[In the following essay, Kehler emphasizes the theme of deception in Love's Labour's Lost.]

When Longaville first sees Maria, he asks Boyet, “Pray you, sir, whose daughter?” “Her mother's, I have heard” (II.i.201-202),¹ quips Boyet, in effect withholding the information Longaville seeks—Maria's paternity. Boyet's witticism intimates that establishing paternity is chancey. Faulconbridge, the Bastard in King John, reminds John that the paternity of “all men's children” is a secret that lies in their mothers' keeping (I.i.63); and, coincidentally, Maria of Love's Labor's Lost turns out to be “an heir of Falconbridge” (II.i.205).

Variations on Boyet's jest appear in other Shakespearean comedies. In Taming of the Shrew the pedant replies to the question “Art thou his [Lucentio's] father?” with “Ay, sir, so his mother says, if I may believe her” (V.i.32-34). In Much Ado Don Pedro, seeking to identify Hero, remarks to Leonato, “I think this is your daughter,” to which Leonato retorts, “Her mother hath many times told me so” (I.i.104-05). In The Tempest Prospero tells Miranda that he was once Duke of Milan. Astonished, Miranda asks, “Sir, are not you my father?” “Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and / She said thou wast my daughter …” answers Prospero (I.ii.55-57).² That a man should assume his paternity on the word of “a piece of virtue” is not surprising. But if, as in Love's Labor's Lost, the source of his belief is the word of his rival, one he has earlier “taken with the manner” (I.i.202-203), that is, caught in the act, neither he nor the audience should overlook the possibility of deception.

Love's Labor's Lost is notable for a spate of cuckoldry jokes and for an open ending involving the main characters and inviting questions about closure among their lower-ranking counterparts. Nevertheless, critics persist in overlooking the possibility that Costard is and has been deceiving Don Armado for some months before the play opens. Only a few critics come near to suspecting Costard. Harley Granville-Barker is not convinced that Jaquenetta is pregnant—“it may all be a joke”—but “If there were a guilty party, we might rather suspect Costard, who did ‘confess the wench.’”³ Ronald Berman, while using the term “in flagrante” and recognizing the triangle, nevertheless asserts “that Jaquenetta proves eventually to be pregnant by the pedant [Armado].”⁴ Herbert A. Ellis, aware of “Costard's having been taken in coitu with Jaquenetta, a wench of questionable probity,”⁵ pursues the point no further. And Louis Adrian Montrose almost acknowledges Costard's possible paternity: “Whether Costard's accusation against him be true or false, Armado's composure … is thoroughly confounded.”⁶ Montrose continues:

The original stage direction, “Berowne steps forth” … can be interpreted as indicating a collusion between Berowne and Costard to slander Armado. Armado's penance, however, makes tacit confession to the accusation of his paternity. This aspect of the plot has much greater significance as Armado's act than as Costard's fabrication.⁷

I believe that considerable significance inheres in the opposite view. I am making a case either for Armado's being deceived, or for his consciously deciding to woo the mother of his competitor's child, in order to uncover a radical subtext for Love's Labor's Lost. In that subtext not only are male/female and menial/non-menial binarisms reversed but also the stigmas attaching to cuckoldry and female promiscuity disappear.

The play encourages us to detect deception. Marriages are not forthcoming among the aristocratic couples because the lords have delayed making forthright declarations of their love; Berowne's description of Rosaline offers an explanation for such delay: she is “one that will do the deed / Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard” (III.i.198-199). Since Berowne has no particular reason to suspect Rosaline, we may understand that he fears being cuckolded by any woman and that a woman is suspect merely because she is a woman.⁸ Certainly, both direct and indirect allusions to cuckoldry and other modes of sexual deception (including the deception of women by men) abound in Love's Labor's Lost. My count yields twelve passages aside from the final cuckoo song⁹—enough to awaken suspicion regarding Costard's easy attribution of paternity to Armado. Such an accusation seems all the more suspicious in light of Armado's difficulty with arithmetic—“I am ill at reck'ning, it fitteth the spirit of a tapster” (I.ii.40-41)—and Costard's stubborn refusal to grant Berowne's premise that “three times thrice is nine”:

COST.
Not so, sir, under correction, sir, I hope it is not so.

.....

BER.
How much is it?
COST.
O Lord, sir, the parties themselves, the actors, sir, will show whereuntil it doth amount.

