SOURCE: “Love's Labour's Lost: The Grace of Society,” in The Vulnerable Text: Essays on Renaissance Literature, Columbia University Press, 1986, pp. 140-58.

[In the essay below, originally published in 1971, Greene assesses Love's Labour's Lost in terms of its concern with society, noting that the play lacks both a locus of political authority and a reliable representative of the citizenry. Greene contends that while the play does not portray a “living society,” it comments on the appropriate conduct of the citizens, and on the roles of entertainment, love, wit, and civility within society.]

The qualities of Love's Labour's Lost determine its limitations. The arabesques of wit, the elaborations of courtly artifice, the coolness of tone—these sources of its charm contribute to that brittleness and thinness and faded superficiality for which some critics of several generations have reproached it. For its admirers, a heavy stress upon these limitations is likely to appear irrelevant. But even admirers must acknowledge that, placed against its author's work, Love's Labour's Lost is distinguished by a certain slenderness of feeling, a delicate insubstantiality. It is most certainly not a trivial play, but its subtlety remains a little disembodied.

One source of that impression may be the play's lack, unique in Shakespeare, of any firm social underpinning. Not only is there missing any incarnation of responsible authority, any strong and wise center of political power, but there is equally missing any representative of a stable and dependable citizenry. There is nobody here who, however quirky or foolish or provincial, can be counted on, when he is multiplied enough times, to keep society functioning. Or if there is such a figure in the person of Constable Dull, we are struck with how very marginal a role his creator has permitted him. The patently comic figures—Armado, Holofernes, Costard, Nathaniel, Moth—are all too thin or specialized or socially peripheral to suggest any sort of living society. They may be contrasted with the mechanicals of A Midsummer Night's Dream, who, for all their splendid ineptness, do persuade us that a kind of Athenian proletariat exists. The earlier play may owe its peculiar airiness in part to a lack of that social solidity.

Yet despite its lack of a ballasted society, the play is really about “society,” in a slightly different sense of the word. Its true subject is caught in an offhand remark by one of its funny men: “Societie (saith the text) is the happiness of life” (IV.ii.177-78).¹ The play does not challenge Nathaniel's text, however insubstantial its dramatic sociology. It is much concerned with society, and the happiness of life in society. If it does not present a living society in action, it presents and comments on configurations of conduct which sustain living societies in and out of plays. It is concerned with styles, modes of language and gesture and action which befit, in varying degrees, the intercourse of civilized people. And being a comedy, it is concerned with the failures of inadequate styles, since this is the perennial source of elegant comedy from Homer to Proust. Only at the end, and much more surprisingly, does it turn out to reflect the failure of all style.

To distinguish most sensibly the play's hierarchy of moral styles, one may adopt the vantage point of the princess of France and her three attendant ladies. These four women, being women, cannot provide a strong political center, but they do constitute a certain spirited and witty center of social judgment. In their vivacious and spontaneous taste, limited in range and depth but not in accuracy, each is a poised, Meredithian arbitress of style. This power of discrimination is established by the first speech each lady makes onstage. In the cases of the three attendants, the speech consists in a sketch of the gentleman who is to become the given lady's suitor, and each speech, in its alert and finely qualified appreciation, does credit to the speaker as well as to its subject. Thus Maria:

I know him Madame, …
A man of soveraigne parts he is esteem'd:
Well fitted in Arts, glorious in Armes:
Nothing becomes him ill that he would well.
The onely soyle of his faire vertues glosse,
If vertues glosse will staine with any soile,
Is a sharp wit match'd with too blunt a Will:
Whose edge hath power to cut whose will still wills,
It should none spare that come within his power.

(II.i.44, 48-55)

As regards the princess, it is her modesty, her impervious disregard of flattery, the sense of proportion regulating her pride of birth, which betoken most frequently her moral poise. The princess' first speech opens with a mild rebuke of the spongy Lord Boyet for his gratuitous compliments:

Good L. Boyet, my beauty though but mean,
Needs not the painted flourish of your praise: …
I am lesse proud to heare you tell my worth,
Then you much wiling to be counted wise,
In spending your wit in the praise of mine.

(II.i.16-17, 20-22)

She refuses coolly to be hoodwinked by the flattery her station conventionally attracts, with an acuteness which sets off the foolish egotism of the king. His first speech, the opening speech of the play, is full of tiresome talk of fame and honor, posturing predictions of immortality and glory. The princess' view of “glory” is plain enough after her quick disposal of Boyet, as it is in a later scene when she laughingly dismisses with a tip an unwitting blunder by the forester. Indeed she follows that incident with reflections which are painfully apposite to the king's foolish enterprise, even if they are ostensibly and deprecatingly directed at herself:

And out of question, so it is sometimes:
Glory growes guiltie of detested crimes,
When for Fames sake, for praise and outward part,
We bend to that, the working of the hart.

