William Shakespeare: Love’s Labor’s Lost.
In the royal park of the King of Navarre, Ferdinand outlines a singular policy to his three principal attendants, the lords Berowne, Longaville, and Dumaine. Ferdinand is modeled after Shakespeare’s contemporary, Henry III of Navarre. By the time Shakespeare wrote this play, Henry had seized the throne of France and had been crowned Henry IV, the first of the Bourbon line. Navarre was a Huguenot sanctuary, but after assuming the kingship of France Henry abjured Protestantism for Catholicism as a means of consolidating his authority in a predominantly Catholic country. As a reader and friend of Montaigne, however, in 1598 he issued the Edict of Nantes, establishing toleration of Protestantism in an attempt to assuage religio-political animosities in the country. Shakespeare’s Ferdinand is also poised to ascend to the French throne, but by romantic rather than military means—means appropriate to comedy.
Berowne is Charles de Gontaut, duc de Biron, a noted Protestant soldier called the ‘Thunderbolt of France; Henry made him Marshal in 1594, but despite this distinction his loyalty remained suspect; he was beheaded on charges of treason a few years after Shakespeare’s play was first staged. Longaville is Henry I d’Orléans, duc de Longueville, a Protestant soldier who had defeated Catholic forces in a 1589 battle; Dumaine is Charles, duc de Mayenne, an ardent member of the Catholic League and former rival of Henry for the throne (they reconciled in 1595). Henry’s court thus consisted of aristocrats representing the two religious sects which had very recently put their arms down after years of civil war. Ferdinand’s court at Navarre is already a miniature version of the French court at the time of the play.
King Ferdinand needs to unite Navarre, especially its ruling class. For this, he seriously proposes a Renaissance version of a plan devised (with characteristic irony) by Plato’s Socrates, who said that unless philosophers become kings, or kings truly and adequately philosophize, a just political regime will prove impossible. As neither the king nor his attendants are philosophers engaged in reasoned inquiry into the conventions of their country, perhaps they can truly and adequately philosophize or, less ambitiously, become more thoroughly the liberally educated men Renaissance scholars and politicians alike esteemed.
If they are not philosophers, lovers of wisdom, why would they do such a thing? The king appeals not directly to their logos but to their thumos. “Fame, that all hunt after in their lives, / Live regist’red 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.” (I.i.1-7). He proposes a vast war, a war of the soul, but most emphatically not the kind of soul-war which has wracked Christian Europe. He will redirect his aristocrats’ souls towards becoming “brave conquerors” in the “war against your own affections,” the “huge army of the world’s desires” (I.i.8-10). “Navarre shall be the wonder of the world” (I.i.12), both a place of wondering and a place wondered at, esteemed, a Jerusalem of learning. “Our court shall be a little Academe”—a modern version of Plato’s school—”still and contemplative in living art” instead of roiling in war and vaunting in the art of war (I.i.13-14).
To this end, the king has ordained that a comprehensive three-year fast, whereby he and his attendants—all young and unmarried—will abstain from strong drink, much food, and all women for the next three years. They will arm themselves for this psychomachia by pledging their honor with “deep oaths” now to be signed (I.i.23). The young king has a bit of ‘secularized’ Calvinism about him.
Longaville and Dumaine readily consent. For these three years, “the mind shall banquet, though the body pine,” Longaville avers, inasmuch as “dainty bits / Make rich the ribs, but bankrupt quite the wits” (I.i.25-27). Dumaine, too, pronounces himself “mortified” against “the world’s delights,” intent rather on “living in philosophy” (I.i.32). Berowne has reservations. “Not to see a woman” in three years (I.i.37)? Harsh sumptuary laws? Even sleep deprivation in order to spend more time studying? “O, these are barren tasks, too hard to keep” (I.i.47). His earlier, verbal, oath he had “sworn in jest,” but an oath in writing is a serious thing (I.i.54). “What is the end of study, let me know” (I.i.55).
