SOURCE: “Sitting in the Sky (Love's Labor's Lost, 4.3),” in Shakespeare's “Rough Magic”: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, edited by Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn, University of Delaware Press, 1985, pp. 113-130.

[In the essay below, Levin presents an overview of Love's Labour's Lost, studying the play's language, plot, and theme of scholarship versus courtship, while noting its playfulness and wit.]

All's Well That Ends Well, Much Ado about Nothing, The Comedy of Errors—such phrases are generic as well as proverbial, and might be applied to almost any of Shakespeare's comedies. He was even more off-hand about specifying his subject matter when he entitled one play As You Like It and subtitled another What You Will. Hence Love's Labor's Lost is an exceptional title for its genre, alerting us to expect the unexpected. Love's Labor's Won sounds much more conformable, and has also been given a contemporary listing; but it is now a ghost, unless it has managed to survive under some alternate name. Courtship is invariably a feature, usually the most central one, in Shakespearean comedy. The standard happy ending, in the prospect of marriage, has traditional roots that reach as deeply into the soil as the hymeneal Kōmos of Aristophanes. Though Love's Labor's Lost comprises “a series of wooing games,” as C. L. Barber has emphasized, these uncharacteristically lead to no festive consummation.¹ When Don Armado writes in his altisonant manner, “The catastrophe is a nuptial” (4.1.76), he is merely utilizing the terminology of rhetoric to inform the simple-minded Jacquenetta that their betrothal will be a dénouement.² For the others the outcome will be catastrophic in a more modern, less rhetorical sense.

Yet their interchanges are colored throughout by tropes of gamesmanship: of cards, of dice, of riddles, of children's pastimes, of tennis and other sports. Metaphor is condensed into a pun on “shooter/suitor” (4.1.108, 112), and the hunt is acted out by female archers. Dialogue becomes choreographic in more ways than one, as when Berowne meets Katherine (it is Rosaline in the Folio). His introductory question, “Did I not dance with you in Brabant once?,” is bandied back by her mocking repetition, and they are off apace on a bantering pas de deux, step by step, line by line, tit for tat (2.1.114-27). The page Moth, the youngest and worldliest of the males, advises his master Armado to win his love “with a French brawl” (3.1.8-9). This would have been a swaying kind of dance, the branle, but it might incidentally recall the play's historical precedent: a French princess, accompanied by a “flying squadron” of ladies-in-waiting, visiting a king of Navarre (actually her estranged husband) to regain her father's dower-rights to the Province of Aquitaine. The atmosphere has likewise been compared with that of a royal English progress. The situation, however, scarcely allows for much of the ceremonious hospitality by which Queen Elizabeth was so elaborately welcomed, when she travelled as the guest of her richest nobles to such estates as Kenilworth and Elvetham.

Shakespeare has complicated the visitation by turning the court into an academy. Here his framework must have been reinforced by The French Academy translated from Pierre de La Primaudaye, a popular compendium of received wisdom, religious, ethical, and scientific. Its mode of discourse was that of a study-circle where four young noblemen engage in dialogues, interrupted for a spell by France's civil wars. Shakespeare's dramatic conflict, the usual battle of the sexes, has been sublimated into a “civil war of wits” (2.1.226), wherein the tag-lines of repartee, stichomythy, and badinage are allotted to the female interlocutors. The paradigm for wooing is naturally a pursuit, headed toward a mutually agreeable capitulation. In this peculiar case, it is preceded and succeeded by a withdrawal, thereby reversing the classic cycle of banishment and homecoming. Ferdinand, the King of Navarre, begins—as if he were beginning a sonnet sequence—by abjuring worldliness in favor of immortality and proclaiming a quasi-monastic retreat along with three of his courtiers:

Our court shall be a little academe,
Still and contemplative in living art.

(1.1.13-14)

The ars vivendi is envisaged, under conditions more suggestive of medieval asceticism than of Renaissance humanism, as a vita contemplativa. Berowne has his misgivings from the outset, realistically grounded upon the constriction of the three-year statutes: “Not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep” (48). He demonstrates, by etymological wordplay, that “study” can mean desire more positively than abstinence. But he rounds out his flight of paradoxes by signing the oath, and earns the King's accolade for his intellectual cultivation: “How well he's read, to reason against reading” (94).

In spelling out that educational covenant, it should be remarked, the emphasis falls upon its regimen and not upon its curriculum. There is much talk about books, perhaps more than elsewhere in Shakespeare, but the documents that come up for direct perusal or critical discussion will be nothing but love letters or poetical screeds. In the age of Galileo, Shakespeare's exact contemporary, astronomy would presumably claim the attention of aspiring scholars. Berowne's anti-intellectual argument is that one may take pleasure in the stars without naming them. The only practical exercise in this science comes when Costard, the clown, propounds a mouldy riddle about the moon, and his two “book-men”—Holofernes and Sir Nathaniel—vary the obvious answer with classical eponyms: “Dictynna,” “Phoebe,” “Luna” (4.2.34, 36-38). Indeed it has been Costard who discredited the academic program, just as soon as it was enunciated, by being taken with Jacquenetta, arrested by the constable Dull, and informed upon by his verbose rival, Armado. Costard, who possesses his own vein of nimble verbiage, slips from one indictment to another by transposing synonyms: “wench,” “damsel,” “virgin,” “maid” (1.1.283-99). The implication is to forewarn us, before we have met the great ladies, that they are her sisters under the skin.

