[In the following essay, Smidt offers an analysis of the apparent inconsistencies in Shakespeare's characters in order to suggest that Love's Labour's Lost begins as a romance and ends as a satire.]

Love's Labour's Lost, says Muriel Bradbrook in a well-balanced judgment, ‘is as near as Shakespeare ever came to writing satire; and yet there is more than a spice of panegyric behind the ridicule of fine manners’.¹ If I were to qualify this judicious statement, I would simply suggest that Shakespeare came rather more than near to writing satire and that the elements of satire and panegyric, or alternatively of satire and romance, are very unevenly distributed in the play. Shakespeare began Love's Labour's Lost in a mood of romance and finished it in predominantly satirical mood. Romance promises well on the arrival of a bevy of beauties already in love with, or at least ready to fall in love with, the noblemen they are about to meet. But it dwindles and changes. The elements of parody and satire are reinforced by the addition of the technically superfluous Holofernes. And satire also engulfs the romantic love theme. At the end of the play, which Berowne no longer thinks a comedy, we may still find romance if we want to, but we have to want to, unless we are content to be guided by stock responses. In between the beginning and the ending Shakespeare seems frequently to have been in two minds about the mood of his play, and his impulsive decisions and revisions have left startling unconformities, to some extent in the plot, but chiefly in the portrayal of characters. (I use the word ‘unconformity’ in the geological sense of discontinuity or fault and it has no direct or final evaluative implications).

The plot of Love's Labour's Lost on the whole is firm and well articulated, and encourages expectations of consistency in other aspects of the play. It is surprising that some leading scholars have thought otherwise. Here is H. B. Charlton:

But though Love's Labour's Lost is mere gay trifling, its peculiar gaiety almost frustrates itself by the formlessness and the spinelessness of the thing as a play. And Shakespeare's first recoil from the insouciant romantic formlessness of Love's Labour's Lost seems to have been a feeling that plays without backbone are hopelessly crippled. No plot, no play.²

More recently J. D. Huston has spoken of the apparent haphazardness of the meetings which occur in the play.³

Surely it is astonishing that this kind of thing can be said of a comedy which is so dependent for its effect on a clear two-sided conflict, on thrust and counter-thrust, dissimulation and discovery, and surprising twists and turns, not to speak of internal agonising, as is Love's Labour's Lost. Consider: first a male alliance, including one unwilling signatory, is formed against all women, then the alliance is threatened by a political intrusion and the external enemy rebuffed, next it is secretly undermined from within until by accidental circumstances a general treachery is revealed among the allies and a completely opposite line of conduct decided upon, plans are laid and betrayed and advances made which in turn are rebuffed, a truce is called and in a surprise ending made conditional on trials to follow. The story-line is unbroken and strong in its main progression. Unbroken, that is, except for the long scenes of comic dialogue, and it is these, of course, that have led so many commentators to see Love's Labour's Lost too exclusively as a play of words and a play about words. The ‘feast of languages’ is no doubt an important feature of the satire but it should not be allowed to obscure the dramatic development. It is not the backbone that is lacking, but the comedy as we have it is strangely fleshed, since the wordplay, particularly of the secondary characters, tends to overwhelm the plot. This, one might say, is its most outstanding unconformity, though not the most interesting.

The secondary characters, in fact, are much in evidence. Between them they account for just about one third of the dialogue, and that is not counting Boyet. Their parts are well defined, but in the case of two of them somewhat redundant. Wishing to parody the affectations of a pedant (I won't go into the discussion of which particular schoolmaster or tutor he may have had in mind), Shakespeare at first rather incongruously attributed them to his Spanish traveller. That formidable gusher of words was there from the start to grant quick recreation both to the noble brotherhood of contemplatives and to us, the common spectators. At some stage Don Adriano de Armado must have been thought of as a miles gloriosus or a boastful Spaniard of the commedia dell'arte variety, since stage directions and speech headings in parts of the play introduce him as ‘Braggart’. But the only occasion on which we catch him actually conforming to this role is the one on which in Falstaffian fashion he boasts of his familiarity with the King. Instead we find him enumerating synonyms and teaching grammar:

which here thou viewest, beholdest, surveyest, or seest
The time when? … the ground which? … the place where?
I spoke it, tender juvenal, as a congruent epitheton appertaining to thy young days, which we may nominate tender

Then for good measure Shakespeare introduced a professional schoolmaster who speaks in the same strain, only with more show of learning:

coelo, the sky, the welkin, the heaven
the nomination of the party writing to the person written unto
The posterior of the day … is liable, congruent, and measurable for the afternoon:

Clearly Armado and Holofernes are duplicates. They would no doubt look very different on the stage, and the visual impact of Elizabethan plays, as Michael Hattaway has recently reminded us,⁴ was an important part of the intended effect. They are both immensely funny and both have moments of moving pathos. We would not want to lose Holofernes, but he could easily be eliminated without damage to the plot. He is there for the satire.

