SOURCE: “Full of Dear Guiltiness: The Playfulness of Love's Labour's Lost,” in Shakespeare's Pastoral Comedy, The University of North Carolina Press, 1972, pp. 49-77.

[In the essay below, McFarland analyzes the comic spirit and form of Love's Labour's Lost, noting the artificiality and thematic significance of its paradisiacal setting.]

The setting of Love's Labour's Lost is not that of Arcadia. The action occurs in the King of Navarre's park. Such a variation of the pastoral environment is significant for the special kind of playfulness in which the plot revels.

The park, though not Arcadia, is nonetheless truly a pastoral environment. There is no hint of city life within its confines; its inhabitants, particularly those of the subplot, where we might anticipate a world of tradesmen, carpenters, blacksmiths, and other cogs in the economic machine of urban actuality, are singularly free from the necessity of providing for the maintenance of life. Instead, the denizens of the subplot constitute a wonderful array of playful irrelevances, a veritable rout of Comus. There are a braggart warrior (with nothing to fight), a curate (with no souls that require his care), a constable (but no crime), a schoolmaster (but no school), a clown, a page, a forester. At the other end of the social spectrum, there are a king, a princess, and noble lords and ladies: figures exempt from the necessity of work and predisposed toward the happiness of play.

The park, indeed, circumscribes the full range of pastoral hope. “The word ‘paradise,’” says Giamatti in The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic, “derives from the Old Persian word pairidaēza—formed on pairi (around) and diz (to mould, to form) which meant the royal park, enclosure, or orchard of the Persian king.” Giamatti continues:

The subsequent history of the word has two branches: it becomes the Hebrew pardēs. … The Hebrew word, pardēs, meant a park or garden … [it] referred only to those gardens, forests, or parks in the Old Testament, and maintained the original meaning of pairidaēza.

The earliest link between the simple word and the specific place, between garden and the garden of Eden, paradise and the earthly paradise, occurs through the Greek adaptation of pairidaēza into paradeisos. The word first occurs in Xenophon and means a royal park. …

([Princeton, 1966], pp. 11-12).

Paradeisos thus originally meant “a royal park,” and the setting of Love's Labour's Lost in the King of Navarre's park can be seen as bypassing the Arcadian mediation in favor of a direct attainment of paradise at the outset.

Such an environment permits the comic action to proceed along unusual lines. First of all, it assures that there will be no serious deviations from the norm, and consequently no heavy burden of comic criticism and social redemption. There can be no real trouble in paradise. An action such as that of Measure for Measure, not to speak of Troilus and Cressida, would have no integrity in this environment. Here we are far removed from their world of transgression and wrong; and even folly, in this happy place, is a merely nominal conception. Relieved of the burden of using laughter as a form of what Freud called “veiled aggression,” the play frolics in an easy merriment matched, in Shakespeare's art, only by that of A Midsummer-Night's Dream.

Secondly, as the play is able to present us at its outset with the ideal of happy playfulness that most comedy achieves only at its conclusion, this ideal setting tends, in order to counteract the possibility of mere formlessness, to mold the play. That is, from its paradisal perspective, in the fullness of its frolic, it gives itself rules: it transforms its play into game. By becoming a game, with rules and goals, it guarantees itself as action rather than merely as celebration. And because game is at once an intensely free, and an intensely artificial, human action, the specifically gamelike character of Love's Labour's Lost accentuates both its carefreeness and its deliberate artificiality. Since comedy itself tends to be artificial, and even more so does the idea of paradise, this emphasis in no way contradicts the decorum of the comic mode.

The rules of the game are laid down at the beginning:

That is, to live and study here three years.
But there are other strict observances,
As: not to see a woman in that term …
And one day in a week to touch no food.

[1.1.35-39]

By deciding to see no woman, the men deliberately allow themselves to fall from comic grace, and thereby deliberately fabricate the comic task of the play: the reclamation from deviant bachelorhood to socially acceptable marriage—or the hope of marriage. That this fault, however, is both an artificial fault and a merry one, and one that furthermore will certainly be eradicated, is indicated early on. “O, these are barren tasks, too hard to keep, / Not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep!” / says Berowne in immediate response to the King's conditions for the game (1.1.47-48). When the King counters that “Your oath is pass'd,” Berowne says:

Let me say no, my liege, an if you please:
I only swore to study with your Grace,
And stay here in your court for three years' space.

[1.1.50-52]

Such a statement isolates the central condition—that the men see no women—from the others, and focuses attention upon it as the motive fault of the comedy. And that it is, in its artifice, a playful and insignificant fault is indicated by the words that follow: “You swore to that, Berowne, and to the rest,” says Longaville. “By yea and nay, sir, then I swore in jest,” replies Berowne, establishing the world of merriment (1.1.54).

That the play not only sports with folly, but with artificial folly, and therefore will sport very lightheartedly, is further indicated by a breaking of the rules simultaneously with their institution. The King, in just the words that would be used by the leader of a game, rebukes Berowne's protests: “Well, sit you out; go home, Berowne; adieu.” Berowne, however, affirms his willingness to play: “No, my good lord; I have sworn to stay with you” (1.1.110-11). He then reads the “strictest decrees” set up to enforce the rules:

“Item. If any man be seen to talk with a woman within the term of three years, he shall endure such public shame as the rest of the court can possibly devise.”

This article, my liege, yourself must break;
For well you know here comes in embassy
The French king's daughter, with yourself to speak—
A maid of grace and complete majesty—

[1.1.128-34]

And to the King's flustered “Why, this was quite forgot. … We must of force dispense with this decree; / She must lie here on mere necessity” (1.1.139, 145-46), Berowne provides the reassurance of comic health:

Necessity will make us all forsworn
Three thousand times within this three years' space

[1.1.47-48]

And again:

I'll lay my head to any good man's hat
These oaths and laws will prove an idle scorn.

[1.1.287-88]

There are thus no real problems, only a game of mock problems. In cheerful symmetry, the action then demands playfulness within playfulness. “But is there no quick recreation granted?” asks Berowne. The King's reply—“Ay, that there is”—introduces the braggart warrior, Don Adriano de Armado, as an object of the laughter of the game's participants:

How you delight, my lords, I know not, I;
But I protest I love to hear him lie,
And I will use him for my minstrelsy.

[1.1.172-74]

And Longaville appends happily:

Costard the swain and he shall be our sport;
And so to study three years is but short.

