SOURCE: “Navarre's World of Words,” in Comic Transformations in Shakespeare, Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1980, pp. 69-95.

[In the essay below, Nevo contends that the transformative power of language is central to Love's Labour's Lost. She examines the significance of the play's ending, seeing the work as transitional among the comedies.]

‘The distinctive human problem’, says Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death, ‘has been the need to spiritualize human life, to lift it onto a special immortal plane, beyond the cycles of life and death that characterize all other organisms.’¹ His words would have been heartily endorsed by Shakespeare's King of Navarre. But Navarre and his bookmen are not content with declarative statements of general import. ‘Our late edict shall strongly stand in force’, says the King. ‘Navarre shall be the wonder of the world; / Our court shall be a little academe, / Still and contemplative in living art’ (I. i. 11-14). ‘Still and contemplative’, but with a wary eye upon that most flattering of the great humanist motivations:

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' endeavor of this present breath may buy
That honor which shall bate his scythe's keen edge,
And make us heirs of all eternity.

(I. i. 1-7)

In these first words both the King's project ‘to live laborious days’ and his characteristic habit of mind are succinctly conveyed. Present rewards will be renounced so that future gains—immortal increments—be ensured. But the particular appeal the project has for the King is rendered in a euphuistic figure called by Renaissance rhetoricians Polyptoton: ‘When ye turn and tranlace a word into many sundry shapes, as the Tailor doth his garment, and after that sort display with him in your dittie’.² Peacham's explanatory image of sartorial display throws no inconsiderable light, as we shall see, upon Love's Labour's Lost. Such a figure is ‘And then grace us in the disgrace of death’, or ‘Your oath is pass'd to pass away from these’ (I. i. 49). It is a favourite of the King's and, to anticipate, one of the play's most effective moments occurs when the King's favourite figure conspicuously lets him down. Mercade has delivered his news, the bereaved Princess is bidding Navarre farewell. The King's speech is a mélange of embarrassment and awkwardness: ‘The extreme parts of time extremely forms / All causes to the purpose of his speed, …’ (V. ii. 740-1), to which the Princess replies simply (and significantly) ‘I understand you not, my griefs are double’ (V. ii. 752), and it takes the dexterous Berowne to attempt reclamation:

Honest plain words best pierce the ear of grief,
And by these badges understand the King.

(V. ii. 753-4)

But this later on.

At the outset Longaville and Dumain, enthusiastic warriors against their own affections and the huge army of the world's desires, yearn to banquet the mind, not the body, to die to love, wealth, pomp. In this they are unlike the practical Costard, who hopes, if he has to fast, to do it on a full stomach. He is foil to the King and his entourage who dream of a spiritualized world of words. The fame they seek is itself a linguistic phenomenon—words engraved to all eternity upon the graves which hold mere mortal remains. The King and his bookmen we perceive, are compulsive not only about the performatives—edicts and oaths and vows—but also about the whole immense array of rhetorical schemes and tropes with which—in which—they delight to disport themselves. For the King even a signature (by way of a zeugma) has illocutionary force:

and now subscribe your names,
That his own hand may strike his honor down
That violates the smallest branch herein.

(I. i. 19-21)

But he does not sufficiently reckon with the presence of a fifth column within his own ranks. The courtiers' heroic enterprise is challenged by the sceptical odd man out in the fraternity. To live and study three years with the King, yes, says Berowne. But there are those ancillary observances which he hopes are not enrolled—‘not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep’. ‘I swore in jest’, he protests, welshing; and equivocates shamelessly. He will swear to study things ‘hid and barred from common sense’—a description of study's arcane and godlike recompense that he has extracted from the King—but only if somewhat differently defined: where to dine well, meet a fine mistress, how to break oaths and get away with it (I. i. ff.). He rises to a vehement eloquence in defence of his pragmatism:

Study me how to please the eye indeed
By fixing it upon a fairer eye,
Who dazzling so, that eye shall be his heed,
And give him light that it was blinded by.
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.
These earthly godfathers of heaven's lights,
That give a name to every fixed star,
Have no more profit of their shining nights
Than those that walk and wot not what they are.

(I. i. 80-91)

So forceful indeed is this pragmatical view that the King resorts to his favourite figure with some unwilling envy: ‘How well he's read, to reason against reading’, and is echoed faithfully and parisonically by his acolytes: ‘Proceeded well, to stop all good proceeding’; and ‘He weeds the corn and still lets grow the weeding’. Berowne parries ironically with suitably similar form and unsuitably dissimilar matter: ‘The spring is near when green geese are a-breeding’, and Dumaine falls into the trap. ‘How follows that?’ he asks. Berowne rubs in the green geese part with ‘Fit in his place and time’, and Dumaine's clumsily defensive, ‘In reason nothing’ gives Berowne the opportunity for a scoffing riposte: ‘Something then in rhyme’. The King, intent upon his beloved scheme, joins in with acerbity: ‘Berowne is like an envious sneaping frost / That bites the first-born infants of the spring’, and Berowne nimbly picks up the cue and turns it to his own advantage with a pointed reference to the unseasonability of the King's desire to study.

Sets of wit, a stylized power game, have been standard fare in courtly comedy since Lyly, with a word or figure tossed back and forth between players who gain points with each shift of meaning or extension of meaning. Nor was an interest in the powers, effects and devices of rhetoric confined to Navarre in the sixteenth century. The point is rather that in Love's Labour's Lost Shakespeare has created laboratory conditions, so to speak, for comic enquiry concerning the way of a man with a word.

As everyone will remember, the academicians, intent upon their monastic vows, overlook in their enthusiasm certain ambassadorial functions which the management of the Kingdom of Navarre continues inconveniently to demand. Therefore all that the play requires for their discomfiture is the arrival of a bevy of charming ladies on embassy from France. The solemn oaths are put to the instant test, they crumble at a touch, the bookmen come out in a rash of sonnets, and a number of low attempts are made on the part of each in turn to break his oath without his companions knowing of his treachery.

