SOURCE: “A Sense of the Ending: ‘Our wooing doth not end like an old play,’” in “Curious-Knotted Garden”: The Form, Themes, and Contexts of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, edited by Dr. James Hogg, Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1977, pp. 154-76.

[In the essay below, Montrose considers the indeterminacy of the ending of Love's Labour's Lostand the thematic reconciliation of actuality and imagination in the play's closing songs.]

The spell of the playworld's magic circle is weakened from within before it succumbs to the pressures of an inexorable outer reality. It is threatened from the play's beginning, and is only maintained by an anxious and at times frantic group effort. The play's texture is filled with ominous prolepses and disturbing images, knit together by an undercurrent of lust and obscenity and the symbolism of the hunt. Berowne and his comrades playfully draw their imagery of love and courtship from disease. This is the stuff of Petrarchism but it has an integral ironic function within the play. The obsessive series of these images hints continually at the world of pain and death from which the courtiers try to insulate themselves in living art.¹

As grotesque embodiments of the lords' faults, Armado, Holofernes, and Nathaniel must become the pathetic objects upon which are projected the uglier aspects of the lords' humor. The baiting of the Worthies begins to reveal a world of nightmares when Holofernes is taunted as Judas Iscariot and a death's head. As Holofernes retires, Boyet shouts “A light for Monsieur Judas! It grows dark, he may stumble (V.ii.630). These disquieting words probably reflect the actual situation of late afternoon in the playhouse; the playworld's inner time is being synchronized with the duration of the play in the theatre. Armado enters, is abused, and justly rebukes the lords, not for his own injury but for the desecration of his heroic ideal: “The sweet war-man is dead and rotten, sweet chucks, beat not the bones of the buried. When he breathed, he was a man” (V.ii.660-62). This sudden memento mori, bringing back the play's opening theme of heroic fame's triumph over “cormorant devouring Time,” shows the brave conquerors' present behavior to be all the more “disgraceful.” The lords' abuse of the Pageant, compounded by the Pageant's subject, places them in a sharply critical perspective as both heroes and audience, speakers and listeners.

Costard's exposure of Armado is a violent reflection of the ladies' exposure of the lords, whose wild enthusiasm now emboldens him. Armado becomes their scapegoat. A brief, stylistically incongruous exchange telescopes the play's disjoined motifs of shame and desire, of the testing and confusion of roles:

arm.
Dost thou infamonize me among potentates?
Thou shalt die.
cost.
Then shall Hector be whipt for Jaquenetta
that is quick by him, and hang'd for Pompey
that is dead by him.

(V.ii.678-82)

Now, as the unexpected, mourning-clad figure of Marcade enters the playground, the subtle interplay of detachment and confrontation within the fiction reaches out into the theatre to directly engage the audience. Navarre's graceless and contorted speech on “the extreme parts of time,” Berowne's admission that they have “neglected time” rather than transcended it, Navarre's insistence that the Princess grant him her grace, “Now at the latest minute of the hour,” and her reply (V.ii.788-89) that such would be “A time methinks too short / To make a world-without-end bargain in,” all contribute to the revivification of the image of “cormorant devouring Time,” with which the play began. As the fable moves rapidly toward its end, the time which had been neglected throughout the playworld's duration—the clock-time to which both the theatre audience and the temporal form enclosing the playworld are subject—begins to reassert itself.

The form of Love's Labour's Lost is very much a mutation of the archetypal Shakespearean comic structure: “Our wooing doth not end like an old play: / Jack hath not Gill” (V.ii.874-75). The harsh law contrary to the comic spirit—the fact of mortality and the world of pain, struggle, and responsibility which it implies—is enforced at the end of this play, rather than at the beginning. The players have been avoiding the burden of imaginatively coming to terms with the facts of fallen nature, so as to accommodate the fear and anxiety which they arouse. The wooing game ends in lost labor, an “abortive birth” (I.i. 104), rather than in rituals of socialized fertility. Love's not Time's fool. Marriage must be “a world-without-end bargain,” rather than a victory of immediate possession. The wise fool, Don Armado, expresses the dialectic of true love with unwonted precision: “What shalt thou exchange … for thyself? me” (IV.i.82-83); then, “the catastrophe is a nuptial; on whose side? the king's; no, on both in one, or one in both” (76-78).

Many critics assure us, or simply take for granted, that there has been merely an interruption of the romantic movement, that the form will complete itself as it should after a year:

Jack shall have Jill;
Nought shall go ill:
The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well.