Armado, on the other hand, figures in a subplot which is woven into and comically parallels the main action. Love's Labour's Lost is basically about sex and love, as the title tells us. There is a general contest of the sexes for superiority, and in this respect Love's Labour's Lost forms a companion piece to The Taming of the Shrew. One may even wonder if it represents Shakespeare's act of penance after presenting that patriarchal play. It would be a very tongue-in-cheek act of penance, as I hope to show. In any case, the Princess's admonition to her attendants, ‘and praise we may afford / To any lady that subdues a lord’, could well serve as an epigraph. And much of the action—which in this connection includes the wordplay—is seen in terms of warfare and battle, not least from the ladies' point of view.

The most common interpretation of Love's Labour's Lost seems to go along with Berowne's disrespectful and healthily sensual criticism of cloistered study and his romantic belief in the virtue of female beauty, and with the women's ridicule of the pretensions, presumptions and conventions of the men. The men are foolish, vain, not serious in love, cruel in their addiction to verbal cleverness, which is misnamed wit. They need a lesson and fortunately begin to learn it in the course of the play. The women are sensible, realistic, generous, serious in love, altogether morally superior beings. They have had fervent admirers among the more prominent critics and scholars. Let me quote from two introductions to Love's Labour's Lost:

Anne Barton (Riverside edition) stresses the realism of the women:

The Princess and her retinue come from a world outside the confines of Navarre that is colder and more realistic than the playground of the park. They too are witty, and they like to play with words. Unlike the men, however, they play their verbal games without ever losing sight of facts and situations … Throughout the comedy the women are ruthless in their dismemberment of the airy rhetoric, the unexamined conceits and images offered by the men … These suitors judge by courtly outsides alone, in marked contrast to the women, who seize upon manners and traits of character in talking about the men they love and distrust in equal measure.⁵

John Kerrigan (New Penguin edition) admires the emotional maturity of the women:

Shakespeare has made the women much more sensible, sensitive, and generous than the men … Rosaline, Katharine, and Maria have lost their hearts before the play even begins …, and their mistress quickly gives hers away. Aware of their vulnerability, all four cultivate a protective scepticism … The passion which the men display …, although deeply felt and delightful, is immature … It is an aspect of [Berowne's] immaturity that he should groundlessly abuse his mistress for doing the very ‘deed’ which his own ‘affects’ urge … Navarre wants his marriage to follow so hard upon a royal funeral that the baked meats served to the mourners could feed the wedding guests … It is indeed a tribute to the perceptiveness and generosity of the women that, even with this conspicuous example of male inadequacy before them, they agree in principle to marry.⁶

Kerrigan's views, though extremely onesided, are probably more typical than he himself is willing to believe.

Typically, too, the plot is experienced as romantic to the end, beneath the surface of wit and practical joking. The penance which the lords are enjoined is hard but appropriate, and has to be accepted in the spirit of comedy. A happy ending is in sight. And there is a present gain in the victory of common sense over conceit and vanity. Some critics take the final songs to illustrate this admirable realistic attitude.

And now let us examine the evidence. That these particular men, the academicians of Navarre, are fools in many respects need not be disputed. Their vain project is ridiculed implicitly by Shakespeare in the very first lines of the play, spoken by the King—

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;

—and explicitly by one of their own number, Berowne:

Small have continual plodders ever won,
Save base authority from others' books.
.....Too much to know is to know nought but fame;

The upstart crow, no doubt, is having a fling at the university wits, and who knows but that Greene's Groatsworth was itching in his feathers at the time of composing Love's Labour's Lost. His satire is directed at three scholarly follies: the vanity of seeking knowledge for the sake of fame and reputation, the illusion that bookish studies are superior to experience of the real world, and the abuse of language for mere display of cleverness. It is this last of the follies which is chiefly exemplified in the play and which may be assumed to have been the main irritant to the dramatist.

