[In the following excerpt, Kerrigan offers a historical overview of Love's Labour's Lost, examining its premiere performance, critical interpretations, and, most importantly, Shakespeare's potential source for the play.]

Love's Labour's Lost has finally come into its own. After more than three centuries of neglect, it stands today among those Shakespeare plays which can be guaranteed to fill houses, thrill audiences, and—most difficult of all—please actors. Ironically, the play is now popular for precisely those qualities which previously kept it from favour. It has no towering central role, no Hamlet or Falstaff, and in the days of Garrick and the Victorian actor-managers, when audiences demanded star actors playing star parts, this made it theatrically unattractive. Now audiences are prepared to respect the play's sociability, its breadth, its capacity to accommodate on more or less equal dramatic terms a whole community of characters from a king to a constable and clown. Its language, too, has been vindicated. In the past, on stages cluttered with scenery and elaborate costumes, its verbal virtuosity must have seemed odd and irrelevant. On today's bare, or nearly bare, boards, the lines sing, crackle with wit, or creak along with laughable pedantry (each idiom appropriate to its speaker), the language seeming part of the comic action. Which is not to say that the play offers exclusively verbal pleasures. It is full of brilliantly engineered situations in which dialogue is used to express and intensify deep dramatic tensions. The multiple eavesdropping scene (IV.3) is only the most famous of these contrivances. Here again, modern audiences can enjoy something deplored by their predecessors. Theatrical contrivance no longer repels us; indeed, we rather like it. We do not now expect plays to be ‘realistic’; we simply want them to be dramatically telling. In short, Love's Labour's Lost has ceased to seem at once crabbed and juvenile; it is today celebrated as the first work of Shakespeare's genius.

The comedy was composed about 1595, when Shakespeare was in his early thirties. He had already written at least eight plays—including the first tetralogy of English histories, The Comedy of Errors, and Titus Andronicus—and his creative method had become more or less settled. All his early plays and poems (with the exception of such of the Sonnets as were composed in the early 1590s) draw heavily on literary sources. Typically, Shakespeare found a good subject, conscientiously read round it, then turned his reading into theatre. In the case of Love's Labour's Lost, he seems to have done something different, and this may explain why the play feels like a new departure, a sudden creative step forward. Although a few echoes of Robert Wilson's The Cobbler's Prophecy (c. 1590) and Pierre de la Primaudaye's L'Académie française (1577, translated in 1586) have been detected, and the earlier plays of John Lyly together with the Italian commedia dell'arte have been identified as general influences, no one has ever found a substantial source for Love's Labour's Lost. The search has been thorough, but nothing significant has turned up, and it is now thought that, in view of the simplicity of the play's plot, there never was anything to find. Certainly, it is easy to imagine Shakespeare inventing a story in which a King and three lords, shadowed by a clutch of lowlier characters, swear an oath to form an austere academy, break their vows by falling in love with a visiting Princess and her three ladies, and are separated from their women for a year and a day when the Princess hears of her father's death. It is a touching tale; it has charm; and it is packed with dramatic potential.

As it became apparent that the foundations of Love's Labour's Lost were not going to be unearthed in Elizabethan literature, scholars began to look for the play's origins among the details of Elizabethan life. Fifty years ago, it was fashionable to take the King's jest about ‘the school of night’ (IV.3.253) as a pointed allusion to a group of writers, scientists, and freethinkers centred on Sir Walter Raleigh, and to identify that group (by a strange circularity) with the coterie established within the comedy by Navarre. Shakespeare had populated his play—it was said—with satirical versions of Raleigh, George Chapman, Thomas Nashe, John Florio, and other contemporary notables. This theory has recently fallen into disrepute: historians have shown that Raleigh had no clearly defined coterie, and literary critics (observing, no doubt, that the number of candidates for each comic role had multiplied to the point of absurdity) have pointed out that characterization in Love's Labour's Lost is more general than specific. Still, the notion that the play is about a group called ‘the school of night’ persists among readers and theatregoers (largely because it has found its way into popular editions), and it is worth driving another nail into its coffin. The fundamental assumption of the topical-satirical interpreters—that the King's remark at IV.3.253 needs clarification from outside the text—is, I believe, demonstrably false. Hearing Berowne call his black-haired mistress ‘fair’, Navarre retorts:

O paradox! Black is the badge of hell,
          The hue of dungeons, and the school of night;
And beauty's crest becomes the heavens well.

IV.3.252-4

As the comma after ‘dungeons’ (present in the first edition of the play, printed from Shakespeare's manuscript) makes clear, there are three phrases in parallel here: black is the badge of hell, black is the hue of dungeons, and black is the school where night learns to be black. The lines are perfectly lucid.

Scholars have sought the origins of Love's Labour's Lost in sixteenth-century France as well as in Elizabethan England. Encouraged by the fact that Navarre's lords bear the names of real aristocrats, they have tried to find some occasion on which Biron, de Mayenne, and Longueville (Shakespeare's Berowne, Dumaine, and Longaville) were together in the company of Henry of Navarre—preferably reading books. They have not succeeded. Indeed, since de Mayenne was a Catholic leader bitterly opposed to the pro-Huguenot Navarre, success was never very likely. Nor has the search for real-life equivalents of the Princess and her ladies borne fruit. Some have regarded the meeting between Marguerite de Valois and Henry of Navarre at Nérac in 1578 as the historical source of the play's French embassy. But the similarities are not great. Apart from anything else, Henry and Marguerite met as an estranged man and wife, not as a king and princess falling in love at first sight. In so far as Love's Labour's Lost can be related to contemporary events—which is hardly at all—it seems to be an oblique response to the unification of France and Navarre under Henry in 1589-94. Like the anonymous The Trial of Chivalry (c. 1600)—another play which deals with love-affairs between the heirs of France and Navarre in a historically fantastic framework (the Earl of Pembroke, one of its central characters, no more fought in France than de Mayenne was Navarre's fellow-scholar)—Love's Labour's Lost offered its Elizabethan audience a reassuringly light-hearted view of an alliance across the Channel which probably seemed in reality rather disturbing. (Despite the defeat of the Armada in 1588, Protestant England lived in fear of invasion by unfriendly Catholic powers.) Where the play uses history, it uses it as something to escape from.

