SOURCE: Alvis, John. “Derivative Loves are Labor Lost.” Renascence 48 (summer 1996): 247-58.

[In the following essay, Alvis concentrates on Shakespeare's use of the main plot and subplots in Love's Labour's Lost to convey the theme of constancy destroyed by vanity.]

Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost has attracted critics' attention to its subtleties of language, its shrewd psychological observations, and its topical allusiveness but not to its plot, which on first acquaintance appears indeed minimal, if not perfunctory.¹ Although spare, the action of Love's Labour's Lost is well-adapted to conveying the theme of the play, a theme I take to be the expense of constancy in a waste of ostentation. To demonstrate the connection between action and subject, I propose to focus on the four chief features of Shakespeare's comic plot: 1) the initial plan of Navarre and his courtiers to set up a hermitage for philosophic study; 2) the paired scenes of forswearing, the first forswearing deliberate, the second, of the Russian maskers, inadvertent; 3) the playlet travesty presented by the clowns impersonating the Nine Worthies; 4) the penances set the courtly suitors in the final scene by the Princess and Rosaline. I must also consider incidentally the relation between the main action involving the court party and the parallel sub-plot involving Armado, Costard, Nathaniel, and Holofernes, since I contend that all the plot elements function in concert to comment upon the nature and consequences of vanity.

The members of Navarre's Academy pledge themselves three times. On two of these occasions they break their oaths. As to their constancy to the third, their vow to prepare themselves for a more serious courtship by undertaking a discipline set by the ladies, regarding the outcome of that pledge we are left in doubt. Time will tell. Yet we find ourselves perhaps not completely at a loss to predict the suitors' future course. From the two instances of forswearing depicted in the staged action we may suspect they will fail to keep the purpose they pledge themselves to honor at the play's close. We infer a third inconstancy from Shakespeare's portrayal of the lords' inability to keep their vow of celibacy compounded by their confusion in love when they go awooing to the Princess and her ladies. The play means to suggest the ways in which souls baffle themselves by contaminating with self-love endeavors which, if pursued with integrity, should produce selfless generosity, large-mindedness, and honesty.

The first forswearing has King Ferdinand, Berowne, Dumain, and Longaville renounce their vow to abstain from sexual love for three years. When we compare Shakespeare's portrayals of fugitives from Navarre's “little academe” we note that responding to a common temptation, the men go through identical stages of truancy. All four premeditate their promise breaking, give assent to their dereliction, attempt to catch their friends in a lapse of faith while concealing their own falsity, then at last devise excuses that suffice to exonerate the breach of oath in their own eyes. The second forswearing appears, however, something they merely suffer rather than actively will. They are tricked by the Princess into mistaking their respective beloveds. It might seem there can be no connection between the breaking of an oath resulting from a willed change of mind and the inadvertent misdirection of a love vow caused by someone else's deception. Yet Shakespeare does in fact establish a connection by showing that the lords' fate in the second instance answers to a shared defect of character manifest in their first forswearing. The falsity apparent in the truancy to academic fortitude warrants the Princess's deception because her ruse exposes a consistent principle underlying the noblemen's unprincipled inconsistency. Her irony reveals how Navarre, his paid sophist, Berowne, and the others conduct their love on the same queasy basis as they had proposed to conduct their studies. Shakespeare seems to have set up the following four term proportion: as a mind regards its intellectual cultivation so it will regard its spouse, its obligations pertaining to social station, and so, finally, will it regard religion. The King and his courtiers pursue studies, conduct courtship, neglect their duties as hosts, and propose theologies in accord with a common principle initiated by Ferdinand and refined by Berowne. At the beginning, this common motive looks to acquiring honors, and, at the end, just saving face.