Affectation of speech is linked with cruelty. And this is where a major discrepancy appears. Berowne is described in the second act by a lady who remains anonymous in the Quarto but whom the Folio identifies as Rosaline:

Berowne they call him; but a merrier man,
Within the limit of becoming mirth,
I never spent an hour's talk withal.
His eye begets occasion for his wit;
For every object that the one doth catch
The other turns to a mirth-moving jest,
Which his fair tongue (conceit's expositor)
Delivers in such apt and gracious words
That aged ears play truant at his tales,
And younger hearings are quite ravished;
So sweet and voluble is his discourse.

And here is Berowne described by Rosaline at the end of the play; she now addresses him directly:

Oft have I heard of you, my Lord Berowne,
Before I saw you, and the world's large tongue
Proclaims you for a man replete with mocks;
Full of comparisons and wounding flouts,
Which you on all estates will execute
That lie within the mercy of your wit:

Can this indeed be the same gentleman who is first praised for his ‘becoming mirth’, his ‘fair tongue’, his ‘apt and gracious words’, and his ‘sweet and voluble discourse’? The fact that Rosaline in the first instance seems to have been previously acquainted with Berowne and in the second instance to have only heard of him before the meeting in Navarre is only the least of the anomalies. The very character of Berowne is made inconsistent. And if it is argued that Rosaline's speech to Berowne at the end of the play is part of a revised passage written in some time after the play was finished in its original state, as indeed seems to be the case, this still does not explain why such a glaring inconsistency was allowed to remain.

Now it so happens that one of the other noblemen, Lord Longaville, is censured in Act II by ‘I. Lady’ for

          a sharp wit match'd with too blunt a will;
Whose edge hath power to cut, whose will still wills
It should none spare that come within his power.

It is this same Longaville who devised the penalty announced in the opening scene of the play for any woman coming within a mile of the court. She is to lose her tongue, in Longaville's opinion obviously her most offensive organ. It is Longaville, then, in the beginning of the play, who can be accused of cruelty and who needs to have his knuckles rapped. But in fact neither Longaville nor Berowne demonstrates sadistic tendencies of any kind until we get to the show of the Nine Worthies, which is on the afternoon of the second day of the action and very near the end of the plot. They, with Dumain and Boyet, heckle the poor Worthies mercilessly. One suspects that Shakespeare by that time needed an excuse for Rosaline's dressing-down speech to her lover and belatedly provided it by letting Berowne unexpectedly show this streak of meanness.

Scholars may be fools, and wits may be cruel, but lovers are greater fools, and Shakespeare never tired of saying so in his early comedies. Puck is amazed at the seeming madness of mortal lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream, though the fairies do not manage much better. And Touchstone reminisces and philosophises in As You Like It: ‘We that are true lovers run into strange capers; but as all is mortal in nature, so is all nature in love mortal in folly’. Armado, in a similar quandary in Love's Labour's Lost, asserts that ‘Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love’. Among the strange capers that lovers run into is the compulsion, which even Armado feels, to write sonnets—a compulsion in itself conventional and artificial and even more conventional and artificial in the forms of wit and sentiment it specialises in. There are three regular love sonnets in Love's Labour's Lost, all deifying the objects of worship. They are charming enough, but completely vapid. And the lovers may be charming and still ridiculous, making themselves particularly foolish when they start out as misogynists.

Berowne, at least, is aware of his foolishness. But in love as in wit Berowne is inconsistently portrayed. It is Longaville, in the beginning of the play, who is the true misogynist. Berowne, on the contrary, eloquently defends women and love against the ascetic project of the King. In the received text he is the first person (apart from Costard and Armado) to start a flirtation. At the end of Act III he sends a sonnet to Rosaline and admits his passion. He stands up for Rosaline against her mocking detractors in the great exposure scene, raves about her beauty, and more generally argues the rights of love, elaborating on conceits he used in the opening scene as well as in the sonnet:

Now, for not looking on a woman's face,
You have in that forsworn the use of eyes,
And study, too, the causer of your vow;
For where is any author in the world
Teaches such beauty as a woman's eye?

He once more returns to similar sentiments and imagery in the farewell scene. Nevertheless, in the jarring soliloquy which closes the third act, Berowne tells himself that he has been ‘love's whip’. He professes to despise love, lovers, and women, and in particular himself as a follower of dan Cupid and Rosaline as the object of his passion:

And among three, to love the worst of all;
A whitely wanton with a velvet brow,
With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes;
Ay and by heaven, one that will do the deed
Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard:
And I to sigh for her! to watch for her!

