SOURCE: “Love's Labour's Lost and the Nature of Comedy,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. XIII, No. 1, Winter, 1962, pp. 31-40.

[In the essay below, Hoy argues that Love's Labour's Lost reveals the function of comedy as a means of discerning human infirmity and incongruity.]

Love's Labour's Lost, says M. C. Bradbrook, “is as near as Shakespeare ever came to writing satire”;¹ and what, in addition to fine manners, pedantry, and the disguises of love, is being satirized in it is, I would suggest, the infirmity of human purpose. Its fable, which turns on vows sworn and then forsworn under the pressure of circumstance and necessity working hand in hand, is the sufficient proof of this. The treatment of the fable is dry, elegant, and highly mannered, and this is as it should be. In the terms which the play sets up, an artificial style is the only appropriate means of purveying—and in the same moment commenting on—an artificial view of life. The action of Love's Labour's Lost is directed at righting the balance of nature, which the proud in their simplicity would upset; it is concerned with undeceiving the self-deceived, thereby making clear the gulf that separates human intentions from deeds. In achieving so much—in enlightening the foolish without destroying them—it accomplishes the purpose which comic drama is uniquely capable of bringing to pass.

What is being imitated, in comedy and tragedy alike, are the actions of men, and the crucial fact about man is his dual nature. His duality makes him an incongruous figure, and if there were nothing incongruous in the human condition, there would be nothing to dramatize. The union of a spiritual essence and a material body poses the initial incongruity, and from this all others flow. Infinite aspirations are subject to a finite capacity for achievement; immortal longings break upon the fact of mortality; the rational purpose gives way to irrational impulse. Incongruities such as these are the warp and the woof of human experience, and the fabric of human life which together they weave yields up a pattern shot through with discrepancies: the discrepancy between the ideal and the reality, between the intention and the deed, to name those which subsume all others. To dramatize the discrepancy between the ideal and the reality, the intention and the deed, is the purpose of tragedy and comedy equally, and this, I would suggest, is the reason why the true artist in the one will be an artist in the other also. In the process of dramatization, the discrepancies that I have named may appear terrible, as in Oedipus or Lear; humorous, because they are so very human, as in Love's Labour's Lost or Twelfth Night; or grotesque, as in Measure for Measure or Volpone. It is in the context of these observations that I wish to consider Love's Labour's Lost and the nature of comedy, suggesting at the same time the manner in which some of the issues which this essentially merry comedy poses lead directly to that basic fact of human incongruity where comedy and tragedy equally inhere, and in the representation of which, “a change of lighting suffices to make one into the other.”²

The play begins with the declaration of a purpose which takes the form, indeed, of a programme for regulating the life of man. It is deceptively simple. The King of Navarre with three of his attendant lords—Berowne, Longaville, and Dumain—subscribes to an oath whereby they will devote themselves for a period of three years to a life of study and fasting, during which term they renounce the company of women. The purpose they have declared is nothing less than an all-out war against the senses; and the King can address his more or less willing disciples as noble warriors, enrolled under the colors of the spirit in its eternal war with the flesh:

Therefore, brave conquerors—for so you are
That war against your own affections
And the huge army of the world's desires. …

(I.i.8-10)³

About the wisdom of this, Berowne, the fourth party to the high design, is dubious from the beginning. They are “barren tasks, too hard to keep” (I.i.47) to which the others have pledged themselves; his fellows have “sworn too hard-a-keeping oath” (I.i.65). The project is, in fact, doomed from the outset, as he alone has the wit to see. In the first place, the daughter of the King of France is due to arrive shortly at the court of Navarre on a diplomatic mission, and must be received, a circumstance which the King of Navarre has “quite forgot” (I.i.139). The decree that no woman come within a mile of the court on pain of losing her tongue must of force be dispensed with “on mere necessity” (I.i.146), and in affirming as much, the King unwittingly names the power that will swamp his whole grand endeavor, as the wise Berowne quickly sees. “Necessity will make us all forsworn / Three thousand times within this three years' space”, he says (I.i.147-148); and he proceeds to an all-important statement about the nature of the “affections” against which his fellows have pledged themselves to wage war:

For every man with his affects is born,
Not by might mast'red, but by special grace.

(I.i.149-150)

But Berowne, being an agreeable sort, subscribes his name to the oath at the others' urging, though he reserves the right to let necessity plead his case if he break faith.

