SOURCE: “Love's Labor's Lost,” in Shakespeare's Comedies: From Roman Farce to Romantic Mystery, University of Delaware Press, 1986, pp. 35-47.

[In the essay below, Ornstein emphasizes the artificiality of Love's Labour's Lost as a comedy and a satire of abstruse intellectuality in conflict with love.]

Like most farces Errors has to be seen on stage to be fully appreciated, partly because of its slapstick scenes and partly because its ingenious plot is inspired by the stage—by a playwright's control of the lives of his characters, who enter and exit on cue and meet or avoid each other as his comic plan requires. The relation of Love's Labor's to the stage is more difficult to assess. Most scholars agree that it was influenced by Lyly's comedies,¹ but these comedies are undramatic as well as highly artificial and much too static and bloodless to succeed in the Elizabethan public playhouses. To the extent that Shakespeare follows Lyly he merely uses the stage as an arena for witty exchanges and debates that masquerade as dramatic dialogue but do not necessarily further the progress of a dramatic action or create an impression of opposing personalities. Yet Shakespeare's heroes and heroines do not weary us with arid euphuistic discourses. They are sometimes too clever but rarely arch; they are ready to display their ingenuity in puns and paradoxes, but unlike the minor comic figures, who try our patience with elephantine attempts at wit, the lords of Navarre and ladies of France are engagingly bright and entertaining.

The verbal brilliance and dullness of Love's Labor's are unique in the comedies. No later play so persistently aims at bravura displays of acrobatic wit and none devotes so much space to figures like Holofernes and Nathaniel, who preen themselves on their turgidities. Unable to account for the lengthy display of verbal pedantry in Love's Labor's, we hypothesize that it had a satiric purpose, and since we cannot document the supposed targets, we assume that the play was written for a special audience that could relish every rhetorical flourish, decipher every obscure allusion, and smile knowingly at palpable satiric hits. Few scholarly hypotheses have had so little foundation in evidence as the conjecture that Love's Labor's is a satire on the abstruse intellectuality of Chapman's circle, a conjecture that rests on a single puzzling line that may refer to a “school of night” or simply be a compositor's misreading of copy. It may well be that various puzzling and curious lines are topical satiric allusions, but this hypothesis does not account for the other peculiarities of the play or its other artistic shortcomings,² whereas the enduring appeal of its heroes and heroines requires no conjectures about arcane intellectual coteries and no footnotes whatsoever.

The static highly patterned scenes of Love's Labor's suggest that Shakespeare consciously sacrificed dramatic tension and excitement to an intellectual purpose. The title reinforces that impression by its deliberate, even defiant rejection of conventional expectations: here is a comedy that ends in separation, not reunion, in the postponement of marital joy, not the fulfillment of courtship. Yet this unconventional, unromantic denouement requires an extraordinary authorial intervention at the moment when the course of love can belatedly run smooth. Just when the Princess is beginning to soften her attitude, Marcade enters with news of the death of the French King. In other words, the dramatic action of Love's Labor's does not from the beginning lead us to expect that the heroes' passions will be frustrated; on the contrary, from the beginning we anticipate that love will subdue those who try to deny its power. But after showing how passion triumphs over asceticism in Navarre, Shakespeare allows only one scene of wooing in the play and that begins badly and is aborted by the arrival of Marcade. Thus love's labors are not so much lost as arbitrarily ended just as they have begun. The lords of Navarre and ladies of France meet in the third scene (2.1) and not again until the last scene of the play, which is mainly devoted to the heroines' ridicule of their lovers' bumbling attempts at courtship. Indeed, the various couples do not speak frankly to each other until the last two hundred lines. Act 4, scene 3 is devoted to the heroes' discovery that they are all in love and to the decision to renounce their ascetic vow, but almost as much space is given to Armado's passion for Jaquenetta, which unfolds its fantastic plumage in several scenes, and as many lines are given over to the tedious hair splittings of the minor characters.