What is lacking at the outset of this comedy—what the King seeks—is plainly stated:

Navarre shall be the wonder of the world;
Our court shall be a little academe,
Still and contemplative in living art.

(I. i. 12-14)

It is the secret of this ‘living art’ which is wanting. And the oxymoron (life/art) makes it clear that the prescription is not to be easily found, even if we could suppose its seekers to be endowed with a greater degree of common sense and more sense of proportion than the courtiers of Navarre. More specifically, however, the comic disposition in Navarre might well be described as the tendency to take oneself too seriously or not seriously enough, or both, at unseasonable times and places; and the cardinal error which the comedy explores, exposes, exacerbates and proposes to remedy is the conviction that the world is made of words.

That the loss of her tongue (Longaville's ingenious penalty clause) will be the fate that awaits a lady daring to come within a mile of the court is a comic exposure of the company's besetting obsession. That the lady could lose nothing more important is a chief tenet in their communal creed; but that she would be ‘frighted hence’ by only hearing of that dread penalty is not only evidence of a truly remarkable faith in verbal power, but a ‘dangerous law against gentility’ as Berowne (of course) is quick to point out. The King describes Armado, who will amuse them, as a man that hath a mint of phrases in his brain:

One who the music of his own vain tongue
Doth ravish like enchanting harmony;

(I. i. 166-7)

But by the time we hear this, we find that the description cuts neatly both ways, applying with equal validity to the designator and the nominee.

Ironic Berowne, accomplished rhetorician, sceptical libertine, pragmatical sophist and (but the matter is, as we shall see, in doubt) lover, is the chief vessel of the play's enquiry. He agrees to take the oath, it will be recalled, precisely at the moment when the Princess has arrived, and ‘not to see ladies’ is already a broken article. ‘Necessity will make us all forsworn’ he announces cheerfully, knowing even before Jaquenetta and Costard produce incontrovertible evidence, that

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

(I. i. 151-2)

But, though he speaks for ‘barbarism’, he is too convivial to renounce the collective pursuit of ‘angel knowledge’, and is moreover complacently assured that

If I break faith, this word shall speak for me:
I am forsworn ‘on mere necessity’.

(I. i. 153-4)

To this debonair young man life is a language game he is confident he can win. It is therefore cunningly consonant with the play's theme that crossed letters constitute the comic device which punctures conceit and reveals truths, exposing at once the deception practised by both Berowne and his comic double, Armado.

The originality of Love's Labour's Lost lies in the transformation of the slippery power of language into the dialectical comic theme itself. Word-play and wit-work, jest and earnest, reciprocally test, define and illuminate each other during the comic progress of the play, itself an extravagant display of verbal exuberance; and it is the learned fools, Armado and Holofernes, who direct our perception to this. They owe their origin no doubt to the unprecedented language explosion of the Elizabethan period. But their functionality in the play is surely an inspiration on Shakespeare's part. Middle class, and transparent in their motivations, they are preposterous, hyperbolic imitations of the courtiers, grotesque mirror images of the heroic furor of arms and arts. The hierarchy of comic resemblance, in earlier plays limited to master and servant, acquires through them a further layer, and a new middle-level possibility is opened up. The result is a master-piece of indirect analogy. The social scene of the play is also extended in range in this way, but chiefly their effect is that of parody.

They, too, the preposterous pair, do things with words,³ rather more prosaic and mundane things, perhaps, but of a revealingly similar kind. They jockey for positions, fantasize, outbid, outwit, compete. The degree to which Armado's peacock display of finery in the shape of flowers of rhetoric is a form of conspicuous consumption—the only kind he can afford, it transpires—is glaringly evident, but Holofernes' ecstasy of schoolmastering is also something of a paying proposition if the adulation of Sir Nathaniel is any indication: ‘And thank you too; for society, saith the text, is the happiness of life’ (IV. ii. 161-2). Thus Nathaniel unctuously accepts Holofernes' invitation to a free dinner, supplied by a pupil's father in return for an exhibition of literary critical skills: Holofernes will prove Berowne's verses to be very ‘unlearned, neither savoring of poetry, wit, nor invention’ (IV. ii. 160). They dined well, if post-prandial conviviality is any indication.

The beauty of Shakespeare's invention is that these unconscious parodists, playing their language games transparently for prizes and praises, and to be ‘singuled from the barbarous’ (V. i. 81-2), use every known and conceivable vice of language recognized in the rhetoric books of the day. The aberrations of language of these fops thus parallels the aberration of mind of the courtiers. In them the verbal dandyism of Navarre is, metaphorically, substantiated. For them words are ‘most dainty epithets’ to be mouthed and tasted and eaten, too, as if words and their powers were the basic stuff of life. If it is a case of the courtiers feasting their minds, these underlings are busy minding the feast, and the inverted caricature is mirrored in the comic catachreses of the play's language itself. ‘They have been at a great feast of languages, and stol'n the scraps’, observes the diminutive Moth, receiving for his pains Costard's retort to the effect that his master might well have eaten him for a word. But he agrees, nevertheless: ‘they have liv'd long on the alms-basket of words' (V. i. 36); while the toady Nathaniel outdoes him in a denigratory apology for poor Dull: ‘Sir, he hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book; / He hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink; his intellect is not replenished’ (IV. ii. 24-6). Berowne joins the chorus when he says of Boyet, ‘This fellow pecks up wit as pigeons pease’ (V. ii. 315) and cheeky, lively Moth provides an offbeat counterpoint in his advice to Armado on the conduct of his amorous affairs: ‘sigh a note and sing a note, sometime through the throat, [as] if you swallow'd love with singing love, sometime through [the] nose, as if you snuff'd up love by smelling love; …’ (III. i. 13-17).