(IV.i.34-37)

This last phrase about bending to externals the working of the heart touches very nearly the heart of the play. For Love's Labour's Lost explores the relation of feeling and forms, feeling and the funny distortions of feeling which our social experience beguiles us to fashion. The four gentlemen, quite clearly, begin by denying the workings of their hearts and libidos for the outward part of fame, just as Armado squirms from his distressing passion for a girl who is outwardly—i.e., socially—his inferior. The distinction of the ladies is that their feelings and their style, their outward parts, are attuned; they know what they feel and they are in control of its expression. Although they are as quick to admire as the four gentlemen, they are slower to think they are falling in love. They are also, to their credit, far clearer about the physiological dimension of their interest. The freedom of their byplay about sex may have lost with time some of its comic sprightliness, but next to the dogged Petrarchan vaporizings of their suitors that freedom still emerges as the healthier and more refreshing mode of speech. The four ladies are, in the best sense, self-possessed, although the play does not try to pretend that the scope of their feelings or their experience is any wider than most girls'. An older person with no wider a scope would risk the hollowness of the ambiguous, slightly sterile Boyet. The ladies are so engaging because their spirited and untested freshness is tempered by instinctive good sense.

The roles of the gentlemen—Navarre and his three courtiers—are slightly more complicated. For they must justify to some degree the interest the ladies conceive in them. Longaville may not be quite the “man of sovereign parts” Maria says he is, but he must remain within hailing distance of that distinguished man she thought she saw and liked. We must always be able to assume that the gentlemen are salvageable as social animals and potential husbands, and need only the kind of education provided by laughter and the penances to which, at the close, they are assigned. But granting them a basic attractiveness, we have to confess that they resemble a little—in their deplorable affectations, their wayward rhetoric, their callow blindness to themselves—the caricatured figures of the subplot. There is a difference of degree, not of kind, between the doggerel of, say, Holofernes (IV.ii.66-76) and the mediocrity of Dumain's verses:

A huge translation of hypocrisie,
Vildly compiled, profound simplicitie

(V.ii.55-56)

Like Holofernes, Armado, and Nathaniel, the gentlemen “have been at a great feast of languages and stolen the scraps”; all steal indifferently from a common alms-basket of words. They are failures as poseurs because their poses are never original, and as Holofernes himself is able to recognize, “imitari is nothing.” The successive defeats of the gentlemen in their sets of wits with the ladies betray an ineptitude of social intelligence and style.

Shakespeare will tolerate cheerfully enough the fashionable inanities of sentimental rhetoric, but he sees the risk of mistaking rhetoric for real sentiment. It is the risk which anguished Pirandello, but it works in this more comical world to expose the gentlemen to their mistresses' ridicule. For the ladies, who are not all wise, know enough to distinguish language in touch with feeling from the language which does duty for feeling, or, more accurately, which papers over adolescent confusions of feeling. The ladies' rhetoric, cooler, more bracing, more alert than the lords', enlivened by the freedom of its casual license, finds a natural recreation in a kind of amiable flyting, a “civil war of wits.” The ladies vanquish their suitors unfailingly in this civil badinage because they are, so to speak, in practice. The suitors are not, having attempted to exclude from their still and contemplative academy what they call “the world's debate.” Or rather, they have allowed the debate to impinge only at second hand, as a recreative fancy and linguistic toy. They may hear, says the king, from Armado:

In high-borne words the worth of many a Knight:
From tawnie Spaine lost in the worlds debate.

(I.i.184-85)

Perhaps it is their unwillingness to be so lost—save in fantasy, through the mediation of high-colored language—which loses them the verbal battles under the banner of Saint Cupid. The play will end with a calendary debate, reminding us that nature itself, and the human lives it governs, are subject to the amoebean conflicts of the seasons.