Even before beauties arrive on campus Navarre's college has yielded to distraction. Berowne doubts the gentlemen scholars are up to the rigors of dorm life under strict supervision, and well he might suspect their staying power given Ferdinand's formulation of an academic purpose statement: the first substantive to appear in the text is not learning but fame. The King supposes all men “hunt after” fame, and he conceives he may best get himself a name by preferring study to the more political or more fleshly occupations customary to the hereditary nobility. Renown, so he boasts, will permit him to live on after death. We do not see the curriculum Navarre plans, if he has any plan. Since he dwells on the elitism of resisting common attractions, it may well be that such honor as he anticipates he counts on receiving solely in respect of the efforts of study irrespective of its fruits. Not intellectual attainments but conspicuous effort on behalf of learning he trusts will bring fame. The play's first word on vanity thus is a recognition of the vain soul's willingness to find satisfaction in slender accomplishment. One wonders how much learning the scholars can expect to acquire from a mere three years' residency? They are satisfied with so little.

Besides their not perceiving the scope of philosophy, these spare-time thinkers, by assenting to distraction in the derivative goal of fame, fail to grasp how philosophy ought indeed to resemble paying court to women. Loving sophia and loving a woman, if incompatible, are so just because the two pursuits so closely resemble each other. Both courtship and philosophical sublimation require self forgetful ardor and full-time application. Philosopher and lover alike make themselves fools for their loves, willing as both are to expend life, property, and honor for enjoyment of the beloved object. Both suffer ridicule gladly as the price of their respective obsessions. Although this disbanded academy will not resume its introduction to philosophy once it has transferred its attention to sexual courtship, still the bookmen's learning to dote on women's eyes gives Shakespeare's audience a lesson in how the courtiers would have addressed themselves to philosophical pursuits if they had possessed an eros sufficient to the task. Since they do not love learning for its own sake, they attract ridicule of another sort, that directed against pretense. Not love of learning so much as desire to be reputed wise falls before desire to enjoy beautiful women. Not surprisingly, Gallic vanity shows itself polymorphous, since although there is only one way to wisdom, there will be many ways to gain prestige, even by mere possession of female beauty.

In this connection we may consider how the subplot serves to reinforce implications carried by the main plot. Shakespeare indicates through the two pedants Armado and Holofernes the prospects for the student princes had they persisted in their plan to quit the world for three years. Once the fame of learning displaces wisdom as the end of study, linguistic manipulation supplants inquiry into nature. More malleable than real things, the bare signs of things can be mastered by those who seek nothing beyond repute of learning. Berowne intuits this lowering of sights when he warns his friends their memorizing the names of stars will yield no better grasp of stellar light (1.1.88-93). Love's Labour's Lost wearies with its quibbles, cavillings, etymologizing, and generally by its unrelenting wordiness because Shakespeare means to disgust while amusing us with the arts whereby speakers debauch language. If the King and his imitators were better gifted with an amused appreciation of their own shortcomings they would see the weakness of their academic project written large in Don Armado's long-winded inanities and Holofernes' waste of his classical learning on trifles. Pedants maintain their status and pay by diverting conversation regarding essences into debates over the handling of terms. Navarre's courtier scholars are susceptible to this diversion because they have previously inclined to divert philosophy into a quest for public recognition. Lowering of the subject matter of education follows a lowering of aims. Vanity chases a downward market content with marginal superiority to those still lower in public estimation. The court has planned to keep on hand a rustic (Costard) as a baseline measure of their progress and Armado as a butt of scorn to assure themselves they are superior to pedantry (I.1.160-75).

The four lords, then, have some cause to forswear themselves and close a school which could not, given its slight foundation, have amounted to much in any event. If only they could repent with good grace a scheme shallowly conceived and not honestly in accord with their capacities, one could credit them with having come to a modicum of self-knowledge. Graceful repentance doesn't come easily to the self-important, however, and since, in their haste for fame, the courtiers have already publicized their venture, they have put reputation at hazard and subsequently risk disrepute if they admit to breaking the publicly promulgated covenant. The sequel lays two further aggravations to their charge. First, when Navarre requires his guests to pitch tents outside his walls, we observe that in attempting to preserve the letter after violating the spirit of his vow, he has committed the discourtesy of denying proper hospitality. Thereafter, once love has bitten them, all four gentlemen attempt to dispense themselves secretly while ridiculing their forsworn comrades for their inconstancy. Flushed out one after the other, each thinks he can sink his particular disgrace in the general embarrassment if only he can persuade the woman he desires to overlook the oath-breaking. The lords suppose the ladies will condone forswearing if they can be convinced their beauty was the cause. Hence their verse letters argue there was no infidelity but merely a substitution of a better object of study, feminine beauty displacing ugly books. We can see why the women will have nothing of this sophistry. Not because they are indifferent to praise and hence absolved from the vanity that befuddles their suitors, but because they are more practical minded and know the danger of trivializing oaths, even ill-considered oaths.