(MND, III.ii. 461-63)

Such an attitude seems to be based on the desire for fulfillment of audience expectation rather than on anything in the text, which gives no assurance that the marriage festival is merely postponed and will in fact take place at the end of the allotted time. That the play ends without marriages is an incontestable fact; that marriages will ensue is an assumption or assertion which the play explicitly refuses to confirm. All that we are told with certainty is that a year and a day is too long for a play. What is emphasized in the major penances of the King and Berowne is the great difficulty of the tasks; the focus is on the penance as an end in itself, not as the means by which to possess the lady.² Both the Princess and Katherine warn their suitors not to swear new oaths, for they are already “perjur'd much.” Rosalind tells Berowne that if he succeeds in the impossible, she will have him; if he fails and purges his humor, she will be joyful of his reformation (V.ii.863-69).

The complementary penances of the King and Berowne—contemplation and action, prayer and good works—point to the play's extrinsic moral. The King must

go with speed
To some forlorn and naked hermitage,
Remote from all the pleasures of the world;
There stay until the twelve celestial signs
Have brought about the annual reckoning.

(V.ii.794-98)

Berowne

shall this twelvemonth term from day to day
Visit the speechless sick, and still converse
With groaning wretches.

(V.ii.850-52)

In frustrating the action of romantic comedy, the ladies seem to be expressing another, more fundamental form of love from which romantic love must draw its life. They are insisting on the reality of what, for Berowne, had been merely a self-serving witticism: “For charity itself fulfils the law, / And who can sever love from charity?” (IV.iii.361-62). He must find for himself that love is a movement out of self, an act of giving; the King must move inward in meditation to find his relations to love's source. Each is required to fulfill the ideal of life he falsely enunciates in the play's first scene. Berowne must indeed lose his oath to find himself, for charity itself fulfills the law; the King, who had devised the oath, is now challenged to fulfill its terms. The four penances emphasize natural, social, and spiritual growth, not marriage.

The tone of the scene between Marcade's entry and the final songs poses a problem of interpretation. The ladies are forcing the lords into a temporal, fallen world of experience which, in the penances of the King and Berowne, is dramatically presented through the tradition of medieval romance. The disdainful lady imposes harsh, long, nigh impossible tasks on the lover who, by undertaking them, aims to perfect his self and prove worthy of the lady. The indeterminacy of the ending, the plot's open form, injects considerable ambiguity into the significance of the action. From one perspective, a new sense of relation is established between the ladies and their courtiers and the action of a romantic comedy has been initiated; from another perspective, the ladies exit the playworld as easily as they had entered it, having fulfilled their function as the collective agency of both a comic nemesis and a diplomatic coup. The follies of the men have been exposed, the illusion broken, the possibilities of self-discovery presented. In either case, the final outcome lies beyond the scope of “our sport,” the dramatic fiction of Love's Labour's Lost. By explicitly pointing out that “our wooing doth not end like an old play,” Shakespeare is conspicuously implying that this is a new kind of play which insists that the audience take seriously the theatre's claim to hold the mirror up to the world's stage upon which the audience are the actors. Shakespeare makes a comedy by refusing to make his characters' sport a comedy. By dooming their “old infant play” from the beginning, he creates an exhilarating and penetrating examination of the modes of playing.

The conclusion of Shakespearean romantic comedy points toward an accommodation of its first and second worlds—the “actual” world of the fiction, in which the characters find themselves, and the imaginative playworld they create within it. The latter is not totally repudiated; we are made to feel that its vision is in some way brought over into the fiction's “actual” world and will be made to imaginatively inform it beyond the characters' final exeunt. The last scene of Love's Labour's Lost, however, tends to force these two worlds violently apart, to irrevocably disjoin them. The King's original ideal of “a little academe, still and contemplative in living art” is reflected by distortion in his penance, which envisions the loneliness and hardship of the ascetic hermit. It is appropriate to recall how suspect was the medieval ideal of ascetic withdrawal to the Elizabethan mind, which was busied with the expansive, secular horizons of the active life and which regarded with some suspicion the cultural legacy of the Roman Church.³ In a prince, of course, such tendencies were seen to have particularly disastrous consequences. In The Tempest, Duke Prospero withdraws to an urban ivory tower; in Arcadia, King Basilius withdraws to a pastoral hideaway. In them, we can see clearly the connection between the ascetic and recreative forms of escapism which makes Navarre's penance so dubious a form of comic purgation.

