[In the following essay, Birenbaum analyzes the themes of will and desire in Love's Labour's Lost and illustrates how these themes are developed through the actions of the characters.]

King Ferdinand of Navarre has persuaded his three companion lords to join him in three years of study without women around, and without much food or sleep either. It does not take long for that good idea to fall apart. After the four aspiring lovers sigh aloud their stanzas of Petrarchan passion and together find out each other's treason, Berowne proclaims the new philosophy they have all been waiting for, simply to justify their male humanness:

From women's eyes this doctrine I derive: They are the ground, the books, the academes, From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire.

(4.3.298-300)¹

The woman's “eye” is, we understand, synecdoche for her body and symbol for her spirit. Women are the ultimate reality before whom all books are pretense. Of course, that means the beloved women, but women are to be loved because of the Sublime that they embody. Knowing them is knowing life. One (a man) sees that, in women's eyes, truth and beauty are the same.

All of this is consistent with Petrarchan-Neoplatonic stylization, providing as it does a helpful fusion of the sensual, the aesthetic, and the spiritual as an essential affirmation of life's values. And yet, the women in the play have something more specific to teach about what life is and how it works. Berowne's dark lady, Rosaline, a model, as far as she is developed, of independent spirit within the bounds of propriety, is the lady one thinks of first. The Princess of France may be less vivacious, yet she is pivotal in her control of the action and also in her expression of doctrine. Editing the Oxford edition of the play, G. R. Hibbard calls her “the plays still centre” (41), which is nice, but she is, I think, both more dynamic than that and perhaps a touch acerbic. The Princess is a tough-minded and clear-seeing leader of her entourage, observing human nature with a typically Shakespearean quality of ironic sympathy.

When the ladies are left to their own hunting party, having been denied full courtly reception by the royal vow, the nameless Princess has a curious, unnecessary exchange with a hapless forester, who gets caught in her quibbles and cannot find his way out again. In a long footnote to the old Variorum edition, H. H. Furness provides an appreciative paraphrase of the episode by Joseph Hunter, writing in 1845. Ralph Berry touches upon it in a discussion of the different attitudes toward words that characters represent (72). Otherwise, the episode has not, to my knowledge, been discussed. It runs through lines 7 to 40 in the first scene of Act 4. First, the Princess professes herself reluctant to “play the murderer” by killing beasts (line 8). The forester sets her in a position where she may “make the fairest shoot” (10). She pretends to think he means because she is the fairest lady (11-12). He explains that he doesn't (13). She pretends to think he is withdrawing the supposed compliment and laments that she is not fair (14). He protests helplessly (16). She gives him a tip for telling her the blunt truth: “Fair payment for foul words is more than due” (19). He attempts a diplomatic resolution: “Nothing but fair is that which you inherit” (20). She condudes that he is praising her, alas, because of the reward (23). Then, returning to her reluctance to murder the deer, she reflects at some length on a peculiarity of human nature: if she shoots well and kills, she will do ill (25). In a mood that is, I sense, whimsically sardonic, she suggests that she will earn credit for mercy if she fails to wound and credit for skill if she succeeds (26-27). However—another twist of logic—she would be praised for her aim even though she was aiming really for the deer, not the praise (28-29). She will go on, of course, to kill a deer between the scenes, a pricket: a buck in its second year.

The Princess's theme is the inevitable impurity of motives. She expands her psychological analysis further:

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

(31-33)

Our highest goals are corrupted by devious drives that make us pursue them. Inner truth, the heart, yields to the outer, or superficial, lure of fame, for glory or praise. It is only to be praised for shooting well that she will shoot at all, to the deer's cost. The Princess's suave attendant Boyet turns the theme into a glib gender joke: Don't women dominate their husbands for some kind of praise, abandoning (presumably) their true nature? (36-38). The Princess responds by giving her argument another twist: Yes, and such praise they deserve, for they are subduing lords, if they are ladies (39-40). This group of ladies, meanwhile, find themselves perplexed by the will of some lords who are behaving rather peculiarly.

All of this dialogue may seem trivially jocular, even annoyingly petty. However, the Princess's reflections provide a shrewd perspective on the play's psychological atmosphere, its life-sense. As such, it underlies the conflicts and movements within the individual characters and among them. Such reflections help to generalize the larger activities, eliciting symbolic force out of them. The Princess's thoughts suggest, therefore, a revealing feature of Shakespeare's sense of life, of how the mind works and helps to constitute personalities.