But why would Shakespeare suddenly write a play without a source? After all, his early work—invariably source-secured—had been both artistically and commercially successful. It is not without significance that Love's Labour's Lost is, as a play, preoccupied with the making of plays. There is the Masque of Russians prepared for the visiting women by the men (V.2.158-264), and the Pageant of the Nine Worthies prepared by the low characters for the high (V.2.543-711). At the end of the comedy, the contention between Ver and Hiems, spring and winter, provides another inset show (V.2.880-920). And the whole action is betrayed as theatre by Berowne when he says that the year and a day interposed between the lovers and marriage is ‘too long for a play’ (V.2.867). Interestingly, the two other Shakespearian dramas which can best claim to be sourceless—A Midsummer Night's Dream (written shortly after Love's Labour's Lost) and The Tempest (the last non-collaborative work, c. 1611)—are similarly preoccupied. The ‘tedious and brief’ tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe, Prospero's masque for Ferdinand and Miranda, Ariel's vanishing banquet: these demand comparison with the shows in Love's Labour's Lost. At the threshold of creative maturity and again at the end of his career, Shakespeare seems to have needed to construct plays which—through their investigation of language, disguise, illusion, convention, directed action, and the drama which can be built from them—helped him come to terms with his art.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, drama is magical. When Oberon and Puck make Demetrius Helena's lover by the operation of the love-juice, they frame by magic precisely that process of self-discovery through role-play which Petruchio uses to make his shrewish wife Kate find herself in an imposed obedience. They create, in theatre, theatre. Again, if Bottom plays a lover's part by choice, he is cast as an ass by enchantment; contrariwise, if Puck can ‘put a girdle round about the earth ❙ In forty minutes’ (II.1.175-6) it is because the dramatic economy, dissolving time, allows his sorcery scope. By the end of the comedy, drama and magic have become so mingled that Puck's last speech, beginning ‘If we shadows have offended’ (V.1.413-28), registers as an apology both for the fairies and for the actors (often called ‘shadows’) who have played them. In The Tempest, drama is not so much magical as metaphysical. Prospero is a playwright deity: he summons storms as easily as shows; he directs men about his island like actors in a play, submitting them to his tragicomic scenario; he punishes, rewards, and forgives. Significantly, he does not leave his realm, or his play, without a tribute to that greater author, God (Epilogue 13-20). But the link has been forged, in any case, at IV.1.148-58, where Prospero's dismissal of the masque of Iris, Juno, and Ceres is said to foreshadow the end of the world. Stern, loving, potent, baffled by the ingratitude of man, Prospero is a glimpse of God, and in his art we see an image of the Divine Will. Neither magical nor metaphysical, drama in Love's Labour's Lost is life itself. Here, more searchingly and single-mindedly than in any other of his plays, Shakespeare explores the theatricality of culture. Songs and sonnets, prose and poetry, masking, masqueing, sighs, formal proposals and more formal rejections: these constitute the comedy. And they are but heightened, courtly forms of those words, disguises, illusions, conventions, and directed actions through which we all live on the world's great stage. So this most private play is also thoroughly public. Not about French politics, and still less about ‘the school of night’, Love's Labour's Lost investigates drama, and, in doing so, it inquires into the character of that sociable, sophisticated, and essentially dramatic animal, man.

Almost all Shakespeare's comedies confront death, the bold antagonist of laughter and happy endings. In The Comedy of Errors, for example, old Egeon, sentenced in the first scene, is rescued from execution by only the narrowest margin in the last. (Significantly, he is Shakespeare's addition to the source.) Again, in Twelfth Night, a play with more than a hint of things violent and sad, the scene chills when Viola describes the death of her imaginary, lovelorn sister—she who ‘sat like Patience on a monument, ❙ Smiling at grief’ (II.4.113-14). And in the last of the comedies, Measure for Measure, not one but two characters face execution: Claudio—who pleads for life in one of the most terrifying speeches in all Shakespeare (III.1.121-35)—and the murderer Barnardine. But Love's Labour's Lost engages with death so much more directly than even these plays that it has been suggested (wrongly, I think) that it cannot belong to the same comic genre. Egeon, father of the twin Antipholi, does not die: the Princess's father does. Viola's sister is a fiction, invented to relieve the speaker's sense of her own unhappy inactivity in love: Katharine's sister really was killed by Cupid's cruel arrows (V.2.13-15). Measure for Measure threatens two characters with death: Love's Labour's Lost begins with a stern reminder that we are all under sentence.

If Navarre can contemplate that truth with assurance, it is not because he welcomes the prospect of a grave. Rather, he believes that he has found a way of evading death's worst consequence:

Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives,
Live registered 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.