That all four parties to the oath will end by breaking faith is, at this point, midway through the opening scene, in the nature of a foregone conclusion. The second half of I.i presents us with direct evidence of how little binding the King's edicts are upon his subjects. Villainy is abroad in the King's own park, where nature is having its way. The constable Dull appears, with a letter from the fantastical knight, Don Adriano de Armado, and with the clownish rustic Costard in custody. Armado has come upon Costard in the company of the country wench Jaquenetta, and this in despite of the King's proclaimed edict decreeing a year's imprisonment for the man taken with a wench. Spurred on by his “ever-esteemed duty”, Armado has remanded Costard to the custody of Dull, to be brought before the King for judgment. Costard, bumpkin though he be, knows what some of his more sophisticated superiors would, for the moment, deny. “It is the manner of a man to speak to a woman”, he says (I.i.206) with unassailable if unintentional logic, and it is the only adequate defense, being in truth but another way of saying what Berowne has already stated: that “every man with his affects is born”, and that these are not to be mastered “by might”.

In the following scene we have further evidence of the ravages worked by passion, this time in the person of the “magnificent” Armado himself. In his punctilious zeal he has seized upon the transgressing Costard in the name of the law, rather in the manner in which the unyielding Angelo arrests the erring Claudio and Juliet in Measure for Measure. And again like Angelo, Armado finds himself a prey to the same passion whose workings he would punish in others. He confesses to his page Moth that he is in love with the country girl he took in the park with Costard. The confession strikes the burlesque note appropriate to the extravagant figure of the fantastical Spaniard, but it achieves as well the very blend of aversion and desire to be noted wherever passion long withstood is yielded to. Love is here, as always on such occasions, a delicious torment, and Armado savors the bitter dose as he contemplates the baseness of the young woman who is the object of his passion.

I do affect the very ground, which is base, where her shoe, which is baser, guided by her foot, which is basest, doth tred.

(I.ii.158 ff.)

It is the glory of love to subdue men, and Armado must fall, as has many another great one (Samson, Solomon, Hercules) in the catalogue of love's victims which he runs through. Thus subdued, there is nothing for it but to bid farewell to the life of knightly endeavor: “Adieu, valour; rust, rapier; be still, drum; for your manager is in love; yea, he loveth” (I.ii.175 ff.). In the circumstances, it is fair to say that Armado's farewell to arms is but the comic equivalent of the deeply tragic farewell that Othello bids to the heroic life, when his conviction of the baseness of Desdemona has effectively poisoned his taste for martial achievement:

Farewell the plumed troops, and the big wars
.....Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, th' ear-piercing fife,
.....Farewell Othello's occupation's gone.

(Othello, III.iii.353 ff.)

The proud, in comedy and tragedy alike, are forever being humbled, in one way or another. The King of Navarre explains to the Princess of France that he cannot receive her into his court by reason of an oath that he has sworn. To this she merely answers, “Our Lady help my lord! He'll be forsworn” (II.i.97). Whereupon the King replies with conviction, “Not for the world, fair madam, by my will.” In saying as much, he has named the very faculty which can best be expected to overthrow his high resolve, for “will” in Elizabethan usage means both “inclination” and “carnal appetite”; and nothing is better calculated to point up the basic infirmity of the King's purpose than the fact that it is dependent on something so dubious as the human will to carry it through. All of which the clever lady is quick to note. She is not impressed with the King's “will” to keep his oath. “Why, will shall break it; will, and nothing else”, she says. He replies, rather feebly, that the Princess is ignorant of what he has sworn. This is not, in fact, true, as we already know. But she contents herself with stating merely that, “Were my lord so, his ignorance were wise, / Where now his knowledge must prove ignorance” (II.i.101-102).

The words of the Princess suggest what has already been hinted more than once to this point in the play: namely, that knowledge, at least on the terms by which the King and his courtiers would seek it, will prove but folly in the end. The sufficient reason for this is that the object of their study (books) is all wrong. In the opening scene, Berowne has gone to some lengths to prove the vanity of poring painfully “upon a book / To seek the light of truth” (I.i.74-75). And he has proceeded there to advise his fellows of the true object of study, wherein inheres the light of the only form of knowledge with which aspiring youth has any concern: a light which, if it begins by dazzling, ends by illuminating, the senses:

Study me how to please the eye indeed,
By fixing it upon a fairer eye;
Who dazzling so, that eye shall be his heed,
And give him light that it was blinded by.

