[In the following essay, Lennam contends that the principal figures in Love's Labour's Lost resemble characters found in traditional morality plays.]

… a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions. These are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourish'd in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion. But the gift is good in those in whom it is acute and I am thankful for it.

(IV. ii. 61-67)

Some years ago T. B. Baldwin observed that Love's Labour's Lost was “constructed on an idea” and that commentators had failed to grasp “the idea as a whole” because of their ignorance of both Elizabethan psychology and the structure of morality plays; particularly he had in mind the pedagogical moralities.¹ He suggested that Shakespeare intended Love's Labour's Lost to be “a school morality in reverse” or, as he put it in another way, that “love won by study is love's labor lost.”² His cogent analysis of this aspect of the play is, in my opinion, essentially right, but he does not appear to have convinced many others. Baldwin's views have been ignored, for instance, by the respective editors of the Arden and of the new Kittredge Shakespeares.³ Perhaps the reason for this is that his remarks about the structure of the educational moralities are general and he did not attempt to show that the play might have been shaped to some extent by any one morality in particular. At any rate, emboldened by the fact that as yet no source has been discovered for the romantic imbroglio between the lords and ladies in Love's Labour's Lost, I would like to follow Baldwin's lead and advance the possibility that when Shakespeare first drafted the play, he had in mind the moral pattern of the “Wit” moralities.

Three of these are extant: John Redford's Wit and Science (ca. 1540), the anonymous Marriage of Wit and Science (1568/9), and Francis Merbury's Marriage between Wit and Wisdom (1579). Despite differences of form, language, and emphases, all three have a similar basic plot which may be summarized as follows: Wit desires Science/Wisdom. He is charged by parental authority, Nature/Reason and Experience/Severity and Indulgence, to pursue his desire through a period of study. Wit promises to do so and is provided with appropriate helpmeets: Instruction, Study, Diligence, Will, and Honest Recreation/Good Nurture. Impatient to bring his wooing of Science to a speedy conclusion, Wit breaks his promise, is seduced by Idleness/Wantonness and Fancy, humiliated by the fool, Ignorance, and falls victim to the monster/giant, Tediousness/Irksomeness. Wit is rehabilitated by Honest Recreation/Good Nurture and, morally rearmed, overcomes the monster and wins his lady. In each of the plays Wit's degradation is exemplified by his metamorphosis into a fool. While under the spell of Idleness/Wantonness, he is stripped of his jacket and clothed in motley, the vestment of Ignorance. In all three plays his face is also blackened. In the two earlier plays, his rehabilitation is not completed until he has been whipped by Shame and he has repented his folly.

In Love's Labour's Lost the young lords vow to pursue wisdom for three years and are provided with recreation. They forswear study, behave foolishly, are verbally chastised and shamed, and they duly repent. If they do not win their ladies, at least they find through love's labors that “the ground of study's excellence” far from being a bookish acquisition lies in “the beauty of a woman's face” and, as Berowne sweetly argues, that women “are the ground, the books, the academes, / From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire” (IV. iii. 299-300). Such, I take it, is the nature of the reversal to which Baldwin has drawn attention.

Navarre and his companions are wits who would be scholars seeking “the light of truth”—Wisdom. Their respective qualities of wit are acutely noted by the ladies. Longaville “is a sharp wit match'd with too blunt a will” (II. i. 49). Dumaine has “wit to make an ill shape good, / And shape to win grace though he had no wit” (II. i. 59-60). As for Berowne, according to Rosaline “His eye begets occasion for his wit” (II. i. 69). Their individual and collective wittiness is, of course, exercised and, alas, rudely mocked, throughout the play. One disastrous display of it prompts the Princess to ask, “Are these the breed of wits so wondered at?” (V. ii. 267), and upon another occasion acidly to comment, “Such short-liv'd wits do wither as they grow” (II. i. 54). These observations and aspersions by no means exhaust their delineation of the lords as wits.

The bookmen-wits are not to be without some diversion during the term of their proposed labor. Berowne asks, “But is there no quick recreation granted?” (I. i. 159). Recreation there is in the person of Armado, another “negligent student” according to Moth, quick perhaps but not very honest, since Navarre loves “to hear him lie” and the King will use him “for my minstrelsy” (I. i. 174-75). In the earliest of the “Wit” plays Honest Recreation is served by minstrel-companions, Comfort, Quickness, and Strength who, in the anonymous redaction, simply become “thre other women singers.”