What is the Princess talking about? The desire for praise undermines the virtue for which we are praised. This is demonstrated by the self-conscious quibbling about the forester's compliment (fair is foul and foul is fair, as we will hear somewhere else) and continued implicitly in the meditation on hunting that follows it. Her thoughts do no not keep her from the kill; however, they are strangely unsettling and seem to strike a nerve in her own mind. Motives in general are not simply mixed, they are paradoxically devious. Since we want the right things for the wrong reasons and the wrong things for the right reasons, value is not the result of a choice between alternatives. Rather, it is itself an involuted situation, emphatically problematic. Thus self-congratulation or simply a concern for the regard of others undermines our worthier thoughts, making integrity questionable. The pleasure of being praised takes over the mind automatically even when one is praised for what is obviously easy or for merely being what one is—such as a good-looking woman or a princess—even when the praise is patent courtesy. So we manoeuvre through life on two planes, split between that normally unspoken realm of being (slippery but all-too ordered) and the overt, more manageable reality that it seems to belie, which is absolutely indispensable but inevitably suspect.

The Princess's paradoxes are not merely facetious; they grasp regrettable truth. The quality of quibbling captures the human spirit's roundabout way of doing business, but also something of its essential isolation. The play's continual hail of wit shows many minds turned inward together, playing upon their own processes—not just linguistics but the powers of response, reasoning and reflection to which language gives body. The only questions are how truly conscious the minds can be of their own activity and how willing these minds are to see each other's, and the answers have something to do with the irresistible sumptuousness of pride, that delirious lust for glory. Perhaps the questions and answers are both what is at stake in the skirmishes of wit.

As the fable shows (by which I mean the structure of the story that in itself conveys meaning), the young men's commitment to study must fail—(as Berowne could see right off) but so must their giddy pursuit of women (as he could not). They need some grounding, the Princess and Rosaline seem to think, in the severity of conscious solitude. At the end of the play, courtly festivities, which have deteriorated into preposterous bitterness, are interrupted by sudden news that the Princess's father has died. Entreating still his case as a lover, the King is told by the Princess that she will hear his suit after he has spent a year in a hermitage learning something basic to all other learning; and Berowne is told by his lady Rosaline that he must spend the same time seeing if his wit can amuse the sick and dying in a hospital. It is the necessities of “cormorant devouring Time” that must be studied, and in Shakespeare's usage, Time is neither cosmic nor historical but a very human term for the experience and the process of mortality: a focus for alarm, grief, and regret but also the whirligig of revenges and the resolution of quandaries. It is the time of one's own life and the necessity driving us all. The sociable young king must spend a year just being himself, as complicated as that is, “doing his time,” as we say; the court wit will for a year see if his jests can amuse some souls in grievous pain. The immediate experience of life and death is to ground any further values, including the love of one genuine person for another.

The Princess's reflections play upon the typically Shakespearean concern with will and personal desire. Given her perceptions, how stable can will be? The terms are set in the scene that first brings the male and female courts together. When the Princess arrives, she sends Boyet to announce her presence to the King:

Haste, signify so much; while we attend,
Like humble-visag'd suitors, his high will.
BOYET.
Proud of employment, willingly I go.
PRINCESS.
All pride is willing pride, and yours is so.

(2.1.33-36)

She is accepting his self-conscious graciousness, satirizing it, and philosophizing about it, all at once. Trapped in “willing pride,” he is no more free than the forester to straightforward response or simple action. When the King arrives, he explains why he cannot accommodate her at court:

KING.
You shall be welcome, madam, to my court.
PRINCESS.
I will be welcome then: conduct me thither.
KING.
Hear me, dear lady; I have sworn an oath.
PRINCESS.
Our Lady help my lord! He'll be forsworn.
KING.
Not for the world, fair madam, by my will.
PRINCESS.
Why, will shall break it will, and nothing else.

(94-99)

Here and in what follows, the speakers' minds play upon the differences between will as eventuality (what will, or shall, occur), as desire, and as intention, between dedicated will (or determination) and casual will (expedient choice), among which possibilities one must find some conscious orientation. The lords' reality has already become hopelessly entangled in the once-free will of commitment. When they find themselves trapped by what they have willed in the very recent past, the dilemma, as Berowne represents it, sounds pretty serious: “Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves, / Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths” (4.3.357-58).

