SOURCE: Gilbert, Miriam. “‘As it was presented before her Highness’: Love's Labour's Lost on the Elizabethan Stage.” In Shakespeare in Performance: Love's Labour's Lost, edited by J. R. Mulryne, J. C. Bulman, and Margaret Shewring, pp. 1-20. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993.

[In the following essay, Gilbert attempts to show how Shakespeare's Elizabethan audiences would have experienced Love's Labour's Lost.]

In this play, which all the editors have concurred to censure, and some have rejected as unworthy of our poet, it must be confessed that there are many passages mean, childish, and vulgar; and some which ought not to have been exhibited, as we are told they were, to a maiden queen. But there are scattered through the whole many sparks of genius; nor is there any play that has more evident marks of the hand of Shakespeare.

(Johnson, p. 112)

Samuel Johnson's closing comment on Love's Labour's Lost for his 1765 edition of The Plays of William Shakespeare is intriguing in its contradictions. After first criticising ‘many passages’ as being ‘mean, childish, and vulgar’, Dr Johnson then praises the play's ‘many sparks of genius’. But since the play received no professional productions between Shakespeare's time and the early nineteenth century, both Dr Johnson and his readers had to find in the text of the play alone matter both for censure and for praise. In our time, as the introduction to the New Penguin Shakespeare (1982) makes clear, ‘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’ (Kerrigan, p. 7). How scholars, directors, actors, and audiences have come to such an appreciation, and what qualities they have found to appreciate, is the story underlying this study of selected productions of Love's Labour's Lost. What emerges from looking at the history of both scholarship and performance is a sense of continual rediscovery. The play seems to disappear and then reappear, with succeeding centuries finding that the features of the play which once seemed strange or forbidding are now precisely the ones we celebrate.

The problems of the play begin with its extremes of content and style. Unlike other early Shakespearean comedies such as The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew or A Midsummer Night's Dream, Love's Labour's Lost does not have a complicated plot, but is basically an elaboration of one situation. The King of Navarre and three members of his court, Berowne, Dumaine, and Longaville, take an oath to study for three years, and during that time to see no women. The signing of such an oath seems to demand that four young women will immediately arrive on the scene and so they do—and of course the young men fall in love with them. That is the plot of the play.

But the style is much more complicated. The witty young men and the equally witty young women excel in verbal pyrotechnics, loving to exchange quips and puns and put-downs. They frequently pick up words or phrases from each other and send them back, with top-spin, like skilled tennis players. No sooner does the King define ‘the end of study’ as ‘that to know which else we should not know’ (I.i.56) than Berowne challenges him, redefining study so that he can successfully evade the prohibition against eating more than once a day or seeing a woman:

Come on, then; I will swear to study so,
To know the thing I am forbid to know;
As thus,—to study where I well may dine,
When I to feast expressly am forbid;
Or study where to meet some mistress fine,
When mistresses from common sense are hid …

(I.i. 59-64)

Berowne even loves to redefine his own words, not just the King's. Having suggested that one studies ‘to seek the light of truth’ (I.i.75), he then launches into a bravura demonstration that ‘Light seeking light doth light of light beguile’ (I.i.77), claiming that too much reading causes blindness, and that the sight of a fair woman blinds a man's vision but illuminates his soul.

Adding to the sense of verbal extravagance in the play's ‘great feast of languages’ (V.i.35) are other game-players, or perhaps chefs: Holofernes, the schoolmaster and Sir Nathaniel, the curate, both of whom adore allusions and Latin phrases; Costard, the rustic swain, who (like Bottom and Dogberry) is guilty of malapropisms; finally Armado, the ‘fantastical Spaniard’, who not only writes but embodies elaborate and romantic terms, and his page, young Moth, who sometimes supports but often undercuts his master's verbal gymnastics. None of these figures, together with Jaquenetta, the country wench loved by Armado, and Dull, the local constable, is essential to the slender romantic plot, except perhaps for Costard, who mis-delivers letters given him by Berowne and Armado. But most of these characters are so sensitive to language, and the games one can play with it, that Nathaniel's description of Dull, ‘He hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink’ (IV.ii.24-5) applies only to Dull and perhaps Jaquenetta. And it is this eating and savouring of words which has, for many readers, made the play seem at once ‘brilliant, high-spirited, and verbally masterful’ (Van Doren, p. 58) and ‘out of fashion’ (Granville-Barker, p. 1). Critics recognise its verbal exuberance, but they do not always admire it, perhaps finding the characters so intoxicated with language that they seem merely witty speakers rather than characters worth exploring. Students find the play ‘difficult’ to read because of the intricate puns, and directors approach the play, blue pencil in hand, ready to cut lines which seem to them obscure and inaccessible; the play's vulnerability to cutting derives also from the repetition of certain passages (most notably Berowne's long speech at the end of IV.iii) which were clearly revised, but not clearly cancelled.

While such an emphasis on stylistic concerns may seem to isolate Love's Labour's Lost from the mainstream of Shakespeare's work, much of the play seems familiar when considered in the context of Shakespeare's early plays and of the major comedies. The four young men in this play seem to anticipate the young men in Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, and Much Ado About Nothing, both in their clannishness and in their avoidance of women (to a greater or less extent). Berowne, the most intelligent of the four, is similar to Mercutio, although, unlike Mercutio, he can turn his cynical eye on himself. He also anticipates Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing who comments so sharply on love-sickness that he sets himself up as Cupid's next victim. The witty sparring between Berowne and Rosaline looks back to Petruchio and Kate, and forward to Beatrice and Benedick; the open-air setting of the King's park is a version of other forests full of lovers, such as the wood outside Athens or the Forest of Arden; the unwittingly comic and accident-prone ‘Pageant of the Nine Worthies’ reminds us of the ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ playlet in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Most of these comparisons imply development, as if Shakespeare were trying out possibilities in Love's Labour's Lost and then realising their potential more fully in later comedies: thus these comparisons have led, I think, to a persistent undervaluing of this comedy.