I.1.1-7

These, the opening lines of the play, have a remarkable affinity with the poems written to the young man in that other almost sourceless and roughly contemporary work, the Sonnets. Verbal echoes ring clear: ‘Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws’ (Sonnet 19), ‘Not marble nor the gilded monuments ❙ Of princes shall outlive this pow'rful rhyme’ (Sonnet 55), ‘Give my love fame faster than Time wastes life; ❙ So thou prevent'st his scythe and crooked knife’ (Sonnet 100). Just as striking is the overlap in subject-matter: Navarre, like the poet of the poems, wants death to be defeated by the defeat of Time. However, whereas the poet advises the young man to ‘breed’, Navarre ushers Berowne, Longaville, and Dumaine towards sexual self-denial. To win ‘fame’ and outlive life, he says, the lords should study, fast, go without sleep, and absolutely avoid the company of women. They should ‘war’ against their ‘affections’ (I.1.9). The proposal is not only (to judge by the Sonnets) un-Shakespearian: it is comically anti-comic, radically at odds with the values of the play which it initiates. Comedy has always celebrated cakes, ale, and marriage at the expense of the contemplative life. Orlando and Toby Belch are its heroes, not Jaques and Malvolio. In Comedy, anyone who seeks an immortality as sterile as Navarre's badly needs to learn the virtue of worldly things. ‘Nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence’, Comedy warns, ‘Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence’ (Sonnet 12). The Princess of France and her three ladies wait in the wings.

At first, Love's Labour's Lost unfolds like King Lear. When Navarre presents the academic schedule to his lords (I.1.15-23), he comically anticipates Lear with his map; he is another monarch offering foolish but settled policy to his court for approval. Longaville and Dumaine behave like benign versions of Goneril and Regan; they tell the King what he wants to hear. Berowne reacts like Cordelia; he resists. Just as Cordelia criticizes her father's plan to abdicate so that he can crawl towards death unburdened, so Berowne speaks against Navarre's decision to prepare for death by retreating from public duties to the studious quiet of his rural park. And in both plays, those best placed to dissuade the sovereign fail to do so because of the way they express themselves. Lear's favourite daughter, unable to heave her heart into her mouth, makes love sound like grudging duty; and Navarre's most intelligent courtier so compulsively twists wisdom into wit that the King cannot disentangle his good counsel from the sophistry which surrounds it.

Here, of course, the plays start to diverge. No one could be less like Cordelia, with her radiant sincerity, than Berowne. ‘Truth’, he declares (using the imagery of St John's Gospel to compel the King's assent), is a kind of ‘light’ (I.1.75). So it follows that scholars get no nearer ‘truth’ by reading; since it dulls the ‘light’ which is the eye (Berowne here draws on the common sixteenth-century belief that the eye produces the beams by which it sees), reading can only blur the ‘light’ which the scholar's eye seeks:

          Light seeking light doth light of light beguile;
So, ere you find where light in darkness lies,
Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.

I.1.77-9

Much the better course, he goes on—how different this is from Cordelia's ‘Nothing, my lord’ (I.1.87)—is for ocular ‘light’ to find the ‘light’ which it looks for in the gleam of a mistress's ‘fairer eye’ (line 81). Dr Johnson observed in exasperation: ‘The whole sense of this gingling declamation … might have been told with less obscurity in fewer words.’ Quite so; but Berowne is the gingler, not Shakespeare. What we are given in the first scene of Love's Labour's Lost is a finely controlled sketch of a man whose verbal powers and love of acclaim are together so nearly boundless that he treats language less as a means of communication than as a vehicle for self-congratulatory display. There is much to be said in favour of Cordelia's silence.

Nevertheless, some of Berowne's objections to the King's scheme are weighty. The most striking, perhaps, is his blunt assertion that without heavenly help—without ‘special grace’ from God—a ‘war’ against the ‘affections’ simply cannot be won. Replying to Navarre's claim that ‘necessity’ compels him to meet the approaching Princess, Berowne says:

Necessity will make us all forsworn
          Three thousand times within this three years' space;
For every man with his affects is born,
          Not by might mastered, but by special grace.
If I break faith, this word shall speak for me:
I am forsworn on mere ‘necessity’.

I.1.147-52

That Shakespeare was in sympathy with this can be deduced from a number of plays, not just Love's Labour's Lost. Consider Measure for Measure. There we are shown a man who fights Navarre's ‘war’ so vigorously that his moral constitution weakens, breaks, and finally festers. By struggling too hard for perfection, Angelo falls into sin. He becomes, not the angel which his name implies, but what Isabella calls him at the denouement: a ‘devil’ (V.1.29). What should he have done? Comedy and St Paul answer—for once—in unison: he should have married. Indeed, his belated acceptance of Mariana falls like a spring sunbeam—tentative but hopeful—across the bleak last act of the play. So when Comedy advances the Princess, it does more than take revenge on Navarre for rejecting sex and festivity: it saves him from spiritual vexation, and protects his kingdom from the kind of tyranny which the harrowed Angelo imposes on Vienna.

King Lear begins with fairy-tale formality, but its symmetries quickly crumble into chaos as the bonds which connect father and child, master and servant, perish. Love's Labour's Lost is quite different. Artful, ornate, poised, spacious, a kind of dramatic Fontainebleau fit for noblemen and women to live, love, and be bereft in, it preserves its symmetries throughout. Perhaps as a consequence of this, its genius is dialectical. Speech answers speech and character balances character. The grand design is held together by organized disagreement. Take the Princess's lines near the beginning of Act IV:

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;
As I for praise alone now seek to spill
The poor deer's blood, that my heart means no ill.