“In Shakespear's plays”—the spelling evinces Bernard Shaw—“the women always take the initiative.”³ Shaw was seeking warrant for his updated version of the Don Juan legend, surely an a fortiori example of the Shakes-Shavian heroine as “pursuer and contriver” and the runaway hero as “pursued and disposed of.” In Man and Superman the Übermensch has to be Woman, the matrix of the Life-Force, instinctively closer to nature and consequently farther away from men's follies. The formula is well exemplified within the Shakespearean repertory, and nowhere more aptly than in Love's Labor's Lost. The diplomatic mission of the Princess and her entourage, as it chances, is timed to coincide with the retirement of the King and his “book-mates” (4.1.100). To their brief experiment in plain living and high thinking, this is an inevitable challenge, exacerbated by the grim proviso that no lady may venture within the verge “on pain of losing her tongue” (1.1.123-24). Thus the starting-point is an uneasy compromise. The delegation must be somehow or other dealt with, though not admitted to the cloistered reading-rooms of the chateau, but encamped in the outdoor climate of the park where they freely exercise. According to Boyet, their courtly escort, it is a state of siege (2.1.86). It is clearly not a coeducational Abbey of Thélème.

If the plot is somewhat episodic, symmetry is imposed by the dramatis personae. Shakespeare's fondness for reduplicating his romantic couples surpasses itself, since both the King and the Princess have a trio of followers, and everyone is respectively interested in his or her opposite number. The fifth flirtation is the first to surface: Armado, a corresponding member of the Academy and its link with the underplot, will outrival Costard for Jacquenetta's favors. Their companions on the lower plane, the schoolmaster Holofernes and the curate Sir Nathaniel, will be introduced late and chiefly employed to provide the concluding entertainment. But their choric presence fills an important gap. The King and his colleagues, despite their declared intentions, have no real opportunities to digest or disseminate book-learning. Nathaniel is the sort of insipid stooge to Holofernes that Justice Silence would be to Justice Shallow, and they are the ones who have “eat paper” and “drunk ink” (4.2.25-26). There survives a well attested tradition that Shakespeare himself had once taught school in the country; there may be sardonic reminiscence when Dr. Pinch makes his intrusion into The Comedy of Errors. Someone must speak for the inkhorn, voicing syntactic and orthographical crotchets, misapplying Ovid, Mantuan, and Priscian, and subjecting Berowne's luckless sonnet to exegetical mayhem.

Accordingly, the pedagogue most fully represents the scholastic viewpoint, its total immersion in bookishness to the exclusion of experience, its susceptibility to Bacon's “first distemper of Learning”: the failure to distinguish words from matter.⁴ Significantly the original texts sometimes refer to Holofernes as “the Pedant,” even as they do to Armado as “Braggart,” relating them explicitly to the stylized characters of the Commedia dell' Arte. To juxtapose them with the witty lovers is to contrast the Comedy of Humors with the Comedy of Manners, to conceive them as more typically in the Jonsonian than in the Shakespearean mode. Affectation—Fielding's perpetual source of “the true Ridiculous”—is pervasive at both levels, each of which has been angled to reflect upon the other, though in a contrasting light.⁵ Addison has clarifyingly written:

A man who has been brought up among Books, and is able to talk of nothing else, is a very indifferent Companion, and what we call a Pedant. But, methinks, we should enlarge the Title, and give it every one that does not know how to think out of his Profession and particular way of Life.⁶

This is to broaden the concept of pedantry into professional deformation, a habitual stimulus toward comic characterization. But the underlying circumstance remains that academism itself has effectively furnished a persistent premise for comedy, in that it has prompted playwrights to expose the disparities between an accepted set of rules and routines, on the one hand, and the perception of more flexible realities on the other. Hence the recurrent notion of a school, in the very flouting of whose derisory lessons there is something solid to be learned: The School for Scandal, L'Ecole des femmes (or des maris), the Frontisterion (or think-tank) of Aristophanes' Clouds.

The wide spread of conjectured dates for the composition of Love's Labor's Lost hints that it might have bordered upon a school-exercise in itself, for an apprentice playwright on his progression through journey-work to mastery. Passages in rambling or galloping couplets redolent of Cambyses, Ralph Roister Doister, or Damon and Pithias, together with certain characteristics of the boy-actors' theater, suggested—to Alfred Harbage—survivals from Shakespeare's earliest novitiate.⁷ The counterargument is that the predominating tone seems highly sophisticated, and that he would not find it hard to echo the archaic while he was deliberately presenting a gallimaufry of styles. Writers usually start with imitation, from which they frequently liberate themselves through parody. Maturing at the florescence of the English language, Shakespeare could not have but been style-conscious. His early work is heavily loaded with classical allusions and rhetorical figures; it resonates with verse that out-Marlowes Marlowe and prose that gilds Lyly. Not long afterward, with the Sonnets and the two epyllia, he plunged into the even more bookish sphere of erotic poetry. He seems to have achieved a voice of his own in the mid-nineties, his “lyrical period,” to which Love's Labor's Lost is commonly viewed as a prologue—with the assumption that it may have been later revised and further elaborated for private performance.

