[In the following essay, McLay maintains that the songs sung by Spring and Winter at the close of Love's Labour's Lost reflect and expand the play's major themes: the movement “from the artificial to the natural, from illusion to reality, from folly to wisdom.”]

Despite the heretical ending of Love's Labour's Lost,¹ an ending where “Jack hath not Jill” (V. ii. 865)² and the ritual marriage celebrations are denied or postponed “too long for a play” (V.ii.868), the drama does have its connections to the ritual origins of comedy in the concluding Songs or Dialogues of Spring and Winter.³ Although there is considerable controversy over the dating of the play, it is generally agreed to be the product of at least two different periods, and there is indication that the songs belong to the 1597 additions.⁴ Nevertheless, the songs are not merely tacked on to the completed play to bring it within the periphery of the usual comic definition. That they are functional, indeed that they hold a key to the interpretation of the central themes of Love's Labour's Lost, I hope to prove.⁵

The dramatic excuse for the Dialogues is admittedly weak. Introduced by the Braggart, they are presented as the conclusion to the interrupted Pageant of the Seven Worthies, which itself seems only to be justified by Berowne's remark: “'tis some policy to have one show worse than the king's and his company’” (V.ii.508-509). At first glance, the dialogues too seem digressive, for they have little direct connection with the events of the play. The opening stanza might easily fit the formula for a typical romantic spring lyric; it suggests that Shakespeare, newly in London, yearned for the freshness of Stratford in the spring:

When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadow with delight.

(V.ii.884-887)

The chorus with its peculiar refrain, however, should make us pause to consider:

The cuckoo then, on every tree
Mocks married men; for thus sings he,
                                                                                                    Cuckoo;
Cuckoo, cuckoo: O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!

(V.ii.888-892)

Now the significance of the cuckoo as an omen of adultery would be unmistakeable to an Elizabethan ear, even in the middle of a lyric which seems to have for its only purpose the delightful conclusion of a light romantic comedy, as in Twelfth Night. But even before this, there are undertones which would unconsciously prepare an Elizabethan audience for a certain ambiguity in the tone and meaning, an ambiguity brought to the surface in the cuckoo refrain and the second stanza, and underlined by the subsequent inversion of the whole dialogue, where the Winter Song of the Owl becomes a “merry Note”.⁶

Although the Spring Dialogue seems to deal solely with Nature, there are certain elements of artificiality, Nature being described in terms of Art: the daisies are “pied” or artificially bred, and the meadows “painted”,⁷ while the flowers are named metaphorically “lady-smocks” and “cuckoo-buds”, both of which have sexual undertones. Neither lady-smocks nor cuckoo-buds were common plants; moreover, the former were milk-white (note the difference in connotation) and the latter not yellow at all.⁸ In addition, the blue of the violets may be interpreted on two levels, since through a paradoxical inversion, blue had come in the Middle Ages to symbolize infidelity, cuckoldry, and folly.⁹ This dual interpretation is further borne out in the second stanza, where the sexual undertones come to the surface in, “Turtles tread, and rooks, and daws”. If we examine the Winter dialogue, however, we find no trace of the double-entendre which has been such a common device in the play as a whole. The surface romance has disappeared and, with it, the underlying sexual connotations. In its place, we have a dialogue of pure realism, marked by such phrases as “nipp'd”, “foul”, “greasy”, and “red and raw” with its comic accentuation of the rhyme “saw”.¹⁰

It becomes evident, in the Winter Dialogue, that we have a clear-cut example of comic inversion. Spring, complete with its accompanying romantic overtones, its spontaneity, freshness, and youth, is also the season of fear. Even the innocent simplicity of the birds and flowers reasserts this emphasis upon nature and natural copulation in opposition to the man-made conventions of marriage and fidelity. The season of love is at once the season of jealousy and folly, as symbolized by the cuckoo. On the other hand, the season of winter, associated with age and sterility, becomes the season of wisdom as represented by the owl. And if the cuckoo suggests the note of fear in disharmony with the whole mood of spring, it is the owl whose mournful “Tu-whit, Tu-who” becomes a “merry note”. There is a peace and serenity in the last dialogue, with its acceptance of life as it is, which is missing in the gayer and more turbulent first stanzas.