Bomphiologia (it is our loss to have allowed this particular inkhorn term to lapse into antiquity) is Armado's characteristic vice. It was, according to Peacham, an inflation of both words and matter

when trifling matters be set out with semblaunt and blazing wordes, used of none but of such as be eyther smell-feasts, and Parasites, which mayntayne their good cheere with counterfeyted prayses, or of great bosters and craking souldyours, as of Thraso in Terence, and such lyke persons in Comodyes.⁴

But he is also not innocent of Soraismus, the mingle-mangle, or mixture of tongues: ‘but we will put it (as they say) to fortuna della [guerra]’ (V. ii. 530). These were recognized vices, and make their users butts for the mocking amusement of the courtiers. But there are other recognized vices—Solecisms, Tapinoses, and general breakings of Priscian's head which the pedant is quick to notice in lesser mortals like Costard and Dull, thus producing a double quota of comic pleasure for the audience.

The comicality of the learned clowns' ‘maggot ostentation’ is further augmented by the marvellous complacency with which they display their bombast, their pomposity, their self-conceit and their affected foppery. Their capacity for self-congratulation is practically unlimited. ‘This is a gift that I have’, says Holofernes modestly, ‘simple; simple, a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions. … But the gift is good in those [in] whom it is acute, and I am thankful for it’ (IV. ii. 65-72). Self-congratulation also takes the form of a capacity to bask in reflected light, however delusive. One of the engaging things about them is the prodigality of their praise for their partners' witty sallies. Except for the one occasion when Armado becomes inexplicably incensed about an eel, he has nothing but praise for the felicities of his tender juvenal, though that ingenious and well-educated infant is very far from invariably on his master's side. Nathaniel is perpetually thanking God for the profundities of Holofernes' learning, his singular choice epithets, his sharp and sententious reasons, his fund of elegancies, and in general the profit accruing to any commonwealth fortunate enough to count him among its pedagogues. Moth and Armado, Nathaniel and Holofernes constitute indeed a pair of mutual admiration societies, highly competitive and volubly critical of each other, mind you, though Armado does succeed in extracting a compliment from Holofernes for his ‘posteriors of the day’: ‘The posterior of the day, most generous sir, is liable, congruent, and measurable for the afternoon. The word is well cull'd, chose, sweet and apt, I do assure you, sir, I do assure’ (V. i. 91-4). They exist in a narcissitic glow produced, one feels, by no more than the sheer profusion of self-enhancing, self-gratifying euphoric speech acts. And in this way the vices of rhetoric parody the vice of Rhetoric. In its mimesis of linguistic absurdities, obsessions, compulsions and self-fulfilling delusions, the play is itself a superb linguistic jeu d'esprit.

At the base of the pyramid are the fools proper. And they, too, function in complex ways both as parodies and foils. The outer limits of Navarre's language territory are defined by Dull, who is for the most part completely out of his depth. Like the later Verges, he ‘reprehends’ the Duke's own person (I. i. 183), clings doggedly to his old grey doe (IV. ii. 12ff.) as the one familiar landmark in the mists of Holofernes' Latinity, and is apologized for by Nathaniel as one who has never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book. Costard, on the other hand, though an unlettered and small-knowing soul in Armado's opinion (I. i. 250) is, in his own modest and plebeian fashion also something of a wit. Costard is a stage in the ramification of Shakespeare's impenetrable wise fool from, first, the undifferentiated Dromio twins, and then the clever / foolish split pair, Speed and Launce. In this new compound of Buffoon and Eiron—an achievement in ironic duplicity—it is as often as not impossible to distinguish between ingenuous naive foolishness and deadpan ironic fooling. Shrewd and unlearned, these are figures through whom mockery pointedly turns around upon the learned (and in this case the mock-learned as well), who show up as impostors against these ingénu ironists. Costard exposes humbug or affectation at both the social levels superior to him in the play. In a play of heroes he is a cock-eyed anti-hero, a faint foreshadowing of Puntila's hired man.⁵ The linguistic appurtenances of learning as well as the ascetic platonism of the courtiers, come apart under his invincible literal-mindedness. He was taken with Jaquenetta he announces under questioning, ‘in manner and form following: he was seen with her in the manor-house, sitting with her upon the form, and taken following her into the park’ (I. i. 205). He is the play's paradoxical life-line between words and things, testing the value of ‘renumerations’ and ‘guerdons’ in solid sterling, and confident, through a barrage of verbal equivocations, that the maid, without benefit of inverted commas, will serve his turn. He is a life-line to reality, but for the audience, not the court. For the court of Navarre, too, is a mutual admiration society, securely fenced about, hermetically sealed from the least breath of reality by the bewitching power of language to delude with its figments of power.

The Princess (first cousin to Portia), has been pedagogue to princes from the start, putting them firmly and properly in their place. ‘“Fair” I give you back again, and “welcome” I have not yet’, she replies to the King's greeting. ‘The roof of this court is too high to be yours, and welcome to the wide fields too base to be mine’ (II. i. 91-4). ‘’Tis deadly sin to keep that oath, my Lord, / And sin to break it’ (II. i. 105-6). She is morally disapproving of hard riders (IV. i. 1-4) and clearly a member of the anti-blood-sport league (IV. i. 24-35). She primly checks Boyet's flattery:

Good Lord Boyet, my beauty, though but mean,
Needs not the painted flourish of your praise:

(II. i. 13-14)

and keeps her girls in order too, adjuring them to keep their powder dry and reserve their ‘sets of wit’, at which they excell no less than the men, for the real battle to come. Boyet, the ladies' man, who is nearly as foppish as the Nemean lion himself, though less preposterous—Monsieur the Nice, as Berowne calls him, ‘that kiss'd his hand away in courtesy’ (it is a marvellous pantomimic portrait, V. ii. 315-34) provides her throughout with someone to rap over the verbal knuckles. ‘Speak to be understood’, she scolds, in reply to a very spruce flourish of his about blowing roses (V. ii. 294). He speaks perhaps with some personal ruefulness when he says ‘The tongues of mocking wenches are as keen / As is the razor's edge invisible’ (V. ii. 256-7), but for the most part the ladies' didactic efforts are directed satirically against the ‘breed of wits so wondered at’ of Navarre. On this topic even the decorous Princess becomes jocular.