Generally speaking, from those times until ours, the play has put off actors and been put down by critics. Anne Barton may afford some explanation by calling it “perhaps the most relentlessly Elizabethan of Shakespeare's plays.”⁸ Granville-Barker, reviving the interest of the twentieth century in it, had conceded that “Here is a fashionable play; now, by three hundred years, out of fashion.”⁹ This has meant that the significance of occasional lines is probably lost forever, yet cruces can be pruned away by cuts. When we are deterred, it is less by the word-games (“a curious foppery of language” which Walter Pater could go along with) than by the in-jokes, many of which have been out too long.¹⁰ Brains have been cudgeled to identify topical references; but the evidence has been slight and strained; and scholiasts have seldom agreed upon their identifications. Meanwhile successful revivals, both on the stage and among the critics, have attested an esthetic charm and a satirical thrust which have not proved so ephemeral after all. The Quarto had announced “A Pleasant Conceited Comedie.” Romeo and Juliet was also termed “conceited” on the title page of its Second Quarto, and the Elizabethans valued a “conceit” as a peculiar grace involving both wit and fancy. By a latterday reckoning, the pioneering study of O. J. Campbell, Love's Labor's Lost might be “regarded as Shakespeare's Précieuses Ridicules.”¹¹

But the difference is more striking than the resemblance. Molière's suitors are rejected from a salon because they are insufficiently sensitive to their ladies' preciosity. They revenge themselves by the practical joke of getting their valets admitted in the roles of pretended précieux. With Shakespeare it is the men who are affected, as it were, and by self-contradictory quirks. Two parallel monologues, Armado's at the end of the First Act and Berowne's at the end of the Third, herald the retreat from their initial retreat. Armado speaks in burlesque prose, and consoles himself by evoking prototypes—ancient heroes in love, such as Sampson and Hercules, of whose cases Moth has just reminded him. Though he defies Cupid in duelling jargon, the miles gloriosus is rapidly turning into a man of letters. A “congruent epitheton” is his mot juste (1.2.14).

Adieu, valor, rust, rapier, be still, drum, for your manager is in love; yea, he loveth. 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. (1.2.181-85)

Berowne speaks in blank verse, albeit less romantically. He is essentially a plain-speaker; and, though he rises to verbalistic occasions with the utmost virtuosity, his commitment is never wholly serious. He is cast as “the merry madcap lord. Not a word with him but a jest” (2.1.215-16). Like his successor, Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing, he has challenged destiny by assuming a misogynistic stance. Berowne's tirade is addressed to three targets. Centrally there is Cupid, whose neglected powers are both belittled and glorified with pungent epithets. Then there is Rosaline, prefiguring not only Orlando's Rosalind but more literally Romeo's first beloved, whom the latter will all too quickly forget. If Berowne's Rosaline is envisioned as a Dark Lady of the Sonnets, the likeness is more pejorative than Petrarchan. The “two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes” (3.1.197) merely fill in the details of “My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun” (130). First and last, subsuming everything else in a humorous outlook, he is angry with himself. It lends an added touch of male chauvinism that, just as Armado mused about King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, so Berowne views his infatuation with Rosaline as a social misalliance:

And I to sigh for her, to watch for her,
To pray for her, go to! It is a plague
That Cupid will impose for my neglect
Of his almighty dreadful little might.
Well, I will love, write sign, pray, sue, groan:
Some men must love my lady, and some Joan.

(3.1.200-205)

The underplot crisscrosses the main plot during the first two scenes of the Fourth Act, when Costard misdelivers Armado's letter to Rosaline and Berowne's sonnet to Jacquenetta. That intercepted “canzonet” would appropriately reappear in the rather conventional Elizabethan miscellany, The Passionate Pilgrim, and it gives us no grounds for refuting Holofernes' Latin dismissal: “Imitari is nothing” (4.2.120, 125-26). Yet it opens by sounding the keynote of the play, with one of the twenty-two iterations of the keyword forswear: “If love make me foresworn, how shall I swear to love?” (105). And it will carry on the metaphorical Leitmotiv in one of its alexandrines: “Study his bias leaves, and makes his books thine eyes” (109). Since we have now heard this specimen of his groaning rhymes, there is no need for Berowne to read aloud his second sonnet when he makes his entrance in the next scene alone, still denouncing himself and praising Rosaline's eyes in prose. Nor is there, as it briskly happens, time. Having broken his own vow, he “would not care a pin, if the other three were in” (4.3.18). And they are not out afield hunting deer, as he has assumed. He is interrupted by the King's stealthy entrance, and must even more stealthily settle himself into an observant hiding place. Most editors direct him to climb up a tree, inasmuch as both he and the King will subsequently allude to his elevated coign of vantage.

