SOURCE: “Love's Labour's Lost: Language and the Deferral of Desire,” in Literature and Psychology, Vol. 35, No. 3, 1989, pp. 1-21.

[In the following essay, Asp demonstrates the way in which the women in the play invite the men to come to terms with human loss, and to temper this loss through both compassion and the “proper” use of language, that is, language focused on others rather than on the self.]

Love's Labour Lost is unique among Shakespeare's comedies in that its conclusion falls short of the conventional comic ending: marriage. Even Berowne, the hero, comments on its oddity: “Our wooing doth not end like an old play; / Jack hath not Jill” (V.ii.864-65), locating the play's generic defect in deferral of desire.¹ Since he blames the ladies for a lack of “courtesy” which “might well have made our sport a comedy” (V.ii.874), he is the first of many critics to attribute aesthetic defect to feminine lack. Peter Erickson echoes Berowne's complaint when he alleges that the unresolved nature of the play's ending is the result of “the humiliation of men as helpless victims of female caprice.”² In Erickson's view, it is not feminine defect as much as feminine excess (“women do not surrender their independence” [p. 10] that skews the comic resolution. These dominant women inspire fear in the patriarchal sensibility and create a tension that works counter to a happy ending (p. 33). This easy attribution of blame, by taking Berowne's disgruntled explanation at face value, disregards large segments of the play's action and representation. If we analyze the play from the perspective of its latent content as well as its manifest statements, we arrive at a different interpretation of failed closure.

Framing the action like the arms of a parenthesis is that great threatener, the ultimate figure of separation and loss (castration). In a flight from such loss, male desire is deferred into linguistic diplacements (pedantic knowledge and courtly rhetoric) throughout much of the action. Since the male lovers refuse to acknowledge the lack that is desire's source, they repress desire by both denial and sublimation³ and pursue an idealized image of ego unity which hides from them the truth of their division into conscious parts.⁴ Unacknowledged, desire “insists” through narcissistic and aggressive behaviors that the men themselves cannot see. Their project attempts to validate illusory subjective unity (“meconnaissance”), which Lacan defines as a pre-Oedipal illusion of subjective unity arising from a perceived image of the body as a unified entity.⁵ The young men's project takes two forms: mastery of knowledge coupled with courtly worship (fetishization) of the feminine which denies castration, or the split in the subject. Both of these attempts to deny lack and assert an undivided subjectivity are linked to language to which the men mistakenly attribute stability and one-dimensionality.

As the play opens the King of Navarre attributes to the “brazen tomb” the power of turning desire from its normal ends to those of sublimation or “fame”. In this play the tomb represents a call to glory that rewards intellectual rather than spiritual achievement. No longer is Christian resurrection set against the power of death; rather, it is the fame of a man can conquer by his own intellectual efforts that lives in the memory of posterity. The warning memento mori is replaced by memento reminisci, i.e., remember to make your mark on the memory of mankind. “Cormorant devouring Time” with “his scythe's keen edge” can only be conquered by the repression of “the army of this world's desires” (I.i.4;6;9) and sublimation of their energies into the drive for intellectual knowledge. In this pursuit action will be sublimated into contemplation, politics to poetry, and desire into courtly codes and linguistic abstractions. The men's drive to transcend death by inserting their behavior into the Lacanian Symbolic Order of contracts, pacts, laws (the oaths and signed agreements to which they so glibly subscribe) finds its origin in the Imaginary function which denies Castration.⁶

At the end of the play the actual event of the King of France's death cuts short the linguistic pleasantries and turns the ladies' thoughts away from the distractions of courtly love to the fact of death.⁷ Then it is their turn to defer desire, to lay ascetic tasks upon their lovers, and to give themselves up to dealing with the reality, not merely the metaphor, of death. The ladies' new preoccupation expresses itself in their joining the (now) Queen of France in mourning and in challenging the young men to engage death's brute reality in its sick and dying representatives. So the play circles back to the original specter, “the brazen tomb”, whose real power creates a loss that cannot be denied. The young men's long deferred confrontation with loss and desire runs through the defiles of denial, repression, verbal dalliance, imaginary infatuation, and narcissistic self-satisfaction only to be catalyzed by Marcade's announcement: “the king is dead!” which imposes on the men a loss that co-exists with desire. The ladies, recalled to their responsibilities in the Symbolic Order, must leave them. As Berowne wryly comments, the traditional comic ending is awry; neither Mercury nor Apollo are substitutes for Hymen or Bacchus.

The “death-conquering” attempts of the young men are at first directed against bodily need and desire: against the need for food, for sleep, the desire for sex. It is the sexed (partial) body with its demands that “speaks” man's incompleteness (lack) since it signifies the disproportion between any sexed being and the ideal of human totality. Lacan argues that “sexuality is established in the field of the subject by a way that is that of lack” (SXI, p. 204), i.e., that even prior to castration, the separation of human beings into sexed categories indicates a “real” lack. He then points out the paradox inherent in sexual union: the “fact” that “the living being, by being subject to sex, has fallen under the blow of individual death … he is no longer immortal” (SXI, p. 205). According to Navarre's idea, deprivations of the body deny lack by accentuating the power of the intellect to overcome death and secure everlasting fame. This attitude bespeaks a shift in sensibility ushered in by the Renaissance, namely, that the great man of modern times is no longer the warrior or the lover but rather the intellectual hero. “The sweet war man is dead and rotten” (V.ii.652) Armado says of Hector in the pageant of the Nine Worthies. Heroic military exploits are resurrected only to be hooted off the stage. In contrast to his comrades, Berowne is skeptical about both the ends and objects of the project proposed by Navarre for whom study is an ascetic discipline that establishes the dominance or mastery of intellect over all other modes of knowing (Anderson, p. 56). The production and exchange of intellectual values in Navarre's academe correspond in general to an alienated and refined form of Symbolic relationship, i.e., a relationship based upon linguistic mastery.⁸ Berowne sarcastically assesses the value of this project when he points out that the end of such study is “to know which else we should know” (I.i.58), its objects merely “things hid and barred … from common sense” (I.i.59). The outlandish pedantry of Holofernes, which satirically illustrates the result of such a project, confirms Berowne's skeptical attitude toward the value and achievements of this “life of the mind”.

