SOURCE: “Giving and Receiving: Love's Labour's Lost and the Politics of Exchange,” in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 23, No. 2, Spring, 1993, pp. 287-313.

[In the following essay, Burnett approaches the topicality of Love's Labour's Lost by exploring the play in terms of its critical discourse on Elizabethan cultural practices, especially that of gift exchange.]

In 1559, basking in the glory of her new queenly status, Elizabeth I processed through London to Westminster, the traditional site of coronation, and on route the sovereign availed herself of every opportunity to express gratitude for the smoothness with which her election had been effected. Elizabeth “did declare herselfe no lesse thankefullye to receive her people's good wille, than they lovingly offred it unto her.”¹ Similar delineations of reciprocal protestations of indebtedness recur in the official account of the event. After a child had delivered a welcoming oration, Elizabeth “thanked most hartely both the citie for this her gentle receiving at the first, and also the peple for confirming the same.”² And so it continues, this pattern of giving and receiving, of accepting proferred good wishes with courteous appreciation and approval. Witnessing a pageant and delighting in the gift of a Bible, Elizabeth displays consummate skills—wooing with modest grace, capturing affections, reinforcing allegiances. The description of her passage through the city is a striking example of the politics of securing royal power at a time of uncertainty and upheaval. As Louis Adrian Montrose states, “The stations of the journey occasioned a coherent program of allegorical pageants which confirmed the royal succession; affirmed principles of good government and reformed religion; and encouraged the young, female, and virgin ruler with demonstrations of public support and citations of biblical precedent.”³

Among the cultural strategies available to Elizabeth in her pursuit of stability, gift-giving was probably the most established and successful. Gifts circulated in abundance at the Elizabethan court, from suitor to sovereign and from sovereign to suitor. To placate enemies, quell resentment, and flatter foreign ambassadors, Elizabeth sent gifts ranging from needlework to rings, books, and golden chess-pieces.⁴ In return, courtiers presented jewels, clocks and literary exercises, encomiums and Latin verses.⁵ Everyone was ideally rewarded according to position and rank; favor was distributed with scrupulousness and exactitude. Particularly on festive occasions and at New Year gifts passed hands, forming part of a narrative of exchange and serving as potent symbols of the workings of patronage. At the Elizabethan court, therefore, gifts fulfilled specific cultural, economic, and political purposes.

Gift-exchange is a distinctive feature of many societies and performs tasks beneficial to the continued viability of the social order. According to Marcel Mauss in his classic study The Gift, “prestations” (the presentation of gifts) guarantee the vitality of a culture; express its connections with the past and the present; permit economic aggrandizement; promote solidarity and trust; and are a binding force in bringing together the members of particular social organizations.⁶ Often exchanged on liminal occasions (births, circumcisions, marriages and funeral ceremonies) and lacking material value in themselves, gifts are coveted for the histories they represent and the relationships they articulate. Things material and non-material (food and ornaments, words and incantations) circulate to engender the successful functioning of a society's activities. Through the gift an identity is ascribed, one which donor and recipient negotiate and renegotiate as they engage in playing their parts in a self-perpetuating system of social obligations. Of course the relationship may break down: refusing to reciprocate or offering more than can be reciprocated can cause conflict, and in the exchange of gifts there is always an element of muted hostility and competitive rivalry.

Interdisciplinary work in the humanities in recent years, including “cultural materialism” and the “new historicism,” has made possible exciting reassessments of the texts of the English Renaissance. Anthropologically inspired readings of Shakespeare and exchange have been attempted, but Love's Labour's Lost has so far remained unaffected.⁷ In this essay I will be pursuing a culturally-inflected interpretation of the play that pays attention to its historical embeddedness and its relationship to court politics. In so doing, I am taking up the suggestions of Montrose who distinguishes the “rhythm of reciprocity” of Love's Labour's Lost, its “network of reciprocal rights and obligations,” and its refraction of the “cultural condition” of the court.⁸ Although Montrose does not elaborate these observations into a discussion of gift-exchange, he furnishes a provocative starting-point for a more fully documented contextual critique. Politically charged arguments over territory, anxieties about money and royal practices which had fallen into disrepair, and speculations about the future of forms of constituted authority determine to a great extent the play's particular tone and texture.

The topicality of the play has been a focus for considerable debate. Earlier studies established precise historical parallels in the visits of the Princess of France, Marguerite de Valois, and Queen Catherine to Navarre in 1578 and 1586 respectively, or they endeavoured to dismantle the drama's satirical apparatus and its lampooning of Sir Walter Ralegh and approval of Essex, Southampton, and their supporters.⁹ My concern is not with a static reflection of a unitary “history”; rather, I seek to understand Love's Labour's Lost in terms of its critical dialogue with more wide-ranging Elizabethan cultural practices and its preoccupation with the dynamics of the gift.

II

Love's Labour's Lost is often held to be “light,” witty, an expression of literary exuberance, and an exercise in courtly entertainment. As a counter-argument to these views, we need to recognize that the play is as much concerned with a contest over power, property, and financial debt. At the core of Shakespeare's text is a dispute over tribute-payments from which the rest of the action springs. Around the discussion between Navarre and the Princess of France about Aquitaine gather a host of competing issues. It is a crucial, if confusing point in Love's Labour's Lost's development:

KING.
Madam, your father here doth intimate
The payment of a hundred thousand crowns;
Being but the one half of an entire sum
Disbursed by my father in his wars.
But say that he, or we, as neither have,
Receiv'd that sum, yet there remains unpaid
A hundred thousand more; in surety of the which,
One part of Aquitaine is bound to us,
Although not valued to the money's worth.
If then the king your father will restore
But that one half of which is unsatisfied,
We will give up our right in Aquitaine,
And hold fair friendship with his majesty.
But that, it seems, he little purposeth,
For here he doth demand to have repaid
A hundred thousand crowns; and not demands
On payment of a hundred thousand crowns
To have his title live in Aquitaine;
Which we much rather had depart withal,
And have the money by our father lent,
Than Aquitaine, so gelded as it is.
Dear princess, were not his requests so far
From reason's yielding, your fair self should make
A yielding 'gainst some reason in my breast,
And go well satisfied to France again.
PRIN.
You do the king my father too much wrong,
And wrong the reputation of your name,
In so unseeming to confess receipt
Of that which hath so faithfully been paid.
KING.
I do protest I never heard of it;
And if you prove it I'll repay it back,
Or yield up Aquitaine.
PRIN.
                                                                      We arrest your word:
Boyet, you can produce aquittances
For such a sum from special officers
Of Charles his father.

(2.1.128-62)¹⁰

The thrust of the disagreement is this: Navarre claims that 100,000 crowns of the 200,000 owed his father by the King of France were never delivered, notwithstanding the King of France's contrary claims. An area of Aquitaine (worth less than 100,000 crowns) was offered in surety. If France were to pay half the outstanding amount, Navarre urges, he would forget about Aquitaine and make peace. However, things are complicated by France's having requested 100,000 crowns from Navarre, which he finds intolerable. Furthermore, it is difficult to decide if France has met all of his financial obligations, if Navarre is unjustly retaining Aquitaine, if both parties are to be trusted and believed, or if both are to blame. All of this is a political mess, a territorial headache, and the difficulties of the situation create a powerful impression of deadlock. Calling for acquittances presents itself as the only solution. But Boyet has a more good-humored idea when he proposes: “I'll give you Aquitaine, and all that is his, / An you give him for my sake but one loving kiss” (2.1.247-48). Boyet elects himself as an arbiter in the diplomatic crisis, and recommends an exchange that fuses property interests with sexual desire as an antidote to injured sensibilities; for material possessions, the Princess will make a gift of her kiss.

