SOURCE: “The Anatomy of Masculine Desire in Love's Labor's Lost,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 4, Winter, 1992, 430-49.

[In the essay below, Breitenberg challenges the notion that the play's ending emphasizes the power the women hold over the men of Love's Labour's Lost. Rather, Breitenberg maintains, the men are empowered through their Petrarchan idealization of the women.]

I

I introduce my subject by way of Montaigne's lengthy meditation on gender and sexuality, translated by John Florio as “Upon some verses of Virgill.”¹ In this essay, Montaigne offers his readers a sometimes rambling collection of observations, anecdotes, classical exempla, and personal confessions on such matters as cuckoldry anxiety, male impotence, constancy and inconstancy in marriage, the nature and causes of jealousy among both men and women, and the social conditions and conventions of heterosexual desire. The essay appears motivated by Montaigne's recognition of the paradoxical fact that sexuality—“so naturall, so necessary and so iust”—is nonetheless rarely talked about “without shame.” The silence regarding sexuality, Montaigne further suggests, may very well promote rather than inhibit sexual desire: “Is it not herein as in matters of bookes, which being once called-in and forbidden become more saleable & publike?”² In part, Montaigne's essay thus represents an attempt to empty out the “forbidden” appeal of sexual discourse by writing about it with candor and honesty.

“Upon some verses” is also motivated by Montaigne's stated conviction that the essentials of sexuality and desire, once stripped of particular conventions, are more similar than different among men and women. In the essay's final paragraph, Montaigne writes: “I say, that both male and female, are cast in one same moulde; instruction and custome excepted, there is no great difference betweene them.” Despite this egalitarian claim, the essay is obviously presented as a dialogue between its author and a male readership, and it offers distinctly masculine constructions of female sexuality, desire, constancy, infidelity, and so on. Frequently this masculine perspective is precisely the subject of Montaigne's investigation. He admits that “women are not altogeather in the wrong, when they refuse the rules of life prescribed to the world, forsomuch as onely men haue established them without their consent.”³ And in other places he implies that the “rules of life” prescribed by men for women may, in fact, contribute to a good deal of suffering and anxiety by men.

For example, after an extended depiction of the jealousy of wives (a “tempestuous scoulding humor”), Montaigne suggests that husbands, or at least the “obligation” they place upon their wives, may contribute to their own cuckoldry:

Let vs also take heede, least this great and violent stricktnes of obligation we enjoyne them, produce not two effects contrary to our end: that is to wit, to set an edge vpon their sutors stomackes, and make women more easie to yeeld. For, as concerning the first point, enhancing the price of the place, we raise the price and endeare the desire of the conquest.

A few lines later, having mentioned that Venus “herselfe … cunningly enhanced the market of her ware,” Montaigne wonders if “we not be lesse Cukcoldes if we lesse feared to be so,” explaining that “according to womens conditions … inhibition enciteth, and restraint enuiteth.” In these passages, Montaigne suggests that heterosexual desire among both men and women is inflamed by the “inhibition” or “obligation” placed upon women. From Montaigne's male perspective the patriarchal “rules of life prescribed to the world” produce an erotic economy based on the valorization of female chastity, virginity, modesty, and so on. This economy encourages male concupiscence and, paradoxically, the desire among women to transgress the restrictions placed upon them, one result of which is male jealousy, or cuckoldry anxiety, “the most vaine and turbulent infirmitie that may afflict mans minde.”⁴

Montaigne is well aware of the inherent contradictions produced in such an economy of desire. At one point he announces that the “very Idea we forge vnto their chastity is ridiculous.” And in several instances he exposes the double standard as serving the “interrest” of men:

Let vs confesse the trueth, there are fewe amongst vs, that feare not more the shame they may have by their wiues offences, then by their owne vices; or that cares not more (oh wondrous charitie) for his wiues, then his owne conscience. … Both we and they are capable of a thousand more hurtfull and vnnaturall corruptions, then is lust or lasciuiousnesse. But we frame vices and waigh sinnes, not according to their nature, but according to our interrest; whereby they take so many different vnequall formes. The severity of our lawes makes womens inclination to that vice, more violent and faultie … and engageth it to worse proceedings then is their cause.⁵

What “interrest” does the “ridiculous” valorization of female chastity, modesty, and restraint serve? Certainly it is utilized in the service of a more general oppression of women. It is also, as Montaigne suggests here, the basis of masculine honor—men fear the “shame they may have by their wiues offences.” On another level the economy that fetishizes female chastity constructs and sustains men as desiring subjects whose identities depend upon an anxious, sometimes volatile relation to “objects” of knowledge and interpretation that are forever outside their mastery. Such an economy produces a masculine subjectivity always in pursuit, one that requires the deferral it also seeks to circumvent. Chastity is thus one of several “necessary” or enabling social tropes that provokes and defers male satisfaction.

To summarize the masculine, erotic economy described above: sexual desire is encouraged and inflamed by the perceived value of the desired object in an economy that requires the deferral or repeated renewal of desire. This volatile economy, according to Montaigne, depends upon inconstancy; as he puts it, “it is against the nature of loue, not to be violent, and against the condition of violence, to be constant.” He is here referring to female inconstancy, but he includes his male readers in the next sentence: “And those who wonder at it [i.e., female inconstancy], exclaime against it, and in women search for the causes of this infirmitie, as incredible and vnnaturall: why see they not how often … themselues [i.e., the men] are possessed and infected with it?” I am inclined to read Montaigne's assertion that violence and inconstancy form the very nature of love as the projection of a masculine model of sexual desire and dissatisfaction onto women. The quoted passage appears amid three examples of women of notorious sexual appetites, examples clearly fashioned out of masculine sexual fantasies and anxieties: Thalestris, Queen of the Amazons; Venus; and Ione, Queen of Naples, who strangles her husband when she finds “neither his members nor endeuours, answerable [to] the hope she had conceiued of him,” as Montaigne reports.⁶

Montaigne continues: “If no end be found in couetousnesse, nor limit in ambition, assure your selfe there is nor end nor limit in letchery. It yet continueth after saciety: nor can any man prescribe it or end or constant satisfaction: it euer goeth on beyond it's [sic] possession, beyond it's [sic] boundes.”⁷ Once again, I would argue that the impossibility of satisfaction assigned to women in this passage may additionally function as an avoidance of a fear of satisfaction among men. In the sexual sense, satisfaction represents to the male imagination not just a “little death” but also a moment of loss and vulnerability—it figures an end to the desiring subject that must be resurrected through another “conquest.” Such masculine vulnerability finds its compensatory articulation in the creation of monstrous or unnatural female sexualities, a projection Montaigne warns against but to which he also succumbs.