The exchanges of academe represented in the play are alienated in the sense that they are treated as being entirely separate from their real environments. They are reified in that the knowledge garnered by the young men is treated as an object of possession, not as an exchange of ideas. In the constitution of knowledge as an object, the function of “mastery” is represented as an effort to suppress the discourse of desire and foster the illusion of the knower's wholeness. A discourse of mastery tries to exclude disruptive elements by concentrating on surfaces of perception (what can be known by consciousness) as the sum of knowledge and truth.⁹ In the Lacanian schema describing the relationship between knowledge and knower, the discourse of mastery achieves only the illusion of truth because it has separated itself from the unconscious truth whose opaque messages and intentionalities inhabit language and make it mean more that it says.

Berowne has contempt for those “earthly godfathers of heaven's lights, / That give a name to every fixed star” (I.i.88-89), i.e., who can master by naming the stars but who cannot appreciate their beauty any more than can the ignorant lout. He muses on the paradox that those who seek the light of truth too assiduously often end up in darkness when their eyes are blinded by that light. As a remedy he suggests seeking the light of truth in a “fairer eye” which will mediate the light that had formerly dazzled its viewers into darkness. Eventually he will argue that the true study of man is woman's eyes and the exchange of desire that accompany those glances. Through the glance of desire, desire is evoked and sparks a response in the other. The interaction of the men and women in the play, however, is fraught with misunderstandings and misrecognitions which are never altered—hence both the failure of the truth-quest and the unusual separation of the sexes at the conclusion. As Lacanian theory postulates: “the (impossibility of the) relation of speaker to receiver is supported by the (failure of the) production of truth” (Melville, p. 359).

The most elaborate of the restrictions that encompass the young men in their project to exalt language at the expense of desire is the restriction concerning women. The men's initial turning from the female body to the higher pursuits of the mind is encoded in a decree which forbids women to come within a mile of the court on pain of losing their tongues. Why does Longaville propose such a penalty? Boyet later gives us a clue when he describes the female's tongue as her most effective weapon: the tongues of mocking wenches are as keen as a razor's edge; their barbed conceits reach their targets more quickly than arrows or bullets. Deprive a woman of speech in the Symbolic Order and she is deprived of her ability to speak from the “masculine” position and define herself and her desire within phallic discourse. She becomes susceptible to objectification and to a discursive construction that is merely a narcissistic projection of male fantasy. Even though Berowne eloquently discourses on the knowledge to be gained from gazing into women's eyes, he agrees that talking to them is anathema. What does this dichotomy between gazing and speaking signify? The women of France are speakers, writers, challenging, flirtatious speakers. The men of Navarre are initially readers (gazers) and writers possessing self-proclaimed powers of interpretation.

According to Lacan, whose theories of the Symbolic and Imaginary orders can be fruitfully applied to the gender discords of this play, the Symbolic Order is governed by language anchored in the Other first put in place by forces outside the subject. The Imaginary Order, on the other hand, is specular; it establishes either oppositional dualities or symmetries of identification. Unlike the Symbolic Order, it does not allow for relationships of desire and difference. In the Imaginary Order, there is no Other, only “others” who can be exploited. Dominated by images, doubles, mirrors, and specular identifications, it is basically narcissistic and sees only its own image in “others”. Attempts to short-circuit communication by making it unnecessary (or forbidden, as in this play) seek to deny difference by replacing the asymmetry of communication with the symmetry of silence. The men of Navarre, in spite of their conscious intention, are firmly fixed in Imaginary Order dynamics. Paradoxically, they are on a regressive trajectory toward “death” (sameness, repression, silence) in relation to the other. Implicated in the illusions of unity associated with the Imaginary Order, they deny castration, lack, desire, and difference which accompany entry into the Symbolic Order. The men perceive what they perceive only in terms of their subjective projections, a form of refusal of the uniqueness and individuality of the other. They remain in a short-circuited dialectic of narcissism and identification.¹⁰

Lacanian theories of intra- and inter-personal development, which give new insights into this play, assert that the passions of love and hate are tendencies formed in the Imaginary Order. The quest for unitary meaning, i.e. the fusions of love, can be seen as the narcissistic drive to deny difference between self and other; this quest is based on an Imaginary function whose principle goal is to deny Castration (loss, death, separation) and regain the mythical paradise of jouissance (fusion). Of course, this mythical paradise is forever lost in reality, but the Imaginary functions to recreate it. When people constitute each other Imaginarily as objects, they are seeking to verify their own identities in terms of samenesses and differences. In such relationships, adults anticipate psychic mastery (wholeness, joy, certainty) and deplore evanescence, weakness, vulnerability (Ragland-Sullivan, p. 154). Although they would be the first to deny it, the men in the play exemplify thought and action within the Imaginary order. Their instant shift of attitude toward the Ladies of France, from denigrating scorn to idealizing passion, signals the Imaginary in its drive to project onto the “woman” the idealizations which would subordinate individuality to patterns of anticipated behavior, i.e., that of the court lady.