[1.1.177-78]

In so identifying the members of the subplot as objects of recreation for the gaming members of the main plot, the play sets up a relationship between the symmetrically repetitive world of the noblemen (where every action tends to be multiplied by four) and the straggling disarray of the clowns and bumpkins; and at the same time it institutes a kind of Chinese-box motif of happiness within happiness, game within game, pastime within pastime. The rustics' play-within-a-play, the pageant of the Nine Worthies, is the fulfillment of this motif. Likewise, the masked conversation-dance of the noblemen and the ladies reflects the motif of symmetrical play into, as it were, a mirrored infinity of carefreeness. The erstwhile students, now forsworn, resolve “to woo these girls of France,” and the King says, “let us devise / Some entertainment for them in their tents” (4.3.368-69). Berowne, in an especially sweet evocation of comedy's happiness as filtered through pastoral, then adds:

In the afternoon
We will with some strange pastime solace them,
Such as the shortness of time can shape;
For revels, dances, masks, and merry hours,
Forerun fair Love, strewing her way with flowers.

[4.3.372-76]

The Princess, forewarned, says to her ladies, in explicit acceptance of a new game within the game,

There's no such sport as sport by sport o’erthrown,
To make theirs ours, and ours none but our own;
So shall we stay, mocking intended game,
And they well mock'd depart away with shame.

[5.2.153-56]

The structure of that game within a game unfolds in symmetrical repetitions of language:

boyet.
What would you with the Princess?
berowne.
Nothing but peace and gentle visitation.
rosaline.
What would they, say they?
boyet.
Nothing but peace and gentle visitation.
rosaline.
Why, that they have; and bid them so be gone.
boyet.
She says you have it, and you may be gone.
king.
Say to her we have measur'd many miles
To tread a measure with her on this grass.
boyet.
They say that they have measur'd many a mile
To tread a measure with you on this grass.

[5.2.178-87]

Even the intended symmetrical dance of the courtiers is a repetition and playfully distorted reflection of an intended clownish dance of the bumpkins:

dull.
I'll make one in a dance, or so; or I will play
On the tabor to the Worthies, and let them dance the hay.
holofernes.
Most dull, honest Dull! To our sport, away.

[5.1.133-35]

The repetitive symmetries of the language are everywhere intertwined with similar symmetries of plot. The King's language in broaching the nature of the oath taken by the courtiers and himself is expansive, lays claim to virtue:

Navarre shall be the wonder of the world;
Our court shall be a little Academe,
Still and comtemplative in living art.
You three, Berowne, Dumain, and Longaville,
Have sworn for three years' term to live with me
My fellow-scholars, and to keep those statutes
That are recorded in this schedule here.
Your oaths are pass'd; and now subscribe your names,
That his own hand may strike his honour down
That violates the smallest branch herein.

[1.1.12-21]

Such language, and the confidence of virtue that accompanies it, finds a humorously distorted reflection in the pomposity of Don Adriano de Armado: “that unlettered small-knowing soul”; “which, as I remember, hight Costard”; “sorted and consorted, contrary to thy established proclaimed edict and continent canon”; “with a child of our grandmother Eve, a female; or, for thy more sweet understanding, a woman” (1.1.239-51). The fact that Costard “sorted and consorted” with Jaquenetta and thus broke the rules of the King's game (“It was proclaimed a year's imprisonment, to be taken with a wench”—1.1.268-69), reiterates the fact that the king has just been forced to break the edict himself by admitting the embassy of the French king's daughter. And just as Don Adriano's hilarious pretense to virtue is deflated by finding that he himself is in love (“Boy, I do love that country girl that I took in the park with the rational hind Costard”—1.2.112-13), so is the King's, by the sight of the Princess of France:

boyet.
… Navarre is infected.
princess.
With what?
boyet.
With that which we lovers entitle “affected.”

[2.1.229-31]

The occasion of the King's formal revelation of his love is a signal for the play to move into its most elegant sequence of symmetrical repetitions. Berowne enters, with a paper in his hand:

By heaven, I do love; and it hath taught me to rhyme and to be melancholy; and here is part of my rhyme, and here my melancholy. Well, she hath one o' my sonnets already; the clown bore it, the fool sent it, and the lady hath it: sweet clown, sweeter fool, sweetest lady! By the world, I would not care a pin if the other three were in. Here comes one with a paper; God give him grace to groan!

Berowne then stands aside; the King enters, obligingly groans: “Ay me!” Berowne, hiding, says to the audience:

Shot, by heaven! Proceed, sweet Cupid; thou hast thump'd him with thy bird-bolt under the left pap. In faith, secrets!

The King then reads a love poem from the paper; next he drops the paper, hears someone coming, and also hides himself: “What Longaville, and reading! Listen, ear.” Still hidden, Berowne says:

Now, in thy likeness, one more fool appear!
longaville.
Ay me, I am forsworn! …
king.
In love, I hope; sweet fellowship in shame!
berowne.
One drunkard loves another of the name.
longaville.
Am I the first that have been perjur'd so?

Then Longaville, after reading his own poem, also steps aside as Dumain enters, and amid a barrage of asides from the hidden commentators, reads his own poetic confession of love. At its conclusion he signals the reversal of the fourfold figure of confession and concealment:

O, would the King, Berowne, and Longaville,
Were lovers too! Ill, to example ill,
Would from my forehead wipe a perjur'd note;
For none offend where all alike do dote.

[4.3.10-20, 40-47, 119-22]

So each lover emerges in reverse order, assumes a chiding air of virtue, is discomfited by the next lover, until Berowne, the first to hide, is at last exposed also, and admits his participation in the “sweet fellowship in shame”:

berowne.
Guilty, my lord, guilty! I confess, I confess.
king.
What?
berowne.
That you three fools lack'd me fool to make up the mess;
He, he, and you—and you, my liege!—and I
Are pick-purses in love, and we deserve to die.

[4.3.201-5]

In such a series of symmetrical figures, we realize the similarity of this playful action to the formality of dance, and likewise to the formality of game. Bergson, speaking not of this drama but of comedy as such, supplies pertinent commentary:

Life presents itself to us as evolution in time and complexity in space. … A continual change of aspect, the irreversibility of the order of phenomena, the perfect individuality of a perfectly self-contained series: such, then, are the outward characteristics … which distinguish the living from the merely mechanical. Let us take the counterpart of each of these: we shall obtain three processes which might be called repetition, inversion, and reciprocal interference of series. Now, it is easy to see that these are also the methods of light comedy, and that no others are possible.

