Don't Have the Baby." (source)
Two Gentlemen of Verona features the smallest cast of any Shakespeare play. (source: Jean E. Howard, Introduction to the Norton Shakespeare edition of Two Gentlemen of Verona, 2008)