Berowne had ridiculed the “barren tasks” (I.i. 47) of the King's edict, preferring a life of feasting, wenching, and sleeping; he must now perform a kind of danse macabre, jesting in a hospital, “to move wild laughter in the throat of death” (V.ii. 855). The tomblike enclosure of the little academe returns threefold. Grotesque and radical parodies of visions of the self (as naked, wintry hermitage) and society (as a plague house) are compounded by the Princess' vow to

shut
My woeful self up in a mourning house,
Raining the tears of lamentation
For the remembrance of my father's death.

(V.ii.807-10)

This resolve seems more appropriate to the conclusion of a tragedy than a comedy. Within the containing context of the fable of Love's Labour's Lost, the penances of its actual or first world, by their violent antithesis to the imaginative second world, look back into that second world as a negative reflection of its partial perspective. Working with heterogeneous elements—a static body of games and ineffectual confrontations and an allegorical quest of moral and intellectual perfection—Shakespeare creates a subtle and distinctive dramatic structure in which a central core of recreative abandon is framed by a rudimentary quest romance. The transition into the recreative core is effected easily and immediately by the entry of the ladies; the transition out of the recreative core is effected with violence and shock by the intrusion of Marcade. These transitions enact an unresolved tension between the poles of Pleasure and Virtue which the characters are unable to transcend. The penances are as unbalanced and inappropriate a realization of the total comic vision as the antithetical state of fantasy which called them forth. The achievement of that vision of integrated experience is the burden of the songs.

We may ask, with Theseus, “How shall we find the concord of this discord?” (MND, V.i.60). Edgar Wind distinguishes between the Renaissance use of figures which explicate and complicate, which unfold and infold meaning. As an example of the former, he gives The Choice of Hercules, “an exoteric fable” in which “the choice is clear because the two opposites, having been introduced in complete disjunction, obey the logical principle of the excluded middle.” His example of the second method is from the conclusion to Jonson's masque, Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618). This work commences with the antimasque of a Silenus-like Comus and his crew, who are effectively dismissed by Hercules. A second antimasque, of pigmies (cthonic brothers of Antaeus), menaces Hercules while he sleeps. The pigmies are routed by celestial music heralding the descent of Mercury, who bids Hercules, “Rest still, thou active friend of Virtue” (147) and presents to him

a cessation of all jars
'Twixt Virtue and her noted opposite
Pleasure.

(168-70)

The disjunction of Comus' sensual depravity and Hercules' heroic virtue (a heroism of the virtuous will) is to be transcended by virtuous pleasure. This Neoplatonic dialectic is symbolically expressed in the dance, led by Daedalus, which epitomizes the masque itself. Wind describes the process of reconciliation:

a sequence of Knots is introduced by the dancing master Daedalus, who interweaves the two opposites in a perfect maze; and his labyrinthian designs are accompanied by a warning that, while the ‘first figure’ should suggest the contrast of Virtue and Pleasure as in the Choice of Hercules, it is the purpose of the dance to ‘entwine’ Pleasure and Virtue beyond recognition:

Come on, come on; and where you go,
So interweave the curious knot,
As ev'n th' observer scarce may know
Which lines are Pleasure's and which not.

In the course of tying the knot, the ‘unfolded’ figures, which appeared familiar because they were closer to exoteric terms, are united—‘infolded’—in a mysterious cipher which comprises the contraries as one.⁴

Unambiguous elements in straightforward relations of contrast or antithesis are symbolically harmonized in a complex image. Following the Jonsonian process, I propose that we consider the songs which conclude Love's Labour's Lost as a lyrical infolding of the dramatic disjunctions.

Textual scholars cannot agree on whether the original version of Love's Labour's Lost dates from the late 1580's (ca. 1588-89) or the early 1590's (ca. 1593-94), nor on how the one or more earlier versions differed from the first Quarto of 1598. There does seem to be general agreement, however, that the penances and postponement are part of the original structure. Whatever else was new to the text in 1598, it now seems certain that the songs made their first appearance then.⁵ It is necessary to imagine the play without the songs which come after the termination of the dramatic action, a play ending in penances and leave-taking, to appreciate what a profound effect the songs do indeed have on the total theatrical experience. Without them, the play would end with a muted inversion of the tragi-comic rhythm of the romances, in an ironic mood, an emotional winter. If the songs were in fact not part of the original design, their addition seems, in retrospect, to have been a formal and thematic necessity. If there was a Love's Labour's Lost without the songs, it was a different play.