The women of France, who come into the male world ironically represent the androcentric Symbolic Order (the Princess of France “speaks for” her father) which the men resist entering until (perhaps) after the play's conclusion.¹¹ They are all “masters” of witty, dynamic language and easily overwhelm the men's conventional discourse. Throughout the play the women stand in what Lacan calls “the masculine position”; they attempt to trick, challenge and push the men into the Symbolic Order—the traditional function of the paternal figure. As long as boys are boys the women must function as “fathers”; from this unbalance grows the irresolvable dichotomies that even genre cannot overcome. The unions of comedy can occur only if the women function as “mothers” or “daughters”, don their “woman's weeds” and submit to male desire (Erickson, pp. 13-38). At the end of this play, the Princess of France, who comes into phallic power as Queen, stands in the pre-eminent “masculine” position.

The women's firm position within the Symbolic Order facilitates their self-conscious perception of both self and other. We see them constantly “decoding” the narcissistic meaning behind lovers' behavior and language via interpretations which connect and label the men's Imaginary productions in relationship to the Symbolic Order.¹² Their analytical skills allow them to read the text of unconscious discourse which permeates the manifest level of the men's speech. They interpret the initial male reclusiveness they encounter as discourtesy, not respect, and they respond to it with the honest anger it deserves. Later, they resist all attempts to idealize them, dismissing their lovers' adulatory poetry as “a huge translation of hypocrisy. / viley compounded, profound simplicity” (V.ii.51-52). When the deflated heroes remonstrate with the women for having slighted their love, the Princess explains how their overtures were interpreted:

We have received your letters …
Your favours … ;
And in our maiden council rated them
At courtship, pleasant jest, and courtesy,
As bombast and as lining to the time.
But more devout than this in our respects
Have we not been, and therefore met your loves
In their own fashion, as a merriment.

V.ii.767-775

Rosaline reminds the young men that even though they protested profound feeling, the women “did not quote them so” (V.ii. 776). The men are discontented by the fact that although they represent themselves as signifying “lovers” in the Symbolic order and try to confirm this identity in the light of real events, the women can read the narcissism in their unconscious discourse and do not confirm their Imaginary ideals in either the Symbolic order or in the realm of real events. Society, in the form of the women, threatens the fixity and constancy of Imaginary ideals the men have of themselves.

In this play the males perceive the female body as a signifier which floats from discourse to discourse; in the process, it undergoes a radical transformation of meaning. As representations of projections of male fantasies, the female body assumes two shapes in the male imagination: an initial debasement and an eventual idealization. The threat that women pose in male fantasies is both sexual and linguistic. Their bodies and their talk distract men from the abstract pursuit of academic knowledge. On the other hand, the female body, especially the eyes, is idealized as the veil of truth. Standing apart from male perception, the women, as they present themselves, remain free of the conventional meanings imposed by the men and thus escape the oppression of imposed definition. The dynamic we observe in Act IV.iii as the men read their carefully indited “love poetry” discloses the relationship between the real and the constructed female bodies.¹³ The beloved “she” is a “queen of queens” (36), “a goddess” (59), she “passes praise” (235) and would make Jove turn mortal to bed her. Through a series of slights and feints, however, the women insist on their own meanings and refuse to consider seriously the constructions that the men attempt to foist upon them. Even the charming Boyet is rebuked for his too fulsome praise of the Princess's beauties. There is much conversation among the ladies about their physical qualities, not all of which conventionally attractive. Rosaline, for example, is a “dark beauty” if a beauty at all; the Princess, in the eyes of her unflattering mirrors, Costard and the Forester, is “thick” (overweight), not “the fairest shoot”. She may even be pock-marked if we are to believe Rosaline's jest: “O that your face were not so full of O's!” (V.ii.45). Yet in a significant mental transformation, the young men insist on the predominance of a discursive body over the real one, a body insulated from the real by the Petrarchan “dead” letter, a body created by narcissistic projection.

Unlike many other comedies of Shakespeare, this play establishes two separate, yet equally powerful discursive groups. Although the men attempt to exclude the women from their speaking association, they are not successful. Political reality, which has vested power in the Princess of France, breaks in upon Navarre and his associates and forces dialogue and negotiation. The women form their own exclusive discursive fellowship through which they eventually assume dominance over the men because of superior knowledge (and concomitant power). This is the effect of the women's strong stance within the Symbolic Order, i.e., the order of law, social organization, language etc. The women distance themselves from what is Imaginary in their interaction with the “world”, i.e., they do not see it as a mirror of themselves but as it is with its networks of political and social responsibilities. Because of this they can establish distance between their perceptions and behaviors and the absolute and distorted demands of the Imaginary. The men, for all of their socially and politically privileged positions, are unable to achieve the same necessary distancing. They therefore appear to the women, and to us, as self-regarding, immature, and unfit for the political and social power that is accorded to their gender.