Idealistic and flippant, perhaps. Still, Boyet's unheeded suggestion prepares the ground for other exchange structures that pervade the play as a whole. Indeed, the opening stages are concerned with nothing less than the granting of gifts and the weighing up of reciprocal responsibilities, reflected in Navarre's announcement of his dedication to academic asceticism:

          Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives,
Live register'd upon our brazen tombs,
And then grace us in the disgrace of death;
When, spite of cormorant devouring Time,
Th' endeavour of this present breath may buy
That honour which shall bate his scythe's keen edge,
And make us heirs of all eternity.

(1.1.1-7)

It is less a transformation of identity than the striking of a bargain that Navarre imagines. Metaphors of monetary exchange dominate although there is no actual money involved in Navarre's speculations. Instead, he will renounce his life to secure glory, the perpetuation of his name and a place in immortality. In his will to win honor, he resembles the “rich man” described by Mauss in some Indian societies of the American Northwest who is “constrained to expend everything” and who spends “recklessly” to gain power and “prestige.” Mauss adds: “Sometimes … one destroys simply in order to give the appearance that one has no desire to receive anything back.”¹¹ This chimes with the way in which Navarre extravagantly makes a gift of himself, although it neglects questions of inheritance. For Navarre does require a reward which will be to inherit eternal fame; in his declarations, even at this early stage, is glimpsed the Princess' becoming an heiress at the close.

One effect of exchange is to inaugurate social obligations, and the ramifications of Navarre's decision emerge when he states:

You three, Berowne, Dumain, and Longaville,
Have sworn for three years' term to live with me,
My fellow-scholars, and to keep those statutes
That are recorded in this schedule here:
Your oaths are pass'd; and now subscribe your names,
That his own hand may strike his honour down
That violates the smallest branch herein—
If you are arm'd to do, as sworn to do,
Subscribe to your deep oaths, and keep it too.

(1.1.15-23)

Now the nature of the contract is explained. Having enumerated the benefits accruing from a devotion to abstinence, Navarre details the inverse side of the agreement, the restraints and regulations. An air of soldierly bravado is introduced as Navarre enjoins his fellows to subscribe their names, an act which is also an effacement of name inasmuch as Berowne, Dumain and Longaville are turning their backs on their previous selves. The gifts they will eventually receive come with a high price. That the imbalances of the exchange outlaw qualities of vitality and spontaneity is registered in the wordplay upon “pass away” (1.1.49) and “rest” (1.1.53), and the reminder of the irreducibility and inevitability of death again anticipates the mood of the play's conclusion.

And yet Navarre will not be persuaded to abandon his scheme. An argument with Berowne develops:

BER.
By yea and nay, sir, then I swore in jest.
What is the end of study, let me know?
KING.
Why, that to know which else we should not know.
BER.
Things hid and barr'd, you mean, from common sense?
KING.
Ay, that is study's god-like recompense.

(1.1.54-58)

Once more Navarre flirts with the idea of spiritual reparation for earthly endeavor. The objections of Berowne do nothing to dampen Navarre's enthusiasm; he is unmoved by his fellows' reservations. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “recompense” as “Compensation (received or desired) for some loss or injury sustained.” However, the word carries the subsidiary meaning of “Return or repayment for something given or received.”¹² The notion of reward recurs as Navarre, to defuse opposition, defends a contract whose terms appear increasingly unattractive and untenable.

If Navarre participates in a system of exchanges, then the Princess is similarly implicated. Her arrival at the court of Navarre is heralded by Boyet's cheering encouragement:

Now, madam, summon up your dearest spirits:
Consider who the king your father sends,
To whom he sends, and what's his embassy:
Yourself, held precious in the world's esteem,
To parley with the sole inheritor
Of all perfections that a man may owe,
Matchless Navarre; the plea of no less weight
Than Aquitaine, a dowry for a queen.
Be now as prodigal of all dear grace
As Nature was in making graces dear
When she did starve the general world beside,
And prodigally gave them all to you.

(2.1.1-12)

Economic metaphors are pointedly emphasized in Boyet's exhortatory address. Spirits are to be valued—“dearest” is employed in the sense of material importance. The financial undercurrent of the speech is sustained in “precious” and “world's esteem,” a phrase that recalls Navarre's reflections on the “world's desires” (1.1.10). Further correspondences accumulate: Navarre's devouring Time becomes a generous Nature who gives the Princess graces in a spirit of aristocratic largesse. As nuance and personification build toward a sense of Navarre's and the Princess' interlocking destinies, the political situation is illuminated: the Princess will be pleading for a gift of property, Aquitaine, to increase the worth of the dowry accompanying her marriage.

What is underscored as the play begins is a series of “prestations” which permeate many levels of the fabric of Navarre, from diplomatic operations and property decisions to relationships between men and fathers and daughters. Equally apparent are voices of resistance and an anxiety that gift-exchange does not advantage both participating parties. Throwaway remarks that pepper the preliminary scenes suggest that every exchange in the play invariably backfires. Berowne exclaims:

These earthly godfathers of heaven's lights,
That give a name to every fixed star,
Have no more profit to their shining nights
Than those that walk and wot not what they are.

(1.1.88-91)

It is possible, as William C. Carroll points out, that Berowne is arguing sophistically here.¹³ More immediately obvious, though, is Berowne's contention that astronomers, having bestowed identities on new solar systems and constellations, are not rewarded with subsequent knowledge. The status of the donor is not augmented by baptizing a previously unknown phenomenon. Shortly afterwards, Armado rhapsodizes about being in love:

If drawing my sword against the humour of affection would deliver me from the reprobate thought of it, I would take Desire prisoner, and ransom him to any French courtier for a new-devised courtesy.

(1.2.55-59)

Armado's mean transaction echoes Berowne's sympathy for the astronomers. To renounce Desire for a tip about the latest fashions in bowing, culled from a French boudoir, seems a poor exchange. Nor is Desire exorcised, for it asserts itself in the phallic deployment of the sword and the sexually charged demonstration of a flamboyant politesse.

III

The fantastical Spaniard is not limited to complaints about his amatory inclinations; he belongs, in fact, to a larger network of exchanges that affects Costard and Jaquenetta, that develops the anatomization of money in Love's Labour's Lost, and that pushes the play's fascination with the gift into other areas of society. The subplot thematizes the writing, sending, and receiving of letters which, in the symbolic economy of Love's Labour's Lost, are perceived as presents.¹⁴ In this matrix of textual transmissions Costard is the unwilling and incompetent messenger. Imprisoned, he is allowed his freedom by Armado: “Sweet air! Go, tenderness of years; take this key, give enlargement to the swain, bring him festinately hither; I must employ him in a letter to my love” (3.1.3-5). Armado becomes a creditor by making a gift which cannot be refused: Costard, he knows, does not wish to remain behind bars.¹⁵ Tied to a social superior who gives to have his rank affirmed, Costard must act as a go-between. Armado states: “I give thee thy liberty, set thee from durance; and in lieu thereof, impose on thee nothing but this: bear this significant to the country maid Jaquenetta” (3.1.125-27). One form of imprisonment has been replaced by another, it seems. Armado offers a gift, but only to advance his own suit and to “impose” upon Costard a subordinate status, to confine him in his new role of servant.