Armado styles the songs “the dialogue that the two learned men have compiled in praise of the owl and the cuckoo,” which “should have followed in the end of our show” (V.ii.885-88). The songs provide a pastoral coda, a lyrical envoy, to the mock-heroic pageantry of both the Worthies and the lords of Navarre. By alluding to Holofernes and Nathaniel as the compilers, Armado prepares us for another ludicrous display of self-delighting pedantry. The false expectation of scornful laughter turns immediately to surprised delight when the songs begin. The absurd attribution and its implied deprecation of the songs' art are ironic techniques by which they may be more directly associated with the playwright than with any of the characters in the fiction. They do indeed “follow in the end of our show,” and tend to separate themselves into a different order of experience from all the games which have constituted it. The achieved effect of this contrast between action and song matches the intention that Lyly describes in the Blackfriars prologue to his Sapho and Phao (1584): “To move inward delight, not outward lightness, and to breede … soft smiling, not loude laughing: knowing it to the wise to be as great pleasure to heare counsell mixed with witte, as to the foolish to have sporte mingled with rudenesse.”⁶

Both songs are praiseworthy, and Armado's suggestion is that the final vision emerges from the dialogue between them. The songs present the first and last seasons of the year in the order of the natural cycle, implicitly reminding us that, from a larger perspective, Janus joins the old year's winter to the new year's spring. As it is, the order imitates that of the play: Ver's “green world” is followed by Hiems' world of the actual; literary pastoral is followed by rustic “realism.” Darkness and fear are contained within Ver, brightness and warmth within Hiems.

In Ver's pastoral landscape, pied flowers paint the meadows to the accompaniment of a shepherd's pipe. An out-of-doors, natural environment of springtime, daylight, and sexuality is touched by the artifice of the court of Navarre and affected by the same disturbing intrusions of lust and cuckoldry, desire and fear. The cuckoo is an icon of folly; it is also, more specifically, an icon of cuckoldry. The natural Spring impulse is usually associated with young lovers as the sexual drive toward union in marriage; the refrain of the cuckoo song in Love's Labour's Lost presents this impulse from a post-romantic comedy viewpoint, as natural passion which threatens the established socio-cultural order. The cry of “cuckoo” is transposed from the category of natural sounds to that of human signs: “O word of fear, / Unpleasing to a married ear!” (V. ii. 901-02). The power of the word and the primacy of the speech act are negatively reasserted; the tie between sexual and linguistic communication is reaffirmed. As a mocking icon of the lords' folly, the cuckoo may thus allude to the imaginative perversions of those whom the music of their own vain tongues doth ravish like enchanting harmony: the marriage of the courtiers' ears to their own vain tongues is an impediment to the marriage of true minds.

Here the owl seems to be an icon of the wisdom of Athena. But in popular tradition and much Elizabethan literature, it is associated with night thoughts and death. In the song of Hiems, it presides over a world of evening, barrenness, infirmity, and coarse rusticity—yet its call has become “a merry note.” The words of the exiled Duke in the Forest of Arden might provide a commentary on Hiems' paradox:

Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,
The seasons' difference, as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter's wind,
Which when it bites and blows upon my body
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say,
“This is no flattery: these are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.”
Sweet are the uses of adversity.

(AYL, II. i. 5-12)

The court party establishes, in the forest of Arden, a society based on charity, feasting, and song. In an analogous way, the adversity of nature is culturally transformed in the owl song, which is focused on the hearth and its associations of warmth, light, feasting, and companionship. The kinesis of Spring, expressed mainly through the sexual, vocal, and other energies of birds, is replaced by images of potential energy, of waiting and control. Treading turtles give place to birds who “sit brooding in the snow”; emblems of Patience and Temperance are embodied in simple, domestic acts: “Dick the shepherd blows his nail” and “greasy Joan doth keel the pot.”

