[In the following essay, Thomas examines the paradoxes found in Love's Labour's Lost.]

Love's Labour's Lost inevitably invites discussion by paradox. It is Shakespeare's most light-hearted and sportive comedy, yet the merriment is interrupted and the scene begins to cloud with an announcement of death. It is a love comedy, yet at its close Jack hath not Jill. It is deliberately artificial in conception, structure, and language, yet it concludes with an attack on the artificial life. It reveals Shakespeare's debt to his predecessors and contemporaries more clearly than any other of his plays, yet it is one of his boldest and most original experiments in form. Finally, it is totally unlike any other play he was ever to write, yet it contains, in microcosm, much of the matter and style of his later work.

Most, if not all, of these paradoxes can be subsumed under a more general paradox: Love's Labour's Lost is Shakespare's most mannerist play, yet it is also his farewell to mannerism. It is, uniquely among his plays, a self-conscious aesthetic manifesto, a statement of what he accepts and rejects in the artistic practice of his own time. To understand, not simply Love's Labour's Lost, but the direction in which the young Shakespeare was moving, the view of life and art which he was arriving at, we need to understand mannerism as one of the dominant art styles of the later sixteenth century.

But to do this, we must first disabuse ourselves of the currently fashionable notion that mannerism is ‘the manifestation of a rebellious, expressionistic “constant of the European spirit”’.¹ We have had, in recent years, a number of attempts by cultural historians to use mannerism as the key to the understanding of virtually all the major creative figures of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Mannerism has become an umbrella term covering not only a multitude of visual artists, from Pontormo to Velazquez,² but also such composers as Gesualdo and Monteverdi, and such writers as Donne and, not least, Shakespeare.

Nowhere has the case for mannerism as a style expressive of profound social and personal alienation been more forcefully and unequivocally stated than in an influential work by Arnold Hauser.³ For him, mannerism is ‘an expression of unrest, anxiety, and bewilderment generated by the process of alienation of the individual from society and the reification of the whole cultural process’.⁴ With this as his major assumption, Hauser can then proceed to the dogmatic certainty of his categorization of Shakespeare: ‘That the author of Romeo and Juliet, as well as of Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida, and even Othello, was a mannerist will be readily admitted, but when he wrote Antony and Cleopatra he was a mannerist still.’⁵

Acknowledging his discipleship to Hauser, Cyrus Hoy has lately gone one step further in transforming Shakespeare into a complete mannerist: ‘Shakespeare's final artistic style … may indeed be viewed as the ultimate expression of mannerist principles in Shakespeare's art.’⁶ Indeed, for Hoy ‘mannerist principles’ underlie not only Shakespeare's art, but all of Jacobean tragedy as well, so that Jonson's Sejanus is no less mannerist than Antony and Cleopatra.⁷

It is easy to understand the strong (one is tempted to say the fatal) attraction of such a critical approach for present-day scholars. To interpret mannerism as an art of shock, tension and angst, and then to classify Shakespeare as a mannerist, is to make him our contemporary, a sharer in our world-view, alienated as we see ourselves alienated. It is to give his work a comforting and familiar relevance, to bring him as close to us as a Kafka or a Beckett, to dignify the art of our own time with the cachet of Shakespeare's genius.

We may well be sceptical, to begin with, of any attempt to group together, as exemplars of the same aesthetic ‘principles’, works created over a rapidly changing period of a century or more, in countries of differing social, political, and religious systems, and art forms at varied stages of development. If a Bronzino court portrait and Hamlet are both expressions of mannerism, then there is clearly something wrong with our definition of mannerism. The more it explains, the less it explains.