The circulation of goods follows the exchange of compliments in Mauss's study of the gift. As he states, “If things are given and returned it is precisely because one [first] gives and returns ‘respects’ and ‘courtesies.’”¹⁶ It is an observation relevant to Love's Labour's Lost, particularly to the scene in which Costard receives money after listening to Armado's orotund, verbal assurances of liberality. Examining the coins in his hand, Costard philosophizes:

Now will I look to his remuneration. Remuneration! O that's the Latin word for three farthings: three farthings, remuneration. ‘What's the price of this inkle?’ ‘One penny’: ‘No, I'll give you a remuneration’: why, it carries it. Remuneration! why it is a fairer name than French crown. I will never buy and sell out of this word.

(3.1.132-38)

Placing himself in an imaginary marketplace and bartering sarcastically, Costard, in what amounts to a phenomenological investigation into the nomenclature of money or the arbitrariness of economic naming systems, exposes, like Berowne, court pretensions, revealing the inadequacy of rhetoric through blunt colloquialisms.¹⁷ One might recall Foucault's thesis that, because of successive devaluings of currency in the early modern period, the monetary sign no longer defined its exchange value; the coin's claim to represent a material reality was placed in doubt.¹⁸ Costard is palmed off with objects that fail to signify, and freed into a more onerous kind of servitude, ostracized from the developing economy of Navarre and granted a pittance masquerading as princely munificence. But Berowne is more generous:

BER.
There's thy guerdon: go.
COST.
Gardon, O sweet gardon! better than remuneration; a'leven-pence farthing better. Most sweet gardon! I will do it, sir, in print. Gardon! Remuneration!

(3.1.163-67)

There is no point in speculating if Costard has discovered the “meaning” of “remuneration.” His change of Berowne's words and preference for an obsolete form of “guerdon” (which suggests that he has reached a conviction that language is tarnished and rarely unproblematically current) is what impresses. All that Costard takes away with him from his transactions is the fear that words do not fit.

The place of money in the exchange system of Love's Labour's Lost is further explored in the banter of Armado, Moth, and Costard, a repartie of rhymes and axiomatic allusions that combines economic rumination with verbal misapprehension and quick-fire, witty exclamation. In these scenes the status of the gift comes under attack, and cash begins to declare its influence. Asked by Armado how he has “purchased” his “experience” (3.1.24), Moth replies: “By my penny of observation” (3.1.25). The proverbial familiarity of the expression cannot conceal the fact that Moth acquires self-interestedly rather than presents selflessly. His reply intimates that he has bought his way into successful courtships, and that reciprocity is giving way to a new formation dependent upon money for its continued existence. A versified dialogue ensues:

ARM.
The fox, the ape, and the humble-bee,
Were still at odds, being but three.
MOTH.
Until the goose came out of door,
And stay'd the odds by adding four.

(3.1.86-89)

Costard has the last word:

The boy hath sold him a bargain, a goose, that's flat.
Sir, your pennyworth is good and your goose be fat.
To sell a bargain well is as cunning as fast and loose:
Let me see; a fat l'envoy; ay, that's fat goose.

(3.1.98-101)

The lines constitute a web of topical reference, but the overriding point (made by Costard) is that Armado's inflated maxims have been capped (or even deflated) by Moth's inventive riposte. Moralizing on the theme of inequality, Armado is upstaged by Moth, who asserts that egalitarian relationships are equally possible. Verbal games in Love's Labour's Lost are potentially subversive: a page, Moth, transgressively challenges his master by practising linguistic subterfuge, increasing his economic command of the relation in which he participates. Carnival enters the arena briefly, roles are reversed, and Moth, with Armado his debtor, enjoys the achievement of a new-found credit.

Earlier I remarked that gift-giving ideally unites the members of a social organization, heals divisions, and engenders lasting harmony, and that in Love's Labour's Lost, although there is displayed an interest in such forms of reciprocity, the exchange of gifts encourages discontent more than it fosters agreement. The situation is partly exacerbated by money competing as an alternative model of human interaction and creating tensions and imbalances, disrupting pastoral calm and hierarchical distinctions. Money's presence is powerfully felt in the subplot; it also spills over into the rest of the play. We would be wrong to assume, however, that the attitudes articulated are clear-cut and, if Berowne's comments are to be reckoned with, Love's Labour's Lost offers no brighter statement about the spectre of capitalism and what were in the sixteenth century unprecedented modes of economic production. The departure of the ladies prompts Berowne to state: “Light wenches may prove plagues to men forsworn; / If so, our copper buys no better treasure” (4.3.381-82). A vein of cynicism runs through this pronouncement that money procures only punishment and illness, and its sentiments glance ahead to the songs of the last act and to a vision of sterility and waste. The bitterness returns when Berowne berates Boyet:

This fellow pecks up wit, as pigeons pease,
And utters it again when God doth please.
He is wit's pedlar, and retails his wares
At wakes, and wassails, meetings, markets, fairs;
And we that sell by gross, the Lord doth know,
Have not the grace to grace it with such show.

(5.2.315-20)

A verbal scavenger who sells the remnants of a vocabulary that was once inventive, Boyet reuses old material, preying on others' linguistic abilities and surviving as a parasite.¹⁹ By plagiaristic exploitation he manages to participate in the economy of circulation but he gives nothing, only receives. In Patricia Fumerton's phrase, he is a “taker of gifts who has not the grace to render back the gift with increase.”²⁰

IV

From its opening stages, therefore, Love's Labour's Lost raises doubts about the viability of gift-exchange and interrogates no less urgently a system dependent upon cash, material acquisition, and a monetary economy. The play manifests a range of responses toward money, from cautious uncertainty to philosophical curiosity and excitement. It broaches but does not resolve a conflict between, on the one hand, exchanges that benefit donor and recipient and, on the other, naked self-interest. In order to contextualize the contradictory nature of these ideological positions and to address issues of gender, it would be helpful to return to Elizabeth, to a court plagued, as the reign drew to a close, by privation and a mood of weariness and disillusionment.