Yet in one aspect, Love's Labour's Lost is different from all other Shakespearean comedies, and that is in its ending. Even plays which we call comedies only with hesitation, such as All's Well that Ends Well and Measure for Measure, end with marriage, and most of the comedies involve multiple marriages, often with family reconciliations thrown in for good measure. But at the end of Love's Labour's Lost, the young men who promised—so rashly, one might argue—to forswear the world and study must make that promise real. Instead of three years' study, they agree to ‘a twelvemonth and a day’ before seeing the women again (V.ii.869). Other Shakespearean comedies emphasise the education of young men, but none insists that the growing-up process must take place before the woman, or women, will accept a marriage proposal. Even Bassanio, whom many have suspected of fortune-hunting as well as love, gets married mid-way through the play to Portia; only the consummation of the marriage is delayed. Even Bertram, the callow youth and utter snob who marries Helena but refuses to sleep with or acknowledge her, does consummate that marriage and is forgiven at the play's end. But Love's Labour's Lost shows us couples parting rather than coming together, and the power of that ending is something that performance history has gradually come to value and to emphasise.

The division between the witty style of the comedy and the defiantly untraditional ending finds an echo in the two famous songs, one of Spring and the other of Winter, with which the play concludes. One might argue that the problem of Love's Labour's Lost for both audiences and scholars has been the insistence on seeing the play as essentially springlike only to discover at the end that winter has come as well. The sprightliness of the play has perhaps masked that balance from readers, but perceptive critics (Anne Barton, Ralph Berry, William C. Carroll, D. A. Traversi, to name just a few) have argued convincingly that the play does not suddenly change course, but rather forces the audience to realise, as the young men do, that the world contains both daisies and icicles, merry larks and brooding birds. Thus this comedy, which seems in many ways more artificial than Shakespeare's others, more concerned with affectation and stylistic brilliance, becomes finally the most realistic of all, as it acknowledges that the theatre cannot always solve life's complex relationships. In a play filled with performances both impromptu and planned—the reading aloud of other people's letters, Moth's song, Holofernes' epitaph on the death of the deer, the overhearing scene, the masque of the Muscovites, and, of course, the Pageant of the Nine Worthies—Shakespeare acknowledges the theatre's limitations through Berowne's rueful comment, ‘That's too long for a play’ (V.ii.870). Only within the world of the theatre do relationships blossom so quickly; in the real world, it is not perpetual springtime. Other Shakespearean endings raise similar questions, with Feste's song, ‘The rain it raineth every day’, as the prime example of an ending which seems to undercut the ‘golden time’ at the end of Twelfth Night. But that song, like Puck's final speech in A Midsummer Night's Dream or Rosalind's Epilogue in As You Like It, is outside the main action of the play, while in Love's Labour's Lost, it is the main action which insists on the separation rather than the union of the young people. Finding the balance between a play of love and wit and an ending which reminds all of us that winter comes too has been the major achievement by critics—and by productions—in the twentieth century.

While we know that modern audiences have come to see Love's Labour's Lost as a theatrical piece which subtly balances the claims of both spring and winter, we can only speculate about the experience of the original audience. Unfortunately, we have no firm evidence about where Love's Labour's Lost was first performed, nor when it was written. The title page of the First Quarto of Love's Labour's Lost, printed in 1598, advertises the play's delights in time-honoured fashion by appealing to the audience's desire to participate in the pleasures of the elite. By announcing that Queen Elizabeth had seen (with the implication that she may have requested) the play for the Christmas celebrations at court, the printer immediately confers status on the play; by stating that the text is ‘newly corrected and augmented’ he implies that what the reader will buy is not just an ‘old’ play but something newly refurbished. To the scholar seeking evidence of when the play was first performed and in what state, the title-page offers some help, but nothing really conclusive. Most chronologies of Shakespeare's works put Love's Labour's Lost considerably earlier than 1598 (or 1597, depending on which part of the Christmas celebration the play graced), usually settling for a date around 1594-95. Another court performance occurred in 1605, this time before King James and Queen Anne, again at Christmas-time. But the play was by then obviously a revival, something suggested by Burbage as full of ‘wit and mirth’ (cf. Lamb, p. 51). The Burbage recommendation of this play for performance, as well as the references in the Second Quarto, published in 1631, to the comedy as ‘acted at the Blackfriars and the Globe’ imply that the play could well have been first performed in a public theatre. Likewise, the evidence of four stanzas in Robert Tofte's 1598 poem Alba: The Month's Mind of a Melancholy Lover which describe clearly Love's Labour's Lost, suggests that the play was first staged at a public outdoor theatre, such as Burbage's The Theatre (Hibbard, pp. 1-2), rather than at a private performance.

Other suggestions for the original performance include Harbage's argument that the play dates from as early as 1588-89 and was written for one of the acting companies of boys (Harbage, p. 27), an argument which begins by rejecting the notion of the play as originally designed for court performance or at a private ‘great house’. Hibbard suggests that perhaps the play was first produced at one of the Inns of Court, such as Gray's Inn, where, for the Christmas Revels of 1594-95, Shakespeare's company presented The Comedy of Errors and, several days later, an entertainment including men dressed in Russian habit took place (Hibbard, pp. 46-7). Did Shakespeare pick up the notion that a ‘Masque of Muscovites’ would work to even greater comic effect in his play—or did the entertainment committee at Gray's Inn borrow the notion of men in Russian attire from Shakespeare?