As a matter of fact, we could discover them … a fortiori in the children's games, the mechanism of which they reproduce.

Thus Berowne says, when the King and Longaville also hide themselves, “‘All hid, all hid’—an old infant play” (4.3.74).

This elegant process of repetition serves, however, not only to emphasize the gamelike nature of the action, but also to substitute society for the individual. As Dumain says, “none offend where all alike do dote.” Indeed, one of the play's frolicsome sorties is to identify what is in fact healthy from a social standpoint (the affections of the sexes) as, in the artificial rules of the King's game, socially reprehensible or deviant (“… your Grace is perjur'd much, / Full of dear guiltiness”—5.2.778-79). But the absurdity of the bookish vow is highlighted from the first. As Berowne says,

Study is like the heaven's glorious sun,
That will not be deep-search'd with saucy looks;
Small have continual plodders ever won,
Save base authority from others' books.

[1.1.84-87]

And the King, by his reply to such reasoning, validates the adequacy of the courtiers' learning as it stands: “How well he's read, to reason against reading!” (1.1.94). “Navarre and his book-men,” “the Prince and his book-mates”—such humorously contemptuous phrases by the Princess (2.1.226, 4.1.93) indicate the ludicrousness of the role initially assumed by the courtiers, who must be transformed by the action of the play into “affection's men-at-arms” (4.3.286).

The process of socialization is simultaneously a process of humiliation: the courtiers are drawn into a “sweet fellowship in shame.” Indeed, the humbling of the pretense to individuality, and its potentially tragic ramifications, is an especially labyrinthine course of the play's action. Two possibilities of tragic individuality threaten the comic paradise: heroic action that might lead to death; romantic love that might become tragic. Both are laughingly disarmed.

The possibility that the dance of courtship might lead to a tragic love is nullified by both the language and the action of the play. The “civil war of wits” between the women and the men, especially between Berowne and Rosaline, which prefigures the wit combats of Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado, serves like them to undercut the plausibility of romantic love, to dry up, as it were, the moisture of emotion. Romantic love is constantly mocked:

princess.
But, Katharine, what was sent to you from fair Dumain?
katharine.
Madam, this glove.
princess.
Did he not send you twain?
katharine.
Yes, madam; and, moreover,
Some thousand verses of a faithful lover;
A huge translation of hypocrisy,
Vilely compil'd, profound simplicity.
maria.
This, and these pearl, to me sent Longaville;
The letter is too long by half a mile. …
princess.
We are wise girls to mock our lovers so.
rosaline.
They are worse fools to purchase mocking so.
That same Berowne I'll torture ere I go.
O that I knew he were but in by th' week!
How I would make him fawn, and beg, and seek,
And wait the season, and observe the times,
And spend his prodigal wits in bootless rhymes. …
princess.
None are so surely caught, when they are catch'd,
As wit turn'd fool. …

[5.2.47-70]

Such verbal rebukes to romantic love's ideal of the unworldly specialness of lovers are teasingly augmented in the action of the play:

princess.The gallants shall
be task'd,
For, ladies, we will every one be mask'd;
And not a man of them shall have the grace,
Despite of suit, to see a lady's face.
Hold, Rosaline, this favour thou shalt wear,
And then the King will court thee for his dear;
Hold, take thou this, my sweet, and give me thine,
So shall Berowne take me for Rosaline.
And change your favours too; so shall your loves
Woo contrary, deceiv'd by these removes.

[5.2.126-35]

As the courtiers attempt the language of romantic love, therefore, their attempts are made ridiculous by the falseness of their objects. The audience, meanwhile, knowing that they “woo contrary, deceiv'd by these removes,” basks in the superiority of true knowledge: romantic love is an illusion; marriage alone is real, and marriage is a social, not an individual, affirmation. The effect of the deception is acknowledged by Berowne: “By heaven, all dry-beaten with pure scoff!” (5.2.263), and the ladies, after the humiliated courtiers have departed, merrily emphasize the meaning of the rebuke:

rosaline.
The King is my love sworn.
princess.
And quick Berowne hath plighted faith to me.
katharine.
And Longaville was for my service born.
maria.
Dumain is mine, as sure as bark on tree.
boyet.
Madam, and pretty mistresses, give ear:
Immediately they will again be here
In their own shapes; for it can never be
They will digest this harsh indignity.

[5.2.282-89]

But indignity, if not harsh at least playfully thorough, is what the courtiers must indeed digest; and their indignity is at once a lowering of their individual self-esteem and a denigration of the meaning of tragic love. Berowne exchanges the heroic expansion of the King's play-opening language for a language of rueful diminution:

And I, forsooth, in love; I, that have been love's whip;
A very beadle to a humorous sigh;
A critic, nay, a night-watch constable;
A domineering pedant o'er the boy, …
This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid; …
Dread prince of plackets, king of codpieces, …
And I to be a corporal of his field,
And wear his colours like a tumbler's hoop!
What! I love, I sue, I seek a wife—
A woman, that is like a German clock,
Still a-repairing, ever out of frame,
And never going aright. …
Nay, to be perjur'd, which is worst of all;
And, among three, to love the worst of all,
A whitely wanton with a velvet brow,
With two pitch balls stuck in her face for eyes;
Ay, and, by heaven, one that will do the deed,
Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard. …
Well, I will love, write, sigh, pray, sue, and groan:
Some men must love my lady, and some Joan.

[3.1.164-95]

As romantic love's claim to a transcending dignity is thus lowered into the rueful commonplace of general human affections, so too the elevation of the courtiers as possible heroes is lowered into a children's game of mock warfare. At the beginning of the play the King activates the heroic potential:

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

[1.1.8-10]

The antisocial stand, presented in the image of heroic warfare, is deflected into a “civil war of wits” whereby the courtiers become “affection's men-at-arms.” The language of warfare is derisively applied to the situation of courtship, and accordingly denatured:

king.
Saint Cupid, then! and, soldiers, to the field!
berowne.
Advance your standards, and upon them, lords;
Pell-mell, down with them! But be first advis'd,
In conflict, that you get the sun of them.