Some readers may consider this interpretation of the Song Dialogue as too extreme, as attaching too complex a meaning to what is merely a sung dialogue in the mediaeval tradition of the debate of the seasons. In the remainder of this paper I hope to prove that these various suggestions and ambiguities are central to the meaning of the play, that the Song functions not only to bring the comedy to an appropriate and unified close, but also to summarize and draw together the basic themes and movements which have formed the dramatic fiber of the play's action. Like the Song, the play too moves from spring to winter, from art to nature, from illusion to reality. And the movement in the Song from the folly of the cuckoo to the wisdom of the owl has its counterpart in the handling of the several strands of the play's action, of its plots and subplots.

The dramatic balance of Love's Labour's Lost is maintained through the conflict of the two rival factions, the idealistic young students who have attempted to deny Life, and the practical young ladies. These two factions represent respectively, Art and Nature, and the identification is made quite explicit. The young scholars pledge themselves to a period of study and fasting:

Our court shall be a little academe,
Still and contemplative in living art.

(I.i.13-14)

The Princess and her maidens are, on the other hand, aligned by Boyet on the side of Nature:

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.

(II.i.9-12)

The Princess completes the identification in her opposition to all things artificial, as implied by “painted”:

Good Lord Boyet, my beauty, though but mean,
Needs not the painted flourish of your praise.

(II.i.13-14)

And later, Berowne asserts: “Fie painted rhetoric! O! she needs it not” (IV.iii.236). It is therefore fitting that the ladies should set up camp in the field while the young men alone belong to the court. Thus the dramatic opposition of the two factions is carried into the setting, and the ultimate victory of Nature is symbolized in Act II, by the transfer of the action from court to field.

The hunting scene of Act IV is central to the meaning of the play, for it is here that the ladies, like the Shavian Ann Whitfield, take over the role of pursuer. The underlying sensual implications of action and dialogue have been indicated by Eric Partridge in his Shakespeare's Bawdy, particularly in regard to the passage from lines 110 to 130, which he calls “one of the most greasy passages in the whole of Shakespeare”.¹¹ Yet the nature of this debate, like that of the virginity debate in All's Well That Ends Well, is essential to the play's theme, which involves a movement from the artificial to the natural on its most basic, as well as its more refined, levels. For the park atmosphere and the hunt metaphor, taken on both levels, express the youth and fertility of Nature in the spring, an expression echoed later in the imagery of the final Spring dialogue. That many of the most bawdy passages are attributed to the virtuous heroines (and Shakespeare leaves no doubt that they, like his other romantic young heroines, are virtuous) is merely evidence of the comic inversion which pervades the play, and an accentuation of the natural vigor of the heroines, who represent the Life-force operating through Nature. Indeed we may carry the analysis one step further. The whole play may be seen as a satire, if a merry one, on Elizabethan artificiality, not only of language and manners but of romantic and courtly ideals. The Spring Song fits into this context. Both it and the hunt metaphor function to dispel conventional romantic illusions, to shock the audience into an awareness of nature and the natural premises of existence. It is not only the youths who are to benefit from the lesson taught by the “wise” Clown, “it is the manner of a man to speak to a woman” (I.i.207-208).

Individually, the youths are prepared as early as Act III to admit that their challenge to Nature has failed (III.i.189-200), and even to concede the inevitability of Nature's victory, although their expression of this is as artificial as the Clown's was blunt:

Yet I will love, write, sigh, pray, sue, and groan:
Some men must love my lady, and some Joan.