The beauty of Spring is a setting for human discord as well as for the creations of art; the adversity of Winter is assuaged by homely images of community among figures with common, Christian names who work, eat and play together. Yet the song of Winter does not in any way triumph over or supplant the song of Spring; it does not have a greater “reality,” though it follows in a natural order. The sweetness and adversity so radically disjoined in the play's dramatic fiction are reintegrated by the songs. Each is an ambivalent vision in which the actual is sustained by the imaginative. They are built on identical metric and rhyme schemes, and use the same nexus of imagery and subject matter in different but complementary ways. The lexical and aural interweaving of the two songs is strongly reinforced by the visual dimension of their staging, with its alternation of two choric groups. Although one song succeeds another temporally, their combined effect is to produce a contrapuntal harmony, a union of contraries within which antitheses are at once distinct and reconciled.⁷

Although it gives the impression of a rather loose structure, Love's Labour's Lost has one notable symmetry. By line count, the numerical center of the play is the sonnet scene in the early part of IV.iii. Within the dramatic context exclusive of the appended songs, the ironic verbal enclosure of lyric poetry is centrally placed between the enclosure of an ascetic academe “still and contemplative in living art” at the beginning and those of hermitage, hospital, and mourning house at the end. The songs add another dimension to this symmetry by supplanting the ironic enclosures of the ending with a verbal form which counterbalances the egocentric heroic rhetoric of the oath and Petrarchan rhetoric of the sonnets. The songs imitate the propositional “when … then” construction of the oath while utterly redirecting its contents. The love sonnets and final songs embody the contrast of an emphatically secretive medium of written composition with a collective, oral performance. Lyricism in the ironic context of drama is supplanted by lyrics which transcend the boundaries of the dramatic fiction.

Love's Labour's Lost persistently probes the relation of the human imaginative faculty to the vision of an ordered and purposeful nature imaged in the zodiacal and seasonal cycles at the end. The songs clarify the distinction between two antithetical potentialities: between the fruitful and sterile uses of the imagination, wit as a means to grace or to bondage. The wisely shaping fantasy of the songs redeems the lyric mode from the hyperbolic fantasy of the courtiers' love poems. The songs eloquently exemplify Puttenham's description of the “well affected” Imagination, which is “not onely nothing disorderly or confused with any monstrous imaginations or conceits, but very formall, and in his much multiformitie vniforme, that is well proportioned, and so passing cleare, that by it … are represented vnto the soule all maner of bewtifull visions” (Arte of English Poesie, pp. 18-19). The songs select, combine, and contrast natural and cultural elements in an imaginative synthesis which does not censor nor deny the hardship, anxiety, and pain which attend human life but rather strives to encompass them within its form. The songs image forth a vision of human beings in dynamic equilibrium with themselves, society, and nature—a vision not unlike the Pageant of the Months in Spenser's Cantos of Mutabilitie or the pastoral dream of poor King Henry the Sixth. The songs wed play to work, love to labor, within the larger cyclical rhythms of a human community which is harmoniously wed to nature. By celebrating the continuity of the public theatre poet's efflorescent art with his common, rural roots, the songs become a critical frame for the courtly style and aristocratic ideology which have dominated the dramatic action. Shakespeare's most courtly play holds the mirror up to the court in order to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.

When Berowne and the King conclude their discussion of the play's dramatic kind, they have closed the borders of the world of Love's Labour's Lost and severed its contract with the audience:

ber.
Our wooing doth not end like an old play:
Jack hath not Gill. These ladies' courtesy
Might well have made our sport a comedy.
king.
Come, sir, it wants a twelvemonth an' a day,
And then 'twill end.
ber.
That's too long for a play.

(V. ii. 874-78)

The world of Navarre is now recognized as a playground bounded by a world outside; the larger context of actuality within the fiction is itself implicitly associated with the world of the theatre audience. When Armado re-enters, the Princess asks, “Was not that Hector?” (V. ii. 880). The characters-as-actors are being separated from their roles in the games which have constituted an elaborate play-within-the-play; all the masquers must resume their true shapes now that the revels are ended. The play seems about to dissolve in unresolved antithesis and dissonance when Armado reconstitutes the fiction, “at the latest minute of the hour,” in order to perfect it for the audience, if not for the characters. Armado is the only humorous character for whom the play's catastrophe has been clearly understood as a recognition scene: “For mine own part, I breathe free breath. I have seen the day of wrong through the little hole of discretion, and I will right myself like a soldier” (V. ii. 722-25). Now he reenters, having “vow'd to Jaquenetta to hold the plow for her sweet love three year” (V. ii. 883-84), the term originally projected for the now defunct academe. This new Adam will labor in the earth, while Jaquenetta (“a child of our grandmother Eve”) will labor in childbirth. Armado's shift from martial to pastoral (or, more precisely, georgic) images ushers in the songs which so simply, concisely, and profoundly express the ground of heroic action in the experience and integration of life's most basic contradictions. By presenting the lyric dialogue which “should have followed in the end of our show” (V. ii. 887-88), Armado becomes, in a rudimentary way, the architect of the happy ending typical of Shakespearean romantic comedy but absent from the dramatic fiction of Love's Labour's Lost.