As well she might, for the comic reversal undoes not only the courtiers' oaths, but their cherished self-images as well—at all events, Berowne's. Hence his fury at his fall. The vexation of his confession in Act III, scene i, reveals the degree to which his own self-complacent self-image—the detached, amused Ovidian libertine—has been impaired, and his own vanity affected:

O, 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 …

(III. i. 174-7)

He is undone on three counts: himself in love, forsworn, and, which is worst of all, in love with the ‘worst of all’: a whitely wanton with a velvet brow and two pitch balls stuck in her face for eyes. The wounding of social vanity adds a spice to the humiliation of his plight, though his rhetorical virtuosity will rise undaunted to the challenge later on. But worse is to come. Berowne is toppled from his perch—we hear him complain of this again in Act IV, scene iii: ‘The King he is hunting the deer: I am coursing myself. They have pitch'd a toil: I am toiling in a pitch—pitch that defiles … I will not love; if I do, hang me; i'faith I will not. O but her eye …’ But so far only for the audiences' delectation. He has not yet been made a fixed figure for the time of scorn to point his slow and moving finger at. This overthrow occurs during the eavesdropping scene and he brings it upon himself. Unable to resist the temptation to recoup his own losses at his companions' expense, he caps the King's hypocrisy with his own:

I that am honest, I that hold it sin
To break the vow I am engaged in.
I am betrayed by keeping company
With men like [you], men of inconstancy.
When shall you see me write a thing in rhyme,
Or groan for Joan, or spend a minute's time
In pruning me? When shall you hear that I
Will praise a hand, a foot, a face, an eye
A gait, a state, a brow, a breast, a waist,
A leg, a limb—

(IV. iii. 175-84)

and is undone before all eyes at the height of his tirade of mock righteous indignation by the arrival of the incriminating letter.

There is still more, however, to the undoing of Berowne. Even when all four woodcocks are caught in this dish and Berowne has invoked his naturalist doctrine of young blood in their defence:

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.
We cannot cross the cause why we were born;
Therefore of all hands must we be forsworn.

(IV. iii. 210-15)

‘What’, says the King, who is a little slow on the uptake, ‘did these rent lines show some love of thine?’

Did they, quoth you? Who sees the heavenly Rosaline,
That (like a rude and savage man of Inde),
At the first op'ning of the gorgeous east,
Bows not his vassal head, and strooken blind,
Kisses the base ground with obedient breast?
What peremptory eagle-sighted eye
Dares look upon the heaven of her brow,
That is not blinded by her majesty?

(IV. iii. 217-24)

And this, the audience at least will remember, was the contemptuous dismisser just so many moments before, of Longaville's ‘liver-vein, which makes flesh a deity, / A green goose a goddess; pure, pure [idolatry]’ (IV. iii. 72-3).

Now Berowne must play a match of wit in defence of his dark beauty against the calumnies of gentlemen who prefer blondes, and don't mind punishing him for his attempt to deceive them. ‘Fie, painted rhetoric’, says Berowne grandiloquently dismissing the Queen of Arts as he marches from paradox to hyperbole, to anaphora, to antimetabole, these moves dissolving into under-graduate ribaldry, and the King's appeal to Berowne to extricate them from the trap of their broken vows. Most critics have taken the view that the oration of Berowne's which follows is perfectly serious. It is, says Traversi, an ‘apotheosis of love and one of the most impressive utterances of the play’:⁶ Berowne has seen the light. We have heard him inveigh against mere booklearning, ‘leaden contemplation’, before, but now the erstwhile philanderer is outdoing the platonist and in the vein of Diotima herself, deriving from womens' eyes the doctrine of the true Promethean fire:

They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That shown, contain, and nourish all the world.

(IV. iii. 349-50)

He is a changed man, it is felt, and the verve and vivacity of the verse surely proves it. ‘In a world of words’, says C. L. Barber, ‘the wine is wit’,⁷ and he very aptly compares Berowne's witty panegyric on love to Falstaff's on sack:

But love, first learned in a lady's eyes,
Lives not alone immured in the brain,
But with the motion of all elements,
Courses as swift as thought in every power,
And gives to every power a double power,
Above their functions and their offices.
It adds a precious seeing to the eye:
A lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind.
A lover's ear will hear the lowest sound,
When the suspicious head of theft is stopp'd.
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 valor, is not Love a Hercules,
Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?

(IV. iii. 324-38)

This is excellent, and the exhilaration experienced by the courtiers at this festive and joyous release from their bond is graphically described later by Boyet:

One rubb'd his elbow thus, and fleer'd, and swore
A better speech was never spoke before.
Another, with his finger and his thumb,
Cried, ‘Via! we will do't,
come what will come’.
The third he caper'd, and cried, ‘All goes well’.
The fourth turn'd on the toe, and down he fell.
With that they all did tumble on the ground,
With such a zealous laughter …

(V. ii. 109-16)

But doubts do creep in. First of all, one remembers the nature of the assignment: to prove ‘Our loving lawful and our faith not torn’; to produce ‘quillets … to cheat the devil’. That Berowne can perform such feats with sprezzatura is his charm, but does that make the tongue-in-cheek mock seriousness less so? Is there not for the alert the hint of an erotic double entendre in ‘tender horns’ and in ‘love's tongue’? The flicker of a parody of the mighty Marlovian line in those Hesperidean trees? And if, when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods make heaven drowsy with the harmony, what are we to make of the earlier (but not all that much earlier) doctrine of the German clock?