Montaigne writes directly about this aspect of masculine desire in an earlier part of the essay: “Take away hope and desire, we grow faint in our courses, we come but lagging after: Our maistery and absolute possession, is infinitly to be feared of them: After they haue wholy yeelded themselues to the mercy of our faith and constancie, they haue hazarded something: They are rare and difficult vertues: so soone as they are ours, we are no longer theirs.” In this passage, Montaigne ominously reveals the dangers to women inherent in this masculine economy of desire. Men desire “maistery and absolute possession” only to resent its negation of the process of desiring; the “conquest” that results is threatening to women (“infinitly to be feared”) because men project the source of their own inevitable dissatisfaction onto women, the result of which is anger, sometimes violence, against women. Montaigne concludes this section by telling the story of Thrasonides, who “was so religiously amorous of his love, that having after much sute gained his mistris hart and favour, he refused to enioy hir, least by that jouissance he might or quench, or satisfie, or languish that burning flame and restlesse heate, wherewith he gloryed, and so pleasingly fed himselfe.”⁸ Thrasonides fears satisfaction because his masculine identity exists only in the process of desiring; he must avoid satisfaction lest the “burning flame” that feeds and sustains him be extinguished.

This structure of masculine desire is by no means unique to Montaigne. Shakespeare describes a similar structure in Sonnet 129, where sexual desire is

Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad. …

(ll. 5-8)⁹

Immediately following the sexual “conquest,” in other words, the male lover hates and despises both himself and his partner, whom he represents as an evil seductress. In effect the woman is blamed for the lack or failure of male satisfaction. The man desires, conquers, then at once becomes the victim of female chicanery—a 1590s version of Fatal Attraction.

The supreme irony of this anger, of course, is that it results from a masculine economy of desire that depends in the first place on the fetishization of female virginity or chastity—what Montaigne above calls “rare and difficult vertues.” Perhaps even more insidiously, since the male subject is culturally inscribed as a subject in and by this economy, it appears very difficult to imagine an alternative way of being and desiring. This difficulty explains in part the haunting sense of inevitability that pervades Othello and explains as well the husband's expectation of his own cuckoldry often expressed in marriage treatises. Conquest, jealousy, and violence, it would seem, are not aberrations of male heterosexual love; they are its very conditions. Following this “logic,” Sonnet 129 represents male desire as an inescapably circular sequence of desire, frustration, anger, and ultimately, I think, the kind of violence exhibited by Othello.

But this is not an essay about literary examples of violence against women, although I think my premises could be usefully engaged in such an analysis. Instead I wish to apply my understanding of Montaigne's observations to a much more benign version of the same economy, that of Love's Labor's Lost, toward the purpose of showing that even such a lighthearted and playful comedy nonetheless participates in the economy of masculine desire that may also include violence. Perhaps this is why so many of the play's (mostly male) critics find themselves uneasy about its gender dynamic, or why many of these critics turn to an almost moralistic reading in which Shakespeare is dictating the proper requirements for romantic love between men and women, or even why critics summarily dismiss it as a bad play.¹⁰

I am especially interested in the ending of Love's Labor's Lost—unique among Shakespeare's comedies for its refusal to promise the typical comic closure of marriage. Up to that point the play has already deferred, confused, even ridiculed the men's desires for their idealized women; now, in a conclusion often termed dramatically incomplete or abrupt, the play ends (in a way Thrasonides would endorse) with an extended deferral of male desire and an increased exaltation of the women.¹¹ But for the moment I wish to continue to defer my discussion of the play in order to discuss the Petrarchan tradition that informs Love's Labor's Lost. The play offers more than just a comic exaggeration of this popular literary convention: Petrarchism underwrites the economy of masculine desire that structures the play and shapes its action.

II

In general the Petrarchan lyric supplies an influential socioliterary code through which the Renaissance could explore its fictions of masculine selfhood and desire in relation to an idealized concept of the feminine. As Nancy Vickers has written, Petrarch's “role in the history of interpretation and the internalization of woman's ‘image’ by both men and women can scarcely be overemphasized.” The manifestations of those attitudes inscribed by the Petrarchan lyric are all too familiar even today in advertising and film: quoting Vickers again, “bodies fetishized by a poetic voice logically do not have a voice of their own; the world of making words, of making texts, is not theirs.”¹² Given its popularity in the 1590s, we can surmise that Petrarchism provided a needed discourse for poets and others during a period of uncertainty about and agitation toward the prevailing sex/gender system. We may thus understand Petrarchism as an enabling discourse of masculine heterosexual desire and as a socioliterary convention that provides a compensatory form of masculine empowerment in response to the perception of psychic and emotional vulnerability. But at the same time, the very premise of Petrarchism is that its discursive control should fail: like Montaigne's model of desire, “writing” is impelled by the inaccessible or “hidden” qualities of its object. Petrarchism thus rests on a “necessary” contradiction: the frustration of desire impels desire itself just as the inability to fully “capture” one's subject in writing engenders more and more writing.

In describing and anatomizing his beloved, the Petrarchan poet/lover occupies a subject position of specular and discursive control over the idealized, inaccessible figure he constructs. As Vickers has also shown, the persona of the poet/lover is emotionally scattered, while the beloved is represented as corporeally scattered. This distinction suggests the ways in which Petrarchism may have functioned, for individual poets and in the collective male imagination, as a literary strategy of compensation: if romantic love is understood as an irrational loss of control, supposedly caused by the beloved, writing about the experience of love and about the beloved provides at least a sense of authorial control. In other words, the lover responds to and compensates for his emotional distress by seizing the means of representation; by writing the female body, he reproduces his own desire and implicitly disavows hers.

From this model it becomes possible to understand Petrarchism as a representation of woman-as-Other that seeks a form of “knowledge” about her that always already remains elusive. The Petrarchan beloved is apprehended in language at the same time that she is represented as unattainable. For Petrarch, as Giuseppe Mazzotta argues, “language is the allegory of desire, a veil, not because it hides a moral meaning but because it always says something else.”¹³ Indeed, Petrarchan writing derives from the impossibility of physical satisfaction in an economy of writing in which there can never be complete representational satisfaction. The limitation of language's signifying authority thus shapes and sustains the structure of masculine desire.