Pitch-balls for eyes can hardly serve as heavenly mirrors. Soliloquising again at the beginning of IV.iii, but now in prose, Berowne resumes in the same strain of disgust:

The king he is hunting the deer; I am coursing myself: they have pitched a toil; I am toiling in a pitch—pitch that defiles:

True enough, his sweeter feelings prevail on this occasion, but after his enthusings on love later in the same long scene he ends both the scene and the act with the remark ‘Light wenches may prove plagues to men that love’. And his very last comments in the play may well be spoken in a new upsurge of bitterness:

Our wooing doth not end like an old play:
Jack hath not Jill: these ladies' courtesy
Might well have made our sport a comedy.

Then, in reply to the King's ‘Come sir, it wants a twelvemonth and a day, / And then 'twill end’, Berowne retorts, ‘That's too long for a play’.

Berowne both as a wit and a lover is two distinct persons. It looks as if early on he took over some of the characteristics of Longaville. Both these noblemen bid pretty equally for importance, as contrasting spirits, in the opening scenes, but perhaps Shakespeare found it difficult or inadvisable to divide his interest between them and concentrated his attention on Berowne, leaving Longaville to sink into near-anonymity. Berowne is undoubtedly the central character of the comedy. But the admired wit and notorious mocker, the romantic sensualist and the contemptuous enemy of sexual love at best make up a paradoxical personality.

Critics have paid surprisingly little attention to these widely divergent aspects of Berowne. The general view seems to be that Berowne in his vilification of Cupid and Rosaline is merely playing for comic effect and actually laughing at his own comic predicament; or else that his rebellious moods represent an intrusion of Shakespeare's private sufferings which has no significance for the over-all interpretation of Berowne's feelings. That Shakespeare's private sufferings played a part in the portrayal of Berowne I am quite willing to believe. That Berowne's contradictory utterances can be assimilated to an unproblematic interpretation of the play I find it hard to accept. Chiefly perhaps because there is a corresponding unconformity in the portrait of Rosaline, and to some extent of the girls as a group.

The women of Love's Labour's Lost come on stage, we are encouraged to imagine, looking young, pretty, pink and white, chattering innocently and merrily, and ready for romantic adventure. In fact they come almost straight out of Lyly's Gallathea, where Diana's nymphs catch one another breaking their vows of chastity almost in the fashion of Navarre's studious companions, and where Diana reproaches them in words partly identical with those of the Princess in Shakespeare's play: ‘What news have we here ladies? Are all in love?’ (The Princess: ‘God bless my ladies! are they all in love … ?’). But in their first conversations with the lords we must surely be struck by the acerbity of their remarks. Berowne begins and is answered by Katharine or Rosaline:

Did not I dance with you in Brabant once?
Did not I dance with you in Brabant once?
I know you did.
How needless was it then to ask the question!
You must not be so quick.
'Tis long of you that spur me with such questions.
Your wit's too hot, it speeds too fast, 'twill tire.
Not till it leave the rider in the mire.
What time o' day?
The hour that fools should ask.

Now this and the next conversation between Berowne and one of the ladies has obviously been misplaced in the context where we find them. But the sharpness of the ladies remains characteristic after this point. ‘The tongues of mocking wenches are as keen / As is the razor's edge invisible’, remarks Boyet when the lords have been routed in the Muscovite scene. The women are far unkinder than the men, and their cruelty is not just that of the conventional coy mistress of the Petrarchan tradition. There is too much malice in some of their speeches. Rosaline, having received flattering verses from Berowne, promises

That same Berowne I'll torture ere I go.
O! that I knew he were but in by the week.
How I would make him fawn, and beg, and seek,

A great deal can be explained and excused by the resentment which the ladies must justly feel after having to camp in the fields, but at least by the end of the play they should have had their fill of revenge without having to prescribe further punishment. Nor is it all just comical pretence, for the girls are as unkind among themselves as they are to their lovers. There is a very unladylike quarrel between Katharine and Rosaline in V.ii. Katharine says Rosaline has ‘a light heart’:

ROS.
What's your dark meaning, mouse, of this light word?
KATH.
A light condition in a beauty dark.
ROS.
We need more light to find your meaning out.
KATH.
You'll mar the light by taking it in snuff;
Therefore I'll darkly end the argument.
ROS.
Look what you do, you do it still i' the dark.
KATH.
So do not you, for you are a light wench.

Or take Rosaline's jibe at Katharine's pockmarked face a bit further on:

My red dominical, my golden letter:
O! that your face were not so full of O's.