The crown in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England made certain of the faithful service of its supporters by distributing money, grants, political privileges, titles, and gifts of office.²¹ Peers of the realm received traditional perquisites (the Garter and the lord lieutenancies, for example) while the gentry were able to bid for knighthoods, posts in the shrievalty and commissions of the peace. Aspirants lower down the scale sought annuities, monopolies and leases or (if fortunate enough to gain office) exploited extra-official profits, what Wallace T. MacCaffrey terms “that indeterminate but ceaseless flow of gratuities, douceurs, and reciprocal favours which the Elizabethan office-holder accounted the principal part of his reward for service.”²² By the end of the sixteenth century, however, it seemed to many as if Elizabeth's customary parsimony had hardened into meanness and ingratitude. Feelings of courtier resentment gathered force: fixed annual fees had not been modified to take account of the rise in prices, few posts were permanent, and there was fierce competition for prizes that were steadily shrinking in number. In 1584 the Dean of Durham inveighed against Elizabeth, complaining that “rewards were not bestowed by those in authority upon such as deserved them” and highlighting “niggardness at court.”²³ The throng of suitors about the court in 1594 was so great that Masters of Requests had to be appointed to issue special passes for entry.²⁴ Passions were running high, and when Essex was released from prison in 1600, he immediately set about attempting to recover royal favor. His efforts were ill-fated. Denied the renewal of his sweet-wines monopoly and excluded from the Accession Day tilt, he rebelled in 1602 with catastrophic consequences.²⁵

Love's Labour's Lost negotiates the political crisis of the last decades of the reign, represents the repercussions of the breakdown of gift-exchange, and reverberates with the dissatisfactions that culminated in Essex's rebellion. The play was produced at a crucial juncture in the history of the court. It looks back to a moment when the circulation of non-material gifts alone was sufficient while tentatively anticipating a new interest in monetary benefits, an interest cultivated by a weakened aristocracy who, to maintain declining estates and to insure the continuation of the family line, had no recourse but to secure financial support. Liveliness and attractiveness have often been singled out as some of the qualities that distinguish the characters of Love's Labour's Lost. A closer look reveals that denial, repression, and exclusion are more strikingly elaborated as dramatic characteristics. In the context of the 1590s, a play preoccupied with the suppression of the will and the frustration resulting from a failure to achieve desired ends must have been particularly resonant. With the Princess and her entourage, moreover, Shakespeare goes so far as to mount a radical critique of Elizabeth, dramatizing the challenges posed by women to patriarchy and the ramifications of their refusal to receive gifts, the cracks that appear in the social order when exchange is abandoned.

Admittedly the Princess, denied a welcoming committee at her arrival, has every reason to resist Navarre's courtesies:

KING.
Fair princess, welcome to the court of Navarre.
PRIN.
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.

(2.1.90-93)

Mauss notes that a “clan, household … [or] association … are constrained to demand hospitality,” and one aspect of exchange in Love's Labour's Lost is surely the respective responsibilities of host and guest.²⁶ The Princess' rejection of Navarre's belated excuses is couched in prose, pointing to the linguistic dimension of the initial conflict. Elevated verse is undercut by prosaic observation and common sense, and further questions are raised about a gap between “word” and “thing” that steadily widens. Although the spirit is comic, the meeting between Navarre and the Princess announces the outbreak of hostilities: as Mauss remarks, “To refuse to give, or to fail to invite, is—like refusing to accept—the equivalent of a declaration of war; it is a refusal of friendship and intercourse.”²⁷

Navarre responds by desperately trying to make amends:

Meantime, receive such welcome at my hand
As honour, without breach of honour, may
Make tender of to thy true worthiness.
You may not come fair princess, within my gates;
But here without you shall be so receiv'd
As you shall deem your self lodg'd in my heart,
Though so denied fair harbour in my house.

(2.1.168-74)

Initially snubbed as a gift-giver, Navarre anxiously wills himself to recover the power that giving entails. The stress is upon the Princess receiving, Navarre portraying himself as a fount of bounty. What he offers, though, does little to make up for the original offense: his gift is hedged about with qualifications, and it is unclear precisely where the Princess is to be accommodated. Honeyed apologies are Navarre's forte, but his gift manages only to contribute still further to the Princess' exclusion.

The discussion of “place” in Love's Labour's Lost, and the representation of women who will play no part in a system of “prestations,” reprise the predicament of contemporaries who were familiar with the paucity of gifts emanating from Elizabeth and who squabbled for court positions that few could hope to attain. Despite its subversive tendencies, however, even-handedness is the play's hallmark. At one and the same time the failings of Elizabeth are indicted and protests are voiced against the constricted roles of women in a patriarchal society. An exchange between the Princess and the forester foregrounds the ways in which women are consumed and commodified:

PRIN.
What, what? first praise me, and again say no?
O short-liv'd pride! Not fair? alack for woe!
FOR.
Yes, madam, fair.
PRIN.
                                                                                Nay, never paint me now:
Where fair is not, praise cannot mend the brow.
Here, good my glass, take this for telling true:
Fair payment for foul words is more than due.
FOR.
Nothing but fair is that which you inherit.
PRIN.
See, see! my beauty will be saved by merit.
O heresy in fair, fit for these days!
A giving hand, though foul, shall have fair praise.

(4.1.14-23)

As she replies to Navarre's assurances of praise, so does the Princess greet the forester's flattery with a comparable wryly humorous, petulantly indignant skepticism. The construction of identity is the issue upon which her rejoinders turn, and she speaks out against men who seek to fashion women and to place them in an allotted niche. Puns spring up: the Princess uses “merit” in the sense of “worth” and “reward,” implying that if she is to be accounted beautiful, she must dispense cash payments. Her final line—“A giving hand, though foul, shall have fair praise”—sounds again the cynical note: in this society, the Princess contends, women give or are given, no opportunities for independent action being available.

When women do receive gifts and are sent love tokens, the effect is to underline an awareness of the limited spheres in which women operate, and to bring to the surface the discord that has been bubbling beneath. Navarre's gift is a jewelled pendant:

Sweet hearts, we shall be rich ere we depart,
If fairings come thus plentifully in:
A lady wall'd about with diamonds!
Look you what I have from the loving King

(5.2.1-4)

Navarre's previous discourtesies are thrown into stark relief by his present behavior, besieging the Princess with favors. “Fairings” are complimentary gifts, yet the word signals, too, the “fair” and the “market.” Mercantile connotations and imprisoning metaphors (“wall'd”) join forces to suggest that the Princess is still regarded as a saleable commodity. Certainly the tokens, apart from the male anxieties they embody, fail to satisfy, and an argument erupts once they are compared:

ROS.
O! he hath drawn my picture in his letter.
PRIN.
Any thing like?
ROS.
Much in the letters, nothing in the praise.
PRIN.
Beauteous as ink; a good conclusion.
KATH.
Fair as a text B in a copy-book.
ROS.
Ware pencils, ho! let me not die your debtor,
My red dominical, my golden letter:
O! that your face were not so full of O's.
PRIN.
A pox of that jest! and I beshrew all shrows!

(5.2.38-46)

The initial joke about Rosaline's dark complexion spirals outward until all the ladies interject to pay and repay abuse in a series of barbed exclamations. Accuracy marks the characters of Berowne's letter, but the praise it expresses is inaccurate. While Rosaline is as “fair” and beautiful as the elaborate letter “B” (known as the “text hand”), she is not “fair” or pale in color as substantial amounts of ink are needed to print the character. The wordplay is particularly pronounced when Rosaline enters the fray to pun upon pencils (small brushes used to paint lines in portraits) and to respond to Katharine's jest. According to Rosaline, Katharine is red-faced and spotty but paints over her imperfections to conceal a complexion spoiled by pock-marks. It is up to the Princess to intervene and restore order. Describing the “agonistic type of total prestation,” Mauss comments upon the “antagonism” of exchanges; Pierre Bourdieu agrees, and writes that the “typical hermeneutic paradigm of the exchange of words is perhaps less appropriate than the paradigm of the exchange of blows.”²⁸Love's Labour's Lost does not seem too far removed from these reflections; behind the games and the high-spirited displays of verbal finesse and accomplishment, the court of Navarre is a battlefield.

