SOURCE: Maus, Katharine Eisaman. “Transfer of Title in Love's Labor's Lost: Language, Individualism, Gender.” In Shakespeare Left and Right, edited by Ivo Kamps, pp. 205-23. New York: Routledge, 1991.

[In the following essay, Maus offer a feminist critique of Love's Labour's Lost in which she explores the connection between the play's language and its theme of sexual politics.]

Influential feminist critics of Shakespeare have rarely dealt with Shakespeare's early, linguistically extravagant work.¹ Most have confined themselves to discussing Kate's capitulation scene in The Taming of the Shrew, or to tracing in the first years of Shakespeare's career basic plot or image patterns that recur in what is often considered the “mature” oeuvre. Understandably, feminists have preferred to concentrate upon the later comedies, the histories, the tragedies, and some of the romances. Proponents of a new critical discourse can most efficiently demonstrate the power of their approach by influencing the ways the most impeccably canonical Shakespearean texts are discussed in professional publications and conferences, and taught in the undergraduate and graduate classroom. Moreover, the perennially fascinating characterological complexity of Shakespeare's later work has proven congenial to feminist critics, allowing them an ample field upon which to display the insights that become available when gender becomes a primary analytical category.

Nonetheless, these critical predilections have some unfortunate consequences. Suspicion of a depoliticized formalism, whether New Critical or deconstructive, has sometimes encouraged feminists to imply dubious distinctions between the language of the plays and poems and their politics. In “The Rape in Shakespeare's Lucrece” Coppélia Kahn, for instance, complains that its “rhetorical display-pieces invite critical attention for their own sake, offering readers a happy escape from the poem's insistent concern with the relationship between sex and power” (45). In Kahn's formulation the feminist critic must resist such temptations, must look beneath the linguistically ornate surface to discern the social and characterological realities which make the work interesting and important.

In this repudiation of “mere rhetoric” Kahn follows, intentionally or not, a host of earlier critics who find themselves apologizing for the early Shakespeare's unseemly linguistic superfluity. In Harley Granville-Barker's account, Love's Labor's Lost seems the symptom of a Shakespearean artistic pubescence: “To many young poets of the time their language was a new-found wonder; its very handling gave them pleasure. The amazing things it could be made to do!” (9). For James Calderwood, Love's Labor's Lost shows the young Shakespeare “passing from a sensuous enchantment with language, a wantoning with words, to a serious consideration of his medium, his art, and their relation to the social order” (“Wantoning” 318). Calderwood sees Love's Labor's Lost as a rite of passage after which Shakespeare, having sown his verbal wild oats, shakes off such adolescent temptations to indulgence, settles down to become the artistic equivalent of a responsible husband, and begins to write the history plays and romantic comedies we value today. Feminist criticism might well question the assumptions about manly adulthood upon which such a critical practice relies, but by and large it has not bothered to do so.

Meanwhile critics who do not concern themselves with gender, but who do confront directly the remarkable linguistic elaborateness of Love's Labor's Lost, have developed an interesting critical perspective upon the play. William Carroll and Keir Elam discuss Love's Labor's Lost in terms of sixteenth-century Neoplatonic linguistic philosophy, popularized in Elizabethan England as part of a new self-consciousness about the expressiveness and literary potential of the vernacular. An essentialist theory of language derived from Plato's Cratylus proved particularly influential: a theory, that is, that “there is an inherent rightness in names, that names are not arbitrary signs but are in some sense themselves the essence of what is named” (Carroll 12).² Carroll and Elam maintain that Love's Labor's Lost is both deeply invested in, and deeply critical of, a Cratylanism they associate with Navarre's Academy. In the course of the play, both critics argue, the inadequacy of this linguistic theory becomes increasingly obvious. Its plausibility is hopelessly undermined by elaborate puns, daring tropes, novel epithets, multilingual malapropisms, ambiguities intended and unintended by the characters: all the verbal exorbitance for which Love's Labor's Lost has long been condemned.

By demonstrating that important sixteenth-century philosophical debates about words and meaning inform the play's linguistic self-consciousness, Carroll and Elam are able to make impressive sense of features of Love's Labor's Lost previously considered trivial. In their account, the play is not just a display of linguistic possibilities; it is about linguistic possibility. My own focus upon issues of naming and reference in the pages that follow bespeak my indebtedness to their arguments. Nonetheless, their thesis has its limitations. Both critics abstract the linguistic issues in Love's Labor's Lost from the sexual politics of its comic plot, ignoring the misogynist assumptions upon which Navarre's failed Academy is founded, the affinities insisted upon in the play between verbal invention and erotic energy, and the tense sexual dynamics of the unexpectedly anti-comic conclusion. In consequence their readings seem deracinated from and unenlightened about psychological or generic concerns.