This is spiteful enough to merit the Princess's reproach, ‘A pox of that jest! and I beshrew all shrows!’ Indeed all the evidence of the play's dialogue goes to prove that the persons who should really do penance for their cruel wit are neither Longaville nor Berowne but the young ladies. Kerrigan is not alone in thinking them more serious and more mature in love than the men. And so one may think at the beginning. But is this impression kept up? At the end of the game the Princess declares that she and her companions received the letters and favours of their would-be lovers in a spirit of

          courtship, pleasant jest, and courtesy,
As bombast and as lining to the time.
But more devout than this in our respects
Have we not been; and therefore met your loves
In their own fashion, like a merriment.

It is tempting to go further and maintain that the French nymphs are delighted with a chance for a flirtation which has no serious consequences to themselves. They certainly flirt outrageously with Boyet, and the bawdiness of one of their conversations is vulgar enough to impress even Costard. Eric Partridge calls it ‘one of the most “greasy” passages in the whole of Shakespeare’.⁷ Accusations of ‘lightness’ abound in the play. The girls are ‘light wenches’ and ‘mad wenches’. That the lightness implies more than mere verbal frivolousness is also made clear. Berowne directly asserts Rosaline's unchastity—she is ‘one that will do the deed / Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard’. There is no previous discovery of this wantonness, and Berowne speaks as if he and we have known of it all along. But the accusation seems entirely serious and its import a serious enough matter. Shakespeare, as Harold Jenkins once remarked, could hardly have foreseen the age of permissiveness. And in case we think Berowne is imagining things, the unpleasant assertions are repeated a number of times by those of Rosaline's own party. We have just heard Katharine's taunt. And there is an obvious insinuation in Boyet's quip in the hunting scene:

My lady goes to kill horns; but if thou marry,
Hang me by the neck if horns that year miscarry.

There is also an interesting conversation between Berowne and Boyet in the part of Act II which has become muddled in transmission or revision. Most editors think the name of Katharine should here be replaced by that of Rosaline:

BER.
What's her name in the cap?
BOYET.
Katharine, by good hap.
BER.
Is she wedded or no?
BOYET.
To her will sir, or so.
BER.
O you are welcome, sir. Adieu.
BOYET.
Farewell to me, sir, and welcome to you.

Boyet is a strangely bawdy old ‘love-monger’ to be attending a troop of young ladies, and he likes both to tease and to shock. But in any case what he must be hinting here is that Rosaline is promiscuous, and perhaps even that she has had an affair with him which will now be exchanged for one with Berowne. This is not the only place in Love's Labour's Lost where the word ‘will’ is open to an interpretation which was fairly common in Elizabethan jargon, meaning ‘lust’. And it is hard to make sense of the ‘Farewell to me, sir, and welcome to you’ except as an indication that one lover is giving place to another. Perhaps the discovery of wantonness is here. It is worth notice that in Act V Berowne puffs himself up in a speech of twenty-two lines to revile Boyet. Then he surprisingly makes it up with the ‘old mocker’ to flout the Worthies. In this connection it is also important to notice the parallelism between the Rosaline/Berowne/Boyet relationship and the Jaquenetta/Armado/Costard relationship. Moth calls Jaquenetta a ‘light wench’, as Katharine does Rosaline, and since Jaquenetta is with child out of wedlock her lightness is manifest. In the beginning of the play she has been caught carrying on with Costard. 'Tis pity she's a whore, we may think, but love makes strange bedfellows. And so with Berowne and Rosaline. With this distinction: for Armado the catastrophe, as he ambiguously predicts in his letter to Jaquenetta, is a nuptial. For Berowne the catastrophe, in the vulgar sense, is averted.

After this view of the main characters it is hardly necessary to demonstrate that the action as a whole is not romantic. But it may be useful to consider some rather odd details and passages which Shakespeare may have put in as pointers to his drift. First the appearance of the ladies. In Act II where they arrive on the scene they are not only anonymous but featureless, and it is some time before they are visually individualised. In the case of Rosaline she is first described by Berowne in his self-mocking soliloquy as ‘A whitely wanton with a velvet brow, / With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes’, which seems to suggest black eyes but a fair complexion, and he continually talks about her white hand, though as it turns out he may be referring to her glove. It is not till after the middle of the comedy that Rosaline indubitably becomes dark-haired and probably dark-skinned. The taunts of Berowne's companions remind us how ill-admired such a complexion was. To make matters worse, Rosaline may be plain as well, at least if this is implied in Berowne's closing line in Act III: ‘Some men must love my lady, and some Joan’. Katharine, as we have seen, is pock-marked, and Berowne even asserts that she is humpbacked—‘Her shoulder is with child’—though this could be said merely to infuriate Dumain. The Princess, in the eyes of the uncourtly and unbiassed Costard, is the ‘thickest’ of the ladies, an observation at which Her Highness is not amused. Anyway, there is no need to imagine the ladies as particularly gorgeous heroines—this is no Victorian melodrama, and the boys who played the parts may not have been all that pretty. The ravings of the lovers are no reliable evidence in this connection. Armado rivals them in eulogising the beauty of Jaquenetta:

By heaven, that thou art fair, is most infallible; true, that thou art beauteous; truth itself, that thou art lovely. More fairer than fair, beautiful than beauteous, truer than truth itself, have commiseration on thy heroical vassal.