In its later stages the play derives much of its political import from a sense of barely concealed violence, an aggression and a competitiveness that obliquely reflect the frustration of courtiers and a contest for power and patronage. Even the economically-inflected language—women are seen in terms of money and value—recalls the cultural presence of Elizabeth and the interests invested in her as a potential distributor of material privileges. The typical experience of an unrequited aspirant at court who gives but receives nothing back finds an echo in Love's Labour's Lost in the representation of men who agitate vainly to fulfill their desires. For, if Love's Labour's Lost's subject is women who defy exchange and gifts which promote contention, it harbors no reassuring counter-images to blunt the sharp edge of its critical machinery. “In certain circumstances,” Mauss suggests, “a refusal [of gifts] can be an assertion of victory and invincibility.”²⁹ Whatever victory is enjoyed by the ladies, however, is called into question by the hollowness and futility of their final transactions. The Princess' decision to mix up the favors invalidates the purpose of the dance, producing a situation in which desire is tested, realigned, and complicated. Exchange founders when the importance of the gift is underestimated, and the Princess, assuming that the lords only give in “mockery” (5.2.139), is chiefly responsible for the ensuing difficulties. In desperation the lords eventually give freely and ask for nothing in return:

BER.
I am a fool, and full of poverty.
ROS.
But that you take what doth to you belong,
It were a fault to snatch words from my tongue.
BER.
O! I am yours, and all that I possess.
ROS.
All the fool mine?
BER.
I cannot give you less.

(5.2.380-84)

Berowne's declaration, his undertaking to bankrupt himself to win his love, cannot dent Rosaline's defenses. The positions of the two parties are too firmly fixed; the promise to give selflessly comes too late.

V

Any attempt to historicize Love's Labour's Lost must take into consideration the fact that the play belongs to a system of exchanges and forms part of the expanding phenomenon of the Elizabethan theater. As much as Love's Labour's Lost reaches beyond the confines of the court of Navarre to the English court, so does it metadramatically contemplate its relationship to another institution, the playhouse, and the contractual nature of the bond between actor and audience. Elizabeth exploited the uses of pageantry in her progress into London; Love's Labour's Lost broods upon the purpose of theatricals in the performance of the Nine Worthies. Typically, the pageant is announced as a gift; Armado confesses that “the king would have me present the princess, sweet chuck, with some delightful ostentation, or show, or pageant, or antic, or firework” (5.1.102-04). “Present” betrays Navarre's intentions (the pageant will preface his final offer), and the word is given subsequent emphasis. With customary ineptitude, Costard blunders linguistically and confuses “pursents” (5.2.488) for “presents” when inaugurating the proceedings in the role of chorus. His mistake sounds warning bells—the play-within-a-play will not run smoothly; the problems afflicting other forms of exchange in the drama will be mirrored in the lords' interference. That the Worthies do not receive the appreciation they require is implied when Costard solicits a kindly response from the Princess in an apologetic aside:

COST.
If your ladyship would say, ‘Thanks, Pompey,’ I had done.
PRIN.
Great thanks, great Pompey.
COST.
'Tis not so much worth; but I hope I was perfect.
I made a little fault in ‘Great.’

(5.2.551-55)

But the players' entreaties are drowned by the haranguing of the onstage audience:

ARM.
The armipotent Mars, of lances the almighty,
Gave Hector a gift,—
DUM.
A gilt nutmeg.
BER.
A lemon.
LONG.
Stuck with cloves.
DUM.
No, cloven.
ARM.
Peace!
The armipotent Mars, of lances the almighty,
Gave Hector a gift, the heir of Ilion;
A man so breath'd that certain he would fight; yea
From morn till night, out of his pavilion.

(5.2.637-47)

It is ironically apposite that Armado should refer to a gift in the context of a performance that seeks to remind its spectators of their obligations as beneficiaries of a specially commissioned entertainment. Armado is prevented from finishing his lines, and Dumaine's mundane interruptions bathetically cut across his hyperbolic phrases. (A gilt nutmeg was a common gift from one lover to another.) Although Armado goes on to complete his speech, the introduction of Mars has a reductive effect, serving to stress that the performers are not valued by their superiors, and that power ultimately resides with forces outside human control.

Montrose points out that the “Pageant of the Nine Worthies hints, through comic parody, at the irony potential in the idealizing allegorical spectacles that Queen Elizabeth might see on her progresses or read in the images of The Faerie Queene.”³⁰ An acute comment, but one might wish to add that gift-giving often accompanied the progresses Elizabeth undertook and the pageants she witnessed. Visiting Lord Keeper Puckering, Elizabeth received a fan, the handle of which was encrusted with diamonds. Before the house, she was given a nosegay in which was displayed a precious jewel with diamond pendants. More presents (a pair of virginals and a gown and skirt) were bestowed on her after dinner. Elizabeth even helped herself to a salt-cellar, a spoon, and a fork that had taken her fancy.³¹ As in Love's Labour's Lost, pageants could constitute political statements, too; Sir Philip Sidney's entertainment, The Four Foster Children of Desire (1581), bristles with the resentment of the four challengers who petition for support, and arraigns Elizabeth for her failure to be nurturing and uberous.³²Love's Labour's Lost, furthermore, was itself a gift: the first Quarto (1598) states that the play was presented before Elizabeth at a Christmas performance. A previous version may well have been staged before an aristocratic gathering that would have readily responded to the satirical and topical allusions. The second Quarto (1631) establishes that the play was acted by His Majesty's servants at the Blackfriars and the Globe.³³ Transitional moments—in the history of money, the court, and the theater—rank high among Love's Labour's Lost's agenda. The Nine Worthies, for example, enact an older dispensation (between a performer and a private, commissioning audience) even as they countenance the possibility of a commercial arrangement, dramatic fare being consumed by a paying multitude.³⁴ This movement between private and public, an alternation between competing forms of exchange, characterizes Love's Labour's Lost's theatrical fortunes. In the unsettled years of the later sixteenth century it appears that the play was first offered to the sovereign, then rewritten for a new literary marketplace.

VI

Perhaps the most distinctive moment of transition in Love's Labour's Lost is when the Princess learns of her father's death, comes into his inheritance, and sheds her marginalized position to become an authentic subject; it is a moment dense with political import. “Inherit” in the play is primarily used to refer to the receipt of property, rank, and title by legal descent or succession from progenitors or predecessors. Women in particular are valued for what they will gain from inheritance. Katharine is described by Boyet as the “heir of Alençon” (2.1.194), and Maria is “an heir of Falconbridge” (2.1.204).³⁵ When the Princess is informed that she is an heiress, she begins reassessing her relationship with Navarre, and the play is overtaken by an unexpected mood of melancholy and almost punitive severity:

MAR.
God save you, madam!
PRIN.
Welcome, Marcade,
But that thou interrupt'st our merriment.
MAR.
I am sorry, madam; for the news I bring
Is heavy in my tongue. The king your father—
PRIN.
Dead, for my life!
MAR.
Even so: my tale is told.
BER.
Worthies, away! The scene begins to cloud.