A woman, that is like a German [clock],
Still a-repairing, ever out of frame,
And never going aright, being a watch,
But being watch'd that it may still go right!
Ay, and, by heaven, one that will do the deed
Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard.

(III. i. 190-3; 198-9)

It is religious to be thus forsworn, is Berowne's climax:

For charity itself fulfills the law,
And who can sever love from charity?

(IV. iii. 361-2)

They asked for a salve for perjury. They are certainly getting it.

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

(IV. iii. 358-9)

It is without a doubt a forensic tour de force. The oath has been undone, perjury justified, faces saved, at least to their owners' satisfaction. But is it ‘serious’? The King's salute, ‘Saint Cupid, then’ suggests that he at least is not taken in by the mock piety of the peroration. And Berowne's final words would seem to indicate a residue (at least) of his old cynic's pragmatism:

[Allons! allons!] Sow'd cockle reap'd no corn,
And justice always whirls in equal measure:
Light wenches may prove plagues to men forsworn;
If so, our copper buys no better treasure.

(IV. iii. 382-3)

It is a puzzle. ‘Berowne’, observes Muriel Bradbrook, ‘plays a double game with language throughout … he runs with the hare and hunts with the hounds’.⁸ ‘Berowne calls a game a game’, Barber replies. ‘He plays the game and he calls it too … in the classic manner of Erasmus in his Praise of Folly; it becomes folly not to be a fool’.⁹

Traversi's view (quoted above) of the seriousness of Berowne suggests itself, I submit, as persuasively as it does, and is able to modify the sceptical view as much as it does, not because of what actually occurs in the play but because of what we expect to occur. We expect marriages. Betrothals, at least. We expect the closure of comedy to resolve our doubts (if any) and to assure us that whatever jeux d'esprits Berowne's virtuosity dictates, whatever high-spirited young wit's posturing remains in evidence, his heart is in the right place, and his lady knows it. Since we do not get this assurance, we are plunged into doubt and all his utterances become ambiguous.

Although in his heart of hearts he [Berowne] knows that love gives to every power a double power … yet when we part from him we doubt much that this voice will echo in his soul throughout his year of penance. His fertile wit will devise many a mean to stifle it should his task to move wild laughter in the throat of death prove too irksome. His present love's labour will be lost, and Jack will never have his Jill.¹⁰

It is not a remark the writer would have made of Benedick, who shares with Berowne what we might call his Confirmed Bachelor Syndrome, but who inhabits a comedy which forecloses options and closes mouths with a kiss.

The pull towards the regulation comedy game ending is very strong, not only because we bring generic expectations with us to our reading, but because the play does nothing to disturb those expectations until the very end.

The ‘little academe’ has been turned upside down into a school for lovers, and now all seems set fair for a fiesta of collective betrothals. And nothing in the sentiments of either of the two parties would seem to preclude this. There is evidence in plenty, and in rhyme, of the state of the courtiers' affections, while the ladies do not appear to have been exactly indifferent to the charms of the bookmen from the very beginning. All these gallants are held, in the opinion of the French young ladies at all events, to be great wits. Maria knows that Longaville is esteemed a man of sovereign parts (II. i. 44); Katharine thinks that Dumain ‘hath wit to make an ill shape good’, supposing he were by any chance in need of such amelioration (II. i. 59). And Rosaline never spent an hour's talk with a merrier man than Berowne, whose discourse positively ravishes young and old alike (II. i. 68-76). The chorus of praise is such as to cause the Princess to exclaim ‘God bless my ladies: are they all in love?’, and the conditions they set at the end of the play can be regarded as no more than the delay of a betrothal willingly anticipated.

Thematically, the ending of Love's Labour's Lost can be accommodated, or found to be intelligible, justifiable and appropriate. The young men have perjured themselves, have been vain and frivolous, must learn responsibility, humility. There must be tests and assurances for ‘world-without-end bargains’—a neat reversal of the King's importunate dedication to the eternity of fame. The play ends as it began with vows, but they are now—particularly the undertaking to ‘move wild laughter in the throat of death’—another neat reversal: of the King's initial dream of a ‘living art’.

The ladies' realism has shown fantasy its limits, and mortal finitude has tapped immortal longings ironically upon the shoulder. These themes have been intimated throughout, are meshed into the semantic web of the text, and capped by the seasonal songs. Whenever descriptions of nature are added epilogue fashion, they will generate, by way of metaphor or metonymy, a sense of thematic continuity. For example: the ‘songs offer us a vision of true pastoral to contrast with the false pastoralism Berowne and his friends had espoused earlier’.¹¹ Great creating Nature (Jaquenetta two months gone), time and the seasons ridicule the pretensions and presumptions to transcendence of carnal and finite creatures. Greasy Joan keeling the pot (with real apples or milk in it) counterpoints the dainties that are bred in books.

The play is indeed obedient to its complex dialectic of nature and art, reality and illusion, jest and earnest, time and eternity. But Armado's scenario for an imperially amorous career reminds us that action as well as dialectic is required. From that learned artsman's epistle to Jaquenetta we learn that

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; [say], two; [overcome], 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. The conclusion is victory; on whose side? the [king's]. The captive is enrich'd; on whose side? the beggar's. The catastrophe is a nuptial; …

(IV. i. 64-77)