It is possible that Shakespeare grew so absorbed in writing the Armado and Nathaniel-Holofernes scenes that he failed to realize the lack of movement in his main plot toward its resolution (or antiresolution). More likely, however, he elaborates the pedantries of his minor figures because he needed their bombast to fill out a dramatic conception that does not develop beyond its original premise and become more complex scene by scene. Although Shakespeare turns away from Plautine farce, he substitutes his own simplistic donné for the suppose of identical twins when he shows the lords of Navarre agreeing to an ascetic vow just before the arrival of the French princess. As we expect, the ladies are annoyed by the edict that bars them from the court and the lords fall in love despite their vow. Thus the stage is set for a variety of romantic encounters and rebuffs. But the possibilities inherent in the plot of Love's Labor's are never realized because the heroes and heroines are not allowed to pair off in scenes or even moments of individual wooing. Dumaine and Longaville exchange less than a dozen lines with their ladies during the play; the King and Berowne have longer (and sharper) encounters with the Princess and Rosaline but always in the company of others. Since the heroes and heroines speak with one another only very briefly and acrimoniously, the memorable debats of the play pit heroine against heroine and hero against hero; they do not allow the men and women to match wits with one another.

By not allowing his lovers to pair off, Shakespeare dooms his play to a certain repetitiousness. The quadrille pattern is amusing, of course; it offers the simple childlike delight of “follow-the-leader.” What one hero does, all do; what one heroine says, the others repeat with variations. But wooing and disdain à quatre becomes a bit tiresome after a while, and one wonders why Shakespeare bothered to create such intelligent, spirited heroes and heroines if he was not going to allow them independence of action or statement. Although there are more vivid characterizations in Love's Labor's than in Errors, the persistence of the quadrille pattern robs Longaville, Dumaine, Maria, and Katherine of their individualities; even the glorious verve of Berowne is a gratuitous flourish as far as the plot is concerned because it does not affect the outcome of events. Despite an initial reluctance, he joins the other heroes as anchorites, falls in love when they do, and woos and is rebuffed with them. Like clockwork figures the lords of Navarre and ladies of France move in unison when the hour of love strikes. The repeated patterns of movement would be sufficient if Shakespeare were fashioning a courtly dance rather than a play, but surely he must have known that the formal, restricted, repetitious patterns of a courtly dance do not hold a viewer's attention for long unless the dancers vary and subvert the formality of their prescribed steps by glances and whisperings, an embrace or a kiss.

In a sense the donné of ascetic vows has nothing to do with individuality of character; it is a variation of the ancient literary joke of Cupid's revenge on those who would deny his sovereignty over the human heart. The reason for the denial or defiance does not really matter—any motive from asceticism to cynicism will suffice; all that matters is the ironic peripeteia in which the scoffer is humbled by passion. The earnest Navarre would improve the minds of his youthful companions by mortifying their flesh, but we know that a royal court is a dubious substitute for an anchorite's cell, especially when the court is set in a park and a garden is a traditional milieu for medieval romances and allegories of love. Love's Labor's turns the conventional allegory of love upside down, for at Navarre the men are cloistered and protected from the importunities of suitors, and the women are the would-be encroachers who seek to enter the park and are rebuffed by the edict rather than by Honor and Shame.

Berowne's sensible opposition to the plan of a “three year's fast” immediately calls attention to its naiveté, and the impracticality of the venture is underlined by his reminder that an embassy from the French Princess is momentarily expected. As soon as the edict is promulgated, Dull appears with Costard, whom he has arrested for consorting with Jaquenetta. It is not very likely that Navarre and his companions will have greater success in denying the flesh. They are more worldly than spiritual, and their edict to bar women from the court under pain of losing their most precious possession—their tongue—is a schoolboy sneer at chattering females. If one may judge by their naive attempt at courtship, the heroes are almost as innocent of the pleasures of love as they are of the disciplines of asceticism. What they lack in suavity they make up for in enthusiasm; they are incompetent rather than insincere, as the French ladies would soon recognize if they were not more disingenuous in their rejection of their suitors than the heroes are in their amorous protestations.