Further, the Hauser conception of mannerism is not, as a literary scholar might innocently assume, that which is universally held by art historians. Rather, it is a view vigorously opposed by most students of mannerism, who hold to an interpretation most eloquently stated by John Shearman, who contends that mannerism is marked, not by ‘qualities inimical to it, such as strain, brutality, violence, and overt passion’, but rather by ‘poise, refinement and sophistication’. And he goes on to assert that mannerism is an artistic language of ‘articulate, if unnatural beauty, not one of incoherence, menace and despair: it is, in a phrase, the stylish style’.⁸

Like Hauser, Shearman finds mannerist qualities not only in the visual arts, but also in the writing of the period. In line with his much more limited and specific idea of mannerism as an art of sophistication and refinement, however, he discovers its literary analogues not in Shakespearian tragedy, but in such examples of the handbook of manners as Stefano Guazzo's La civil conversazione of 1574.⁹ This book, translated into English by George Pettie and Bartholomew Young as The Civile Conversation in 1586, attracted the attention of Francis Douce in 1839 as a possible source of both Jacques's ‘All the world's a stage’ speech and of Timon's epitaph.¹⁰

More recently, Sir Edward Sullivan¹¹ has attempted to make a case for Shakespeare's extensive borrowing from Guazzo. Many of the verbal parallels he points out between the Pettie-Young translation and Shakespeare's plays are such commonplaces as to mean very little, but others, such as those for Hamlet, are quite striking, especially in their cumulative effect. He suggests, with a certain plausibility, that the idea of the academe in Love's Labour's Lost may have come from Guazzo's discussion of Italian academies. John W. Draper,¹² more convincingly, has argued that the social convention of the conversazione was widely known throughout Europe, and would certainly have attracted Shakespeare's attention. However, he treats the conversazione simply as a genre of formal courtly debate, and therefore sees the influence of such works as Guazzo's on Love's Labour's Lost as limited to such debates, of which he identifies two in the play.

The Guazzo-Pettie-Young work has, however, a deeper significance for Shakespeare's early comedies, and particularly for Love's Labour's Lost. The Civile Conversation is precisely the kind of model of upper-class social behaviour, of elegant raillery and witty game playing, that the young actor from Stratford would have turned to for guidance when he attempted an urbane comedy of aristocratic life. Though in the direct tradition of Castiglione's The Courtier, the Guazzo book lacks the gravity, the philosophic idealism, the sense of social purpose which inform the earlier work. The passionate lyricism of Bembo's great discourse on love and beauty in the fourth book of The Courtier finds no echo in Guazzo. As if in deliberate contrast, the corresponding section of The Civile Conversation reaches a climax of polish and refinement of conduct and language.

It is this fourth book of Guazzo's manual of etiquette that provides perhaps the clearest link between continental mannerism and Shakespeare's early style. It describes a banquet betweene sixe Lords and foure Ladies' at which a ruler is selected by lot, through a procedure involving a random reference to a Petrarch sonnet. The Queen then chosen declares it ‘my will and pleasure … that some pretie sporte of solitarinesse may be deuised amongst you … That euerie one of us shall chuse to himselfe a conuenyent place for a solitarie life, with declaring the occasion mouing him thereunto, & confirming it with some prouerbe.’¹³

After recording a series of witty answers given by members of the company to questions propounded by the Queen, Guazzo concludes: ‘By this banquet men may learne to take their meate temperatelie, to exercise their stile modestlie, to sport and iest discreetlie, to use concord without roisting, learning without vaineglorie, curtesie without blemish or fault.’¹⁴

We do not, of course, need to assume that Shakespeare knew and used the Guazzo book in order to argue that there is a strong element of mannerism in Love's Labour's Lost. Here, if anywhere in Shakespeare, we can find a parallel to the ‘stylish style’ in the visual arts. None of Shakespeare's plays is more glittering with artifice, more openly addressed to a sophisticated coterie.

Nonetheless, much of Love's Labour's Lost inescapably reminds us of The Civile Conversation, particularly of its fourth book. The play opens, almost as if in direct reference to Guazzo, with Navarre and his friends devising ‘some pretie sporte of solitarinesse’, and the whole action of the play, until the final scene, is only the elaboration of a game, a succession of choreographic approaches and withdrawals, a progression by set speeches and witty retorts.