The women represent prudence alert to difficulties attendant on vainglory. They perceive their beauty can inspire love but not insure constancy. They realize that familiarity dulls the lover's eye, and they suspect that men so suddenly charmed as the Navarrese are likely to take beauty where they find it, in or out of marriage. Civilized peoples make provision for inconstant desire by regulating love with marriage laws. Marriage laws rely on oaths, nevertheless, and these lovers have just demonstrated that although sensitive to being exposed as untrue to their word, they treat violation of an oath in itself as a trifle. They've placed more value on verbal honor than on honorable action when they scanted hospitality; thereafter, when they turned to sophistical poetry, they showed themselves disposed to place more value on avoiding ridicule than upholding their word. Finally the lords have tacitly insulted the ladies by making manifest their assumption that the Frenchwomen would connive at or even welcome sophistries gratifying to their vanity in their physical allure.

These considerations prepare a transition from the voluntary forswearing to the unintended. The episode depicting the visit of masked courtiers posing as Russians we can see to be an extension of the theme of vanity ensnaring itself. We infer that the Princess resents the court merriment because the King's company is trivializing courtship as earlier it had trivialized study and then had niggled over hospitality. By treating themselves to this diversion the courtiers are neglecting to put foremost a mending of their prior failure in courtesy. Instead of inviting the ladies to better accommodations in the palace Navarre, the King and his followers will leave their guests to continue camping out while they themselves display their wit in disguise. Disguise affords moreover the luxury of courting without being held accountable. Concealing their identity, the lords can take a closer estimate of the women—whose priority in beauty has already become the subject of boastful competition among the suitors—without subjecting themselves to being similarly assessed. The women, Shakespeare suggests, are entitled to practice the counter-deceit of changing their suitors' favors because the suitors regard their courtship so lightly that they will not expose themselves to the possible embarrassment of an honest, face-to-face meeting. Besides, there is the practical matter of feudal economics. Vizarded, the lords can play at courtship without actually offering their land and revenue, an essential part of their identity as potential husbands.² They prefer to present themselves as mere individuals rather than as rulers of subjects and proprietors of estates. Moreover, their assumed identities give the suitors opportunities to observe the effectiveness of the proffered rich gifts and equally extravagant sonnets. The women show their contempt of the gifts by swapping the jewels amongst themselves, thereby, through this transposition of pearls and diamonds, making the Princess and Rosaline interchangeable counters to the confusion of the masked men. But since all four women have just read aloud the verse letters, they all recognize from the conventionally uniform character of the sentiment and imagery employed therein that the Navarrese have chosen to make love not to persons frankly known but to symbolic objects barely individuated at this stage of acquaintance. The women realize they are being treated precisely as interchangeable counters in a game of courtship. They could hardly think otherwise given that none of the letters so much as declares the name of the beloved. The four women are taken virtually as bills of exchange or, better perhaps, as books unread, collectibles.

Once the ladies have revealed this countermining of the “Russian” visitation, Berowne laments:

we,
Following the signs, wooed but the sign of she.
Now, to our perjury to add more terror,
We are again forsworn, in will and error.

(5.2.468-422)

Although they did not intend perjury when they pledged troth to a women disguised, this second, albeit unpremeditated, forswearing proceeds from the same weakness that had been exposed in their prior intentional renunciation of public vows. In other words, the involuntary forswearing is in character because it results, as had the first, from the men's having adulterated a worthy purpose with motives apart from the point. The King and his company had allowed love of learning to be diverted to a pursuit of fame only to discover that the diluted article could not withstand the first temptation interposed by feminine beauty. Then they had violated the equally exacting rule of honest wooing by seeking to play at love without taking on the full risk which a proper love match requires. They lack the requisite daring either to make themselves fools for Lady Philosophy or fools for Lady Venus. The lords are therefore virtually forsworn a second time, although they were not intentionally false to their plighted compliments. They are, so to say, essentially false, like merchandise that has suffered spoilage yet still advertises itself as sound.