(V.ii.489-500)

The next “party” Costard speaks of is Jaquenetta; he interrupts Hector's “The party is gone” with “Fellow Hector, she is gone; she is two months on her way. … Faith, unless you play the honest Troyan, the poor wench is cast away. She's quick …” (V.ii.671-676). The blurring of the number of Worthies in the pageant with the term of gestation—all the more blurred for Armado, bemused by numbers—emphasizes the uncertainty of when Jaquenetta became pregnant and, more important, by whom. Our acceptance of the braggart soldier's fatherhood, seemingly self-evident, may rest upon no more than Costard's clever choice of verb: “the child brags in her belly already. 'Tis yours” (V.ii.676-677).

Bearing on this argument is the interpretation of Armado's considered response, some fifty lines after his immediate response to Costard's accusation—threatening Costard with death for conferring infamy upon him. Upon further reflection Armado says, “For mine own part, I breathe free breath. I have seen the day of wrong through the little hole of discretion, and I will right myself like a soldier” (V.ii.722-725). Editors have reached no consensus on the meaning of this passage. Warburton, Heath, and Steevens are all at odds with one another.¹⁰ A division of opinion is still reflected in the split between Evans's Riverside reading: “I now perceive my wrongdoing and will make honorable amends”; and Harbage's Pelican reading: “I have caught on to the fact that I am abused (‘to see day through a little hole’ was proverbial for ‘to be no fool’).”¹¹ If Harbage is correct, then the question of why Armado feels himself abused becomes crucial. Is he angered only by public exposure, or does he, unlike the critics, suspect that Costard is attempting to escape responsibility for producing Jaquenetta's interesting condition? Having himself apprehended Costard, does he in fact know that Costard could very well be the father? Does he know that Costard has been more successful “in the manor-house” (I.i.206) than he (Armado) has been “at the lodge” (I.ii.135) and that he himself could not possibly be the father?

Ellis, whose labors in the linguistic netherlands of the play have been prodigious, believes that through a homophonic pun on “following,” Costard claims to have had intercourse with Jaquenetta. He argues that “follow was pronounced like fallow ‘to plough’, and that, figuratively, meant ‘to copulate with.’”¹² Ellis points to the following lines:

COST.
I was seen with her in the manor-house, sitting with her upon the form, and taken following her into the park, which, put together, is in manner and form following. Now, sir, for the manner—it is the manner of a man to speak to a woman; for the form—in some form.
BER.
For the following, sir?
COST.
As it shall follow in my correction, and God defend the right!

(I.i.206-214)

Additionally, Ellis hears “park” as a pun on “pock” as in venereal disfiguring and “right” as a pun on “rite” or sex act.¹³ It is only right, therefore, that we take Costard's confession—if it is a confession—into account as we try to decide whether Don Armado intends “to right himself like a soldier” by doing the right thing by Jaquenetta or by fighting Costard for defaming him.

These are not the only passages alerting the audience to possible treachery within the Jaquenetta-Armado-Costard triangle. Early in the play Costard brings Jaquenetta's sexual status into question:

COST.
… I deny her virginity; I was taken with a maid.
KING.
This maid will not serve your turn, sir.
COST.
This maid will serve my turn, sir.

(I.i.296-299, my emphasis)

Moreover, Jaquenetta mocks Armado cruelly. J. J. Anderson notes that in Act I, scene ii, she “turns every one of Armado's remarks against him.”¹⁴ This is the only time Jaquenetta speaks to Armado; she never speaks of him. Her amiability toward Costard stands in stark contrast. Significantly, Berowne later characterizes Jaquenetta and Costard as “turtles” (that is, turtledoves; IV.iii.208). We would say lovebirds. Armado misses the point of Moth's song, which generates suspicion of women:

If she be made of white and red,
Her faults will ne'er be known,
For blush in cheeks by faults are bred,
And fears by pale white shown:
Then if she fear, or be to blame,
By this you shall not know,
For still her cheeks possess the same
Which native she doth owe.

(I.ii.99-106)

What solace Moth has for Armado in this scene is, as Neal L. Goldstien observes, ambiguous: “He seeks comfort in his pain from his page Moth, who cites Samson and Hercules as great men who have been in love. The Spaniard's foolishness keeps him from grasping the fact that these are figures who were deceived by love.”¹⁵ In fact, Moth is convinced that Armado misjudges Jaquenetta. In an aside, he implies her prior seduction by calling her “a hackney” (III.i.32), that is, a whore. She is again associated with promiscuity by Costard, who suspects Armado's intention to “enfranchise” him. Costard seems to fear being married off to Jaquenetta—to “one Frances,” to “some goose” (III.i.120-122), both slang terms for whore.