Navarre's ambition to make his court a world-renowned center of learning could be taken more seriously if his proposed academy were modeled after the ducal academies of Italy in which poetry, music, drama, and neoplatonic philosophy flowered. Trappings of neoplatonism are ubiquitous in the dialogue of Love's Labor's but only as themes for ingenious quibbling, as, for example, about light and darkness, or fairness (light complexion) and darkness, or sexual lightness and the heaviness it may produce in women. Like the lords of Navarre, the French ladies have read Ficino and Castiglione; they can be equally clever in their neoplatonic equivocations and they are considerably franker in their double-entendres than their suitors. They could be the ladders by which their lovers ascend from earthly passion toward the knowledge of spiritual truths, but Shakespeare will not allow them the honored place at Navarre that women had in the academies of Renaissance Italy. For his plot demands that Navarre's academy have more of the cold ascetic flavor of the northern Renaissance than the warm expansiveness of Florentine humanism.

A search for Hermetic truths was of course one of the currents of Renaissance thought. Navarre's desire to know “things hid and barred … from common sense” is echoed in some of Donne's greatest poems, which yearn for the hidden essence of love, and in alchemical philosophy, which also assumes a spiritual purity in the seeker.³ But Navarre's philosophy is retrograde in temper, for its goal of cloistered mortification of the flesh was one that Renaissance intellectuals associated with an outworn medieval monasticism.

One cannot imagine the ladies of France desiring to lose themselves in arcane studies. Like most of the heroines of the comedies, they have a firm grasp on reality. And unlike Adriana and Luciana of Errors, they have a confident sense of their dignity and worth as women, which they will not let men compromise. Wary of the biological consequences of sexual love, about which they broadly jest, they are not eager to give their hearts away, but neither are they antagonistic at first to the lords of Navarre. The edict that bars them from the court insults their womanhood, however. It is doubly insulting to the majesty of the Princess, who comes as a royal ambassador; and she is further angered by Navarre's unwillingness to take her word about the repayment of the debt France owes. If she finds Navarre attractive, she will not admit it, and she will not allow her ladies to fall in love with Navarre's companions, whom they already admire.

If we remember that the Princess is not an idealized figure—that she has a personal reason to take Navarre down a notch or two—we will not oversimplify the action of Love's Labor's by turning the heroines into wise tutors of their somewhat shallow wooers. When the heroines gain the upper hand they do not use their advantage graciously, and since they are bent on enjoying their lovers' discomfort, they are not particularly qualified to give lessons in frankness and moderation. Indeed, their scorn is finally more excessive than the heroes' initial discourtesy. Some have suggested that the lords of Navarre must learn plain-speaking from the ladies of France, but that is to ignore the heroines' continual strivings for wit, their pleasure in wordplay, and their readiness to “abuse” language in the manner of the heroes. If Shakespeare's purpose is to protest excessive verbal cleverness, he protests it excessively by providing hundreds more examples than his didactic intention requires. He also commits the blunder of making the verbal high-wire acts the chief glory of the play.⁴ If Nathaniel and Holofernes are meant to be cautionary figures, they do not persuade us that the desire for verbal cleverness is reprehensible; they merely demonstrate that a simpering or leaden wit is exceedingly tiresome. Moth, on the other hand, is amusing even though he cannot resist a quibble because his wit is quicksilver. He also makes us think better of his master Armado, whom he mercilessly rags, because any fantastico who would hire Moth as a page cannot be all bad.

Unlike Holofernes's pedantic vanities, Armado's affectations are gifts of nature. The only end of his rodomontade is clarity. He gilds the lily of factual description so that there can be no doubt of his meaning, not even a shadow of a doubt, nor the barest scruple of a shadow of a doubt. His passions are genuine, however inflated his manner of expressing them. He loves Jaquenetta beyond reason, and necessarily so, because she was taken consorting with Costard, whose child she is carrying. He loves by the book because all lovers are supposed to derive inspiration from literary sources: witness the lords of Navarre, who express their intimate yearnings in poems that look suspiciously like those in Tottel's Miscellany. The only plain speaker in a world of wits and would-be wits is Costard, a worthy successor to the Dromios and progenitor of Launce and Speed. He is incapable of affectation, but he is too capricious to give a sober answer to any question. He also has a talent for equivocation that makes it difficult for the King or Berowne to get the truth out of him, even though he never tries to impress anyone or seem cleverer than he is; like Pompey in Measure for Measure he is as honest a reprobate as one would desire to do business with.