(III.i.201-202)

Nevertheless, it is not until the quadruple revelation scene of Act IV that they admit outwardly to the supremacy of Nature over man's artificial dictates, in a passage which indicates, by its natural use of imagery, their progress away from artificiality:

Sweet lords, sweet lovers. O! let us embrace.
As true we are as flesh and blood can be:
The sea will ebb and flow, heaven show his face:
Young blood doth not obey an old decree:
We cannot cross the cause why we were born;
Therefore, of all hands must we be forsworn.

(IV.iii.211-216)

But the process is not complete. And as is habitual in this play, whose central preoccupation is one of words, they fall back upon paradox to resolve their controversy:

It is religion to be thus forsworn;
For charity itself fulfills the law;
And who can sever love from charity?

(IV.iii.360-362)

The central problem, however, still remains: to find the true nature of wisdom. It is no accident that “wit” is one of the most frequent words of the play and at the heart of the satire. As we have observed, it is not only Holofernes and Armado whose wit is mocked, for these serve chiefly as an intensification, a reductio ad absurdum, of the folly of the intellectuals themselves, on the stage and in the audience. Armado's “Assist me, some extemporal god of rhyme for I am sure I shall turn sonnet. Devise, wit; write, pen: for I am for whole volumes in folio” (I.ii.173-175) is not the less hilarious because it may be seen, in retrospect, as an ironic parody on the sonnets of the young lovers.

The futility of Navarre's designs is first exposed by Berowne, who, before the entrance of the ladies in Act II, operates as a natural balance to the Art school (I.i.55-69). Consequently, it is Berowne, who, early in the play, recognizes that there is an essential difference between Knowledge and Wisdom:

Too much to know is to know naught but fame:
And every godfather can give a name.

(I.i.92-93)

It is not until the discovery scene of Act IV, however, that Berowne discovers that what men frequently call wisdom is, in reality, folly:

Then fools you were these women to forswear,
Or, keeping what is sworn, you will prove fools.

(IV.iii.352-353)

But in renouncing one illusion, the young men become prey to another: they renounce all for the sake of love and find in women the perfection of the world and a fit subject for study (IV.iii.296-301). Nature again intervenes, and the folly of the young men (and of all young courtiers) is contrasted repeatedly with the wisdom of the girls:

PRINCESS.
We are wise girls to mock our lovers so.
ROSALINE.
They are worse fools to purchase mocking so.

(V.ii.58-59)

This contrast is dramatized effectively in the Russian disguise scene where the girls, informed by Boyet, “Cupid's grandfather” (II.i.255), are able to penetrate their lovers' disguise, while the lovers, blinded again by appearance, are again forsworn:

The ladies did change favours, and then we,
Following the signs, woo'd but the sign of she.

(V.ii.468-469)

In renouncing the artificiality which has been such a prominent characteristic of his style, Berowne reasserts the identification of the ladies with Nature and her wisdom:

                                                                                                              Your capacity
Is that of Nature that to your large store
Wise things seem foolish and rich things but poor.

(V.ii.376-378)

But an understanding of reality has not yet been achieved, for at the opposite pole of Nature stands Death, and the entry of Marcade casts a shadow not only over the youths but also over the maidens as well. Until this point, Spring and Summer have held the center of the stage.¹² The youths have been associated by Berowne with Spring and, incidentally, with its folly: “‘The spring is near, when green geese are a-breeding’” (I.i.97). The King's retort that Berowne is “like the envious sneaping frost / That bites the first-born infants of the Spring” (I.i.100-101), although it underlines the seasonal contrast of the imagery, is not to be taken seriously since Berowne is as unaware of Winter and Death as his companions. The ladies, in turn, are associated with the maturity and fertility of Summer in the rose image (V.ii.293-297), which contrasts effectively with the “barren tasks” of the youths (I.i.47) and the “gelded” state of Aquitaine (II.i.149). The analogy is carried still further, for the maidens share Summer's power as an agent of rebirth after the sterility of Winter:

A wither'd hermit, five-score winters worn,
Might shake off fifty, looking in her eye:
Beauty doth varnish age, as if new-born,
And gives the crutch the cradle's infancy.