IV.1.31-5

In one sense this cannot be a reply to the play's first speech. The Princess did not hear Navarre's ringing oration; and her subject is in any case the death of a deer, not the mortality of man. But there is another sense—the dramatic one—in which her lines clamour to be read as an attack on the academy. If it is a crime for the Princess to hunt the deer for ‘fame’, against her heart's inclining, it must also be criminal for the King to ‘war’ against his heart's ‘affections’ for ‘fame, that all hunt after in their lives’ (I.1.1). Evidently the Princess would agree with Berowne that the ‘affects’ should be respected. But her speech is in one way more critical of the academy than anything which that courtier had been able to muster. Berowne's love of acclaim is such that, though he dislikes the King's means to ‘fame’, he does not object to his end. The Princess, by contrast, sees beyond ‘fame’ to the ‘praise’ which it entails, and, like the poet of the Sonnets (in 84 and 95, for example), she detects and despises those qualities which the praised man shares with the hypocrite. Navarre wants admiration to create for him an ‘outward part’ which can then be admired; he seeks acclaim for his apparent, not his real, divided, warring self. But the Princess (as we see at II.1.1-19, where Boyet tries to praise her) regards admiration and acclaim as the thin end of a flattering wedge. It is most appropriate that Love's Labour's Lost should end, in the songs of Ver and Hiems, with a debate. We talk, loosely, about a play's action constituting an argument; in Love's Labour's Lost, argument often constitutes the action.

It is one of the most delightful ironies of the comedy that when, in Act V, the courtiers actually confront men of renown—or at least their semblances—they do nothing but fleer, mock, and jibe at them. So eager are they to prove to the women that their own show, the abortive Masque of Russians, was not utterly foolish that they do everything they can to sabotage the Pageant of the Nine Worthies—indifferent, apparently, to the injury which this does to the memory of famous men. They will not join Costard in his celebration of Pompey; they refuse to applaud Nathaniel's Alexander (the curate, they say, lacks the conqueror's wry neck); the baby Hercules in the shape of Armado's page is just tolerated; but Judas Maccabaeus (played by the pedant) is greeted by a torrent of abuse, and his fame rendered infamous, his ‘Maccabaeus’ turned to ‘Iscariot’ (V.2.591-7). The women sit by in disapproving silence as their lovers and Boyet triumph over the unfortunate players. They seem to sympathize with Holofernes's rebuke (which doubtless stills audiences because part of every theatregoer has enjoyed the men's mockery and feels implicated): ‘This is not generous, not gentle, not humble’ (line 626).

Even more striking than the lords' cruelty is their increasing concentration on death. Judas, they say, should ‘hang himself’; his countenance is ‘A death's face in a ring’ and ‘The carved bone face on a flask’ (lines 601, 609, and 613). Boyet's valediction to the pedant could scarcely be more resonantly ominous: ‘A light for Monsieur Judas! It grows dark; he may stumble’ (line 627). Death is insistent. Once established in the courtiers' abuse, it begins to infect the players' replies. When Armado, the last Worthy, offers himself as Hector, that ‘flower’ of chivalry, only to be greeted by ‘That mint!’ and ‘That columbine!’ (line 653), he retorts, gravely: ‘The sweet war-man is dead and rotten. Sweet chucks, beat not the bones of the buried. When he breathed, he was a man’ (lines 658-60). Such is the impact of this speech (it recalls Hamlet's show-stopping remembrance of his father (I.2.187-8): ‘'A was a man. Take him for all in all, ❙ I shall not look upon his like again’) that it darkens everything which follows. When Armado challenges Costard for revealing Jaquenetta's pregnancy, we cannot believe that the braggart himself poses a threat to the clown. Yet his ‘Thou shalt die!’ (line 676) is fearful nevertheless: Costard must indeed one day die. Death, here, is not the abstraction of Navarre's first speech. Nor is it the lot of a hunted animal or lost sister. It is the fixed destiny of a known character on stage before us. The Pageant has prepared us for the greatest shock in Shakespeare:

Enter a messenger, Monsieur Marcade
MARCADE
God save you, madam.
PRINCESS
                                                                                          Welcome, Marcade,
But that thou interruptest our merriment.
MARCADE
I am sorry, madam, for the news I bring
Is heavy in my tongue. The King your father—
PRINCESS
Dead, for my life!
MARCADE
                                                                      Even so; my tale is told.

V.2.712-16

It sounds faintly paradoxical, that suggestion that something ‘prepared’ can ‘shock’. But one's experience both in life and in the theatre is that anticipation, far from reducing the impact of a revelation, may actually increase it. Think of the many strands in Macbeth which lead towards ‘Macduff was from his mother's womb ❙ Untimely ripped’ (V.6.54-5), and then recall the effect of the words on audiences. Think, too, of the shock of bereavement, which always registers when someone close has died, even if the dead person was last seen—as in the French King's case—‘decrepit, sick, and bedrid’ (I.1.136), and even though we all know that death is inevitable, always, in a final sense, expected. Significantly, Shakespeare has crafted V.2 in such a way that, in the theatre, Marcade's actual entry is not noticed. What happens is that the characters and the audience gradually become aware that there is something on stage more important than the clown and the braggart, squaring up for a fight. Marcade seems to emerge from, rather than enter, the action. Good directors have always co-operated with this sense of emergence. Thus, in Peter Brook's 1946-7 production, as the stage-lights dimmed slowly over the Pageant (‘It grows dark’ indeed) they simultaneously went up on the black-clad messenger, as though Death himself were taking shape among the vulnerable mortals. And in John Barton's superb 1978 Love's Labour's Lost shadows were thick from the start. The action was played under a fixed set of autumn boughs; leaves fell in elegies; the costumes were sombre and the lighting restrained; Armado, far from being a swaggering gallant, was an ageing Quixote. And the arrival of Marcade was a great shock.