It is, above all, in the language of the play that Shakespeare's debt, not simply to Guazzo, but to the whole tradition represented by Guazzo, is most apparent. In a very real sense, as many recent commentators have noted, Love's Labour's Lost is a play about language, a play on words and through words.¹⁵ For most of its length, it is an anthology of false and affected modes of discourse. The most conspicuous and fantastical of the wordmongers, the one who most needs to learn to exercise his style modestly, is, of course, Armado, ‘a man in all the world's new fashion planted’. In his delight in fire-new-words, his intemperate hyperboles, his offences against decorum in language and behaviour, he constantly violates the mannerist ideal of true poise and refinement.

Nathaniel and Holofernes, the curate and the schoolmaster, are more familiar and traditional figures, whose literary origins go back to antiquity. But in the context of the play, their excesses of pedantry form still another element in the mannerist attack on crudity and exaggeration in speech. Their learning is condemned by its vainglory, and comes to nothing. ‘They have been at a great feast of languages and stol'n the scrapes,’ says Moth. And when Holofernes condescendingly rebukes Dull, ‘Thou hast spoken no word all this while,’ his reply is just and final, ‘Nor understood none either, sir’ (V, i, 131-3).

In contrast to the pretentious falsity, in its various modes, of the speech of Armado, Nathaniel and Holofernes, the language of the lords and ladies seems to offer examples of true wit and elegance. The King and his friends, the Princess and her attendants, appear, at first glance, very patterns of how to sport and jest discreetly, and how to use courtesy without blemish or fault. Each of them is a virtuoso of repartee, a master-mistress of felicitous and perfectly tuned discourse. The obvious delight which Shakespeare takes in their quickness, precision and grace of discourse is matched by the delight with which we respond to it. This is Shakespeare the wholehearted mannerist, exuberant in his command of words and in his ability to mirror and please an aristocratic audience. It is almost as if he is responding to the injunction of the King to the poet Lodowick in the anonymous Edward III:

Better than bewtifull thou must begin,
Deuise for faire a fairer word than faire,
And euery ornament that thou wouldest praise,
Fly it a pitch aboue the soare of praise.(16)

But in the end mannerism is not enough for Shakespeare. To say, as John W. Draper does, that ‘the theme of Love's Labour's Lost is the predominance of love over study in youthful minds’¹⁷ is to miss the point of the play. The lovemaking of the lords is as mannered and unreal as the construction of their little academe. They are no more truly serious in the one than they were in the other. The sonnets in which they phrase their formal passion, the masque of Russians with which they woo the ladies of France, continue on another plane the game-playing with which the comedy has begun. Berowne's great speech on love at the end of Act IV is, for all its eloquence, an intricate set piece embellished with all the tricks of rhetoric, and produced as a response to the King's plea, ‘Then leave this chat: and, good Berowne, now prove / Our loving lawful and our faith not torn.’ Language can make all things right (IV, iii, 280-1).

That nothing has really changed with the lords' surrender to love is fully evident in the second scene of Act V, where the game of wit achieves its ultimate complexity as paradox is piled on paradox. ‘They do it but in mocking merriment,’ says the Princess, ‘And mock for mock is only my intent.’ And then she continues:

There's no such sport as sport by sport o'erthrown—
To make theirs ours, and ours none but our own.
So shall we stay, mocking intended game,
And they, well mock'd, depart away with shame.

(V, ii, 153-6)

Artifice met with artifice, thrust with counter-thrust—all goes almost to the very end as the Princess has planned it. But then, in one of the most dramatic reversals in Shakespeare's plays, none the less so for being so quietly managed, Marcade enters with the news of the French king's death. He makes his announcement and then, having spoken no more than two dozen words, ‘My tale is told,’ he says and vanishes. At this point, the whole conventional world of the play crumbles: artifice is overwhelmed by reality.¹⁸

But this is no accidental effect, no sudden improvisation on the part of Shakespeare to bring his play to a conclusion. It has been prepared for from the beginning; every flourish of style has been designed to lead up to the moment when style itself is defeated. In the customary world of Shakespearian comedy, journeys end with lovers meeting. Here, the journey is yet to take place, and it is therefore clear why the comedy cannot end like any old play.

