SOURCE: “‘The Catastrophe Is a Nuptial’: Love's Labor's Lost, Tactics, Everyday Life,” in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, edited by Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, pp. 271-98.

[In the following essay, Corum reviews the critical debate concerning the problematic ending of Love's Labour's Lost, reassessing the play as a whole and the ending in particular in terms of its relevance to Elizabethan cultural views on adolescence.]

I always thought marriage was one step away from death.

—Sandra Bullock, The Late Show with David Letterman, 12:10 a.m., Friday, July 25, 1995

In such conditions, the heterogeneous elements, at least as such, find themselves subjected to a de facto censorship. … They cannot be kept within the field of consideration.

—Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess,¹

“In the eighteenth century,” Michel de Certeau writes, “the ideology of the Enlightenment claimed that the book was capable of reforming society, that educational popularization could transform manners and customs, that an elite's products could, if they were sufficiently widespread, remodel a whole nation.”² This ideological program's long-term effect on Shakespeare's plays—their appropriation and dissemination as a “book”—was to move these plays from the margins of the culture to its center where, remade as “an elite's products,” they were called upon (through various modalities: in-, re-, trans-, con-) to “form” a heterogeneous public.³ In this location, Shakespeare's comedies, deployed as one of several dominant homogenizing technologies, staged festive or problematic models of gender/sex conflicts resolved by love/marriage, and did so to inculcate heteronormativity, gender inequality, homosociality, and class difference, among other practices, into everyday life.⁴ For this scheme Loues Labors lost long posed a problem. It leaves us, Stephen Booth notes, with the “feeling that [it] has not come out right”⁵: “The wooing doth not end like an old play; / Jack hath not Jill” (5.2.864-65).⁶ Moreover, encountered in contexts where “coming out right” was a signal marker of social stability, such “not coming out right” generated powerful anxieties. So it is not surprising that we may read this play's critical/performative history as a collection of middle-class discourses engaged, however consciously, in assigning blame for LLL's failure, and/or in erasing it.

For the first two hundred-plus years of the play's post-folio life, failure was attributed to Shakespeare's inexperience: too many puns and obscure jokes; a trivial plot; his first play.⁷ When Shakespeare gravitated close enough to the culture's center that appearances had to be saved, LLL's infelicities were reattributed first to its historical referents, Henri of Navarre and Marguerite de Valois,⁸ then, after a further rise in Shakespeare's stature in the 1920s, to the putative source of the play's allegedly affected language, Lyly's euphuistic style,⁹ and, a decade later, to members of Raleigh's alleged “School of Night” and/or participants in the Martin Marprelate controversy.¹⁰ In the decades following the Second World War, when the middle classes no longer needed to use LLL as stick to beat this or that upper-class cultural formation via Elizabethan or Shakespearean surrogates, these classes attributed LLL's failure to aristocratic practices which various internal elements continued to ape, and turned the play's satiric energies against one or another alleged aristocratic infection: homosocial coteries of men, rhetorical verbiage, brittle wit, heartless mockery, fancy, independent women, sterile imagination, artifice—anything, that is, which seemed to be denying these classes access to their utopias and which could be scapegoated onto their predecessors in power, a King and three Lords, who will do penance for “a year and a day.”¹¹ Finally, given the momentum generated by such recuperative endeavors, it was but a short step from the last of these ideological appropriations of LLL to a recasting of noble penance into an educational program whereby King and Lords grow up and prove everyday middle-class life (its values, ordinary speech, heteronormativity, fertility, etc.) preferable to aristocratic excess: “As the [final] songs are sung, Time seems to pass … and, as the seasons change, the lovers prove inseparable. Armado's last words, ‘You that way; we this way’ (V.2. 920), announce, then, only a qualified separation, for his show has already conducted the stage and theatre audiences through a year and a day to the true, comic end of the action. The owl and the cuckoo assure us that the labour of love will not be very long lost” (my emphasis).¹² Because Comedy and St. Paul (powerful bulwarks of bourgeois culture) insist that four allegedly immature men must mature and marry, there will be proper middle-class heroes, there will be a proper comedic ending, there will be everyday bourgeois life as the middle classes envision it, and LLL, finally “coming out right,” will realize itself as a proper festive comedy—its failed ending, jests, and sport disappearing; its difference from the lost play, Loves Labor's Won, reduced to the infinitesimal.

So successful was this long-evolving middle-class appropriation of LLL as a dominant ideological instrument (a process in which the primary critical task proved to be ascertaining where to aim the play's aggressivity), that it is difficult now to reconstruct the functions such an ungeneric comedy may have had in the 1590's other than (as above) to implement one or another form of anti-aristocratic or anti-adolescent scapegoating. As a way, however, of offering a new analysis of several early modern functions of this play's difference, we may entertain the distinction de Certeau makes between strategy and tactic. That is, if the cultural appropriations of LLL itemized above are recognized as strategies—“A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper (propre) and thus serve as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it”—then we may ask how LLL may have performed in its own time (and how it may be retheorized in our time) as a tactic:

I call a “tactic,” on the other hand, a calculus which cannot count on a “proper” (a spatial or institutional localization), nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality. The place of a tactic belongs to the other. A tactic insinuates itself into the other's place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance. It has at its disposal no base where it can capitalize on its advantages, prepare its expansions, and secure independence with respect to circumstances. The “proper” is a victory of space over time. On the contrary, because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time—it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized “on the wing.” … It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into “opportunities.” Many everyday practices … are tactical in character. And so are, more generally, many “ways of operating”: victories of the “weak” over the “strong” (whether the strength be that of powerful people or the violence of things or of an imposed order, etc.), clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things … maneuvers, polymorphic simulations, joyful discoveries.¹³

Rather than encouraging us to go on constructing LLL in our time as a passive bearer of dominant cultural strategies, de Certeau's distinction allows us to reperceive this play as an active maker of cultural difference in its own time, as well as reperceiving Shakespearean theatre itself as an “everyday practice [of making] … tactical in character.”¹⁴ It also allows us to recast the characters Shakespeare gives dramatic agency—Berowne, the French Princess, Moth, and Costard, among others—as tacticians whose “maneuvers, polymorphic simulations, joyful discoveries” allow them to “seize” opportunities “on the wing” and “get away with things.” And it allows us as well to rerepresent LLL as a Shakespearean tactic which, despite obvious strategic overcodings, enables its everyday audiences to reappropriate comedy for their own uses and pleasures.

But by what methodology, it may be asked, is it possible to generate a radically new assessment of the tactical potentialities of a play that has consistently been read as a failed, and recuperated as a strategic, ideological instrument? One answer is to turn to the resources of a discourse—psychoanalysis—which offers techniques for analyzing those everyday tactics (slip of tongue, joke, hysteria, defense mechanism, dream, fantasy, symptom, etc.) at play within all strategic behavior. Thus, if dominant codes have long given us access to the strategic functionalities of appropriated, “Shakespearean” comedy, discourses like Lacanian psychoanalysis and de Certeau's socio-materialism may provide access to comedic tactics which of necessity will be temporary, largely invisible, and, in the main, unrecorded and unrepresented because—as emergent everyday practices—they did not (and do not) conform to strategic, and thus proper, comedic formulae or ends.¹⁵ There is this gain: LLL, seen for the first time (in our time) as a staging of tactics, will be recognized as a more interesting cultural document than the submissive instrument of dominant strategy it has been; moreover, its strategically perceived “failed” ending will prove, tactically speaking, its chief success.¹⁶

To collate the appropriative arguments that have reduced LLL to a strategic instrument is to produce the following abstract: the King of Navarre and his attendant Lords, Berowne, Dumaine, and Longaville, are narcissistically self-enclosed boys who fear women; don't know how to woo, speak, or love properly; and worse, write sonnets, forswear oaths, and thus face the prospect of losing their love's labors unless they perform sufficient penance for their errors to get themselves, after a year and a day, to the requisite socially inscribed goal: marriage to their Jills. In short, a moral: young men must give up prophylactic defense mechanisms constructed to protect the interiority of their male selves (and its architectural extension, their all-male court) from the contamination, disintegration, pain, and death that would be caused, they fear, by contact with the female body—its earth, fluids, and fluxes—which they take to be grotesque if not lethal. And they must marry.¹⁷