Whether Berowne's flights of poetic fancy are less honest than Costard's utterances is hard to say. Artificiality of style expresses native wit and genuine exuberance of feeling at Navarre; verbal ingenuity is for the heroes and heroines a friendly competitive sport that confirms the opposing players' affinities as well as differences. Unlike some Shakespeareans, the lords of Navarre do not take their casuistries too seriously. They have no doubt read some of Shakespeare's sugared, highly conceited sonnets and know what clever punning will accomplish. The Hotspurs of the world, unaware of the poetry of their personal idiom, would have truth bluntly spoken, but Hotspur is not a useful model of decorum. Knowing that imaginative play of language is intrinsic to the pleasure of poetry, Shakespeare never insists that sincerity demands plain speaking. Romeo's apostrophe to Juliet's beauty at Capulet's ball is, if anything, more artificial and richly conceited than his earlier lines about Rosaline.⁵ Juliet's love is similarly expressed in very elaborate conceits. Since hypocrisy can be blunt and plain-spoken in manner (witness Iago's gruff “honesty”), we have to judge the sincerity of poetic statement by its imaginative conviction and intensity, not its lack of adornment.

Costard knows that words are not in themselves deceptive; on the contrary, the more obviously affected they are, the more they reveal about sham and evasion. The smaller a reward is, the fancier is the name given to it. A guerdon is necessarily worth more in currency than a remuneration because it has, shall we say, less ring to it: tokens of gratitude, like inexpensive presents, are best delivered in elaborate boxes.

After love poems, masked and unmasked embassies, and entertainments fail to soften the hearts of the French ladies, Berowne announces his intention to woo frankly in “russet yeas” and “honest kersey noes.” Repeated humiliations have taught him, he says, never again to

trust to speeches penn'd,
Nor to the motion of a schoolboy's tongue,
Nor never come in vizard to my friend,
Nor woo in rhyme, like a blind harper's song!
Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,
Three-pil'd hyperboles, spruce affection,
Figures pedantical—these summer flies
Have blown me full of maggot ostentation.

(5.2.402-9)

It does not matter that this dedication to utter simplicity flows forth in a stream of metaphors because the metaphors are instinct with Berowne's contempt for preciosity. To speak more plainly than this, Berowne would have to change his nature, seel up his poet's eye, and lose his sensitivity to the texture of “taffeta phrases” and “silken terms precise.” Despite his pledge to reform his hyperboles, Berowne later attributes the wantonness of the heroes' behavior to love rather than conceit and is as casuistic as ever in pleading for forgiveness:

Therefore, ladies,
Our love being yours, the error that love makes
Is likewise yours. We to ourselves prove false,
By being once false for ever to be true
To those that make us both—fair ladies, you;
And even that falsehood, in itself a sin,
Thus purifies itself and turns to grace.

(5.2.770-76)

What could be plainer!

The heroes are vulnerable to the heroines' scorn, not because they are too ingenious and sophisticated, but because they are too impetuous and unguarded in their emotions. As soon as they fall in love, they retire to write love poems to their mistresses, as soldiers, statesmen, courtiers, and scholars are supposed to do. Their poems are fairly conventional and derivative but no more so than most Elizabethan love lyrics. Although they will not win any laurels as poets, the lords of Navarre are more competent versifiers than Hamlet, whose rhymes to Ophelia are stumbling; or Orlando, who is absolutely sincere in his love of Rosalind though absolutely pedestrain as a sonneteer. At least Berowne and his colleagues are skilled enough to rationalize their stunning change from anchorites to amorists. They also can wax metaphysical and impress their mistresses with subtle equivocal plays on the meaning of faith and apostasy in love. Since Berowne was most dubious of the monastic vow, it is appropriate that he be the first to confess his love; it is also fitting that he be skeptical of romantic infatuation and unwilling to surrender easily to Dan Cupid, “dread prince of plackets,” that comic figure he so often mocked. He will not lose himself in Petrarchan raptures or exaggerate the beauties of Rosaline, she of the velvet brow with two pitch balls for eyes. He knows that his attraction is sexual—he desires her as one who “will do the deed”—and yet he seeks a wife, not a courtly mistress. He looks forward, not to the excitements of wooing, but to the irritations of married life. If he does not achieve Benedick's charm as a lover, it is because he has no opportunity to express his feelings to a Beatrice who tempers her wit with affection. His Beatrice is a Rosaline determined to remain Lady Disdain.