Thus we may say that the failure of language to correspond to the object of its representation, as well as the instances where language is in excess of what it purports to represent, underscores rather than obfuscates the condition of the desiring masculine subject in patriarchy. If we apply such an insight to Love's Labor's Lost, the often-remarked-upon split between the male characters' words and meanings¹⁴ is not so much a case of true identity gone astray but rather the very condition of masculine identity, inasmuch as it is defined in relation to woman as inaccessible Other. To pursue this point a little further, the play's comic eroticism is enacted on two levels: the first is the split between the male characters' thoughts and words, their signifiers and signifieds; the second is the continual frustration of their semantic expectations. In effect, signs offered by the male characters do not reach their intended objects, nor do they achieve their desired effects. This “split” and “frustration” produces masculine desire instead of merely representing some extralinguistic desire gone astray.

The politics of desire may thus be discovered through an analysis of the discursive and social forms of which Love's Labor's Lost is but a single example. And yet, the play inevitably reaches beyond its own literary boundaries: one might say that it is both written by Shakespeare and underwritten by representations of desire drawn from the contemporary appetite for Petrarchan sonnet writing, the age's abiding concern with female sexuality and the threat of cuckoldry, the politics of courtship and marriage, and at least indirectly from the presence of a virgin queen who presided at the apex of this otherwise thoroughly patriarchal culture. And each of these elements are themselves nodes in the discursive network that constructs individual men as desiring subjects. Shakespeare's own unique discernment of language and desire, therefore, should not be subsumed by an ubiquitous concept of structure. But at the same time, we cannot claim for him, or for his play, a status transcendent of those structures of desire and representation available in the late sixteenth century.

As I have suggested, interpretations of Love's Labor's Lost tend to discover a counter-patriarchal tone in the way that the women expose and ridicule the men's romantic advances. In such interpretations the play's failure to end in marriage sustains the empowered position of the women and underscores once again the inadequacies of the men.¹⁵ This reading is supported by an understanding of the Petrarchan lover as “effeminized” inasmuch as he is disempowered by the excess and irrationally of his love—it is a cliché of the Renaissance to say that love usurps (male) reason. Furthermore, as Patricia Parker has pointed out, rhetoric itself was often connected to or expressed in terms of the “feminine”: it represented garrulity, deception, and a lack of control. She paraphrases Dudley Fenner's translation of Cicero's definition of metaphor as “a figure whose movements must be carefully monitored.”¹⁶ This association means that the Petrarchan sonneteer in effect utilizes a “feminized” language to represent and express desire for his beloved. To this we may add Linda Woodbridge's observation that the Petrarchan lover of the 1590s was viewed as a “wily-tongued seducer,” once again associating him with supposedly feminine qualities.¹⁷ But this way of understanding Petrarchism as “effeminizing” men does not support an argument for female empowerment, since it relies upon the most traditional of stereotypes.

Indeed, if we follow Vickers's arguments, we can actually understand Petrarchism as a form of male empowerment: the Petrarchan sonnet represents the beloved as a “dispersed” (and in a sense, dismembered) Other against which the male poet can measure and retain his own “coherent,” unified identity.¹⁸ Petrarchan poetry becomes the textualized form of the male gaze: it specularizes “woman” by way of anatomical hyperbole and thus creates only an idealization of women. Perhaps the most important basis for understanding Petrarchism as a literary form that perpetuates the empowerment of men at the expense of women is quite simply that it constructs and confirms men as looking and writing subjects. Petrarchism sustains male poets in their control of the medium of representation, denying women any public means of representing their own subjectivity. Within this view of Petrarchism, the play's refusal of linguistic and erotic consummation upholds a masculine structure of desire because deferral is the basis of the traditionally gendered subject/object economy in the first place. In other words, deferral and “frustration” sustain men in the active position of pursuit, of doing the representing, and women in the static position of being represented.

III

In the opening scene of the play, the King and his lords position their mutual desire for “fame” and “honor” as dependent upon a renunciation of women and sexuality—the “grosser manner of these world's delights” (1.1.29), according to Dumaine. Masculine identity is established in the play when the men sign their names to a pact that unites them in opposition to the idea of women as linked to debased corporality; in effect the men purge themselves of their own corporality and mortality by projecting it onto a particular construction of woman. From the outset, then, the play sets up a functional concept of “woman” as that which needs to be transcended or renounced in order to purify masculinity and to establish bonds among men. This is a particularly fascinating version of the triangular model of homosocial bonding offered by Eve Sedgwick.¹⁹ Sedgwick points out that one of the significant structures of patriarchal power is, in its simplest form, the relationship of rivalry and identification between men that functions through and in relation to a repudiation or idealization of women. Since masculine desire is so inextricably linked with the idea of conquest, homosociality and heterosexuality are cooperative rather than antagonistic. In Henry V, for example, Henry rhetorically sexualizes the “penetration” of Harfleur to rally the English soldiers around the ideal of English unity and purity; in his “conquest” of Katharine at the end of the play, similarly, he has become a royal synecdoche for the bonds among his “band of brothers.”

In Love's Labor's Lost the King expresses this initial renunciation of physical desire in a metaphor drawn from military conquest:

Therefore, brave conquerors—for so you are,
That war against your own affections
And the huge army of the world's desires—
Our late edict shall strongly stand in force. …

(1.1.8-11)

In effect the men are unified around the construction of a shared enemy that must be conquered. That which they must renounce in themselves (their “own affections”) is projected onto a particular construction of woman as desire embodied. In this way the beginning of the play makes clear that the identities of the men and the bonds between them depend upon their ability to sustain this fictive conception of woman. Initially, then, the renunciation of women and sexuality requires the conquest of masculine desire.

A parallel way of understanding the relationship between desire and power that the play sets up is in terms of masculine knowledge. Here, once again, we see the way in which the women function as a third term that unifies the men with each other. Abstract, pure, disembodied philosophical knowledge—the privileged and decidedly masculine term—can only be obtained by the repudiation of what might be called carnal knowledge, or what the play understands as the knowledge of women. In effect the men at the outset privilege a desire for disembodied forms of knowledge (“living in philosophy”) over and against “the world's [physical] desires” (ll. 32, 10). But Berowne quickly and cleverly begins to question whether or not these two forms of knowledge are discrete, and, in so doing, he suggests that desire for books or desire for “some mistress fine” (l. 63) are in fact interchangeable objects of desire. “What is the end of study, let me know,” he asks the King, who replies, “… to know which else we should not know.” “Things hid and barred, you mean, from common sense?” the lord rejoins (ll. 55-57). The original opposition between abstract knowledge and corporeal knowledge has been dissolved by Berowne's simple point that both are forms of desire for something unknown—both are generated by the deferral of their objects of knowledge: “Things hid and barred.”