The King has brought along a paper too, and—with Berowne as his invisible spectator and critic—he proceeds to declaim what could have been a sonnet, if he had not added a supererogatory couplet. That it was not anthologized, like the other three love-poems, confirms an impression that it is the weakest of the four. Its solar imagery reads like a parody of Sonnet 33 (“Full many a glorious morning I have seen …”), and it will earn the sarcasm of Berowne with its metaphysical conceit of the lover's teardrops being transposed into coaches that convey his mistress to her triumphs (33-34; 153-54). Before the King can drop this vulnerable missive where the Princess might pick it up, Longaville comes in with one of his own—composed, as it transpires, with stubborn effort and without much confidence. The King must therefore hide and, in his turn, comment anti-phonally on Longaville's plaints. The latter's sonnet, which would be included in The Passionate Pilgrim, addresses itself to the issue at hand as Berowne's had done: the making and breaking of vows. Longaville's images similarly modulate from the literary to the ocular, when he belauds “the heavenly rhetoric” of Maria's eye (4.3.58). The quartet is expectably completed when Dumaine enters, causing Longaville to seek private shelter, where he has his sole chance to eavesdrop, unaware that he himself has been doubly eavesdropped upon.

Poor Dumaine! He is the only member of the quaternion who will not have the immediate consolation of witnessing another in his plight. His lucubration is not strictly a sonnet; it is more like the songs from the plays, and not unlike the many other lyrics of the period celebrating the month of May; and its reprinting, not only in The Passionae Pilgrim but in the much choicer England's Helicon (where “the lover” becomes a shepherd), documents its popularity and justifies its culminating place. The reprinted versions drop the distich that connects it with the action:

Do not call it sin in me
That I am forsworn for thee.

(113-14)

Dumaine ironically longs for the amnesty that might be granted to him if the others were proved to be companions in perjury: “O would the King, Berowne, and Longaville / Were lovers too!” (121-22). He will have his wish soon enough. Meanwhile, while he is mooning over his Katherine, Longaville is vocally and critically aware of his tergiversation, the King is aware of Longaville's as well as of Dumaine's, and Berowne is aware of all three. From his upmost perch he looks down upon them, as if it were the turning-point in a game of hide-and-seek, and as if he were omniscient and beyond reproach:

“All hid, all hid,” an old infant play.
Like a demigod here sit I in the sky,
And wretched fools' secrets heedfully o'er-eye.

(76-78)

Longaville over-eyes one fool's secret, the King two, and Berowne three. Each of them is additionally conscious of his own folly, but blithely unconscious of having been observed in it, whereas we—the audience—are sitting upon an Olympian eminence, whence the whole sequence of four foolish secrets will fit into an ultimate fifth perspective.

Bertrand Evans, in his intensive structural study of Shakespeare's Comedies, bases his analyses on a principle of “discrepant awareness.”¹² This would constitute the very basis of dramatic irony, where we play blindman's bluff until disclosures of full knowledge throw a final light on tragic flaws or comic errors. Professor Evans tells us that Love's Labor's Lost relies less on the exploitation of that device than we might have expected, and yet the sonnet-reading scene must be its tour de force. Eavesdropping is brought about by conspiracy in Much Ado about Nothing and Troilus and Cressida, not to mention Hamlet or Othello. Herein it is accidental, or otherwise the contrivance of the dramatist. Shaw, in his first Shakespearean review, called it “the only absolutely impossible situation” within the comedy.¹³ As an early apostle of naturalistic drama, though he would move on toward his own stylizations, he particularly balked at the convention of the aside—that brief speech which, like the longer soliloquy, was presumed to be the unvoiced thought of the speaker. We may assume that each of these successive speakers, on making his appearance, thinks out loud viva voce. Each of the hiding listeners, overhearing him, is supposed to express a reaction aside. But it would seem that, through some extension of poetic license, the King overhears the reactions of Longaville, while Berowne overhears the asides of both.

Furthermore, there are momentary rhymes linking unheard speeches by characters who are not engaged in conversation. Such expedients offer no greater difficulties to a sympathetic imagination, willing to suspend its literal disbelief, than the mere fact that the dialogue mainly consists of iambic pentameter. Formal articulation, we must realize, is built into the subject. Lovers may well consider each other unique; but if another couple goes through the same set of motions, and then another simultaneously, with finally a quadruple replication, we are less and less apt to take their individual problems seriously. Such repetitions have a reductive effect upon the emotions, as Bergson pointed out, but with a compensating response that expands our laughter like a rolling snowball. Repeatedly, in Shakespeare's comedies, sex-objects become virtually interchangeable. This can be especially easy if one of them is a twin, as in The Comedy of Errors, though complicated if the twins are sexually unidentical, as in Twelfth Night. Love could be regarded as a potion which casts a fortuitous spell, realigns and reunites the swinging paramours, and infatuates Titania with Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream. It could yield to friendship much too weakly, when Valentine offers Sylvia to Proteus in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. And it could arrange for clandestine substitutions, with the bed-tricks of All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure.