As language has been the vehicle through which the make-believe world of the play has been created, so it is the vehicle by which that world is to be destroyed. Even before the appearance of Marcade, Berowne has proclaimed his renunciation of the mannerist style:

Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,
Three-pil'd hyperboles, spruce affection,
Figures pedantical—these summer flies
Have blown me full of maggot ostentation.
I do forswear them; and I here protest
By this white glove (how white the hand, God knows!)
Henceforth my wooing mind shall be express'd
In russet yea's and honest kersey no's.
And to begin: wench, so God help me, law!
My love to thee is sound, sans crack or flaw

(V, ii, 407-16)

The forswearing of spruce affectation, however, is announced in an elaborately patterned speech of alternately rhyming lines rounded off with a couplet, making a mockery of Berowne's promise, a few lines earlier, never to woo in rhyme. And when Rosaline replies ‘Sans “sans”, I pray you’, he confesses that he still has ‘a trick of the old rage’.

The reformation of Berowne, as of the other lords, is still to come. It is projected to a time and a world outside of the play, when love's labour shall have become truly a labour of love: only then can love's labour's lost be changed into love's labour's won. ‘And therewithal to win me if you please, / Without the which I am not to be won,’ says Rosaline to Berowne,

You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day
Visit the speechless sick and still converse
With groaning wretches; and your task shall be,
With all the fierce endeavour of your wit
To enforce the pained impotent to smile.

(V, ii, 834-46)

And Berowne replies:

To move wild laughter in the throat of death?
It cannot be; it is impossible.
Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.

(V, ii, 841-3)

Shakespeare is never again, in any of his comedies, as serious about his vocation as an artist as he is at this moment. Love's Labour's Lost, we may remember, was probably written during, or immediately after, the terrible plague years 1592-4. At no other time during his career can the limitations of wit, of language and art itself, have been so apparent to Shakespeare. The speech in which Rosaline responds to Berowne's outburst is the clearest statement in the play of this awareness: … If sickly ears,

Deaf'd with the clamors of their own dear groans,
Will hear your idle scorns, continue them,
And I will have you, and that fault withal;
But if they will not, throw away that spirit,
And I shall find you empty of that fault,
Right joyful of your reformation.

(V, ii, 849-55)

‘That fault’ which Rosaline reprehends in Berowne and whose reformation she awaits is not simply the exercise of a gibing spirit, the wormwood of his wit. It is rather the elevation of artifice to a way of life, the insulation from reality, the rules of the game elaborated and refined to an ultimate degree. It is, in short, the mannerist style and the mannerist mode of being which are here being decisively rejected. Or so it would seem.

Shakespeare, however, even so early in his career, is already Shakespeare and avoids the too easy and obvious solution. The antithesis between art and nature, the shattering of the play world against the hard surface of reality—this is what the comedy is about, but it is not all that it is about. The supreme power and grace of language, the exercise of wit, art itself, are still to be tested. It may be that they will fail: to move wild laughter in the throat of death may be impossible, but it is still to be attempted.

As with all major creative artists, it is the totality of Shakespeare's career that finally establishes the meaning of any one of the works that make up that career. That word-play and wit do not insult reality but can be deeply serious and penetrating, that truth can be expressed through artifice—these are concepts that are central to the plays of Shakespeare's maturity, whether expressed in the antic disposition of Hamlet or the riddles of the fool in Lear. They receive perhaps their ultimate statement in the colloquy between Polixenes and Perdita in Act IV scene iv of The Winter's Tale:

POL.
                                                                                Wherefore, gentle maiden
Do you neglect them? [i.e. gillyflowers]
PER.
                                                                                For I have heard it said
There is an art which in their piedness shares
With great creating nature.
POL.
                                                                                Say there be.
Yet nature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean. So, over that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes …
                                                                                This is an art
Which does mend nature—change it rather; but
The art itself is nature.