What can we learn by listing the various venues associated with or suggested for the original performance of Love's Labour's Lost? The first point is that we cannot assume any one particular audience for the play. Though the play's emphasis on elaborate language has led a number of critics to assert that the play was meant for a learned audience, such as one might expect at court, Tofte's poem and the claims of the Second Quarto point more obviously to public performances. And, as Ann Jennalie Cook argues in The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London, audiences in the public theatres were likely to be reasonably well-educated people with enough time and money to attend the theatre in the daytime rather than working full-time (p. 224).

The various venues also lead to the conclusion that the play could be performed almost anywhere since the play's requirements for performance are relatively simple. Only one scene requires any particular kind of stage set. In IV.iii Berowne must watch from above as his fellow ‘students’ successively appear, each reading a love-poem, and then going into hiding as the next lovestruck man appears, but even the need to find three hiding places would work easily on a two-level stage without any additional construction or properties. Otherwise, nothing specific in the way of stage decor is indicated. Although the Princess fusses about the fact that the King will not allow her inside his gates, nothing in the text suggests that we see those gates. The bare stage of the Elizabethan theatre can easily be the King's park and for most of the play it does not really matter where in the park we are. The production does need to create a sense of separation between the men's space and that of the women, but the two doors of the Elizabethan theatre could easily serve that function. Once the women arrive, and set up ‘housekeeping’ somewhere in the park, they would probably continue to enter and exit from that same door, just as in twentieth-century productions the women and men tend to ‘claim’ one side of the stage and to use that side for their entrances and exits. And in the long final scene, the women need to retire offstage briefly to discard their masks and switch back the favours which they have received from the young men.

IV.iii, the overhearing scene, does require that all four men be on stage at the same time and that, at least to the audience, it look faintly plausible that they do not see each other. The stage directions from the Quarto are simple: ‘Enter Berowne with a paper; The King entreth; Enter Longauill with papers. The King steps aside; Enter Dumaine.’ Berowne's lines imply another stage direction when, after Dumaine's entrance, he comments:

All hid, all hid; an old infant play.
Like a demi-god here sit I in the sky,
And wretched fools' secrets heedfully o'er-eye.

(IV.iii.75-7)

Each man hides as the next comes in and Berowne's line indicates that he is above the others. John Kerrigan suggests that Berowne could be in the ‘lords' room’, above and behind the stage (p. 199) while G. R. Hibbard mentions the possibility of a climbable property tree, such as Marston intended for The Fawn, his 1605 comedy (p. 165). We know that a portable ‘arbour’, solid enough to hold the weight (actually the dead weight) of the murdered Horatio is a requirement for Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, probably written in the late 1580s. Moreover, Ben Jonson's early comedy The Case is Altered (first printed in quarto, 1609, but presumably dating from 1597-98) includes a scene in which Peter Onion, a servant, hides in a tree from the miserly Jaques and from the threat (kept offstage) of Garlic the mastiff; while Jaques questions Juniper, another servant who had been with Onion, Onion keeps up a punning commentary (‘I fear not Garlic; he'll not bite Onion, his kinsman’) very similar to Berowne's comments on his three infatuated friends. The 1598 inventory of the properties held by the Lord Admiral's Men mentions ‘j baye tree’ (Henslowe's Diary, p. 319) which allows for the possibility that Berowne hid in an onstage tree, either brought on for the occasion, or perhaps there from the beginning as part of the ‘outdoor’ setting, though scholars still disagree about whether stage trees are fictive or actual constructions (Henslowe's Diary, Reynolds, Habicht, Rhodes). The obvious hiding places for the King and Longaville are, as both Kerrigan and Hibbard note, the two downstage pillars supporting the canopy over the stage. Given the relative simplicity of producing this scene in the Elizabethan theatre, Bernard Shaw's strictures on the scene, growing out of an 1886 amateur production, are particularly amusing:

The only absolutely impossible situation was that of Biron hiding in the tree to overlook the king, who presently hides to watch Longaville, who in turn spies on Dumain; as the result of which we had three out of the four gentlemen shouting ‘asides’ through the sylvan stillness, No. 1 being inaudible to 2, 3, and 4; No. 2 audible to No. 1, but not to 3 and 4; No. 3 audible to 1 and 2, but not to No. 4; and No 4 audible to all the rest, but himself temporarily stone deaf. Shakespeare has certainly succeeded in making this arrangement intelligible; but the Dramatic Students' stage manager did not succeed in making it credible. For Shakespear's sake one can make-believe a good deal; but here the illusion was too thin. Matters might have been mended had Biron climbed among the foliage of the tree instead of affixing himself to the trunk in an attitude so precarious and extraordinarily prominent that Dumain (or perhaps it was Longaville), though supposed to be unconscious of his presence, could not refrain from staring at him as if fascinated for several seconds.

(Shaw on Shakespeare, p. 114)

The scene works not because it is credible but because visual conventions come into play for the audience. Just as Oberon tells us, ‘I am invisible; / And I will overhear their conference’ (A Midsummer Night's Dream, II.i. 186-7), so too in IV.iii of Love's Labour's Lost we need only to see the character ‘stand aside’ for him to become hidden as he wishes. Moreover, the characters are so absorbed in their own problems that it looks entirely feasible for them not to see the person or persons already on stage. Only Berowne has enough distance from his own feelings to mock them rather than to wallow in them. His soliloquy at the beginning of IV.iii shows us that he can call himself a ‘fool’ and a ‘sheep’ and realise that he is trapped by his own feelings. But although the King speaks of his ‘folly’ when he drops his paper, Longaville calls himself ‘forsworn’, and Dumaine says he ‘would forget’ Katharine, all of them are really more interested in their feelings and their sonnets than in anything else. Such self-absorption is plausible, and we watch the set-up of the scene with delight, knowing that successive ‘disappearances’ will create successive revelations—as indeed they do.