From a tactical perspective, however, LLL functions quite otherwise. Consider the situation of its eight young aristocrats (four young men and four young women to insure that we contemplate, not individual actions, but those of a species). The old King of Navarre has just died, and this death instantiates an unspoken demand with respect to the young men: “Now you must grow up, become men, get married, be King and courtiers in fact as well as in name.” The young men know this, and the King of France knows this; hence the embassy France sends to Navarre composed of his daughter, three ladies in waiting, and a parallel unspoken demand: “Now you, too, must grow up, become women, get married, be Queen and Ladies in fact as well as in name.” If we ask what mode of agency Shakespeare is representing on stage, it is clear that these young persons' desires at this transitional moment of the father's death are no doubt divided between a powerful urge, as children, to obey the law of the father, and a powerful urge, as emergent adolescents, not to obey this law, a conflict which, in this play, takes as its compromise formation a desire not to obey the law of the father, but not to obey in such a way that non-compliance will nonetheless appear to be—will be masked as—compliance. So if we ask—“Why does the expected comedic ending fail to occur in this play?”—the answer, read tactically, is that these eight young people do not want it to take place. Their loves' labor is lost because the young men and women desire this labor to be lost. Not only do these Jacks not get their Jills, they do not want to get them, nor do these Jills want to be got. Perceiving that “The catastrophe [in the sense both of disaster and of comedic denouement] is a nuptial,” and seeing themselves about to be cast in a strategic comedy in which they do not wish to participate, they choose to fail, they intend to fail, and, in the end, they do fail, and they do so by pursuing activities that, conventionally (and strategically) speaking, should guarantee success, but, tactically speaking, prevent “catastrophe.” What is particularly brilliant about their use of tactics, moreover, is that they defeat their wooing with all the tools of Cupid's trade (“A tactic insinuates itself into the other's place … without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance”). Thus, the men do everything Renaissance lovers do: sonnets, flirtatious battles of wit, broken vows, courtly pastimes, witty repartee, melancholic swooning, jeweled bribes, excessive flattery, Muscovite masque, sexual innuendoes, pageant of nine worthies. Despite setbacks, they never give up. They bemoan their “failures,” and they vow to do whatever they can do in the future to make up for what they haven't done right in the past. So, they win when they fail, and they win again when they accomplish their “failure” in such a way that it will be impossible for anyone in authority to identify them as the intentional rather than the immature cause of their failure, since they will be seen as having done their very best to succeed at courtship and marriage.

Wooing to fail at wooing is not, of course, the only tactic these young men use. Consider the opening scene of the play. Navarre and his colleagues do not (as is commonly assumed) get together and vow to maintain three years of self-imposed academic isolation in serious imitation of Platonic or French neo-Platonic models, a solitude that is only then interrupted by the arrival of women and desire. Rather, they have previously received notice that an embassy of French women is about to arrive. They understand what this embassy portends. And, knowing these things, they then get together and construct a male-only enclave. They are then surprised when Berowne remembers that the women are coming, and solve the problem they have engineered (vowing to see and speak to no women in the face of the arrival of women they must see and speak to) by deciding to meet the women in a field adjacent to the Navarre's court. The “first” action, and the vows constituting this action are intentionally constructed, that is, as impossible (and thus as tactical) enterprises, and the men know this; but they engage in these tactics (which they dress up as strategies necessary for the salvific eternalization of their classical bodies, minds, and homosociality) in order purposefully to send a signal (by instituting an all-male academy, lodging the women in the field, failing to entertain them at court) that they are not in, and, despite whatever will seem to be the case in the future, are not going to be in, the matrimonial business—a signal that is received and reciprocated by the four young women. In other words, at the outset of this play, both parties conspire not to succeed at the task assigned them by their respective fathers, and it is clear that one motive the young men have for not entertaining the visiting French women at court is to keep these women and themselves out of a space that was constituted by and which to a large extent remains the domain of the dead father's desire/demand/law. They understand, that is, the need to maintain distance from this paternal space and its implicit gaze, if only to insure that the guilts, anxieties, obsessions, melancholies, and paranoias which tend to occur in such a domain will not be sufficiently energized outdoors to prevent them from seizing this post-paternal opportunity to differ and defer.

It is useful to note how this tactical evasion of paternal (and generic) law differs from strategy. As de Certeau's distinction indicates, the eight adolescents' evasion of adult eventualities does not proceed from a center of cultural power (a court); it is not planned in its entirety ahead of time; and it generates the numerous problematics attendant upon the not proper. That is, a tactical evasion of “catastrophe” is improvisational for both parties, neither the young men nor young women knowing in any certain way exactly what the other party is doing or what they themselves will do next. This evasion is also inescapably excessive, not to mention inconsistent except as a consistent use of tactic disguised as conventional strategy. As a result, it is constantly open to misinterpretation, and thus is almost never free of uncertainty, anger, pain, and embarrassment. Egos are very much at stake. At any time, failure, however strongly desired, is capable of being perceived by self and others as nothing but failure, just as the tactics independently engaged in by both parties are capable of being seen by the other party as hypocrisy, insult, neglect, condescension, arrogance or whatever. Thus, the duration of this play's action is not simply a function of the time it takes eight young men and women to foreclose successfully the possibility of precipitate “arranged” marriages; rather, narrative duration is a function as well of the time it takes them to appear to be submitting to parental demand, as well as to negotiate a complicit evasion of catastrophe which cannot be regarded as either party's sole responsibility, nor played out in such a way that it will constitute a real loss or failure for either party.

Once it is possible to read part of this play from a tactical perspective, it is possible to read all of it in such a fashion. And to see just how far these four young men go out of their way to fail is to juxtapose what we see them do against what they would do were they intent upon success. (i) Berowne, were he seriously in pursuit of love and its consequences, would speak to Rosaline in person instead of writing a sonnet, and worse, sending it via a messenger.¹⁸ (ii) Instead of sticking together, as a gang of four men wooing a gang of four women, Berowne and his colleagues would end the ritualistic “square dance” we see taking place on stage and woo in private (as Costard tries to do, and Don Armado does, with Jaquenetta). (iii) Instead of masking themselves during their Muscovite entertainment (5.2.157ff) and wooing masked women according to their favors, they would woo face to face. In other words, it's not that these young men immaturely and mistakenly woo “the sign of she”; it is that, as wooers, they intentionally become signs of he (as the women become signs of she) to be in a position to (mis)woo signs of she.¹⁹ (iv) Instead of intentionally proliferating a discourse of witty idealization which distances them from actual persons, bodies, and feelings (“O queen of queens, how far dost thou excel” [4.3.36]), or an equally witty discourse of bawdy innuendo which turns social intercourse wholly to the sexual body (“Did not I dance with you in Brabant once?” [2.1.113]), these young men would speak their own speech to the objects of their desire.²⁰ (v) Rather than fetishize the woman's eyes, hair, etc., they would get past, as it were, the blazon. (vi) Instead of distancing themselves from their love objects by sublimating these objects into the heavens as “stars,” they would (to alter Donne's phrase) “go to bodies” and look for violet-covered banks upon which to recline. And (vii) rather than accept rejection, they would endeavor “to convert the ladies' striking refusal into a conventional acceptance” in the fashion of lovers throughout the canon who encounter such obstacles.²¹ In short, when the men are not engaged in preposterous “infantile” overshootings of their objects, keeping the young women at an excessively idealized distance, they engage in equally preposterously “adult” undershootings of these objects, maintaining an excessive closeness of physical proximity sufficient to drive the woman away.

