[In this essay, Curren Aquino discusses the concluding scenes of The Taming of the Shrew and Love's Labor's Lost. She judges that in each instance, the final scene effectively crystallizes the themes, imagery, characterization, and dramatic action of the play as a whole.]

About Shakespeare's endings, Samuel Johnson wrote:

in many of his plays the latter part is evidently neglected. When he found himself near the end of his work, and in view of his reward, he shortened the labor to snatch the profit. He therefore remits his efforts where he should most vigorously exert them, and his catastrophe is improbably produced or imperfectly represented.

(71-72)

In the twentieth century, Ernest Schanzer has echoed Dr. Johnson's opinion in his commentary on A Midsummer Night's Dream: “For sheer economy and multiplicity of effect it [the first scene] has no equal in any of Shakespeare's opening scenes, on which he generally bestowed more thought and care than on any other part of his plays” (242). I would suggest, however, that Shakespeare's endings, particularly in the comedies, show a vigorous exertion of effort rather than a remittance, a heightening rather than a shortening of labor. It is, moreover, formal integrity, not the ends of plot structure per se, that governs the effort and labor.¹

In a study of The Merchant of Venice, James Siemon claimed that Shakespeare's construction of the final act so as to form “a complete ritual restatement of the body of the play” was experimental and unique, for none of his plays, whether written before or after, made use of the final act to reprise the whole (208-209). According to Siemon:

Act V begins again with Act I, with the hero's pursuit of the heroine, and reenacts, in precisely legalistic terms and in a social ritual (that is a trial), the legal impediment of the hero's success. Bassanio has sworn that “when this ring / Parts from this finger, then parts life from hence,” and has then promptly given away his ring to an importuning stranger. Portia's case is airtight, as Shylock's had seemed to be, and it finds its resolution in charity and love, in reconciliation. … The last act … festively and ritually reenacts the pattern of threat, release, and reconciliation which the preceding acts have dramatized.

(208)

But certainly the seeds for such a “complete ritual restatement” are present in earlier comedies.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, in fact, might just as easily lay claim to being the first comedy to provide a fifth act reprisal as MV. Consider, for example, the order in which the four major groups of characters (Theseus and Hippolyta, the young lovers, the mechanicals, and the fairies) make their appearance, an order which parallels the way they were introduced in the play. The tripartite division of the act also mirrors the play's movement from daylight to night and back to day by the end of Act Four, and the spatial movement from Athens to the wood and back again to Athens. Lines 1-105 recall the opening conversation between the royal lovers, Hippolyta's demonstration of feminine intuition and common sense, and Theseus' charge to Philostrate to provide revels. At the beginning of the play, Theseus wanted entertainment to pass the days and nights before the nuptial ceremony; in the final act he wants something to pass away the three hours between “after-supper and bed-time” (5.1.35).² The second division (lines 106-370), also the longest, parallels the longest section of the play, the nighttime world of the wood which extends from Act Two through the first ninety-four lines of Act Four. Just as disorder, confusion, and disharmony prevailed in the wood, so now, for all Theseus' gracious words, theatrical chaos erupts. As others have noted (Clemen xxxiv-xxxvii and Mehl 46), the interlude dealing with Pyramus and Thisby, which like the middle acts of the play is about love in the moonlight, burlesques the story of the four young lovers lost in the wood. The final part of the scene from line 371 to the conclusion brings the benedictional arrival of the fairies, which corresponds to the arrival of order in the fourth act when Theseus' appearance accompanied the dawning of a new day. Where that order was diurnal, social, and legal, the final order resonates with the eternal, natural, and spiritual.

Key iterative images like moon, eye, play, and dream are present, as is one of Midsummer's chief compositional principles, antithesis. The first twenty-seven lines of Theseus' and Hippolyta's dialogue deal with such opposites as illusion and reality, falsity and truth, the ordinary and the strange. The performance of the interlude itself raises questions concerning the relation between art and life, imagination versus fact. The “palpable-gross play” is immediately juxtaposed to the wondrous, strange entry of the ethereal world of the fairies. The bergomask, a lively rustic dance, stands in sharp contrast to the lyrical music of Oberon and Titania and their entourage. Puck's references to shrouds and graves, pointing to the end of the life cycle, counter Oberon's blessing of the bridal beds and prayerful good wishes for healthy children, the beginning of the cycle.