Just before the ladies meet the lords, they describe their previous impressions of them. Margaret says of Longaville, “Nothing becomes him ill that he would well” and complains of his “sharp wit match'd with too blunt a will” (2.1.46, 49). In the ladies we see perhaps a more effective form of will, especially in the Princess's service as ambassador. When Berowne asks whether the lady Rosaline is married, Boyet responds: “To her will, sir, or so” (211), reflecting upon her independence. All such play with “will” in Shakespeare (including Sonnets 135 and 136) dramatizes the predicament that we will will whether we will or won't. Shakespeare satirizes the motif and romance and logic in A Midsummer Night's Dream, with Lysander's justification of his Puck-induced change of loves: “The will of man is by his reason sway'd, / And reason says you are the worthier maid” (2.2. 114-15).

In his sharpest criticism of the King's project, Berowne shows specifically how it demonstrates the problem of will:

So study evermore is overshot:
While it doth study to have what it would,
It doth forget to do the thing it should;
And when it hath the thing it hunteth most,
'Tis won as towns with fire, so won, so lost.

(1.1.141-45)

We have here first of all a variation on the Princess's theme, also expressed through the metaphor of hunting as an exercise of will. Study, Berowne says, is another form of hunting, one that must, in fact, overshoot its target. It is more than the acquisition of knowledge, it is the determined pursuit of desire: studying to satisfy will; and the force of desire overtakes its own goal, becoming more important than what it desires and even more important than what it should desire. When we pursue wisdom, therefore, we can never attain it, because the desire diminishes our judgement. What we get is not what we were really after. Achievement is self-defeating.

Playing within this trap expresses the pleasure and the frustration of it at the same time. There was never any truly free will, but we have no alternative such as determinism. We need to will and just as much to see our will frustrated, or worse yet, lead us to disaster. Most dramatically and most tellingly, we need to be conscious of both our will and our frustration, our fine desires and their absurdity. The play is, among other things, therefore, a study of the snarled relation between affection and affectation—the frequent word affect goes both ways—for the lovers' awareness of the lovely ladies seems utterly inseparable from their awareness of themselves.

And through all the characters we see how this confusion of consciousness entangles the ever-fascinating tie between language and logic, reminding us that language lets us inform and misinform each other, know ourselves and get lost in ourselves, bringing us together and keeping us apart. It twists us about in our own minds, entertaining us and dismaying us. It is beautiful and lofty, silly and arbitrary, making consciousness and unconsciousness together, all of which this comedy dramatizes with emphatic though often maddening energy. When poor Berowne renounces courtly eloquence, “taffeta phrases, silken terms precise” (5.2.406), for “russet yeas and honest kersey noes” (413), he falls promptly, before the sentence is finished, into a sneaking affectation, “My love to thee is sound: sans crack or flaw” (415), as Rosaline cannot keep herself from pointing out. Try as he might, he will not cease to be self-conscious. If this is pride, it is an almost ineradicable quirk, like the air bubbles that one presses down in one place and sees pop up in another. The ordeal his lady assigns him may not transform his consciousness but may deepen it instead. After jesting among the incurables, he may give up humour in despair, but one may well hope for the alternative: a Shakespearean humour at its best, acknowledging death and pain in their definitive place, enriching life with profound laughter. Hopefully, a right Rosaline would want him still Berowne.

In the broadest terms, this exploration of will and the choice of value arises over and over in Shakespeare's plays as conflicts between polity and person, the court and the “green world,” civilization and the bestial drives of “appetite.” Polarities between art and nature or illusion and reality are often touted as themes of this play and all the others for that matter, but these seem to me somewhat crude terms considering the Shakespearean sensibility. The common denominator of all such contrasts is human consciousness and the basic facts of life, facts that include mortality itself with all the implications thereof and, in modern terms, the unconscious mind. In more Shakespearean terms, we get the long dramatic dialogue between Desire and Necessity that is human life. We become ourselves by willing our desires. Will learns its true nature by what it comes up against: the necessity of steadfast drives within, the will of perversely inconvenient other people without, and death. Such conflict is particularly dynamic, almost calling for dramatic expression: drama posing our drives in opposed perspectives, working out the implications of their own entanglement, and following all this with the alarm of consciousness. Will must be implicated in passion, our awareness of others, and our feelings about being mortal.

In its psychological philosophy, the Princess's speech is far beyond the scope of the would-be scholars in the play, struck as she is with paradoxes about behaviour and consciousness, values and aspirations, identity and convention. The full meaning of these paradoxes lies in the quality of her response to them. Her tone, of course, is her character, and it is also the spirit of the plays perspective. This tone, I think we have seen, maintains a blend of whimsy, irony, a shrewd sense of mind, a touch of self-mockery, a marvelling at human oddities, and finally a pathos that is all the more convincing because of the drier elements accompanying it. All the tonalities together make up one wise viewpoint conveying a quasi-amused compassion for both the animal and the hunter, for the forester who is also her target, and, by symbolic expansion, for the condition of life.