[4.3.362-65]

Such a transformation of warfare's threat into the encounters of the sexes (including the change of the military “get the sun” to its punning sexual meaning, and also Berowne's earlier punning change from tragedy to sexuality in “we deserve to die”) echoes a persistent comic tradition. Thus, for example, Ralph Roister-Doister's courtship of Dame Custance erupts not only into the language of warfare, but actually into a wild and hilarious melee, in which, predictably, the females rout the males, and the miles gloriosus is humiliated. The situation in this play is too sophisticated for the crudeness of such physical combat, but the language frolics as warfare's terror is made harmless by sex:

boyet. Prepare, madam, prepare!
Arm, wenches, arm! Encounters mounted are
Against your peace. Love doth approach disguis'd,
Armed in arguments; you'll be surpris'd.
Muster your wits; stand in your own defence;
Or hide your heads like cowards, and fly hence.

[5.2.81-86]

One of the most persistent motifs in Love's Labour's Lost is, indeed, the ridicule of all heroism. Heroism implies the existence of danger; in paradise there can be no real threat of danger, and consequently no need for heroism. As Ovid says of the golden age, “sine militis usu / mollia securae peragebant otia gentes”—“nations, secure, without need for armed men, passed their time in gentle ease” (Metamorphoses, 1.99-100). If heroism does exist in such a place, a disquieting possibility also exists. So not only is the language of heroism disarmed by the situation of courtship, but it is also discharged into the world of rustics and fools. Such is a major significance of the bumpkins' pageant of the Nine Worthies. The discrepancy between the invocation of heroic figures of history and legend, and the clownish figures who act the roles, displaces heroism into the artificiality, and the ludicrousness, of the play-within-a-play. The bumpkins' parody of the heroic pointedly reflects the humiliation of the courtiers. As Costard departs to bid the rustics prepare, the King says, “Berowne, they will shame us; let them not approach.” But Berowne replies, “We are shame-proof, my lord and ’tis some policy / To have one show worse than the King's and his company” (5.2.509-11). And the bungling of the skit, together with the comments of its noble audience, dissolves the threat of tragic heroism in communal laughter:

dumain.
Most rare Pompey!
boyet.
Renowned Pompey!
berowne.
Greater than Great! Great, great, great Pompey! Pompey the Huge!
dumain.
Hector trembles.
berowne.
Pompey is moved. …
dumain.
Hector will challenge him. …
armado.
By the North Pole, I do challenge thee.
costard.
I will not fight with a pole, like a
Northern man; I'll slash. …
dumain.
Room for the incensed Worthies!

[5.2.671-85]

Costard's threat to “slash” makes him share in the ritualistic harmlessness of the “Bold Slasher” who appears in English folk play variants. In a situation where Judas Maccabaeus, Hector of Troy, Alexander the Great, Pompey the Great, and Hercules are represented by “the pedant, the braggart, the hedge-priest, the fool, and the boy” (5.2.538-39), the realm of isolation and death in which a true hero moves is transformed into the paradoxical security of the happy group.

Even when, at the end of the play, death does appear, it serves, again paradoxically, to emphasize the ease of the paradisal enclosure. [I maintain this opinion despite the established acting tradition by which Marcade's entrance is given spectacular emphasis (see, e.g., Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare [Princeton, 1959], 2:426), and despite the equally established critical tradition that sees it as altering the whole tone of the play (e.g., Cyrus Hoy, “Love's Labour's Lost and the Nature of Comedy,” Shakespeare Quarterly 13 [1962]: 38-39).] When the messenger enters, his woeful news is juxtaposed against the lightness of the action within the park:

princess.
Welcome Marcade;
But that thou interruptest our merriment.
marcade.
I am sorry, madam; for the news I bring
Is heavy in my tongue. The King your father—
princess.
Dead, for my life!
marcade.
Even so; my tale is told.

[5.2.704-9]

Only in the world outside the park does death hold sway; we cannot mourn the King of France, for within the world of the park and the confines of the play he has never existed. His reported death, indeed, serves within the play merely to justify the teasing title, Love's Labour's Lost. For the lovers have broken their oaths—however injudiciously given—and must be punished for their “dear guiltiness.” Just as the guiltiness is only formal, however, so too is the punishment. To the King's impassioned suit to “Grant us your loves,” the Princess responds with a conditional acceptance:

… 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.
If this austere insociable life
Change not your offer made in heat of blood …
Then, at the expiration of the year. …
I will be thine. …

[5.2.782-95]

The year's delay (which punishes in the same coin as that of the original vows) is, however, only apparently the result of the lovers' perjury; it is really necessary as mourning time for the death of the Princess's father. Until the instant of the lovers' return from their year of exile, the Princess will shut

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

[5.2.796-98]

Thus even death is made part of the game. And the delay in a sense makes the victory of happiness yet sweeter:

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

[5.2.862-66]

So the world of the park is proof against death and in no need of heroism. The dissolution of the heroic standard melts all figures into the same common pot, and the bumpkins' parody of the heroism of the Nine Worthies is prefigured in the words of Berowne, as he surveys the perjur'd bookmen and confessed lovers:

O me, with what strict patience have I sat,
To see a king transformed to a gnat!
To see great Hercules whipping a gig,
And profound Solomon to tune a jig,
And Nestor play at push-pin with the boys,
And critic Timon laugh at idle toys!

[4.3.161-66]

The repudiation of the heroic not only accords with the task of Love's Labour's Lost as comedy; it also accords with a larger meaning of the pastoral vision. The King opens the play with an invocation, in the heroic-romantic language of Spenser, of “fame” and “honour”:

Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives
Live regist'red upon our brazen tombs,
And then grace us in the disgrace of death;
When, spite of cormorant devouring Time,
Th' endeavour of this present breath may buy
That honour which shall bate his scythe's keen edge,
And make us heirs of all eternity.

[1.1.1-7]

It is the style achieved by Spenser, but also, and particularly in its apprehension of the threat of time, a style that recalls the sweetness of Shakespeare's tragic sonnets in celebration of love; and it is therefore a style that implies events alien to the pastoral paradise. The idea of “fame” is alien to the concept of happy play for its own sake. As Milton says, the spur of fame tends to counteract the reality of pastoral play:

Were it not better done as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neaera's
hair?
Fame is the spur that the clear spirit
doth raise
(That last infirmity of Noble mind)
To scorn delights, and live laborious days, …

Still more specifically, the word “honour” represents the chief of all threats to pastoral bliss. It is the absence of “honour,” even more than the presence of honeyed breezes and green fields, that defines the golden age as sung by Daniel; or by Tasso, where honor (“onor”) is “quel vano / nome senza soggetto”—that empty name without a substance (Aminta, 1.2.669-73). “Honour,” indeed, despite C. B. Watson's unsatisfactory awareness of the fact, is a word often used equivocally in Shakespeare, as in its Machiavellian meanings in Antony and Cleopatra, or its sardonic rejection in Falstaff's catechism. In Love's Labour's Lost, however, it becomes the sign of the absolutely alien; to restore the golden age the play must evict honor. And the play does so. It is specifically the courtiers' “honour” that is taken upon their oaths:

Your oaths are pass'd; and now subscribe your names,
That his own hand may strike his honour down
That violates the smallest branch herein.