But as David Young has so cogently shown in his study of MND, a principle of fluidity also permits a commingling of opposites without abandoning the individual makeup of the elements so commingled. While Young's focus is not the final act per se, I think this principle of interpenetration clearly pervades the scene from beginning to end—perhaps never as graphically as in the Fairy Queen's embrace of Bottom in Act Four, but present nonetheless. I have in mind such moments as the Prologue's failure “to stand upon points” (5.1. 108-18) which results in lines and sentences running into each other; the synaesthesia informing “I see a voice / I can hear my Thisby's face” (192-93); the direct interaction between the actors and the newlyweds which blurs the dividing line between illusion and reality; and finally, the invoking of the imagination so as to allow the courtly audience, after its numerous interruptions of the show, to enter into its spirit and to be caught up in the story:

Theseus: This passion, and the death of a dear friend would go near to make a man look sad.

Hippolyta: Beshrew my heart, but I pity the man.

(5.1.289-90)

In moving from mockery to commiseration, the audience moves from detachment to engagement, from separation to oneness with the actors. What Theseus said earlier about “musical confusion” (4.1.110) and Hippolyta about “so musical a discord” (4.1.118) accurately describes the final scene, where opposites are set up in a way that admits but rises above juxtapositions to suggest interpenetration, one antinomy “translating” into another. In the much-quoted line about the strange “story of the night” which grows to something of great constancy” (5.1.23-27), Hippolyta taps right into the compositional rhythm of the play, acknowledging contrasts while sensing a fluid commingling that precludes rigid polarization.

Like the charade depicted in the fifth act of MV, the final act of MND does not so much resolve the plot structurally as provide us with divertissement,³ an elaborate entertainment to while away the time between the technical resolution of the plot (which occurred in Act Four) and the actual point of closure.⁴ In MND, the entertainment takes the form of a play within a play. And like the conclusion of MV, the final act of MND goes beyond the level of divertissement to suggest a formal microcosm of the whole.

In the present essay, I would like to discuss how Shakespeare anticipates the fulness of these fifth act reprisals in two apprentice comedies, The Taming of the Shrew and Love's Labor's Lost, where in neither case is the final scene crucial for the “deknotting” of the action. By the end of the penultimate scene of Shrew, Petruchio has happily tamed his Kate, and Lucentio has securely won his Bianca. In LLL the quadruple forswearing of the young men (4.3) shows clearly that the academy, if it ever really existed, is now most certainly a thing of the past. The final scene of each may also be described as divertissement, taking the form of an extended wager in Shrew and a masque and a pageant in LLL. But as with MND and MV, divertissement fails to penetrate their formal value as microcosms of their respective wholes. Let us now turn to a closer examination of the microcosmic “sense of an ending” (Kermode) in Shrew and LLL.

Throughout The Taming of the Shrew, as part of his method, Petruchio subjects Kate to a series of tests or, more accurately, obstacle courses: the indecorous behavior on their wedding day, the deprivation of food and sleep, the less than chivalrous rescue from a “miry” place, the peremptory dismissal of the tailor and the haberdasher, the catechism on the moon versus the sun, and the “mistaken” perception of an old man as a “fair lovely maid.” He favors the imperative as his general mode of utterance, giving commands left and right. Gradually Kate moves from feistiness to a more tempered state, appearing quite tamed by the end of Act Five, scene one. That they have made their peace by this point is clear from the words they direct at each other. Sensing a good show in the making in the comic confrontation between the false Vincentio and the true, Petruchio says to Kate: “Prithee, Kate, let's stand aside and see the end of this controversy” (5.1.61). The volitive subjunctive softens the imperative force; Petruchio does not so much command Kate as express a wish that they stand together and watch. Near the end of the scene, when Baptista and the legitimate Vincentio venture indoors with Bianca and Lucentio, Kate echoes Petruchio: “Husband, let's follow, to see the end of this ado” (5.1.141). They both know a good entertainment when they see one. Petruchio is perfectly agreeable but does make one small request. He wants a kiss. Kate, standing on principles of decorum, is reluctant to oblige. Her hesitancy has nothing to do with the object of the kiss, only with its propriety. But as soon as Petruchio threatens to leave, she lovingly replies: “Nay, I will give thee a kiss; now pray, thee love, stay” (5.1.148). The word “love,” the first time Kate has thus addressed Petruchio, connotes affection and endearment. Petruchio, it seems responds in kind: “Is not this well? Come, my sweet Kate: / Better once than never, for never too late” (5.1.149-50). These lines, particularly in their couplet formation, suggest a close, a completion. The shrew has been tamed and all looks promising.