We have already mentioned the initial negative attitude of the aspiring scholars toward “woman” as a distraction from the pursuit of the higher truth. Actual contact with the women of France, however, produces another extreme reaction: excessive adulation. According to Berowne, women are no longer a fleshly temptation from the truth, but the truth itself, the object of all knowledge. In his enthusiasm, he disparages the mere study of language, which attempts to cast a dead net over living reality, and instead, he puts language in the service of desire. The ground of study's excellence is not to be found in books but in “the beauty of a woman's face”, especially in her eyes, from whence springs the true Promethean fire (I will return to this allusion later). A man, he argues, must study the woman's eye for in it he will see himself, a spectacular image:

Learning is but an adjunct to ourself,
And where we are our learning likewise is.
Then when ourselves we see in ladies' eyes.
Do we not likewise see our learning there.

IV.iii.310-313

This love that springs from the Imaginary order, i.e., the love of the specular image, a symbiosis, is first learned by gazing on the mother's eye which reflects the father's image and his power or lack thereof. This experience that Berowne describes replicates Lacan's description of the mirroring process in the mother/infant dyad which must eventually be broken through separation and loss.¹⁴ According to Berowne the fire in the woman's eyes not only purifies and intensifies the perception of the other senses; it energizes the man who gaze upon it, i.e., the man takes energy from the woman. Where does the woman get this fire? Berowne describes this fire as “Promethean”, i.e., stolen from the gods.¹⁵ In a way, all knowledge is theft, as Lacan implies in “The Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’”; it allows the knower to participate in the being of the original possessor, in Prometheus' case in the being of the gods. The fire stolen from the gods, or knowledge, should eventually be put to use, not just assimilated as passion.¹⁶ Berowne and his compeers may feel the heat of passion ignited by the women's eyes, but their knowledge is limited by their narcissism and cannot effectively be put to use. Even on the most rudimentary level, they cannot advance their own cause.

The link which Berowne makes between Promethean fire and the ladies' eyes, i.e., identifying them with godlike being, gives some depth to the Muscovite scene in Act IV. Again we see the men creating discursive projections and the women taking them to their absurd but logical conclusions while at the same time insisting on their own individuated reality. Early in the scene the women turn their backs to Moth who is delivering a speech on behalf of the four lovers. The women are confronted for the first time by the men since they renounced their vows to study books and who wish, instead, to study ladies' eyes. When Moth tries to praise the ladies as “the richest beauties of the earth” they turn their backs on him. Shaken, Moth misquotes the set speech:

A holy parcel of the fairest dames.
[The ladies turn their backs to him]
That ever turned their—backs—to mortal view!

(160-162)

Noticing the mistake, Berowne corrects Moth: “‘Their eyes,’ villain, ‘their eyes’” (163). Although Moth corrects this line, he cannot complete the speech and is shouted away from the scene.

As we have seen, Berowne self-servingly justifies abandoning book knowledge by praising desire (to see ladies' eyes) as a quest for hidden knowledge. Although this equation still holds true in the masque scene, there is another dimension of knowledge presented here, i.e., the premise that knowledge is not attainable, not “seeable”, not vulnerable to theft. The turning away of the women represents the impossibility of knowledge, for how can knowledge be gained when “moral view” is deprived of women's “holy” eyes? The ladies' eyes contain the “light of truth” which “doth falsely blind the eyesight of mortal men” (I.i.75). If we recall Exodus 33 we realize that the ladies are replicating the behavior of Yaweh who tells Moses, “You cannot see my face, for no one may see my and live.” Then He tells Moses “you will see my back; but my face must not be seen” (33:20-23). Just before the men enter, the Princess says, “And not a man of them shall have the grace, / Despite of suit, to see a lady's face” (V.ii.128-129). If the men insist on reading women's eyes as the locus of Promethean, or divine fire, then the ladies will literally and mockingly act out their godlike status. As a “holy” being, the lady is deadly—something then men had not counted on. As long as the men insist on divinizing the women, the women must remain “deadly”, hidden, secret, mysterious, leaving the lovers in a state of deferred and ignorance. Standing firmly in the Symbolic Order, the women ridicule the men's Imaginary projections and behave in ways that point to the absurdities of such projections. The men, understandably, are disconcerted but fail to see the source of their frustration in their own absolutizing desires.¹⁷

Not only do the ladies turn their backs to Moth during his speech; they are all wearing masks so that the men find it impossible to identify them except through the gift (signs) that the men had previously sent to them. The ladies exchange these signs among themselves so that the men, unaware of the exchange, are completely deceived and “woo but the sign of she” (V.ii.470) not the reality. Unable to see the faces or the eyes of their beloveds, they are lured by gifts that reflect but themselves. The men's inability to distinguish individual difference through language patterns emphasizes their fixation on images and their entrapment in the realm of surfaces. Blocked at the level of the mask they swear oaths of fealty and fidelity that are intrinsically false because they are addressed to the wrong “other”. Like clouds the masks have hidden the “sun” and the lovers are left in darkness and confusion.

The ladies' unsympathetic responses to their lovers' clumsy wooing attempts are disconcerting. Miscommunication and misunderstanding occur because the men, who consciously assess themselves as rational and well-meaning, in fact are caught up in the Imaginary circuit of narcissistic “truth” that is played out in the field of language. In this dynamic, the beloved “you” of the direct address refers not to the other as other but to that which, outside of us, supports an ego ideal, i.e., the ideal of the young men as lovers. The basic reason, according to Lacan, why people talk to each other is for recognition and love. The beloved other is supposed to recognize this message being sent at the latent level of language and send back a reinforcing response. This type of communication emphasized the evocation and invocation of narcissistic systems rather than information. The situation of the Muscovite masque is a perfect illustration of Imaginary confusions since it ends the fact that the men, blocked by narcissistic impulses, cannot know who the other really is or how the other truly receives them. Addresses to the “beloved” ladies are not attempts to know them as other but attempts to reinforce what the young men think about themselves. By taking control of the jest, the ladies resist narcissistic circuits of reinforcement and force the men to see themselves as fools rather than as lovers. When the expected narcissistic dynamic does not occur in the play, the men are both disconcerted and with the exception of Berowne, at a loss for words.