(I.i.80-83)

The eye of the King of Navarre, in the course of his first interview with the French Princess, during which he tells her of his will to keep his oath, is dazzled by her fair form in just the manner Berowne has prescribed; and upon the King's departure, at the end of Act II, Boyet, the old love-mongering lord in attendance on the ladies of France, can report to the Princess that “Navarre is infected”, which is to say, “affected” (II.i.229 ff.). And he recounts in detail how all the King's “behaviours did make their retire / To the court of his eye, peeping thorough desire”, with inevitable results:

All senses to that sense did make their repair,
To feel only looking on fairest of fair.

(II.i.239-240)

The defection of “Navarre and his book-men” will thereafter follow a conventional course, from the study of books to the study of eyes. By the time the carefully patterned action of IV.iii is finished, each of the young men in his turn has declared his love for one of the French ladies, and has been detected by the others in so doing. Their transformation from scholars to lovers is complete; and the sometime warriors who have sworn themselves to do battle against their “own affections / And the huge army of the world's desires” are now hailed by Berowne as “affection's men-at-arms” (IV.iii.286). The vow that they have sworn has proved, as Dumain has roundly declared in his verses to Katharine, “for youth unmeet” (IV.iii.109), which is just what Berowne has said from the beginning; and not surprisingly, it is to him that the others turn for “some salve” for the perjury of which all have been discovered guilty. The speech in which he sets about to prove their “loving lawful” and their “faith not torn” (IV.iii.281) is a bravura example of special pleading and the praise of folly; folly which, in the context, is proved the highest wisdom. The lovers were fools to forswear women; they will continue fools in “keeping what is sworn” (IV.iii.352). The conclusion is inevitable:

Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves,
Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths.

(IV. iii. 357-358)

But the matter is not quite so simple as Berowne suggests. They will not find themselves simply by losing their oaths, as the long fifth act will prove. They have played at being scholars; now, in the concluding act of the comedy, they play at being lovers, and with hardly more success. In V. ii, the ladies of France are found comparing the favors they have received from their several suitors, and passing hard judgments on the conduct of the lovers, who have by now given over all pretense of abiding by their initial vow. If, in the opinion of the ladies, the young men were foolish to forswear love in the first place, their surrender to the passion exhibits folly at its height; and the folly of the lovers is compounded by their very cleverness. Had they not been so clever, they could not now prove so foolish. As the Princess declares:

None are so surely caught, when they are catch'd,
As wit turn'd fool; folly, in wisdom hatch'd,
Hath wisdom's warrant and the help of school,
And wit's own grace to grace a learned fool.

(V. ii. 69-72)

And Rosaline makes an even more penetrating pronouncement when she observes that

The blood of youth burns not with such excess
As gravity's revolt to wantonness.

(V. ii. 73-74)

This goes very deep. One wonders, indeed, if it does not go deeper than the occasion warrants.⁴ Neither Berowne, “the merry mad-cap lord” (II.i.214), nor any of his companions, has struck us as particularly grave, and their revolt to wantonness would seem to imply no great falling off from sobriety. Looking to the future of Shakespearian drama, Rosaline's words would seem to apply more appropriately to such a figure as Angelo in Measure for Measure, where gravity revolts to wantonness with a fury that bids fair for a time to be terrible in its consequences: the more terrible because the blood of youth in Angelo has been so long and so steadfastly denied. The moral here is not hard to find; and it provides, I would suggest, the clue to the basic pattern of Shakespearian comedy: a pattern which consists in a movement from the artificial to the natural, always with the objective of finding oneself. The objective is typically accomplished in the context of a world governed by the seasonal laws of great creating nature, where affectation gives way before the onslaught of the elements. The wonder thus worked is seen in its most mysterious form in The Tempest where, in Gonzalo's words near the end of the play, each of the principals has found himself “when no man was his own” (The Tempest V.i.213). To find oneself is to know oneself, and to know oneself is to recognize the truth about one's natural condition. In Shakespearian comedy, characters such as Angelo who never come to know themselves have never had occasion to take stock of themselves in the world of created nature; and it is no accident that the action of Measure for Measure never moves far beyond the city limits of Vienna. The process of self-discovery which experience of the natural world provides is best described by Duke Senior in As You Like It, when he declares his reaction to “the icy fang / And churlish chiding of the winter's wind” in the Forest of Arden:

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.’