But Shakespeare does not end the story there. Instead, he provides an additional 190 lines that manage to replay the major action of taming a “froward” woman. In the final scene, Petruchio once again engages in his typical modus operandi, a series of tests couched in the imperative mode:

Say I command her come to me.

(5.2.96)

Go fetch them [the other woman] hither. If they deny to come,
Swinge me them soundly forth unto their husbands.
Away, I say, and bring them hither straight.

(5.2.103-05)

Katherine, that cap of yours becomes you not.
Off with that bable, throw it under-foot.

(5.2.121-22)

Katherine, I charge thee tell these headstrong women
What duty they do owe their lords and husbands.

(5.2.130-31)

Come on, and kiss me, Kate.

(5.2.180)

Moreover, these tests occur in the context of a wager. Since the whole play has been in some sense a wager—a betting to see if anyone could or would marry Kate—this final gamble to determine who has married the “veriest shrew of all” (5.2.64) reprises the entire action of the play. And while the contest is technically won by line 99 when Kate enters, and formally recognized as such at line 112, Petruchio is not yet ready to call it a day. The show goes on as he milks his triumph for all it's worth in his continued tests of Kate's obedience. There is something hyperbolically extravagant about this wager, a point accentuated by Baptista's raising the winnings from one hundred crowns to twenty thousand (5.2.112-113). To this financial extravagance, we may add the extended, almost never-ending contest itself, and the rather exaggerated overkill of Kate's final speech; all of which captures the hyperbolic strain that permeates the play, most notably in the discourse and conduct of Petruchio and Kate.⁵

The banquet scene shows the essential qualities of the two leading characters in microcosm. We see both Petruchio's zest for living and wiving it well in Padua, and Kate's independent spiritedness, most visibly apparent in her conduct toward the other women. As she does in the fourth act, Kate acquiesces to each of Petruchio's commands, not in any meek or docile manner but in energetic, confident, and strong fashion. Although her final speech articulates the Renaissance doctrine of order and the orthodox view of marriage, Kate appears dominant rather than subordinate. Given the chance to exercise her tongue, she makes the most of this new-found opportunity; her speech, filled with imperative force, is the longest in the play. No one shuts her up until she is ready to be silent.

The finale also recapitulates patterns of thought and imagery. For example, competition—whether it be of husband versus wife, suitor versus suitor, or bride versus bride—runs throughout the play from the induction where the vying is among animals (Ind.1.16-29) to the last scene where the competition is to determine who has won the best wife. Petruchio's talk of hawks and hounds (5.2.72), along with similar references in lines 52-56, continues the hunt imagery first introduced in the Induction and then reiterated in Petruchio's second soliloquy (4.1.188-196). The play's commercial motif pervades the banquet scene in references to crowns (5.2.70, 71, 113), marks (35), losses (113), dowries (114), cost (128), payment (154), and “assurance”:

Petruchio: Well, I say no; and therefore for assurance
Let's each one send unto his wife
And he whose wife is most obedient,
To come at first when he doth send for her,
Shall win the wager which we will propose.