[1.1.19-21]

But as Berowne later sums up the matter, the oath and the “honour” for which it stands are alien:

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

[4.3.357-58]

And to find themselves is also to find paradise. “What fool is not so wise,” writes Longaville, “To lose an oath to win a paradise?” (4.3.68-69). The King, mocking him, thereby emphasizes the exchange: “You would for paradise break faith and troth” (4.3.139).

The eviction of honor, and the rejection of the heroic, represent the main function of the chief figure of the subplot, Don Adriano de Armado. Don Adriano is ostensibly the butt of the courtiers' humor:

Costard the swain and he shall be our sport;
And so to study three years is but short.

[1.1.177-78]

He is also specifically indicated as a figure ludicrously compatible with the motifs of nobility (with its implication of “honour”) and the game:

moth.
You are a gentleman and a gamester, sir.
armado.
I confess both; they are both the varnish of a complete man.

[1.2.42-43]

His name indicates his character type: the braggart warrior. With the actual threat of the Spanish armada so recent in Elizabethan minds, a “traveller of Spain” (1.1.161) named Armado provided associations of the utmost reality, associations too of extreme foreboding. Don Adriano, however, as a miles gloriosus should, focuses not only emotions of apprehension, but emotions of security and superiority as well. Indeed, because the fearsome threat of the Spanish armada could be recalled in the secure knowledge of English superiority and of God's special favor, Don Adriano participates in the consequent wave of well-being as fully as he does in the previous threat. As Boyet says, “This Armado is a Spaniard, that keeps here in court; / A phantasime, a Monarcho, and one that makes sport / To the Prince and his bookmates” (4.1.91-93).

In any event, a miles gloriosus in a pastoral environment, when compared to, say, a real warrior such as Marlowe's Tamburlaine, is a house cat to a tiger. Don Adriano's pastoral progenitor, Lyly's Sir Tophas, shows how completely nominal the braggart's threat must be to a society fully protected by the pastoral environment:

samias.
Sir Tophas, spare us.
tophas.
You shall live: you, Samias, because you are little; you, Dares, because
you are no bigger; and both of you, because you are but two; for commonly
I kill by the dozen, and have for every particular adversary a peculiar weapon.
samias.
May we know the use, for our better skill in war?
tophas.
You shall. Here is a bird-bolt for the ugly beast the blackbird.
dares.
A cruel sight.
tophas.
Here is the musket for the untamed or, as the vulgar sort term it, the
wild mallard.
samias.
O desperate attempt! …
tophas.
Here is a spear and shield, and both necessary, the one to conquer,
the other to subdue or overcome the terrible trout. …
samias.
O wonderful war! [aside] Dares, didst
thou ever hear such a dolt?

[Endymion, 1.3.78-104]

Don Adriano's threat, however, is ridiculed not so much in ludicrous physical encounters, as in pointless verbal expenditures. As the King says, he is

A man in all the world's new fashion planted,
That hath a mint of phrases in his brain;
One who the music of his own vain tongue
Doth ravish like enchanting harmony;

[1.1.162-65]

And Berowne concurs:

Armado is a most illustrious wight,
A man of fire-new words, fashion's own knight.

[1.1.175-76]

Inasmuch as a threat of action usually precedes action, the miles gloriosus was traditionally represented as a man who verbally vaunted, but then did not act. This intrinsic implication of his character is, in Don Adriano, heightened, both by removing entirely the object of expected action, and by making the boasting ever more prolix and fanciful. Don Adriano becomes not a threat but “a plume of feathers,” “a vane,” “a weathercock” (4.1.87-88). The rush of verbosity is, wickedly, both a testimonial within the play to Don Adriano's harmless but ludicrous inflation and at the same time a parody of Lyly's euphuism: “So it is,” writes Armado,

besieged with sable-coloured melancholy, I did commend the black oppressing humour to the most wholesome physic of thy health-giving air; and, as I am a gentleman, betook myself to walk. The time When? About the sixth hour; when beasts most graze, birds best peck, and men sit down to that nourishment which is called supper. So much for the time When. Now for the ground Which? which, I mean, I walk'd upon; it is ycleped thy park. Then for the place Where? where, I mean, I did encounter that obscene and most prepost'rous event that draweth from my snow-white pen the ebon-coloured ink which here thou viewest, beholdest, surveyest, or seest. But to the place Where? It standeth north-north-east and by east from the west corner of thy curious-knotted garden.

[1.1.225-36]

Armado's inane precision mocks that “logicality” that Jonas Barish has elucidated as “the basic principle of Lyly's style” (“The Prose Style of John Lyly,” ELH 23 [1956]: 27). A random sample of Lyly's style reveals how cleverly Shakespeare has caught its tone in other respects:

For as the bee that gathereth honey out of the weed, when she espieth the fair flower flieth to the sweetest; or as the kind spaniel, though he hunt after birds, yet forsakes them to retrieve the partridge; or as we commonly feed on beef hungerly at the first, yet, seeing the quail more dainty, change our diet: so I, although I love Philautus for his good properties, yet, seeing Euphues to excel him, I ought by nature to like him better. By so much the more therefore my change is to be excused, by how much the more my choice is excellent; and by so much the less I am to be condemned, by how much the more Euphues is to be commended. Is not the diamond of more valew than the ruby bicause he is of more virtue? Is not the emerald preferred before the sapphire for his wonderful property? Is not Euphues more praiseworthy than Philautus, being more witty?