This is a pivotal moment in the opening scene because it turns the play's concerns to sexuality and courtship through an equation of abstract and carnal knowledge. Desire for the idea of woman as the basis of all knowledge will soon supplant desire for the fame and honor of the vita contemplativa that formerly relied on the repudiation of women and sexuality. But the important point is that the play depends on the same masculine structure of desire for both. It suggests, too, that masculine identity is shaped and understood by the act of desiring a form of knowledge either set in opposition to “woman” or gained through women. As Berowne will offer later in the play, “women's eyes” are “the books, the arts, the academes, / That show, contain, and nourish all the world” (4.3.323, 326-27). Men write and study books and men “write” and study women. (It is as if Shakespeare had read Virginia Woolf's account of her trip to the British Museum.)

Although the King and his lords remain at least publicly faithful to the oath of renunciation until the fourth act, for Don Armado (and for the audience as well) sexual desire is let loose in the play immediately following Berowne's reluctant signing of the oath. The King receives a letter from Armado, already noted for his fustian indulgence, that describes Armado's discovery of Costard and Jaquenetta behaving “contrary to thy established proclaimed edict” (1.1.252-53). As we learn in the next scene, Armado's own prurient interests have been aroused as a result of having spied upon Jaquenetta. It is significant that sexual desire is introduced in the play in this fashion. The audience, who finds itself in a similarly voyeuristic position, hears of the sexual transgression through the mediation of Armado's letter and the King's voice.²⁰ The taboo against displaying sex onstage is roughly parallel to the oath of renunciation; when the latter is transgressed by Armado's voyeuristic report of Jaquenetta and Costard, masculine desire is released into the world of the play. It is thus generated rather than curbed by taboo, renunciation, and mediation.

Immediately following the edict, then, the play introduces masculine desire in a textualized and specularized form, and it follows that Armado's desire is soon manifested in his bombastic sonnet-writing. In this sense, looking at and writing about “woman” are represented as interchangeable forms of knowledge, both directed from a safe and unthreatened male position, that is to say, a position of specular and discursive control. Once again, the Petrarchan model is informative: as Vickers points out, the lover's “description, at one remove from his experience, safely permits and perpetuates his fascination.”²¹ Indeed, the play's numerous references to “seeing” women are perhaps only exceeded by the men's “literary” attempts to apprehend them in letters and sonnets. Having “turn[ed] sonnet” (1.2.177), Armado is exhorted by Mote to “learn her by heart” (3.1.34).

Once this sexual energy is released from (and simultaneously produced by) its initial restraint, the second act proceeds in a series of bawdy dialogues, first among the Princess and her court and then in the course of the initial meeting between the prospective lovers. These scenes exemplify Stephen Greenblatt's observation that “for Shakespeare [erotic] friction is specifically associated with verbal wit; indeed at moments the plays seem to imply that erotic friction originates in the wantonness of language and thus that the body itself is a tissue of metaphors or, conversely, that language is perfectly embodied.”²² Greenblatt's homology between the indirect route of linguistic signification exemplified by metaphor (in which verbal chafing is the result of the friction between literal and metaphorical senses) and various social obstacles (blocking fathers or mistaken class difference, for example) that temporarily defer the lovers' union is decidedly a masculine model of desire because it is impelled by deferral and obstacle—what Greenblatt describes as “swerving.” In Love's Labor's Lost the verbal banter introduces a similar deferral of erotic satisfaction to that expressed through the play's use of Petrarchan conceits and in the mediation of Armado's voyeurism through writing.

But if the theater is so resolutely masculine in its structuring of desire, as Greenblatt argues, then it remains to consider why this is so. What is it, in other words, that this structure must exclude or set itself against? As a beginning, let us turn to the initial encounter between the ladies and lords, where the lords' erotic desire is first incited. Although there is a good deal of the kind of bawdy wordplay that Greenblatt notes in Twelfth Night, this scene requires us to look more closely at how this wordplay is distributed and at how power is enacted among those who engage in verbal sparring. The scene does not offer an equal display of verbal “chafing” on the part of men and women; instead, the women are represented as deliberately thwarting every effort by the men to utilize language as a purposeful, expressive medium. This is accomplished by a kind of mimicry in which the women repeat all or part of what the men say in order to dissolve or transform the original utterance.

KING
Fair Princess, welcome to the court of Navarre.
PRINCESS
“Fair” I give you back again, and “welcome” I have not yet.
The roof of this court is too high to be yours, and welcome to the wide fields too base to be mine.

(2.1.90-94)

And later, between Berowne and Rosaline:

BEROWNE
[to Rosaline]
Did not I dance with you in Brabant once?
ROSALINE
Did not I dance with you in Brabant once?
BEROWNE
I know you did.
ROSALINE
How needless was it then
                                        To ask the question!

(ll.I 14-17)

The women refuse to play the same “language game” as the men, and they thus “leave the rider in the mire” (l. 120), as Rosaline remarks, reversing a commonplace metaphor for male authority. The fact that the ladies are probably masked offers an additional specular analogy to this linguistic model of female resistance. The women have thwarted the male gaze by inverting it: they can recognize the men without being recognized by them. As I suggested above, the play introduced masculine desire in the form of Don Armado's scopic and linguistic apprehension of Jaquenetta; now, the male position as looking, speaking subject is “mired” (and mirrored) by women who thwart the economy of desire and representation that situates them as objects. Thus it would seem that the structure of desire so “identifiably male” in the comedies is overturned. But does this moment provide us with a merely temporary inversion of the “normative,” or does it offer the possibility of a sustained critique of the normative?

I would argue that the women's resistance to operations of this economy actually impels masculine desire, given that masculine desire is produced by deferral and resistance in the first place. In the play the clever Boyet remarks, after the lords have left, that “Navarre is infected. … With that which we lovers entitle ‘affected’” (ll. 230, 232). In explaining his reasons for this observation to the Princess, Boyet describes the King as follows: “His face's own margent did quote such amazes / That all eyes saw his eyes enchanted with gazes” (ll. 246-47). The King's desires appear to have been spurred by having looked at the Princess and having been frustrated by her wordplay; at the same time, his lords have fallen in love as a result of their introduction to disguised women by whom they have been linguistically tripped up. And all of the men, it will be remembered, have fallen in love while still under the oath renouncing women and physical desire. In effect the initial renunciation of sexuality as well as the women's resistance seem to have been the condition of their desire as well as the basis of its continuation.