(5.2.65-69)⁶

Iterative words like “shrew,” “froward,” “duty,” and “obedient” reverberate throughout the last scene.⁷ Finally, there is the pattern of changing places, roles, and identities. It began with the trick played on Christopher Sly. It continued through Tranio's disguise as Lucentio, the substitution of a new couple for the abruptly departed new bride and groom in Act III (Berry 62), Petruchio's becoming a “shrew” in order to “kill Kate in her own humor” (4.1.180), the mistaking of a false Vincentio for the true, and the trompe l'oeil that took the sun for the moon and an old man for a “budding virgin” (4.5.37). The pattern culminates in the major inversion of Kate and Bianca, when the supposed shrew exchanges places with the supposed ideal woman. Nowhere is exchange or inversion more succinctly summed up than in Baptista's promise of a new dowry for Kate: “Another dowry to another daughter, / For she is chang'd, as she had never been” (5.2.114-15).

Early in the play, Tranio provides the prototypical line for the main action: “Strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends” (1.2.271-275). There is much mighty striving in The Taming of the Shrew—physical, mental, and verbal. The commands “to her Kate” and “to her Widow” (5.2.33-34), uttered with gusto in the last scene, capture the farcical pugnacity informing the play's plot, characterization, and thought. But there is also much eating and drinking, activities that suggest a social truce, a communal accord.⁸ The concluding scene, which brings together all the characters except the tailor and the haberdasher (and those of the Induction), depicts both striving and feasting along with the emotional states associated with such conduct, tension and amiability. In doing so, it manages to reiterate words, phrases, motifs, and characteristic behavior. Through its series of tests and imperatives, its hyperbolic vein, and its competitive, wagering spirit, the conclusion captures the energy and dynamism of the play's rhythm. In short, it reprises the whole process of the taming of a shrew.

By the end of the fourth act of Love's Labor's Lost, what action there is in the play is virtually over.⁹ The young men, having been found out, are willing to ring the death knell for their academy. They intend to go wooing in an atmosphere of “revels, dances, masks, and merry hours” (4.3.376). The final scene becomes one long interlude of merry pastime—wooing games, wit combats, and two theatrical presentations (the Masque of the Muscovites and the Pageant of the Nine Worthies). As C. L. Barber noted in his seminal study of Shakespearean comedy, the play is filled with a sense of game:

What is striking about Love's Labor's Lost is how little Shakespeare used exciting action, story, or conflict, how far he went in the direction of making the piece a set exhibition of pastimes and games. … Shakespeare is presenting a series of wooing games, not a story. Fours and eights are treated as in ballet, the action consisting not so much in what individuals do as in what the group does, its patterned movement.

(89)

This spirit of game and festivity is crystallized in the final scene, beginning at line twenty-five where we find a compositional metaphor for the entire play, the tennis match: “Well bandied both, a set of wit well played.” There follow references to cards (67), hunting (69), dice (233 and 326), backgammon (462), pastimes and pleasant game (360), and Christmas comedy (462). Games and sports, as Barber's statement indicates, are marked by a principle of patterning that penetrates to the heart of the play's very rhythm. This patterning results from the abundance of verbal schematization and the numerous symmetrical pairings of characters, repeated situations, and stylized encounters, all of which suggest artifice and formality rather than naturalness and spontaneity. The play is extremely repetitive, to the point of rigid symmetry, appearing—as Margreta de Grazia has so aptly noted—“syndronomic.”¹⁰

The final scene is no exception. In it, we find four sets of wit combats in which each courtier is paired with the wrong lady (220-261). In each case, the gentleman is verbally dominated by the woman. Boyet, as mediator (178-194), personifies the repetitive principle when he goes back and forth between Rosalind on one hand and the King and Berowne on the other, repeating their words verbatim until he arbitrarily stops (194). The second instance of quadruple forswearing in the play is noted by the ladies in serial fashion (281-285). We find not one theatrical production but two, and at the conclusion, not one song but two. Rhyme and schemes of repetition flourish. In their reiteration of phrases, lines like the following underscore the pattern of symmetrical repetition:

Boyet:
Prepare, madam, prepare!
Arm, wenches, arm! …

(81-82)

Princess:
But what, but what, come they to visit us?
Boyet:
They do, they do; and are apparell'd thus,

(119-120)

Boyet:
They will, they will, God knows,

(290)

Princess:
How blow? How blow? speak to be understood.

(294)

Rosalind succinctly sums up the pattern when she says, “We four indeed confronted were with four” (367).