But what of other features of this play, particularly the pageant in which five lesser-classed men present themselves to their betters as legendary worthies (5.2.485ff)? Though this pageant is an overdetermined event in the structure of the play, it constructs a strikingly visible analogy for the argument I take as fundamental to LLL: Costard, Nathaniel, Holofernes, Moth, and Armado are to the roles they have engaged to act (Pompey, Alexander, Judas Maccabaeus, Hercules, Hector) what Navarre, Berowne, Dumaine, and Longaville would be to the role paternal law is demanding they play (husbands). Like their subordinates heroized, the noble young men, married, would be cast in parts beyond their desire to perform, a matrimonial part, moreover, which would put them out of that part, adolescence, in which they have just been cast, which they enjoy, and which they desire to go on playing. The pageant's on-stage function, then, is to convey to the women (and to us)—and, due to the men's forceful interventions, is made to convey—the principal reasons why the young men do not want to marry after a day or so of adolescence.²²

Another significance of this pageant is that it constructs a visible but untenable version of the paternal demand the young men are resisting. As the law/death-of-the-fathers commands the four males to “Be men!” and the four females to “Be women!,” so the “law” of the pageant commands Costard and his associates to “Be legendary heroes!” (or, alternatively, to “Be brilliant actors!”). But if the pageant fails (and the noble youths ensure that it does), then the resulting parental imperative (“Be what you do not desire to be and therefore in a sense can't be!”) becomes identical to the theatrical demand on their subordinates—“Be what you are not and cannot be!”—a demand that is legitimately resistible because, impossible to obey, it becomes tyrannical by definition. In short, the play's “failure” to produce young men as husbands is anticipated and explained by the pageant's failure to produce Nathaniel as Alexander, etc.²³

In this context, it is clear that one of the play's most frequently quoted sentences has frequently been misread—that is, the Princess's observation (reacting to a claim that the pageant of the worthies will fail) that “Their form confounded makes most form in mirth / When great things laboring perish in their birth” (5.2.517-8). Usually taken as articulating the central thrust of LLL's satiric action, these lines are glossed in the major editions (as in Kerrigan's) as “The ruin of great things … creates more mirth than anything else could” (227). In such readings, the phrase, great things, refers to the pageant and the pretensions of its lower-class performers. But to read this way is, I suggest, to miss the larger point. The “great things laboring” that “perish in their birth” in this play, and quite specifically in this pageant of worthies, are a pantheon of cultural signifiers—Pompey, Hector, Judas Maccabaeus, Hercules, Alexander—and the dominant social formation these heroes epitomize, namely, that humanistic, homosocial, patriarchal ideological legacy that is being handed down through these exemplars (as through the dominant form of marriage) to these adolescents. Given, then, that it is precisely this cultural legacy which they are tactically subverting, surely the eventuality which would provide them with the most mirth (and the most release from their anxieties) would be to see great things like Hercules and Alexander perish, not to mention seeing those labors perish which the cultural formation symbolized by Hercules uses to contain subversive individuals like themselves. For the young men to patronize (and deconstruct) a pageant in which a nine-fold epitome of the regime of the father self-deflates is to entertain themselves, and to justify the loss of their love's labor—i.e., the loss, not of their labor to love the young women, but of their labor to love the heroic “fathers,” the desire/law of these fathers, and the roles (particularly the matrimonial role) this desire/law demands of them. The pageant is one of several opportunities, then, by which these adolescents realign their desire by making this desire, to a greater extent, their desire rather than the desire of the paternal other. Moreover, this pageant allows them to raise and answer a question: “If no one can live up to these models, and if trying to do so makes one a ridiculous failure, then why try, given that such roles are clearly not worth the trouble of living up to anyway?”

Strategic readings of LLL tend to pit the events of the play's last two hundred-plus lines—Marcade's entrance, the men's proposals, the women's refusals, the men's year-and-a-day vows, Armado's reentry, the songs of cuckoo and owl—against the play's remainder. It is in these sobering activities, we are told, that prior expenditures of time and energy are judged as waste and converted into the suburbs of maturity. And it is in this textual space that strategy (in de Certeau's terms) has been seen to “assume a place that can be circumscribed as proper (propre) and thus serve as the basis for generating relations [of power] with an exterior distinct from it.” How, then, does tactic insinuate itself in these closing activities, and how does it prevent a victory of proper ideological space over adolescent time, or a victory of the proper over LLL itself?

One popular way of reading the fifth act arrival of Marcade's news of the King of France's death is that this eruption of death/reality into a world of fantasy, game, and pastime shocks four young men out of their affectations, teaches them humility, subjects them to the law of the father, and aims their truant desires toward a matrimonial target via the penitential demands placed on them by young women standing in as surrogates for an absent cultural mother. Perhaps. But in a play where interruption is a fundamental structuring device,²⁴ Marcade's entrance is, I suggest, precisely what enables the desire of all eight adolescents not to marry. Narrative sequence, to be sure, encourages one to think that Marcade's news causes the men to proffer sincere marriage proposals, but it is more likely, I suggest, that the men seize this opportunity to make the expected/demanded proposals (what the dead fathers, not to mention many members of an audience, expect) because they know that this is by far the most inappropriate moment they could choose to do so, and thus the moment when such proposals would be the most likely to fail. Marcade's entrance, then, allows the men to do the expected, paternally-demanded strategic thing, but prevents this “right” thing from succeeding, since it allows the men to make their most “sincere” move at the very point when such a move has the least chance of success. France's death, far from creating desires for maturity, creates, as does old Navarre's, an opportunity to differ and defer that eight adolescents seize “on the wing.”

Nevertheless, rejected, the young men do swear new vows that, if honored, will, in effect, force them to offer the women a pageant of four worthies for a year and a day. The Princess instructs Navarre to go “To some forlorn and naked hermitage” (5.2.786), and he vows performance: “If this, or more than this, I would deny / … The sudden hand of death close up mine eye!” (5.2.803-5). Told to use his “wit / To enforce the painéd impotent to smile” (5.2.841-4), Berowne likewise vows obedience: “befall what will befall / I'll jest a twelvemonth in an hospital” (5.2.860-1). Thus the vow, slighted in the past, reasserts itself in an allegedly workable form, and the young men, seeming at last to have thrown away their “idle scorns” (5.2.855), appear to be proving that the longstanding “developmental” reading of the play is accurate. But since every earlier vow these young men make has been forsworn—since they have rejected every other chance to cast themselves as “Worthies”—why assume now that these final vows will not succumb to tactical evasion as surely as their predecessors did? A newly crowned Renaissance King is likely to vacate throne, power, courtiers, and public presence to spend a forlorn year in solitary confinement? Berowne (who passionately vowed, one act earlier, that anyone who saw Rosaline would, “like a rude and savage man of Inde,” bow “his vasal head … and kiss the base ground with obedient breast,” but who in fact did no such thing himself) is going to give up his freedom and place at court for a year and a day to entertain groaning wretches? To satisfy the law/demand of the father (mediated parodically through the women) the men must make these vows, but surely it is clear by this point in the play that as soon as the women return to France the men will seize whatever opportunity avails itself to forswear these oaths as thoroughly as any they made in the past. It is also clear that the women impose penances they know the men will not, in fact cannot, fulfill, and that they do so not just to evade nuptial catastrophe themselves, but to enjoy being able to hear at some future point that another set of “great [vows] laboring [have] perish[ed] in their birth.” The women, that is, understand (and help the play's audiences recognize) that strategic vows tactically “confounded make most form in mirth.”

It is similarly conventional to read Armado's closing affirmations—“For mine own part, I breathe free breath. I have seen the day of wrong through the little hole of discretion, and I will right myself like a soldier,” and “I am a votary; I have vowed to Jaquenetta to hold the plough for her sweet love three year” (5.2.713-15, 872-74)—as symbolic of the marital consummation the young men should not be avoiding, and thus a yardstick against which to find them lacking. However, if we recognize that Shakespeare's representation of Armado presents the urgency of an adult man “who spends time only to make time, whose desires brook no deferral,” and whose “body of desire cannot wait [because] it is unfree, impelled, lacking in the interior space of lack inhabited by the will,” we will see that unlike the adolescents in LLL, who possess a “body capable of deferral and lack,” Armado and Jaquenetta are among those who impatient consummate-or-fail narrative requires the closure that only nuptial catastrophe—its dutiful sacrifice, its “little hole of discretion,” its “ploughing,” its lack of subjectivity, freedom, and vitality—seems capable of providing.²⁵ In short, Armado and Jaquenetta are a precise figuration of one sort of so-called adult maturity the adolescents are subversively resisting, and, although Armado and Jaquenetta presumably find it worthwhile to cast themselves in the roles of yet two more mythic worthies, King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, it is nonetheless clear that their culture's repertoire of adult erotic roles is no more viable than its adult heroic roles.