The war of wits is “civil” in more meanings than one, since the term civility gathers up all of the play's central values. The term as Elizabethans used it embraced all those configurations of political and social and moral conduct which can render society the happiness of life. The gentlemen, in their cocksure unworldliness, have only bungling conceptions of civility, and for all their fumbling efforts toward urbanity, their parochial manners unflaggingly show through. The ideal is defined partly by its breaches: the ascetic breach represented by the academy's austere statutes; or the inhuman breach of the decree which would deprive an interloping woman of her tongue: “a dangerous law against gentilitie” (I.i.139); or the inhospitable breach which denies the princess welcome to the court of Navarre; or the rhetorical breaches of the gentlemen's poetastical love complaints; or the fantastical breach of the Muscovite embassy:

Their shallow showes, and Prologue vildely pen'd:
And their rough carriage so ridiculous;

(V.ii.342-43)

or the final blunder which asks the bereaved princess to listen still to her lover's suit. This variety of gaffes is filled out by the cruder affectations of the minor comic characters. Virtually all the men in the play violate, each in his peculiar way, the values of “civility,” which meant at once civilization, social polish, government, courtesy, decorum, manners, and simple human kindness.

Of these various participant values, the play lays particular stress on the virtue of decorum, which becomes here a sense of the conduct appropriate to a given situation. Berowne's main charge against Navarre's academy appeals implicitly to that virtue:

FERDINAND:
Berowne is like an envious sneaping Frost,
That bites the first borne infants of the Spring.
BEROWNE:
Wel, say I am, why should proud Summer boast,
Before the Birds have any cause to sing?
Why should I ioy in any abortive birth?
At Christmas I no more desire a Rose,
Then wish a Snow in Mayes new fangled showes:
But like of each thing that in season growes.
So you to studie now it is too late,
That were to clymbe ore the house to unlocke the gate.

(I.i.110-19)

Enterprise blossoms when, in Berowne's phrase, it is “fit in his place and time” (I.i.107); comedy wells up from the disjuncture of act and occasion. The lords' intuition of this great Renaissance virtue is blunted equally in their roles as students and as suitors, so that an especial irony tinges the king's summons to courtship:

Away, away, no time shall be omitted,
That will be time, and may by us be fitted.

(IV.iii.400-401)

That cry will receive an unwitting answer in Rosaline's fantasy:

O that I knew he were but in by th'weeke,
How I would make him fawne, and begge, and seeke,
And wait the season, and observe the times.

(V.ii.65-67)

and finds another faint echo later in the princess' rejection of Navarre's last plea:

KING:
Now at the latest minute of the houre,
Grant us your loves.
QUEEN:
A time me thinkes too short,
To make a world-without-end bargaine in.

(V.ii.861-64)

This fault of abusing season and “time” is implicitly caught up in Berowne's incoherent apology for the misconduct of himself and his companions, whose errors he ruefully confesses to have sinned against decorum.

                                                  Your beautie Ladies
Hath much deformed us, fashioning our humors
Even to the opposed end of our intents.
And what in us hath seem'd ridiculous:
As Love is full of unbefitting straines,
All wanton as a childe, skipping and vaine …
Which partie-coated presence of loose love
Put on by us, if in your heavenly eies,
Have misbecom'd our oathes and gravities.
Those heavenlie eies that looke into these faults,
Suggested us to make.

(V.ii.829-34, 839-43)

The key words are “deformed,” “unbefitting,” and “misbecom'd,” suggesting offenses against that value of propriety which had not yet, in the sixteenth century, become the fossilized austerity we have learned to deplore.

The relationship of Berowne to the ideals of civility is rather more complex than his fellows', since he understands so much more than they without ever saving himself from their muddles. He has traits in common with Shaw's John Tanner: both are brilliant, ineffectual talkers who never quite learn how useless are even their best lines. Berowne for all his brilliance is easily put in his place by the securer wit of Rosaline. But despite his frustrations he remains the most original, interesting, and complicated character in the play. He is insincere from the outset; he knows of course that he will sign the articles of the academic oath, even as he calls attention to himself by pretending to refuse. He plays with life, and his life is a play within the play. It is the last word he speaks, in the famous regretful line that gives us—had we been so obtuse as to miss it—the key to his character: “That's too long for a play” (V.ii.955). Ironist, sophist, scoffer, he has one small, delusory faith: he believes in language, and it fails him. He is almost saved by his capacity to laugh at himself, but not quite; his worst muddle is his last, when he tries to chasten his rhetoric before the fact of death, and cannot shake his inveterate cleverness:

                                        We to our selves prove false,
By being once false, for ever to be true
To those that make us both, faire Ladies you.

(V.ii.845-47)

To themselves they do indeed prove false, and to the motto “Honest plain words, best pierce the ears of griefe” (V.ii.826).