A major pattern informing the play (and one, to the best of my knowledge, not noted elsewhere) is that of separation and departure. It is first introduced in the opening scene when Berowne appears, at least for a while, as an outsider: “Well, sit you out; go home, Berowne, adieu” (1.1.110). It is echoed in the second act when the ladies speak of completing their task quickly and then returning to France (2.1.109-10). They never entertain the possibility of an extended stay in Navarre, let alone the thought of any permanent union with the men in the future (2.1.112). Throughout this scene we find passages showing alienation rather than détente: the confrontation of the Princess with the King (90-113 and 128-178), that of Katherine with Berowne (114-127), and that of Rosalind with Berowne (180-193). All three encounters end abruptly with sudden departures, the last two standing upon no ceremony whatsoever (127 and 193). Thus, the only meeting of the ladies and gentlemen before the final one in the last scene shows them at odds with each other. By the end of Act Two, scene one, there is a stalemate, each side waiting until the next day when the necessary documents will be delivered. At the end of the play there will again be a stalemate, each man being forced to wait until a year has passed before challenging the ladies anew. When the women reappear in the fourth act, they repeat their plan to depart for home: “On Saturday we will return to France” (4.1.6). Holofernes accents this pattern of quick departure and going off in different directions when he says, “Away, the gentles are at their game, and we will to our recreation” (4.2.165-66). The King's words at the end of Act Four: “Away, away no time shall be omitted” (4.3.378), along with those of Holofernes at the end of the penultimate scene: “Most dull, honest Dull! to our sport; away!” (5.1.155), not only continue the pattern of quick exiting but constitute a prologue of sorts for the concluding scene.

In Act Five, scene two, the sense of (what we might call) “awaying” is most prominent, not only in the frequency of the word “away” itself, but also in the rapid proliferation of other words and passages that either denote or connote departure or division.¹¹ A listing of such references follows: depart (1, 156), go (60, 280, 478, 509, 625, 794), cross (138), divorce (150), gone (174, 182, 183, 311, 671, 672), part (57, 220, 249, 811), adieu(s) (227, 234, 241, 265), farewell (264, 736), break off (261), withdraw (308), leave (418, 872, 882), take away (572), and stand aside (587). To these we may add the Princess's “whip to our tents” (309) and “liberal opposition of our spirits” (733), along with Berowne's “I will not have to do with you” (428) and “Neither of either; I remit both twain” (459). Not once but several times in the last scene does Shakespeare show that the matches desired by the men do not seem to be in the cards. Separation rather than togetherness is constantly stressed. When Mercade appears with his grim tidings, the Princess's response is directly opposed by the King's. Where one insists on departing for home, the other insensitively urges remaining in Navarre. The required tasks or penances which will separate the ladies and gentlemen for a year soon follow. After the rigidly juxtaposed seasonal songs, reminiscent of medieval débat,¹² Armado pointedly verbalizes this pattern of parting: “You that way; we this way” (931). Apartness, separation, and alienation, instead of fusion, harmony, and togetherness, have enjoyed more than adequate preparation. Shakespeare has not suddenly pulled the rug out from under the gentlemen or, for that matter, the audience. The signposts have been there all along, only to be magnified and multiplied in the concluding scene.

As in The Taming of the Shrew, all the main characters are present for the grand finale and conform to the self-image projected in earlier scenes. Berowne, from the beginning, has functioned, at least in part, as a choric figure pointing up the foolishness of the academy. So in the last scene he chorically comments on the men's verbal folly of:

Taffata phrases, silken terms precise,
Three-pil'd hyperboles, spruce affection,
Figures pedantical. …

(406-408)

At the end of the play, it is he who notes the atypicality of the conclusion: “Our wooing doth not end like an old play: / Jack hath not Gill” (874). Boyet repeats his role as middle-man (174-194), a role in which he has had much practice (2.1.81-88, 194-214). The ladies remain as witty and sharp as ever, and the men as a group are as obtuse and superficial as they have always been. Thinking that one can secure “a world-without-end bargain” in a matter of moments—and right on the heels of a death announcement—is both foolish and gauche.