Is it possible for feminist criticism to avoid, on the one hand, treating Shakespearean verbal complexity as a distraction from politics or psychology, and on the other, treating politics or psychology as a distraction from verbal complexity? Perhaps we ought to wonder not merely why Shakespeare writes a play overtly concerned with linguistic problems and with problems of figuration, but why these problems become important in this unusual comedy, in which a group of men and a group of women fail to reconcile their differences. To answer this question, we need to understand how apparently abstract intuitions about linguistic meaning acquire psychological and political urgency in the court of Navarre. For in fact, I shall argue, some of the important linguistic issues in Love's Labor's Lost are inseparable from its generic, comic concern with sexual politics and with the construction of a gendered identity in a social context.³

As Love's Labor's Lost begins, the King of Navarre is completing his plans for an “Academy” devoted to celibate study and to the mortification of the senses, and requiring his courtiers to sign a document listing the conditions by which they propose to live for the next three years. He explains his rationale in an intricate opening speech, the complexities of which deserve close attention:

Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives,
Live register'd upon our brazen tombs,
And then grace us in the disgrace of death;
When, spite of cormorant devouring Time,
Th'endeavor of this present breath may buy
That honor which shall bate his scythe's keen edge
And make us heirs of all eternity.
Therefore, brave conquerors—for so you are,
That war against your own affections
And the huge army of the world's desires—
Our late edict shall strongly stand in force:
Navarre shall be the wonder of the world;
Our court shall be a little academe,
Still and contemplative in living art.

(1.1.1.-14)⁴

What is the appeal of this project? As a way for a king to spend his time, it would have been inconceivable a few generations earlier. In the course of the sixteenth century, however, the humanist emphasis on the education of secular leaders makes intellectual pursuits, previously considered fitting only for churchmen, newly respectable for an aristocrat.⁵ Thus while we learn in the second act that Navarre's late father involved himself in military adventures, the son, like the young Hamlet in a later play, turns to scholarship. As a result, the conflicts he anticipates are largely spiritual or internal. The new enemies are one's own affections, the huge army of the world's desires.

Interestingly, however, Navarre assumes that the metaphors of the battlefield remain appropriate, and the anticipated gratification similar. In the Courtier Castiglione writes: “Where the courtier is at skirmish, or assault, or battle upon the land, or in such other places of enterprise, he ought to work the matter wisely in separating himself from the multitude, and undertake noble and bold feats which he hath to do, with as little company as he can, and in the sight of noble men that be of most estimation in the camp … for indeed it is meet to set forth to the shew things well done (95).⁶ Castiglione's courtier neither concerns himself with military discipline, nor sees himself as carrying out part of an overall strategy involving an entire army. Rather he uses the circumstances of conflict to detach himself from the group and cut an unmistakable figure in the eyes of others. In Love's Labor's Lost, Navarre wants the same rewards from scholarly asceticism. Traditional forms of contemplation, dissolving the individual in the apprehension of the absolute, are not for him. Rather he imagines himself undergoing the contemplative life as if it were a heroic ordeal, emerging victorious and universally admired. Self-mortification becomes a means to self-exaltation, a way to acquire the traditional aristocratic desiderata, honor and fame.⁷ The potential absurdities of such a combination will be suggested later in the play in the figures of Armado, the bombastic soldier, and Holofernes, the militant pedant, who burlesque from opposite directions, so to speak, Navarre's idealized conflation of martial valor with learning and eloquence.

Navarre's opening speech, as well as the scene that follows it, connects his particular kind of identity-formation with a particular rhetorical anxiety. Love's Labor's Lost begins with edicts proclaimed, contracts endorsed, and promises extracted—a flurry of what J. L. Austin calls “performative utterances.” This kind of language is not referential; it performs actions rather than describe or point to an extralinguistic reality. As such, performative utterances seem to close the gap between signifier and signified, verba and res, word and world. Closing that gap is something Navarre seems to find highly desirable. In his opening speech he suggests that the fame he expects for his ascetic heroism will take the form of a stable description, a name permanently “registered” on a tomb. “Navarre shall be the wonder of the world!” In the meantime he demands another sort of stabilization of and through the name, asking his courtiers to ratify their promises with their signatures.

Navarre's desire for the permanence of his own name and those of his friends is quite comprehensible, because proper nouns seem to attach uniquely and immutably to their referents as other identifying features might not. They are, as Hobbes puts it, “singular to only one thing.”⁸ If, moreover, William Carroll is right that Navarre would like to believe that names “are not arbitrary signs but are in some sense the essence of what is named,” if verba and res are really inseparable, then ensuring the permanence of the name becomes a magical way of ensuring the permanence of the self. Thus the King sees an inscription upon the tomb as a way of overcoming death. If his logic seems specious here, it is no more so than that of many Renaissance writers of love poetry, Shakespeare included, who assert that their words grant the beloved a kind of immortality.⁹

Navarre's opening speech suggests, however, that the permanence he desires is not merely an automatic consequence of the usual relationship between names and things. Rather, it is a hard-won achievement. He describes a kind of transaction: hardships in the present “buy” an honor that mitigates the effects of mortality. In this passage he seems less the Cratylan essentialist than the prudent investor who has learned how to make a profit from “cormorant devouring Time,” contractually assenting to deprivation in the short term in order to realize a long term gain. This long term gain is represented as an inheritance: the King expects that he and his friends will become “heirs of all eternity.”

