The Reformation revived ancient debates about idolatry as both a theological and scientific problem. For Francis Bacon, for example, idolatry names epistemological problems that keep us from understanding the divine order of nature. Protestant efforts to reform religious institutions and rituals likewise invoked idolatry in their critiques of established religious practices, with radical implications for understanding language and other systems of representation in the period. Idolatry was both a classical and biblical problem of material worship and representation that Shakespeare adopted in new ways to address both the challenge of how to represent love and to situate bodies, words, and images on the stage. In his early comedy of Two Gentlemen of Verona, on which this chapter focuses, idolatry shapes both homosocial and heterosexual bonds in defining the central question of how to represent love. Silvia’s “presence” in the climactic final scene in which Proteus tries to rape her confronts the false idolatry of erotic obsession that has consumed the male lovers. In seeking to neutralize and transform modes of idolatry, the play channels potentially transgressive forms of sexuality into new and “godly” domestic structures. Moving from objects to language to images as vehicles of representation, Shakespeare’s comedy ultimately identifies the authentic source of desire in the natural body.