(As You Like It II.i. 8-11)

For a man to be feelingly persuaded what he is, is the beginning of wisdom, and so can be nothing other than a salutary experience: salutary, because if a man does not know what he is—which involves, among other things, knowledge of his very human infirmities, his mortal frailties—he is likely to be made rudely, not to say tragically, aware of his natural condition. One thinks of Lear, the flattered king who has “ever but slenderly known himself”, as Regan remarks on one occasion (Lear I.i.286), exposed to the wind and the rain on the heath, and brought thereby to a shattering knowledge of his mortal nature in its most essential aspects: “the thing itself”, “unaccommodated man”, “a poor, bare, forked animal” (Lear III.iv.96 ff.). This is the tragic destiny of the man who does not know himself; and as is usual in tragedy, the fate that overtakes him is not lacking in irony, the irony here consisting in the incongruous distance that separates what man is in fact from what man, in his self-deceiving pride, thinks he is. But the destiny of the man who does not know himself may have, alternatively, a comic issue; for the lack of self-knowledge implies a failure to recognize the nature of human limitations, and this, like nearly everything else about the human condition, may occasion either tears or laughter.

In the comic vision of experience, the effort to transcend human limitations can never be regarded as other than folly or worse. “People try to get outside of themselves, and escape from the man”, says Montaigne at the end of his last book of essays. “That is foolishness: instead of transforming themselves into angels, they transform themselves into beasts. Instead of raising they degrade themselves.”⁵ We are reminded once again of Angelo in Measure for Measure, a character for whom Montaigne's passage might well stand as an epitaph. For Angelo, as his name implies, seeks to be nothing less than angelic, and ends as something of a devil of the flesh when, after years of strictly enforced continence, necessity forces him to give his “sensual race the rein” (Measure for Measure II.iv.160). Which reminds us in turn of Love's Labour's Lost, and Rosaline's statement that “The blood of youth burns not with such excess / As gravity's revolt to wantonness”, and of Berowne's “For every man with his affects is born, / Not by might mast'red, but by special grace”. There is, of course, no question of Berowne and his elegant companions transforming themselves into either angels or beasts; their oath is never taken seriously enough for that; they are only made to look distinctly foolish in the eyes of the ladies of France. Still, the fact remains, the oath that they swear is against nature (“Flat treason 'gainst the kingly state of youth”, as they later agree), and while the consequences of so swearing, and then finding themselves forsworn, may appear innocent enough in Love's Labour's Lost, they will not always be so. To see where this sort of thing leads, one must look to Angelo and Measure for Measure, which is my justification for alluding to that play so often in the course of this discussion. Even in Love's Labour's Lost, Berowne recognizes that he and his friends must lose their oaths to find themselves; and if, as I have already said, they will not find themselves simply by losing their oaths, neither will they find themselves until the oaths have been renounced and that particular folly is behind them. To find oneself is to escape from artificiality into the natural, to leave off deceiving oneself by setting about to know oneself. The King of Navarre and his attendant lords are made to realize what Chaucer's Troilus under similar circumstances is forced to acknowledge, that “no man [may] fordon the lawe of kynde” (Troilus and Criseyde I.238). Realization of this brings in its wake the realization of something else equally obvious, but hitherto equally ignored by the King of Navarre and his men: that the study of human perfection is ever being undermined by the infirmity of human purpose. “O heaven, were man / But constant, he were perfect! That one error / Fills him with faults”, says Proteus in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (V.iv.110-112), and his name, to say nothing of his deeds, underscores the frailty that defeats resolution.

Navarre and his book-men forswear their oath to study, thereby presenting incontrovertible proof of their inconstancy. “Charity” alone can redeem them, for as Berowne says, “charity itself fulfils the law, / And who can sever love from charity?” (IV.iii.360-361). The charity of love repairs the imperfections wrought by the wayward will, and here it is at one with the “special grace” which, as Berowne has declared earlier, must aid man in the mastery of his affections. Thus, it is unfortunate that the King of Navarre and his men, guilty of perjury on one count, promptly forswear themselves again, this time to the very ladies whose charitable dispositions must be appealed to if their original offense is to be forgiven. The courtiers come to the ladies disguised as Muscovites. The ladies, warned of their intent, and assuming that the gentlemen come “but in mocking merriment”, are prepared to give them “mock for mock” (V.ii.139-140). They mask themselves, and exchange the favors which each of the suitors has previously sent to his mistress. The gentlemen fall into the trap. Each unsuspectingly pays court to the wrong lady, and all are scoffed for their efforts. They retire in confusion, but return again shortly in their proper shapes. They are forced to confess to their previous disguises; and Berowne, for his part, renounces “affectation”—where love-making is concerned—in all its forms; it has but blown him “full of maggot ostentation” (V.ii.409). But the worst is not yet behind, for the ladies reveal the deception they themselves have practiced on the disguised lords, whereby each has sworn his faith to the wrong mistress. It is left to Berowne, typically, to put into words the enormity of this:

Now, to our perjury to add more terror,
We are again forsworn in will and error.