The play's closing songs have also been taken as sentimentally satisfying proleptic substitutes for the plot's absence nuptials, but to take them this way is to ignore that these songs are deeply embedded in this play's warring forces of signification. It would be more accurate to see that two unmarried men—a verbose pedant, Holofernes, and a sycophantic curate, Nathaniel—sing a cuckoo-owl “dialogue” that functions, not to conduct “theatre audiences through a year and a day to the true, comic end of the action,”²⁶ but to debate, among other possibilities, which are worse, the inevitable side-effects of premature and/or arranged marriages, or the residues of such marriages later in life. Ver (Holofernes) represents such marriages as an exceptionally bad deal for men, given that the energies of youth's spring will lead inescapably to the adultery and cuckoldry mocked by the cuckoo: “When Dasies pied, and Violets blew, / … Do paint the Mcdowes with delight. / The Cuckow then on euerie tree / Mocks married men, for thus sings he, / Cuckow. / Cuckow, cuckow: O, word of feare, / Vnpleasing to a married eare” (Folio, ll. 2860-68). In short, spring nuptials cast young men in the role of horned beasts, a form as grotesque as the page Moth is in his Hercules costume, or Armado is in his “worldly traveler” affectations. In reply, Nathaniel, as Heims (winter), argues caution on the grounds that the wintry residue of marriages lacking love is little more than tedium and/or depression: “When all aloud the winde doth blow, / And coffing drownes the Parsons saw: / And birds sit brooding in the snow, / And Marian's nose lookes red and raw … / Then nightly sings the staring Owle, / Tu-whit to-who: / A merry note, / While greasie Ione [Joan] doth keele the pot” (Folio, ll. 2888-96). A loveless marriage's wintry catastrople, we understand, is relieved solely by a merry note from outside the house which painfully reminds those in the house of what should be but isn't taking place inside the house, namely, to-whoing and to-whitting: that is, wooing (“to-who”—i.e., to woo) and copulating (“tu-whit”—i.e., to it, or to't).²⁷ In listening to this “debate” we are not asked to decide which is worse, spring's adulteries or winter's aftereffects, but to recognize the fear—held by men and women alike—that the pleasures of matrimony will be quickly and permanently lost in these sorts of traditional marriages, and to recognize as well that women who are denied a viable, independent adolescence will most likely flower in youth's spring as wives cuckolding husbands, and decline in winter's age to raw, red-nosed Marians and “greasy,” disempowered and dispirited Joans who have been left to “keel” (i.e., stir) their unused and undesired “pots.”²⁸

It would be a mistake, however, to equate Holofernes and Nathaniel with the young men for and to whom they present this dialogue, since to speak of Holofernes is to speak, in both psychoanalytic and rhetorical terms, not only of repetition—“coelo, the sky, the welkin, the heaven” (4.2.5)—but of pointless repetition. Holofernes and Nathaniel, that is, represent what adult life is like if it lacks that repetition with significant difference which is the hallmark of the adolescence that is being constructed in LLL. As men who clearly did not enjoy a significant adolescence themselves, Holofernes and Nathaniel have become such petrified practitioners of marital delaying tactics that the only sex they seem now to engage in is a tedious and grandiose multiplication of words, innuendoes, and fantasies. Thus, in much the same way that Armado's and Jaquenetta's precipitate flight into nuptial consummation brackets the adolescent youths' behavior at one adult extreme, Holofernes's and Nathaniel's permanent avoidance of matrimony does likewise at the other. To realize, then, that Holofernes and Nathaniel are repetitively defending against, and paralyzed by, what Armado and Jaquenetta race toward—i.e., “the Parsons saw”—is to see why eight adolescents are negotiating an indefinite space of time prior to nuptials in order to make their erotic/sexual/marital relationships something more, or less, or other than submission to or rebellion against strategic ideological impositions.

Up to this point I have been arguing that the understanding of LLL we get if we read it tactically is radically opposed to the meanings produced by reading it strategically. Though this argument is clearly not complete, it is necessary at this point to turn to a number of larger questions: why Shakespeare staged such warring forces of signification in a French mise en scène, in a comedy, and in virtually invisible fashion? First, there is, I suggest, an English royal citation. Throughout her reign, Queen Elizabeth, if not also her suitors, wooed in order to fail at wooing's formal consummation, and did so perhaps most spectacularly a decade prior to LLL with the duc du Alençon, the youngest son of Catherine de Medici, and Henri of Navarre's brother-in-law. For many of her subjects, Elizabeth's negotiations with Alençon seemed to aim solely at imposing Catholic rule over herself and England; however, the obvious necessity was to see that Elizabeth and Alençon were tactically defeating, by means of sonnets, tokens, masks, and pageants of excessive wooing, the strategic matrimonial goal each had to pursue. To keep peace with Catherine de Medici, both Elizabeth and Alençon had to woo as “sincerely” as possible, and had to do so for considerably longer than a year and a day. For Elizabeth not so to woo most likely would have meant an unwanted conflict with France at the time England was already supporting an expensive war against Spain in the Netherlands.²⁹

There is also, I suggest, a powerful (and, in relation to this play, an as yet unnoticed) aristocratic citation. In 1590 Lord Burghley determined that his seventeen-year-old ward, Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton (and Shakespeare's patron at the time LLL most likely was written), would marry his granddaughter, Lady Elizabeth Vere, daughter of the Earl of Oxford. While seeming to acquiesce to Burghley's insistence as well as to his mother's and his grandfather's persuasions that he honor this arranged marriage, Southampton in fact tactically resisted, in part by gaining “a further respitt of one yere to answere resolute in respect of his yonge years”; however, at the end of this “respitt of one yere” (echoing the play's “year and a day”), Southampton refused and was forced to pay Burghley 5,000 pounds to extricate himself from a “vow” Burghley had unilaterally made for him.³⁰

Most immediate to the play's dramatic action, however, is the French royal citation. Despite a long-standing claim that the action of this play references an embassy which Marguerite de Valois (hereafter Margot), her mother Catherine de Medici, and their famous bevy of ladies-in-waiting known as “l'escadron volant” conducted to Nérac in 1578 to negotiate with Henri of Navarre, Margot's estranged husband, in fact it does not.³¹LLL refers not to an actual meeting which took place years after Henri's and Margot's marriage in 1572 (he at 26, she at 19), but, I suggest, to an imaginary meeting that should have taken place prior to their wedding, but did not. For audiences in the 1590s enjoying the advantage of historical hindsight, the question that makes the point is, “What would happen next in the play if Navarre and the Princess of France did not resist matrimony and history repeated itself?” As every Elizabethan knew, what would happen if history repeated itself on Shakespeare's stage, as it did on the stage of Marlowe's probably earlier Massacre at Paris, would be a repeat performance of massacre, forced conversion, incarceration, renewal of religious civil war, and a long and disastrous marriage.³²

In these citational contexts, answers to why Shakespeare stages a Navarre and a Princes who desire to lose their love's labors seem obvious. Given that Queen Elizabeth and Southampton were always already in its audience, LLL retroactively applauds their tactical resistance to entering into arranged dynastic marriages by celebrating Elizabeth's ability to insinuate tactical maneuvers into the place of wooing, and by praising and justifying Southampton's tactical victory as a relatively weak ward over Burghley's strength. And, as importantly, LLL prevents, in fiction at least, a disaster that had happened in another, historical place from happening again in this place, an outcome which satisfies at least one definition of comedy. That is, if the adolescents we see on stage retroactively fail to institute Elizabeth's and Southampton's tactics within the normative activities of Henri's and Margot's past, the historical trajectory originating in the law/demand of parents, guardian, and tradition would once again lead to catastrophe.³³LLL is designed in part, then, not to repeat history by pushing stage versions of Margot and Henri once again into a nuptial that had been a catastrophe, nor to stage a Navarre liberating himself from a dominant social order's strategic ambush in some impossibly utopian fashion; rather, it is designed to demonstrate how fictionally improved surrogates could successfully engage (as Elizabeth and Southampton engaged) in innovating practical modes of tactical resistance within such an order—a lesson Essex tragically, and Southampton expensively, forgot seven or eight years after LLL was written when both replaced tactical resistance with open rebellion.³⁴

The royal citations also explain why LLL stages resistance to matrimony in virtually invisible fashion. By providing its audiences with a vicarious experience of the tactical skills needed to keep such a wasteful history as Margot's and Henri's from repeating itself—skills that, by definition, have to be invisible if they are to be tactical and successful—LLL teaches these audiences the considerable value of being able to resignify such tactical events retroactively if not to deconstruct them while they are taking place. LLL does this by offering its audience a chain of signifiers that seems to be moving directly toward comedy's obvious generic destination, but a chain that inexplicably ends up at an altogether different destination instead, and does so because the visible chain of signifiers was in fact part of another, invisible chain all along. How valuable such knowledge can be is made pointedly clear if we again consider Elizabeth's and Alençon's wooing. Had John Stubbs been able to resignify this wooing deconstructively as it was taking place, or retroactively after the fact, and had he understood that it was about Elizabeth's maintaining power rather than securing a foreign royal husband, he would not have lost to the Queen's executioner the hand that penned his attack on her love's labors in 1579; instead, he would have understood that these labors had always already been designed to be lost.