(IV, iv, 85-97)

And we answer with Perdita: ‘So it is’. The words of Mercury do not cancel out the songs of Apollo. The paradoxes of Love's Labour's Lost do not so much contradict as reinforce each other. Harsh reality intrudes upon the mannered world of the King of Navarre's park, but it opens it up to the world outside rather than destroys it. Mannerism, in the end, is absorbed into anti-mannerism. It is rejected as an ideal, but retained as a stratagem, both of language and behaviour. Only in this sense can it be true to speak of the Shakespeare of the great tragedies and of the last plays as a mannerist.

Notes

1. Craig Hugh Smyth, ‘Mannerism and Maniera’, The Renaissance and Mannerism: Studies in Western Art (Acts of the Twentieth International Congress of the History of Art, vol. II, Princeton, 1963), p. 197.

2. See, for example, Wylie Sypher's reference to ‘Velazquez' Maids of Honor (1656), a belated mannerist composition’, Four Stages of Renaissance Style (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), p. 171.

3. Mannerism (New York: Knopf, 1965), 2 vols.

4. Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 111.

5. Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 342.

6. ‘Jacobean Tragedy and the Mannerist Style’, Shakespeare Survey 26 (1973), 64. For Hoy, Hauser's book is a ‘definitive account of mannerism’ (49).

7. ‘Jonson might be termed the Bronzino of Jacobean mannerism’ (ibid., 56).

8. Mannerism (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1967), p. 19. See also the same author's ‘Maniera as an Aesthetic Ideal’, The Renaissance and Mannerism: Studies in Western Art, pp. 200-21. For a similar view of mannerism, see Alastair Smart, The Renaissance and Mannerism in Italy (New York: Praeger, 1971), p. 167; and S. J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy 1500 to 1600 (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1971), p. 144. (‘… The passion of Parmigianino's Vision of St. Jerome is not an emotion about the subject matter of the picture so much as it is an emotion about art. Its excitement derives from the intensity and quick, mannered fineness with which aesthetic sensation is experienced … the ultimate meaning of the altarpiece is its power of aesthetic artifice.’)

9. Shearman, Mannerism, p. 41.

10. Illustrations of Shakespeare (London, 1839), pp. 185, 358.

11. Introduction to Pettie's Guazzo (The Tudor Translations, Second Series VII. London: Constable, 1925), Vol. I, pp. xxxviii-xcii.

12. ‘Shakespeare and the Conversazione’, Italica, 23 (1946), 7-17.

13. The Civile Conversation (London, 1586), Aaiii[r].

14. Ibid., Ccviii[v].

15. See, for example, William Matthews, ‘Language in Love's Labour's Lost’, Essays and Studies, 17 N.S. (1964), 1-11; James L. Calderwood, ‘Shakespeare Metadrama (University of Minnesota Press, 1971), pp. 52-84; William C. Carroll, The Great Feast of Language in ‘Love's Labour's Lost.’ (Princeton University Press, 1976); and Malcolm Evans, ‘Mercury Versus Apollo: A Reading of Love's Labour's Lost’, Shakespeare Quarterly 26 (1975), pp. 113-27.

16. Edward III (London, 1596, Cl[r]. These lines occur in a scene often ascribed to Shakespeare.

17. Draper, 16 (see note 12).

18. This development is brilliantly treated by Bobbyann Roesen in her essay ‘Love's Labour's Lost’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 4 (1948), 411-26. See also her later discussion of the play, Anne Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962), pp. 110-12.

All quotations from Shakespeare are from the Kittredge–Ribner edition (Waltham, MA: Ginn), 1971.