What are the implications of these metaphors? Why should the problem of stabilizing the name, of making an indissoluble connection between signifier and signified, be formulated in terms of exchange or inheritance? Perhaps an association between naming and inherited property seems “natural” for the King because the aristocratic male name—Navarre, Berowne, Dumaine, Longaville—is normally an inherited name; moreover, it is the name of what is inherited, the piece of property that guarantees its owner income and status.

The close connection in the aristocratic mind between a name and a title to property is adumbrated later in the play, when Longaville catches sight of a lady, immediately falls in love with her, and “desires her name” of Boyet. Boyet playfully refuses to tell him, so Longaville rephrases his request:

Pray you, sir, whose daughter?
BOYET:
Her mother's, I have heard.
LONGAVILLE:
God's blessing on your beard!
BOYET:
Good sir, be not offended.
She is an heir of Falconbridge.
LONGAVILLE:
Nay, my choler is ended.
She is a most sweet lady.

(2.1.201-07)

And Longaville exits forthwith, satisfied despite never, apparently, receiving an answer to his question. For it is Maria's place in the network of aristocratic entitlements that matters to Longaville, that constitutes her “name.”

The inextricability of person and property has important consequences for the way the King is able to formulate his desire for immortal fame. When he declares, in his opening speech, that “Navarre shall be the wonder of the world!” it is unclear whether he is referring to himself—the founder of the Academy—or rather to the site upon which it will be located. (Likewise, when Boyet tells Longaville that Maria is “an heir of Falconbridge,” there is no way of knowing whether Falconbridge is what or from whom she will inherit.) A related ambiguity confuses the claim Navarre makes in his opening speech, when he imagines himself and his associates as the “heirs of all eternity.” Is he thinking of eternity as testator or as bequest?

Perhaps Navarre sees no reason to distinguish the two possibilities because for him they have amounted to the same thing: he has inherited the territory of Navarre from a father named Navarre. But becoming the “heir of eternity” is more problematic, since inheritance requires the death of the previous possessor, and eternity is precisely what does not die. The dream of a fixed name, called forth by an anxiety about “the disgrace of death,” turns out paradoxically, as the King has formulated it, to need what it wants to resist or avoid.

In other words, the King demands a name that will refer permanently and uniquely to him, but he is frustrated by the fact that the aristocratic male name is a doubly transferred name—transferred in space, so to speak, from possession to possessor, and then again in time, down the generations from one possessor to the next. The names the courtiers “subscribe” to Navarre's document in the first scene are metonymies in both a synchronic and a diachronic sense.¹⁰ And an aristocrat's name seems, as proper names go, an unusually unstable matter, since if his father or older brother dies, then his name changes to reflect the alteration in status and property rights.

Moreover, the Cratylan position is stronger than is required to maintain the aristocratic privilege of Navarre and his courtiers. The landowning class as a group needs not fixity of reference but predictability of reference: regular and orderly methods of managing the necessary transfer of title from father to child, from debtor to lender, from buyer to seller. The propriety of the aristocratic proper name actually rests not upon an essential, immutable connection to the individual whom it denotes, but upon the legitimacy of the means by which that name has been acquired and by which it will be passed along. Thus when Boyet praises Navarre as “the sole inheritor / Of all perfections that a man may owe” (2.1.5-6), he uses “owe” here in its common Renaissance sense, a variant of “own.” But the language simultaneously invokes the sense still current today, suggesting not possession but its apparent opposite, debt—the obligation to relinquish ownership. These two senses are not as inconsistent as they might seem. The fact of death, which makes possible the acquisition of property from one's ancestors, also necessitates its eventual surrender.

For Navarre, however, this is not good enough. To be “matchless,” in his terms, is to take possession of his proper name once and for all. But this desire is covertly, illogically linked to an incompatible order of inherited transfer, in which the possessor of a name is merely the temporary bearer of a title acquired from the father and passed along to the son. Resisting the inevitability of his own mortality, Navarre resists at the same time the effect his mortality has upon the meaning of his name. Without acknowledging it, he asks to be installed forever in a place that he is only allowed to occupy for the time being. The imagery of inheritance that comes naturally to him thus seems ill-suited to the aggressively meritocratic and competitive quality of the sentiments he uses that imagery to express. Navarre makes, as it were, an excessive demand upon the very system to which he owes his preeminence.

The linguistic confusion here is structurally identical with an ambiguous feature of Renaissance aristocratic psychology first discussed by Jacob Burckhardt and analyzed more recently by Stephen Greenblatt. Well-off, educated men in early modern Europe manifest a powerful desire to distinguish themselves from each other, to demonstrate their freedom and uniqueness. But because the aristocratic impulse to individuality is the cultural construction of a particular class, the aristocrat's convictions about his own independence and originality are themselves inevitably derivative, part of a group ethos. What seems like a meritocratic claim has subterranean links to a system of inherited entitlement it seems to oppose or subvert. In Love's Labor's Lost, the meritorious aristocrat desires an identity based upon his own individual exploits, but in fact derives his prestige not from his own heroic exertions, but from the transferred glory of accomplished ancestors.