Again, however, the context immediately relevant is the French one, and the speculative question to ask is, “What can one imagine going through Henri's head five days after his spectacular arranged wedding to Margot in 1572?” The most likely answer is that Henri was painfully recognizing that what had looked at the time like a marriage capable of cementing peace between Catholics and Huguenots was in fact, retroactively resignified, a Catholic ambush designed by Henri III and his mother, Catherine de Medici, to obliterate the core of the Huguenots, and force Navarre and his cousin Condé to convert to Catholicism. The point, then, is that if prior to his marriage Henri had been able to read the chain of exceptionally visible signifiers that seemed to be leading through his marriage to a Huguenot-Catholic peace other than, or more than, or less than he in fact did, and thus had recognized that these signifiers were part of a virtually invisible chain that led through this marriage to bloody slaughter, he no doubt would willingly have lost all of his love's labor.³⁵ Thus for Shakespeare to design LLL to take fictive representatives of Henri and Margot back to a better French future than the tragic one their real life doubles experienced via a more intelligent imaginary past, in which a Navarre resists and a Princess of France says “No,” teaches theater audiences to use tactics to subvert strategic containment as well as the considerable value of reading the tactics of powerful others retroactively if not deconstructively in the first place.

Staging an eminently sane evasion of a nuptial that proved catastrophic for Henri and his Huguenot followers in order to celebrate Queen and patron, and instruct English theater audiences goes a long way in explaining why LLL takes the form it does, but to understand the larger tasks LLL was designed to perform requires asking how it relates to early modern everyday life, a question which raises the complex issue of how everyday life itself is to be signified. The argument, “The catastrophe is a nuptial,” must be contextualized, not just in terms of Queen Elizabeth, Southampton, Henri, and Margot,—“the actors” (to use de Certeau's terms) “who possess proper names and social blazons”—nor of ‘secondary characters” like Burghley, Montagu, and Stubbs who crowd into the historical accounts, but also in terms of the “countless thousands” of persons who make up “the mass of the audience” whose desires Shakespeare did not neglect.³⁶

At present two rival ways of theorizing everyday life seem to be shaping social histories of early modern England (roughly 1450-1700): (i) the conviction that throughout this period everyday life was a relatively homogeneous organic affair, ambivalently viewed sometimes as peaceful security, sometimes as tedious routine, but in any case surviving relatively unchanged throughout the period despite being punctuated on an everyday basis by heterogeneous deviations from a dominant everyday norm—positive ones like weddings and festivals, as well as negative, transgressive ones like food riots, rebellions, murder and war. And (ii), the conviction that, despite some of the features itemized above, early modern everyday life was a social construction that came to be fundamentally and irreversibly altered in form and content over the course of the period in question. As is well known, Lawrence Stone is notorious for arguing (and for the way he argued) the latter view, an argument infected, his detractors imply, by America, German psychoanalysis, and French theory—particularly Foucault's. Stone's detractors and opponents—most notably, Alan Macfarlane—take the former (and, in their minds, the pure, English) position.³⁷ What makes Stone scandalous (rather than, admittedly, merely at times overstated and underevidenced) in the eyes of these opponents is that (a) he maps the fundamental social changes he sees in early modern English history as a function precisely of those heterogeneous ruptures which his opponents marginalize as relatively ineffectual deviations, and that (b), rather than reading the facts drawn from statistical studies of wills, diaries, and parish records from a strategic perspective, he retroactively resignifies these facts from an emergent perspective in terms (as we shall see below) of quality, or adequacy. So, where Macfarlane limits analysis to dominant chains of signifiers, Stone extends analysis to the chains of signifiers that emerged from within such dominant chains and in time replaced them. What is chiefly at stake, then, between these rival modes of historiography is the role played (properly? improperly?) by (i) the heterogeneous ruptures/deviations that transform/punctuate everyday life, (ii) the emergent theoretical discourses Stone uses to rupture the dominant discourses of his opponents, and (iii) the equally heterogeneous ruptures his problematizing of adequacy makes in discourses that take quality as a given. In short, whereas something like Macfarlane's historiographical method is homologous with the traditional readings of LLL, a version of Stone's is homologous with the analysis presented above.

The subject of this historiographical debate most immediately relevant to LLL is the way various forms of adolescence functioned in early modern England.³⁸ Keith Thomas's “Age and Authority in Early Modern England” details the facts. At the beginning of the early modern period the gap between child and adult (i.e., between puberty and marriage) was minimal. This does not mean that formal categories of youth (ages 7-14 for men, 6-12 for women) and adolescence (14-21 for men, 12-19 for women) did not exist; rather it means that fourteen-year-old male, and twelve-year-old female youths routinely took on full adult roles, adolescence regularly being foreclosed. By the end of the period, however, this minimal gap between puberty and the assumption of adult roles had considerably expanded, 28 becoming the average male age for marriage, and 24/26 the average end of apprenticeships. Thus, a roughly 2-7 year period in which youth might be continued as adolescence gradually stretched to a 7-14 year period in which adolescence became increasingly inevitable—a change of considerable magnitude since more than half the population of England at this time was under 28.³⁹

At issue is the relation this lengthening period of adolescence had to everyday social life: that is, how did English society utilize the increasingly massive pool of energies it was diverting away from childhood, yet was preventing for increasingly longer periods of time from being channeled into adulthood, and what effect did the energies of these progressively older, more numerous, and more powerful adolescents have on English society? Did these energies, as Stone's schema maintains, produce new modes of family and marriage that significantly rewrote everyday English life? Or, as Stone's opponents insist, did they go either smoothly into longer and more complex, but still rather traditional, preparations for adulthood, or roughly into transgressive waste activities, but in either case maintaining the forms of self, family, and marriage that characterized everyday life from the outset? For Stone's opponents, for whom the phenomenon of adolescence was unitary except for deviations, everyday life contained adolescent energies irrespective of duration, ensuring that adolescence would take roughly the same forms and serve the same functions throughout the period. For Stone's followers, however, for whom adolescents became less and less a homogeneous group, these energies not only took residual, dominant, and transgressive forms, but also emergent ones that over time restructured everyday life as it had been lived.⁴⁰

What are the larger consequences of Stone's opponents' position? By arguing that early modern adolescence was in the main an extension of youth, and thus a phenomenon similarly prior to, less valuable than, and prefatory to adulthood no matter how long it lasted, social historians like Macfarlane, and historians of adolescence like Ilana Ben-Amos, assume, however unconsciously, that, despite negative deviations, the core of English society was relatively, and relatively equally, adequate throughout the early modern period, so that adolescence, whatever its duration, remained a series of relatively inflexible steps that youths took to enter this relatively unchanging, yet positive, status quo. Moreover, arranged marriages were equally adequate, given that they were the formal means whereby adolescents entered this adequate status quo by becoming one, not with a spouse, but with the dominant social order itself.⁴¹ In such a social order there would be no legitimate reasons for youths to employ tactics; and, should they do so, such tactics would be regarded as nothing more than transgressive deviations (as would the tactical reading of LLL offered above).⁴² In this model, then, comedy celebrates successful completion of a culturally constructed drive towards oneness with a homogeneous social order—one reason why, for Macfarlane, literature is irrelevant to the writing of history, since it either repeats the status quo or subverts its unitary adequacy.⁴³ From this perspective, the young men in LLL deviate as much from their proper cultural roles as LLL deviates from its proper generic role.