The Princess cannot shoot just in order to kill because pride intervenes with its own motivations and its off-putting sense of reality. There is no dear will at hand here, especially since she is apparently just trying to amuse herself to pass the time. She does not have a choice among alternative values, but neither is she indecisive. We certainly cannot say that the alternative logics deconstruct one another, leaving us with no implied meaning. The view she conveys depends upon ambiguity, ambivalence, and an inclusive attitude toward contradictions, a natural indeterminacy. However, it is a coherent view, not free of meaning, not trapped in arbitrary words or self-sustaining codes, but expressing life through an intricate relationship to language that is almost as subtle as consciousness itself. It confirms the fundamental presence of a conscious self as a standard of mature understanding.

For Shakespeare, there are naturally two basic ways to resolve a dilemma like the Princess's and the lords' dilemma that it echoes—the comic, that is, and the tragic and this play represents them both. The Princess herself is poised between both tonalities, even in this speech, when she talks whimsically of murder, and everyone joins her at the end in some degree of solemnity. In tragedy the discrepancy between our feelings and our purposes is understood with great pain; in comedy, of course, we see how lightly we deserve to take the problem. From both perspectives, the conflict is seen as naturally human, moving us toward a kind of honest humility, humility as a secular virtue, with more strength than meekness, assured of will: the humility shown by Cordelia from her first appearance. It denotes a vulnerability that is an end in itself, a poise with which one can live in a creative spirit, inclusive of feelings in as broad a range as possible. Shakespeare's reading of romance forms fostered such a range of awareness.

The main fable of Love's Labour's Lost emphasizes three points about its characters. First, the gentlemen overvalue books, and they undervalue women. Learning, they assume, will cultivate the male mentality in isolation, but living knowledge involves people. Second, they are youthfully facile in their commitments. The reason given for their penance is the breaking of oaths: what is needed is, therefore, clarification of will and its implications. Third, they trust in the dream of glory which evaporates before the immediacy of personal feelings, or, to put it with a different emphasis, they are inappropriately optimistic about the possibility of transcending mortality, to the gates of glory, by the means of self-will. They find a surer strength in that source of grace that a Petrarchan calls a woman's eyes. And the way to find this clarity—in King Lear and Othello at least as much as in this play—is to let oneself be egregiously foolish, recognizing, in fact, that so one has been, inevitably, to begin with.

Most of the males of the play are proudly committed to a style of life. That is foolishness, but it is also a sense of flair or vivacity: it characterizes their vitality, gives it character. And they take upon themselves a kind of grace, even though it is not yet the best kind. It cannot, of course, take into full account the ways they must live but it is a way they will live. Both as scholars and as lovers, the King of Navarre and his friends have been involved in a program of self-fashioning, to borrow Stephen Greenblatt's good phrase. As an act of will working against human necessity, however, self-fashioning can be for Shakespeare a dubious undertaking.

Now, theatre itself is a way of fashioning selfhood, and Shakespeare's theatre reminds us repeatedly of both its own limits and its capacities for self-transcendence. In both ways, it represents life ontologically: Prospero's spirits and “cloud-capped tow'rs” on the one hand and, on the other, the “thin air into which they melt”; the “stuff / As dreams are made on” and the sleep that “rounds” our little life. Within Love's Labour's Lost occur two episodes of parodic theatre, both of which demonstrate the limits of self-fashioning and the ultimate truth of the given self. The lords appear before the ladies ineptly and implausibly disguised as Russians, their wonderful secret having been overheard and revealed by the officious Boyet. The ladies toy with the “actors” and easily demolish their illusion. Then, Armado and the villagers try to stage a pageant of the Nine Worthies to help the lords entertain the ladies. The ungrateful lords rag them mercilessly, hypersensitive, one may feel, about their own fiasco. Both bits of theatre, which Shakespeare stages somewhat uncomfortably, prove to be humblings of affectation in a quasi-ritual manner; yet they are also games lovingly foolish.