Given this incoherence, it is not surprising that the intelligent Berowne finds Navarre's scheme objectionable. He suggests a different way of conceiving of the relation between name and referent:

These earthly godfathers of heaven's lights,
That give a name to every fixed star,
Have no more profit of their shining nights
Than those that walk and wot not what they are.

(1.1.88-91)

The “name” for Berowne's purposes is the first or Christian name, bestowed by a godfather who has no proprietary interest in the child, rather than the last or family name, derived from a father whose stake in his own offspring is far more consequential. Berowne suggests that the names of the fixed stars have nothing to do with how they originated, whether they shine, or who profits from them. Language is merely arbitrary, unconnected to facts about inheritance and social privilege.

Berowne's separation of naming from paternity has a number of advantages. Not only does his account avoid the contradictions of Navarre's essentialism, but it promotes more radical possibilities for individuation, since if signifiers are no longer strictly aligned with signifieds, then the topic of an utterance no longer determines usage. The idiosyncratic pressures of the speaker's personality and choices—his individual style—determines how he speaks and what he says. Not surprisingly, most critics of Love's Labor's Lost have seen Berowne as the most “realistic” or “fully realized” character in the play, a harbinger of the highly particularized protagonists of the romantic comedies Shakespeare writes a few years later.¹¹

Nor is it surprising that despite his expressed doubts, Berowne does agree to participate in Navarre's project, for despite their difference the two men share important common ground. For both of them, the linguistic problem of what and how names mean is inextricably linked to a psychological problem of self-construction. They both want to be “individuals,” though they envision different paths to that goal. As such they are both caught up in what might be called the quintessential humanist problem, that is the relation of original to copy, archetype to type, model to imitation, source to derivation, ancestor to heir.¹² Much of the so-called action in Love's Labor's Lost, a virtually plotless play, concerns the manifold ways in which one thing can stand in for another, replacing and displacing it: Dull's representation, or reprehension, as he calls it, of the King's authority; Armado's search for precedents in love; the oddly prolonged discussion about whether Cain can substitute for Adam in an old joke about the moon; the bizarre argument about how many actors are going to “pursent” (present, personate) the Nine Worthies. On a dramatic level the problem might be seen as intrinsic to the theatrical medium, in which a character is always an impersonation or counterfeit. On the linguistic level the problem is one of the substitutability of one word for another, and finds expression in the play's obsession with figures of synonymy: coelo, the sky, the welkin, the heaven; wench, damsel, virgin, maid; carry-tale, please-man, zany, mumble-news, trencher-knight. The most elaborate and gratuitous example of the anxiety generated by such substitutions is the curiously exaggerated hostility the courtiers displayed at the masque of the Nine Worthies near the end of the play. Their ridicule suggests a discomfort at the way the names and attributes of quintessentially exemplary individuals—Hector, Hercules, Alexander, Judas Maccabeus—are subject to appropriation by incompetent place-holders, degraded even at the moment of memorialization.

COSTARD:
I Pompey am,—
BEROWNE:
You lie, you are not he.

(5.2.541)

While the masque purportedly celebrates the immortal fame of virtuous heroes, it actually conducts a final assault upon the aristocratic fantasy of an absolute heroic identity, unalterable by death or by the passage of time.

The issues about language and meaning that Navarre and his courtiers debate in the first scene of Love's Labor's Lost, and which continue to arise in many of the scenes thereafter, are thus profoundly implicated in their own sense of themselves as men of a particular class and generation. In Navarre's case the unacknowledged incoherence of this self-conception is connected with a refusal to acknowledge women, whose role in the production of a new generation involves them indispensably in the process of title transfer. Navarre establishes “Academe” as an entirely male community, protected from female incursion by a penalty reminiscent of Tereus's abuse of Philomela: any woman who approaches the court will have her tongue cut out. With some help from Longaville, who devises this threat, Navarre wishfully defines language as a wholly male possession, and imagines women as speechless and passive. Their attitude is consistent with that expressed in English Renaissance linguistic and historical writing, which often associates linguistic slippage and transfer with a female sexuality both indispensable for social and familial order and potentially uncontrollable by that order.¹³ William Camden, for instance, looking back at the English spoken before the Norman invasion, admires the Anglo-Saxon preference for expressing complex or abstract ideas in compound words derived from native elements, rather than importing words, as sixteenth-century speakers do, from French, Latin, or Greek:

Our ancestors seemed … as jealous of their native language, as those Britons which passed hence into Armorica in France, and marrying strange women there, did cut out their tongues, lest their children should corrupt their language with their mothers' tongues.