But the catastrophe of Love's Labour's Lost is not a nuptial. There is delay. And it is no mere postponement for a mourning period. There are conditions, and very testing conditions at that. Nothing surely would have been simpler than to have the Princess's father arrive on some pretext connected with the Aquitaine treaty, and to have found some suitable formula which would have allowed the very attractive and eligible suitor for his daughter's hand to be forgiven ‘the dear guiltiness’ of his perjury. Replication would then look after the affairs of the other three couples and appropriate betrothal celebrations would close the play. The seasonal songs which are the play's epilogue would then, I suggest, truly and resonantly celebrate an interlocking of contraries, an achieved simplicity, domesticity, equilibrium and natural harmony (despite the touch of ironic realism for married men). As it is, only special pleading for a generalized lyrical—rather than a particularized dramatic—embodiment of comic resolution affords then this status. Why, we must be tempted to reflect, does the play end in this way? It is a breach of (theatrical) promise which seriously disrupts, or challenges, our retrospective reconstructions of the play's coherence. Despite thematic continuities, the play is fractured. If it is as G. B. Harrison claims, a case of ‘Cupid's Revenge’¹² we have been watching, in which the young men, having turned their backs upon the ‘wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy’ (III. i. 179) are promptly brought to heel, and taken down a peg or two in the pride of their imagined imperviousness, then the extra penance is surely superfluous. And what have hospitals and almshouses and hermitages to do with the traditional and legitimate concerns of the little blind Eros? This comedy ‘denies itself and refuses to behave’ as Philip Edwards puts it: ‘The mating quest ends not with triumphant wedding music, but with a disconsolate group of lovers dismissed to a wintry twelve-month in hermitage or hospital’.¹³ If it is, however, the Abasement of the Proud King, or Heroic Raptures Transprosed, then love's labour was not, surely, lost, because love, in this model, is purely instrumental, a didactic means for the acquisition of sobriety and humility.¹⁴ If again love is, and deservedly, lost, so that the play becomes a derisive satire against the frivolous courtiers, what of the princess' young ladies, if not the cool princess herself, who admits to ‘double grief’ at the news of her father's death and the parting from Navarre? And if, on the other hand, it is their love's labour that is ‘lost’, it is surely strange that it should be by their own doing, and right doing at that.

The most impressive attempt to reconcile the ending of Love's Labour's Lost with a consistent theory of comedy is that of C. L. Barber in his admirable Shakespeare's Festive Comedy. No play of Shakespeare's is more packed with references to games, sports, pastimes, revels, masques—the whole slight plot hinges upon the entertainment, with suitable festivities, of the visiting ladies, and the commissioning of a ‘delightful ostentation, or show, or pageant, or antic or firework, or … suchlike eruptions and breakings out of mirth’ to make amends to the ladies for previous breaches of hospitality and for the abortive masque of Muscovites. Since, nevertheless, Carnival is abruptly transformed into Lent at the end, the play would seem to provide a test case for the festive theory, of which, were the ending otherwise, it would be natural to suppose it no less than a paradigm.

That the play should end without the usual marriages, is exactly right, in view of what it is that is released by its festivities—the folly of amorous masquerade … of acting love and talking love without being in love. … The game of witty wooing seemed to be love: now comes clarification … Berowne's last line (‘That's too long for a play’) recognises explicitly that to have brought these people from these festivities to the full fledged event of marriage would have required a whole new development.¹⁵

But this will surely not do. For if non-marriage is ‘exactly right’ here, how can marriages be exactly right elsewhere? Why does this particular folly require more of ‘a whole new development’ than the various other follies and delusions that are exhibited in other comedies? It might be sobering to reflect how much time Demetrius and Helena could be conceived to need for the ‘full-fledged event of marriage’, not to mention Proteus and Julia or, for the matter of that Olivia and Sebastian. The argument is untenable, as reversing it at once makes clear. Had Love's Labour's Lost ended with marriages not one accepted statement of the play's thematic import would have required alteration. The marriages would simply have set the seal of certainty upon the reformation and illumination, in terms of nature, reality and seriousness, of Navarre's young men. What the absence of marriages does is to leave the comedy radically unfinished. I believe, for reasons that I shall presently come to, that it is better to recognize this than to attempt to cover up for it.

It is in the nature of open forms to approach a state of infinite non-finality or non-resolution. There is, precisely, no closure, and therefore counter and incompatible possibilities traverse the events of the play retrospectively like magnets across a board of iron filings. Take for example, the little problem of Armado's expiatory three years behind the plough for Jaquenetta's sweet love. Jaquenetta is two months pregnant so she is hardly in a position to expect knightly courtship of this length. Is there some strange foreshadowing here of Quixote, whose love for Dulcinea was a total figment of his imagination? This in itself is a fascinating thought, since Armado precedes his fictive countryman by at least a decade; but what light does it reflect upon the ladies'devoted suitors and their expiatory vows? Since the issue of the latter is inconclusive, we cannot preclude the possibility of irony, which generates further irony, the process going so far (in these degenerate and cynical times) as to cause a recent critic's suggestion that we should understand Costard to be taking the opportunity of fathering his bastard upon the gullible Don. Armado's extravagant nonsense would have functioned simply as foil for the courtier's achieved wisdom had betrothals closed the play. As it is, the ending makes it not only impossible to fathom Armado's cloudy depths, but also to decide the major issues of the play: whether the young men are to be understood as being genuinely in love with the ladies, or in love only with themselves; whether their rash of sonneteering is to be regarded as the symptom of their malady, or as the beginning of their cure.

‘We are wise girls to mock our lovers so’, says the Princess, as they prepare to tease the masked Russians; ‘They do it but in mockery merriment’. (V. ii. 58, 139) and clearly require chastening. The fooling of the Muscovites is perhaps just what is required for homeopathic therapy—‘sport by sport o'erthrown’—the perfect remedy, indeed, for wordy intoxications.

Moreover, the pageant of the Nine Worthies, the King's amendment for his previous breach of hospitality, though it does not ‘fadge’ quite as was intended, could be seen, by dramatic indirections to the audience, admirably to serve such remedial purposes. For the performances of the Nine Worthies, who are engaged to perform, are in fervent earnest, while their play audience jests unmercifully at their expense. Only the ladies are compassionate: ‘Alas, poor Machabeus, how hath he been baited!’ (V. ii. 631). What the lord's baiting reveals behind the travesty of a pageant and the breakdown of language is the native reality of the performer. It is the real Costard we hear modestly confessing to ‘a little fault in “Great”’, and rushing at once to the castigation and defence of ‘the world's commander’, and it is the real Nathaniel we are invited to recognize in his defence of the crest-fallen Alexander:

There an't shall please you, a foolish mild man, an honest man, look you, and soon dash'd. He is a marvellous good neighbor, faith, and a very good bowler; but for Alisander—alas, you see how 'tis—a little o'erparted.