The male discursive group in the play enacts the Lacanian insight that the self who speaks rarely coincides with the self to whom it refers in speaking, i.e., that there is a double aspect to the speaking subject as “it” uses language—or as language uses “it”. The giving and getting of information is the function of what Lacan calls language; the unconscious function of language, on the other hand—parole—is to transmit desire and narcissism. Parole is evocative of the persuasiveness of unconscious discourse and desire in language. Since desire is the primary organizer of human behavior, parole utilizes langue to rationalize the discourse of desire. Since all linguistic articulations are made in relation to lack (desire), the informational and grammatical functions of language are merely a titillating glimpse of the ankle, so to speak.¹⁸ The men of the play speak the parole of narcissism thinking it is the language of love and the women, understanding their narcissistic pleas, refuse to echo them. Instead they deflect or deaden them with their own wit. But the women do not speak merely on the level of langue; they respond on the level of the men's parole and make conscious to the audience, at least, the narcissism that has ruled the men's behavior and discourse.

In this play so manifestly and reflexively concerned with a level of language devoted to conscious, intellectual expression, the unconscious expresses itself but is seldom acknowledged.¹⁹ One of the primary avenues for the “speaking” of the unconscious in this play is its language of joke and wit. There is a strong connection between the joke, wit, word-play and the unconscious as Freud points out in his essay, “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.”²⁰ The laughter occasioned by wit or jokes is often a reaction to feelings that make us uncomfortable and which, as a result, are repressed from consciousness. As in the dynamic of negation, so also in laughter: the contents of the repression are raised momentarily to consciousness through language, only to be denied or trivialized. Such feelings can be either sexual or aggressive, or both. Cultural and social demands mandate that we deny or curb these feelings in ordinary interaction. The physical response of laughter arises from a momentary fusion of conscious, preconscious and repressed materials often brought about by word-play or visual jokes. The synchronic nature of the joke's perceptions, both conscious and repressed, results in the liberating outburst of laughter.²¹

The nature of jokes is paradoxical in that, although they are highly rational in form, they also allow a temporary suspension of rational criticism. They return us to an infantile state of play prior to the stages of repression. According to Freud, the positive side of a joke it its verbal play—the empty, even meaningless word play of the jest; as such the jest embodies the essence of wit, the pleasure of play in its purest form. Meaning enters the jest as an instrument “to protect that pleasure (play) from being done away with by criticism” (p. 130). Verbal play, although independent of sense, does not need to be nonsense; it is indifferent to, but not in opposition to, meaning. Verbal play is actually an appeal to reason with the intention of suspending its inhibitive power.²² Another pleasure arising from jokes that is germane to this play, is what Freud called “tendentious” pleasure, i.e., pleasure that arises from releasing the “tendencies” (instincts) of sexuality and aggression. The person who tells such jokes or engages in such jests depends upon verbal discourse rather than action to display the mastery and aggression situated in the narcissistic ego. This type of joke involves the “exposure of the sexually different at whom it is directed” (p. 97), and I would add, “the different person” can be masculine or feminine depending upon what discursive group has power.

When the woman takes herself inaccessible to the male and refuses to respond to his advances, he takes his revenge by making her the object of the joke (the obscene joke) thus mobilizing the sadistic component of sexual politics. We could say the same is true of the man. The tendentious joke is situated, then, in a force field of social and sexual conflict (Weber, p. 18). It is the very nature of wit, its thrust and parry, for which this play is so famous that creates the impasses between the sexes; language between the sexes turns against its end (the communication of desire) and becomes enclosed in repetitions of narcissism and aggression.

In the beginning of Love's Labour's Lost, as we have, the company of males actively banishes the female other not only from their physical environs but even from their psychic landscape thus channeling psychic energy into both repression and sublimation. Actual contact with the other, the elusive feminine, subverts their intent and channels their energy into witty and tendentious exchanges, “civil wars of wit” as the Princess punningly calls them (II.i.224). The success of wit is ambivalent, however, since it depends upon the laughter of the hearer, and laughter is something that eludes rational consciousness. The response of the other determines whether or not wit is successful, i.e., whether or not the presumption of wittiness by the speaker is accurate. The women do not find the men's wit very amusing, as Rosaline comments: “They are worse fools to purchase mocking so” (V.ii.59), and their responses threaten the men's fragile self-organizations. The women, on the other hand, banter jests among themselves and are amused by each other's wit which is directed against the silliness of the men. Because the ego's identification of itself on the Imaginary level seeks verification from the other through a response (laughter) which is impossible to control, the witty situation is unstable and perdures only through repeated exercises of verbal “warfare”. Wit involves word and thought in an exercise of word-play that seeks to define itself and dominate by displays of linguistic superiority.