Key patterns of imagery and topics of thought are also reiterated. The martial imagery of Boyet (261) in its reference to arrows and bullets is most appropriate since the play depicts not merely a battle of the sexes but of wits. In such a battle, words are the weapons and must be rapier sharp. Boyet's words recall the Princess's talk of “civil war” (2.1.225-26) and the battle cries of the King and Berowne (4.3.363-66). The word “roes” (309) harks back to the hunt episode in the fourth act. The witty banter of the women (11-20) and the verbal skirmish of Rosalind, Berowne, and the King (200-06) replay the light/dark imagery so prominent in the opening scene. From the beginning, in the concept of “devouring Time” (1.1.4) and in words like “tombs” and “death,” there has been an underlying serious strain; the whole point of the academy, after all, is to allow the young men a way of achieving immortality. The divertissement marking the end of the play brings on the figure of death in the person of Mercade and resounds with sobering concepts and percepts: gallows (12), melancholy (14), death (146, 810, 815, and 855), butcher (255), sickness (280), shrouds (479), plague(s) (394, 421), grief(s) (752, 753), lamentation (809), groans (864), mourning (744, 808), and hospital (871).

The play's concern with fame and immortality is graphically parodied in the young men's response to the “Pageant of the Nine Worthies.” This concern with fame points up a temporal motif that runs through Love's Labor's Lost. Time is recognized as limited and quantifiable on one hand, and as eternal and immeasurable on the other. In the first four acts, the characters speak of tomorrow (2.1.165), a week (1.1301), a month (1.1.302), three days (1.2.129), and three years (1.1.16, 24, 35, 52, 115, 130). But they also speak of legendary figures who have achieved immortality, and of the seasons (1.1.99-107). So too in the final scene, we find mention of a clearly demarcated temporal span of one year (eight times in the eighty lines from 797-877) as well as of a more rhythmically expansive time in “world-without-end bargains” (789) and the concluding seasonal songs.

A motif of failure or labors lost is a strong undercurrent in the comedy. Berowne, in his disparagement of the academy, first articulates it. Then, we hear of the violation by Costard and Jacquenetta. The first meeting between the gentlemen and the ladies does not bode well for future relations. Misdelivered letters indicate labors gone awry. The final scene gives more of the same, only on a larger scale; in fact, the last scene is a prolonged series of labors lost or “thwarted expectations” (Carroll 81): the Masque of the Muscovites, the catastrophic Pageant of the Nine Worthies, and the courtiers' ultimate failure to secure the ladies in marriage. The Princess calls attention to this pervasive pattern of failure when she says: “Their form confounded makes most form in mirth, / When great things laboring perish in their birth” (520-21).

Finally, if the play is a “feast of words,” as Ralph Berry notes in his claim that “words compose the central symbol of LLL” (73), then the last scene is quite fittingly word conscious. This is evident in Berowne's speech on “taffata phrases” and “russet Yeas,” and in the ladies' preoccupation with linguistic precision (188-190, 195-97, 234, 321). Moreover, the very words that are iterative in the scene—“wit,” “mock(s) ('d) (ing),” “mocker,” “mockery,” “challenge,” and “word” itself—sum up the major concerns of the play as a whole.¹³

Formality, artifice, stylization, symmetry, and repetition are at the center of Love's Labor's Lost and they are “choreographed” most appropriately in the final scene. In reminding use of the vows that marked the beginning—only now to be taken more seriously—and in having the women urge the gentlemen to come and challenge them again in the future, Act Five, scene two reiterates the play's mythos, or perhaps I should say its dianoia (i.e., the element of thought or what Aristotle in his Poetics describes as “the power of saying whatever can be said, or what is appropriate to the occasion” (232).) Like the comedy which it ends, the scene is largely an interplay of word and idea, not event and action.