(IV.iii.239-242)

The entry of Mercade marks the Winter period of the play, the period of suffering and purgation; however, there is promise that, if the young men fulfill their vows of penance, the ladies possess the power to restore the Spring-world to the “blossoms” of love:

If this austere insociable life
Change not your offer made in heat of blood;
If frosts and fasts, hard lodging and thin weeds,
Nip not the gaudy blossoms of your love,
But that it bear this trial and last love;
Then at the expiration of the year,
Come challenge me. …

(V.ii.789-795)

But another theme has been suggested here. The seasonal metaphor has been used to suggest a new process, one beyond Nature and therefore Death. As Winter turns to Spring, age turns to youth and death to birth. Thus the entry of Winter in the fifth act suggests a passing out of the realm of Nature and into a realm beyond, and the concluding song of the owl epitomizes Wisdom because it takes account not only of Life but also of Death. And so the apparently heretical ending of the play with the Winter Song is, in truth, an early statement of themes which Shakespeare was to develop very much later, in the Problem Comedies and the Late Romances, where the comedy passes beyond the suffering of the natural world and emerges in a New Heaven and a New Earth.

These major themes of the comedy, the movement from Art to Nature, from Illusion to Reality, from Folly to Wisdom, and from Spring to Winter, are accentuated and underlined through careful technical handling of the two sub-plots, embryonic though they may be. The Clown and Armado stand at the two opposite poles of comedy and incarnate between them the forces of the extreme natural and the extreme artificial which are struggling for the souls of the young men. For the Clown is the complete embodiment of the natural and uninhibited response to life, as Armado is of the egoistic and pedantic. The two are brought into dramatic juxtaposition in the opening scene, where the Clown comments on Armado's letter (I.i.227-254). The young men, associated to a certain degree with Armado, are to have the worst of the match, and it is not long before their ultimate fate is foreshadowed in the more comic, because more incongruous, fall of Armado: “I will hereupon confess I am in love; and as it is base for a soldier to love, so I am in love with a base wench” (I.ii.54-56).

It is significant that Boyet, at the close of the hunt scene with its emphasis upon nature and natural copulation, should identify the Clown with the owl, even if ironically. For it is the Clown who puts his finger on the artificiality of the young scholars' design: “Such is the simplicity of man to hearken after the flesh” (I.i.215). And if Costard is the owl, there is little doubt as to who is the cuckoo, and our suspicions are confirmed when we hear of Jaquenetta's condition.¹³ Thus in a highly ironic inversion, Folly becomes Wisdom and the “wise man” becomes the Clown:

By my soul, a swain! A most simple clown!
Lord, Lord, how the ladies and I have put him down!

(IV.i.139-140)

Ah! heavens, it is a most pathetical nit.(14)

(IV.i.147)

Indeed it is Costard, the exponent of the natural, who is to provide the natural heir, if we are to believe Granville-Barker.¹⁵

The second sub-plot, introduced as late as Act IV, Scene ii, presents a new angle of affectation. The dialogue parodies, at one and the same time, the artificial and pedantic delight in words for their sound rather than their sense, and the ignorance of the “scholars” as to the most common meanings of the words they use, as “posteriors” of the day (IV.ii.84-86). Again, the sub-plot functions as an accentuation of the main themes of the play. The Holofernes-Nathaniel dialogue juxtaposes once more the natural and the artificial in its use of language:

The deer was, as you know, sanguis, in blood; ripe as the pomewater, who now hangeth like a jewel in the ear of coelo, the sky, the welkin, the heaven, and anon falleth like a crab on the face of terra, the soil, the land, the earth.¹⁶

(IV.ii.3-7)