Costard is undoubtedly ready to mate if not to marry. His physical endowments, metonymically certifying his ability to sire a child, are never in question. Holofernes determines that “this swain (because of his great limb or joint) shall pass Pompey the Great …” (V.i.127-128), and Berowne confirms the wisdom of Holofernes's choice: “Greater than great, great, great, great Pompey! Pompey the Huge!” (V.ii.685-686). Costard's English name gives him another advantage over his Spanish rival, for as Costard's countrymen defeated the Armada, so Costard promises to defeat Armado in love. Further support for Costard's having falsely accused Armado of fathering Jaquenetta's baby is the fact that, because the lords foreswear their oaths, a major part of the play's action deals with love's perjury and betrayal. Forms of the word “perjury” are used thirteen times in Love's Labor's Lost.

Composed before the development of blood tests to establish the likelihood of paternity, the play insists that hierarchical and patrilineal systems remain vulnerable to female subversion due to the nature of the reproductive process. Shakespeare explores some class and gender implications of this circumstance in his rendering of Armado's love. Armado is due for a major come-uppance. His letter to Jaquenetta, in which he represents himself as king and her as beggar, is absurdly arrogant: “I profane my lips on thy foot, my eyes on thy picture, and my heart on thy every part” (IV.i.84-86, my emphasis). Equally unattractive is the letter's “poetic threat of sexual assault”¹⁶ in “But if thou strive, poor soul, what art thou then? / Food for his rage, repasture for his den” (IV.i.92-93). If “Armado is a convex mirror held up to the court, … [who] reflects, grotesquely, the folly of the lords,”¹⁷ then three years of wooing and working for (but not necessarily winning) a woman whose child may or may not be his can be seen as a symbolic corporate punishment; Armado, the whipping boy, pays not only for his own élitism and attempt to intimidate but also for the wrongheadedness of the gallants, who are protected from greater mortification by their rank.¹⁸

Similarly, by taunting Armado as she does in Act I, scene ii, and then putting him on probation, Jaquenetta becomes a mirror of the ladies. Moreover, if she is pregnant by Costard, then Armado is, for lack of a better term, a pre-marital cuckold, and Jaquenetta's behavior is a lower-class actualization of expected aristocratic behavior; for, as Berowne states the case, Rosaline will “do the deed / Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard.” While the ladies retain their chastity, metonymically through Jaquenetta, suspicion breeds the event.¹⁹

Issues of class may explain why Armado must endure a longer probationary period than the lords. Armado's three-year term of labor is appropriate not because he broke or sought to break a foolish, externally imposed vow of celibacy. Rather, it is just that he “hold the plough” (V.ii.883-884) because of his Harold Skimpole-like existence. More parasite than braggart soldier, Armado neither works nor fights. He travels, and his journeys end in courts where he can live off a flair for the extravagances of language. Holding the plough for Jaquenetta's love will be an exercise in productivity, a counterpart to Jaquenetta's reproductivity. Rather than suffering humiliation for lack of a shirt (V.ii.710), he will soon be able to earn a shirt.

Since the surface of the play must remain “class-bound,”²⁰ the heaviest penalty falls on a Spaniard whose rank is unspecified and whom critics group with the “low” characters. Nevertheless, by virtue of his title (Don), his association with the lords, his page Moth, and the world of courtly fantasy he constructs for himself, he appears to be a gentleman, perhaps a knight, albeit an impoverished one.²¹ For Armado, desire proves stronger than the ideology of class, stronger than the ideology of male dominance. At the end of the play, writes Erickson of the Princess, “patriarchal authority is presented as weak or nonexistent, precariously exposed and threatened.”²² Although an uneducated rustic, now barefoot and pregnant, Jaquenetta exerts a power over Don Armado that is even more striking than that of the ladies over their social equals. Jaquenetta's role is especially remarkable because she is the only “maid” in Shakespeare to breach the code of female chastity and lose nothing by it.²³ Shakespeare's slandered-lady plays (Much Ado, Othello, Cymbeline, and Winter's Tale) are ideologically conservative in that, although the lady's reputation is redeemed, the code remains in place. Here, on the other hand, at least the possibility exists that, unburdened by moral pretensions, Jaquenetta slept with one or more men (perhaps Armado, perhaps not), was proposed to by Armado, and provisionally rejected him in favor of single parenthood. Eventually, she may have received his letter and decided he was a fool. Conceivably, she always preferred Costard. At any rate, the ladies' rejection of the lords parallels Jaquenetta's bid for a more extreme version of independence.

The shadow text that haunts the received reading is constructed of such subversive challenges as these to status quo thinking. Cuckoldry jokes may be more than just jokes; instead, there is the chance of genuine deception due to male competition for sexual favors and reluctance to take responsibility for the consequences of sex. No less subversive, in a class-conscious, patriarchal society Armado ennobles himself by remaining the milkmaid's votary, no longer a braggart but a man brave enough to accept the ignominy other men fear.²⁴ Disturbing even now, judging from its total absence from the criticism, is the possibility that Jaquenetta herself does not know who the father of her child is—a reminder that paternity may not be recoverable.