Although Berowne does not bow to convention, it bothers him that by conventional standards Rosaline is the least attractive of the French ladies. When his secret passion for her is revealed, he labors to prove that her dark complexion is dazzlingly fair, indeed, that only dark is fair, only black is white. No one takes this casuistry seriously, least of all Berowne, who threatens to prove Rosaline fair or talk to doomsday. These heroes are not deceived by their cleverness; no more hyperbolic in their enthusiasms than the usual run of smitten versifiers, they know the difference between verbal extravagance and romantic commitment. Dumaine and Longaville pay fairly conventional tributes to their goddesses, the former in a pretty, garlanded May song, the latter in an earnest sonnet that argues the virtue of breaking his monastic vow. Navarre, attempting a higher metaphysical vein, out-Donnes Donne in elaborating a conceit of a lover's tears. The scene in which the heroes read their love poems aloud does not expose their shallowness of feeling; it frees them from the folly of the ascetic regimen. This is their one brief moment “alone” on stage, their one opportunity to escape or nearly escape the group pattern. It is also one of the few moments in Love's Labor's that is intrinsically dramatic in inspiration, for its comedy of multiple eavesdropping depends on the use of the stage as a place to play hide-and-seek, not simply as a platform for witty exchanges.

The heroes are too fond of each other and too good-humored to resent being spied on or exposed, especially when it allows them to love openly and unabashedly. Berowne summons them to the hunt of love, and as earnestly as he had argued that white is black, he proves that they remain true to themselves by breaking their ascetic vows:

[Let] us once lose our oaths to find ourselves,
Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths.
It is religion to be thus forsworn:
For charity itself fulfills the law,
And who can sever love from charity?

(4.3.358-62)

If this be foolery, it is an honest, forward-looking chop logic that replaces the dusty monasticism of the proposed academy with a neoplatonic credo that is intellectually à la mode;

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.

(4.3.347-50)

The wheel has come half-circle: no longer a distraction and bar to learning, women have become the source of all wisdom.

Where the heroes vie with one another in justifying their true affections, the heroines vie with one another in mocking their suitors, and that mockery is less honest than the love poems they receive. For Rosaline, Maria, and Katherine knew the virtues of their suitors and openly praised them at first; afterward, they dutifully take their cue from the Princess's disdain and strain their wits to make a joke of their wooers. “O, he hath drawn my picture in this letter,” Rosaline says of Berowne's epistle. The Princess asks, “Anything like?”

Ros.
Much in the letters, nothing in the praise.
Prin.
Beauteous as ink—a good conclusion.
Kath.
Fair as a text B in a copy-book.
Ros.
Ware pencils [ho!] let me not die your debtor,
My red dominical, my golden letter:
O that your face were not so full of O's!

(5.2.39-45)

Katherine carries the game a step further by describing Dumaine's poem as

Some thousand verses of a faithful lover.
A huge translation of hypocrisy,
Vildly compiled, profound simplicity.

(5.2.50-53)

Is this plain-hearted candor? Or a brittle slander that is falser than Dumaine's expression of love, and a warning of worse to follow? “We are wise girls,” the Princess says, “to mock our lovers so.” Rosaline adds:

They are worse fools to purchase mockery 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 shape his prodigal wits in bootless rhymes,
And shape his service wholly to my device;
And make him proud to make me proud that jests!
So pair-taunt-like would I o'ersway his state
That he should be my fool and I his fate.

(5.2.59-68)

It is hard to say which is more conventional and artificial: Berowne's poetry or Rosaline's determination to play the “cruel fair.” The Princess applauds her scheme, “None are so surely caught, when they are catched, / As wit turn'd fool.” Portia will express something like this scorn of deliberate fools, but her target is Arragon, whereas Rosaline and the Princess belittle suitors who are like Bassanio.