We don't know that Holofernes and Nathaniel can benefit much from their humiliation—although we admire their moments of farcic-tragic dignity—but the main point lies in Shakespeare's theatre, not theirs, in the general fable, which calls for a wholesale disgracing. The humiliation of Armado's page Moth seems quite superfluous: the boy is actually the most adroit satirist in the play, flitting lightly about his victim and having more fun than anyone else. But satire is also a form of self-fashioning, in the cultivation of perspicuous aplomb, and all the satirists must take their dose of sobriety along with the fools. While Navarre and Berowne endure themselves for a year, Armado will hold the plough for Jaquenetta (and two years longer). Even the Princess, the leader of the female wits and the best critic in the play, is brought down at the end, by the old news of death: memento mori. All the critics withdraw, as the play withdraws, into the silence from which a renewed sense of being can emerge.

Eccentricity, then, is self-fashioning with uneasy balance. In this mode, the self doesn't quite fit in to the background world of others with its collusive codes of decorum but commits instead to the luxuriance of its own being. Of course, the affected are star-struck with themselves, convinced of universal admiration. But even such tenuous grandeur may convey something definitive about being a self, both about the self's isolation (preening) and its need for others (strutting). It is will enlarged under a kind of compulsion. It is one of the endless forms of self-dramatization that Shakespeare himself dramatizes, alert constantly to the ironies that consciousness imposes upon itself, ironies about being and doing, about immediacy and imagination, about reality, therefore, and art. The chief irony lies in the fact that such terms cannot be separated.

The result of insight like this should be, and for Shakespeare would have to be, “living art,” a form of life deliberately created to be admirable. It is a phrase Navarre uses in his opening address, proclaiming his ideal: he and his companions will perfect themselves as works of art by the way they live, in a glory that will be the ultimate response of culture to the ultimate evidence of vulnerability, our mortality. In his own practice, imagining Navarre for us, Shakespeare reverses the thought. Living art is, writes William C. Carroll, “the very goal toward which the play drives” (199); it is the goal, in fact, that almost all of the plays attain, most explicitly in The Winter's Tale, with its living statue of Hermione. We have, then, art that lives not just because it survives but because it carries so substantially the qualities of living in its imaginative experience, in which the glory of being is exactly the same as the glory of imagining and being imagined. Navarre would fulfill art by bringing it into life; Shakespeare, by bringing life as fully as can be into art—and then by giving it back again. The project that the King of Navarre and his companions undertake at the start of the play is lightly Faustian. Their will to study should lead to some satisfaction beyond contingency. Notoriously, their academy boasts no syllabus or reading list: we cannot tell what it is that they are going to study. And yet neither the lords nor Shakespeare is being evasive, for the focus is upon their motivation, and, as usual in the plays, motivation is not essentially personal or idiosyncratic as it is in naturalistic fiction; it is, rather, thematic and broadly psychological, expressing the nature of the human mind. The first line of the play makes clear what the King is after: it is in fact fame, the same theme the Princess will descant upon from a different direction:

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

(1.1.1-7)

That the idea is not very well thought out is the main joke of the play, but it is facile to see the plan only as folly. Quickly and pleasantly, the idea makes its challenge.

The King and his friends, we can safely assume, have not mastered already the achievements of logic, medicine, law, and theology like Faustus. However, they too seek a glory that will stand up to Time and transience, a sufficiency of being. “Fantastic and contrived as they are,” wrote Bobbyann Roesen (later Anne Barton), “those absurd vows to which the four friends commit themselves in the initial scene spring from a recognition of the tragic brevity and impermanence of life that is peculiarly Renaissance” (412). The King explains to Berowne that study will lead to a “godlike recompense,” to know “things hid and barr'd […] from common sense” (1.1.58, 57), meaning ordinary perception. Their conception of purpose is often compared with Shakespeare's own as he proclaimed it in the sonnets, and no doubt this was a driving power in his creative plan. “So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee” (no. 18). In Navarre, we have the drive itself. I do not want to make it sound too heavy, as Shakespeare this time surely does not, yet it does have, with Faustus, a Renaissance ring.

Such fame is an important Renaissance version of what I have called “symbolic integrity,” the conviction that expressions of the spirit must be substantial or spirit itself cannot be real, whether they be honour, divine rights, ceremonies, reputation (also called “fame,” as in this play), names, or poetry (Birenbaum 137 esp.). It is also related to what we can call “optimization,” a quality of aristocratic and romance rhetoric that is particularly foreign to modern mentality, giving substantial reality to what is superbly human, as in Boyet's account of “matchless Navarre” as “the sole inheritor / Of all perfections that a man may owe” (2.1.5-6): not hyperbole but superlative truth. (To accommodate the wicked, we might use the term attributive intensity.) The effect is a kind of inverted projection, experiencing the other perhaps as a dream of the self. In aristocratic romance terms, the dream has its definitive truth, but, as the Princess implies when she fends off the forester's compliments, the possibility of such truth must be repeatedly tested. The King's exalted vision projects what must be possible; the Princess is there to show him what “must” may mean.