The ridicule of Don Armado's bombastic letter anticipates the revelation in 4.3 that the King and his lords have all committed their own amorous desires to writing: writing both informs their desire and openly proves their perjury of the oath. Or, in terms of the play's frequently used double entendre, the men's “will” (desire and volition) exposes their lack of “will.” This double sense of “will” is perhaps the guiding trope of the play's treatment of masculine desire. Early in the play, “will” represents male renunciation of women and sexuality; as such it marks the women as unattainable and distant. When we add to this the second connotation—“will” as masculine sexual desire—we recognize the mutual dependence of denial and desire, of not having and wanting, within the masculine economy figured by the play.

In succession the King's poem and the sonnets of Longaville and Dumaine are read aloud and then derided by Berowne, whose own letter until now remains undiscovered. Indeed Berowne resolutely maintains his innocence while indicting the men for breaking the bonds between them originally constituted by their mutual renunciation of women and sexuality:

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

(4.3.175-82)

The answer to Berowne's question is provided instantly when his own love letter to Rosaline is brought forth by Jaquenetta and Costard. The comic irony is that Berowne delivers his claim to have upheld the oath of renunciation in the very terms of Petrarchan anatomization that encode and produce male desire in the first place. But when he is also discovered, the bonds once forged by a repudiation of sexuality are re-formed through the men's shared status as lovers. A second ceremony establishing male bonds is effected as the men's collective renunciation of love at the beginning is now replaced by a collective pact formalizing their new status as lovers.

In other words, what was formerly conceived as masculine debasement is now celebrated: woman-as-Other has easily changed from debased corporeality to the source of idealized love. “Who sees the heavenly Rosaline,” Berowne offers,

That, like a rude and savage man of Ind
          At the first opening of the gorgeous east,
Bows not his vassal head and, strucken blind,
          Kisses the base ground with obedient breast?
What peremptory eagle-sighted eye
          Dares look upon the heaven of her brow
That is not blinded by her majesty?

(ll. 217-24)

In effect the loss of power understood as the condition of heterosexual love for men is retained, but in this passage it is glorified rather than renounced: the lover is figured as a “vassal” who is willingly “obedient” to “her majesty.” The functional idea of woman has been transformed from the “grosser manner of the world's delights” to a heavenly, regal figure.²³

In order to justify this transformation, Berowne is called upon to “rewrite” the contract in order to accommodate the men's newly confessed love: “now prove / Our loving lawful,” the King demands, “and our faith not torn” (ll. 280-81). Despite having chastised the others for engaging in “pure idolatry” (l. 71) and “painted rhetoric” (l. 235), Berowne is no less soaring in his praise of the new feminine ideal that justifies renouncing the oath:

From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes
That show, contain, and nourish all the world;
Else none at all in aught proves excellent.

(ll. 324-28)

In an earlier version of the same speech (which Bevington prints in his Textual Notes), “ground” is substituted for “arts,” thus making clear the sense that woman is figured as the foundation of all male endeavors, a kind of “first cause” for all the world's activities. If in the initial oath the men elevated their pursuit of “fame,” “honor,” and abstract knowledge by debasing a corporeal, material world that included women and sexuality, in this second agreement women and male desire for them become the condition of all knowledge; in other words, an ideal of woman now functions as the transcendent principle that “guarantees” the masculine pursuit of fame and honor, indeed of their very existence. Berowne reproduces a formula all too familiar in Western patriarchy: desire for idealized woman is either embedded in the very material world that needs to be transcended, or, conversely, “woman” is wisdom itself, the idealized object of desire that functions, in Philippa Berry's phrase, as a “mediatrix between heaven and earth” for men.²⁴

The love of knowledge and the knowledge of love: this chiasmus describes the way in which Berowne's speech figures masculine identity in relation to idealized woman:

For wisdom's sake, a word that all men love,
Or for love's sake, a word that loves all men,
Or for men's sake, the authors of these women,
Or women's sake, by whom we men are men,
Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves,
Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths.

(ll. 331-36)

As a kind of anatomy of masculinity in miniature, this rather dense passage deserves a moment of close attention. In the first two lines Berowne recapitulates his earlier argument that the men will gain both wisdom and love by renouncing the oath; this belief employs the figure of wisdom as Sophia, or Sapientia, the chaste, idealized conduit of truth for men. The third and fourth lines appear to acknowledge that men (“the authors”) indeed discursively construct women as the basis or “ground” of their own identities.

It will be recalled that in the original oath a version of masculine identity was forged by swearing allegiance to a renunciation of love, sexuality, and women—as the King proclaims, “Your oaths are passed; and now subscribe your names” (1.1.19). The signing of names is conspicuously repeated as the men each in turn agree to uphold the bonds among them. In the subsequent pact the love letters and sonnets provide another signatory bond: writing functions in both cases to legitimate homosociality construed in relation to “woman.” Furthermore, the second, less formal agreement also results in a call to arms: “Saint Cupid, then!” cries the King, “And, soldiers, to the field!” (4.3.340). The military metaphor is echoed by Boyet in his warning to the Princess and ladies upon the arrival of the men: “Prepare, madam, prepare! / Arm, wenches, arm! Encounters mounted are / Against your peace” (5.2.81-83). In the opening scene of the play, the men declared war against “the huge army of the world's desires” (1.1.10); by the fourth act the object of conquest has become the women's affections rather than the men's own. If renouncing a debased notion of woman was supposed to have led the men to “find [them]selves” in the first instance, now the same objective depends on conquering an idealized, transcendent notion. Here we might recall Montaigne's observation that by “enhancing the price of the place, we raise the price and endeare the desire of the conquest.”

Disguised in Russian costume, the men lay siege to the women's camp, but once again masculine desire is confounded. The Princess and her ladies don masks and trade love tokens, forcing the men to direct their attentions to the wrong women: male specular positions of authority are again thwarted. Earlier the excessively Petrarchan love letters and sonnets were not received by their intended readers; in this scene the disguise of the object of male desire misdirects the men's gaze and serves to expose and ridicule them for relying on the signs rather than the substance of love. One could argue once again that the women disrupt the structure of male desire by calling attention to the medium in which it is expressed. “Following the signs,” the men “wooed but the sign,” Berowne later remarks (5.2.470). But, as I argued earlier, deterring and deferring the satisfaction of male desire can be read either as a parody of the way that desire is enacted or as the basis of producing desire within a masculine economy. Indeed, “following the signs” in the Petrarchan tradition engenders and constitutes the desiring/writing masculine subject.