We are not liable to forget that the debonaire parodist of Love's Labor's Lost was a practising sonneteer in his own right. Whatever his personal involvement may or may not have been, he was dramatically satirizing moods and permutations of heart which he had been lyrically registering in the first person. When his votaries of study are converted into devotees of love, their conversion is as shallow as their defection is sudden. When they take the new initiative, they will at once be frustrated by a typical mixup, become confused by masks, and leave their respective tokens with the wrong ladies. But that will be a non-recognition-scene; we must return to their scene of poetry-reading for those moments of truth which are elicited and enlarged by a series of exposures. After the fourth votary, Dumaine, has made his profession and confession, the machinery is wound up. Immediately it commences to unwind as Longaville, the third, emerges from hiding to denounce him. Thereupon Navarre steps forth from behind a bush; as their leader, and the second arrival, he can be more categorical in raising the blushes of both. Passing over his own complicity, like Longaville with Dumaine, he waxes holier than both, and unwittingly calls down castigation upon his own head by evoking Berowne. What would he say, who had sworn, “I am the last that will keep last his oath” (1.1.160)? We have already seen him being the first to break it.

This is his cue to descend from his elevation, join in the interplay of heroic couplets, and administer his pharasaic reproof: “Now step I forth to whip hypocrisy” (4.3.149). Not sparing royalty itself, he cites the analogy of Saint Matthew for the man who ignores his own sins while noting his brother's pecadillos:

You [Longaville] found his [Dumaine's] mote, the King your
mote did see,
But I a beam did find in each of three.

(159-60)

He continues with a mordant roll of mock-heroic comparisons, dignitaries of legend reduced to second childhood. “Too bitter is thy jest,” the King demurs. “Are we betrayed thus to thy overview?” (172-73). Thoroughly enjoying his occasion to moralize, Berowne would like to go on assuming that he himself is invulnerable. But his hubris is up and, like the King just a moment before, he conjures up his own comedown:

When shall you see me write a thing in rhyme,
Or groan for Joan, or spend a minute's time
In pruning me?

(179-81)

He has already betrayed himself to our overview, groaning for Joan and writing a thing in rhyme. That thing, his sidetracked sonnet, now makes its opportune and inglorious reappearance, handed on by Jacquenetta and Costard. Berowne is able to avoid further embarrassment by snatching it from their hands, tearing it up before it can be savored by the company, and—in a curious passage of old-fashioned amphibrachic tetrameters—abruptly confessing. … When the recognitions are complete, it is truly an anagnorisis with a vengeance, since comic irony is most dramatic when the would-be wise man is revealed to be just another fool in spite of himself. On a tragic scale, the psychological development of King Lear has been conceived stylistically and thematically in terms of blind obtuseness to which eyes must be opened. Such is the movement, much slighter, more brittle and playful, of Love's Labor's Lost.

After the backsliders have all been taken in the manner—as Costard would have put it (1.1.202)—it is a relief that their guards are down, and flesh and blood can freely avow its natural inclinations. Shifting from couplets to rhymed quatrains, the King and Berowne vie in conversely extolling the blonde Princess and the brunette Rosaline. When Berowne, professing disdain for “painted rhetoric,” launches on thirteen lines of what might become an extemporaneous sonnet, the King cuts him off with a fourteenth line of dispraise: “By heaven, thy love is black as ebony” (4.3.235, 243). This provokes Berowne to an encomium on the fairness of blackness, after the fashion of Sonnet 127. The King's retort embodies a notorious crux:

O paradox! Black is the badge of hell,
The hue of dungeons, and the school of night.

(250-51)

It should be noticed, since the first two metaphors are simply attributive, that the older commentators were blankly perplexed by the third. They attempted to regularize the diction by dropping “school” and substituting such readings as “scowl,” “scroll,” “shade,” “shroud,” “soil,” “soul,” “stile,” and “suit.” A generation ago there was a tendency, while reaccepting the text as it stands, to search for external topicalities which might be considered by way of cross-reference. And it is true that a nocturnal strain can readily be discerned in contemporaneous literature, notably in George Chapman's Shadow of Night. Conjecture went much farther when it suspected an allusion to Sir Walter Ralegh's rumored “School of Atheism.” The philosophic and scientific concerns of that elusive seminar, from what can be fragmentarily gathered, are not touched upon in Shakespeare's play. Instead we have the “arts-man” Holofernes holding forth in the stila pedantesca, at a light-year distance from Thomas Harriott or Giordano Bruno and pretty distant from Marlowe, Nashe, or John Florio (5.1.81).

This passing phrase could hardly have brought home a satirical point, since the context moves on faster and faster toward an amatory wit-combat, with Dumaine and Longaville adding their gibes to Navarre's, not so much in denigration of Rosaline as in revenge against Berowne for his erstwhile pose of moral superiority. Inasmuch as they are all “still in love,” all “affection's men-at-arms,” the King calls a halt to the counterattack on Berowne, and calls upon him—as their most accomplished sophister—to rationalize their apostasy (278, 286). Having originally resisted the compact, he cannot resist an exordium which sounds the note of “I told you so.” To state the case in blank verse, after the bouts of deft rhyming, is to adopt a modality of higher seriousness. Both the Quarto and the Folio texts of his set-piece include twenty-three introductory lines which obviously belonged to a preliminary draft, and have been reworked and augmented in what follows. Though they should be skipped in performance, of course, they afford us a rare opportunity to collate Shakespeare's revisions as we can Whitman's and Yeats's. Berowne's casuistry takes us back to his ambiguous interpretations of “study,” his antithesis between the narrowly bookish and the broadly vitalistic, and his view of love as the discipline that enriches all other aspects of life.