The last scene of Love's Labour's Lost also requires nothing special in the way of a permanent stage setting; and, given the way in which the four couples meet, separate, regroup to watch the Nine Worthies, and separate again, a relatively empty stage seems not merely possible but necessary. The scene with the four lords as Muscovites requires only that the four couples betake themselves to different parts of the stage to create the sense of four private wooings. The Worthies might set up a stage on which to present their pageant, but even a curtain held up by, say, Dull and the Forester would work equally well (as it did in the 1990 RSC production, directed by Terry Hands). The Elizabethan thrust stage almost invites each of the Worthies to come forward: Costard/Pompey offers his armour to the Princess, Moth/Hercules gets so involved in strangling his snake(s) that Holofernes has to get him offstage, and both Holofernes/Judas and Armado/Hector reply so directly to the onstage audience of hecklers, that they seem to be with them, rather than separate from them. Only perhaps Sir Nathaniel, already ‘o'erparted’ with Alexander the Great, might want to stay as close to the ‘curtain’ or ‘onstage’ area as possible. Marcade's entrance could easily be made through either of the upstage doors.

But if the play demands little in the way of stage sets and thus lends itself easily to performance in a variety of settings, it does create major work for the costumers. This emphasis on costume, rather than setting, suits a play which emphasises fashions in speech; Berowne famously links the worlds of clothes and language when he renounces ‘Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise, / Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation, / Figures pedantical’ (V.ii.406-8). Taffeta, silk, and the heavy velvet implied by ‘three-piled’ are all fabrics associated with the upper classes—and may derive from the luxury of the costumes worn by the King's court and the French visitors. Moreover, they are also fabrics familiar to anyone who browses through the lists of costumes in Henslowe's Diary, lists which indicate that such fabrics were readily, if expensively, available:

• Item, j orenge taney satten dublet, layd thycke with gowld lace.
• Item, 1 blew tafetie sewt.
• Item, j payr of carnatyon satten Venesyons, layd with gold lace …
• Item, Harey the fyftes vellet gowne. …

• (p. 317)

Even more noticeable are the implications of elaborate costumes for the men when they disguise themselves as Muscovites. We hear first from Boyet that they are ‘disguised’, a word repeated by the Quarto stage directions, ‘Enter Black-moores with musicke, the Boy with a speach, and the rest of the Lordes disguysed.’ Katharine asks the seemingly speechless Longaville, ‘What! was your visor made without a tongue?’ (V.ii.242) and Rosaline asks Berowne, later in the scene, ‘Which of the visors was it that you wore?’ (V.ii.385), indicating that the men's disguises include facemasks. Similarly, all the women, following the Princess's instruction, ‘we will every one be mask'd’ (V.ii. 127), wear or hold masks, probably of ‘rich taffeta’ if we hear Boyet's reply to Moth (V.ii.159) as a description of those masks. Rosaline speaks of the ‘Muscovites in shapeless gear’ (V.ii.303), implying that the men's disguises were loose and baggy.

Other costumes called for by the text involve the costumes for the Nine Worthies; we hear of Pompey's shield, Alexander's scutcheon (coat of arms, probably on his shield), and Hector's armour. The inventory list for the Lord Admiral's Men in 1598 contains items similar to ones that the Worthies might have used:

• a lion skin (Costard needs a leopard skin and head for Pompey)
• assorted armour
• 1 snake, (probably for a play called 1 Hercules—although the text does not exist, it seems that the infant Hercules strangled a snake, as Moth will do. See Henslowe's Diary, pp. 319-21).

But the existence of stage armour (surely a necessity for any Elizabethan acting company) does not necessarily imply complete or authentic costumes for the Pageant. Unlike the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night's Dream, who seem to have thought about the play for longer than an afternoon, Armado, Holofernes, Sir Nathaniel, Costard and Moth clearly have not had much time to whip up costumes or even to memorise their lines. As the text makes clear, Costard has almost managed that feat, but Sir Nathaniel is having major trouble coping with the lines at all. So in production, the Worthies might well appear in their own clothes with pieces of armour over them. Perhaps they brought in yet other pieces of costume or perhaps some decorative props for the final songs, the dialogue between the Owl and the Cuckoo, but nothing in the text specifically insists on more spectacle. Still, if an inventory list can have a dragon for Doctor Faustus, a bull's head, and a black dog, perhaps small birds might be easily available (Henslowe's Diary, pp. 319-21).

Several other costume details emerge from the text. When the women appear in II.i, Maria must be wearing white, so that Longaville can ask about her (II.i. 196). Rosaline wears a cap, since that is how Berowne identifies her, ‘What's her name in the cap?’ (II.i. 209), even though his earlier conversation suggests that he knows exactly who she is. Both the Princess (IV.i.1) and Berowne (IV.iii.1) refer to the King out hunting which may suggest that he has changed into a hunting costume. The references to hunting in IV.i might also imply a costume change for the Princess and her ladies, with all appearing in something appropriate for that sport—or they could just carry bows and arrows. It is traditional in contemporary productions for Marcade to be all in black; Henslowe's Diary makes clear that elaborate black costumes were available, even for a single scene (p. 223), so it seems probable that Marcade's was such a one. The Princess is quick to understand his errand and even finishes the sentence for him:

MARCADE:
The king your father—
PRINCESS:
Dead, for my life!
MARCADE:
Even so: my tale is told.

(V.ii.711-13)

His black costume announces the King's death even before his grave tone and quiet words do so. Marcade's entrance late in the play may also take advantage of the fading light of an afternoon performance at an outdoor playhouse. When Berowne remarks after Marcade's line, ‘The scene begins to cloud’ (V.ii.714), his words are metaphorical in terms of the stage action but may have been literally true for the outdoor audience.