(32)

By means of a violence identical to that contemplated by Navarre and his courtiers in the first scene of Love's Labor's Lost, the British fathers maintain the fixity and purity of their language by passing it directly to the next generation, without the intrusion of the women who under ordinary circumstances would introduce their children to language. The accurate transfer of the mother tongue from generation to generation requires the silencing of actual mothers. Like Navarre in Love's Labor's Lost, Camden associates originary language, true naming, with the male. By contrast, the openness of modern English to alien influence constitutes a kind of corruption of its bloodline, which perhaps contributes to its hybrid vigor but which also defines regulation and makes purity impossible. Navarre's desire to clarify the relation between names and things thus not surprisingly requires the exclusion of female sexuality, associated as it is with a corruption of the truth. Since Berowne is not so heavily invested in this particular notion of truth—since for him signifiers are arbitrarily applied anyhow—Navarre's interdictions make no sense to him, and he attempts to make a case for a more accommodating attitude toward women.

If Navarre's fantasy of a fixed name represents a kind of excessive attempt to guarantee aristocratic privilege, the fantasy of the silent woman represents a similarly excessive assertion of male privilege. The connections between these two kinds of privilege quickly become clear. The Princess of France arrives to enquire about title to Aquitane, a title disputed because of a deal made between her father and Navarre's father. As she enters for the first time at the beginning of the second act, her courtier, Boyet, is describing her mission to her:

Consider who the King your father sends,
To whom he sends, and what's his embassy:
Yourself, held precious in the world's esteem,
To parley with the sole inheritor
Of all perfections that a man may owe,
Matchless Navarre; the plea of no less weight
Than Aquitaine, a dowry for a queen.

(2.1.2-8)

In Boyet's account the Princess seems to exemplify woman's place in a strict patriarchal system, an item of exchange among men. While Navarre's position, as we have already seen, is that of an heir (“the sole inheritor / Of all perfections”) the Princess is by contrast a valued object, something “held precious in the world's esteem.” Her task requires her to act as an intermediary between father and potential husband, representing her father's interest in a negotiation for a territory described as a “dowry.” Nonetheless, her arrival forces “matchless Navarre”—matchless not only in the sense of being unique, but in the sense of being still unmarried—to confront everything he has tried to repress: the involvement of women in the process of title transfer, the dependence of the present generation upon the actions of its predecessors, and the possibility that the title itself may be ambiguous, subject to conflicting claims.

Moreover, since the paternal source of her authority is remote, offstage, the Princess seems to operate in the world of the play as a power in her own right. Her first action is to command one of her male followers to act as deputy or “fair solicitor” between herself and the young King. The drama of title transfer, in other words, casts the Princess as both object and subject in a system of exchange. Another way of describing this doubleness is that the women in Love's Labor's Lost turn out to talk, as well as to listen to themselves being talked about.¹⁴ Their lovers imagine them attending silently to sonneteering monologues, the topics and recipients of an erotic discourse they themselves are not permitted to speak. But the Princess and her ladies are, in fact, vocal and witty critics of the poems and gifts sent to them by the men. The female tongues the men imagine excising in the first scene turn out to be cutting, not cut: by 5.2 Boyet is remarking gleefully that “The tongues of mocking wenches are as keen / As is the razor's edge invisible” (5.2.256-57). As the play proceeds the women appropriate many of the postures associated with the subject-position conventionally occupied by an aggressive male lover. In 4.1 Rosaline, skillfully launching arrows at a target, indulges simultaneously in a bawdy dialogue with Boyet in which she identifies herself as the shooter / suitor who “hits” (copulates with) the “mark” (female genital) with a “prick.” In the hunting scenes, the Amazonian princess penetrates her deer / dear with a similar phallic efficiency; as Holofernes puts it, “The preyful Princess pierc'd and prick'd a pretty pleasing pricket” (4.2.55-56). Helpless at last, Berowne presents himself to Rosaline as a target:

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

(5.2.396-99)

The mutilated Philomela of the first scene is here replaced by the male victim Orpheus, dismembered by unruly female Bacchantes.

How are we to understand the kinds of power and prestige the women in the play find it possible to acquire and deploy?¹⁵ In theory, the role of the female in the passing down of titles is merely instrumental. In Love's Labor's Lost the women do not have surnames at all, and in Shakespeare's England, a woman's property like her surname ordinarily disappears into her husband's when she marries. Aristocratic men are endowed with the goods, power, and equipment they need to become Renaissance self-fashioners and heirs of all eternity, while the female role seems in contrast to be defined as purely ancillary. Thus when Boyet tells the enamored Longaville that Maria is her mother's daughter, Longaville finds it a mere impertinence. He imagines the mother as a necessary but ideally unnoticed conduit between the father who possesses wealth and the child who will inherit it. For ideally, under the rule of primogeniture, the patriarch passes the bulk of his property to his eldest son, who succeeds to his position of power over the resources of the family.