For a brief moment, the lords and ladies are again an audience; now they listen and watch together in silent attention. The relation of the theatre audience to the formalized art of the songs is not mediated by the fictive audience on the stage. The theatre audience is led into the dramatic fiction and beyond it, toward the vision of the lyrics. The awareness of the various characters and the members of the theatre audience have been levelled by the entry of the messenger of death; the knowledge of death as an ultimate separator is the bond which brings characters and audience together. Now, game becomes ritual in this moment of song.

The ambiguity of reference characteristic of the play's language is present in the final words which dissolve the play-world—“You that way; we this way.” The director's options in interpretation will create different final effects: Armado may clear the stage by separating the players into two groups on the basis of class distinctions, which gives the effect of distinguishing the unlikely couple for whom love's labors have been won from the four aristocratic pairs who are about to part; he may clear the stage by separating the players into the original groups of Navarrese residents and French visitors, emphasizing the tonality of separation and loss; or he can break through the illusionary actuality of the fictional world to speak directly to the audience an epilogue on behalf of all the players.⁸ Though the audience who have been entertained in the playworld of Navarre are now bid to return to their own worlds, it is to be expected that they carry something of its vision home with them.

In a poetic eulogy prefixed to the Shakespeare First Folio, Jonson gives testimony to the dual godlike powers of his friend and rival:

And all the Muses still were
in their prime,
When like Apollo he came forth to
warme
Our eares, or like a Mercury to charme!

Shakespeare possesses the poetic furor and rhetorical mastery to delight and move us. The final lines of The Quarto of Love's Labour's Lost—“the words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo” (V. ii. 930-31)⁹—should not be made too much of but they do invite us to contemplate the ways in which Jonson's image resonates in the play. One obvious reference is to the mortal message of Marcade-Mercury,¹⁰ which stills the lyric voice of love, “as sweet and musical / As bright Apollo's lute, strung with his hair” (IV. iii. 339-40). Interpreted as a sententious reflection, the envoy would merely describe the movement of the action from the perspective of the disappointed characters. From a perspective from outside the fiction, Berowne's self-identification with Apollo during his speech on Love is dubious. Mercury was popularly interpreted as patron of trade and theft, rhetoric and lies; as a sophistic buyer and seller in words, he is an apposite patron for Berowne.¹¹ It could be argued that the lords' original ill-founded quest of Hermetic wisdom and the self-charming Mercurial eloquence of their amatory speeches and poems are silenced by the intervention of Marcade's “word of fear” and supplanted by the “merry note” of the Apollonian final songs.¹²

Jonson's investiture of Shakespeare with the attributes of a composite deity should warn us against any too simple evaluative contrast of songs and words. In the rich syncretism of Renaissance symbolism, no pagan deity is more prevalent nor more multifaceted than Mercury. His roles as patron of thieves and divine mystagogue polarize the power of the word as the instrument of deception and enlightenment. Marcade's entry enacts a descent of Mercury into the fable as agent of the omnipotent author. The poet has seduced his audience into the world of his play and led them through its mazes toward its infolded culmination in the songs of Apollo. Now it is under the aegis of Mercury that the audience return to themselves, to the harsh world of negotium, and also to the critical task of unfolding the images they have been shown. After initially being moved to delight, both the spectator in the theatre and the reader in the study must now distinguish themselves from the imaginative world of the fiction—and from the characters who fail to distinguish themselves from the roles they have created within the fiction—and understand their relation to that imaginative world before they can meaningfully respond. “Moouing,” Sidney declares, “is wel nigh the cause and effect of teaching. For who will be taught, if hee bee not mooued with desire to be taught? And what so much good doth that teaching bring forth … as that it mooueth one to do that which it dooth teach?” (Apologie, p. 171). If an audience appreciates the play as no more than a pleasant diversion, as it would “some delightful ostentation, or show, or pageant, or antic, or firework” (V. i. 111-13), it can only do so by cutting loose the characters' antics from the formal and thematic context in which they exist.

The catastrophe of its ending constitutes a critique of the play's action. The characters within the fiction of Love's Labour's Lost fail to perfect that equilibrium of their experience which can provide the audience with its model. The audience must amend the characters' imagination, and its guide is a lyric rather than a dramatic one. In place of the comic rituals of marriage and festivity which would have been the expected culmination of the plot, we are given a pair of songs which follow the plot but are not part of it. Contained within the polarized structure of their imagery is its own principle of unity, providing a lyric key to the resolution which the dramatic action cannot give us.