The jesting pun, which is so predominant in the word play of the text, is, according to Freud, constructed of a word with two meanings or a word that is only slightly modified so as to take a short cut from one circle of ideas to another. Between those two circles of ideas there must be a link of significant sense, i.e., the one word that makes the point of the jest. Through intellectual cleverness, it reconnects with the childhood pleasure of non-sense words, using condensation and displacement (metaphor and metonymy) as its major techniques (pp. 128-129). Many of the interactions between the lords and ladies in the play take this form of jesting. The ladies usually displace metaphorical meaning into literal meaning as in the conversation between Rosaline and Berowne (II.i) which deflates the witty but pretentious expressions of conventional emotion. Occasionally smutty jokes lurk behind displaced meanings as in Maria's conversation with Boyet. (IV.i.) on the topic of “pricking the mark” and Berowne's defense of Rosaline (IV.iii.) where the metaphorical expansion is reduced obscenity: “O, if the streets were paved with thine eyes, / Her feet were much too dainty for such tread. / O vile! Then as she goes, what upward lies / The street should see as she walked overhead” (273-276). From behind the mask of courtly convention and “high” witty conversation peers the face of sexual desire and aggression.

Prior of their first meeting with the men, the women of France assess them only as “merry mocking lord[s]” but even as verbal aggressors. Longaville has “a sharp wit matched 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.9-51). Dumain has “most power to do most harm, least knowing ill, / for he hath power to make an ill shape good” (II.i.58-59) and Berowne, less harshly judged, has an eye that “begets occasion for his wit; / for every object that the one doth catch / the other turns to a mirth-moving jest” (II.i.69-71). Their hard-edged wit deserts them, however, when they determine to become lovers and, as the Princess comments: “none are so surely caught, when they are catched, / as wit turned fool” (V.ii.70-71). When it seems as though the ladies are assailable and will, in fact, kindly reflect their lovers' images and listen to their pleas, wit takes a back seat to sentimentality in the men's discourse. Although the ladies seem to cooperate with their lovers' desires, they do so only to dupe them the more completely.

The duping of the “Moscovites” is associated with a dynamic that Freud originally described in a supplement on nonsense jokes (1912 edition) as a production resembling jokes, i.e. duping. This dynamic creates the expectation of a joke, yet when one tries to find a hidden meaning behind the nonsense, one is disappointed. Although these productions may not have a hidden meaning, they do have a purpose: to fool the dupe and give the duper pleasure in misleading and annoying her/her “victim”. The point is tendentious, aggressive deception which results in the victim realizing that he/she has been “had”. The duplicity of the duper plays on the delusion of the duped, i.e., the women's plot plays upon the narcissistic delusions of the young men and discomfits them. In this production, each side is engaged in an ambivalent game which leaves the duped no choice but to acknowledge their complicity (Weber, pp. 18-19). The production, predictably, results in the intense annoyance of the duped and propels them to vent their anger on other “victims”.

When Navarre at first declines to attend “The Pageant of the Nine Worthies,” Berowne reminds him: “‘Tis some policy / to have one show worse than the king's and his company’ (V.ii.510-511). Since the women have put themselves beyond recrimination through the demonstration of their superior cunning and through the conventions of courtly, decorum, the young men's anger is displaced away from them during the performance of the pageant in an unworthy display of verbal aggression. They feel free to badger and debase the well-meaning but inept performers. One of the players finally rebukes Berowne: “This is not generous, not gentle, not humble” (V.ii.629). With the exception of the Princess, who makes a few conciliatory remarks, the women say nothing during the entertainment. They have their marks already and there is no point in wasting wit on those who cannot reciprocate. The Pageant degenerates into childish squabbles when reality intrudes in the form of a debate over the paternity of Jaquenetta's child. By the end we see the instincts which the language of wit both reveals and sublimates revealed in their most unadorned realities.

This well-meaning debacle as well as other comic interludes in the subplot can be classified as belonging not to the level of wit but to the level of the comic. The comic involves a conscious perception of disproportion in mental and physical effort to the end attained. In situations of reception, exaggeration or imitation the adult reduces himself or the other to the level of the playful or helpless child trying to exert mastery.²³ The sub-plot with its emphasis on the use and misuse of language mirrors and distorts the verbal thrust and parry of the main plot. The wooing of Jaquetta by Armado, a debased mirror of the courtly antics of the princely plot, depicts both self-delusion and disproportion of effort. Attempting linguistic mastery, Armado's rhetoric over-extends itself almost beyond the realm of caricature and makes a fool of its creator. Holofernes, also attempting to play the master through verbal pyrotechnics, speaks the discourse not of truth, but of pedantry animated by the passion of ignorance. The authority for this discourse is not truth but “academic knowledge” of the driest and most uninteresting kind: a smattering of philology and classics. The master takes his narrow vision to be the sum of all knowledge; he will brook no contradiction and spins out his narrow perceptions in elaborations of linguistic effects. Every master, of course, needs a discipline and Nathaniel fulfills this ridiculous role, mouthing his master's empty phrases and aspiring to equality. Dull, whose common sense we applaud in this interlude, stands on the side-lines, mystified by the arcane jargon, honestly stupid (Hawkes, pp. 51-52). Finally, Costard, the shrewd “child” immune to the pretensions and restraints of Navarre, Armado, etc., follows his instincts with healthy vigor.