Berowne's teasing dilettantism is not up to death—nor (more surprisingly?) is it up to sex. His sexuality, like his fellow suitors', is visual, not to say voyeuristic. Their obsession with the eye transcends the Petrarchan cliché; it betokens their callow and adolescent virginity. It is symptomatic that the most sleazy joke the gentlemen permit themselves has to do with looking;² when the ladies' talk is bawdy, they refer to the more relevant organs. Their ribaldry is the cleaner. None of these women would say of her lover what Berowne is so foolish to admit:

O but her eye: by this light, but for her eye, I would not love her; yes, for her two eyes.

(IV.iii.10-12)

And again later:

From womens eyes this doctrine I derive.
They sparcle still the right promethean fire,
They are the Bookes, the Arts, the Achademes,
That shew, containe, and nourish all the world.
Else none at all in ought proves excellent.

(IV.iii.369-73)

This fascination is echoed in the rhetoric of the other suitors, and enters the plot with the misleading exchange of favors:

The ladies did change Favours; and then we
Following the signes, woo'd but the signe of she.

(V.ii.521-22)

The sign of she! That is always the object of immature desire. To know and love the complex living creature takes more time and a wiser heart.

The comedy of the gentlemen's sentimental inadequacies is reflected obliquely in the comedy of their inferiors. This reflection receives dramatic expression in Costard's mistaken interchange of Berowne's poem with Armado's letter. The confusion suggests a common element which we recognize as the vice of affectation, a vice which is only a few degrees more marked in the style of Armado and spills over into humor. One might almost say that we are invited to share Costard's error. But from another perspective the gentlemen as gallants emerge from the contrast with even less credit than the ostensible clowns. Costard at least represents the closest thing to good sense in the flights of folly of the opening scene; through his malapropising nonsense a few primitive truths are sounded which shatter all the foregoing silliness about asceticism:

Now sir for the manner; It is the manner of a man to speake to a woman.

(I.i.221-22)

Such is the simplicitie of man to harken after the flesh.

(I.i.229-30)

Armado of course is more closely parallel to the gentlemen because, unlike Costard, he fancies himself to be in love. Armado is the most suggestive of the comic figures and one of the richest of any in Shakespeare's early comedies, although his potentialities are not consistently developed. There is a resonance to his humor which is lacking, say, in the humor of his fellow pomposity, Holofernes. This is because Shakespeare invests Armado's grandiloquence with a touch of melancholy. We are allowed to catch a bat's squeak of pathos behind the tawny splendor, and a lonely desire for Jaquenetta behind the clumsy condescension to her. The pathos is really affecting when he must decline Costard's challenge and confess his shirtlessness, infamonized among potentates. Nothing so touching overshadows the presentation of the gentlemen. Armado's courtship is more desperate, more clouded, and more believable.

A conventional reading of the play places the main turning point at the end of the fourth act, with the fourfold exposure of the quondam academics and their abjuration of study in the name of Saint Cupid. But to read in this way is to be taken in by the gentlemen's own self-delusions. For their apparent conversion is at bottom a pseudo-conversion, the exchange of one pretentious fiction for another, and we are meant to view ironically their naive release of enthusiasm, as we view Caliban's “Freedom, high-day!” The Muscovite embassy represents the culmination of the gentlemen's clumsy posing, their inept sophistication, and their empty formalism. Never yet in the play have manner and mien been quite so far from feeling, and we learn merely that courtship as performance can be just as silly as the performance of monastic seclusion. The real turning point begins with Berowne's second abjuration and its potentially deeper renunciation of rhetorical affectation.

Taffata phrases, silken tearmes precise,
Three-pil'd Hyperboles, spruce affection;
Figures pedanticall, these summer flies
Have blowne me full of maggot ostentation.
I do forsweare them.

(V.ii.452-56)

Berowne underestimates the difficulty of the sacrifice, as Rosaline finds a way to suggest, but we are allowed to hope that the seed of understanding has been planted. Indeed the remaining action of this rich last scene—almost a one-act play in itself—can be regarded as a progressive and painful exorcism of the gentlemen's pretenses and pretensions. The first step involves a humiliating sincerity.

KING:
Teach us sweete Madame, for our rude transgression, some faire excuse.
QUEEN:
The fairest is confession.
Were you not heere but even now, disguis'd?
KING:
Madam, I was.