Let us say the insult of the edict that barred women from the court justifies the heroines' rudeness, and the suddenness with which the heroes turn lovers merits their skepticism. Perhaps this pack of schoolboy wooers, who regard courtship as a May game, deserve the schoolgirl tricks the heroines use to wreck the embassy of love. But then the score is even and some gentler response would seem appropriate. When the chagrined lords return without their vizards, however, the ladies do not relent; they continue to mock the apostasy of their suitors and their Muscovite embassy. Stung by Rosaline's gibes, Berowne confesses the folly of their wooing and declares his love is “sound, sans crack or flaw.” When she responds with another clever thrust, one suspects that she and the Princess have come to enjoy this brittle game. It is not until she learns of her father's death that the Princess responds frankly and directly to the heroes' wooing:

We have receiv'd your letters full of love;
Your favors, the embassadors of love;
And in our maiden council rated them
At courtship, pleasant jest, and courtesy,
As bombast and as lining to the time.

(5.2. 177-81)

Dumaine rightly protests, “Our letters, madam, show'd much more than jest,” and Longaville rightly adds, “So did our looks.”

If Love's Labor's were by Lyly, it could appropriately end with noble reununciations of desire calculated to flatter a virgin queen. Such denials of human nature would sound ludicrous from the lips of Shakespeare's flesh and blood characters, who are so attractive and suited to one another that one anticipates a happy ending despite the play's ominous title. It will only be a matter of time, one assumes, before the ladies of France drop their roles of cruel fair and respond warmly to their deserving suitors. Unfortunately time runs out on the plot and the wooers of Love's Labor's, because the news of the King's death demands the immediate departure of the heroines even while the heroes are still smarting from their recent humiliations. Yet Shakespeare cannot abruptly and arbitrarily conclude his dramatic action by an extrinsic device,⁶ and he cannot leave the romantic issues of his play unresolved, especially since he has created the impression that the heroines are a bit chill in their insistent mockery of their suitors. Even before Navarre and his comrades make their last desperate appeal for love, Shakespeare subtly creates the anticipation that their appeal will be answered. Since the Princess placed the chief obstacle in the path of love, she is the one who must remove it. Her innate gentleness and warmth begin to show when the suitors debate whether to allow the Pageant of Worthies to proceed. Navarre would abort the pageant lest it become another source of humiliation. Berowne would have it go on because it is “some policy / To have one show worse than the King's and his company.” Navarre still says no, but the Princess “begs” to overrule him:

That sport best pleases that doth [least] know how:
Where zeal strives to content, and the contents
Dies in the zeal of that which it presents.
Their form confounded makes most form in mirth,
When great things laboring perish in their birth.

(5.2. 516-20)

This Thesean appreciation of honest amateur efforts contrasts with the readiness of the chagrined heroes to confound the actors of the pageant, while the ladies, all gibes before, are either demurely silent or sweetly sympathetic. Indeed, nothing that the heroines did to unnerve their suitors is quite as bad as the heroes' baiting of defenseless actors who do not deserve this “revenge.” Although Berowne makes a shambles of Costard's presentation of Pompey the Great, the Princess pretends that it has given much pleasure: “Great thanks,” she says, “Great Pompey.” Astonished by Don Armado she asks Berowne, “Doth this man serve God? A’ speaks not like a man of God his making”; yet she is all courtesy to him while the lords hardly permit him to speak. They also join forces to disconcert Nathaniel and Holofernes, who tries to keep to his part but finally justly complains, “This is not generous, not gentle, not humble.” Moved to genuine sympathy the Princess remarks, “Alas, poor Machabeus, how hath he been baited!” By now it is evident that the impulse to belittle is as native to the quick-witted male as to the clever female. Yet Berowne is still unsatisfied and would have Costard/Pompey do battle with Armado/Hector, knowing that Armado's cowardice will make him ridiculous. This “sport” comes uncomfortably close to the “sport” of the comic duel that Sir Toby forces upon Viola and Sir Andrew. Marcade's entrance is welcome despite his sad news because it ends the baiting of the “worthies.”