We can infer, then, that the first production—or productions—of Love's Labour's Lost followed conventions of staging that we associate with the Elizabethan stage. The play appealed visually through gorgeous costumes rather than through elaborate settings, and through the quick movement from one group of characters to another. Indeed, the beginning of IV.i, when the Princess enters for the hunt with the question ‘Was that the king, that spurr'd his horse so hard / Against the steep-up rising of the hill?’ (1-2), suggests that she enters just in time to see someone leave the stage; it is not the King, but probably Berowne, exiting from the previous scene. At the end of IV.i Costard hears a ‘shout within’ (actually printed as ‘shoot within’), cries ‘Sola, sola’, and rushes off, presumably to watch the hunting/shooting, and immediately Holofernes, Sir Nathaniel and Dull come in from watching the shooting, and commenting on it. And at the end of their scene, Holofernes comments ‘the gentles are at their game, and we will to our recreation’(IV.ii.158-9), inviting us to believe that we will see more hunting. Then Berowne enters with the words, ‘The king he is hunting the deer; I am coursing myself’ (IV.iii.1-2) and we are into the hunt for the heart, rather than the hart.

But the play's real life on stage for the Elizabethan audience was a verbal rather than a visual one. The Princess's description of the slightly barbed interchange between Rosaline and Katharine (V.ii.19-28) as ‘a set of wit well-played’ (V.ii.29) could well apply to many moments when the play's abundant energy comes from speakers who delight in witty thrusts and counter-thrusts. I have already mentioned Berowne's opening challenges both to the King's proclamation and the King's language. So infectious is his wit that soon the other men join in, picking up his rhythms, his verbal oppositions, and his rhymes:

KING:
How well he's read to reason against reading!
DUMAINE:
Proceeded well to stop all good proceeding!
LONGAVILLE:
He weeds the corn, and still lets grow the weeding.

(I.i. 94-6)

The effect of such language games is, from the first, to make the audience listen carefully. By the time Dull enters with Armado's letter, we have become accustomed to the balanced wit of the young men and so are ready to enjoy both the puns of Costard and the elaboration of the obvious in Armado's letter. While the point of the letter is to accuse Costard of misconduct, both the writer and the readers seem more interested in style, or, as Berowne puts it, ‘How low soever the matter, I hope in God for high words’ (I.i. 190-1). ‘High words’ are exactly what Armado adores, whether he's addressing the King as ‘Great deputy, the welkin's vicegerent, and sole dominator of Navarre, my soul's earth's God, and body's fostering patron’ (I.ii. 216-18), characterising his mood, ‘besieged with sable-coloured melancholy’ (I.ii. 227), or specifying the time of the incident as ‘about the sixth hour; when beasts most graze, birds best peck, and men sit down to that nourishment which is called supper’ (I.ii. 231-3). Armado's ‘high words’ when writing to the king continue in his polysyllabic conversation with his young servant Moth: ‘I spoke it, tender juvenal, as a congruent epitheton appertaining to thy young days, which we may nominate tender’ (I.ii. 13-15). Only when he confronts the country wench, Jaquenetta, with whom he has fallen in love, does he shrink into monosyllabic wooing—and the sharp contrast is extremely funny.

The fascination with how people express themselves, perhaps even more than what they say, is obvious throughout the play. We sense the immediate connection (whether of attraction or competition) between Berowne and Rosaline in their echoing phrases of II.i; we hear the pretentiousness of Holofernes in the Latin phrases slipped easily into sentence after sentence—and his condescension in the translations he supplies; further, we savour the sonnets of the young men, noting that Dumaine cannot even manage such an intricate form and settles for tetrameter couplets, while the King's passion makes him exceed the normal fourteen lines and go on for an extra couplet. Because the characters and their costumes, not the setting, provide all the visual interest, we focus on them—and because they enjoy language so much and comment so frequently on the language of others, we listen closely.

Such emphasis on language is one of the distinguishing features of Shakespeare's contemporary, John Lyly (1554-1606), whose well-known prose work, Euphues (1578), embodied a highly symmetrical style, so distinctive that it came to be called ‘euphuistic’, and so noticeable that Falstaff could easily parody it in Henry IV, Part 1. In his plays, as Peter Saccio has noted, Lyly often creates not just parallel dialogue but parallel actions; in Gallathea (1588), ‘three of the nymphs enter serially to soliloquize on their lovestricken state and then discover their common condition’, while in Love's Metamorphosis (c. 1590) ‘three couples enter serially, each man passionately pleading his suit and each nymph contemptuously rejecting him’ (Saccio, p. 134). Saccio connects these actions to the climactic scene in Love's Labour's Lost where the hidden Berowne overhears first the King, then Longaville, and then Dumaine each read a sonnet confessing his love, as well as to the swearing of oaths of love by Orlando, Phebe, and Silvius in V.ii of As You Like It (p. 134); in Shakespeare, even more than in Lyly, the ostentatious parallelism creates laughter.

As Jocelyn Powell suggests in an illuminating article on Lyly, the notion of style as action is grounded in the Elizabethan love of play and display, of showing off one's expertise in dancing, music, chess, cards, or conversation. Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier (1528, trans. 1561) emphasises the need to be a good conversationalist, while Stephano Guazzo's Civil Conversation, translated into English in 1581, noted the importance of witty speaking, through the use of variety and decorative phrases. The Elizabethan habit of keeping a commonplace book in which one could note down aphorisms and phrases that would turn up later in conversation suggests how prevalent was the interest in sounding witty. Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night, hopelessly hanging around Olivia's house in hopes of wooing her, is alert to notice the speech of the disguised Viola and to comment on particular words: ‘Odors’, ‘pregnant,’ and ‘vouchsafed’—I'll get 'em all three all ready' (III.i.88-9). A similar appreciation of fine language turns up when Holofernes congratulates Armado on his elegant variation for the common word ‘afternoon’: ‘The posterior of the day, most generous sir, is liable, congruent, and measurable for the afternoon: the word is well culled, chose; sweet and apt, I do assure you, sir; I do assure’ (V.i. 83-6).