(V.ii.478-82)

That step leads to the further humbling discovery of the exchanged favors and mistaken identities, and that in turn to the puzzling but clearly important episode of the Worthies' pageant.³

The intrusion of this interlude, so cruelly and even pathetically routed at the climax of the action, has troubled more than one reader,⁴ and indeed it is not easily justified by our common standards of daily morality. Yet I think that Shakespeare has given us a key to its interpretation, a key which no critic to my knowledge has noticed. The essential point is the reluctance of the gentlemen to watch the pageant, chastened as they already are at this point by their sense of their own absurdity. Yet in fact they do watch. The exchange is notable that immediately precedes this ambiguous entertainment:

KING:
Berowne, they will shame us:
Let them not approach.
BEROWNE:
We are shame-proofe my Lord: and 'tis some policie, to have one shew worse then the Kings and his companie.
KING:
I say they shall not come.
QUEEN:
Nay my good Lord, let me ore-rule you now;
That sport best pleases, that does least know how.
Where Zeale strives to content, and the contents
Dies in the Zeale of that which it presents:
Their forme confounded, makes most forme in mirth,
When great things labouring perish in their birth.
BEROWNE:
A right description of our sport my Lord.

(V.ii.567-79)

The clumsy pageant will imitate uncomfortably the fumbling Muscovite masquing. The analogy is painfully close, as both the king and Berowne are alert enough to perceive. The princess' wise insistence on the performance—“That sport best pleases, that does least know how”—creates a small moral dilemma for the lords which they come to resolve by mocking their own unwitting mockers. They recognize, not without a certain rueful courage, that the pageant represents a quintessential parody of their own offenses against propriety; so they choose to follow Boyet in turning upon that parody as though to exorcise their own folly. The telling line is Dumaine's:

Though my mockes come home by me, I will now be merrie.

(V.ii.704-5)

Unforgivable in itself, the routing of the pageant is dramatically right as ritual action, as a symbolic rejection of a mask beginning to be outworn. Indeed only the savage shame one feels toward an unworthy part of one's self could motivate the gentlemen's quite uncharacteristic cruelty.

Considered in this way, the ridicule of the pageant needs no palliation, and yet two palliative observations can be made. The first is that the ridicule is not heaped equally on all five performers. Moth as Hercules remains silent while presented by Holofernes-Maccabaeus and is allowed to leave the stage after the six-line presentation without any interruption. Costard is interrupted twice and corrected once at the outset, but is then heard out quietly, thanked by the princess, and complimented by Berowne. Nathaniel fares somewhat worse, but the most scathing ridicule is reserved for the two most outrageous (if charming) pomposities, Holofernes and Armado. This careful apportioning of embarrassment is not accidental, nor is the circumstance that the two most harried victims achieve individually their finest, and simplest, moments under fire. Holofernes' reproach is his last line and his one stroke of quiet dignity: “This is not generous, not gentle, not humble” (V.ii.696). Armado, the richer character, is vouchsafed by his creator a felicity close to eloquence:

The sweet War-man is dead and rotten,
Sweet chuckes, beat not the bones of the buried:
When he breathed he was a man

(V.ii.731-33)

and by the end something like a transformation seems to be operating even upon his stiff and shallow playing-card magnificence. (“For mine owne part, I breath free breath: I have seene the day of wrong, through the little hole of discretion, and I will right my selfe like a soldier”—V.ii.795-97.) He too will serve a penance like his betters.⁵ Thus the lash of comic criticism chastens with bitter success all the surquedry of this dramatic world. Thus all men are taught, with Nathaniel, not to o'erpart themselves.

The final and most telling chastisement appears with the entrance of Marcade, who brings the fact of death. Even a few minutes earlier, this fact would have shattered the play; now it can be borne. Heretofore death has been itself rhetorical, as in the very first lines:

Let Fame, that all hunt after in their lives,
Live registered upon our brazen Tombes,
And then grace us in the disgrace of death.

(I.i.6-8)

Then an abstract unreality, death now is a particular event. No one of the characters has the emotional depth fully to command a rhetoric commensurate with the event, but in the speeches following Marcade's entry three degrees of rhetorical inadequacy can be distinguished. The princess falls short only in the reserve with which she receives her bereavement, a reserve which betrays no feeling and risks the appearance of coldness. Otherwise she is sensible, brief, even, briskly courteous, alert to the relative inconsequence of all the badinage that has preceded. In contrast, the poverty of the king's rhetoric is painfully manifest:

The extreme parts of time, extremelie formes
All causes to the purpose of his speed:

(V.ii.813-14)

a rhetorical failure because it cannot conceal the underlying poverty of sympathy or even of decent respect. In essence, the king is making a request which is shockingly improper—that his courtship not be neglected because of her loss—and perhaps it is his consciousness of this indecorum that produces such monstrous linguistic convolutions and elicits her wryly polite answer: “I understand you not, my greefes are double” (V.ii.825). Berowne's essay at a valediction, as we have seen, opens with a gesture toward the proper simplicity but winds up with an equally inappropriate contortion. Berowne at least recognizes the rhetorical problem; the lesson of his failure seems to be that habits of feeling and language are not quickly overcome. Earlier he had confessed:

                                                  beare with me, I am sicke.
Ile leave it by degrees.