On those familiar and interwoven themes Shakespeare has devised many variations, such as the succinct example in Sonnet 15 (9): “But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive. …” The transition from scholarship to courtship is sanctioned by the topos that the truest books are “women's eyes” (4.3.298). This will be briefly if brusquely modified when the men's overture is rebuffed, and Moth is constrained to salute not “eyes” but “backs” (5.2.161-62). But they will still believe in the close connection affirmed by Longaville's sonnet: “the heavenly rhetoric of thine eye” (4.3.58). And “eve,” used more often by Shakespeare here than anywhere except in A Midsummer Night's Dream, is closely associated—through the changes rung on eyesight, daylight, enlightenment—with “light,” used more often here than anywhere except in Romeo and Juliet. Berowne rises to a decisive statement, which has been climactically amplified in the revision:

From women's eyes this doctrine I derive.
They sparkle with the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain, and nourish all the world.

(347-50)

The myth of Prometheus, with its subversive impact, strengthens the image and underlines the theme: the power of lightning, the acquisition of knowledge, both of these untraditionally attained through feminine intercession. Meredith does not mention Love's Labor's Lost in his essay On the Idea of Comedy and of the Uses of the Comic Spirit, yet it offers a congenial illustration of his theories on the civilizing influence of womanhood, and on the theater as a salon. But Shakespeare would not press us to pursue the cosmic flight of Goethe's Faust, or to conclude that all means of salvation depend upon das Ewig-Weibliche. He is content to let Berowne work up a paradoxical formula which will release his colleagues from their artificial dilemma:

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

(358-59)

Words can be endlessly drawn upon to cancel out other words, when the spokesman is such a logodaedalist as Berowne. Not for nothing is he the predecessor of Mercutio, and both live under the aegis of Mercury—“the President of Language,” according to Ben Jonson, and the astral spirit of volatility.¹⁴ After the apologia has been amplified, classically and hyperbolically, eloquence has served its purpose and Longaville can artlessly propose:

Now to plain-dealing, lay these glozes by:
Shall we resolve to woo these girls of France?

(367-68)

This new resolution is concurred with more quickly and enthusiastically than the one they took the day before. As against Saint Denis, traditionally the guardian of French interests, the King canonizes a quasi-classical demigod by invoking the patronage of “Saint Cupid” (363; cf. 5.2.87). Previous allusions to Cupid have been frequent and largely adverse. He has been blamed as an indiscriminate leveller in the monologues of both Berowne and Armado, since Cupid's bow is a symbol of the lover's irresponsibility for controlling his own behavior.

But there was never less of a foregone conclusion than this belated decision, at the end of the Fourth Act, “to parley, to court, and dance” (5.2.122). By the end of Act 4, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the several plots have been neatly disentangled; every Jack has acquired the right Jill at last; all is well, as Puck has promised; and what has been left over for Act 5 is neither more nor less than the celebrations of marriage, with their incidental entertainments. The Fifth Act of Love's Labor's Lost is comparably a showpiece, yet by no means an afterpiece. Its second and concluding scene is the longest in Shakespeare, more than half as long as the rest of the play. Its ensuing revelry participates in two pseudo-theatrical interludes. Neither of them turns out to be a success by recognizable standards, except possibly as a reminder that both sets of actors have been role-playing, even when they were appearing in propria persona. There is no inherent reason why the wooers should be so ill received; even before they had been smitten, the heroines had spoken favorably of them. To combine their courting with a masquerade, they disguise themselves as Muscovites. In those opening days of Anglo-Russian relations, this would have been a modish, exotic, and not unattractive gesture. We have records of such masques, not to mention the embassy that Virginia Woolf fantasizes in her Orlando.

Despite the reiteration of the pleading vocable “vouchsafe,” urged eleven times in a single scene, the Russianized masquers encounter nothing but misunderstanding and mockery. This is because the master of ceremonies, Boyet, has—by a not unfamiliar contingency—overheard their plans and advised the hostesses on their policy of “mock for mock” (5.2.140). As the Princess puts it, “There's no such sport as sport by sport o'erthrown” (153). They exult in their dialectical advantage, when the courtiers return in their own garb. The only tactic now is for their orator, Berowne, to proffer an open confession and whole-hearted renunciation, warranting the sincerity of his palinode by shifting from rhyme to blank verse. But if his verbal pyrotechnics help him to forswear monasticism, they make it harder to abandon Petrarchism:

Taffata phrases, silken terms precise,
Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affection,
Figures pedantical———

such fineries are lingered over in the very act of dismissal (406-8). Whereas the homespun attire that should replace them, with “russet yeas and honest kersey noes,” is not so easily donned by habitual wearers of fancy dress (413), Berowne will do his unaccustomed best to converse in rustic monosyllables:

And to begin, wench, so God help me law!
My love to thee is sound, sans crack or flaw.