(V.ii.470-471)

Happily, at this point, attention is directed from the folly of the lovers to folly in another guise. The show of the nine worthies is announced. The King fears lest the entertainment Armado, Holofernes, and the rest have undertaken to provide will shame them, but Berowne reassures him. By now they are shame proof; and further, “ 'Tis some policy / To have one show worse than the king's and his company” (V.ii.510-511). Throughout the play, the affectation of the courtiers who turn scholars only to turn lovers has been parodied in the several affectations of the braggart Armado, the pedant Holofernes, and Sir Nathaniel the hedge-priest. Armado's surrender to the charms of Jaquenetta has anticipated the collapse of the courtiers' vow before the gaze of the ladies of France. The presenters of the show of the nine worthies are flouted by the lovers, even as the lovers have been flouted by the ladies; folly is mocked out of countenance, from the King to the pedant. But at the height of the merriment, word is brought of the death of the King of France, and the scene begins to cloud. As the ladies prepare to take their leave, the lovers press their suits in earnest, Berowne as ever serving as their spokesman, and putting their case in “honest plain words” (V.ii.741). The ladies, being gracious, do not reject their suits out of hand; but not unreasonably, they are determined to have some proof of the seriousness of their lovers' intentions before they enter upon “a world-with-out-end bargain” with the gentlemen. The Princess speaks for all her train when, addressing herself to the King, she declares plainly that his Grace “is perjur'd much, / Full of dear guiltiness” (V.ii.778-789). If he will prove his love for her, he will remove himself “with speed / To some forlorn and naked hermitage, / Remote from all the pleasures of the world”, and there remain for a year while the Princess mourns the death of her father. At the end of the period, if the King remains constant, he may have his wish. The condition is echoed by each of the ladies in her turn: Katharine to Dumain, Maria to Longaville. The injunction Rosaline imposes on Berowne is even more explicit: he is to spend his twelvemonth term in visiting “the speechless sick” and conversing “with groaning wretches”, ever seeking “with all the fierce endeavour of [his] wit, / To enforce the pained impotent to smile” (V.ii.838-842). He promptly cries out upon the impossibility of this, which is precisely the point; if “mirth cannot move a soul in agony”, to be made aware of the fact is, of all ways, “the way to choke a gibing spirit”. The ascetic life to which the courtiers have pledged themselves at the beginning of the play is going to be theirs after all.

The hope is that it will teach them something of human experience, and that in its grimmer aspects, where privation, suffering, and death round out the cycle of “revels, dances, masks, and merry hours” with which Love's Labour's Lost, until its closing minutes, has been exclusively dealing. It is just possible that, if the frosts which the Princess anticipates for the King in his “forlorn and naked hermitage” do not indeed nip the gaudy blossoms of his love, they may do for him what “the icy fang / And churlish chiding of the winter's wind” do for Duke Senior in As You Like It: they may “feelingly persuade” him what he is. Intimations of what a man is have been introduced into Love's Labour's Lost before it comes to its end. The foolish Armado, during the show of the worthies, has turned upon his tormentors, who are ringing some of their wittiest changes on the name of Hector, and invoked respect for the memory of the vanished hero whom he is representing—and he has done so in words that should have silenced the scoffers:

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.652 ff.)

The show of the worthies is itself interrupted by the fact of death; and from here to the end of the play the movement from the artificial to the natural is accelerated. The lovers are assigned to hermitage and hospital for the period of their trial. Armado appears and announces his vow to Jaquenetta “to hold the plough for her sweet love three year” (V.ii.871 ff.), thereby functioning to the end in his role of zany to his betters. Whereupon he asks the company if they will “hear the dialogue that the two learned men have compiled in praise of the Owl and the Cuckoo”.