This being so, should Jaquenetta give birth to Jacaranda, who grows up lovely as a tree, surely someday a young man will ask, “Pray you, sir, whose daughter?” Not unexpected might be the reply, “Her mother's, I have heard.”

Notes

1. All Shakespeare citations are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

2. A similar joke appears in 1 Henry IV, where Falstaff, playing the king, addresses Hal: “That thou art my son I have partly thy mother's word …” (II.iv.402-403).

3. Granville-Barker, “Love's Labour's Lost,” Prefaces to Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), IV, 34.

4. Berman, “Shakespearean Comedy and the Uses of Reason,” South Atlantic Quarterly 63 (1964), 3.

5. Ellis, Shakespeare's Lusty Punning in “Love's Labour's Lost” with Contemporary Analogues (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), p. 189.

6. Montrose, “Curious-Knotted Garden”: The Form, Themes, and Contexts of Shakespeare's “Love's Labour's Lost,” Salzburg Studies in English Literature 56 (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1977), p. 117.

7. Montrose, p. 211, n. 15, citing LLL V.ii.664.

8. Leslie A. Fiedler suggests that in Shakespeare's personal mythology the Academy is a paradise of men and that Love's Labor's Lost can be read as “a new version of the Fall of man, in which woman and the serpent are identified with each other and Adam is condemned to leave the garden arm in arm with his temptress—if she will have him” (The Stranger in Shakespeare [New York: Stein and Day, 1972], p. 30).

9. At I.i.201-203; I.ii.123-124; II.i.201-202; III.i.22-25, 30-33, 120-122, and 198-201; IV.i.111-118 and 125-130; IV.iii.334-335; V.i.61-70; and V.ii.252-253. Where the bawdy allusion is not immediately apparent, see Ellis.

10. Quoted in Horace Howard Furness, ed., A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: Love's Labour's Lost (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1904), p. 298, n. 796.

11. At V.ii.713-715 in Alfred Harbage, ed., Love's Labour's Lost, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, The Pelican Text Revised (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969).

12. Ellis, p. 132.

13. Ellis, pp. 172 and 186-187.

14. Anderson, “The Morality of ‘Love's Labour's Lost,’” Shakespeare Survey 24 (1971), 57. Oddly, Joseph Westlund cites this passage as evidence of Armado's triumph over Costard after acknowledging that “Costard's momentary success with Jaquenetta suggests that the swain is more direct, and thus more effective, than the lords” (“Fancy and Achievement in Love's Labour's Lost,” Shakespeare Quarterly 18 [1967], 39). Westlund forgets that a “momentary success” is all that is required to make a baby.

15. Goldstien, “Love's Labour's Lost and the Renaissance Vision of Love,” Shakespeare Quarterly 25 (1974), 347.

16. Peter B. Erickson, “The Failure of Relationship Between Men and Women in Love's Labor's Lost,” Women's Studies 9 (1981), 71.

17. John Kerrigan, ed., “Introduction,” Love's Labour's Lost (New York: Penguin, 1982), p. 26. Kerrigan adumbrates the links between Armado and the lords on pp. 25-26.

18. My thanks to Bethany Sinnott of Catawba College for pointing out similar conflicts between élitism and desire in As You Like It (Touchstone and Audrey) and Measure for Measure (Lucio and Kate Keepdown).

19. See Marilyn L. Williamson's important article on lower-ranking characters who enact behaviors not allowed the superiors whom they double (“Doubling, Women's Anger, and Genre,” Women's Studies 9 [1982], 107-119.

20. John Kerrigan, “Love's Labour's Lost and the Circling Seasons,” Essays in Criticism 28 (1978), 283.

21. Armado's provenance may suggest low comedy in that he derives from Commedia dell' Arte's Spanish Miles Gloriosus, Capitano Spavento del Vall' Inferno (Richard David, ed., “Introduction,” Love's Labour's Lost [London: Methuen, 1956], xxxi). Yet William C. Carroll writes, “In Armado, Shakespeare seems to have found the perfect representative of a bygone era of knights, chivalric romances, and flamboyant grandiloquence” (The Great Feast of Language in “Love's Labour's Lost” [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976], p. 47).

22. Peter B. Erickson, “Sexual Politics and the Social Structure in As You Like It,” Massachusetts Review 23 (1982), 79.

23. Henry VI's Queen Margaret and King John's Lady Faulconbridge are wives; Cleopatra is Ptolemy's widow.

24. The King of France could have served as an example of an iconclast of another sort, having empowered his daughter as his plenipotentiary.