(V.ii.464-65)

The degrees do indeed come slowly.

In the light of the lords' inadequacies before the fact of death, the penances set them by the ladies constitute a kind of final prodding toward maturation. Berowne's will test the relevance of his dilettantish jesting to human suffering⁶ and thereby purge perhaps the frivolity of his ironies. In these closing moments of the last scene, one has the impression of the comedy turning back upon itself, withdrawing from those modes of speech and laughter which have in fact constituted its distinctiveness. Pater is surely right when he suggests that the play contains “a delicate raillery by Shakespeare himself at his own chosen manner”⁷—at least of the manner chosen for this work. The raillery has been there throughout, diffused and subtle, but now at the end it has become something more serious and has determined the conclusion. Could this final verdict have been introduced in the later version, “newly corrected and augmented,” as the title page of the 1598 quarto informs us? The judgment on Berowne comes to seem like a judgment on the slenderness of a certain moral style that has been outgrown.

There could be no greater mistake than to conclude from this judgment that Shakespeare disliked rhetorics and forms, patterns of words and of experience. He was not, needless to say, in favor of the crude expression of raw passion. He knew that society, the happiness of life, depends on configurations and rituals. He represented the Muscovite masquing to be silly not because it was artificial but because, in his sense of the word, it was not artificial enough; it was “shallow” and “rough” and “vilely penned.” This being so, one may ask whether Shakespeare did not provide within the play an instance of authentic artifice, and the answer is that he did provide it, in the form of the two concluding songs.

If we regard the presentation of these songs literally, as a part of the pageant they are designed to conclude, then their artistic finish is out of place. But if we regard them as rhetorical touchstones by which to estimate the foregoing funny abuses of language, they form an ideal ending. In their careful balance, elaborate refrain, and lyric poise, the songs are artificial in the good old sense, but in their freshness and freedom from stale tradition, they blithely escape the stilted modern sense. They violate the cliché preference of spring to winter and adumbrate a finer decorum; they “like of each thing that in season grows.” They like of each thing, but not conventionally or sentimentally; the “unpleasing” word of the cuckoo sounds in the spring, while the wintry cry of the owl is “merry.” Joseph Westlund points out suggestively that the more attractively “realistic” world of Hiems lies further from the effete world of the play itself, and closer to the experience the gentlemen must come to face.⁸ The winter song achieves a mingling of the lyrical and the humbly truthful which none of the courtly poetasters in Navarre could manage.

“The Words of Mercurie, / Are harsh after the songs of Apollo” concludes Armado (V.ii.1012-13). A recent editor paraphrases:

i.e., let us end with the songs, because clever words of the god Mercury would come harshly after the songs of Apollo, the god of poetry.⁹

Such may well be Armado's meaning, but his words can bear an ulterior construction. He might be taken to mean that the songs we have just heard, with their bracing directness, are to the rest of the play and its pseudo-golden poetry as Mercury is to Apollo. From the narrow world of neo-Petrarchan sentiment, the experience of the songs may well seem “harsh,” since they treat of cuckolds and red noses and frozen milk. With that adjective in our ears, Armado ends the comedy: “You that way; we this way” (V.ii.1014). Who is “you”? The actors on the other side of the stage? Or we in the audience, who must leave the theater and exchange one set of conventions and disguises for another, less tractable to laughter?

Society may be, ideally, the happiness of life, but the end of the play has not placed us in it. Perhaps Nathaniel's text is fallacious. But by one very faint, almost surreptitious means, Shakespeare seems to me to remind us repeatedly of the possible felicity into which society can flower. This means is the unusual frequence and special prominence accorded the word “grace”—the word, we remember, with which the opening sentence plays (quoted above …). As the play continues, the many extensions and intricate variations of “grace” in all its meanings are explored with deliberate subtlety. In no other play by Shakespeare is the address “Your Grace” to a sovereign so alive with suggestiveness. The princess is represented explicitly and emphatically as endowed with “grace,” from the first mention of her:

For well you know here comes in Embassie
The French Kings daughter, with your selfe to speake:
A Maide of grace and compleate maiestie

(I.i.145-47)

and again at her first appearance, in Boyet's injunction:

Be now as prodigall of all deare grace,
As Nature was in making Graces deare,
When she did starve the generall world beside,
And prodigally gave them all to you.