Consequently, although this scene undoubtedly leaves the balance of power on the side of the women, it is also possible to read the women's actions, and thus the play up to this point, as complicit in the very structure of male desire they seem to have foiled. The following exchange occurs between the Princess and the shrewd Boyet just after the men, ridiculed and exposed (at least to the audience), have departed:

PRINCESS
Will they return?
BOYET
                                                                      They will, they will, God knows,
And leap for joy, though they are lame with blows.
Therefore change favors, and when they repair,
Blow like sweet roses in this summer air.
PRINCESS
How “blow”? How “blow”? Speak to be understood.
BOYET
Fair ladies masked are roses in their bud;
Dismasked, their damask sweet commixture shown,
Are angels vailing clouds, or roses blown.
PRINCESS
Avaunt, perplexity!—What shall we do
If they return in their own shapes to woo?

(ll. 291-300)

As Boyet seems to suggest, by masking themselves the women have fueled rather than foiled the men's desires; “fair ladies masked” increase among the men anticipation of the women “dismasked,” just as “roses in their bud” promise to become “roses blown” (e.g., full-blown). The metaphor additionally suggests that the inaccessibility of the women wearing masks resembles their as yet “unconquered” virginity: once “dismasked,” their “damask sweet commixture” represents a mingling of white (purity) and red (defloration) that suggests anticipation of sexual “conquest.” According to the military metaphor already in place in the play, the more difficult the conquest, the greater the desire. If female virginity and chastity are indeed a source of power for women, as Elizabeth's own sexual politics demonstrate, such a form of power simultaneously foils and exercises masculine desire within a culture that fetishizes female sexuality in the first place.²⁵ Similarly, although the women are represented as empowered and in control of the various forms of courtship, Love's Labor's Lost appears to imagine the play of desire only within a distinctly masculine structure.

And yet, as I have suggested, a number of moments in the play leave a reader (and perhaps an audience) uneasy with such an interpretation. As much as the Princess plays the game of deferral and denial, she is additionally represented as challenging the rules of the game in the first place: she may be said to expose the Petrarchan idealization of woman as a construct. In dialogue at the beginning of the fourth act, she argues in favor of praise that is earned (“merit”) against mere flattery based on appearance: “Nay, never paint me now. / Where fair is not, praise cannot mend the brow” (4.1.16-17). And a few lines later:

Glory grows guilty of detested crimes,
When for fame's sake, for praise, an outward part,
We bend to that the working of the heart. …

(ll. 31-33)

In this passage the Princess seeks praise for her ability to shoot a bow, rejecting the “outward” Petrarchan flattery that the play so thoroughly satirizes. Boyet immediately turns her skill at archery into a metaphor for the power struggle between husbands and wives:

Do not curst wives hold that self-sovereignty
Only for praise' sake when they strive to be
Lords o'er their lords?

(ll. 36-38)

To which the Princess replies, “Only for praise, and praise we may afford / To any lady that subdues a lord” (ll. 39-40). In this scene the Princess recalls the figure of Diana, the chaste huntress spied bathing by Actaeon, refiguring the original scene of desire in the play when Armado watches Jaquenetta and Costard and then immediately “turns sonnet.” But it also underscores the threat to masculinity that informs the need for a specular and discursive apprehension of idealized woman. “Petrarch's Actaeon,” according to Vickers, “realizes what will ensue: his response to the threat of imminent dismemberment is the neutralization, through descriptive dismemberment, of the threat.”²⁶ While the Princess may thus expose the falseness of Petrarchan flattery, the play nonetheless represents her authority by invoking a literary tradition that fetishizes woman as an idealized, virginal figure who simultaneously confers and disturbs masculine identity. The Princess occupies the place of Diana and Elizabeth: she is uniquely empowered among women as an inaccessible object of male desire who consequently both serves and disrupts patriarchal authority.

The ending of the play allows for similar interpretive possibilities. We may read it as offering distinctly powerful, independent women (without the usual comedic excuse of male attire) who successfully disrupt the traditionally patriarchal structure of masculine desire; or, instead, we may see it as playing out an elaborately crafted set of courtship games that retains that structure. The argument for the former position would be based on the fact that the female characters seize the means of representation—the forms and phrases of courtship—and expose them as mere representations that operate without regard to the particular situations or people involved. The specular and discursive economy of masculine desire introduced in the play, according to this reading, is exposed and parodied at the expense of the men. This very appealing interpretation is enhanced by the closing sincerity of the men; Berowne, for example, confesses that their love was

Formed by the eye and therefore, like the eye,
Full of strange shapes, of habits, and of forms,
Varying in subjects as the eye doth roll
To every varied object in his glance. …

(5.2.758-61)

And the most compelling aspect of the play in support of this reading is provided by its unusual ending. If other of Shakespeare's comedies are at best ambiguous toward the final closure and reintegration provided by marriage, Love's Labor's Lost is unequivocal: “Our wooing doth not end like an old play; / Jack hath not Jill. These ladies' courtesy / Might well have made our sport a comedy” (ll. 864-66).

The female characters retain a stature of independence and authority that is compromised among their counterparts in other comedies by marriage; furthermore, they dictate the terms of any imagined future marriage by imposing a series of year-long penances on the men. This lack of traditional comic closure leaves the women as the arbiters of their own romantic involvements; they remain in what was often considered in the Renaissance the dangerous position of the marriageable maiden unattended, a fact underscored by the death of the Princess's father. This interpretation is complicated, however, by the fact that the end of the play looks conspicuously like its beginning. The male characters each in turn pledge themselves to yet another renunciation of love and sexuality for a designated period of time; once again, sexual desire, one could argue, is spurred by its deferral and by a failure to find even offstage the promised consummation suggested by comedies that end in marriage. It would thus seem that the structure of desire introduced at the outset of the play and sustained throughout its playful representations of courtship is reinforced rather than challenged by the play's lack of closure. That structure, as I have suggested, positions men as desiring subjects and women as the inaccessible objects of desire; desire itself is generated by the forms through which it is mediated, by the obstacles it confronts, and by the fact that desire can only glimpse rather than reach its end. But however difficult it might be for a Renaissance male playwright to envision an alternative economy of romantic love, Love's Labor's Lost is at least self-conscious about the way patriarchy constructs and reproduces masculine desire. And no matter how much the ending of the play might mimic the structure of desire that impelled the lovers at the outset, it is significant that, at the end, the women are represented as in control of the forms and phrases of masculine desire they have so thoroughly exposed.