In his proclamation to his three companions, the King expects of fame a grace “in the disgrace of death” (1.1.3). “Grace,” it would seem, is the most important word in romance sensibility, and as John Dixon Hunt has shown, this play is very much about the way that grace can encompass time to achieve full human meaning. The implications of grace can be explored with all qualities of consciousness, and it is perhaps the primary function of the romantic comedies and romances to define its full scope. The theme is developed most fully in The Winter's Tale, where it is embodied in Queen Hermione, though it seems to me especially moving and subtle in Measure for Measure, where Angelo, the judge, shocked to discover his unacceptable humanity, reflects in dismay: “Alack, when once our grace we have forgot, / Nothing goes right; we would and we would not” (4.4.31-32). Measure for Measure and The Winter's Tale also seem to me Shakespeare's most poignant treatments of the tangles that desire and will can make between them, what we need grace for. The grace that Shakespeare's plays move toward is not, of course, “that loose grace / Which shallow laughing hearers give to fools:’ that Rosaline, making a careful distinction, accuses Berowne of courting (5.2.851-52). Discussing Berowne's peroration on women's eyes, Carroll says: “The play argues that a more imaginative sympathy is necessary, a ‘special grace’ that still eludes the lords” (107). Combining social, esthetic, and spiritual dimensions in one ultimate sense of the way to be, summing up religion, love, aristocratic idealism, and eloquence, romance grace is the factor that can reconcile will and necessity. Grace permits will to embrace necessity in a creative spirit. Symbolized in the image of a woman appearing as both goal and guide, it provides an orientation to the world that makes being feel fully meaningful in itself, in the face of time and mortality. In this play the women are rather brittle and peppery, maybe less “gracious” than usual, in fact, and, if the wisdom they lead the men to is sublime, they are quite matter-of-fact in themselves. They bespeak a deflating grace.

The “grace” that the King speaks of is probably no more than adornment, yet it should be able to resist its contrary, he tells us, “the disgrace of death.” Now, “disgrace” usually has its modern meaning in Shakespeare's plays, or meanings close to it. The thought of death as in itself a humiliation to contemplate is disturbingly suggestive. Death brings, in this consideration, not blind terror or guilt or a sense of waste to life, but an awareness that makes all our efforts and achievements seem shameful. All the proud work of willpower breeds its own worst fear: how deathly embarrassing that we have to die! The thought is both grotesque and only ambiguously Christian. Aside from this familiar meaning, however, the word also had a literal sense now obsolete: “want of grace” esthetically speaking (OED 7). Castiglione described his famous term sprezzatura as “la disgrazia della affetazione,” which Sir Thomas Hoby (1561) rendered as “a certain disgracing,” “the disgrace of curiositie”—that is, of eccentricity “a certain disgracing to cover art withall” (286). Following this meaning, the King sees death as the depriver of grace, negating value and meaning in life, along with man (and certainly with woman—) made beauty. Longaville repeats the King's antithesis with its double meaning when he asserts, in his sonnet to Maria, that her love and “graciousness” will undo the shame of his vow-breaking: “Thy grace being gain'd cures all disgrace in me” (4.3.64).

Navarre and his companions are commonly seen as foolish and immature; yet they are sincere, their undertaking is significant, and fortunately it cannot work. As soon as it has been explained, Berowne has seen both the problem and the solution in the general terms I have been using:

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.

(1.1.148-51)

Nevertheless, the King and his companions, with different degrees of enthusiasm, intend to follow their will in a grand effort that will win them praise. Clearly, they engage in what they think they should want, even what they want to want, and their ideals are by and large enlightened ones, pursuing knowledge after all and the Castiglionian image of nobility as realization of the culture's highest values. Nevertheless, although they are no Tamburlaines slaughtering gloriously, they are in all sincerity “overreachers” still, as Harry Levin called Marlowe and his heroes. The Princess herself, just before the deer-killing speeches, seeing from the distance a rider she thinks is the King racing up a hill, jests admiringly, “Whoe'er a' was, a' showed a mounting mind” (4.1.4). At any rate, Shakespeare has been said to be criticizing so many contemporary themes in this play that we might as well add the topic of Marlovian ambition.