(5.2.707-14)

The new owner of her father's name, the Princess experiences a release which is forcefully communicated when she interrupts Marcade, preventing him from delivering the rest of his message. Joy is balanced with sorrow, a combination that smacks of a carnivalesque delight in mortality, and “Dead” and “life” rest side by side, juxtaposed in nice alignment. Theatrical metaphors are abandoned. The tableau of the Nine Worthies dislimns. Death is the pageant's final interventionist.

With unprecedented frankness the difficulties that have beset giving and receiving in the play are addressed at last. The wrangle over Aquitaine is settled discreetly by Navarre behind the scenes, for which the Princess is grateful: “Excuse me so, coming too short of thanks / For my great suit so easily obtain'd” (5.2.730-31). It now remains to unravel the amatory entanglements. France's death does not prompt the Princess to revise her attitude toward courtship, however: she admits to Navarre that she has “receiv'd” (5.2.769) his tokens but reiterates that she responds with amused indulgence, playful lightness, and teasing insouciance (5.2.770-73). Nothing has changed, and the lords' frantic request to the ladies to “Grant us your loves” (5.2.780) is greeted with unyielding indifference.³⁶

In most exchange systems women are given in marriage and take on the purpose of the gift. Women are exchanged between groups to establish links between clans and families, to unite a community's interests, and to contribute to the formation of an amalgamated whole. These transactions invariably apportion the woman a subservient place as she is perceived, above all, as symbolic capital, as a reproductive agent whose children will guarantee social cohesion and the continuation of a family name.³⁷ As Luce Irigaray argues, “The use, consumption, and circulation of their [women's] sexualized bodies underwrite the organization and the reproduction of the social order, in which they have never taken part as ‘subjects.’”³⁸ A similar point is made by Foucault who contends that the subordination of women works to “ensure population, to reproduce labor capacity, to perpetuate the form of social relations.”³⁹

All exchange systems, however, need to obey the laws of mortality. Death cuts short the circulation of gifts and ruptures the dependencies that exchange fosters: to lessen its impact, therefore, funerals are accompanied by elaborate “prestations” which reaffirm kinship connections and often extend over long periods of time.⁴⁰ The flurry of giving and receiving in the aftermath of France's death in Love's Labour's Lost parallels these strategies for coping with mutability and the afterlife. But the refusal of the women to marry constitutes the play's most radical departure from traditional exchange practices. Authority rests in the last scene with the women who, after a symbolic gestation period of one year, will give birth to new suitors. In addition, the anti-comic dénouement which celebrates separation rather than union carries a powerful political charge. Few could forget in the later sixteenth century that Elizabeth's endless procrastinations and deferrals had left the country without an heir, with no male issue who would cement the foundations of the Tudor dynasty. The Queen had resisted sexual congress and failed to insure a male succession, the ultimate gift to her people. What in Love's Labour's Lost may appear merely extraneous (the dispute over Aquitaine) highlights social, economic, and political anxieties about the fate of the realm and a growing realization that James VI of Scotland could be England's only inheritor.

In view of the preoccupation with reproduction and inheritance, it is not coincidental that Love's Labour's Lost should abound in metaphors of birth. Berowne does not “joy in any abortive birth” (1.1.104), while Holofernes is grateful for the linguistic facility he has been given, “begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater” (4.2.67-68). An actual birth will be the result of the liaison between Armado and Jaquenetta, a coupling that throws into disarray established distinctions of nationality and social place. Through the songs of Ver and Heims, the powers invested in the lower orders are reinscribed, but it is a bleak and uninspiring vision which follows. In Spring's song, the “cuckoo” refrain recalls the bird's usurpation of another bird's nest and destruction of its eggs (the creature takes rather than gives); Winter's song is no less somber and suggests a state of suspended animation and the refrigeration of desire. Milk is frozen and greasy Joan overturns (“doth keel”) the pot—she is the last woman in the play to deny men the sustenance they crave. With typical slipperiness, however, Shakespeare refuses to allow any one set of meanings to dominate: “greasy” may well have been pronounced “gracie,” suggesting divine favor, gifts or gratitude, and “keel” could signify the action of cooling as well as upsetting. Joan represents a complex conjunction of positive and pejorative associations; she is an ultimately ambiguous figure with a capacity to soothe overheated energies and to frustrate desire at one and the same time.⁴¹

Underlying both songs is the inescapable conclusion that no progress has been made. The “When … Then” construction of the songs harks back to the “then … When” formulation of Navarre's opening address, and a repression of vitality and the will is underlined as the play circles back upon itself. Over and above its other features, circularity is the essential characteristic of exchange. Jean-Christophe Agnew argues that reciprocity, “however unbalanced or exploitative, is an intrinsically circular relation,” and Ian Reid, discussing “textual exchange,” suggests that “a storytelling transaction unties discourse as it ties. It enacts continually a rhythm of tying / untying / retying (and so on) because the inescapable effect of substitutive and dispossessive devices is circular.”⁴² As Navarre's contract resurrects itself to haunt the performers, Armado steps forward to sum up the prevailing freelings of the assumbly: “The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of / Apollo” (5.2.922-23).⁴³ The play closes with another messenger, Mercury, and a reminder of the fluctuating fortunes of gift-exchange. Hermes, the Greek messenger of the gods, traded in letters with no material value, but he was transformed by the Romans into Mercury, the deity of merchants and thieves.⁴⁴ Inhering in Love's Labour's Lost's appropriation of Mercury is a complex of transitional moments that brings to mind the evolution of a new economic system, a political crisis and the point at which the Tudor line would end and the Stuart dynasty would commence.

VII

Tracing the material contacts which contributed to Love's Labour's Lost's production, and determining the ways in which the text intersects with its contexts, requires us to look to the capitalist economy of early modern England, to expanding commercial sectors, to changes that were overtaking constituted social and political arrangements, and to an influx of money that was transforming the face of the metropolis. The play is acutely sensitive to these developments; beyond the unstable fortunes of the gift in the play there lies a turbulent history. A clan society uses gifts, but a class society exploits property and commodity, Mauss argues. “We may then consider that the spirit of gift-exchange is characteristic of societies which have passed the phase of ‘total prestation,’” he writes, “but have not yet reached the stage of pure individual contract, the money market.”⁴⁵ The phases that Mauss identifies are rehearsed in Love's Labour's Lost: they suggest themselves in a confusion between and conflation of clientage and patronage, in a scornful treatment of reciprocity, in the difficulties the characters experience in distinguishing between bribes and gifts, and in the crumbling of the edifice of the system of exchange. Discontinuity in Shakespeare's text can be contextualized historically, but it is also possible to argue that exchange itself harbors inconsistencies. In the play gifts displease almost as soon as they are presented; in the same moment balances are achieved and injustices are perpetuated; harmony coexists with social divisions. Annette B. Weiner's description of patterns of reciprocity in the Trobriand islands is pertinent in this respect: “exchange mediates the opposition between the self and others, while simultaneously it reinforces the very same opposition. Every individual believes himself or herself able to negotiate some measure of control in all relationships; yet recognition of the inherent limitations of control is just as immanent.”⁴⁶