The Princess and her fair ladies are witty too, but they are also “wise girls” as befits their divinities, at least in the view of the wooers who hail their exalted state in song and sonnets. The Princess is a “queen of queens”; Katharine is “most divine Kate,” for whom Jove would deny himself and turn mortal; Maria will be proved “a goddess” and possesses eyes capable of “heavenly rhetoric,” and Rosaline (“the fairest goddess on the ground”) has dark eyes which have a regenerative power. Collectively these beautiful, celestial creatures are the teachers and the light-givers and so represent “that angel knowledge” (I. i. 113), Science/Wisdom, for which the wits are to lose their oaths and find themselves (IV. iii. 285-361). Berowne's sonnet offers further testimony to this:

Study his bias leaves and makes his book thine eyes,
Where all those pleasures live that art would comprehend.
If knowledge be the mark, to know thee shall suffice;
Well learned is that tongue that well can thee commend,
All ignorant that soul that sees thee without wonder;
.....Celestial as thou art, O, pardon love this wrong,
That singës heaven's praise with such an earthly tongue.

(IV. ii. 102-11)

The wits break their vows and embrace folly, as the wise girls mockingly observe. “The blood of youth burns not with such excess / As gravity's revolt to wantonness,” remarks Rosaline (V. ii. 73-74) and Maria responds:

Folly in fools bears not so strong a note
As fool'ry in the wise when wit doth dote;
Since all the power thereof it doth apply
To prove, by wit, worth in simplicity.

(V. ii. 75-78)

The Princess is another clear-eyed witness: “None are so surely caught, when they are catch'd, / As wit turned fool” (V. ii. 69-70). It is fitting that spokesman Berowne is the first of the wits to recognize the metamorphosis: “Well, ‘set thee down sorrow!’ for so they say the fool said, and so say I, and I the fool. Well proved, wit” (IV. iii. 3-5). He is in no solitary state; his fellow scholars are similarly transmuted and the guilt-stricken Berowne must soon confess, “That you three fools lack'd me fool to make up the mess” (IV. iii. 203). Indeed they all don the equivalent of motley, as Rosaline points out when she advises her companions, “Let us complain to them what fools were here, / Disguis'd like Muscovites in shapeless gear” (V. ii. 303-4), and as Berowne confirms later, ruefully admitting to Rosaline that he has been wearing “the parti-coated presence of loose love / Put on by us” (V. ii. 752-53). The ultimate ignominy, however, is reserved for Berowne alone. In the two later “Wit” plays, Wit is not only dressed as a fool, his face is blackened. Berowne recognizes himself to be in a similar condition of degradation as a result of falling in love with a black-haired beauty—“The King he is hunting the deer: I am coursing myself. They have pitch'd a toil; I am toiling in a pitch—pitch that defiles. Defile! a foul word” (IV. iii. 1-3). He is hard put to it to vindicate Rosaline from the ridicule of his fellow fools, who wittily connect her dark attributes with those of the devil. As Navarre says, “Black is the badge of hell. …” The besmirched face of Wit in The Marriage of Wit and Science shocks Lady Science who cries, “Thy loke is like to one that came out of hell.”

Shame and punishment follow degradation. In the two earlier “Wit” plays it is Shame who whips Wit. Navarre and the lords suffer likewise from the pitiless “tongues of mocking wenches” and also from Boyet, whose “eye wounds like a leaden sword” (V. ii. 480). The wits are twice scourged. After the muscovite foolery they “depart away with shame” as the Princess had intended (V. ii. 156) and, as the humiliated Berowne admits, “By heaven, all dry-beaten with pure scoff!” (V. ii. 264). Rosaline has observed their discomfiture, “O, they were all in lamentable cases. / The king was weeping-ripe for a good word” (V. ii. 274-75). Unmasked, the transgressors return to receive further chastisement, for, as Boyet has correctly judged, “it can never be / That they will digest this harsh indignity … though they are lame with blows” (V. ii. 289-92). Rosaline had promised “That same Berowne, I'll torture ere I go” (V. ii. 60) and he, her fool (V. ii. 384) who had once been “love's whip” (III. i. 161) and later confesses, “For your fair sakes, we neglected time, / Play'd foul-play with our oaths” (V. ii. 741-42), is now prepared to face the cutting edge of her tongue:

Here stand I, lady. Dart thy skill at me,
Bruise me with scorn, confound me with a flout,
Thrust thy sharp wit quite through my ignorance,
Cut me to pieces with thy keen conceit.

(V. ii. 397-400)

Unlike the “Wit” plays there is no “world-without-end bargain” between the lovers in Love's Labour's Lost; after all, as Berowne declares, “Our wooing doth not end like an old play” (V. ii. 860). Nonetheless, the wits do at least kiss the hands of wisdom.