The low characters who inhabit Navarre's park have always found favour. Even William Hazlitt, who was generally hostile towards Love's Labour's Lost, admired them. ‘If we were to part with any of the author's comedies, it should be this’, he wrote dismissively in his Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817), only to add, in an affectionately ample qualification: ‘Yet we should be loath to part with Don Adriano de Armado, that mighty potentate of nonsense, or his page, that handful of wit; with Nathaniel the curate, or Holofernes the schoolmaster, and their dispute after dinner on “the golden cadences of poesy”; with Costard the clown, or Dull the constable.’ But if the low characters have been long loved, their dramatic function has been until quite recently little understood. Coleridge, Hazlitt's contemporary, noted in his 1818 lectures that Armado and Costard share with the King and his lords a love of argumentative rhetoric; but he did not feel, apparently, that this linguistic overlap helped unify the play. It was left to Walter Pater, in a magnificent but flawed essay first published in 1885, to unite high and low linguistically. In Love's Labour's Lost, Pater argued, Shakespeare had set out to analyse and satirize ‘that pride of dainty language and curious expression’ which was so incident to the high Elizabethan authors, and to himself on occasion—and, it must be added, to Pater. The play shows ‘this foppery of delicate language’ operating on several levels of sophistication, ‘passing from the grotesque and vulgar pedantry of Holofernes, through the extravagant but polished caricature of Armado, to become the peculiar characteristic of a real though still quaint poetry in Biron himself, who is still chargeable even at his best with just a little affectation.’

In one sense Pater did not go far enough, though in another he went too far. If, instead of organizing the play into a pyramid with Berowne at the top, he had conceded the obvious—that the academic oath is both the lynch-pin of the action and a recurring centre of dramatic interest—he might have uncovered a more radical and inclusive principle of unity than he actually did. For Shakespeare has put the oath unambiguously into the category of Holofernes's ‘vulgar pedantry’, Armado's ‘extravagant’ rhetoric, his page's wordplay, Nathaniel's bad Latin, and Costard's competitive banter with Boyet: all these utterances try to attract the admiration which the King calls ‘fame’. Love's Labour's Lost needs no scenery because its characters ‘hunt’ renown across a linguistic landscape. Significantly, Shakespeare records the progress of the chase in his Pageant of the Nine Worthies. Jaquenetta and Dull—rustic taciturnity and illiteracy personified—play no part in the show, except, in Dull's case, for the occasional inarticulate rumble on the tabor (see V.1.146-8). But Costard, who has a rudimentary feeling for rhetoric, qualifies as the first Worthy. He is followed by the eagerly linguistic, if not always competent, Nathaniel. Then comes Mote—so much the epitome of verbal wit that his very name puns on the word ‘word’ (see the commentary for I.2). Holofernes—that master of fecund sterility, that prolific rhymester and arid quibbler—succeeds him. And the last Worthy, naturally, is the master of Mote and the ‘word’, Armado:

A man in all the world's new fashion planted,
          That hath a mint of phrases in his brain;
One who the music of his own vain tongue
          Doth ravish like enchanting harmony. …
A man of fire-new words, fashion's own knight.

I.1.162-5, 176

In Elizabethan pronunciation, the show's title sounds suspiciously like ‘Pageant of the Nine Wordies’.

In what sense, then, did Pater go too far? He overestimated the unifying power of the language theme, because he was unresponsive to the other integuments which hold the play together. Sex, for instance. Hardly has Berowne delivered his warning about the vigour of the ‘affects’ than his evidence is brought in by Dull. Costard is in custody because he has—in the words of Armado's lavish and jealous letter—‘Sorted and consorted, contrary to thy proclaimed edict and continent canon … With a child of our grandmother Eve, a female … Jaquenetta … the weaker vessel’ (I.1.250-61). The clown is absolutely unrepentant. ‘It is the manner of a man to speak to a woman’, he says, and ‘Such is the sinplicity of man to hearken after the flesh’ (I.1.206-7, 214-15). Costard, it could be said, adds practice to Berowne's precept. But his position in the comic dialectic is more interesting than that. The mock-biblical idiom of his excuses rather draws attention to than conceals what he Freudianly calls his ‘sinplicity’. If Berowne is too theoretical, Costard is too carelessly practical. If the King is too ascetic, the clown is too sensual. Comedy and St Paul would tell Costard, like Navarre and Angelo, to marry.

Not that that places Costard precisely either: he is far from being a simple sensualist. His very excuses for attempting seduction displace the ‘affects’ from the sensual to a linguistic sphere in a way which is highly reminiscent of the comedy's most sterile couple, Holofernes and Nathaniel. ‘Speak to a woman’ and ‘hearken after the flesh’ (as though sex were conversation) have exactly the same overtones as the curate's description of Dull—‘he hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book’ (IV.2.24)—and the pedant's account of the origin of his verse: ‘begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion’ (IV.2.69-71). Like Holofernes and Nathaniel, Costard knows that words as well as babies breed. Like them, he knows what it is to ‘affect the letter’ (IV.2.55). It is hardly surprising, then, that when he fails to move Navarre by his appeal to the appetites he proliferates words instead. To the King's ‘It was proclaimed a year's imprisonment to be taken with a wench’, he replies ‘I was taken with none, sir; I was taken with a damsel’ (I.1.275-8). Told that a ‘damsel’ is as illegal as a ‘wench’, he tries first ‘virgin’ and then ‘maid’; and, when forced to end the exchange by the King's intransigence, he does so with a parting quibble (line 286).

