Proteus and Valentine, lifelong friends, each leave their rural hometown of Verona to experience life in the city of Milan.

Antonio, a Veronese nobleman, then decides to send his son Proteus to the Duke's court in Milan, to experience a more well-rounded life.

After his arrival in Milan, Proteus also sets his sights on Sylvia, disregarding his loyalty to both Valentine and Julia (his sweetheart back home).

In Milan, Julia (disguised as Sebastian) delivers to Silvia the ring Proteus gave her, on his behalf (not realizing the page was actually his Veronese girlfriend).

"[6] After tryouts at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park in the summer of 1971 and twenty previews, the Broadway production, directed by Mel Shapiro and choreographed by Jean Erdman replaced by Dennis Nahat for Broadway and London productions, opened on December 1, 1971 at the St. James Theatre, where it ran for 614 performances.

[10] The original Broadway cast album[11] was released on ABC Records in the US at the time; through merger and acquisition over the years, the Universal Music Group now owns the rights.

[14] The New Jersey Shakespeare Festival revived the piece in 1996, directed by Robert Duke and starring Philip Hernandez, Dana M. Reeve, and Keith Byron Kirk.

"[17] Critic Ben Brantley, in The New York Times, compared the 2005 revival to a "festive production" to "a fruity sangría", praising the cast but concluding that the work has not held up well.

He wrote that the play's "wayward" characters were "not without parallels among the lotus-eating youth of the post-Woodstock years – a comparison that Messrs. Shapiro, Guare and MacDermot made canny use of.

They also scaled down Shakespeare's passages of poetic pain for an approach that emphasized an easygoing, multicultural exuberance over wistful poetry and nonsense over sensibility.... [But] MacDermot's songs... lack the variety of his score for Hair.... And the lyricism Mr. Guare is known for as a playwright is rarely in evidence in his clunky work here as a lyricist".