(V. ii. 580-4)

The real Armado, who can afford nothing but woollens beneath his fancy attire, makes a forlorn but dogged attempt to pass it off: ‘I go woolward for penance’ (V. ii. 711). While the real Holofernes, savaged by the picador courtiers, acquires dignity in protest: ‘This is not generous, not gentle, not humble’ (V. ii. 629).

A jest's prosperity lies in the ear
Of him that hears it, never in the tongue
Of him that makes it.

(V. ii. 861-3)

A jest, as well as an oath we are invited to perceive, and so surely are the courtiers invited to perceive, should be taken very seriously indeed.

If this is so, then Berowne's repudiation of maggot ostentation, his renunciation of ‘taffata phrases, silken terms precise’ in favour of ‘russet yeas and honest kersey noes’ (V. ii. 413) would appear to be a genuine recognition, and his love for the wench ‘sound, sans crack or flaw’ (V. ii. 415). Ah, but there is the fatal giveaway—‘sans’, and Rosaline catches him in the act. Does this suggest that he is putting off affected finery but only for another garb? That he has struck one linguistic posture after another on the question of love and is still caught in his web of self-regarding rhetoric? Or is it no more than ‘a trick of the old rage’, as he disarmingly admits, and proof, the more endearing for its fallibility, that the ladies' game has really been a triumphant lesson in the importance of being earnest? But then again if that is the case the words of Mercury are indeed harsh after the songs of Apollo.

The truth of the matter is that a betrothal delayed is an antistrophe, resolving nothing. ‘Our wooing doth not end like an old play:’ says rueful Berowne, frustrated in his hope that russet yeas will save the day. ‘Jack hath not Gill. These ladies' courtesy / Might well have made our sport a comedy’ (V. ii. 874-6). ‘Come, sir’, says the King, seeking consolation no doubt, for his own enforced retirement from the world; ‘it wants a twelvemonth an'a day, And then 'twill end’. But Berowne: ‘That's too long for a play’. Self-reflexion of this kind, a deliberate drawing of attention from within the represented world of the play to some alleged inadequacy in the artifice of its representation can only act either as a forestalling of possible criticism, or as an invitation to consider all that has passed in an ironic light. So glum Berowne's remark is yet another source of possible ironic retrospection. His words are immediately followed by Armado's leave-taking, as he sets off for the plough, and then by the seasonal songs. We have, therefore, instead of the anticipated Komos, a positive cluster of irony-producing occurrences; and it will have been noticed that the ironies are themselves conflicting, and even incompatible. They do not point in the same direction.

I believe that these effects are inadvertent, and I venture to suggest that Professor Barber's sense of ‘exact rightness’ comes to him from his knowledge of all of Shakespeare's comedies. He knows what is to come. He knows that implicit or latent elements in Love's Labour's Lost will be brought out and realized in all their dramatic plentitude in later plays, and he therefore assimilates Love's Labour's Lost to this larger knowledge. And I wish to conclude this discussion of Love's Labour's Lost with a speculation of my own concerning the relation of the play to the comedies which follow it.

The comic deficiency which the play explores is displaced from the complexities of relations between lovers, and localized in the follies of the mind: specifically, the belief that with words one can do anything one wishes to do; that with words reality can be mastered, will performed. The title misleads us if we think of the later plays, for the play is only half, or secondarily, about love at all; but if we remember the earliness of Love's Labour's Lost then the title reveals. The ‘labourers’ are the men. Shakespeare's concern with love at this stage is still rooted in the absurdities and follies of male courtly lovers, with the logic or illogic of men in the role of lovers. The play follows The Two Gentlemen in this respect though it does allow the ladies far more scope. Shakespeare's early comedies are altogether doubtful about the efficacy of romantic love to redeem or to resolve, tending to class Petrarchan ardours with the errors rather than with the remedies; and are markedly satirical about its effects. Love is a seizure, a sudden malady, the symptoms of which are mockingly etched by Moth (and Speed in The Two Gentlemen), and gleefully gloated over by the ‘lovemonger’ Boyet. Love is furiously repudiated by Berowne (until the grand recantation), enacted in burlesque by Armado, and coolly criticized by the ladies. In this early comedy, as in The Shrew and The Two Gentlemen (and even initially in A Midsummer Night's Dream) courtly love is still a posture, and even an imposture. The play is richly and exquisitely amusing, even today when so much of the wit is dated, brilliant in its comic dialectic, accomplished in its engineering of a comic rhythm of hyperbolic accumulation. It is not yet ready, or willing (hence the evasion of closure) to take the testing of the non-seriousness of contracts and the non-seriousness of games as far as the full dramatization of the serious game of love and the serious contract of marriage. This move is imminent in the comic material but for its full development to take place individualized couples rather than symmetrical foursomes are required. And required, above all, is a comic heroine who will do more than occasion comic reversals and administer wholesome reproofs. As an independent source and originator of comic pleasure herself, she will not be simply an object of masculine attention, but an active, self-assertive improvisor of the confrontations, evasions, manoeuvres, self-discoveries, through which lovers finally, and remedially, recognize each other and transcend the power game. But this Shakespeare comedy of courtship is yet to be composed.