For Stone's perspective, such a view of adolescence (not to mention of marriage, literature, and social history), falls “like that of a hagiography … into the platitude of repetition” (to borrow a sentence from de Certeau⁴⁴) and does so because it ignores several crucial socio-historical realities: (i) that, at the beginning of the early modern period, the dominant core of everyday English social life was by no means adequate in the eyes of powerful oppositional constituencies that should not be written off as negative deviations; (ii) that adolescence, a relation of power, not a thing or a duration, must be understood as being “constituted not substantively but oppositionally, not by what it is, but where it is and how it operates”; and (iii) that history is not an account just of a subject's interpellation, but also of the breakdowns in this process that open “up the possibility of a derailment from within.”⁴⁵ From Stone's perspective, then, the increased duration of adolescence that made a variety of adolescences possible was not just a lengthier way of entering an adequate adult status quo (despite dominant attempts that adolescence should be no more than this), but one of the sites where social institutions regarded as inadequate (e.g., arranged marriages) were remodeled through increasingly sophisticated employment of tactics. Thus, whereas arranged marriages had worked successfully, and virtually across the board, as a means of reproducing the dominant social order by reproducing dominant property owners, and whereas this primarily economic form of marriage, though it did not need to do so, occasionally produced affectionate husband-spouse relationships and viable affective families, the desire that increasingly came to shape marriages throughout the period—particularly emergent adolescent ones that chose not to reproduce the self-perpetuating socioeconomic oligarchies of the past—was a desire to produce something other. And although this “something other” took a variety of forms, one particularly popular one was the one Stone terms the companionate marriage—that is, a reconfiguration of marriage as a relation to an individual person (i.e., a love marriage) instead of a relation through a generic type to the dominant social order. Indeed, a new sense of what constituted an adequate marriage, not to mention an adequate family and society—generated by a new sense of what were adequate relations of power in all three formations—gradually but fundamentally emerged as the basis of a new everyday life, as did an enabling sense of what constituted an adequate sense of self.⁴⁶

At the outset of the period the dominant (though not, of course, the only) sense of self was a self who occupied a specific, known role cast for it by a relatively fixed social structure (Moth, Armado, and Holofernes trying to fill roles as Worthies when they aren't filling their page, monarcho, and pedant roles⁴⁷)—a social structure that was paternalistic at the top (Armado as Cophetua), deferential at the bottom (Jaquenetta as Beggar Maid), and content to repeat the past (Armado as Cophetua, etc.). Increasingly throughout the period, however, a concept of an individual self relatively separable from such fixed identity-roles emerged within these older roles (as the commoners do from their failed “Worthy” roles), but not wholly independent of these roles (Navarre and his courtiers in their “lover” roles). That this tactical sense of individuality (which had first emerged decades earlier⁴⁸) became increasingly separable from the extremely hierarchical paternalistic/deferential relations of power meant that strong adolescents had something like the opportunity, however slight, to create relatively new roles for themselves in a relatively changing dynamic social process, the future forms of which could not be foreclosed. One result was that an increasing number of adolescents moved from various object positions of the past (youth, wife, boy, servant, etc.) to new authoritative subject positions, and did so without becoming dominant adults. In LLL, for example, the Princess, in contrast to her historical predecessor, is able to be the subject, “I,” of the predicate, “do not want to marry you” instead of being the object of royal/maternal law, “We command you to marry Henri.”⁴⁹ This shift from object to subject positions also meant that vows, like those the young men make, though they could not be broken, could be negotiated and reconfigured. Clearly this relatively flexible relation between self and social identity-role did not erase the former relatively fixed self-identical dominant relation, nor did it work the same way for everyone, nor was it absent at the beginning of the period; rather, it was a choice increasingly made by masses of strong adolescents who, tired of being youths or adolescents per se, seized the opportunity to make new meanings. From this perspective, the adolescents in LLL, alienated from dominant role-identities, can be seen as tactically exploiting their object positions to prevent further interpellation, and to mask such prevention. In short, Stone's model, unlike his opponents', allows us to resignify LLL retroactively, and thus to see, not just the chain of signifiers that leads (in Zizek's terms) to “the empty, homogeneous time of continuity,” but also the chain that creates “the ‘filled’ time of discontinuity.”⁵⁰

If, in LLL, Shakespeare is staging a version of an emerging process whereby subject-positioned adolescents tactically prevent their energies being appropriated by/for an inadequate status quo, then what we deconstructively see as the play unfolds (or retroactively when it is over) is that, with few if any models to identify with, with much improvisation, with considerable potential for mischance and embarrassment, with no encouragement from the dominant culture of which they are a part, and with all the difficulty of having to proceed without discussion and by means almost solely of action, eight youths are roughing out that new cultural construct, that new range of fictionalities and narrativities, that freedom and différance, which we now designate as significant adolescence. That is, the “contraceptive” tactics eight strong adolescents engage in to defer the inevitable “catastrophe” of dynastic marriages (and whatever “adult” eventualities may follow in the wake of such marriages) provide an early modern blueprint for a way of configuring power that prevents everyday “adult” history from repeating itself, an innovation that for four hundred years made these adolescents and this play vulnerable to accusations of being frivolous, trivial, unproductive, immature, hysterical, affected failures. If one were grudging, one would say, then, that it is the emergence of strong adolescence that writes LLL's “failed” ending; however, the energy, tonalities, sophisticated obliquities, and historical contingencies of this play encourage us to take the wider view and see that the strong adolescence it figures helped rewrite everyday life itself by “ending” at least one of its failures. So, if analyzing LLL has long been a matter of deciding where to aim its aggressivities, and if in the past these have been aimed at one or another aspect of the play itself, an emergent reading of LLL lets us see that Shakespeare aimed them at the inadequacies of early modern adult everyday life itself.

At the outset of early modern English social life there was no place, no practice, no writing constitutive of popular professional public theater; however, by the end of the sixteenth century such a place, such practices, and such writing had come to exist because a critical mass of strong adolescent energies, diverted from flowing “naturally” into the dominant order, flowed instead into the creation of such a place, practices, and writing. Moreover, given that this theater's repertoire of plays was, in the main, a collection of retroactive deconstructive resignifications of power relations characteristic of the dominant past and present, it is clear why early modern theater existed “on the wing” (in several senses) as a site of continual différance, and that plays such as LLL restaged historical events like the 1572 marriage of Henri and Margot to announce “victories of the ‘weak’ over the ‘strong’”—victories, that is, of innovative adolescents over adult law/demand/desire. That is, by staging retroactive resignifications of everyday adult life's institutions and practices for adolescent audiences (i.e., audiences who resisted identifying with, or fully with, dominant adult roles—in short, virtually everyone who attended theater⁵¹), popular public theater constituted itself as one of several strong “adolescent” formations emerging within, and tactically rewriting, everyday life.

What, then, can protect LLL's “not coming out right” from centuries of de facto censorship and/or misappropriation? What can keep it from being interpellated into yet one more variation of the symbolic order it was designed subversively to resignify? The answer is nothing less, of course, than an equally aggressive reappropriation of LLL powerful enough to keep its heterogeneous differences and deferrals “within the field of consideration,” and thereby to keep the play itself from being cast, despite its extraordinary tactical resistances, among the comedic Worthies entombed in bourgeois cultures' pantheons of fame.

Notes

1. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, trans. A. Stockl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 141.

2. The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 166.

3. The heterogeneous/homogeneous distinction is Georges Bataille's, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” Visions of Excess, pp. 137-60. For discussions of this appropriative history, see, among others: Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, “History and ideology: the instance of Henry V,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London and New York: Methuen, 1985); Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); and Hugh Grady, The Modernist Shakespeare: Critical Texts in a Material World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

4. The debt to Michel Foucault's analyses of the constructedness, not to mention the ideological power of socio-political institutions, apparatuses, practices, and discourses is obvious. Particularly relevant is the “Marriage” section of The Care of the Self, the third volume of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990). The discourse of dominant, residual, and emergent forms of power (to which transgressive has been added) is Raymond Williams's, Marxism and Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 121-27.

5. King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 76. Also see: David Bevington, “‘Jack hath not Jill’: Failed Courtship in Lyly and Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Survey 42 (1990): pp. 1-13.

6. All citations to Loues Labors lost are from Alfred Harbage's revised Penguin edition, Love's Labor's Lost (Harmondsworth, 1973), except the songs of the cuckoo and owl which have been transcribed verbatim (except for the long ‘s’) from The Norton Facsimile of The First Folio of Shakespeare, ed. Charlton Hinman (New York: Norton, 1968), p. 162. The title used in the body of this paper is taken from the first Quarto's title page: A Pleasant Conceited Comedie Called, Loues Labors lost (London: W. W., 1598).

7. For example, by Pope, who “found the comic scenes so generally barren,” writes the Arden editor, Richard David, “that he cut whole pages of them out of his text, printing them at the page-foot for those curious archaeologists who might wish to see what blunders Shakespeare made before he learnt his business” (Love's Labor's Lost [London: Methuen, 1951]), p. xiii. For the stage history, see Nancy Lenz Harvey and Anna Kirwan Carey, Love's Labor's Lost: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1984), pp. xii-xiii; and Miriam Gilbert, Love's Labour's Lost (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993).

8. Sir Sidney Lee, “A New Study of Love's Labour's Lost,” Gentleman's Magazine 249 (1880): 447-458.

9. O. J. Campbell, “Love's Labor's Lost Restudied,” in Studies in Shakespeare, Milton, and Donne. University of Michigan Publications in Language and Literature 1 (1925): rpt. New York: Haskell House, 1964, pp. 3-45; and E. K. Chambers, Shakespeare: A Survey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1926).