As if she expected her father to die, the Princess seems to know Marcade's news before he delivers it; now her angry response to Navarre's questioning of her father's word becomes understandable. Despite a heavy heart she greets the news royally, apologizes for the mistreatment of the suitors, and almost admits that she and her women have taken advantage of Navarre's courtesy by overboldness of speech. Now when Navarre makes one last stilted appeal for love, she simply answers, “I understand you not—my griefs are double.” She will not “at the latest minute of the hour” grant her love, but her challenge to Navarre to prove the steadfastness of his love leaves no doubt that she loves in return. Indeed, her insistence on a trial of his devotion expresses the ideality of her view of love and marriage, not a dark suspicion about his truth. She will not plight troth with him now because the time, she thinks, is “too short / To make a world-without-end bargain in.” These words make clear how sacred wedding vows are to her—a commitment that reaches beyond time itself. Now she speaks of Navarre's apostasy as a “dear guiltiness” to be absolved by a year in a “forlorn and naked hermitage.”

If this austere insociable life
Change not your offer made in heat of blood;
If frosts and fasts, hard lodging and thin weeds
Nip not the gaudy blossoms of your love
But that it bear this trial, and last love;
Then at the expiration of the year,
Come challenge me, challenge me by these deserts,
And by this virgin palm now kissing thine,
I will be thine.

(5.2.779-807)

This invitation to love is as warm as that which Juliet extends to Romeo when at the ball she responds to his request for a holy kiss.⁷ She seals with her hand a mutual commitment, for she will endure an equal time of religious retreat in grieving for her father.

After Navarre consents, Katherine and Maria also promise loving answers to their suitors in a year, and though the joy of marriage is to be postponed, the testing of love is in itself a romantic notion, indeed, an echo of the testing of chivalric heroes like Gawain in medieval romances. Desiring to be Rosaline's knight, Berowne asks, “What humble suit attends thy answer there. / Impose some service on me for thy love.” Her reply is harshly different in tone from those of the other heroines, for she would have Berowne, the most reasonable of the lovers, spend his year of penance in visiting “the speechless sick” and conversing

With groaning wretches; and your task shall be,
With all the fierce endeavor of your wit,
To enforce the pained impotent to smile.

(5.2.851-54)

No wonder that Berowne, alone of the suitors, is dismayed by his lady's answer. Rosaline explains her grotesque demand as salutory to weed the wormwood from Berowne's brain and as a remedy “to choke a gibing spirit” and end his idle scorns. Alas, there is more wormwood in Rosaline's gibes than in Berowne's brain.⁸ She enjoys her power over him to the last moment and that is almost too long for a satisfying ending to the play.⁹ This sudden change in the emotional weather of the denouement would leave a sense of bitter impasse were it not for the reappearance of Armado to announce the lyrical debate of the Owl and the Cuckoo.

Although the minor figures of Love's Labor's are often tiresome, one welcomes their presence here because their songs bring the play to an enchanting conclusion. They turn our attention away from the artifices of courtly wooing to the homely facts of life as it is known to farmers, shepherds, dairymen, and their wives, who make their way to church in winter over icy roads. After so many clever exchanges and barbed remarks the good-natured innocence of the debate is doubly welcome.¹⁰ One might think that the Owl's song should come first to symbolize the days of wintry trial that will end with the spring of love's fulfillment. Yet the Cuckoo rightly begins because he is not love's champion but rather a sophisticated lyricist who paints a somewhat enameled portrait of spring, in which flowers paint meadows and Meissenware shepherds pipe on oaten straws. Turtles tread, and so do unromantic rooks and daws; worse still, the Cuckoo has the last words, which are unpleasing to a married ear.

The Owl's song is no dreary account of wintry nights. It is a lilting celebration of the daily round of life in the countryside. Icicles hang by the wall, milk comes frozen in the pails, and roads turn slippery. Who indeed would know better than Nathaniel the curate the futility of preaching when the coughing of the congregation drowns out the sermon? Springtime is the only pretty ring time; winter is the season of domesticity. If love is not time's fool, it will survive long wintry days when noses turn red and hands greasy; and if the lords of Navarre are steadfast, “frosts and fasts, hard lodging and thin weeds” will not nip “the gaudy blossoms” and gaudy expressions of love. The winter of waiting will be the prelude not only to the joy of sexual union but also to years of contentment before the fire.