Thus, for Shakespeare's audiences, both in the public theatres and at court, Love's Labour's Lost must have seemed, in the words of the First Quarto's title-page, ‘a pleasant conceited comedie’, especially when we remember that ‘conceit’ implied fanciful and imaginative metaphors. They saw elegantly dressed courtiers exchanging witty remarks; they picked up the Latin tags of Holofernes; they enjoyed the ‘mistakes’, unconscious and conscious, of Costard; they savoured the verbal one-upmanship of Moth. With Armado, they might well have said: ‘Now, by the salt wave of the Mediterraneum, a sweet touch, a quick venue of wit! Snip, snap, quick and home! It rejoiceth my intellect. True wit!’ (V.i. 54-6). An audience used to listening rather than reading as its primary way of receiving ideas would enjoy Love's Labour's Lost in the same way that people who play tennis, even as amateurs, appreciate the subtleties of a well-played Wimbledon match. There is something exciting about watching professionals at work: the stichomythic banter between Berowne and Rosaline in II.i sets them up as contenders equally skilled at come-ons and put-downs; the elaboration of epithets for Cupid from Berowne (III.i) reveals simultaneously that he is in love and that he is angry at finding himself in love; Boyet's description of the offstage rehearsal of the Muscovites (V.ii) shows him to be a shrewd observer and, even better, a marvellous raconteur.

In addition to such displays of aristocratic verbal wit, the play offers the audience other forms of wit. We remember that Dr Johnson complained of passages ‘which ought not to have been exhibited, as we are told they were, to a maiden queen’ (p. 112), and certainly the play's sexual punning is constant and obvious, so much so that at one point Maria complains to Costard and Boyet, ‘Come, come, you talk greasily; your lips grow foul’ (IV.i.138). Boyet is the master of sexual innuendo, whether trying to convince the Princess that the King has fallen in love with her, or flirting with the ladies, or teasing Rosaline; but Rosaline and Katharine trade accusations of unchastity (V.ii.24-5), and Berowne's defence of Rosaline's beauty sends Dumaine into a schoolboy's ‘dirty joke’:

BEROWNE:
O! if the street were paved 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 walk'd overhead.

(IV.iii. 274-7)

These lines, and many other references (although, to my mind, fewer than Herbert A. Ellis argues for in Shakespeare's Lusty Punning in ‘Love's Labour's Lost’), all contain deliberate sexual references. There are also what might be called the unconscious references, at least so far as the characters are concerned, such as Nathaniel's praise of Holofernes' teaching and Holofernes' placid acceptance:

NATHANIEL:
Sir, I praise the Lord for you, and so may my parishioners; for their sons are well tutored by you, and their daughters profit very greatly under you; you are a good member of the commonwealth.
HOLOFERNES:
Mehercle! if their sons be ingenious, they shall want no instruction; if their daughters be capable, I will put it to them

(IV.ii. 71-7)

It's difficult to believe that the curate Nathaniel would even imply, let alone think, that Holofernes has any sexual involvement with the daughters ‘under’ him, although the next phrase certainly allows the audience such a connection, as does Holofernes' ‘I will put it to them.’

Most of all, with Costard, played originally by the best-known comedian of the age, Will Kemp (Wiles, pp. 105-6), the play reminds the audience constantly that ‘Such is the simplicity of man to hearken after the flesh’ (I.i.214-15), a simplicity which is natural and, as the courtiers learn, undeniable. No sooner have the young men signed the unnatural oath, forbidding themselves the sight of women and forbidding women to enter their sight, than Dull drags on Costard, arrested because he ‘sorted and consorted’ (as Armado's letter puts it, I.i. 252) with a woman. We cannot be sure whether the ‘consorting’ involved just speaking to Jaquenetta, or something more intimate. Costard implies the latter, denying her virginity (albeit in the context of trying to wriggle out of the accusation by quibbling over various words for ‘woman’) and then capping the King's warning, ‘This maid will not serve your turn, sir’ with ‘This maid will serve my turn, sir’ (I.i. 289-90), implying that he knows her to be sexually forthcoming. In addition to Costard's sexual puns, he is also remarkable (as are Bottom and Dogberry, two other roles that Kemp played) for his malapropisms: ‘therefore welcome the sour cup of prosperity’ (I.i. 304); ‘if ever I do see the merry days of desolation that I have seen’ (I.ii.149-50); and so on. But if he twists and sometimes mutilates language, he can also expose its pretentiousness, as in his memorable comparison of Armado's ‘remuneration’ to Berowne's ‘gardon’ where he rightly concludes that the latter tip is ‘a 'leven-pence farthing better’ (II.i. 165), or in his crushing rejoinder to the ‘head lady’, the Princess, that she must be the ‘chief woman’ since she is also ‘the thickest’ (IV.i. 51). Though Costard confuses Armado's letter and Berowne's, thus setting up the exposure of Berowne as a lover, he nonetheless rises above the situation to escape any blame, ‘Walk aside the true folk, and let the traitors stay’ (IV.iii. 209). He is, whether unwittingly as with the letters, or wittingly as in the revelation of Jaquenetta's pregnancy (V.ii.667-9), the exposer of others throughout the play, inviting the audience not only to laugh at him, but to laugh with him at those who pretend to knowledge.