10. The principal advocates of this position were Muriel C. Bradbrook, The School of Night: A Study of the Literary Relationships of Sir Walter Raleigh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), and Frances A. Yates, A Study of Love's Labor's Lost (London: Cambridge University Press, 1936). For a rebuttal, see David Young, “Recent Studies in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama,” Studies in English Literature 16 (1976): 344.

11. Of those arguing a moral and/or satiric reading, the following are representative: Bobbyann Roesen, “Love's Labour's Lost,” Shakespeare Quarterly 4 (1953): 411-26; Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965); E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Early Comedies (London: Chatto and Windus, 1966); Thomas M. Greene, “Love's Labor's Lost: The Grace of Society,” Shakespeare Quarterly 12 (1971): 315-28; Leslie Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (New York: Stein and Day, 1972); Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare's Talking Animals: Language and Drama in Society (London: Edward Arnold, 1973); Malcolm Evans, “Mercury Versus Apollo: A Reading of Love's Labor's Lost,” Shakespeare Quarterly 26 (1975): 113-27; Louis Adrian Montrose, “Sport by sport o'erthrown': Love's Labor's Lost and the Politics of Play,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 18 (1977): 528-52; Peter B. Erickson, “The Failure of Relationship Between Men and Women in Love's Labor's Lost,” Women's Studies 9 (1981): 65-81; Richard Wheeler, Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); Carol Thomas Neely, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985); and Meredith Anne Skura, Shakespeare: The Actor and the Purposes of Playing (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994). For a useful compendium, see Love's Labor's Lost: Critical Essays, ed. Felicia Hardison Londré (New York: Garland, 1992).

12. The New Penguin Love's Labor's Lost, ed. John Kerrigan (London: Penguin, 1982), pp. 36, 24. Kerrigan's redemptive version of the play is indebted to C. L. Barber's Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959); and William C. Carroll's The Great Feast of Language in Love's Labor's Lost (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976).

13. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. xix.

14. The bearer/maker distinction is Laura Mulvey's, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (1975).

15. For an alternative Lacanian analysis of this play, see Carolyn Asp, “Love's Labour's Lost: Language and the Deferral of Desire,” Literature and Psychoanalysis 35 (1989): 1-21.

16. In proposing this argument I rely silently on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's distinction between arborescent and rhizomatic, as well as Deleuze's analysis of minoritarian literature. For the former, see A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); for the latter, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

17. Underlying this “developmental” formula is Bakhtin's distinction between the ideal classical body and the grotesque body. For an analysis of this distinction and its temporal implications in relation to the preposterous sodomitical body, see Patricia Parker, “Preposterous Reversals: Love's Labor's Lost,” Modern Language Quarterly 54 (1993): 435-82.

18. Except in cases like Spenser's recuperation, early modern sonnets were figures of failure, and, as many have argued, served to defend against erotic success. See Mark Breitenberg, “The Anatomy of Masculine Desire in Love's Labor's Lost,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992): 430-49, and Nancy Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Women and Scattered Rhyme,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 265-79.

19. On the constructedness of gender roles and the ways we “act out” the signs we make of ourselves, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990).

20. This “speech of their own” is not a matter of “russet yeas and honest kersey noes” any more than it is a matter of “Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise, / Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affection,” and the like (5.2. 414, 407-8), since the former undershoots the young men's everyday speech (they do not speak in the fashion of “homespun,” “wollen” cloth) just as much as the latter overshoots it. For “dance” as a euphemism for “fornicate” see Frankie Rubenstein, A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and their Significance (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 70.

21. This point is Keir Elam's, Shakespeare's Universe of Discourse: Language-Games in the Comedies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 71.

22. If we vary slightly a brilliant insight of Alice Miller's, we can say that these adolescent males have “no other way of telling [their thoughts and desires] other than the ones [they] actually use,” which, at this moment in time, is the pageant of the nine worthies. See The Drama of the Gifted Child (New York: Basic Books, 1981), p. 77.

23. Note that most LLL criticism aims this “Be what you are not and cannot be” demand, in amplified form, at the noble characters (“Grow up and be proper dominant adults”) and at the play itself (“Be a proper comedy”).

24. Old Navarre's death interrupts the young men's adolescence, the French women interrupt the all-male academy, Armado's morning walk interrupts Costard and Jaquenetta's love-making, each eavesdropping sonneteer interrupts another, etc. On interruptions in Love's Labor's Lost, see Joseph Chaney, “Promises, Promises: Love's Labor's Lost and the end of Shakespearean Comedy,” Criticism 35 (1993): 51.

25. For the language cited above and access to an analogue—Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls—that has played little if any significant part in discussions of LLL, I am indebted to Louise Fradenburg's City, Marriage, Tournament (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 126.

26. Kerrigan, Love's Labor's Lost, p. 36.

27. For evidence supporting these glosses, see Herbert A. Ellis, Shakespeare's Lusty Punning in “Love's Labor's Lost,” Studies in English Literature 81 (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), pp. 198-200, particularly the parallel cited from Lyly's Endimion.

28. For the “pot” / vagina substitution, see Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature (London: Athlone Press, 1994), 2: 1079. For the masturbatory sense of “keeling a pot,” one may read between the lines of the OED, keel, v, 1.b: “To cool (a hot or boiling liquid) by stirring,” and 2.a: “To make less violent, eager, or ardent; to assuage, mitigate, lessen.” For the sense of a sexual body and its desire grown frigid, see 4. fig. “To grow cold, in feeling, etc.; to become less violent, fervid, or ardent, to ‘cool down’.” If these readings seem farfetched it is important to remember that they are farfetched if these chains of lyric signifiers are read strategically. Such a sense will be quite different from the tactical sense they have when read as part of an emergent chain of signifiers. For an argument that they celebrate daily events of country life, see Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, pp. 113, 118; for one arguing that “the songs wed play to work, love to labor, within the larger cyclical rhythms of a human community that is harmoniously wed to nature,” see Montrose, “‘Sport by sport o'erthrown’,” p. 548.

29. For an alternative view of this play's relation to Elizabeth, see Mark Thornton Burnett, “Giving and Receiving: Love's Labour's Lost and the Politics of Exchange,” English Literary Renaissance 23 (1993): 287-313. For accounts of Elizabeth's relations with Alençon that take their courtship at face value, see Anne Somerset, Elizabeth I (New York: St. Martin's, 1991), pp. 308-30; Carolly Erickson, The First Elizabeth (New York: Summit Books, 1983), pp. 323-30; and J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth I (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1957), pp. 243-53. To the question of whether Elizabeth, a monarch, can be said to be using tactics, one may posit her relations, not just to the dominant ideology of male rule articulated, in the main, by her parliaments, but also to Catholic Europe's determination, following Pope Pius V's 1570 Bull Regnans in Excelsis, to depose her.

30. The story of Southampton's refusal to marry Burghley's granddaughter is told by Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, The Life of Henry, Third Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare's Patron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), pp. 34-40; A. L. Rowse, Shakespeare's Southampton: Patron of Virginia (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), pp. 53-7; and G. P. V. Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 31-39. I focus in part on Southampton because there is much to recommend J. Dover Wilson's suggestion, Love's Labour's Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), that LLL was written during the plague years which produced the narrative poems Shakespeare dedicated to Southampton, “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece.” For alternative dates, see H. B. Charlton, “The Date of Love's Labour's Lost,” Modern Language Review 13 (1918): 257-66, 387-400; and Alfred Harbage, “Love's Labor's Lost and the Early Shakespeare,” Philological Quarterly 41 (1962): 18-36.

31. The Nérac embassy, suggested by Abel Lefranc, Sous le Masque de “William Shakespeare” (Paris: Payot, 1918), has been accepted by R. David, p. xxix, and Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), 1: 429, among others. For LLL's troubled relation to issues of topicality, see Albert H. Tricomi, “The Witty Idealization of the French Court in Love's Labor's Lost,” Shakespeare Studies 12 (1979): 25-33; Hugh Richmond, “Shakespeare's Navarre,” Huntington Library Quarterly 42 (1979): 193-216; and Mary Ellen Lamb, “The Nature of Topicality in ‘Love's Labour's Lost’,” Shakespeare Survey, 38 (1985): 49-59.