In practice, however, things do not always work this way. To function smoothly, primogeniture requires a son who survives to manhood. When there is no surviving son, inheritance customs diverge; in some systems, title to the property goes to the next surviving relative, even if that relative is female, and in others, title passes over the females to the next surviving male, if one can be found. In England, where Love's Labor's Lost is written, the first practice was normal; in France, where the play is set, the second prevailed; but in both cases an absence of male heirs could allow women to occupy places in the inheritance system supposedly reserved for men. So even while Longaville belittles the role of the mother he is gratified to learn that the lady he desires is “the heir of Falconbridge.” Just as the conventions of sonneteering courtship employed by Navarre and his associates deny women a position from which to speak—a position the women nonetheless find it possible to appropriate for themselves—so in some circumstances the conventions of inheritance grant aristocratic women the very power they seem at first glance designed to preclude. But this does not really feminize power, since the woman's possession of it is accidental, perhaps temporary, and most importantly remains defined in male terms. For despite their apparent independence, the Princess and her ladies never have available to them a specifically feminine subjectivity, a special claim upon the cultural or material resources available to the men. Camped for the duration of the play in a field just outside the borders of the male domain, they find it possible to insinuate themselves precariously into a subject-position normally defined as male, taking advantage of the absence, naiveté, or inattentiveness of those who are its normal occupants. This is why Rosaline's and the Princess's seizure of initiative is figured by phallic attributes (pricking the pricket) and why the men may react by accusing them of a usurpation which, in fact, they have in a way committed.

The possibility of a woman inhabiting such roles, however, does function to cut social facts loose from biological ones and to blur or complicate the significance of gender difference. Moreover, it suggests that the sharp demarcation between men and women Navarre insists upon early in the play involves a significant mystification of the facts of male lives. For it is possible to think of men, too, as conduits through which the family title passes from generation to generation. Unlike their mothers and sisters, male heirs are allowed some control over their property in their lifetimes, but as we have already seen this may not satisfy those to whom the fact of mortality itself seems unacceptable. Perhaps the men exaggerate the passivity and discursive inconsequence of the women in order to displace onto them an anxiety generated by their own inconsistent sense of identity: how are they to reconcile an inherited status, which must eventually be relinquished to the next generation, with an energetic egoism that refuses to give up what it has acquired, defying “cormorant devouring Time” with a demand for eternity?

And there are further complications. Since a woman can function as a subject rather than a mere object or a conduit, with a mind and a speech of her own, she possesses the power to interrupt or derail the orderly process of transferring names from father to son, from original to likeness. This disruptive potential is the subject of many of the notoriously bawdy double-entendres in Love's Labor's Lost. One class of such jokes implies fantasies of simply bypassing female subjectivity altogether: by rape, in which the woman's desires are overruled, or by homosexuality or onanism, in which they become irrelevant. Another class of jokes recognizes the indispensability of female subjectivity for the functioning of kinship networks and property transfers, but stresses the unreliability built into such a system. The constant witticisms about light women, horns, and cuckoos constitute reminders that although fathers may possess titles, their relationship to the children who will inherit those titles is always open to question.¹⁶

Many critics have noticed that the aristocratic women in Love's Labor's Lost seem more “serious” than their male counterparts about the ways language can be used—a seriousness evident in the attitudes they express toward language rather than in any plain-style austerity of usage.¹⁷ The Princess, for instance, repeatedly deplores the “painted flourish” of flattery and professes horror at oath-breaking; Rosaline regrets Berowne's uncontrolled wit. It is hardly surprising that the women are more likely than the men to construe the referentiality and reliability of words as a specifically moral issue. They cannot help knowing that the truth of names in patriarchy is the consequence not of some intrinsic connection between names and things but of female sexual fidelity.

While “truth” for the men, in other words, is an issue of right definitions—a matter of correctly aligning words and things-in-the-world—for the women “truth” is a behavioral matter, the keeping of a marital vow that demands submission to a patriarchal order. For the women, truth is an exercise not of the intellect but of the will: and not, moreover, of an ambitiously self-assertive will but of a will that disciplines itself, that brings desires into accord with social requirements. For the Princess and her ladies are not revolutionaries. They do not want to undermine or escape from patriarchy, but to find themselves a secure and relatively advantageous position within it. Thus Berowne's skepticism, with its refusal to acknowledge a connection between words and practice, is despite its apparent tolerance at least as threatening to their interests as Navarre's rigid misogynist exclusivism. For the happiness of their lives will depend upon their husbands' scrupulous fulfillment of their contractual obligations in marriage.

The aristocratic women's relatively earnest association of truth with virtuous self-restraint has, however, a flip side—a playful awareness of the way they can, by their own initiative, alter the relationship between sign and referent. When they learn that their lovers, disguised as Muscovites, are coming to woo them, the ladies mask, and exchange among themselves the love-tokens the men have just sent them. They know that the lords will not think of questioning the symbols of male entitlement—that they will be, in the Princess's phrase, “deceived by these removes” (5.2.135). As Berowne laments when he learns of the ruse, “we / Following the sign, wooed but the sign of she” (5.2.469). The ladies in Love's Labor's Lost perform the equivalent of a bed-trick on the level of the signifier. The way the Princess describes the deception suggests that the aristocratic concern with property can be as pressing for the women as for the men:

There's no such sport as sport by sport o'erthrown,
To make theirs ours and ours none but our own.