We may now turn to consider which of the “Wit” plays gave Shakespeare the idea of reversing the precepts of the educational morality and offered him matter and incident he was to diffuse throughout Love's Labour's Lost. Redford's Wit and Science, so far as we know, was never printed and only the major portion of it survives in manuscript.⁴ Of the three, it seems to be the least likely source. Merbury's play, The Marriage between Wit and Wisdom, is extant only in manuscript, although this has some appearance of being an early seventeenth-century transcript of a play printed, perhaps, by either John or Edward Allde.⁵ W. W. Greg has pointed out that the entry in the Stationers' Register on 23 June 1591, which records that it was granted to Thomas Orwin by Edward Marshe, may really refer to The Marriage of Wit and Science entered to Thomas Marshe about August 1569 and printed by him shortly after.⁶ Edward Marshe inherited his father's business in 1587. Greg reminds us that “it is a mistake that would hardly have occurred had not a piece with that title (i.e., The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom) been known in print.”⁷ There are, however, other reasons for doubting that it was Merbury's play which prompted Shakespeare. The plot elements of the “Wit” play taken over by Merbury from the earlier two are compressed into the first few scenes; thereafter the action is almost wholly concerned with the adventures of Idleness, the vice, in a series of episodes culled from Gammer Gurton's Needle, Cambises, and Misogonus. The Marriage between Wit and Wisdom is, in fact, more of a “prodigal-son” drama than an educational morality, and it may well have been written for a college performance at Cambridge while Merbury was there between 1571-76. Its secondary sources would seem to reinforce this possibility.

The Marriage of Wit and Science, presented at Court between Christmas and Shrovetide 1567/8 by Sebastian Westcott and the Children of Paul's and recorded in the Revels Accounts as “witte and will,” appears to be the most likely source. It is the only surviving printed version of the “Wit” plays, and it includes all the plot elements summarized above. Merbury's play does not contain the punishment of Wit. Moreover, it is a thoroughly romantic piece in which the courtship of Wit and Science is given a far greater prominence than in either the earlier or the later version. There are additional resemblances to note between The Marriage of Wit and Science and Love's Labour's Lost. Young Wit sends Science a picture of himself as a token of his esteem and seriousness. Later, Reason, Science's father, presents Wit with a token, a “glasse of Christal cleare” to

Marke what defectes it wil discover and discrye,
And so wyth judgement rype, and curiouse eye,
What is a mysse indeuor to supplye.(8)

These tokens are made much of when Wit confronts Reason and Science after his transmutation into a fool. “The fairings” and “tokens” of the lords are put to teasing use by the Princess and her ladies. Reason's mirror eventually reflects Wit's blackened face and fool's garb—the truth of his degraded condition. The Princess charmingly embarrasses the Forester by deliberately misunderstanding the meaning of his words “thou speak'st the fairest shoot” (IV. i. 10). She concludes the brief contretemps with

                                                            Nay, never paint me now!
Where fair is not, praise cannot mend the brow.
Here (good my glass) take this for telling true.

As the Arden editor has noted, “The forester is the mirror that shows the Princess her face at its true value.” In drawing attention to this parallel, I hope that I am not seeing through a glass too darkly. Perhaps more convincing is the similarity between the pages, Moth and Will. They are impertinently brilliant boys and both are in nicely ambivalent relationships with their respective masters, Armado and Wit. Both are employed as ambassadors of love. Will's embassy to Science wins commendation from Experience: “I have not harde a meyssage more trymlee done,” and Reason concludes, rightly, “He hath bene instructed this errand. …” Moth the “herald is a pretty knavish page / That well by heart hath conn'd his embassage” (V. ii. 97-8), and, in rehearsal at any rate, satisfies the wits that “A better speech was never spoke before” (V. ii. 110). Will is instrumental in persuading Wit to forswear his promises to Nature and Reason. Wordplay between Navarre and the Princess reflects this situation in the Paul's play.

PRIN.
Our Lady help my lord! He'll be forsworn.
FERD.
Not for the world, fair madam, by my will.
PRIN.
Why, will shall break it; will and nothing else.
FERD.
Your ladyship is ignorant of what it is.
PRIN.
Were my lord so, his ignorance were wise,
Where now his knowledge must prove ignorance.