Having already been treated to a poetical effusion by the more learned of the two learned men, Holofernes the pedant, in his “affected” poem beginning “The preyful Princess pierc'd and prick'd / a pretty pleasing pricket” (IV.ii.52 ff.), we are not prepared for the wondrous songs of spring and winter which close the play. They are essential to the design. With them the movement from the artificial to the natural is complete. Human nature, in all its moral, and mortal, infirmities, comes finally into focus against the world of created nature, here viewed in its seasonal aspects. There is a hint of death in “Winter”; there is more than a hint of unsanctified copulation in “Spring”. But the cry of the owl, funereal bird, sounding from out the dark and the cold, is “a merry note” within the circle of the winter fire; and if the sound of the cuckoo, derisive emblem of broken marriage vows, strikes fear into the hearts of married men, it is nonetheless the basis of a venerable joke. There is a paradox here. The infirmities of the flesh would not be so troublesome if the vernal meadows were not so inviting; the hardships of winter would be less endurable than they are, were death felt as anything less than a real—though comfortably distant—presence.

To view the infirmities of human nature in perspective is the special province of comedy. In Shakespearian comedy, the perspective is provided by viewing man's moral and mortal frailties in the context of the seasonal variations of the natural world wherein they are adumbrated. For is not “the season's difference”, after all, the very “penalty of Adam” of which Duke Senior speaks; and that being so, the nexus between man's infirmities and a mutable world is not to seek. To view in such a perspective all the natural shocks to which human flesh is heir is to transcend them; and in Shakespearian comedy the trick is typically turned by the most economical means: with a song. After Duke Senior has catalogued the uses of adversity, Amiens congratulates him on his ability to “translate the stubbornness of fortune / Into so quiet and so sweet a style” (As You Like It II.i.19-20). And later in As You Like It (II.vii.174 ff.), Amiens himself accomplishes just such a wonder in his song beginning “Blow, blow, thou winter wind” (“Thou art not so unkind / As man's ingratitude”). Folly, knavery, and worse are always with us, like the wind and the rain that accompany them in their several outcroppings from infancy to man's estate in Feste's song at the end of Twelfth Night: and nothing is better calculated to show just how appropriate a commentary on human experience, viewed tragically or comically, this is, than the fact that the same song—with its burden of “heigh-ho, the wind and the rain” and “the rain it raineth every day”—is sung by the Fool at the height of the storm in Lear (III.ii.74 ff.). In the songs of Shakespearian comedy, the grimmest facts of human experience are transmuted by the lyric art, relegated to their proper place in the natural scheme of things, and thereupon dismissed, their sting having been drawn. The ugly fact of adultery, potent disturber of ordered society, is echoed back from the natural world only in the cry of the giddiest of birds. Human ingratitude is dispatched with a “heigh-ho”, as in the continuation of Amiens' song in As You Like It (“Heigh-ho! sing heigh-ho! unto the green holly. / Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly”). And death's harbinger sounds a reassuring—and therefore merry—note because, in the rural world where it is heard, it bears witness to the success of one more season's efforts to keep the enemy of life at bay. Even as it sounds its “tu-who; tu-wit, tu-who”, greasy Joan keels the pot. Which is natural enough, for life, in despite of death, broken friendships, cuckolded husbands, and perjured lovers, goes on. The “lawe of kynde” takes care of that. In doing so, it binds the realm of natural impulse, the sphere of common duties, and a world of mannered artifice in a relationship which it is the function of comedy to explore.

Notes

1. Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry (London, 1951), p. 212.

2. Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York, 1948), p. 304. The common origin of tragedy and comedy is alluded to in the passage in question: “Tragödie und Komödie auf demselben Holze wüchsen und ein Beleuchtungswechsel genüge, aus dem einen das andre zu machen” (Stockholm, 1947), p. 469.

3. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, edited by Peter Alexander (New York, 1952). All references to Shakespeare's plays in the text below are based on this edition.

4. So it seems to Mann's Adrian Leverkühn, one of whose first important musical compositions was an opera based on Love's Labour's Lost. Cf. Doctor Faustus (New York, 1948), p. 216, where the passage quoted above from V.ii.73-74 has just been cited: “he [Berowne] is young and not at all grave, and by no means the person who could give occasion to such a comment as that it is lamentable when wise men turn fools and apply all their wit to give folly the appearance of worth. In the mouth of Rosaline and her friends Biron falls quite out of his role; he is no longer Biron, but Shakespeare in his unhappy affair with the dark lady. …”

5. The Essays of Montaigne, translated by E. J. Trechmann (London, 1935), II, 600.