The Princess's line of thought suggests also a still more fundamental view of personality that the play repeatedly demonstrates. It is based upon a radical but urbane ambiguity. A modest irony is its rhetoric. The great pair of songs that end the play, on spring and winter, are most important for the balance between them, as Carroll argues particularly well (Ch. 6), but also for the balance within them. The seasons are equally beautiful and disturbing, but also “Winter” suggests the libertine's fun as well as the cuckold's shame. Yet there are in the play two kinds of balance that are more important. The first lies in the characters' ambiguous awareness of their own motivations, which focusses their sense of what and who they are—balancing pride and humility, self and others, desire and necessity, life and death—but, most centrally and specifically, purposefulness and the involuted nature of desire, as will hears its own ironic echoes. It is not just that our desires are mixed or that they are uncertain but also that they are mixed and uncertain because they arise amid the broad sense of our being—being our particular selves human. We will as we are, responding continually to anxieties and passing satisfactions and the imagination's strange demands. That the princess makes her quizzical observations as she self-consciously poses herself to take a creature's life suggests, I think, such implications, or at least supports them, in an emblematic fashion.

Understanding oneself, in the way the Princess seems to do and in the way she would like Navarre to do if he is to marry her, implies a thoroughly problematic sense of human nature. We will seek glory, though it can never be enough, just as we will hope continually to prevail in games of banter. We will take ourselves too seriously and we will be able to remember once more how silly that is. We will want what won't help and for the best reasons make life more problematic still. Such thoughts suggest the second kind of balance, a paradoxical attitude toward character and therefore toward life as a personal phenomenon. The response to such insight is, continually for Shakespeare, one of respect for what we are up against being ourselves. For Lear, Macbeth, Richard II, and Mark Antony, as I have argued in my book The Art of Our Necessities, tragic effect depends upon the integrity of their fallacies. Shakespeare dramatizes the challenge they present with compelling urgency, so it is properly appalling to realize, as we do from the start, how utterly destructive of themselves and of others it must be.

Such a problematic view of character invokes, therefore, a deep kind of sympathy as a principle of life: to comprehend experience is to care about it. For all that has been written about the satire in this play, what is most striking, I think, is how genial its humour is, which means how affectionate toward foibled humanity. Of course the play ridicules affectation of various sorts; here we have an astute geniality, which sees into people rather than through them as is likely to be the case in a comedy of manners or of humours. Love's Labour's Lost dramatizes throughout what a pleasure innocent affectation can be, both for those who strut and those who watch. Armado, for one, is very much a stage character, made to thrive perfectly in a specialized theatrical language. Yet how splendid it is to say, “The heaving of my lungs provokes me to ridiculous smiling” (3.1.73-74), or to feel one's own lungs heave as one hears it. How right his affected language can be when at the end he proclaims he has “seen the day of wrong through the little hole of discretion” (5.2.716-17). If Shakespeare is glancing satirically at any of his contemporaries—such as Harvey, Nashe, Chapman, or Raleigh—perhaps he did not wholly despise them. His ideal, rather, is expressed humorously by the young page, Moth, when he wants to explain how they can present Hercules killing a snake in their pageant: “to make an offense gracious, though few have the grace to do it” (5.1.130-31).

We observe almost all the characters of the play through a doubling lens, or with some kind of ambiguity that softens judgement. The ladies are distinctly cool as well as charming. The King, Dumain, and Longaville are fairly superficial yet are undoubtedly worthy of a lady's love; along with Berowne, they are sincere enough, as far as they go. Nevertheless, the Princess remains suspicious, perhaps in order to justify her denouement. She had said, quite unfairly, of their Russian escapade, “They do it but in mockery merriment” (5.2.139). The lords do not know the ladies as well as a realist would like, but they know them better than Romeo knows Juliet before marrying her into mortal danger, which is quite enough to let the conventions carry their own conviction. At the end, Rosaline still sees Berowne as more of a glib prankster than we have known him to be: his major show of scepticism has been healthful rather than cynical, and it is willingly put aside, both for the King and for the lady. His “great tribute to love's educative power,” which “lyrical emotion suffuses,” is joyfully heartfelt (Brooks li). Similarly, Margaret describes Lord Longaville as one with a sharper wit and weaker will than Shakespeare shows in him, with his eye more on the fable perhaps than characterization. Like the Hector of Troilus and Cressida, Berowne embraces the plan he disapproves of, getting credit for being admirable in contradictory ways, as wise critic and as reliable good fellow. He is supposed to be an enemy of love, although he is the one who resists the study project because it leaves out women. Such discrepancies may indicate authorial revision or carelessness or they may reflect, as I think, a tolerance for inconsistency built into both romance style and Elizabethan theatrical technique. In any case, it leaves us with a problematic sense of character and of the kind of reality that literature can point to more clearly than it can describe, like the play's continual tension between the fun and the aggression of language games.