It is precisely this strain of hyperbolical love-speech that Shakespeare wishes to ridicule.

There is an odd little passage which endows Katharine with a sister, now dead. The ladies are talking, as they would be, of Cupid, and Rosaline remarks that ‘he hath been five thousand year a boy’:

KATH.
Ay, and a shrewd unhappy gallows too.
ROS.
You'll ne'er be friends with him: a' kill'd your sister.
KATH.
He made her melancholy, sad, and heavy;
And so she died.

Now why is this sister introduced? It could be to add a dimension to the otherwise rather flat and insignificant portrait of Katharine: she has not only suffered the loss of a sister but learnt the cruelty of love. It could be to put a touch of pathos into the merriment and remind us of the proximity of death to life, which some critics find to be an interesting Leitmotif of the play. But neither of these explanations is satisfying unless it goes along with a more dominant development of character and action. And this I take to be the refusal of serious love which becomes evident on the part of the young ladies. They are not, and do not mean to be, ‘devout’ in love in spite of the expectations aroused on their arrival.

One scene is clearly emblematic. The forenoon of the second day comprised by the action finds the lords and ladies out hunting in separate parties. On the stage we would see the ladies equipped with bows and quivers and probably in hunting costume. Again the visual impression is of the first importance and supplements what we learn in the dialogue. The women would appear as Amazons, not merely hunting the deer but arrayed for battle against the men. It is in this scene that the Princess announces, ‘and praise we may afford / To any lady that subdues a lord’. This is Hippolyta before she is tamed by Duke Theseus.

Then there is the Aquitaine affair. It is strange enough that the ostensible reason for the French embassy which leads to so much conflict and complication, the redemption of the mortgage on Aquitaine, should be quickly and consistently forgotten, with only one brief reminder, until the Princess at parting almost casually mentions ‘my great suit so easily obtain'd’. After all, we are, at the first broaching of the business, given to expect a decision on the morrow, when the packet containing the necessary documents will have arrived. Some matter which was originally in the play could have been lost or jettisoned. What I find more surprising than this lacuna in the action is the nature of the Princess's errand. Aquitaine is described by Boyet in his first speech as ‘a dowry for a queen’, but it appears shortly afterwards that nobody wants it, ‘so gelded as it is’, as Navarre explains: both the French King and Navarre prefer the money. That the lords of Navarre should at first mistake the purpose of the embassy, expecting a demand for the return of Aquitaine rather than a return of the hundred thousand crowns which (according to the French) have gone back and forth between the two sovereigns, is perhaps not surprising. But even Boyet is apparently misinformed. He still speaks of Aquitaine as worth having after the first meeting with Navarre:

I'll give you Aquitaine, and all that is his,
An you give him for my sake but one loving kiss.

It's just like Boyet, of course, to confuse politics and kissing. On top of everything the problem of Aquitaine as Navarre reports it must be almost unintelligible to an audience in the theatre, and one wonders why Shakespeare did not stick to a more simple solution than the complicated cash transactions which he devised. What emerges is that the French are virtually trying to foist Aquitaine on Navarre in order to have his money, and if this is grasped by the audience it detracts considerably from the dignity of the embassy. From that of the Princess, too, it must be added. I believe that Navarre's speech about France's letter, disagreeing as it does with what other information we are given of the business, was a product of revision and that it was meant to deromanticise the royal ambassador. She is highly praised by others, and she praises herself amply, but her conduct and speech during her brief stay in Navarre are not irreproachable. She may be the only chaste woman in the play. She affirms her chastity, and we are given no reason to doubt her on this point. Indeed in the hunting scene she would be associated with Diana as well as Hippolyta, and she is related, as I hinted, to Lyly's Diana. But her modesty is not always above suspicion, and she is capable of joking as bawdily as her attendants. Then there is the little passage where the Forester is introduced:

PRIN.
Then, forester, my friend, where is the bush
That we must stand and play the murderer in?
FOR.
Hereby, upon the edge of yonder coppice;
A stand where you may make the fairest shoot.
PRIN.
I thank my beauty, I am fair that shoot.
And thereupon thou speak'st the fairest shoot.
FOR.
Pardon me, madam, for I meant not so.
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.