The songs point beyond Love's Labour's Lost to the vision of a “great creating nature” at work in The Winter's Tale, a nature which implies not the denial of art but its triumph. When a supposed statue by Julio Romano turns into a living Hermione before the eyes of both stage and theatre audiences, the miracle is due to the great creating nature of Shakespeare's art. From the entry of Time as Chorus at the beginning of Act IV, everything in The Winter's Tale leads toward this epiphany of Art as Nature, Nature as Art. Even as they move toward rusticity on the semantic level, the songs at the end of Love's Labour's Lost insist—by virtue of their lyric genre, highly formalized presentation, and temporal position posterior to the dramatic action—on the aesthetic and symbolic status of their harmonious vision.

Art, language, and sexuality are, in Love's Labour's Lost, largely devoid of the complex social context and web of kinship so pervasive in the other comedies and the romances. Both kinship and socio-political relations are alluded to only in the most oblique, negative, and fragmentary way. The characters practice a promiscuous abuse of the analogy of creation and procreation, which the playwright uses to negatively reassert the analogy's validity. Love's Labour's Lost is an implicit critique of the self-persuading rhetoric and asocial lyricism of which it is largely composed—and, at some level, a critique of the centripetal impulse in Shakespeare's own art. The failure of form at the play's conclusion is genuinely poetic justice; it is the play's own nemesis. Love's Labour's Lost demonstrates its own rhetorical logic, which is to deny a conclusion based on the logic of its characters. Rituals of verbal, sexual, and social bonding are denied: the lords deny their own oaths, the ladies deny the lords their favors, the playwright denies the audience the expected conclusion.

That which is “too long for a play” to perfect must be worked out among the members of the audience; the songs are their guide. It is appropriate, and even necessary, that the final festivity be a specifically aesthetic and objectified one. It is not the expression of the characters' own realization but a gift to them—and to the audience—from the playwright. As far as the courtiers are concerned, the songs are only a lyric consolation for their own dramatic failure. In The Winter's Tale, resolution is fully incorporated within the dramatic fiction as the discovery of the characters, within the mimesis of the actual world of human action rather than beyond it in the aestheticized genre of lyric. The Winter's Tale weathers the tragic experience whose shadow is sufficient to destroy the fragile fiction of Love's Labour's Lost. While in the late play it will be truly said that “the art itself is nature,” the seeds of that final vision are already being cultivated in the songs at the close of Love's Labour's Lost.

Notes

1. References to plague and torture presumably had a more immediate and visceral effect on Elizabethan audiences than they do on us. Some of the more striking passages are III. i. 196-98; IV. iii. 381; V. ii. 60, 394-99, 408-09, 417-21, 843-44. Ominous currents in the play's imagery are also discussed in Roesen, “Love's Labour's Lost.”

2. Among the few critics who emphasize the indeterminacy of the ending are E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Early Comedies (London, 1965), pp. 137-81; and Larry S. Champion, The Evolution of Shakespeare's Comedy (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1970), p. 45. J. J. Anderson, “The Morality of Love's Labour's Lost,” ShS, 24 (1971), pp. 55-62, relates LLL to the morality play tradition, and maintains that an eventual happy outcome is left in doubt. G. Wilson Knight, The Shakespearian Tempest, 3rd ed. (London, 1953), emphasizes the solemnity of the play's finale: “Thoughtless love may well be victor over ‘learning’. It meets a sterner antagonist in knowledge of human suffering. Henceforth, romance is ever to be related to tragedy. No Shakespearian comedy sports so much golden fun at the start; none ends to sadly. … Love's Labour's Lost is profound; too profound to find a happy ending” (pp. 81-82).

3. The monastic vita contemplativa was frequently ridiculed as an icon of Sloth. See, e. g., Spenser, FQ, I. iv. 18-20. An extended indictment of “loytring contemplation” is put into the mouth of Winter in Thomas Nashe's Summer's Last Will and Testament (1592).

4. Pagan Mysteries, p. 206. Wind continues: “Mystical images … belong to an intermediate state, which invites further ‘complication’ above, and further ‘explication’ below. … They keep the mind in continued suspense by presenting the paradox of an ‘inherent transcendence’; they persistently hint at more than they say.” For Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, I have followed the text and lineation in Ben Jonson: Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel, and have slightly emended Wind's excerpt to conform to it. Orgel provides a reading of this beautiful work in The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1965), pp. 149-85.