In addition to the play's attractiveness as a spirited linguistic game, it also created for Elizabethan audiences, through the French setting, and the names of contemporary historical figures, a tantalising set of topical references. There really was a King of Navarre, though he was named Henri and not Ferdinand. Yet since the name ‘Ferdinand’ appears only in stage directions and never in the text, it's quite possible that audiences immediately thought of Henri of Navarre, later Henri IV of France (1553-1610). The Duc de Longueville was an ally of Henry's during the Protestant/Catholic religious wars in France extending through the last half of the sixteenth century, as were two members of the Biron (Berowne) family. Dumaine seems to refer to the Duc de Mayenne, a well-known opponent of Henri IV's, and a character seen on the Elizabethan stage in Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris (1593). Though Henri of Navarre did possess a country estate, Nérac, where he was visited in 1578 by his wife, his mother-in-law, and other women, including both a former mistress and a future mistress (cf. Hibbard, p. 50), it is difficult to see how such a visit fits with the announced desire of Shakespeare's King of Navarre to live in celibate study. Indeed, the more details one gathers about the real historical figures, such as the fact that Henri was first a Protestant and then a Catholic, while Du Mayenne was always a fervent Catholic, the less easy it becomes to reconstruct the exact significance that these figures had for Shakespeare's audience.

Scholars have proposed various readings, of which two strike me as persuasive. Henri's switch from Protestantism to Catholicism (in 1593) might well have been seen as oath-breaking of a particularly serious kind, especially to an English audience which had lived through its own period of repression under the Catholic Mary I. The gravity of the oath-breaking by the real Henri might, as Mary Ellen Lamb suggests, thus extend to the breaking of oaths by Shakespeare's Navarre, fictional character though he is. But it is also possible to see what Albert Tricomi calls ‘a deliberate contratopicality, a deliberate inversion of the topical wherein these persons are charmingly transmuted from the French civil war into the fairy-tale world of Nérac’ (p. 29). With this reading, the audience smiles at Shakespeare's characters, knowing well how unlike the historical Henri the fictional Ferdinand really is, especially in matters of sexual fidelity and abstinence.

Given the allusions, however the audiences read them, to actual historical figures for some of the play's aristocratic characters, it is therefore not surprising that scholars have tried for years to find connections between the more obviously comic characters and contemporary figures. Richard David's introduction to the Arden edition offers a useful summary of the suggestions developed over many years that Holofernes represents the translator John Florio or perhaps the Cambridge don, Gabriel Harvey, that Moth is the playwright Thomas Nashe, and that the play itself was, in David's words, ‘a battle in a private war between court factions’ (p. xliii). The problems with such allusions are many, including their assumption that the play was performed primarily at court (thus ignoring the evidence of the Second Quarto's title-page) and the difficulty of proving any of the often strained connections; as Mary Ellen Lamb points out, ‘who could prove that Holofernes was not Gabriel Harvey?’ (p. 53). But the very efforts to find contemporary figures behind the characters of this play, whether soldiers, politicians, playwrights, or teachers, reflects a particular kind of anxiety, the feeling that the play would become more comprehensible if some sources could be found, if not for plot, then at least for characters. It's interesting to note that A Midsummer Night's Dream, with which Love's Labour's Lost shares many qualities, including the lack of a particular literary source, seems not to arouse the same kinds of questions, perhaps because the characters of Theseus and Hippolyta, as well as Oberon, Titania and Puck, have a pre-Shakespearean literary life.

What we cannot know is exactly how Shakespeare intended his original audience to respond to these references, or even whether he expected the audiences, either at the Globe or the Blackfriars, to whisper to themselves, ‘Ah, what a wonderful parody of John Florio!’ or ‘Look at what he's doing with the King of Navarre!’ The play has its own internal consistency, and so it is entirely possible to see the irony of the oath-breaking without having ever heard of Henri IV, and to recognise that there is something overblown and pompous about Holofernes without trying to figure out who he really is. Since we cannot be sure about the original audience, we cannot therefore assume that the play is an extended ‘in-joke’, whether academic or political.

Questions about how the audience experienced the play extend also to the play's central love relationships. Tofte's poem, our chief contemporary evidence, reports that ‘To everyone (save me) 'twas comical’ (quoted by Hibbard, p. 1). Perhaps Tofte is offering an objective description of the audience's reaction, or perhaps he wishes to emphasise his own reaction, ‘Whilst tragic-like to me it did befall’, as a way of persuading his lady-love to pity him. His poem suggests that the actors portrayed the lovers, ‘those entrapped in Cupid's snare’ with ‘feigned’ ease, and complains ‘They seemed to grieve, but yet they felt no care’, implying that the loss of the lovers at the end seemed merely a surface one. But since Tofte wants to contrast the actors' ‘feigning’ with his own ‘mere truth’, his account lacks the objectivity one would want. Still the question he raises and others it implies persist to the present day. Does the play show us men and women who think they are in love with each other, but who are really more in love with their own witty ideas about love? If so, should the loss of such ‘love’ be seen as appropriate rather than regrettable? Do the two songs at the end, with their evocations of familiar scenes and sounds (and familiar jokes about the cuckold too) manage to reconcile the spectators to an unfamiliarly open-ended play? How seriously does the play ask us to take the opening oaths and the breaking of those oaths? Is the prevailing tone satiric, lighthearted or witty?