To what extent Love's Labour's Lost is transitional in the way thus suggested can perhaps be indicated by considering the notorious textual crux known as the ‘Katharine-Rosaline tangle’. In the scene of introduction between the lords and ladies (II. i.) there are two teasing exchanges between Berowne and a Lady called Katharine in Q and Rosaline in F, and the same lady (or another? it is impossible to tell) named alternately Rosaline and Katharine by Boyet in reply to inquiries of Dumain and Berowne. Dover Wilson argues that the two exchanges were deleted by Shakespeare during revision. Boyet's identifications then having to be adjusted in order simply to link each lord with his own favoured lady; and that these cancellations and corrections were so confusingly or unclearly indicated that the compositor could not make them out. Dover Wilson believes that there was an original plan: to have the lords and the ladies in masks, and be teasingly deceived about their identities, and that at some point Shakespeare decided to transfer his comedy of mistaken identities to later on in the play, where it becomes the foiling of the Muscovites.¹⁶ There, however, mistaken identities function rather differently. The men are coyly hiding behind their masks, the ladies calling their bluff. The latters' intrigue has been in the first place punitive, and not, as later stratagems in Much Ado or As You Like It for the purpose of matchmaking. As Rosaline says:

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,
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 same Berowne I'll torture ere I go.

(V. ii. 60-8)

Mutual sparring of exactly the same kind occurs in the encounters, masked and unmasked, between Beatrice and Benedick. Whether Much Ado is the lost Love's Labour's Won as is sometimes supposed, it certainly supplies in full measure the merry war of courtship which is half deleted, and belatedly returned to, in Act V of Love's Labour's Lost, which, though it does propose a (penitential) ‘remedy for the great ills’ does not ‘give all the persons what they desire’ or ‘fill them with great joy’.¹⁷

A Midsummer Night's Dream, however, redresses the balance. It has never, so far as I am aware been put forward as such, but it might well be a contender for the title of the lost Love's Labour's Won. If weddings are required, there we shall find them in plenty. And there mistaken identities, if not yet the fully interiorized variety Much Ado will offer us, will yield a cornucopia of comic insights.

Notes

1. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Macmillan, 1973), p. 231.

2. Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1577), quoted in Sister Miriam Joseph's excellent account of figures of rhetoric, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947), p. 303.

3. In the sense made famous by John L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1965).

4. Quoted by Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare's Use, in her treatment of the vices, pp. 64-73 and 251-9 passim. Pleonasmus is redundancy; Periergia is superfluity resulting from over-labour ‘to show himself fine in a light matter’ according to Puttenham (p. 258) and is characteristic of Hoskins' ‘schoolmaster, foaming out synonymies’ (J. Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hudson, Princeton University Press (1935), p. 24); Cacozelia is the coining of fine words out of Latin and the use of new-fangled expressions to appear learned (p. 251), but according to Peacham the kind of misapplication called today malapropism; Solecismus is the ignorant misuse of cases, genders, tenses (p. 251): ‘bone for bene. Priscian a little scratched; ’twill serve’ (V. i. 30) and Tapinosis is the diminishing and debasing of a high matter by the baseness of a word (p. 259).

5. Bertolt Brecht, Puntila and his Hired Man (1940).

6. Derek Traversi, The Early Comedies (London: Longmans Green, 1960), p. 31.

7. Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1959), p. 99.

8. M. C. Bradbrook, Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1951), p. 215.

9. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, pp. 91-2.

10. Horace Howard Furness, editor of The New Variorum edn (reprinted 1904; New York: Dover Publications, 1964), p. xviii. See also William C. Carroll, The Great Feast of Language (Princeton University Press, 1976): ‘“Let us once lose our oaths and find ourselves” … rings true on the deepest level, for the movement of the entire play has been towards such a self-discovery. Yet it is also a self-justification, and to some extent another self-deception: its sincerity is undermined by the over-elaborate patterning and repetition …’ (p. 152).

11. Carroll, The Great Feast, p. 217. But irreconcilable responses are on record. To Thomas McFarland, Shakespeare's Pastoral Comedy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), p. 76, the songs are ‘the sweetest and most gardenlike of all the play's language’; to Dover Wilson, editor of The New Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), p. 184, ‘they burst upon us with exquisitely ludicrous effect’. Robert G. Hunter, ‘The Function of the Songs at the End of Love's Labour's Lost’, Shakespeare Studies, vol. VII (1974), pp. 55-63, says that the songs reaffirm cyclic return ‘carnival time—circular, as round as Falstaff's belly’—despite ‘Cormorant devouring Time’, and finds them ‘moving, right and meaningful’ (p. 55).

12. Both Carroll and S. K. Heninger, ‘The Pattern of LLL’, Shakespeare Studies, vol. VII (1974), find that the songs embody a reconciliation of opposites which they take to be the play's final thematic conclusion. Terence Hawkes, too, in Shakespeare's Talking Animals (London: Edward Arnold, 1973) links the songs to a dialectic of the written, silent and book-learned as opposed to the oral, resonant and unlettered; of ‘rhyme against reason’, sterile academia against fruitful community.

13. G. B. Harrison, ed. Complete Works (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1952), p. 394.

14. Shakespeare and the Confines of Art (London: Methuen, 1968), p. 37.

15. Cyrus Hoy takes this view, for instance, in ‘Love's Labour Lost and the Nature of Comedy’, Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. XIII (1962).

16. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, pp. 93-113. It is worth noting that Shakespeare nowhere else forgoes his final weddings. It is interesting, too, that Navarre's park, though certainly a green and pleasant place does not make Love's Labour's Lost a green world comedy in Northrop Frye's valuable sense, in which the wild and recreative world of nature is set against a constraining and restraining world of culture. Sherman Hawkins, ‘The Two Worlds of Shakespearean Comedy’, Shakespeare Studies, vol. III (1967), goes so far as to classify it as a ‘closed world’ comedy, the category he finds antithetical to the comedies of the green world. Had the comedy ended differently, however, it would certainly have been received as a green world regeneration for the Platonic courtiers.

17. The New Shakespeare edn, pp. 117-24.

18. Willichius, ed. Terence's Andria (1550). See T. W. Baldwin, Shakespeare's Five-Act Structure (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1947), p. 232.