This is another of those odd passages where one looks for a motive. Whatever the pun the Princess twists from the Forester's words, why should she wish to indulge her wit to confuse this simple rustic? Why if not to demonstrate her vanity, or to allow Shakespeare to demonstrate it? She may be the only beautiful woman in the play, too, in spite of her ‘thickness’, so we may have one Marilyn to admire. But she shouldn't be the one to say so. And the Forester bit is followed by a speech in which she admits that she hunts the poor deer, which in her heart she pities, in order to show her skill and to win praise and fame, the very prizes which we contemn the lords for seeking in their pursuit of knowledge. She does show pity for the poor Worthies, but her reason for wanting the Worthies show to go on is hardly as admirable as some critics pretend:

Their form confounded makes most form in mirth,
When great things labouring perish in their birth.

And the penance she imposes on the King at the end is ridiculous in its severity:

                                                            but go with speed
To some forlorn and naked hermitage,
Remote from all the pleasures of the world;

There, for twelve months, His Majesty is to endure ‘frosts and fasts, hard lodging and thin weeds’ to see if he deserves to marry her.

Now let us draw in our nets and see what we have. There are four men (or five, counting Armado) who fall in love in spite of vows of celibacy and labour determinedly in their childish courtly fashion to win their mistresses. There are four women who fall out of love in spite of amorous intentions and exert themselves in their pert and petulant fashion to repel their suitors. These cross-purposes would have made for an excellent comic conflict if the motives and the morality of the women had been less obscure. The Petrarchan situation, unattainable mistresses and sighing lovers, and the Petrarchan and Neoplatonic style of the lovers' addresses, eyes and stars and heavenly truth and beauty, are sufficiently prominent for the satire on courtly love conventions to be highly entertaining. But the situation is not quite Petrarchan, for the girls are not proud and aloof but teases and wantons. And in the centre of the abortive pairings is a man of poetic spirit who becomes infatuated in a worthless trollop. His remark about having been ‘love's whip’ makes no sense and must be discounted as a meaningless inconsistency. But he has had sublime thoughts about love which he cannot accommodate to the reality which he experiences, and which are therefore put to shame. And the descent of his mistress from angel to whore is really too painful to be insisted on in a comedy, so we are given a chance to pass over it lightly.

The relationship of the lovers, then, is not entirely Petrarchan, though that may have been the original intention. But nor does it quite represent the caricature of the Petrarchan relationship set out by some of the more overt satirists of the age. Frances A. Yates, who is an authority on the topical allusions and concerns of Love's Labour's Lost, connects Shakespeare's comedy with contemporary dialogues debating the pros and cons of the cult of love, particularly those of John Florio, which in turn were probably triggered by Giordano Bruno's De gli heroici furori, with its anti-Petrarchist dedication.⁸ As Frances Yates translates Bruno's dedication, the Italian philosopher ridicules the typical affected lover who suffers under ‘the tyranny of an unworthy, imbecile, infatuated, wanton, filthy wretch of a woman’.⁹ This could have been a description of Rosaline by a cynical critic. And Berowne's anti-Petrarchist recognition of the ‘pitch that defiles’ could be dialectically opposed to the Petrarchan hyperboles of his eulogies of his beloved, though his disgust does seem too violent for a complaint within the courtly tradition. There are undeniably elements of the Petrarchist and anti-Petrarchist debate in Love's Labour's Lost and they partly explain the seeming contradictions. But it is no intellectual debate, and it is not conducted by characters who hold consistent views. I cannot accept Frances Yates's assertion that ‘Berowne starts as a pronounced anti-Petrarchist’.¹⁰ He surely starts at the very opposite end, as an idealistic devotee of love, and is unexpectedly and temporarily disillusioned. Or his mistress unexpectedly changes and he accordingly. But Shakespeare will not allow us to scoff at Berowne's misdirected passion too comfortably or to completely discredit his Petrarchan hymns to a Rosaline that passes praise.