(II.i.12-15)

The princess' grace has something to do presumably with the comely carriage of her physical bearing, but also with a certain courtesy and sweetness of manner which transcend the body. As the multiple meanings of the word quietly exfoliated, educated Elizabethan playgoers may have remembered the quality of grazia in Castiglione's Cortegiano, that indefinable air which represents the courtier's supreme distinction, and which is repeatedly and emphatically opposed to affectation.¹⁰ Such an echo could only heighten the ironies of the honorific “Your Grace” addressed to the king, and indeed on one occasion his fitness for it is indirectly questioned:

Good heart, What grace hast thou thus to reprove
These wormes for loving, that art most in love?

(IV.iii.158-59)

The word in these contexts signifies a virtue a person can possess, but other contexts remind us that it is something that can be given to another. It is what lovers want, as Longaville's poem shows:

Thy grace being gain'd, cures all disgrace in me

(IV.iii.68)

and what the ladies determine to refuse:

And not a man of them shall have the grace
Despight of sute, to see a Ladies face.

(V.ii.134-35)

No, to the death we will not move a foot,
Nor to their pen'd speech render we no grace.

(V.ii.152-53)

Grace is what a wit desires from his audience, perhaps meretriciously:

For he hath wit to make an ill shape good,
And shape to win grace though she had no wit.

(II.i.63-64)

Why that's the way to choke a gibing spirit,
Whose influence is begot of that loose grace,
Which shallow laughing hearers give to fooles

(V.ii.934-36)

but it is also the very ability to amuse:

He is Wits Pedler, and retailes his Wares,
At Wakes, and Wassels, Meetings, Markets, Faires.
And we that sell by grosse, the Lord doth know,
Have not the grace to grace it with such show.

(V.ii.356-59)

These last passages suggest the paradoxical openness of this ability to perversion or manipulation, and other usages imply the same double-edged danger:

                                                  Follie in Wisedome hatch'd:
Hath wisedoms warrant, and the helpe of Schoole,
And Wits own grace to grace a learned Foole?

(V.ii.74-76)

But all these failures, real or potential, of the virtue never quite suppress the hope which the word embodies: the hope for felicitous human conversation. And although the hope is firmly rooted in the affairs of this world, at least one usage holds the word open briefly to its theological sense:

For every man with his affects is borne,
Not by might mastred, but by speciall grace.

(I.i.163-64)

That is Berowne on the resilience of human passion, to be echoed later by his flip cynicism: “God give him grace to grone” (IV.iii.20). Is it fanciful to think that the word is introduced deliberately, to enrich its resonance still further, in the invitation of Holofernes to Nathaniel?

I do dine to day at the fathers of a certaine Pupill of mine, where if (being repast) it shall please you to gratifie the table with a Grace, I will … undertake your bien vonuto … I beseech your Societie.
NATHANIEL:
And thanke you to: for societie (saith the text) is the happinesse of life.

(IV.ii.169-73, 175-78)

Here, just below the amusing surface, two or three meanings of the word seem to coalesce.

The grace of entertainment, the grace of love, the grace of wit, the grace of civility—Love's Labour's Lost is about the pursuit of all these fragile goals. Its opening adumbrates the need of some ulterior, metaphysical principle to “grace us in the disgrace of death,” though the principle of fame proposed there is quickly forgotten. The reader may ask what means the play holds out to us to confront that disgrace, since in fact we are forced at the end to consider it, and the disgrace also of “the speechless sick” and “the pained impotent.” Perhaps the upshot is a wry surrender and such a devaluation of grace as Kokeritz teaches us to find in the irreverent play of The Comedy of Errors on the word's Elizabethan homonym: “Marry, sir, she's the kitchen-wench, and all grease.”¹¹ But Love's Labour's Lost is not, in the last analysis, devaluative, and in a sense its object is to live with the best sort of grace—with enlightened intercourse between the sexes, with gaiety and true wit, with poise, taste, decorum, and charity. The ending does not discredit this object, even if it acknowledges the helplessness of wit before suffering, and even if it extends the realm of grace to unexpected social strata. For the play does not leave us with the princess; it leaves us with a pun on greasy Joan who keels the pot.