Berowne's self-exculpation had taken the form of secularizing Calvinist theology. Responding to the King's command to “prove / Our loving lawful, and our faith not torn” (4.3.280-1) and to Longaville's plea that he locate an authority by reference to which the forsworn scholars may “cheat the devil” (284), Berowne had appealed ultimately to a sophistry he foisted on St. Paul. That passage in Romans which proclaims the law is fulfilled in charity Berowne wittily tortures to authorize his and his friends' trespass (4.3.360). Berowne deliberately confuses charity with erotic love in order to emphasize his low estimate of the human capacity for virtue by natural strength alone. He has already absolved himself by maintaining he has been “As true as flesh and blood can be” (4.3.211) and he believes “Young blood doth not obey an old decree” (213). Since the decree he has violated was promulgated just days before, Berowne must expect his auditors to realize he means Paul's old law against the promptings of the flesh. The Pauline epistles envision this old law as set in opposition to sin yet insufficient to remedy out failings unless enlivened by grace. Without grace, Berowne suggests, men cannot by their own lights attain to righteousness.³ In fact, at the very beginning before he had fallen in love Berowne had bespoken a view of human weakness that all but identified wrong-going with necessity:

Necessity will make us all forsworn
Three thousand times within these three years' space,
For every man with his affects is born,
Not by might master'd, but by special grace.

(1.1.148-151)

An intellectually consistent Berowne does not renounce his Calvinism when he turns to a new love. We observe him making use of Calvin's doctrine of depravity to excuse his dishonor, then in accord with his revision of Pauline theology, he transfers the source of “special grace” from God to woman. The implication, however, is damaging to his suit, as Rosaline shrewdly grasps, because Berowne has implicitly acknowledged that his constancy in love will depend solely on the imputed or infused grace conferred by his beloved rather than on any power he can command of his own will. Rosaline presumably objects to courtship conducted on such terms inasmuch as the burden of insuring spousal fidelity, if she grants Berowne's assumption, would fall on her alone. She should have to go warrant for her own constancy and for that of her husband to boot. Hence, Rosaline's own wit turns the tables, and by her imposition of confession and penance, she requires that Berowne become more the Pelagian and less the Calvinist if he would have her. To put it in theological terms, she will dispense her grace only if Berowne shows himself properly disposed to receive it. This initiative he must demonstrate by the good old Aristotelian and Dantesque means to virtue, by acquiring in the course of a year a moral habit. The habit of making his witticisms responsible will, she hopes, rein in his sophistry and restore his sense of the seriousness of pledging his word.

It could be objected that Calvinism hardly comports with vanity since doctrines of innate depravity and salvation by grace alone leave little to please human pride. True enough, but Berowne's Calvinism is not serious. He pleads depravity and special grace only so far as it permits him to put a face on having forsworn himself. Even so, Rosaline will seek to cure pretended Calvinism with a dose of real Arminianism, since whatever are the serious grounds, if any, of Berowne's pretenses, the issue is whether he can be brought to a condition that permits Rosaline to have some confidence that he has acquired a sense of responsibility.⁴

When fame proves out of reach, vanity may still discover something to salvage in avoiding shame. The play exposes this declension by means of the last scene before the arrival of Marcade. The Nine Worthies playlet affords opportunity for Navarre's four battered gallants to divert their shame on another party. Again Berowne formulates the court's strategy when he advises the King:

'tis some policy
To have one show worse than the King's and his company.

(5.2.508-9)

Shakespeare's aristocrats here and elsewhere in his plays enjoy poking fun at bumbling actors, but only here, I think, do high-bred spectators go the length of positively sabotaging a stage performance. Longaville, Dumain, Berowne, and, eventually, the King, all interrupt with quips or objections which succeed in preventing dramatic illusion and, at last, in putting the actors out of their parts. The schoolmaster's protest against treatment he complains is “not generous, not gentle, not humble” (623) breaks through the play's otherwise consistent tone of levity to underscore the courtly boorishness.