Dull's misinterpretation of haud credo as an assertion that the deer is feminine gives Holofernes excellent opportunity for a tirade against those who cannot appreciate the finer points of the Latin tongue and, at the same time, maintains an emphasis on the male-female opposition which is essential to the main theme of the play. The delightful incongruity of the scene lies in its juxtaposition of the artificiality of learning with its ultimate sterility, and the fecundity of nature, carried unconsciously in the undertones of the dialogue. The sexual imagery of the play is further emphasized in Holofernes' metaphor of wit, the dry pedantic tone of the speech accentuating the contrast:

This is a gift that I have, simple; a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, revolutions: these are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion.

(IV.ii.66-71)

The two sub-plots are interrelated not only in the association of the comic characters in the pageant which precedes the entry of Mercade, but also in the essential similarity of Armado and Holofernes, a similarity ironically pointed up by Holofernes himself in his description of Armado: “He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument” (V.i.17-18). Again it is the Clown who can laugh at the foolishness of the seeming-wise who have “lived long on the alms-basket of words” (V.i.39-40). Even Dull, the fool's fool, puts a finger on the nature of their folly, although, characteristically, he is too dull to observe his own wisdom:

HOLOFERNES.
Via, goodman Dull! thou hast spoken no word all this while.
DULL.
Nor understood none neither, sir.

(V.i.143-145)

And so, as we have seen, both main and sub-plots deal with the movement of the play from the artificial to the natural, from illusion to reality, from folly to wisdom. These themes are all present in the Spring-Winter debate, which functions, then, to draw together and unify them. But the Song does more than this. It introduces the problem of Time, which the whole play-world has neglected until the entry of Mercade. In the Spring-Winter debate, the cyclical nature of the seasonal metaphor carries us through the world of Winter and Death and into the new Spring. Thus the Song foreshadows the theme of redemption which will form a major part of the action in The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. But only the seed is there. For Shakespeare, in the early years of his career, this theme would require a time “too long for a play” (V.ii.868).

Notes

1. This article was originally prepared for a graduate seminar class in Shakespeare at the University of Toronto. The writer would like to thank Dr. F. D. Hoeniger of Victoria College for his encouragement and advice, both at the time of writing and during several revisions.

2. All quotations are from the New Arden text edited by Richard David (London: Methuen, 1951).

3. C. L. Barber discusses the relationship of the play to ritual comedy in his Shakespearian Festive Comedy (Princeton U. Press, 1959), pp. 87-118.

4. Richmond Noble, Shakespeare's Use of Song (Oxford U. Press, 1923), p. 38. For a summary of the controversy over text and dating of the play, see R. David's introduction to the Arden text, pp. xvii-xxxii.

5. Richmond Noble, studying the text of the songs, concludes that they are digressive, having no close relationship to the theme (pp. 12-13). John Long, however, claims: “Shakespeare considered them [the songs] an integral part of the comedy” (Shakespeare's Use of Music, University of Florida Press, 1955, pp. 77-78). He notes the parallel between the language and imagery of the songs and the central theme of the play, “the ridiculing of pastoral conventions and exaggerated scholasticism” (p. 78). It is not part of Long's intention to examine the themes of the play and he does not do so. However, his conclusion is significant: “The relationship of the songs to the structure of the play appears to be so close that I would hesitate to label them extraneous songs. … They are a part of the setting and structure of the play. They serve, I think, for a final statement of the theme …” (p. 78).