The play's ambiguous enjoyment of romantic love carries over to its notoriously, wonderfully ambiguous conclusion. On the one hand, the four Jacks really do love their four Jills (or Lauras), and they will prove it by undergoing the conventional lover's ordeal by sacrifice; on the other hand, the four men must love four women, and they have yet to appreciate what that means. These sensible women are here to attend to some solidly realistic business: a specific sum of money and territorial claims, but the reality of death is the final counterweight to romance. When the new queen turns back to the world that is less ambiguously real, she leaves Navarre in a state of crisis. The future will depend upon whether or not the gentlemen really are in love and what kind of reality their love can have, and for the ladies to mean anything, there must be some question.

But, though Love's Labour's Lost ends with a solemn dose of reality, it is not simply open-ended. We have a final balance in sobered romance, romance fleshed out with present consciousness as romance always is in Shakespeare, but now in a dramatically explicit manner. Grace is clearly available, and its terms are defined. The lovers' test for “a year and a day” is a romantic measure of time, as Hibbard observes, and the “forlorn naked hermitage” to which the King is assigned is an appropriately vague and hyperbolic romantic place (26); and the familiar motif of heroes undergoing ordeals to attain brides comes with a built-in expectation of success, which we have a right to if there is no clear indication otherwise. The form of the fable itself, but also the play's sense of geniality, prevail to carry the plot forward. Thus a solemnly happy ending is projected as a very strong probability beyond our play as we imagine romance extending into mortal time, carrying with it the deeper sense of grace that Shakespeare will draw out of the romance mode and style time and again in comedies and tragedies alike.

We should not dismiss, therefore, an impression that the men will prove their worth and claim their brides. Yet we don't want to know that it will happen, for the focus is not merely on the either/or question: will they marry or not? If we return to the Princess's theme of will and purpose, we can see what it is that the men must do. When she takes aim at the King of Navarre, she is neither hunter nor Cupid. She is asking of life something more meaningful than the roundabout sport of hunting for praise. The ambiguous ending is realistic, therefore, not just because life is uncertain or because romance oversimplifies love or comedy gives easy answers. Off on their trials, the men must suspend their own intentions, break the bond between desire and glory. Isolated from the society that gives easy admiration, they will more seriously endure humiliation through a “disgracing” of the will, so they must not be assured of their success. They must have serious purposes aside from their own gratification. They must let the process of getting there be more real than the goal, living in the problematic Time that comes. They may free their will, perhaps, by willing what they do not want. How do we achieve the wisdom that comes from not wanting it? How do we attain the love that comes from not insisting upon it? Perhaps the men are to demonstrate for the Princess what life must make possible if we are to feel sincere. Things must be held in abeyance at the point where desire does not determine its own fulfillment. Is this a non-ending or a resolution of the Princess's dilemma? Is it a frustration of will or a dramatic communication about the nature of will and the way one may have it?

Notes

1. All Shakespeare quotations are from The Arden Shakespeare editions.

Works Cited

Berry, Ralph. “The Words of Mercury.” Shakespeare Survey. Ed. Kenneth Muir. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1971.

Birenbaum, Harvey. The Art of Our Necessities: Form and Consciousness in Shakespeare. Bern: Peter Lang, 1989.

Brooks, Harold F. Introduction: A Midsummer Night's Dream. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 1979.

Carroll, William C. The Great Feast of Language in “Love's Labour's Lost.” Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976.

Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtier. Three Renaissance Classics. Ed. Burton A. Milligan. New York Scribner's, 1953, 246-618.

Furness, H. H., ed. Love's Labour's Lost: A New Variorum Edition. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1904.

Hibbard, G. R., ed. Introduction. Love's Labour's Lost. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990.

Hunt, John Dixon. “Grace, Art and the Neglect of Time in Love's Labour's Lost.” Shakespearean Comedy. Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 14. Ed. David Palmer and Malcolm Bradbury. London: Edward Arnold, 1972, 173-92.

Roesen, Bobbyann. “Love's Labour's Lost.” Shakespeare Quarterly 4 (October 1953): 411-26.