A spirit of opposition presides over Love's Labour's Lost. The voices of protest belong mainly to the servants, to the imprisoned Costard, for example, who questions the gifts bestowed upon him when he is liberated. A comparison with Elizabeth's servants, toiling within an outmoded system of reciprocity and prevented from gaining preferment, is inevitable. Mobilized in the play, therefore, is a coded critique of contemporary exchange practices: the lords fail to undergo a rite of passage to become husbands and progenitors, even as Elizabeth's courtiers were constrained by their role of suitors to a mistress who remained unattainable. The delight displayed by the characters in ill-fitting names and numbers which fail to add up is an integral part of the drama's concern with a disintegrating political structure in a state of crisis. I am not suggesting that Elizabeth is specifically identified; no text can be so unambiguously mimetic. The play's relationship to the Court needs to be appreciated more guardedly. To adapt Montrose writing on A Midsummer Night's Dream, Elizabeth's “pervasive cultural presence was a condition of the play's imaginative possibility.”⁴⁷ But Elizabeth's cultural presence was itself shaped by the institutions of early modern England, by money and by the theater, all of which Love's Labour's Lost represents contradictorily, self-consciously. When Armado in the Folio version states, “You that way: we this way,” he requests the lords and ladies to separate. A subsidiary level of meaning is in play, however. “You that way: we this way” is a metadramatic reminder that the play-world is about to end and a signal to the actors to prepare to receive applause. The performance concluded, the audience is invited to give thanks.⁴⁸

Notes

1. “The Quene's Majestie's passage through the citie of London to westminster the daye before her coronacion,” in Elizabethan Backgrounds, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Hamden, Conn., 1975), p. 15.

2. “The Quene's Majestie's passage,” p. 17.

3. Louis Adrian Montrose, “Gifts and Reasons: The Contexts of Peele's Araygnement of Paris,” ELH 47 (1980), 450. Montrose's work has been of particular value in developing my own critical perspective. See also Mark Breitenberg, “‘the hole matter opened’: Iconic Representation and Interpretation in ‘The Quenes Majesties Passage,’” Criticism 28 (1986), 1-25.

4. J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth I (Harmondsworth, 1967), pp. 55, 143, 310; Montrose, “Gifts,” 452. See also Christopher Haigh, Elizabeth I (London and New York, 1988), p. 93; Richard C. McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley, 1989), p. 45.

5. J. W. Binns, Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age (Leeds, 1990), p. 26; Montrose, “Gifts,” 452.

6. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, tr. Ian Cunnison (London, 1970), pp. 1, 3, 6, 10. Mauss's work has been most profitably employed in the following studies: Peter M. Blau, Exchange and Power in Social Life (New York, London and Sydney, 1964); D. K. Feil, Ways of Exchange: The Enga “Tee” of Papua New Guinea (St. Lucia, 1984); The Kula: New Perspectives on Massim Exchange, eds. Jerry W. Leach and Edmund Leach (Cambridge, Eng., 1983); Erik Schwimmer, Exchange in the Social Structure of the Orokaiva: Traditional and Emergent Ideologies in the Northern District of Papua (London, 1973).

   For useful commentary on Mauss's theories, see Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge, Eng., 1986), p. 19; Cyril S. Belshaw, Traditional Exchange and Modern Markets (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965), p. 46; Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, tr. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Eng., 1977), p. 5; Anthony Heath, Rational Choice and Social Exchange: A Critique of Exchange Theory (Cambridge, Eng., 1976), pp. 50-60; Ruth Lederman, What Gifts Engender: Social Relations and Politics in Mendi, Highland Papua New Guinea (Cambridge, Eng., 1986), pp. 4, 67, 82; Blake Leland, “Voodoo Economics: Sticking Pins in Eros,” Diacritics 18:2 (1988), 38; G. MacCormack, “Mauss and the ‘Spirit’ of the Gift,” Oceania 52:4 (1982), 286-93; Jonathan Parry, “The gift, the Indian gift and the ‘Indian gift,’” Man 21 (1986), 453-73.

7. See Lars Engle, “‘Thrift is Blessing’: Exchange and Explanation in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986), 20-37; Coppélia Kahn, “‘Magic of bounty’: Timon of Athens, Jacobean Patronage, and Maternal Power,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987), 34-57; Karen Newman, “Portia's Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987), 19-33; Ronald A. Sharp, “Gift Exchange and the Economies of Spirit in The Merchant of Venice,” Modern Philology 83 (1986), 250-65.

   On gift exchange in the English Renaissance, see Patricia Fumerton, “Exchanging Gifts: The Elizabethan Currency of Children and Poetry,” ELH 53 (1986), 241-78; Janet E. Halley, “Textual Intercourse: Anne Donne, John Donne, and the Sexual Poetics of Cultural Exchange,” in Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings: Essays in Feminist Contextual Criticism, eds. Sheila Fisher and Janet E. Halley (Knoxville, 1989), pp. 187-206; Montrose, “Gifts,” 433-61.

8. Louis Adrian Montrose, “Curious-Knotted Garden”: The Form, Themes, and Contexts of Shakespeare's “Love's Labour's Lost” (Salzburg, 1977), pp. 50, 68, 121. Another contextual reading of the play that neglects gift-exchange is Graham Holderness, Nick Potter, and John Turner, Shakespeare: Out of Court (Houndmills, Basingstoke, and London, 1990), pp. 19-48.

9. Frances A. Yates, A Study of “Love's Labour's Lost” (Cambridge, Eng., 1936). On the play's topicality, see William C. Carroll, The Great Feast of Language in “Love's Labour's Lost” (Princeton, 1976), p. 5; Mary Ellen Lamb, “The Nature of Topicality in Love's Labour's Lost,” Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985), 49-60; Montrose, “Curious,” pp. 177-95.

10. Quotations are from Richard David's Arden edition of Love's Labour's Lost (London, 1976).

11. Mauss, p. 35. See also Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. and tr. Allan Stoekl (Manchester, 1985), p. 121.

12. The Oxford English Dictionary, eds. J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, 20 vols. (Oxford, 1989), XIII, sb. 2, 3.

13. Carroll, pp. 15-16.

14. See 4.3.186-89 where Navarre describes the letter he is about to receive from Costard as a present.

15. Belshaw, p. 24.

16. Mauss, pp. 44-45.

17. Carroll has a useful section on “Words and Things” in The Great Feast, pp. 12-25. On p. 36, Carroll also cites Angel Day, The English Secretorie 1586 (Menston, 1967), p. 43. For Day, “rumuneration” was a figure of speech “whereby wee give thanks for courtesies, benefites, or good turnes receaved, or care or other liking had or shewen unto us.”

18. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, tr. Alan Sheridan (London and New York, 1989), pp. 169, 172, 176. On the circulation of books in early modern France, see Natalie Zemon Davis, “Beyond the Market: Books as Gifts in Sixteenth-Century France,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th ser. 33 (1983), 69-88.