(414-15)

But Rosaline, no light wench like Jacquenetta but a strong precursor of Benedick's Beatrice, will have the last words: “Sans ‘sans,’ I pray you” (416). Her purism is more Fowleristic than Shakespeare's, who permitted the melancholy Jacques to pronounce the problematic gallicism sans four times in the last line from his famous monologue on the ages of man in As You Like It: “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing” (2.7.166).

The King seems reluctant to go on with the revels, apparently fearing to be put to shame by the “delightful ostentation” of the local louts (5.1.111-12). But Berowne argues that the noblemen have made themselves “shame-proof” in any event, and that a worse production might make theirs look a little better (5.2.512). And the Princess, deciding to entertain another play-within-the-play, an antimasque after their masque, characterizes both:

Their form confounded makes most form in mirth,
When great things laboring perish in their birth.

(519-20)

The Nine Worthies, featured in Lord Mayors' pageants, composed a folkloristic pantheon of biblical, classical, and medieval heroes, however uncanonically represented by the present scenario. “The pedant, the braggart, the hedge-priest, the fool, and the boy” are even less worthy of their exalted roles than Bottom would be as Pyramus (542). Four of those five players would have to double, if the performance were not mercifully stopped at its mid-point. Ingenuity may have surmounted a few of the obstacles, for instance by casting Moth as Hercules in his infantile exploit. But the problem, like so many problems in this play, like so many of the maladjustments of drama and life itself, is a matter of miscasting. It must be admitted that Sir Nathaniel, the village parson, is not up to the grandiose part of Alexander the Great. “He is a marvellous good neighbor, faith, and a very good bowler,” Costard testifies by way of extenuation, “but for Alisander—alas, you see how ’tis—a little o’erparted” (582-84). Earth-bound creatures, we tend to exceed ourselves when temporarily seated in the sky.

Just as “This pert Berowne was out of count’nance quite,” so will Holofernes be “out of count’nance” when his Judas Maccabeus is willfully mistaken for Judas Iscariot (271, 621). He is so heckled and hissed and hooted at that some readers end by sympathizing with his quavering valediction: “This is not generous, not gentle, not humble” (629). But, though our hearts may be softened by such an appeal, we must ask ourselves when he was ever seen to be generous, gentle, or humble. It is an object-lesson we may do well to remember. Armado next, in his pivotal impersonation of Hector, is teased until he steps out of character and pleads for the dead hero: “… beat not the bones of the buried. When he breathed, he was a man” (661-62). Ubi est? Whatever became of heroism? Wherever he may or may not be, his impersonator is in an immediate quandary; for it is at this juncture that his competitor for Jacquenetta, Costard, announces that she is pregnant by Armado. Aroused to belligerence by their impersonations, a fight is looming between our Hector and our Pompey the Great (Big? Huge?). True to his thrasonical prototypes of New Comedy, or to such future Shakespearean braggarts as Falstaff, Pistol, or Parolles, Armado will come up with a ready excuse for not fighting. He cannot strip to his shirt, since he wears no shirt—more an indication of penury than of penitence, it would seem, but at any rate an evasion.

After all the romantic prospects, it is an anticlimax that the only marriage will be Jacquenetta's to Armado, the warrior being tamed into a farmer. “The scene begins to cloud” when Berowne dismisses the Worthies, as the French emissary suddenly appears (721). Marcade is a somber figure, unlike his frivolous compatriot Boyet, and his messenger's duty is not to produce the expected documents but to report the death of the Princess's father, the King of France. That she has anticipated the bad news would seem to imply a not unclouded prior state of mind. Instead of a deus ex machina descending to unscramble life's complications, we experience this coup de théâtre which warns us that happiness should never be taken for granted. If Shakespeare glances at the antic disposition in tragedy, his comedy does not altogether escape from ills that flesh is heir to. The first and lightest, The Comedy of Errors, has a death-sentence suspended over it; Twelfth Night, which may be the sunniest, is set in a house of mourning. We retroactively consider The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure as problem plays, and have invented the category of “romances” for those later comedies which attain their happy endings by painfully stretching the long arm of melodramatic coincidence. Sadness is foreboded, in the Arcadian purview of Love's Labor's Lost, with the remembrance of Katherine's sister, who had died as one of Cupid's victims (13-17).

Since all is not well, all cannot end well. The “Christmas comedy” is dashed: “Jack hath not Gill” (462, 875). The best that the mourning Princess and her women can do is to put the men on a year's probation, whereby they must lead—in earnest—the “austere insociable life” to which they had pledged themselves before these distractions (799). Berowne, having been chief merrymaker, must undergo the severest penance. He must spend his year in visiting hospitals, listening to the groans of genuine pain, striving for laughing-matters in sickrooms, and conceivably learning—through such waste of spirit—the limits of the comic. The King looks ahead optimistically: “Come, sir, it wants a twelvemonth an’ a day, / And then ’twill end.” But Berowne tags the rhyme with a conclusion in which nothing is concluded: “That's too long for a play” (877-78). Pending an absent sequel, disappointed by the two previous divertissements, all can take satisfaction in the “dialogue” introduced by Armado and “compiled” by “the two learned men” (885-86). Their pretensions to book-learning have not prepared us for anything so vivid, fresh, and natural. It resembles a pastoral singing-match, though it is modelled on the medieval conflictus or débat—often between allegorical birds, as in The Owl and the Nightingale. Shakespeare would weave such ornithological symbolism into the aubade of the nightingale and the lark, the lyrical exchange of parting lovers in Romeo and Juliet.