The logic behind ending Love's Labor's Lost with the “cuckoo's song,” if such logic exists, has eluded most critical treatments of the play.²⁷ But in many ways the association of cuckoldry and marriage provides an apt coda, for it suggests once again the way in which romantic love is construed by patriarchal thinking in terms of loss and fear. And, more specifically, the reference to cuckoldry promises a continuation rather than a resolution of the power struggles that have occupied the play thus far, once more suggesting the limitations and contradictions of romantic love that are figured in terms of an idealization of woman. As I have argued, although the ability of wives to cuckold their husbands is often represented as a source of power for women, such a form of empowerment is certainly circumscribed by the fact that it depends on the fetishization of female chastity. Like Petrarchan idealizations of chaste women as powerful and unattainable, cuckoldry anxiety employs the opposite yet complementary representation of women as dangerously powerful due to their supposedly unbridled sexuality. Indeed, the tradition of placing horns on the head of the cuckolded husband duplicates the same displacement of male fears of dismemberment through the use of a phallic symbol of male potency.²⁸ The play's final reference to the threat of cuckoldry thus appears to remind us of its initial structure of male desire rather than to promise some sort of future reconciliation between the sexes.

The play's longest treatment of the threat of cuckoldry in love and marriage is offered by Berowne in Act 3:

What? I love, I sue, I seek a wife?
A woman, that is like a German clock,
Still a-repairing, ever out of frame,
And never going aright, being a watch,
But being watched that it may still go right?
Nay, to be perjured, which is worst of all;
And, among three, to love the worst of all—
A whitely wanton with a velvet brow,
With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes;
Ay, and, by heaven, one that will do the deed
Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard.

(3.1.187-97)

Berowne understands cuckoldry as outside even the panoptical gaze of Argus, the hundred-eyed giant of mythology. In this passage the cuckolded husband is “perjured” by his wife, the very same term used to describe the men's failure to abide by their own oath of sexual continence in the first act. As suggested in the reference to Argus and in so many Renaissance treatments of jealousy and cuckoldry, the prevention of a wife's infidelity depends on the specular vigilance of the husband; he is entreated to watch her constantly and to interpret her for any signs of wandering. As such, the threat of cuckoldry demands on the part of men an interpretive “knowledge” that serves as a form of regulation and control over female sexuality. But the perception that this vigilance is never fully successful perhaps explains the need to write about cuckoldry and female sexuality: the failure of specular constraint is turned into an attempt at discursive control.²⁹

Understood in this way, cuckoldry anxiety bears a number of resemblances to Petrarchism: in both cases men are led by their fear of emasculation to construct women as the objects of their specularization; the female body is either “scattered” in Petrarchism or scrutinized by the jealous husband; the wife's or the beloved's sexuality is fetishized, although in different ways; and finally, women are represented as holding a certain power over men, but only within a way of thinking that remains patriarchal. Indeed, the independence displayed by the women would seem to make them more likely, in the men's imagination, to cuckold future husbands. This connection seems to be drawn by the play when, during the ridicule of Armado's love letter, Boyet suggests that if Rosaline marries, “horns” would soon appear on her husband's head (4.1.111-13).

It thus seems not at all fortuitous that cuckoldry should be the theme of the closing of the play: more than just an example of male disempowerment or inadequacy, the reference functions within masculine structures of desire and representation that have been comically treated throughout. But most important, cuckoldry anxiety calls attention to the issue that the play has so nervously explored: the prospects of romantic love in a structure of masculine desire in which the conquest of women is dialectically bound to their idealization as chaste or virginal. If the men successfully “conquer” the women they have come to idealize in some anticipated moment beyond the end of the play, the promise is hardly one of “shared experience” between the sexes.³⁰

IV

What, then, is Love's Labor's Lost's answer to Montaigne's question, would “we not be lesse Cukcoldes if we lesse feared to be so?” I think it is possible to interpret the play in such a way as to provide an affirmative answer—indeed, I hope my reading has done so. But the play itself is far more equivocal. Shakespeare anatomizes masculine desire by reproducing and parodying its effects, providing an anatomy that exposes the very same limitations and contradictions it cannot fully escape.

This position is roughly that of present-day critics whose writing and teaching involves issues pertaining to sexuality and identity. We speak within an economy of desire (whose antecedents are recognizable in the Renaissance) that inevitably shapes and informs what we say. But at the same time, our critical task must be to uncover the fissures, paradoxes, and contradictions that lie at the heart of that economy. The recognition of this double position does not represent an acquiescence to stasis or inevitability; rather, it is the necessary starting point of a critical intervention. According to Montaigne:

One must suruay his [own] faultes and study them, ere he be able toe repeate them. Those which hide them from others, commonly conceale them also from themselues; and esteeme them not sufficiently hidden, if themselues see them. They withdraw and disguise them from their owne consciences. … Why doth no man confesse his faults? Because he is yet in them.³¹

Surely this “suruay” is the first step toward dismantling the patriarchal “logic” I discussed at the outset of this essay, in which men project the cause of their own frustration and anger onto women. It is a “logic” marked by a profound irony: the very system that enables masculine identity and desire in the first place simultaneously restricts, agitates, even tortures its masculine subjects. Like Montaigne, I think that the preliminary step toward reaching a place outside this vicious circle is to recognize our own complicities. Toward that end, Shakespeare and Montaigne have left behind texts that encourage us, on levels even the authors did not envision, to see our own “faultes and study them.”

Notes

1. The Essayes or Morall, Politike and Millitarie Discourses of Lord Michaell de Montaigne, trans. John Florio (London: V. Sims, 1603), pp. 505-37.

2. pp. 508, 509.

3. pp. 537, 512. Here and throughout the quotations from Montaigne, the italics are Florio's.

4. pp. 523, 518.

5. pp. 521, 516.

6. p. 531. In this regard one might also turn to Montaigne's discussions of female sexual appetite as it relates to male impotence and to his discussion of the dangers of exaggerating penis sizes to women (pp. 531-33). Sometimes Montaigne's understanding is distinctly male, even when he speaks in general terms; for example, love is “an insatiate thirst of enjoying a greedily desired subject … a tickling delight of emptying ones semenary vessels” (p. 526).

7. p. 531. The double-entendre use of “satisfaction” in Othello supports this argument. Othello's demand for satisfaction (Iago repeatedly taunts him with the word) refers to his requirement of proof of his suspicions but also carries a sexual connotation that is especially played out in the sexualized murder of Desdemona. See Edward A. Snow, “Sexual Anxiety and the Male Order of Things in Othello,” English Literary Renaissance, 10 (1980), 384-412, esp. p. 396. For the idea that male representations of women and female sexuality are often compensations or projections of masculine anxieties, I am indebted to Abbe Blum's wonderful essay on Shakespeare's monumentalization of female characters, “‘Strike all that look upon with mar[b]le’: Monumentalizing Women in Shakespeare's Plays” in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky, eds. (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1990), pp. 99-118.