Neal L. Goldstein has an important article entitled ‘Love's Labour's Lost and the Renaissance Vision of Love’.¹¹ He rightly sees that the satire on love is in keeping with the satire on language (or on the extravagances of both) and that the love theme is at the heart of the comedy. But he wrongly, in my view, regards Love's Labour's Lost as consistently satirical in its treatment of the love theme, probably because he fails to distinguish between the Renaissance vision of love (chiefly composed, as he says, of ‘Florentine Neoplatonism and Petrarchanism’¹²) as embodied and ridiculed in the comedy, and the actual character of the emotional and sexual entanglements which are dramatised. ‘Shakespeare's play’, he writes, ‘seems in its entirety a vehicle for the discarding of the higher ideals of another age’.¹³ He admits that the play does not ‘ever fully make up its mind’ as between the relative dangers of false spirituality and mere sensuality,¹⁴ but he does not ask whether Shakespeare ever fully made up his mind about the romance or evil of love, or whether his characters can be held responsible for their urgent feelings. Or whether Shakespeare invariably saw consummation in marriage as the most desirable goal of the labour of love, as he apparently did, for instance, in Much Ado About Nothing.

There will be no marriages here, except for Armado's three-year contract with Jaquenetta, and unless Longaville and Dumain are more constant than we have reason to suppose. A year is too long to wait for a happy ending under the circumstances, and the ladies are as unlikely to relent as the King and Berowne to fulfil their penance. And this takes me to the final songs, which in my reading of the play constitute no great problem. They seem to me to be an obvious satire on marriage. The cuckoo in spring time ‘on every tree / Mocks married men’, and the owl's exhortation in winter time, ‘To-whit, To-who’, even with roasted crab-apples in the bowl, can hardly recommend the attractions of greasy Joan to finicky courtiers. So Armado goes one way, the lords another.

There is a happy comedy ending for the women. They depart victorious. But their victory is a pyrrhic victory, the victory of the shrews. It has to be faced: Love's Labour's Lost does not do much for feminism. But it is a satire on love, or an ironical exposure of the nature of love, more than a satire on women; or on men, for that matter, for the men naturally have their share of the satire. The ‘Love’ of Love's Labour's Lost does not primarily refer to the feelings of individuals. It is personified Love, the God Cupid, who has laboured and lost.¹⁵ Looked at in that way the men have had a narrow but happy escape and the comic ending is theirs as well.

It may be thought I have read with a jaundiced eye. But perhaps Shakespeare wrote with a jaundiced eye. Or caught the jaundice while writing. There is nothing more similar in manner and matter to his tormented ‘dark lady’ sonnets than parts of Love's Labour's Lost. However, I have said Shakespeare was in two minds. The romantic intention with which he seems to have begun Love's Labour's Lost may not have been deeply deliberated, but it was part of an aristic conception and was not easily abandoned. It continued to govern the plot and to some extent the characters. It inspired a great deal of the poetry, which cannot all be written off as parody. It fused uneasily with the scepticism and cynicism which more and more invaded the play, leaving unconformities in the development of characters and relationships and causing contradictory details. But Shakespeare was astute as well as inspired. He knew he could have it both ways. And he can still satisfy those who want to see Love's Labour's Lost as romance. Jan Kott did not include it in Shakespeare Our Contemporary, and directors are free to make it as charmingly idyllic as they please. But for the full interest of the play I believe we must come to terms with its complexity as well as its perplexity—that which it contains and that which it occasions.

Notes

1. Muriel C. Bradbrook, Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry. London: Chatto and Windus, 1951, p. 212.

2. H. B. Charlton, Shakespearian Comedy. London: Methuen, 1938; University Paperbacks (1966) 1979, p. 47.

3. J. D. Huston, Shakespeare's Comedies of Play. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981, pp. 49-50.

4. Michael Hattaway, Elizabethan Popular Theatre. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982. ‘I firmly believe that the visual texture of these plays equals their verbal elements in importance’ (p. 11).

5. Anne Barton in The Riverside Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974, pp. 175-6. The excerpts are from two separate paragraphs.

6. John Kerrigan, ed., Love's Labour's Lost. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982. The quotation combines excerpts from pp. 27-33.

7. Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy (1948). New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1960, p. 53.

8. Frances A. Yates, A Study of ‘Love's Labour's Lost’. Cambridge University Press. 1936, pp. 104-26.

9. Ibid., p. 105.

10. Ibid., p. 122.

11. Neal L. Goldstein, ‘Love's Labour's Lost and the Renaissance Vision of Love’, Shakespeare Quarterly XXV.3 (Summer 1974), [335]-50.

12. Ibid., p. 336.

13. Ibid., p. 339.

14. Ibid., pp. 349-50.

15. One is again reminded of Lyly's Gallathea.