Like the final movement of a symphony, which repeats earlier themes, the endings in the texts under discussion recall what has gone before. Each concluding scene dynamically synthesizes the individual elements that make up its respective play, with verbal echoes, reprisals of action, and restated ideas coming together to yield a miniature of the whole. Helen Gardner has said, “In Shakespeare's four great tragedies, when his imagination was working at its highest pitch, Shakespeare relates his beginnings to his ends particularly closely” (48). It would seem that in his early years Shakespeare was capable of doing the same thing. Contrary to James Siemon's claim, the ending of MV is not unique; nor is it the first in Shakespeare's canon to make use of the final scene as both divertissement and microcosm. What comes to fruition in the earlier MND was well anticipated in Shrew and LLL. In all three, Shakespeare's sense of an ending shows not a slacking of effort but an outpouring that vies with his distinguished opening scenes in providing a key to each play's form. The endings reveal a sustained comprehension of design—no small talent, especially for a style that had not yet reached maturity. Look again, Dr. Johnson, wherever you are!

Notes

1. By “formal” I mean the Aristotelian principle of uniqueness that shapes and informs matter and is thus responsible for the “whatness” of the object in question; for example, “the Midsummer Night's Dreamness” of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Plot structure, however, deals specifically with the process of tying and untying dramatic knots of complication. Form is inclusive of but not limited to such a process. Formal integrity, then, is not any mechanical sum of parts but a dynamic synthesis that yields the totality to which we respond.

2. The Riverside Shakespeare. All subsequent references to the plays will be from this edition.

3. The term is Harry Levin's. At a 1980 Folger Institute seminar, Professor Levin referred to the final scene in LLL as divertissement.

4. As Anne Barton states, “In terms of plot, this fifth act is superfluous. Almost all the business of the comedy has been concluded at the end of Act IV” (219).

5. For a fuller treatment of this hyperbolic mode, see Ralph Berry (63-71).

6. The verb “assure” and the noun “assurance” occur at several points in the play, and always in the context of betting, bargaining, and vying for supremacy. See, for example, 2.1.123, 343, 345, 379, 387, and 396.

7. The following figures are taken from the Spevack Concordance. In this and subsequent notes, wherever two numbers are indicated, the first refers to the frequency of occurrence in the play as a whole; the second, to the frequency in the last scene; shrew (8, 2), froward (8, 4), duty (16, 7), obedience/obedient (8, 5).

8. The word “eat” (and by extension its variant “eaten”) occurs eleven times in the play; “feast” and “drink/drinking” occur six times each. In no other comedy do the words “eat” and “feast” appear as often. The comedy that leads in its references to drinking is Twelfth Night (fifteen times).

9. Harry Levin has suggested that Act Four, scene three is the denouement, the final act serving as a kind of epilogue (Folger Institute Seminar, 1980).

10. “Syndronomic Language in Love's Labor's Lost,” unpub. paper presented at the seminar “The Character of Verse and Prose in the Early Plays, 1590-95,” Second Congress of the International Shakespeare Association, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1981. The famous eavesdropping scene (4.3), with its multiple sonnet readings, withdrawals, asides, and comings forth for the purpose of reproach, is perhaps the most elaborate example of symmetrical repetition.

11. The word “away” occurs twenty-seven times in the play as a whole, eleven times in the last scene. Only Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well, two problem or dark comedies, have a higher total frequency of twenty-eight and twenty-nine respectively. Both, however, fall short of the eleven occurrences in the final scene of LLL, each having only nine. A survey of the Concordance's entries for a small sampling of words—away, exit, part, leave (as in taking one's leave), depart, farewell, adieu, and go/gone—shows that in no other comedy does the final scene reverberate with so many references to departure as does the conclusion to LLL. The total figure for the words listed above is forty; The Comedy of Errors has the next highest total (eighteen), followed by The Merchant of Venice (sixteen) and A Midsummer Night's Dream (fourteen).

12. William Carroll believes that LLL “can profitably be read as a debate on the right uses of rhetoric, poetry, and the imagination; extraordinarily self-conscious, the play ultimately exemplifies and embodies, in the final songs, what has only been discussed before. The term ‘debate’ is justified by Shakespeare's use of the medieval conflictus between Spring and Winter at the end, but it defines a principle of structure in the play as well” (8). Where Carroll has incisively focused on the microcosmic quality of the final songs, I have chosen instead to deal with the final scene as a totality.

13. The actual figures are as follows: wit (32, 11), mock/s/'d/ing (16, 15), challenge (7, 6), and word/s (48, 18). The words “mocker” and “mockery” occur once and only in the final scene.

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