In Armado we sense the exaggeration that gives point to the caricature, while recognizing that the balanced clauses, repeated phrase patterns, invidious comparisons, and festooned rhetorical questions are a parody of Lyly (for a survey of the “restricted number of figures”—eight of them—that are the characteristic elements of euphuism, see G. K. Hunter, John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier [Cambridge, Mass., 1962], p. 265):

By heaven, that thou art fair is most infallible; true that thou art beauteous; truth itself that thou art lovely. More fairer than fair, beautiful than beauteous, truer than truth itself, have commiseration on thy heroical vassal. The magnanimous and most illustrate king Cophetua set eye upon the pernicious and indubitate beggar Zenelophon; and he it was that might rightly say, “Veni, vidi, vici”; which to annothanize in the vulgar,—O base and obscure vulgar!—videlicet, He came, saw, and overcame. He came, one; saw, two; overcame, three. Who came?—the king. Why did he come?—to see. Why did he see?—to overcome. To whom came he?—to the beggar. What saw he?—the beggar. Who overcame he?—the beggar. …

[4.1.60-71]

The character of Armado, in thus reaching out of the play to parody the style of Lyly (and sometimes perhaps that of others), and to parody the threat of the Spanish armada, represents what is an undoubted, although not always clearly identifiable, tendency of Love's Labour' Lost to engage in topical allusions. The awareness of the existence of these references has resulted in numerous attempts, some convincing, others less so, to isolate them. For instance, it seems not improbable that “if the latter half of 1592” is the date of Shakespeare's first draft of the play, then “he may have wished to incorporate in it certain aspects of the Harvey-Nashe controversy” (W. Schrickx, Shakespeare's Early Contemporaries; the Background of the Harvey-Nashe Polemic and Love's Labour's Lost [Antwerp, 1956], p. 246). As David Bevington says, “Love's Labor's Lost has exercised the ingenuity of investigators more than any other of Shakespeare's early plays, partly because its names of Navarre (Henry IV), Berowne (Biron, Henry IV's general), Dumaine (Du Mayenne, brother of the Guise), Longaville (Longueville, Governor of Normandy), and perhaps Armado (Armada) and Moth (Marquis de la Mothe, Henry's amiable diplomat) were unquestionably names in the news during the early 1590's” (Tudor Drama and Politics; A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning [Cambridge, Mass., 1968], p. 15).

In this connection, three points should be made. First of all, topical references are not alien to the comic spirit. On the contrary, they occur frequently, as in all the monologues by nightclub entertainers that depend upon the audience's knowledge of ephemeral, usually political, events. It is easy to call to mind popular comic entertainers who build entire careers upon this one device. Secondly, topical reference is not alien to pastoral either. In fact, one use of the pastoral, from Theocritus and Virgil through Spenser and Milton, was the deliberate masked presentation of people or events from actual life, sometimes, especially in the Shepheardes Calendar and Lycidas, with the object of satirizing abuses. As Spenser's E. K. says, the pastoral eclogue can “be mixed with some Satyrical bitternesse.” Puttenham, indeed, believed that the form was originated so as “under the vaile of homely persons and in rude speeches to insinuate and glaunce at greater matters, and such as perchaunce had not bene safe to have beene disclosed in any other sort.”

These two points having been noted, however, it remains to modify them by a third. Except for the incorporation of the threat of the Spanish armada into the name Armado, probably no single one of these topical references need be identified today. The critic is not obliged to become, in Ben Jonson's words, a “state decipherer, or politic picklock of the scene, so solemnly ridiculous as to search out who was meant” by the various characters of this or other plays. Moreover, as has recently been urged in another context, “the trouble with political allegory is that it soon loses its effectiveness. The hidden secret of 1590 may need no concealment and may have become irrelevant by 1620 and certainly by 1960. The more contemporary a poet makes his political allegory, the less interesting it becomes for succeeding generations” (Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory [Chicago, 1969], p. 118). We can be content with knowing that the comedy's playfulness appealed to the social consciousness of its original audience—or of certain privileged members of that audience. But each society has its own ephemera; and the true meaning of Love's Labour's Lost is intrinsic, not extrinsic. The extrinsic references constitute a kind of corona of mask and game. Their function was, by an immediate appeal to the existing social sense of the audience of the 1590s, to reinforce the social sense set up in the play. All comedy is able to avail itself of such extrinsic assistance; no comedy that aspires to more than an ephemeral summoning of social awareness can thereby rest content.

Accordingly, it really makes little difference whether, as Bradbrook and others contend, Love's Labour's Lost is an account of the School of Night, with Armado as Sir Walter Raleigh. Nor does it make much difference, even if it were true, whether, as Frances Yates would have it, Berowne's “name and some of his characteristics … were deliberately meant to recall [Giordano] Bruno to the audience” (A Study of Love's Labour's Lost [Cambridge, 1936], p. 127). The fictional pedant Holofernes may well have mocked the actual pedant Gabriel Harvey (or Florio, or Harriot); but the humor resides in the type, not in the man: we all know our own pedants.

What does make a difference is that we should not miss the forest in our zeal to identify the trees. It is important to see this comedy in all its vernal wonder, to experience it as a curious-knotted frolic at heaven's gate. The Holofernes-like pursuit of topical meaning largely accounts for the fact that, until recently, Love's Labour's Lost has been spectacularly misunderstood, and by critics who in other moments rendered happier judgments. For Dryden, it was one of those plays “so meanly written that the comedy neither caused your mirth, nor the serious part your concernment.” Dr. Johnson, who, as both Rambler 36-37 and his insensitivity to Lycidas show, was not sympathetic to the meanings enclosed in pastoral, said that “in this play, which all the editors have concurred to censure, and some have rejected as unworthy of our poet, it must be confessed that there are many passages mean, childish and vulgar. …” And Hazlitt achieved the nadir of stultification with his opinion that “If we were to part with any of the author's comedies, it should be this.”

It is, however, neither to acquiesce in such dismal misconceptions, nor to become involved in the vain pursuit of receding topicalities, to be aware that a large function of the play's language is to parody literary modes of the day. The modes thus parodied have become, on their own terms, a part of our heritage, and they thereby accompany those intrinsic meanings of the play that exist not as social ephemera but as artistic permanence.

The recognition of this element of parody in Don Adriano's language therefore gives an added dimension to the comedy's playfulness. For Don Adriano is the chief link between the subplot and the main plot. His consummate foolishness warrants him an honored place in the rout of bumpkins, whilst the fact that he is not only a “gentleman and gamester,” but a grandee of Spain, provides him a place in the society of noblemen. His euphuistic flow, accordingly, mediates between the linguistic foolishness of the bumpkins, and the linguistic games of the noblemen.