(II. i. 197-202)

Aside from undoubted charm and inherent merit, there are some reasons for supposing that The Marriage of Wit and Science remained a popular and influential play in the Paul's repertory. In addition to contributing to Merbury's Wit and Wisdom, it supplied situations and characters for “the playe of playes and pastimes” referred to at length and synopsized by Stephen Gosson in Plays Confuted in Five Actions (1582), and which, according to Gosson, was performed at the Theatre “the three and twentieth last” (i.e., either 1580 or 1581).⁹ It will be seen that the leading character is Delight and that “A Comodie called delighte” was presented to the Queen on 26 December 1580 by Leicester's men.¹⁰

Although there is no evidence to show that Wit and Science was revived as was its companion piece, Prodigality, after their Court performances in 1567/8, there were a number of visits by Westcott's boys to Court in the seventies and early eighties which could have provided occasion. Prodigality was shown again on 2 February 1575 and thought good enough to be presented once more in 1601.¹¹ It will be recalled that the play-within-the-play of Sir Thomas More (to which Shakespeare is supposed to have contributed) was called “The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom” even though the performance of it by “My Lord Cardinalles players” turned out to be a crossbreed of other moralities.¹² One wonders whether other Paul's plays offered sources for plays performed later by adult companies. Was Pompey, performed at Court in January 1581 and at the Paul's theater, in any way connected with Caesar and Pompey given by Leicester's Men at the Theatre a little before 1582?¹³ Was Cupid and Psyche revised or adapted by Chettle, Day, and Dekker for the Admiral's Men in 1600?¹⁴ And finally, was “the historie of Error” shown to the Queen at Hampton Court by the Children of Paul's on 1 January 1571 a source of Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors?

A few years ago Alfred Harbage challenged the prevailing orthodoxy about Love's Labour's Lost.¹⁵ His remarkable lecture raised some exceedingly awkward, if not unanswerable, questions for those who would support the claim that the play in its first form belongs to the period 1593-95, and, among other things, drew attention once more to the structural and tonal affinities the play has with those of the Chapel's and Paul's boys of the eighties and with the work of John Lyly and others who wrote for them. He found “it more congenial to imagine Love's Labour's Lost originally in the repertory of the boy actors, rather than that of grown men,” and he proposed that Shakespeare's play “in its original form was written for Paul's in 1588-89.”¹⁶ My attempt to show that one of Shakespeare's principal sources was The Marriage of Wit and Science may, I hope, give substance to his view. From his knowledge and remembrance of that “Wit” play, Shakespeare appears to have begot the root idea which, “nourish'd in the womb of pia mater” as Holofernes has it, was eventually “delivered upon the mellowing of occasion.”

Notes

1. T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespere's Five-Act Structure (Urbana, 1947; repr. 1963), chaps. 26 and 27, pp. 579 ff.

2. Baldwin, pp. 588 and 585.

3. Richard David (Love's Labour's Lost, Arden Shakespeare, 5th ed. [1956; repr. 1960, 1963, and 1965]; Introduction; p. xxvii) briefly refers to Baldwin's work and merely dismisses his claim that it “seems clearly to have been the first of Shakespere's surviving plays.” Irving Ribner does not mention Baldwin, but is at least open-minded about the possibility of an early date of composition (see Love's Labour's Lost, Kittredge Shakespeare [Waltham, Mass.; Toronto; London; Blaisdell Publishing Company, 1968]; Introduction, p. xii). My references to the play follow the new Kittredge edition.

4. BM Add. Mss. 15233.

5. BM Add. Mss. 26782. See my articles, “Sir Edward Dering's Collection of Playbooks, 1619-1624,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly], XVI (Spring 1965), 145-53, and “Francis Merbury, 1555-1611,” SP [Studies in Philology], LXV (April 1968), 207-22.

6. W. W. Greg, Bibliography of the English Printed Drama, 4 vols. (London, 1939), I, 183.

7. Ibid. Perhaps Greg is right; but might not the slip “Wisdom” for “Science” be quite natural? One should also note that the correct title of Merbury's piece is the “marige betweene wit and wisdome.”

8. The Marriage of Wit and Science, Malone Society reprint (Oxford; 1960, 1961), ll. 666-68.

9. See W. C. Hazlitt's edition in The English Drama and Stage under the Tudor and Stuart Princes, 1543-1644 (London, 1869), pp. 198 ff.

10. See Albert Feuillerat, ed., Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels in the Time of Queen Elizabeth (Louvain, 1908; repr. 1963), p. 336.

11. See H. N. Hillebrand, The Child Actors (Urbana, 1926; repr. 1964), pp. 128-31, and also W. W. Greg, ed., The Contention between Liberality and Prodigality (1602), Malone Society reprint (Oxford, 1903), Introduction.

12. These were The Disobedient Child, Lusty Juventus, and possibly The Trial of Treasure.

13. See Hazlitt, p. 188.

14. Hazlitt, p. 187, citing Gosson: “In Playes either those thinges are fained that never were, as Cupid and Psyche plaid at Paules.”

15. Alfred Harbage, “Love's Labour's Lost and the Early Shakespeare,” Stratford Papers on Shakespeare (Toronto, 1962), pp. 107-34.

16. Harbage, pp. 123 and 125.