8. pp. 528-29.

9. “The Sonnets” in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 4th ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). References to Shakespeare's works, including Love's Labor's Lost, are from this edition and will appear in the text.

10. A brief account of the play's criticism may be found in William C. Carroll's The Great Feast of Language in Love's Labor's Lost (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 3-8. For example, Dr. Johnson found many phrases “mean, childish, and vulgar” (p. 6); and H. B. Charlton thought the play “deficient in plot and in characterisation” (p. 7). Alexander Leggatt suggests that “the play's ultimate effect is to provide an image of insecurity” (Shakespeare's Comedy of Love [London: Methuen, 1974], p. 88). Most critics have worked with the two most salient features of the play: its attention to linguistic confusion/misprision and its concern with heterosexual love and courtship. An interesting study could be done on the ways critics have linked these two issues. Generally, the argument is that, in Mary Beth Rose's words, the “overblown rhetoric” and “narcissistic posturing” of the men prevent a “shared experience” between the lovers. The play is thus a call for honest feelings expressed in the “plain style” (The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Drama [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988], p. 36). Karen Newman's interesting reading is more attentive to the way language additionally shapes identity in the play; still, she retains a belief that beneath its linguistic games the play offers a model of transparent communication and authentic selfhood: “Shakespeare's use of language to further the theme of error and misunderstanding” results in characters who “delude themselves with their own language …” (Shakespeare's Rhetoric of Comic Character: Dramatic Convention in Classical and Renaissance Comedy [New York: Methuen, 1985], p. 87). The best socioliterary study of the play as a “cynosural staging” of “Elizabeth's court” is Louis A. Montrose's “‘Sport by sport o'erthrown’: Love's Labour's Lost and the Politics of Play,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 18 (1977), 528-52, esp. p. 546. Finally, Carolyn Asp has read the play through rather strictly defined Lacanian categories. Male subjectivity, constructed in terms of an idealization of women, is placed in the imaginary stage, while the female characters have mastered the symbolic order (“Love's Labour's Lost: Language and the Deferral of Desire,” Literature and Psychology, 35 [1989], 1-21). The play has always seemed to me highly susceptible to Lacanian analysis, and my own reading is an attempt to historicize the play through the interpretive lens Lacan provides.

11. The only interpretation I have found that does not read the Cuckoo Song as integrating or harmonizing disparate elements is the fine chapter on the play by John Turner in Graham Holderness, Nick Potter, and John Turner's Shakespeare: Out of Court: Dramatizations of Court Society (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 19-48.

12. “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” Critical Inquiry, 8 (1981), 265-79, esp. pp. 265, 274. See also Giuseppe Mazzotta, “The Canzoniere and the Language of the Self,” Studies in Philology, 75 (1978), 271-96. Mazzotta points out that “the lyric emerges as the conventional privileged form of literary discourse because it is the representation of the will and the direct and spontaneous expression of the self …” (p. 274). For a superb account of the popularity of sonnet writing in the 1590s as a way of encoding political ambition, see Arthur F. Marotti, “‘Love is not Love’: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and The Social Order,” English Literary History, 49 (1982), 396-428.

13. p. 291.

14. For example, J. Dennis Huston has written that “Berowne's manipulation of language thus divorces words from fact and undermines the basic foundation on which human communication and community are built …” (Shakespeare's Comedies of Play [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1974], p. 44). William C. Carroll's book-length study of the play (cited in n. 10, above) remains one of the best works on rhetoric and referentiality in the Renaissance.

15. A number of readings see the play as empowering the women while ridiculing the men. According to Peter Erickson, for example, “male relations” are “made laughable” in the play (Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985], p. 9). Montrose shows that sexual and moral shame is cast as masculine in the play, precipitated by “female superiority in the game of sexual politics” (p. 535).

16. Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 107.

17. Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620 (Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1984), pp. 184-85.

18. Vickers, passim.

19. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985). For a discussion of the way male bonds are effected around the exclusion of women, see also the introduction to Peter Erickson's Patriarchal Structures, pp. 1-13. Karen Newman's argument linking the economic “structures of exchange” to the love relationships in The Merchant of Venice also provides a useful model for understanding male bonding in the Renaissance (“Portia's Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 38 [1987], 19-33).

20. Katherine Eisaman Maus develops this parallel in “Horns of Dilemma: Jealousy, Gender, and Spectatorship in English Renaissance Drama,” ELH, 54 (1987), 561-84, esp. p. 565.

21. p. 273.

22. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), p. 89.

23. The passage may serve as an oblation to Elizabeth herself. Indeed, the “savage man” metamorphosed by the sheer presence of the Virgin Queen remained a popular motif in courtly entertainment. For example, at the 1591 entertainment at Elvetham, Elizabeth “tames” Sylvanus, the god of the woods cast as a wild animal.

24. Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 4.

25. For an excellent analysis of this dynamic, see Louis A. Montrose, “Celebration and Insinuation: Sir Philip Sidney and the Motives of Elizabethan Courtship,” Renaissance Drama, 8 (1977), 3-35. Montrose's discussion of the Triumph of the Fortress of Perfect Beauty offers a useful model for the way masculine desire is figured in relation to the queen and to the symbolic power represented by her virginity. Indeed, there are enough parallels between Love's Labor's Lost and this text that, according to Glynne Wickham, Shakespeare intended the play as a direct satire on the courtly entertainment (“Love's Labor's Lost and The Four Foster Children of Desire,” SQ, 36 [1985], 49-55).

26. p. 273.

27. Given the pervasive male anxiety toward cuckoldry, it is difficult to agree with Mary Beth Rose's observation that “Love's Labor's Lost concludes with a song celebrating summer and winter and suggesting the alliance among fruitful sexual love, the predictably recurring cycle of the seasons, and the ongoing life of society” (The Expense of Spirit [cited in n. 10, above], p. 36). On the contrary, the final song's choric references to cuckoldry would seem to suggest a future disruption of what Rose anticipates as “fruitful sexual love.”

28. See Coppélia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), p. 122. Kahn's study provides the most extensive and insightful paradigm to date for theorizing masculinity in the Renaissance; my essay owes a general debt to Kahn's persuasive arguments.

29. I have developed these issues in “Anxious Masculinity: Sexual Jealousy in Early Modern England,” forthcoming in Feminist Studies.

30. Rose, The Expense of Spirit, p. 35.

31. pp. 507-8.