The encounter between Navarre and Costard works superbly in the theatre, and not just because the clown's self-justification and sophistry are beautifully articulated: Shakespeare gradually makes both Navarre and the audience aware that the opposition here is less real than apparent. As Costard tries to wriggle through the proclamation by chopping and changing words, Navarre's recent erasure of the very decree which the clown wants to evade through the power of that mere ‘word … “necessity”’ inevitably comes to mind. That the King is smitten by the same recollection seems clear: he sentences Costard not to the ‘year's imprisonment’ required by the law but to a token ‘week with bran and water’ (I.1.275, 288). The confrontation is a miniature Shakespearian comedy: it moves from distinction to unity; it is corrective, yet ultimately reassuring; Navarre's notion that his oath has raised him above other men is razed, but so gently and by such a beguiling representative of common humanity that his loss is made a kind of gain.

Armado, the play's other seducer, has no such encounter with the King. Although we are told more than once that he is intimate with the nobles (I.1.160-76, V.1.90-103), we do not see him in their company until the Pageant assembles. Nevertheless, Shakespeare forges so many links between the braggart and his superiors that it is difficult to assess one without judging the other. If they swear to ‘study three years’, so does he (I.2.35-6); and if they escape from school through the loophole of a ‘word’, he succumbs easily to his page's suggestion that one may ‘put “years” to the word “three”, and study three years in two words’ (I.2.52-4). If Berowne is outwitted in a first encounter with his mistress, Jaquenetta similarly outfaces her admirer (II.1.114-28, I.2.126-39). If love drives Berowne to poetry, it makes Armado brimful of sonnets (IV.3.12-17, I.2.176-8); and if the courtier includes a sample of his work in a letter which goes astray, so does the braggart (IV.2.105-18, IV.1.89-94). When Longaville seeks the ‘authority’ of Berowne's sophistry to excuse his love for Maria, one cannot help remembering how Armado asked Mote to list the names of great men who have loved so that his affection for the dairymaid could be excused by some show of ‘authority’ (IV.3.285, I.2.65). And if Berowne, Costard, and the Princess reply to the King's first speech, so does Armado; he makes Navarre's metaphorical ‘war’ literal, and, as a result, exposes the absurdity of the whole campaign: ‘If drawing my sword against the humour of affection would deliver me from the reprobate thought of it, I would take desire prisoner …’ (I.2.58-60).

For most of the play, then, Armado is a convex mirror held up to the court. He reflects, grotesquely, the folly of the lords. But in the last scene he emerges as an important figure in his own right. It is his argument with Costard which fragments the Pageant. And it is the same ribald wrangle which holds our attention until Marcade arrives. Now, though the clown deals indiscreetly with the braggart here, morals are undoubtedly on his side. Armado was wrong to break his oath to ‘study three years’, and wrong to get Jaquenetta pregnant outside wedlock. Still, neither wrong is quite irreversible, and once Armado has promised to ‘right [himself] like a soldier’ by marrying the maid and labouring ‘three year’ in the fields as penance for his perjury, his honour is restored (V.2.720, 873). Meanwhile, he has made himself the custodian of Comedy. What Costard reveals to the court is that, while the lords and ladies have lingered, Armado has bred to brave Time's scythe. Even as the Princess hears of her father's death, we are aware of new life elsewhere: another braggart ‘brags’—a child boasts its parentage—in the dairymaid's ‘belly’ (V.2.673-4). It is on the strength of his opposition to death and despair, demonstrated by his eagerness to breed new life, that Armado is granted the privilege of introducing the songs of Ver and Hiems.

Most Shakespeare criticism is written by academics, and most academics are male. Perhaps this explains why the men who join Navarre's academy have been generally indulged and their mistresses sometimes abused. The following comments (from a usually shrewd scholar) typify this strand in the critical tradition: the Princess ‘consistently misjudges the situations in which she finds herself’; ‘the genuineness of the men's affections … the women fail to perceive’; and, once they do get a glimmering of the lords' intentions, all endorse ‘Rosaline's reaction to Berowne's courtship’ at V.2.60-68—‘arrogant and spiteful’ though it is. I believe, on the contrary, that Shakespeare has made the women much more sensible, sensitive, and generous than the men.

Certainly the lords are misunderstood; they are even, towards the end of the play, misunderstood deliberately. But this is perfectly natural. To the wooed, wooing is always at least potentially ambiguous. So stylized is the language of courtship, and so careful is the lover making his first hesitant advances to seem more ideal than real, that his sincerity is necessarily difficult to gauge. Deceit cloaks easily under sonnets, jewelled favours, and masks. In love, as in the theatre, feigned passion can be very convincing. (Shakespeare makes this point eloquently at III.1.10-23 by having Mote—who can hardly have loved a mistress yet—tell Armado how to win a wench by singing, sighing, and striking postures.) What is more, the dangers of deception increase greatly if the wooed woman wants to be won; and there is no doubt that the ‘girls of France’ (IV.3.347) are attracted to the King and his lords. Rosaline, Katharine, and Maria have lost their hearts before the play even begins (the Princess's question at II.1.77-9 is rhetorical), and their mistress quickly gives hers away. Aware of their vulnerability, all four cultivate a protective scepticism. They are, as the Princess says when introducing Rosaline's ‘arrogant and spiteful’ speech about Berowne, ‘wise girls to mock [their] lovers so’ (V.2.58).