   It is interesting to note in the thesis of James Wey (“Musical Allusion and Song as Part of the Structure of Meaning of Shakespeare's Plays”, Catholic University of America, Washington, D. C., 1957) a close parallel between his intentions and my own. In both cases, the songs are seen to be highly relevant to the themes of the play as a whole, tying in action, characterization, and imagery, and rounding out the play dramatically and effectively. In addition, Wey is almost the only critic who observes the predominance of sexual reference and connotation in the songs, especially in the spring sequence which, he notes, concerns the theme of sexual activity and cuckoldry in contrast to the a-sexual activities of Winter where “greasy Joan” (interpretated sexually) turns from bleaching her summer smocks to a Winter of penance in the kitchen (p. 153). Wey also discusses the songs as “a gentle warning of the realities of married love” (p. 153), a restatement of the central themes of the play “the fitness of the action to the time” and a reflection of the “major imagistic motif … the opposition of light and darkness” (p. 155). He concludes that “the songs are like a microcosm of all the chief themes, motifs, actions of the play” (p. 167).

6. It is singular that almost all comments on the Spring Song, with the recent exception of Wey's, have insisted upon its freshness, innocence, and spontaneity. Tangible proof of this serious misconstruction is its assignment, in the eighteenth century, to Rosalind of As You Like It! (Noble, p. 36). Only Noble and Bertrand Bronson, “Daisies Pied and Icicles”, MLN [Modern Language Notes], LXIII (1948), 35-38, seem to note anything “unpleasant” in the song, and even they look no farther than the song of the cuckoo for this element. Noble considers the songs irrelevant in any case (see note 5 preceding), and Bronson, after speaking of the “vernal delights” of the opening lines, concludes that the Song is curious in that “the burden … falls upon a consideration which elsewhere in Shakespeare, as in life, makes toward tragedy” (pp. 35-36). He notes the structural parallel of the two songs, a “pretty” opposition between the “boding” note of the cuckoo and the perversely “merry” note of the owl, but finds in this reversal of roles only “a delightful surprise and reversal of the traditional ‘debate’ of the birds” (p. 37). If the Spring Song is as fresh and innocent as most seem to consider, one wonders why it is not included in the high school curriculum in Ontario, as is the Winter Song.

7. See Perdita's flower dialogue of The Winter's Tale, where Perdita rejects “pied” or artificially-bred flowers as products of Art rather than Nature. She also draws a parallel between artificial breeding in flowers and “painted” women (IV.iv.78-103, especially 87-88 and 101-103).

8. Lever, J. W., “Three Notes on Shakespeare's Plants”, RES, n.s. III (1952), 117-120.

9. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (London: Penguin Books, 1955). “By a very curious transition, blue, instead of being the colour of faithful love, came to mean infidelity too, and next, besides the faithless wife, marked the dupe” (pp. 273-274). In France, blue became the color of cuckolds and of “fools in general” (p. 274).

10. But see Wey (footnote 5), who interprets “greasy” in sexual terms and indicates that Winter is merely a period of arrested sexual desire.

11. Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy (London: Routledge, 1947), p. 53.

12. Bobbyann Roesen notes that the hunting-scene marks the first entry of Death into the play, brought into the park by “the intruders from the outside world” but muted to remove “any disturbing reality”, pp. 419-420 (Love's Labour's Lost, SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly], IV (1953), 411-426). Miss Roesen also notes the increase in the fifth act of imagery of disease and death which builds up to the entry of Mercade.

13. Granville-Barker comments: “it is surely clear—though, to many editors, it does not seem to be—that in the accusation poor Armado is most scandously ‘infamonized’! Where would be the joke else?” (Prefaces to Shakespeare, First Series, London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1927), p. 46.

14. There is no doubt as to whom Costard refers to in the second of these comments. The first might refer to Boyet who has just left the stage, but what, then, would be the point of the passage? R. David suggests that Armado has been present in an earlier draft of the scene (see footnote to this passage, Arden, ed., p. 75).

15. See note 11 preceding.

16. J. A. K. Thomson, in pointing out the errors in “sanguis” and “coelo” remarks: “Shakespeare's knowledge of Latin was at any rate sufficient to tell him that these were errors. He must so mean that Holofernes does not know his own subject”, p. 67 (Shakespeare and the Classics, London: Allen and Unwin, 1952).