(5.2.153-54)

Appropriating male sport and subsuming it under the rubric of a sport “owned” by the women, she reverses the direction in which property and power ordinarily flow in patriarchal marriage. Although it is never as ambitious, the Princess's desire for self-ownership—“ours none but our own”—resembles Navarre's competitive individualism in some respects. But while Navarre's strategies of self-assertion involve thinking of the relationship of name and thing as a clear and permanent matter, the Princess's self-assertion involves subverting that clarity and permanence, rupturing the connections between desire and its objects, signifier and signified. These reversals are, however, limited ones, unlike Berowne's more wholesale subversions: a game in which rules and durations are carefully specified.

The significant conceptual differences between the sexes become starkly evident at the end of the play, when Jacquenetta's pregnancy is announced, the death of the King of France is reported, and the aristocratic women refuse to marry the men. The men have sworn to abjure the company of women, but they find themselves in love nonetheless. Berowne satisfies them that their perjury can be overcome by a process of redefinition, that the performative utterances with which the play began do not really matter. In Berowne's account the eyes of women become sources of truth:

From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:
They are the grounds, the books, the academes,
From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire.
.....For where is there any author in the world
Teaches such beauty as a woman's eye?
.....Then when ourselves we see in ladies' eyes,
Do we not likewise see our learning there?

(4.3.298-312)

Berowne reformulates the place of sexual desire in the pursuit of knowledge, repudiating Navarre's original conception of passion as an enemy to the scholar's “still and contemplative” mind. The truth-seeker comes upon himself not directly, but as a displaced image, reflected in the object of his passion. Berowne rejects Navarre's notion that by some strenuous effort of self-creation the scholar can achieve a perfect autonomy. Nonetheless, like Navarre, Berowne assumes that truth is a place, a locus of authority from which originary meaning issues. Although he installs women in that place of privilege, his assumptions are very different from those of the women themselves, whose conception of truth is social and contractual.

Unfortunately for the men, the women insist upon the seriousness of male vacillation far more vigorously than might be expected. The Shakespearean heroine—Julia in Two Gentlemen of Verona, Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hero in Much Ado, Mariana in Measure for Measure, Imogen in Cymbeline—typically asks not that her lover has kept faith throughout the play, but that he promise improvement in the future. Comic endings require a certain female charity, or laxness of standards, that the Princess and her entourage refuse to endorse. In Love's Labor's Lost, the women's refusal to credit the men's apparently sincere declarations of ardor makes the predictable unions impossible. Instead, in the last lines of the play, the women impose tasks upon the lovers. The Princess insists that Navarre perform a version of his original project, sequestering himself in a hermitage for a year, learning to keep his word. Rosaline sends Berowne away to try jesting with the sick at hospital beds:

A jest's prosperity lies in the ear
Of him that hears it, never in the tongue
Of him that makes it.

(5.2.851-53)

These tasks involve a re-education in the nature of truth as the women conceive it: as the faithful submission to the command of another, and as a speech-act completed not when it is uttered but when it is heard and assented to.

The ending of Love's Labor's Lost is derailed, then, because the women find it impossible to believe the men. But issues of belief, trust, and faith are implicated in relations of power. The death of fathers—Navarre's before the play begins, the Princess's as it ends—makes the transfer of title possible, indeed necessary, imposing the pleasures and obligations of reproduction upon the next generation. Making these transfers, however, requires the cooperation of women, and Love's Labor's Lost calls the inevitability of this cooperation into question. The only union in the play, Armado's and Jacquenetta's, provides a father's name to a child whose paternity is in fact very much in doubt. The aristocratic women disrupt the process of transfer by a different strategy, insisting upon the postponement of their nuptials. “Our wooing doth not end like an old play” complains Berowne, “Jack hath not Jill. These ladies courtesy / Might well have made our sport a comedy” (5.2.864-66).

Patricia Parker has recently argued that the delay of closure in courtship and in literature is identified with women's interest and women's power, and the pressure towards an ending represents reimposition of a stable patriarchal order in which men can exert their control unchallenged (8-35). Courtship, reversing the normal currents of social authority, grants women a kind of power, a power Berowne casts in philosophical terms when he grants an originary status to women, instead of defining them as secondary, derivative, or ancillary. “O! I am yours, and all that I possess,” he declares to Rosaline (5.2.383). This ownership of men by women is a temporary matter, however, and will be reversed in the event of their marriage. For normally, women finally submit to men, finally extend the “courtesy” that allows courtship to come to an end. But Love's Labor's Lost ends without closure, with the women's insistence upon further delay. They sustain the fiction of their power in order, they hope, to be able to dispense with it at last.

A refusal to provide the expected satisfactions of a comic denouement, then, is part and parcel with the play's inquiry into problems of signification. The socially prescribed ways the characters conceive of themselves, and the ways they try and fail to interact with each other across the psychic rifts of gender difference, are deeply implicated in anxieties about the naturalness of meaningful language, and with a closely related concern for the elusiveness and displacement of origin. The linguistic pleasures and perplexities of Love's Labor's Lost are inseparable from its sexual politics, as the play calls the relations between the sexes and the appropriateness of names into question by the same means and for similar reasons.