The play, indeed, constitutes on one level “a great feast of languages,” to use Moth's description of Holofernes, Sir Nathaniel, and Armado (5.1.33). As Dover Wilson says, “of all the games played with the English tongue in the theatre of the age, Love's Labour's Lost was the most zestful, and must have seemed to contemporaries the most fascinating” (Shakespeare's Happy Comedies [London, 1962], p. 61). Without any certainty that all modes are identifiable, it is possible to experience at least two besides Don Adriano's “mint of phrases.” There is an almost perfect imitation (achieved also, in a more serious context, in Shakespeare's Sonnet 106) of the Spenserian reverberation of The Faery Queene:

This child of fancy, that Armado hight,
For interim to our studies shall relate,
In high-born words, the worth of many a knight
From tawny Spain lost in the world's debate.

[1.1.168-71]

And there is an equally exact parody of the Marlovian sensuality of Dido and the Marlovian exuberance of Tamburlaine:

Love's feeling is more soft and sensible
Than are the tender horns of cockled snails;
Love's tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste.
For valour, is not Love a Hercules,
Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?

[4.3.333-37]

The echo of Marlowe's “Still climbing after knowledge infinite” in the subtly distorted “Still climbing trees in the Hesperides” achieves the elegance proper to the linguistic games of the noblemen.

Such elegance would not be proper with the characters of the subplot, and their linguistic foolery is accordingly bumpkin-broad. The malapropistic delights of Dogberry are prefigured in the Stygian opaqueness of Dull: “I myself reprehend his own person” (1.1.181); “the collusion holds in the exchange” (4.2.40-41). The macaronic nonlanguage of Holofernes teasingly complements the Lyly-parody of Armado by a parody of Lyly's grandfather, the author of the famous Latin grammar used by schoolboys:

The deer was, as you know, sanguis, in blood; ripe as the pomewater, who now hangeth like a jewel in the ear of caelo, the sky, the welkin, the heaven; and anon falleth like a crab on the face of terra, the soil, the land, the earth.

[4.2.3-6]

The Latinate pedantry of Holofernes interweaves itself with the malapropistic stupidity of Dull:

nathaniel.
Truly, Master Holofernes, the epithets are sweetly varied, like a scholar
at the least; but, sir, I assure ye it was a buck of the first head.
holofernes.
Sir Nathaniel, haud credo [I don't believe it].
dull.
’Twas not a haud credo; ’twas a pricket [buck of the second
year].

[4.2.7-11]

And at the opening of the Fifth Act, members of the subplot come together in a linguistic Babel that must be relished in all its voices:

holofernes.
Satis quod sufficit.
nathaniel.
I praise God for you, sir. Your reasons at dinner have been sharp and
sententious; pleasant without scurrility, witty without affection, audacious
without impudency, learned without opinion, and strange without heresy. I
did converse this quondam day with a companion of the King's, who is
intituled, nominated, or called, Don Adriano de Armado.
holofernes.
Novi hominem tanquam te. His humour is lofty, his discourse peremptory,
his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, his gait majestical, and his general
behaviour vain, ridiculous, and thrasonical. He is too picked, too spruce,
too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it.
nathaniel.
A most singular and choice epithet.
holofernes.
He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of
his argument. I abhor … such rackers of orthography, as to speak “dout”
fine, when he should say “doubt”; “det” when he should
pronounce “debt”;—d, e, b, t, not d, e, t. He clepeth a
calf “cauf”; half, “hauf”; neighbour vocatur “nebour”; “neigh”
abbreviated “ne”. …
nathaniel.
Laus Deo, bone intelligo.
holofernes.
“Bone”?—“bone” for “bene.”
Priscian a little scratch'd; ’twill serve.
Enter Armado, Moth and Costard.
nathaniel.
Videsne quis venit?
holofernes.
Video, et gaudeo. …
armado.
Men of peace, well encount'red.
holofernes.
Most military sir, salutation.
moth.
[Aside to Costard] They have been
at a great feast of languages and stol'n the scraps.

[5.1.1-34]

This cacophony serves as a kind of out-of-tune orchestral prelude to the dancing and playing of the Fifth Act. By its innocence of exigent meaning it emphasizes the leisure and security of the park, where life, freed from the demands of actuality, can mirror itself in language unburdened by the laconic necessities of communication.

Linguistic affectation and parody constitute one of comedy's more comprehensive themes. Language, like sex and money, is a social phenomenon, and like them, both holds society together and symbolizes society's understanding of itself. The abuse of language, therefore, is a staple of comedy. Many jokes, in fact, are told in dialect to reinforce their wit; and the inability of a foreigner to speak a language both draws the laughter of the society of native speakers, and simultaneously emphasizes their superiority and their common bond. The German, the French, the Italian pronunciation of English is found funny; as, indeed, is a high English accent in America, or an American accent in England. Linguistic abuse, moreover, is a particularly suitable substitute, in this and other of Shakespeare's comedies, for the absent theme of the abuse of money, which, associated with work and with the city, does not fit readily into the carefree world of pastoral.

The specific comic character of Holofernes's pedantry of Latin tags, accordingly, is elucidated by Bergson's general theoretical proposition that “we laugh at anything rigid, ready-made, mechanical in gesture, attitude and even facial expression. Do we find this kind of rigidity in language also? No doubt we do, since language contains ready-made formulas and stereotyped phrases. The man who always expressed himself in such terms would invariably be comic.” The linguistic antics in Love's Labour's Lost, however, extend beyond mere rigidities. In coalescence with the motif of artifice-within-artifice, they permeate the drama from the low buffoonery of the “delightful ostentation, or show, or pageant, or antic, or firework” of the Nine Worthies (5.1.97-98) up to the serene and lovely songs of spring and winter that conclude the play. Linguistic subforms teem within the larger poetic form of the drama. Letters and poems abound, and take part in the repetitive symmetry of the action. Armado hands Costard a letter for Jaquenetta (“bear this significant to the country maid”—3.1.123-24) shortly before Berowne also hands him one for Rosaline (“And to her white hand see thou do commend / This seal'd-up counsel”—3.1.158-59). When, predictably, Costard misdelivers Armado's letter to the Princess, who causes great delight by reading it aloud, the repetitive series demands that Berowne's letter be likewise misdelivered, to fall into the hands of the King and thereby make complete the “sweet fellowship in shame.”