In spite of their wit, the young men lack what the play itself contains in abundance: humor. According to Freud, humor established psychic equilibrium and vitality, not by denying but by confronting and incorporating radical insufficiency and suffering, by coming to terms with loss, absence and limit. Humor represents a failure of repression. It is willing to focus conscious attention on ideas with pain; at the same time it defends against pain, not by denying it, but by withdrawing from the affect part of its energy, i.e., conflict.²⁴

The news of the King of France's death, which brings to an end the wooing and wit, is a painful, real fact which, although cannot be denied, can be survived and incorporated into life through transfers of power and rituals of mourning. Instead of marriages, the young men are given tasks that involve their confrontation with pain: asceticism, visitation of the sick and dying, absence. They must be transformed from mere wits into wiser and more tolerant men who are able to confront situations of loss and mitigate them by compassion and the proper use of language, i.e., language that seeks the other, not the self, in its extensions. It is to this end that Rosaline challenges Berowne at the end of the play:

You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day
Visit the speechless sick, and still converse
With groaning wretches; and your task shall be
With all the fierce endeavor of your wit
To enforce the pained impotent to smile.

V.ii.840-844

Berowne is commissioned either to develop a method for turning tears to laughter, or to give up his “idle scorns” altogether. He must strive to assert life in the face of death not merely to repress loss by the exercise of mastery that uses wit as a shield and dagger. According to Freud, humor is a deliberately cultivated attitude, not as dependent on instincts as wit nor as dependent on context as the comic (p. 218). It is both a filter for perception and a mode of coping with the world of pain and loss. The essence of humor is that one spares oneself the affects to which an unpleasant situation would naturally give rise. It has something fine and elevating in it that is lacking in both wit and the comic. What is “fine” about it is the fact that the ego refuses to be compelled to suffer; wounds dealt by the world become occasions for pleasure rather than occasions for despair. Humor therefore signifies the triumph of the pleasure principle which is strong enough to assert itself in the face of adverse real situations (p. 127). It possesses a dignity wholly lacking in wit which is marred by tendentiousness. The humorist acquires his/her superiority by assuming the position of the mature adult who can re-distribute energy from ego concerns and put them in perspective. On the intra-psychic level, humor encourages the super-ego (normally repressive and constraining) to treat the ego benevolently as a kind parent would treat a child. Lacan would say that humor allows us to see the needs and insecurities of the unconscious ego on the slope of the Imaginary for what they are: limited, ideological, narcissistic constructs which need to be mitigated by the supra-personal and more extensive concerns of the Symbolic Order. Humor can create those liberating and elevating effects. As Freud states: “The principle thing is the intention which humor fulfills—its meaning is ‘Look here! This is all that the seemingly dangerous world amounts to: child's play—the very thing I jest about!’” (p. 221). Rosalie's mandate to Berowne suggests that he cultivate such an attitude and transfer it to his despairing audience, that he practice a wise and pragmatic use of the comic spirit to enable the dying to face death. Although Berowne objects that “Mirth [may not be able to] move a soul in agony” (V.ii.847), still, humor can give that soul a perspective on suffering that keeps despair at bay.

In both of his writings on humor Freud uses examples of “those who are about to die” to illustrate his theory. He cites the example of “the rogue on the way to execution [who] asked for a scarf for his bare throat so as not to catch a cold—an otherwise laudable precaution but one which, in view of what lay in store so shortly for the neck, was remarkably superfluous” (Jokes, p. 229). Freud comments on the magnanimity of this request indicating, as it does, the man's tenacious hold on his sense of himself and his disregard for what might defeat that self and throw it into despair. We who hear the story are not moved to pity; instead, we become infected by the rogue's indifference to death and are moved to laughter rather than to tears. Freud also cites the story of the aristocratic bandit Hernani who insists on his privileges at his execution, one of which is to keep his hat on in the presence of the king: “… Nos têtes ont le droit / De tomber couvertes de toi” (Jokes, p. 230). Humor, then, asserts the indestructibility of the human spirit in the face of death. If the young academic men seek a way of outwitting death, that way is pointed out to them by the women at the play's end. Neither bookish fame nor earthly generation is as effective as humor in confronting loss (castration) because it neither represses it nor concedes it victory.

The two songs as the end of the play address the equilibrium of life and death, spring and winter in a kind of “natural language”.²⁵ Although composed by “two learned men” as a “dialogue” the songs, in fact, imitate bird voices: the owl is the voice of winter; the cuckoo the voice of spring. In the midst of winter the owl sings “tu-whit, tu-who: a merry note” which seems to belie the rigors of the season. In contrast, the cuckoo sings “cuckoo, cuckoo: O, word of fear” again apparently belying the gentleness and mildness of the landscape. “Natural language” unlike the artifice of language which defers desire throughout the play, is a pure representation of emotional energy. In the human realm, laughter, like gesture, is a “natural language” that reveals a “truth” of the unconscious which challenges the speaking subject, the social, rational self. It is the language from “within”. The mimicry, or “natural language” in the songs speaks at variance with the depicted scene, singing from the center an opposing truth. Like humor, these songs assert a mixture of vitality and threat as the matrix of nature. And so this play rounds on a complex imbrication of life and death, hope and despair intimately connected with levels of language and desire. The words of Mercury and the songs of Apollo²⁶ alternate in what can, in theatrical representation, only be shown as diachronic, but which in fact are synchronically intermingled in an irreducible text, the text of the play, the text of our lives.

Notes

1. J. J. Anderson is “The Morality of Love's Labour's Lost,” Shakespeare Survey, 24 (1971). ed. Kenneth Muir (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press), p. 55 remarks: “the ending is not truly comic … but moralistic—punishments are meted out.” In The Great Feast of Language in Love's Labour's Lost (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976) William Carroll says that Berowne looks to the “old play” in which every Jack has his Jill as a dramatic and social model. p. 202. See also E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Early Comedies (London, 1965) pp. 176-8 as well as S. K. Henninger, “The Pattern of Love's Labour's Lost, Shakespeare Studies VII (1974), p. 25 who says, “Contrary to any other comedy of Shakespeare, the ultimate relationship of the lovers in this play is not consummated in the eye of the beholder.”