32. In Henry IV (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984), David Buisseret writes that in March 1572, Henry's mother Jeanne “sent for Henry to come to court, and went on towards Paris to make preparations for the marriage. … By 13 June, Henry had reached Chaunay. … There he learned that his mother was dead. … Then he continued on his way to Paris, very slowly, as if he were not looking forward to his marriage” (p. 7). For other histories of Henry of Navarre (later Henri IV of France), see Mark Greengrass, France in the Age of Henri IV: The Struggle for Stability, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Longman, 1984/1995); Irene Mahoney, Royal Cousin: The Life of Henri IV of France (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970); G. R. R. Treasure, Seventeenth-Century France (London: John Murray, 1966); Hesketh Pearson, Henry of Navarre: The King Who Dared (New York: Harper, 1963); and Andrew C. P. Haggard, The Amours of Henri de Navarre and of Marguerite de Valois (London: Stanley Paul, n.d.).

33. To my knowledge the only critic who recognizes that “where the play uses history, it uses it as something to escape from” is John Kerrigan, though he has the play escaping in the direction of escapism itself: LLL “offered its Elizabethan audience a reassuring light-hearted view of an alliance across the Channel which probably seemed in reality rather disturbing” (pp. 10-11).

34. The liberation/resistance distinction, like the object/subject position distinction used below, is David Halperin's, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 56-7.

35. I rule out the possibility that Henry, knowing what was going to happen, intentionally walked into this slaughter because he felt caught by forces beyond his control. Note that the problem Henri faced is virtually identical to the problem we face as LLL's audience. Like the events of 1572, LLL consists of at least two chains of signifiers, a strategic one, made up of the normative male activities we see taking place on stage (academy, sonnets, masque), that lead inexplicably to the play's problematic, ungeneric non-marriage ending, and a tactical one, constructed of these same activities, that, beginning at a different place, ends up leading to a non-nuptial ending that is, in its own way, comedic. It is only by analyzing both chains that the design/function of LLL becomes apparent, since it is only by seeing both chains and their relationship to each other that LLL is a comedy despite the fact that it does not “come out right” in conventional manner and form.

36. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. i.

37. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965/1974), and The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977). The latter was reviewed positively by Keith Thomas, Times Literary Supplement (21 Oct. 1977): 1226; negatively by E. P. Thompson, New Society (8 Sept., 1977): 499-501; and extremely negatively by Alan Macfarlane, History and Theory 18 (1979): 103-26, a review depending heavily on Macfarlane's earlier work, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978). For social histories following Macfarlane's lead, see: Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1982); Ralph A. Houlbrooke, The English Family, 1450-1700 (London and New York: Longman, 1984); and J. A. Sharpe, Early Modern England: A Social History, 1550-1760 (London: Edward Arnold, 1987).

38. For studies of early modern adolescence, see: Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994); Marjorie Garber, Coming of Age in Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1981); Keith Thomas, “Age and Authority in Early Modern England,” Proceedings of the British Academy 62 (1976): 205-48; Steven R. Smith, “The London Apprentices as Seventeenth-Century Adolescents,” Past and Present 61 (1973): 149-61; and Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-Century France,” Past and Present 50 (1971): 41-75. For general studies, see: Erik Erickson, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1950); Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. R. Baldick (New York: Vintage, 1962); Peter Blos, On Adolescence: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation (New York: Macmillan, 1962); Aaron H. Esman, ed., The Psychology of Adolescence: Essential Readings (New York: International Universities Press, 1975); Aaron H. Esman, Adolescence and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); and Alice Schlegel and Herbert Barry III, Adolescence: An Anthropological Inquiry (New York: The Free Press, 1991).

39. In 1552—according to S. Rappaport's Worlds Within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 392—56٪ of the male population of London was under 30.

40. Clearly not all youths took advantage of this strong, or emergent, “adolescent” opportunity. Many would not have seen anything inadequate about things as they were and would have taken well-worn paths into dominant adulthood; others no doubt used this longer span of time to maximize the number of transgressive activities they could indulge in.

41. Henri thought he could marry Margot without also “marrying” Catholic France; Elizabeth knew she could not marry Alençon without also marrying Catholicism and patriarchy; Margot did not want to marry Henri because it would mean not marrying the Catholic social order (through her lover, Henri, the duc de Guise) she was one with and desired to remain one with. In fact, told by her mother, Catherine de Medici, that she would be marrying Henri of Navarre, Margot (according to her memoirs) responded as follows: “I made answere, that I having no other will but hers, it were superfluous, but I besought her seriously to consider that I was a Catholike, and that it would be a great affliction to me, to be married to one that was not of my Religion. Afterwards. … I replyed to her againe, that I had neither choice nor will, but what was hers, and besought her againe to remember, that I was a true Catholick.” The Grand Cabinet-Counsels Unlocked … Most excellently written … by Margaret de Valois, trans. Robert Codrington (London: by R. H., 1658), p. 29.

42. Of emergent, strong adolescence there is virtually nothing, for example, in Ben-Amos's study. We are told that early modern adolescents “had few values that truly distinguished them from adults, and had few, if any, institutions which were wholly theirs” (p. 205). But this, as de Certeau shows us, is to miss the point. Strong adolescents appropriated adult values and institutions (e.g., academy, sonnet, masque) in order to exploit them tactically.

43. One reason Macfarlane disagrees so profoundly with Stone is that, unlike Stone, he refuses to consider the period's literary evidence: “The didactic, artistic and moralistic material in sermons, pamphlets, plays and poems has been little used [in my book]. Although I am reasonably familiar with such material, it seemed to me that one of the possible reasons for the distortion of English social history has been too heavy a reliance on upper class literature and on writing which stated what ought to happen” (p. 205). For Macfarlane to conflate dominant didactic and moralistic tracts with plays staged in emergent/transgressive theatres, not to mention representing plays and pamphlets as upper class literature, suggests the degree to which he excises from early modern culture the heterogeneous activities effecting many of the socio-cultural changes Stone records.

44. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988 [1975]), pp. 84-85.

45. The language for the second point is taken from David Halperin's Saint Foucault, pp. 61-62; that for the third is from Judith Butler's Excitable Speech (New York and London: Routledge, 1977), p. 156. For the claim that early modern England was always already uniquely adequate, if not virtually perfect, see Macfarlane's chapter on “England in Perspective” in The Origins of English Individualism, pp. 165ff.

46. There is no doubt that Stone somewhat miscasts his central argument. By arguing, as he does, that early open lineage families were generally cruel and heartless, he asserts what he can't prove and what he neither needs to assert nor prove. The stronger argument is that these open lineage families only needed (that they were designed) to produce a heir and reproduce the existing symbolic order, and that, as a consequence, they didn't have to do, and often didn't do, anything but that. In this way his argument that, over time, marriages had to do something else, and did do something else, would be correct even if the something else they were doing was neither affectionate nor companionate. In short, Stone weakens his case by coming at these issues primarily from the perspective of the emotional aspects of marriage, as important as these are, rather than from the perspective of marriage's socio-economic functions. This sometimes causes him to focus more on a now largely invisible object, emotions, than on the crucial changes taking place in the relations of power that caused, and were caused by, such emotions.

47. Part of the subversive power of commedia dell'arte is that it both ridicules those who allow themselves to be reduced, and at the same time humorously displaces shame from those who had been reduced, to stereotypical identity-roles like pedant, braggart, clown.

48. Clearly this new form of individuality was available at the beginning of the sixteenth century in, most famously, Henry VIII's relations to marriage and Rome, but it was available only to what Bataille calls imperative and base heterogeneities (kings and criminals); moreover, for all its value, it was, psychically and socially speaking, disorienting, feared, and relatively forbidden, if not lethal, for anyone who was not king.

49. Margot no doubt wished retroactively that, at her marriage to Henri of Navarre, she had said “No” forecefully enough to prevent her brother, King Henri III, from being able, when she refused to say “Yes,” to push her head down in a seeming gesture of compliance and consent, overruling her will, desire, and silence.

50. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso Press, 1989), p. 138.

51. Although the debate concerning Shakespeare's audience has usefully focused on identifying early modern playgoers in terms of class and gender, the category, strong adolescence, proves more helpful in identifying the “privileges”—i.e., education, empowerment, etc.—which audience members sought from early modern theatres than does the privileged or unprivileged status they brought with them to the theatres. For opposed versions of the class/gender approach, see Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare's Audience (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), and Ann Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London, 1576-1642 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981).

A shorter version of this paper was presented at “The Culture of Class” at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in April, 1992. I would like to thank Peter Stallybrass and Patricia Fumerton for responding to its argument in provocatively helpful fashion.