The singers personify spring and winter, and each has a birdlike refrain: Ver the cuckoo's song, with its taunt of sexual duplicity, and Hiems the owl's hoot, wiser and more comfortable. Each of the pair has two stanzas, through which the description progresses from vernal landscape to snowbound interior, from shepherds and maidens amid the “daisies pied, and violets blue,” to a Breughelesque picture of “greasy Joan” stirring the pot, while “icicles hang by the wall” (894, 929, 912). Berowne cannot have forgotten that Joan was the nickname for his personification of the love he had so vainly resisted, while the seasonal rhythms of the lyrics may encourage the lovers to hope for better luck next year. “And,” as Theodore Spencer comments:

just as the theme of the play dissipates illusion for reality, so does the language—not only as far as Berowne is concerned. It is surely no accident that the most verbally artificial and metrically elaborate of all Shakespeare's plays should end with the most rustic, simple and countrified of all his songs.¹⁵

The textual status of the last two sentences is not entirely certain, but they have generally been assigned to Armado as an epilogue. “The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo” (930-31). Why, at this stage, revert to oratory, when we have reached the scraps at the “feast of languages,” and have poetically exhausted “the jerks of invention” (5.1.36-37; 4.2.125)? Why not close under the tutelage of music, the most concrete expression of harmony? Armado must be pointing both to the audience and backstage, as he concludes: “You that way; we this way” (5.2.931). Back again, ladies and gentlemen, to your workaday world. Back to the tiring-house for these, our actors. The holiday is over; lives go on.

It might be worth adding that Apollo's adherents have outdone Mercury's in some respects; these lyrics have been revived with other Shakespearean plays while Love's Labor's Lost stayed on the shelves. Yet Adrien Leverkühn, the imaginary composer in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, bases an opera upon it. Though the pact between the King and his companions is not very Faustian, Leverkühn is much attracted to “the parodic artistry of the style,” and even wants to keep it in English.¹⁶ Curiously enough, Mann's son-in-law, W. H. Auden, in collaboration with Chester Kallman, would write a libretto for Verlor'ne Liebesmüh', first performed in English by the Brussels Opera in 1973. The actual composer, Nicolas Nabokov, could be counted on to make the most of the pseudo-Muscovite interlude. But Auden, who was well acquainted with the operatic medium and with the demands and restrictions of writing for music, felt constrained to simplify both the cast and the style. Thus Berowne's renunciation of Academe becomes a trio and gets a straightforward message across:

Learning, my lords, requires a ground,
Excellence a cause and base.
Where, my lords, can these be found
But in a woman's face?(17)

What gets stripped away is what must have fascinated Mann, reading the original for the first time: the parody, the persiflage, the playfulness. He showed a peculiar insight into where Shakespeare had stood as a journeyman, after a generation of rhetorical experiment. Shakespeare's homeopathic task was to overmaster that rhetoric, to commandeer artifice as a weapon against artificiality. It was incidentally fun, since it allowed him to have his cake while eating it. The jeu de mots would become a jeu d'esprit. The implicit appeals to nature would not diminish art; they would ultimately extend and solidify it. What had been so labored, so laborious, so overelaborate well deserved to be lost, along with the transitory courtships of Navarre and his book-men. What Shakespeare won was his own courtship of the English language and his accession to artistic maturity.

Notes

1. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton, 1959), p. 89.

2. Shakespearean quotations are cited from the text of G. B. Evans, The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, 1974).

3. Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy (New York, 1903), p. xvi.

4. Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. W. A. Wright (Oxford, 1869), p. 30 (First Book, 4:3).

5. Henry Fielding, The Adventures of Joseph Andrews, ed. J. P. De Castro (London, 1929), p. 22.

6. Joseph Addison, Works, ed. Richard Hurd (London, 1854), 2:433 (Spectator No. 105, Saturday, 30 June).

7. Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare without Words, and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), pp. 125-27.

8. Anne Barton in The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 174.

9. Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare, First Series (London, 1933), p. 1.

10. Walter Pater, Appreciations, With an Essay on Style (London, 1889), p. 170.

11. O. J. Campbell, “Love's Labour's Lost Re-studied,” in Studies in Shakespeare, Milton, and Donne, University of Michigan Publications: Language and Literature, 1 (New York, 1925), p. 4.

12. Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford, 1960), passim.

13. Edwin Wilson, ed., Shaw on Shakespeare (New York, 1961), p. 120.

14. C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson, eds., Ben Jonson (Oxford, 1947), 8:621. (Discoveries, 1882f.).

15. Theodore Spencer, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (New York, 1942), p. 90.

16. Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York, 1948), p. 209; cf. Doktor Faustus (Stockholm, 1947), p. 326 (“die parodistische Künstlichkeit des Stils”).

17. Nicolas Nabokov, Love's Labour's Lost: Verlor'ne Liebesmüh' (Berlin, 1973), pp. 191-92.