Notes

1. For instance, Carol Neely gets underway with Much Ado About Nothing; Peter Erickson with As You Like It; Marianne Novy with The Taming of the Shrew. Linda Bamber discusses Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice in the context of the histories and tragedies. The earlier plays addressed by the essays in The Woman's Part are Richard III and The Taming of the Shrew. Coppélia Kahn's Man's Estate contains a chapter on Venus and Adonis, but as in her essay on The Rape of Lucrece, she downplays Shakespeare's rhetorical self-consciousness in order to pursue other lines of inquiry.

2. Keir Elam, 114-58, makes a somewhat more elaborate philosophical argument with similar consequences for a reading of the play.

3. A fuller reading than I have room to present here would take account of class as well as gender. Love's Labor's Lost explicitly frames the interactions among aristocrats, professionals, and peasantry in terms of the possession of a literacy imagined in humanist terms as both the ability to read and write and as access to the classical past.

4. All references are to the Arden edition of Love's Labor's Lost, ed. Richard David.

5. Numerous historians of education have commented upon the significance of this change in the conception of the aristocrat, and its impact upon educational institutions and curricula. See, e.g., J. H. Hexter; Mark H. Curtis, Oxford; Lawrence Stone, “Educational Revolution”.

6. I have modernized the spelling in this and other passages from Renaissance texts.

7. In fact, by the latter part of the sixteenth century changes in military technology have already rendered obsolete the individualistic military strategy Castiglione describes. With the widespread employment of weapons capable of killing at long range (muskets, cannons, etc.), sophisticated group maneuvers become more effective than uncoordinated one-to-one confrontations in the battlefield. For a succinct account of these changes see, e.g., Felix Gilbert. One reason Navarre may be searching for an alternative form of self-display is that older means of acquiring honor in hand-to-hand combat are no longer available, except in the artificial circumstances of the jousting ring.

8. Cf. Elam 120-21: “The great paradigm for language at large in Love's Labor's Lost is the proper name … the appeal, as it were, of appellation is evident first in the obsessive adamic ceremony of nomination as such and in the very range of names for naming drawn upon … and then in the carefully cultivated anxiety that the pedants in particular express over nominal propriety.” Although she does not deal with Love's Labor's Lost, or with much other Shakespeare for that matter, Anne Ferry (69-80) usefully illuminates the privilege given to the proper name in sixteenth-century linguistic theory.

9. It is also a kind of error that Shakespeare elsewhere associates with royalty. What a king says or demands often happens, and the correlation between his words and the real world can present itself to him as an issue about the nature of language rather than about the nature of politics. Thus Sigurd Burckhardt writes about Lear: “The full, gapless identity of sentence and of power, of word and act, is the essence of Lear's conception of himself and his place” (276). But of course this is a mystification. The end of the first scene of Love's Labor's Lost demonstrates efficiently that the truth of the King's words requires the subject's participation: Costard, arrested in the company of Jacquenetta and asked if he had noticed the decree forbidding him the company of women, admits “much the hearing of it, but little the marking of it.”

10. The sixteenth-century antiquarian William Camden remarks upon the impulse to suppress the metonymic transfer of the name from places to persons: “I cannot see why men should think that their ancestors gave names to places, when the places bare those very names, before any men did their surnames. Yea the very terminations of the names are such as are only proper and appliable to places, and not to persons in their significations. … Who would suppose hill, wood, field, ford, ditch, pole, pond, tower, or ton, and such like terminations to be convenient for men to bear in their names, unless they could also dream hills, woods, fieldes, [sic] fords, ponds, pounds, etc. to have been metamorphosed into men by some supernatural transformation” (104).

11. See, among many others, Bobbyann Roesen 415-18; Alexander Leggatt 79; Kenneth Muir, Comic 35.

12. For a discussion of the linguistic issues of origin, copy, and translation in humanist texts from Erasmus to Montaigne, see Terence Cave.

13. For a discussion of the way fears of female uncontrollability are figured in Renaissance rhetorical treatises, see Patricia Parker 103-13.

14. It is perhaps easy to exaggerate what seems to be a validation of female subjectivity in this play; the Princess and her insouciant ladies are, after all, boy-actors speaking lines written for them by a male playwright. Nonetheless love-comedy virtually requires a different and more active fictional role for women than does the sonnet sequence: one needs to put female characters on the stage, and once they are there they must be given something to say.

15. Claude Lévi-Strauss (60-61) comments on women's ambiguous position both as signifiers in a kinship system that works as “a kind of language,” and as producers of signs in their own right: “words do not speak, while women do.”

16. A recognition of the mutual dependence of the sexes is, Berowne suggests, one of the differences between falling in love and indulging the rape fantasies that beguile the men in the early scenes; he recommends that the courtiers abandon their original oaths “for men's sake, the authors of these women / Or women's sake, by whom we men are men” (4.3.356-57).

17. The usual way of interpreting this difference is in terms of the greater “maturity” of the women: see, e.g., Thomas Greene.

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