But if—by some act of God—the ladies had shared our privileged access to the lords and had seen them sigh and groan in private, would they have reacted differently to the proposals made late in V.2? Would they, instead of delaying, have married at once? I think not. The passion which the men display in III.1, IV.3, and the first part of V.2, although deeply felt and delightful, is immature. Anyone who has known adolescent love will recognize the heady mixture: on the one hand, the mistress is ideal, out of reach, ‘holy’ (V.2.160); on the other, a short cut to sensual pleasure:

                    love, first learnèd in a lady's eyes,
Lives not alone immurèd in the brain,
But with the motion of all elements
Courses as swift as thought in every power,
And gives to every power a double power,
Above their functions and their offices.
It adds a precious seeing to the eye:
A lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind.
A lover's ear will hear the lowest sound
When the suspicious head of theft is stopped.
Love's feeling is more soft and sensible
Than are the tender horns of cockled snails.
Love's tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste.
For valour, is not Love a Hercules,
Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?
Subtle as Sphinx; as sweet and musical
As bright Apollo's lute, strung with his hair.
And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Make heaven drowsy with the harmony.

IV.3.303-21

This is exquisite, but as a Definition of Love decidedly inadequate. It persuades by provocation, not argument. Although less paradoxical than Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)—that extraordinary poem of Chapman's in which each sense is roused in turn so that the reader may be purged of desire—it nevertheless invites a reaction against itself. ‘Berowne,’ one wants to say, ‘this Love of yours sounds most appealing; but what of the woman who creates it?’

Perhaps understandably, the young dramatist praised by Henry Chettle in 1592 for having a ‘demeanour no less civil than he excellent in the quality he professes’ paid great attention in his comedies to the incivility which love rouses in lovers. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, for example, Valentine's crying-up of Sylvia over Julia—his mistress, he says, is a ‘heavenly saint’, a ‘Sovereign to all the creatures on the earth’ (II.4.143, 151)—not only contrasts tellingly with Sylvia's generosity towards her: it marks that decisive and destructive point in the play at which Proteus's thoughts begin to drift away from the woman he has promised to love. The nobles of Navarre are even more competitive than the Veronese gentry. When Berowne calls his mistress (like Sylvia) ‘heavenly’, the King replies that beside the Princess she is but ‘an attending star’ (IV.3.219, 229). And when Berowne, stung by this, declares ‘O, but for my love, day would turn to night!’, Navarre deflates his hyperbole by observing that Rosaline's favour is dark, not light (lines 231, 245). Round abuse follows on both sides, until the banter declines into bawdry:

BEROWNE
O, if the streets were pavèd with thine eyes,
          Her feet were much too dainty for such tread.
DUMAINE
O, vile! Then, as she goes, what upward lies
          The street should see as she walked overhead.

IV.3.276-9

What is—since this is so clearly not—the proper way to praise a mistress? Berowne and his fellows could learn from Shakespeare's most famous sonnet to the dark lady. ‘My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun’ not only scrupulously avoids exaggeration (far from being ‘heavenly’, the poet's love ‘treads on the ground’) but refuses to exalt the lady above those admired by others. Its moving final couplet is a model of modesty and decorum: ‘And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare ❙ As any she belied with false compare’ (Sonnet 130).

That there is some connexion between Berowne's darkhaired and black-eyed mistress, the dark lady of the Sonnets, and, more distantly, that other Rosaline, abandoned for the sake of Juliet by Romeo—the ‘pale hard-hearted wench’ with a ‘black eye’ (II.4.4, 14)—is indisputable. What to make of it is the critical problem. Evidently, Berowne's most ferocious attack on his mistress overlaps with the bitter poems written to the dark lady by the poet after he discovers that she has betrayed him sexually with the young man (Sonnets 131-52):

What? I love? I sue? I seek a wife?
A woman, that is like a German clock,
Still a-repairing, ever out of frame,
And never going aright, being a watch,
But being watched that it may still go right!
Nay, to be perjured, which is worst of all;
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!

III.1.186-96

But Berowne's rage is not motivated by the facts, as the poet's is. He has no evidence—indeed, no reasonable grounds for assuming—that Rosaline is unchaste. Has Shakespeare perhaps let his own feelings about a woman (she who became the dark lady of the Sonnets) invade those of Berowne? Many have thought so. Serenus Zeitblom, the narrator of Thomas Mann's Dr Faustus, for example, says this:

There can be no doubt that the strangely insistent and even unnecessary, dramatically little justified characterization of Rosaline as a faithless, wanton, dangerous piece of female flesh—a description given to her only in Biron's speeches, whereas in the actual setting of the comedy she is no more than pert and witty—there can be no doubt that this characterization springs from a compulsion, heedless of artistic indiscrepancies, on the poet's part, an urge to bring in his own experiences and, whether it fits or not, to take poetic revenge for them. Rosaline, as the lover never tires of portraying her, is the dark lady of the second sonnet sequence, Elizabeth's maid of honour, Shakespeare's love, who betrayed him with the lovely youth.

(Chapter 24; translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter)

My own view is that if Berowne's contempt for Rosaline has been fuelled by Shakespeare's feelings towards a real, treacherous mistress (and I suspect that it has) the private emotions have in no way distorted the drama. Berowne's outburst may not be motivated by the facts, but it fits his character well for all that. It is an aspect of his immaturity that he should groundlessly abuse his mistress for doing the very ‘deed’ which his own ‘affects’ urge. Like his dramatic descendant, Benedick, Berowne enjoys being a mocker of love, ‘A very beadle to a humorous sigh’ (III.1.172); and, like Benedick, he is aggressive towards the woman he loves because he wants to defend the detachment which allows him to mock. It may not be a worthy reaction, but it is understandable.