The more one asks such questions, the more one becomes aware of the play's complexity, a complexity enacted in the last lines of the play as well as in the concluding action and the songs. The final speech of the play, ‘The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo’ (V.ii.922) points in contrary directions. The god Mercury is associated with conducting the dead to the underworld, and the messenger who announces the death of the French king is named Marcade, probably pronounced Marcadé (cf. Hibbard, p. 48) while Apollo, in Berowne's great fourth-act speech, is the god of love and poetry. So too the very last words, printed only in the Folio, ‘You that way; we this way’, perhaps a stage direction for the characters separating the men and women, perhaps a comment from stage to playhouse audience reminding them that they now return from the artificial to the real world, suggest contrarieties. The awareness of such contrarieties marks the major academic critical discussions of Love's Labour's Lost, beginning with the essay of Anne Barton (then Bobbyann Roesen) on the play in 1953. The essay begins arrestingly and paradoxically:

In a sense the play has ended; an epilogue has been spoken by Berowne and that haunting and beautiful kingdom created by the marriage of reality with illusion, destroyed, seemingly beyond recall. In the person of Marcade, the world outside the circuit of the park has at last broken through the gates, involving the people of the play in its sorrows and grim actualities, the plague-houses and desolate retreats, the mourning cities and courts of that vaster country overshadowing the tents and the fantastic towers of Navarre.

(p. 411)

At first one may wonder what play she could be talking about, but as her essay makes clear, ‘plague’ and ‘desolation’ are the play's own words. Moreover, after beginning at the end, she then moves quickly and convincingly to the play's opening lines, reminding us of their preoccupation with Fame, Time, and Death, ‘a shadow [that] darkens for a moment the delicate dream landscape of the park’.

A series of books and essays followed Anne Barton's lead in taking Love's Labour's Lost seriously. C. L. Barber's Shakespeare's Festive Comedy in 1959, Ralph Berry's ‘The Words of Mercury’ in 1969, William C. Carroll's The Great Feast of Language in ‘Love's Labour's Lost’ in 1976, all focus attention on the language of the play, but see it in terms of what that language reveals about the characters and how the use of language is itself a major theme of the play. Such concentration on the meaning of the play itself, rather than on discovering its topical background (a practice that began in 1747 when Warburton proposed the Holofernes/Florio connection) or on placing the play in the context of other Shakespearean comedies and thus, almost inevitably, relegating it to the sidelines or treating it as an anomaly because of its ending, has accompanied and perhaps stimulated the many revealing productions of the play in the twentieth century. Indeed, the disappearance of the play from the stage in the late seventeenth and the entire eighteenth century might be compared to its disappearance from sustained critical commentary—each reflecting the other. And it is worth noting that the revival of interest in the play on stage in the twentieth century in fact preceded Anne Barton's influential essay. Modern directors seem particularly sensitive to the play's contradictions and switches of mood, as the later discussion of productions by Peter Brook and John Barton will suggest. But the Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences would equally have relished those oppositions, and one of the mysteries of theatre history is why it took 200 years before audiences could again enjoy Love's Labour's Lost in the theatre.

Bibliography

Barber, C. L., Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, Princeton, NJ, 1959.

Barton, John, Playing Shakespeare, London, 1984.

Berry, Ralph ‘The Words of Mercury’, Shakespeare Survey, 22, 1969, 69-77.

———, ‘Stratford Festival Canada’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 31, 1980, 167-75.

———, On Directing Shakespeare, revised edition, London, 1989.

Carroll, William C., The Great Feast of Language in ‘Love's Labour's Lost’, Princeton, NJ, 1976.

Cook, Ann Jennalie, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London, 1576-1642, Princeton, NJ, 1981.

David, Richard (ed.), Love's Labour's Lost, The Arden Shakespeare, London, 1951.

———, ‘Shakespeare's Comedies and the Modern Stage’, Shakespeare Survey, 4, 1951, 129-35.

———, Shakespeare in the Theatre, Cambridge, 1978.

Ellis, Herbert A., Shakespeare's Lusty Punning in ‘Love's Labour's Lost’, The Hague, 1973.

Granville-Barker, Harley, Prefaces to Shakespeare, First Series, London, 1927.

Habicht, Werner, ‘Tree Properties and Tree Scenes in Elizabethan Theater’, Renaissance Drama, n.s. 4, 1971, 69-92.

Harbage, Alfred, ‘Love's Labor's Lost and the Early Shakespeare’, Philological Quarterly, 41, 1962, 18-36.

Henslowe, Philip, Henslowe's Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert, Cambridge, 1961.

Hibbard, G. R. (ed.), Love's Labour's Lost, The Oxford Shakespeare, Oxford, 1990.

Johnson, Samuel, Selections from Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Bertrand H. Bronson with Jean M. O'Meara, New Haven, CT and London, 1986.

Lamb, Mary Ellen, ‘The Nature of Topicality in “Love's Labour's Lost”’, Shakespeare Survey, 38, 1985, 49-59.

Powell, Jocelyn, ‘John Lyly and the Language of Play’, in Elizabethan Theatre, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, London, 1966.

Reynolds, G. F., ‘“Trees” on the Stage of Shakespeare’, Modern Philology, 5, 1907, 153-68.

Roesen, Bobbyann (Anne Barton), ‘Love's Labour's Lost’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 4, 1953, 411-26.

Saccio, Peter, The Court Comedies of John Lyly: A Study in Allegorical Dramaturgy, Princeton, NJ, 1969.

Shaw, George Bernard, Shaw on Shakespeare, ed. Edwin Wilson, London, 1961.

Traversi, D. A., An Approach to Shakespeare, 3rd edition, London, 1968.

Tricomi, Albert H., ‘The Witty Idealization of the French Court in Love's Labor's Lost’, Shakespeare Studies, 12, 1979, 25-33.

Van Doren, Mark, Shakespeare, London, 1941.

Wiles, David, Shakespeare's Clown: Actor and text in the Elizabethan playhouse, Cambridge, 1987.