As Armado's letters exploit the artifice-within-artifice motif in terms of prose, the lovers' poems exploit it in verse. The King composes and reads a love poem of sixteen lines:

So sweet a kiss the golden sun gives not
To those fresh morning drops upon the rose. …

[4.3.22-23]

Longaville's is a fourteen-line sonnet:

Did not the heavenly rhetoric of thine eye,
’Gainst whom the world cannot hold argument. …

[4.3.56-57]

Dumain's contribution has more but shorter lines:

Do not call it sin in me
That I am forsworn for thee;
Thou for whom Jove would swear
Juno but an Ethiope were;

[4.3.111-14]

Indeed, poems, or the threat of poems, preoccupy many of the characters. Armado, the “man of fire-new words,” calls on the muse: “Assist me, some extemporal god of rhyme, for I am sure I shall turn sonnet. Devise, wit; write, pen; for I am for whole volumes in folio” (1.2.170-72). And Berowne—“so sweet and voluble is his discourse”—not only composes a sonnet (“If love make me forsworn, how shall I swear to love? / Ah, never faith could hold, if not to beauty vow'd!”—4.2.100-101), but delivers a great set speech in the Marlovian vein:

… when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Make heaven drowsy with the harmony.
Never durst poet touch a pen to write
Until his ink were temp'red with Love's sighs;
O, then his lines would ravish savage ears,
And plant in tyrants mild humility.
From women's eyes this doctrine I derive.
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain, and nourish all the world. …

[4.3.340-49]

This speech, which runs to seventy-five lines, is not only an ornamental piece of linguistic gaming; it also sums up the whole argument against the comic deviance: is the “salve for perjury” requested by the other lovers. As such, it is an integral part of the meaning of the drama as a whole. So, too, other linguistic artifices. The pageant of the Nine Worthies, as noted above, assists in the eviction of the heroic; but even more important, it serves, by bringing together the members of the subplot and the members of the main plot, as actors and audience, to assemble the whole society in one mutual happiness.

The final songs of spring and winter, in more subtle manner, reinforce the mood of mutual happiness. They are sung by the bumpkins with the elegance of the courtiers, and their rustic references (“While greasy Joan doth keel the pot,” “And Marian's nose looks red and raw,” and “Tom bears logs into the hall / And milk comes frozen home in pail”) introduce the commonplaces of the bumpkins into the courtiers' realm.

And miracle of miracles, the sweet and mysterious limpidity of the songs reveals itself as the achievement of Holofernes and Sir Nathaniel, for the songs are “the dialogue that the two learned men have compiled” (5.2.873). The pedant and his foil, till now lost in babbling disharmonies of language, here symbolically project themselves, and the language of the play, into the paradisal community it now attains, and, behind its mock deviances, has always had. Earlier Holofernes, by his “extemporal epitaph on the death of the deer” (4.2.47-48), has fallen below even the ludicrous standards of Don Adriano:

The preyful Princess pierc'd and prick'd a pretty pleasing
pricket;
Some say a sore; but not a sore till now made sore with shooting. …

[4.2.54-55]

His theorizing in retrospect of this disaster seemed to have removed forever the possibility that meaningful language might come within his reach:

This is a gift that I have, simple, simple; a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions. These are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourish'd in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion. But the gift is good in those in whom it is acute, and I am thankful for it.

[4.2.62-69]

And then, from this “learned fool” and his dense companion, “upon the mellowing of occasion,” issues forth, in the play's most exquisite playfulness, the sweetest and most gardenlike of all its language:

When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white. …
When all aloud the wind doth blow,
And coughing drowns the parson's saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow. …

[5.2.881-82, 908-10]

Yet the wonder might almost have been anticipated. The largest function of Holofernes and his foil, Sir Nathaniel, had been to make mockingly present the false future chosen by “Navarre and his bookmen,” that is, “painfully to pore upon a book” (1.1.74). “You two are book-men,” says Dull to the pedant and the hedge-priest (4.2.32), thereby indicating their career down the King's wrong road. But all roads in paradise lead to happiness; so even Holofernes, by a botched Latin quotation from one of the pastoral eclogues of “good old Mantuan” (4.2.90), and a lopsided invocation of Ovid (“Ovidius Naso was the man. And why, indeed, ‘Naso’ but for smelling out the odoriferous flowers of fancy”—4.2.117-18), points to the involvement of the play in the ideal world where “shepherds pipe on oaten straws” (5.2.890).

That world controls all meanings of Love's Labour's Lost. The play's language is constantly alight with happiness. “Did not I dance with you in Brabant once?” (2.1.114); “Berowne they call him; but a merrier man, / Within the limit of becoming mirth, / I never spent an hour's talk withal” (2.1.66-68); “the merry mad-cap lord” (2.1.214); “the curate and your sweet self are good at such eruptions and sudden breaking-out of mirth” (5.1.98-100); “To our sport, away” (5.1.135); “The third he caper'd, and cried ‘All goes well’” (5.2.113); “Knowing aforehand of our merriment” (5.2.461); “like a merriment” (5.2.772); “A right description of our sport, my lord” (5.2.519).

Murmuring through this sunlit gambol flow old words of guilt and atonement, suggesting old thoughts of other gardens; but here without catastrophe. “’Tis deadly sin to keep that oath, my lord, / And sin to break it” (2.1.104-5). “Guilty, my lord, guilty! I confess, I confess” (4.3.201). “You must be purged too, your sins are rack'd; / You are attaint with faults and perjury” (5.2.806-7). king: “Teach us, sweet madam, for our rude transgression / Some fair excuse.” princess: “The fairest is confession” (5.2.431-32).

But in this garden regained it is possible to “confess and turn it to a jest” (5.2.390). For here blooms the land of “Love, whose month is ever May” (4.3.98), where lovers act “like sweet roses in this summer air” (5.2.293). Mild and everlasting in its golden afternoon, the play looks upon that realm where “cuckoo-buds of yellow hue / Do paint the meadows with delight” (5.2.883-84). In the dear guiltiness of its inhabitants this glad enclosure finds a common factor of gentler meanings: in entreating excuse for the “liberal opposition of our spirits,” the Princess says: “your gentleness / Was guilty of it” (5.2.721, 723-24). The separations of self-imposed law are repealed by a new awareness of community:

Sweet lords, sweet lovers, O, let us embrace!
As true we are as flesh and blood can be.
The sea will ebb and flow, heaven show his face;
Young blood doth not obey an old decree.

[4.3.210-13]

The new community established, the edicts of still older law are now declared fulfilled:

It is religion to be thus forsworn;
For charity itself fulfills the law,
And who can sever love from charity?

[4.3.359-61]

And the golden world reverberates with the merriment that proves “Our loving lawful, and our faith not torn” (4.3.281).