The antecedent action had already revealed that for each suitor love distracted by vanity had turned to disparaging the charms and chastity of the women courted by the other lovers rather than resting unobtrusively in the contemplation of each suitor's own proper beloved. Similarly here their abuse of Costard, Nathaniel, Holofernes, and Armado exposes the court party in the act of disparaging pedants rather than acknowledging their own shortcomings. The courtiers discern motes in their brothers' eyes but thereby distract themselves from recognizing the beam in their own eye. Contemptible as the pedants may be, they have not added vanity in courting to vanity in learning. To demolish their innocently ridiculous pretensions to learning is, as Samuel Johnson says in another context, to inflict violence “on unresisting imbecility.”

We are supposed to perceive that, quite apart from bruised feelings, a failure in self-knowledge is at issue here. Instead of taking easy shots at these ludicrous pretenders, the lords might have shown a better sense of their own pretenses had they played the penitent by making themselves the actors in a skit exploding ostentatious learning. Thereby they would have demonstrated to the ladies a judgment against their own self-importance, a confession of folly that might have promised amendment. As it is, however, they are content to divert embarrassment upon someone else, and thus the women, seeing no purpose of amendment volunteered by their suitors, will have to test their capacity for education by imposing penances of the women's own devising.

This brings me to my final observation regarding the unity between dramatic plot and the theme of complacency baffled. The penances imposed by the ladies on their suitors have three functions all related to the purpose of making the courtiers perceive how difficult a matter it is to restore confidence in a man's word once he has shown a will to shrug off the disgrace of renouncing an oath. First, the year of celibacy imposed by all four women resurrects the vow the suitors broke when they forsook their academic rigors. It remains to be seen, the women realize, whether the lords find irresistible these particular beauties or just any women who may come their way. Second, Rosaline's saddling Berowne with the additional pains of attempting to exercise his jokes on sick people has the intent of humbling a wit hitherto employed to make Berowne seem imposing in his own eyes. And perhaps we are to infer Rosaline has accurately conjectured what the audience has witnessed, that Berowne contributed at the King's command the sophism by which the suitors had tried to excuse inconstancy. Third, by virtue of submitting to the year long penance, the lords would be obliged to refound their pledges of fidelity upon a better reckoning of just what they love and in just what degree, a surer estimate than has been available in the heat of a few days' flirtation. To these elements of self-knowledge the women hope the year of enforced self-scrutiny will bring to light, for the suitors, a sense of what permanent wounds to vanity these lords might be willing to expose themselves to through the hazard of marriage.

The parallelism of the subplot also instructs us in reasonable prophecy regarding the futures of the lovers in the main plot. Armado, like the courtiers, has brought his love-making to the point of composing a travesty of a love missive. Jaquenetta resembles the ladies of the French embassy in postponing her acceptance of Armado's suit until he should prove the strength of his intentions by hiring himself out for three years as a ploughman. Although at the end of the play the braggart pledges himself to this ordeal, the audience can hardly suppose this addict to aristocratic fashion will prove capable of fulfilling his vow any more than he has shown himself up to observing the original pledge to celibacy. By parity of reasoning, once we perceive that mainplot tracks subplot, we deduce no promising prospects for the courtly suitors' living up to their present resolves to discharge the penances imposed by the ladies. Vanity seems very nearly incorrigible inasmuch as we have seen it possesses considerable capacities for self-renewall.

Love's Labour's Lost was probably first performed in 1597, perhaps as early as Christmas 1594. In July of 1594, a more famous King of Navarre forswore himself by renouncing the Protestantism of his upbringing for a Catholicism that would secure his possession of the throne of France. On the occasion of Henri IV's conversion, Elizabeth is reported to have cautioned that it was a dangerous thing to do evil in the hope of good. In love as well as politics, the danger of forswearing one allegiance for another supposed better is that few observers will believe the second allegiance is any less unalterable than the first.⁵ The ladies are assuredly entitled to take what precautions they can devise against another inconstancy. Especially since they must perceive that their suitors have compounded a good portion of self-love with their professed affections for the women. What the audience further grasps is that a declaration of fidelity can be no more reliable than the self-knowledge which supports the promise. An alert audience then will have even less cause for hope than the Princess and her company. But then such an audience, unlike the fictive characters having nothing practical at risk, can content itself with the general lesson in the obstacles vanity opposes to the effort of knowing oneself in the light of what one ought to be.