We can be grateful to the playwright for not attempting to put onstage the truly enlightened society. He leaves that achievement where it belongs, in the indefinite future, not altogether remote, but much too long for a play. In 1598 he was beginning to outgrow comedy as he knew it, and to question the truth of a comic resolution. Shortly he would reach his own Twelfth Night, an end to merriment. At the end of this comedy, we hardly know where we are, as Berowne goes off to the hospital and the king to a naked hermitage, and Armado to his plow, and the princess to her loss, all off to the world's debate, and we are left with our former mirth a little suspect, and are signaled to leave, almost enigmatically: “You that way; we this way.”

Notes

1. Quotations from Love's Labour's Lost are from the New Variorum Edition, H. H. Furness, ed. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1904).

2. BEROWNE:

   O if the streets were paved with thine eyes,

   Her feet were much too dainty for such tread.

   DUMAINE:

   O vile, then as she goes what upward lyes?

   The street should see as she walk'd over head.

   (IV.iii.295-98)

3. Still another step, just preceding and accompanying the pageant, is the reconciliation of Berowne to Boyet, upon whom Berowne has vented considerable irritation during this scene in two extended speeches (354-73, 513-34). The second speech (concluding bitterly, “You leere upon me, do you? There's an eie / Wounds like a Leaden sword”) is met with a surprisingly soft reply:

   BOYET:

   Full merrily hath this brave manage, this carreere bene run.

   (V.ii.535-36)

   That courtesy, a bit unexpectedly magnanimous and suggestive of a generosity beneath Boyet's mockery, elicits in turn Berowne's retirement from the quarrel:

   Loe, he is tilting straight. Peace, I have don

   (V.ii.537)

   and anticipates the warmer rapproachement a few moments later:

   Well said old mocker, I must needs be friends with thee.

   (V.ii.609-10)

   “Tilting straight” is generally taken to mean “tilting immediately”; it would make more sense if interpreted “in a straight-forward manner, without malice or irony.” This interpretation would better fit Boyet's actual speech, and motivate better Berowne's retirement. In any case, the acceptance of Boyet, with his tougher and more “realistic” wit, by Berowne (and by extension his companions) is not without psychological and thematic importance.

4. To cite two critics:

   “In contrast to that of the Princess, the behaviour of the men is incredibly unattractive, particularly that of Berowne. It is difficult to believe that this is the same man who spoke so eloquently a short time ago about the soft and sensible feelings of love, and promised Rosaline to mend his ways. … The laughter is unattractive, wild, and somehow discordant … and it has little resemblance to the laughter we have heard in the play before this, delicate, sophisticated, sometimes hearty. But never really unkind” (Bobbyann Roesen, “Love's Labour's Lost,” Shakespeare Quarterly [1953], 4:422-23).

   “After this defeat, and especially after Berowne's self-criticism one might expect the men to begin acting with more discretion and self-consciousness; but any such expectation proves false, for in the pageant of the Nine Worthies, which breaks in on the men's defeat, their behavior attains to a new degree of crudity” (E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Early Comedies [New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965], pp. 147-48).

5. “I am a Votarie, I have vow'd to Iaquenetta to holde the Plough for her sweet love three yeares” (V.ii.961-62).

6. Just as death has been an abstraction, so disease has heretofore served Berowne as a source of witty imagery:

   Light Wenches may prove plagues to men forsworne.

   (IV.iii.404)

   Write Lord have mercie on us, on those three,
   They are infected, in their hearts it lies:
   They have the plague, and caught it of your eyes.

   (V.ii.466-68)

7. Walter Pater, Appreciations (London: Macmillan, 1913), p. 166. Pater is speaking specifically here of the style of Berowne; the larger context deals with the “foppery of delicate language” as it is toyed with throughout the play.

8. “All the wooers must learn to be patient, to wait out the full seasonal cycle which the songs represent. … The gaudy blossoms of Ver, the wonderful artifice of wit and wooing, are to be tried by the rigors of winter—of experience in the real world.” Joseph Westlund, “Fancy and Achievement in Love's Labour's Lost,” Shakespeare Quarterly (1967), 18:45.

9. The Signet edition of Love's Labour's Lost, John Arthos, ed. (New York and Toronto, 1965), p. 146.

10. “Sarà adunque il nostro cortegiano stimato eccellente ed in ogni cosa averà grazia, massimamente nel parlare, se fuggirà l'affetazione.” Baldassare Castiglione, Il Cortegiano, con una scelta delle opere minori, Bruno Maier, ed. (Turin: U.T.E.T., 1955), p. 129.

11. Helge Kökeritz, Shakespeare's Pronunciation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), p. 110.