Although no later comedy is as artificial as Love's Labor's, it was not a sterile experiment in courtly wit. Shakespeare will remember and redeem the fiasco of the pageant of the Worthies in the triumphant performance of “Pyramus and Thisbe” in the last scene of A Dream. The bristling encounters of Navarre and France will be reenacted with more sweetness of humor and meeting of minds in the merry wars of Beatrice and Benedick.¹¹ The writing of Love's Labor's, I imagine, convinced Shakespeare of the need for more energetic plotting in his comedies, but he was not willing to abandon his romantic themes by turning back to the plot devices of Roman comedy. Instead he tried to incorporate the variety and excitement of romantic fabling in Two Gentlemen, one of the very few plays Shakespeare wrote that invites the scorn of critics by asking the audience to laugh at the actors as well as the characters in the final scene.

Notes

1. See Hunter, John Lyly, 315ff.; Mincoff, “Shakespeare and Lyly,” 19ff.

2. Dover Wilson, among others, suggested that Shakespeare was alluding to an Elizabethan coterie of atheism that gained notoriety about 1593 (new Cambridge Shakespeare [Cambridge: At the University Press, 1923], xxviii-xxxiv). A more elaborate topical interpretation appears in Frances A. Yates, A Study of Love's Labour's Lost (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1936).

3. The demand for purity in those who search for the philosopher's stone is parodied in Jonson's The Alchemist.

4. See Barber's illuminating discussion of the treatment of language in the play (Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, 97-109).

5. Compare Romeo's description of Juliet, “she hangs upon the cheek of night / As a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear” (1.5.45-46), with his description of Rosaline, “O she is rich in beauty, only poor / That, when she dies, with beauty dies her store” (1.1.215-16).

6. The denouement of As You Like It also depends on the sudden arrival of a messenger with unexpected news, but the emotional resolution of the play is achieved before the characters learn of the conversion of Duke Frederick to a holy life.

7. The Princess invites Navarre to “come challenge me, challenge me by these deserts, / And by this virgin palm now kissing thine, / I will be thine (5.2.805-7). Juliet uses the same metaphor in sweetly putting off Romeo's desire for a kiss: “For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch, / And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss” (1.5.99-100).

8. Those who would justify the harshness of Rosaline's treatment of Berowne speak of his need for further chastening. Nevo, for example, says that he is still caught “in his web of self-regarding rhetoric” (Comic Transformations, 89).

9. Philip Edwards thinks the ending of Love's Labor's is flawed; see Shakespeare and the Confines of Art (London: Methuen, 1968), 47-48. Mincoff thinks that the abruptness of the ending almost suggests that Shakespeare “had suddenly lost patience with the very convention [of Lylyan love comedy] he had been exploiting” (“Shapespeare and Lyly,” 19-20. An opposing view appears in B. Roesen (Anne Barton), “Love's Labor's Lost,” Shakespeare Quarterly 4 (1953): 411-26, but her attempt to see the last act as a scene of lengthening shadows and increasing premonition of death seems to me unconvincing.

10. If, as Dover Wilson has suggested, the final lyric debate was added to the text in the revision and amplification of the play that preceded the 1598 Quarto, then it is quite possible that Shakespeare added the songs to round off a dramatic action that he recognized as lacking in emotional resolution. See Wilson, new Cambridge Shakespeare ed., 184.

11. It is puzzling to me that Barber omits Much Ado from his study of Shakespeare's festive comedies even though it has close affinities of plot structure with Love's Labor's and, indeed, has more festive occasions and observances than Love's Labor's. The festive spirit of the comedies, which Barber so cogently describes, does not depend on the dramatic use of holiday occasions and observances. There are, for example, more festive celebrations and game playing in The Shrew than in Love's Labor's, but Barber rightly omits The Shrew from his study of festive comedies because its “festive” occasions are moments of humiliation and subjugation.