2. Peter Erickson, Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 17. See also Erickson's article, “The Failure of Relationship Between Men and Women in Love's Labour's Lost,” Women's Studies 9 (1981), 65-91 in which the author accounts for the unsuccessful relationships as the result of the conventions of love poetry which exalts women and debases men.

3. Following Freud (“Instincts and Their Vicissitudes”), Lacan defines sublimations as “the third of the four fundamental vicissitudes of the drive … In this article Freud tells us repeatedly that sublimation is also satisfaction of the drives … inhibited as to its aim—it does not attain it” (The Four Fundamentals Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Sheridan [New York: Norton, 1977], p. 165. Sublimation occurs when a drive advances in the direction of satisfaction, then is inhibited or deflected, so that only partial satisfaction is achieved. In this play the young men deflect the sexual drive into language rather than directly satisfy it.

4. Subjectivity is constituted by the “splitting” into conscious and unconscious psychic topographies at the castration crisis.

5. The ideal ego is an image of wholeness outside of “the infant” with which it identifies. “This Gestalt … symbolizes the mental permanence of the “I”, at the same time that it prefigures its alienating destination” says Lacan. (Ecrits, p. 2). For an elaboration of the “mirror stage” see Ecrits pp. 1-7.

6. By “castration” Lacan means the eclipse of the object of desire by the signifier. This process is always accompanied by a sense of profound loss. The object is alienated as it is “eclipsed” and consequently becomes a “lost” object of desire, to be only partially recovered through an unsatisfying metonymic chain of substitutions.

7. According to Lacan, death and the death drive belong in the field of the Real, (Seminar XI, p. 45), i.e., that structure beyond the pleasure principle that blocks the path of freedom and denies us access to joy through inevitable repetitions.

8. Terence Hawkes, “Shakespeare's Talking Animals,” in Shakespeare Survey. 24 (1971) ed. Kenneth Muir (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 47-54.

9. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, “Lacan, Language and Literary Criticism”, The Literary Review, Summer, 1981 (Vol. 24, #4). 576. See Also Jacques Lacan, Seminaire XX, p. 21.

10. Anthony Wilden, System and Structure (New York: Tavistock, 1980), p. 20. In Seminar I Lacan describes the Imaginary as gravitational force that introjects and projects images from the “real” world in the process of ego building. These images are both conscious and unconscious, perceived and imagined. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan in her book Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (Champagne: The University of Illinois Press, 1985) describes the effects of the Imaginary in discourse: “it appears as the implied [latent] meaning of a statement … These second meanings refer to some diachronic aspect of the childhood drama … But since the meaning is opaque, what the Imaginary text actually reveals is a dissymetrical relationship between the subject and its own unconscious: a relationship without reciprocity” p. 148.

11. The Symbolic Order interferes with fusion of the “self” and the world by impending or channeling desire through language, signs, directions, laws, contracts, oaths, etc. Because the Symbolic Order is arbitrary and artificial, it is always liable to subversion by the Imaginary (Lacan, Seminar I).

12. One of the functions of the Symbolic Order is to “translate” the rather inchoate messages of the Imaginary into language.

13. Kaja Silverman, “Histoire d'O: The Construction of a Female Subject” in Pleasure and Danger, ed. Carole Vance (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 324.

14. Les Complexes Familiaux (Paris: Seuil, 1984), pp. 49-58. My own translation.

15. Malcolm Evans, in “Mercury Versus Apollo: A Reading of Love's Labour's Lost” Shakespeare Quarterly 26 (1975) discusses the shifting iconographics surrounding the figure of Prometheus and his connection with Mercury (p. 115).

16. Stuart Schneiderman, Jacques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 102.

17. I am indebted to Nae Heui Kang, a graduate school student, for insights into this incident.

18. Lacan discusses these ideas in Seminar I passim. Ragland-Sullivan comments on parole: “it is woven into speech as an implicit tension or pressure which asks for love and recognition … it infers an identity question by which a person constitutes her/himself as a subject” p. 161.

19. The “nonsense” that Freud describes as integral to jokes is, for Lacan, typical of the non-sense that underlines meaning. Jokes allow this non-sense to irrupt into the surface meaning of discourse and are thus, one of the important links to parole (Seminar I).

20. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1963).

21. Mary Eloise Ragland, “The Language of Laughter, Sub-stance 13 (1976), p. 93.

22. Samuel Weber, “The Divaricator: Remarks on Freud's Witz,” Glyph 1 (1977), p. 16.

23. Ragland (p. 97) differentiates the comic from wit in their relationship to the infantile. The comic relies on comparison while wit relies on language.

24. Sigmund Freud, “Humor”, in Collected Papers, Vol. V, ed. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1959), p. 218.

25. Henninger argues that the two songs complete a play that the failed union of the lovers leaves open-ended (26). Robert G. Hunter in “The Function of the Songs at the End of Love's Labour's Lost,” Shakespeare Survey VII (1974) sees the songs as resolving the play's conflict between love, life, and time, by creating a kind of stasis of repetition—season follows season (63). Erickson says that while the songs aim to invoke the sources of festivity, they actually contribute to the mood of frustrated celebration (p. 177-78, n. 3).

26. Evans (119) discusses the relationship of Mercury and Apollo to the linguistic skills of prose (the written word) and poetry (the spoken words).