5. See the Appendix for a more detailed and fully documented review of these problems and a discussion of their possible effect on the interpretation of LLL offered in this study.

6. The Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. R. Warwick Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1902), II, 371.

7. Richmond Noble (Shakespeare's Use of Song [Oxford, 1923], p. 36) found the songs to be “without any serious intention whatever.” A few recent critics have looked deeper. The paradoxical unity of the songs is stressed in Francis Berry, The Shakespeare Inset. Word and Picture (New York, 1965), p. 112; Bertrand H. Bronson, “Daisies Pied and Icicles,” MLN, 62 (1948), pp. 35-38; and Cyrus Hoy, “Love's Labour's Lost and the Nature of Comedy,” SQ, 13 (1962), pp. 31-40. Others tend to make the Winter song normative for Spring: Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, pp. 113-18; McLay, “The Dialogues of Spring and Winter”; Westlund, “Fancy and Achievement.”

8. “You that way; we this way” is the one line in the play which was added to the 1598 Quarto text by the 1623 Folio. Whether a genuine Shakespearean line or the addition of the Folio editors, it is a necessary device for clearing the stage and a charming final touch. The way in which a director chooses to interpret it in performance can contribute significantly to the play's final impact on the audience. However it be staged, it should not be omitted.

9. The final sentence of the 1598 Quarto of LLL is printed without speech heading and in larger type than the rest of the text. The Folios add “You that way: we this way” with the speech heading “Brag” (i. e., Armado). Hawkes suggests (“Shakespeare's Talking Animals,” pp. 52-53) that the opposition of the words of Mercury to the songs of Apollo signifies a contrast of the play's printed text to its theatrical realization; it is an explicit reminder to the reader of the primacy of oral discourse, which is the central theme of the play itself. The hypothesis is attractive, though perhaps over-ingenious.

10. Preservation of the blank verse line (V. ii. 716) requires “Marcade” to be pronounced in three syllables, with a final acute accent. The name thus suggests a pun on “Mercury.”

11. Mercury “is feigned to be messenger of the Gods, because that by speeche and woordes all thynges be declared. He was coumpted God of eloquence, merchaundyce, feates of actiuitie, and thefte also” (Thomas Cooper, Dictionarivm Historicum & Poeticum [London, 1565], sig. Ml^v). On the other hand, “Mercurie was often taken for that light of knowledge, & spirit of vnderstanding, which guides men to the true conceauement of darke and enigmaticall sentences” (Linche, Fountaine of Ancient Fiction, sig. Rl^r). Renaissance Neoplatonic and esoteric traditions emphasized the latter aspect of his symbolism: psychopomp, mystagogue, leader of the Graces, and spirit of alchemical transformation.

12. Greene (“Love's Labour's Lost: The Grace of Society,” p. 326), suggests that the final lines “might be taken to mean that the songs we have just heard, with their bracing directness, are to the rest of the play and its pseudo-golden poetry as Mercury is to Apollo.” Tinsley Helton, “Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, V. ii, 940-41,” Explicator, 22 (1963), item 25, interprets the lines as an address to the audience, contrasting the play's Apollonian “world of arts” to the Mercurial “workaday world” to which they are about to return. John P. Cutts, The Shattered Glass: A Dramatic Pattern in Shakespeare's Early Plays (Detroit, 1968), pp. 22-23, interprets LLL as representing “not so much man's desire to rise above the level of his base humanity as his refusal to admit that his humanity exists” (p. 32). Accordingly, Apollo is “the god of inspiration for letters, blinding in his own brilliance,” while the words of Mercury are the message of Costard, “reducing things to real life considerations” (p. 27).

Abbreviations

Cent R: Centennial Review

CL: Comparative Literature

EA: Etudes Anglaises

E&S: Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association

EIC: Essays in Criticism

ELH: Journal of English Literary History

JW CI: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes

MLN: Modern Language Notes

MLR: Modern Language Review

OED: Oxford English Dictionary

PBA: Proceedings of the British Academy

PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

PQ: Philological Quarterly

RES: Review of English Studies

RORD: Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama

SAQ: South Atlantic Quarterly

SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900

ShakS: Shakespeare Studies (University of Cincinnati)

ShS: Shakespeare Survey

So RA: Southern Review: An Australian Journal of Literary Studies

SP: Studies in Philology

SQ: Shakespeare Quarterly

SRen: Studies in the Renaissance