What, then, does the play say about ostentatious self-display? First, it offers a definition. Vanity reduces to an inordinate concern for one's standing in the opinion of other people. What constitutes for Shakespeare a properly regulated regard for other people's opinion is a long question that would take us through Shakespeare's Roman plays and his portrayal of Henry V. In the comedy we have in hand inordinate concern for one's credit with others seems to be a matter of attachment to a distraction, a preoccupation with a derivative rather than a primary natural good. Standing in the opinion of others rests upon performance, but vanity looks to the derivative rather than the original good and constitutes a distraction from the first end of the particular activity a person has undertaken. Derivative seems the right word because vanity seeks not learning for its own sake or love for the sake of mutual benefit in marriage, but rather in both endeavors the purpose of the vain is to acquire a credit in the ledger of public prestige: fame for learning or good opinion for courting a conspicuous beauty in a conspicuous fashion. The primary good is compromised by admitting the derivative good, and indeed, the primary is put at risk to being sacrificed altogether for the derivative. For this reason, pursuits adulterated by vanity will likely prove inconstant. Vanity easily shifts its objects and lowers its sights. The lords desire fame after death, thereafter become preoccupied with the notion of possessing a mistress superior to the mistresses of their fellows, and then, in the last resort, settle for only not falling short of the others in the mistress they mean to possess. Furthermore, to maintain credit after behaving discreditably requires a good deal of extemporaneously devised revisionist history, or in a word, lies. The combined effect of distraction, lowering sights, inconstancy, and misrepresentation is to deceive themselves, invite the distrust of the women, and thereby lose the primary good in consequence of pursuing the derivative. A succinct way of putting this is to say the courtiers have lost through vanity the fruits of love's labors.

Notes

1. On linguistic complexity of particular interest, see Calderwood; on the play's psychology, see MacCary; on historical topicality, see Lamb and Tricomi.

2. Cook reminds us of the practical basis of romance in the comedies: “Nothing in courtship affronts modern sensibilities quite so much as the insistence that an exchange of money accompany an exchange of vows. Yet an Elizabethan or Jacobean could hardly ignore such matters, fixed as they were into the matrix of existence. The constant references to dowries, portions, jointures, and dowers give ample evidence that Shakespeare's plays recognize the financial basis on which marriages rested” (133).

3. I agree with Carroll that Berowne articulates what the audience already knows—“that every man is … ruled by his own effects … rather than by his reason. Whether grace is capitalized or not, these “affects amount to a kind of original sin that man cannot overrule by his own rule” (97).

4. Although I do not credit Berowne with the superlative degree of understanding MacCary ascribes to him, MacCary formulates quite well the perspective Shakespeare establishes through his portrayal of the reversals Berowne endures:

   the way men see women as objects of desire in Shakespeare is a model for their seeing the entire world, so that when Berowne learns to see Rosaline as a particular woman and not as the sun, then he has changed not only the orientation of his desire but also his epistemology and ontology.

   (112-130)

5. According to Cook, “there is no doubt that Love's Labour's Lost was performed at court, regardless of whether it was specifically written for performance there.” I agree, moreover, with Cook's observation that “the feminine rejection of romantically impossible offers of marriage provides a graceful affirmation of the Queen's public policies” (257).

Works Cited

Calderwood, J. C. “Love's Labour's Lost: Awakening With Words.” EL 5 (1965): 317-32.

Carroll, W. C. The Great Feast of Language in Love's Labour's Lost. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977.

Cook, Ann Jennalie. Making a Match: Courtship in Shakespeare and His Society. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.

Lamb, Mary Ellen. “The Nature of Topicality in Love's Labour's Lost.” Shakespeare Survey (1985): 49-59.

MacCary, W. Thomas. Friends and Lovers: The Phenomenology of Desire in Shakespearean Comedy. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.

Shakespeare, William. Love's Labour's Lost. Arden edition. Ed. Richard David. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1951.

Tricomi, Albert H. “The Witty Idealization of the French Court in Love's Labor's Lost.” Shakespeare Studies 12 (1979): 25-33.