Less forgivable, perhaps, is the male insensitivity which declares itself in the Pageant of the Nine Worthies and which surfaces for a second time in the belated pressing of the marriage suits. Hardly has Marcade delivered his sad message than Navarre advises the Princess to ‘rejoice at friends but newly found’ rather than ‘wail friends lost’ (V.2.744-6). Is it any wonder that she—unable to follow his twisted syntax yet gathering enough to find his attitude inconceivable—should say: ‘I understand you not’ (line 747)? True, comedies often end with the displacement of Age by Youth, and in the Plautine tradition to which Shakespeare owes so much this displacement is commonly enshrined in a marriage which disregards the views of a parent. But even Comedy refuses to dance on dead men's graves. 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: he wants to create in his kingdom precisely the kind of disorder which makes Claudius's Denmark the natural habitat not of Comedy but of Tragedy. 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. The year of divorce which they ask their lovers to respect is quite unlike the month required of Courtall and Freeman by Ariana and Gatty at the end of Etherege's She Would If She Could or the open-ended delay demanded by Araminta from Congreve's Vainlove: it is not even marginally coquettish. Recognizing that the men have no faults which experience cannot amend, the Princess, Rosaline, Katharine, and Maria simply ask their lovers to submit to the trying complexity of life outside Navarre's park, and to the power of Time.

On three separate occasions, Love's Labour's Lost stalls, reaches deadlock, and apparently denies itself a comic conclusion, only to recover. After the collapse of the Russian Masque, Berowne's abuse of Boyet becomes so vituperative that Costard's arrival pulls the scene back from the brink of a brawl (V.2.459-84). Still more spectacular is the confrontation between Costard and Armado after the disintegration of the Pageant. Here, a character new to the play, Marcade, is needed to restore—at a cost—order (V.2.669-712). The third and most serious discord comes when the Princess and her ladies offer delayed rather than immediate marriage. Berowne and the King deliver in response what sounds like the play's epilogue, a regretful farewell to the longed-for comic conclusion:

BEROWNE
Our wooing doth not end like an old play;
Jack hath not Jill. These ladies' courtesy
Might well have made our sport a comedy.
KING
Come, sir, it wants a twelvemonth and a day,
And then 'twill end.
BEROWNE
That's too long for a play.

V.2.863-7

But this, of course, is no more an epilogue than that seemingly final speech with which Theseus dispatches the newly-weds ‘to bed’ some seventy lines from the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream (V.1.353-60). At what Navarre calls ‘the latest minute of the hour’ (V.2.782), both Love's Labour's Lost and its successor blossom into the unexpected.

The last speeches of Puck, Oberon, and Titania stop their play's drift towards fantasy. We have been charmed into thinking that life is all love, festivity, and pantomime lions, and then we hear Puck say:

Now the hungry lion roars
          And the wolf behowls the moon,
Whilst the heavy ploughman snores
          All with weary task foredone.
Now the wasted brands do glow
          Whilst the screech-owl, screeching loud,
Puts the wretch that lies in woe
          In remembrance of a shroud. …

V.1.361-8

Oberon is less threatening: he promises to protect the lovers' children from scars and harelips. And Titania speaks only of blessing. Nevertheless, the fairies' lines add up to a clear warning that beyond the still centre of Theseus's great house—even ‘Now … Whilst’ we listen—life is at best a mingled yarn. It may begin with blemishes, and it must end in a ‘shroud’.

The songs of Ver and Hiems, like the fairies' last speeches, open a window on the wide world. They remind us that, beyond the King's enclosed park, ‘lady-smocks all silver white’, shepherds playing ‘on oaten straws’, ‘merry larks’, ‘rooks’, ‘daws’, and the chanting ‘cuckoo’, ‘icicles’, ‘Dick’, ‘Tom’, and ‘greasy Joan’, ‘coughing’, ‘brooding’, ‘roasted crabs’ and the ‘staring owl’ proliferate multitudinously. And they warn us that life is mingled: spring is a season of ‘delight’, but not for the man mocked as a cuckold by the cuckoo; winter is icy, harbouring no bright ‘lady-smocks’, yet it has fresh milk, log fires, piping hot apples, and an oddly ‘merry’ owl. But the songs differ from the speeches in one crucial respect: life is heaped around the Athenian lovers; it spreads along the axis of Time for those who gather to hear the owl and the cuckoo. ‘Now’ and ‘Whilst’ are replaced, in Love's Labour's Lost, by that structure so common in the early sonnets, ‘When … Then’.

Winter and summer, spring and autumn, these are more obvious opposites than spring and winter; and spring is both logically and chronologically winter's successor, not its precursor. Why, then, did Shakespeare make Ver and Hiems contend, and why in that order? No doubt he wanted to echo in his songs the main movement of the play, from youthful ‘delight’ to cold death and divorce. (The spring song, like the life lived in the park, is full of pleasant artifice; winter is more harshly actual.) But there is another, more hopeful, rationale, and it registers very strongly in the theatre. From spring to winter is the King's ‘twelvemonth and a day’. As the songs are sung, Time seems to pass and the future is grappled to the instant. A show is at last heard through in peace and civility, a kingdom forms on stage—the low with the high, headed by a King and the new Queen—and, as the seasons change, the lovers prove inseparable. Armado's last words, ‘You that way; we this way’ (V.2.920), announce, then, only a qualified separation, for his show has already conducted the stage and theatre audiences through a year and a day to the true, comic end of the action. The owl and the cuckoo assure us that the labour of love will not be very long lost.