19. I am here opposing the Hegelian notion that host and parasite (or master and slave) mutually benefit each other, and accepting J. Hillis Miller's first modern definition of “parasite” in his “The Critic as Host,” Critical Inquiry 3 (1977), 442.

20. Fumerton, p. 263.

21. Much of this paragraph is indebted to Wallace T. MacCaffrey, “Place and Patronage in Elizabethan Politics,” in Elizabethan Government and Society: Essays presented to Sir John Neale, eds. S. T. Bindoff, J. Hurstfield, and C. H. Williams (London, 1961), pp. 95-126.

22. MacCaffrey, p. 111.

23. Quoted in Anthony Esler, The Aspiring Mind of the Elizabethan Younger Generation (Durham, N.C., 1966), p. 138.

24. Penry Williams, “Court and Polity under Elizabeth I,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 65 (1983), 263.

25. McCoy, pp. 98-99. A powerful reading which traces connections between Elizabeth's parsimony and Essex's dissatisfactions is elaborated in D. M. Loades, Politics and the Nation 1450-1660: Obedience, Resistance and Public Order (London and Glasgow, 1974), pp. 301-13. See also Simon Adams, “Faction, Clientage and Party: English Politics, 1550-1603,” History Today 32 (December 1982), 33-39.

26. Mauss, p. 11.

27. Mauss, p. 11. Hospitality was a pressing issue at the Elizabethan court. Pam Wright observes that “Thomas Radcliffe, earl of Sussex, as Lord Chamberlain used his position to try and keep Mary, Lady Sidney, away from court at a time when she was a potential ally of her brother, Lord Robert Dudley. By offering Lady Sidney unsuitable lodgings, her return to the Privy Chamber was delayed, and it was only when she threatened to inform the queen that her absence was due to the intransigence of the Lord Chamberlain that Sussex's opposition ceased.” See her “A change in direction: the ramifications of a female household, 1558-1603,” in David Starkey, D. A. L. Morgan, John Murphy, Pam Wright, Neil Cuddy, and Kevin Sharpe, The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (London and New York, 1987), p. 154.

28. Mauss, p. 4; Bourdieu, p. 11.

29. Mauss, p. 39. See also Bourdieu, p. 13; Lederman, p. 98.

30. Montrose, “Curious,” p. 151.

31. Neale, p. 213.

32. McCoy, p. 61. Louis Adrian Montrose notes of Elizabethan pageants: “Offerings of devoted submission may be functionally ambiguous. They may allow an oblique and limited expression of the aggression or independence that is being denied, and a purgation of the resentment that the submission entails.” (“Celebration and Insinuation: Sir Philip Sidney and the Motives of Elizabethan Courtship,” Renaissance Drama N.S. 8 [1977], pp. 28-29). On entertainments in general, see Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London and New York, 1989), pp. 83-110.

33. Montrose, “Curious,” p. 39.

34. See David Lloyd, “Valéry on Value: The Political Economy of Poetics,” Representations 7 (Summer 1984), 124-26; Katharine Eisaman Maus, “Satiric and Ideal Economies in the Jonsonian Imagination,” English Literary Renaissance 19 (1989), 58, 61; John Gordon Sweeney, Jonson and the Psychology of Public Theater: To Coin the Spirit, Spend the Soul (Princeton, 1985), pp. 4, 207.

35. See also 2.i.40-43.

36. Mauss points out that “there are occasions, such as the preparation of funeral feasts, when it is permitted to receive and to pay nothing.” See p. 22.

37. These comments are indebted to Georges Bataille, Eroticism, tr. Mary Dalwood (London and New York, 1987), p. 203; Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York, 1983), p. 99; Geoffrey MacCormack, “Reciprocity,” Man 11 (1976), 89; Newman, pp. 20-23; Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York and London, 1975), pp. 157-210; Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (Berkeley, 1988), pp. 143-47.

38. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, tr. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, 1985), p. 84. See also pp. 32, 157-58, 171, 186.

    In traditional systems, women who engage in exchange practices are viewed as deviant. Of New Guinea M. J. Meggitt writes: “There are, however, some women, especially vigorous, self-assertive widows without married sons (who might otherwise be their guardians) who engage in a small way in Te transactions, generally with older men of their natal or their late husbands' clans—that is, with men of little reputation and limited networks of partners. All Mae men with whom I have discussed the matter unequivocally expressed their distaste for such an anomalous behaviour and were quick to blame it on the (assumed) menopausal condition of these widows. ‘They are no longer women; they have stopped menstruating and are just like old men!’” (“‘Pigs are our hearts!’: The Te Exchange Cycle among the Mae Enga of New Guinea,” Oceania 44:4 [1974], 187).

39. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, tr. Robert Hurley, 3 vols. (Harmondsworth, 1987-90), I, pp. 36-37.

40. Annette B. Weiner, Women of Value, Men of Renown: New Perspectives in Trobriand Exchange (Austin and London, 1976), pp. 85-89.

41. I am grateful to Constance Jordan for alerting me to the complexities of the Elizabethan pronunciation.

42. Jean-Christophe Agnew, “The Threshold of Exchange: Speculations on the Market,” Radical History Review 21 (1979), 100; Ian Reid, “What is a Textual Exchange?,” Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 74 (November 1990), 21. See also Fumerton, p. 266.

43. I accept here the Folio reading and speech attribution, not the Quarto reading printed in the Arden edition. Armado's “You that way: we this way” is similarly taken from the Folio version of the text. For an account of the text, see John Kerrigan's “An Account of the Text” in his edition of Love's Labour's Lost (Harmondsworth, 1982), pp. 241-60.

44. See Agnew, “The Threshold of Exchange,” p. 101. Malcolm Evans, in a perceptive analysis of writing in Love's Labour's Lost, comments upon Mercury's traditional functions (Signifying Nothing: Truth's True Contents in Shakespeare's Text [Brighton, 1986], p. 54). On the different identities that can inhere in the messenger or chorus, see Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language (Oxford, 1980), p. 161; Ronald R. MacDonald, “Playing Till Doomsday: Interpreting Antony and Cleopatra,” English Literary Renaissance 15 (1985), 85.

45. Mauss, p. 45. See also C. A. Gregory, Gifts and Commodities (London, 1982), p. 19; Jonathan Parry, “On the moral perils of exchange,” in Money and the morality of exchange, eds. J. Parry and M. Bloch (Cambridge, Eng., 1989), p. 64.

46. Weiner, pp. 212-13.

47. Louis Adrian Montrose, “‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” Representations 1 (1983), 62. Montrose's work on Elizabeth has been elaborated more recently in his “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text,” in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, eds. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore and London, 1986), pp. 303-40; “The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery,” Representations 33 (Winter 1991), 1-41.

48. I would like to thank Christina Britzolakis, Constance Jordan, F. J. Levy, and Richard C. McCoy for their encouraging and constructive comments on an earlier version of this paper.

    After this essay had been accepted for publication, I enjoyed reading an approach to Love's Labour's Lost which complements my own: Katharine Eisaman Maus, “Transfer of Title in Love's Labour's Lost: Language, Individualism, Gender,” in Shakespeare Left and Right, ed. Ivo Kamps (New York and London, 1991), pp. 205-23. I am grateful to Professor Maus for sending me her article to read in typescript.