Ferdinand answers that the end of study is “to know which else we should not know” (I.i.56). You mean, Berowne asks, “things hid and barr’d… from common sense” (I.i.57)? Yes, “that is study’s god-like recompense” (I.i.58). Oh, but of course, Berowne rejoins, I have no problem in swearing to do those sorts of things—to study where I might dine well, especially on days when I am forbidden to do so; or to “study where to meet some mistress fine, / When mistresses from common sense are hid”; “Or, having sworn too hard-a-keeping oath / Study to break it, and not break my troth” by some exoteric show of compliance (I.i.63-66). This is (following Socrates’ own formula) to know what one doesn’t know. “Swear me to this, and I will ne’er say no” (I.i.69). But mere book-learning will never do. “Study is like the heaven’s glorious sun, / That will not be deep-searched with saucy looks. / Small have continual plodders ever won, / Save base authority from others’ books.” (I.i.84-87). You, King, may aspire to Platonism but you will end in Scholasticism. [1] There is no real glory or honor in that. In this, Berowne plays the role of the girl who laughed at the philosopher who stumbled while gazing up at the heavens. Such “earthly godfathers of heaven’s light”—the astronomers—”have no more profit of their shining lights / Than those that walk and wot not where they are. / Too much to know is to know nought but fame; / And every godfather can give a name” to a star he can never reach (I,i.88-93). The Christian-Aristotelian peripatetics—those Roman Catholics who couldn’t beat the duc de Biron in battle—cannot make practical use of the phenomena they know merely by observation, in order to name. The end of the king’s new regime is as little likely as Socrates’ politeia.
Ferdinand dismisses Berowne’s common-sense critique of Scholasticism as a self-contradictory effort “to reason against reading!” (I.i.94), and his loyalists concur. Berowne replies with an argument founded on nature as it is, obedient to the cycles of time. The king conceives of time as a death-dealing scythe against which only fame can triumph, a fame which only a three-year ‘regime’ of study governed by a uniform rule of conduct can win. But real nature is seasonal. “Why should proud summer boast / Before the birds have any cause to sing? / Why should I joy in any abortive birth? / At Christmas I no more desire a rose / Than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled shows; / But like of each thing that in season grows; / So you, to study now it is too late, / Climb o’er the house to unlock the little gate.” (I.i.102-09). The king would require book-study of four men, including himself, who should instead be thinking of marrying, then of producing heirs to their estates. (The real King Henry would indeed die heirless.) “Study evermore is over-shot,” Berowne comments, after reviewing the king’s laws; “While it doth study to have what it would, / It doth forget to do the thing it should; / And when it hath the thing it hunteth most, / ‘Tis won as towns with fire—so won, so lost” (I.i.141-44). The king’s war for fame overlooks the conditions of life itself.
Nonsense, the king replies. He shall “of force dispense with this decree”; it will then rest “on mere necessity” (I.i.145-46). But, Berowne replies, such necessity will simply cause men in their weakness to fail in their compliance, “For every man with his affects is born, / Not by might mast’red but by special grace” (I.i.149-50). Spoken like a Protestant, but a prudent one. I shall sign your oath, my liege (Paul the Apostle also requires obedience to rulers), but I predict that I, who am the last to sign, “will last keep his oath” (I.i.158).
Meanwhile, Ferdinand offers a form of recreation to relieve his austerity regime. There is now in Navarre “a refined traveller of Spain,” a “child of fancy,” a man “in whom all the world’s new fashion is planted,” and so a fit object for courtly entertainment at his expense (I.i.161-62,168). This Quixote, named Don Adriano de Armado, will serve as court jester; Berowne and Longaville relish the prospect of mocking such a comical land-armada of a man.
But first the court must deal with the first arrested violator of the king’s decree, the rustic Costard, who arrives in the custody of Constable Dull with a letter from Armado. Costard has been caught speaking with a country wench, Jaquenetta; “such is the simplicity of man to hearken after / The flesh” (I.i.211-12), he confesses. The king reads aloud Armado’s verbose letter, in which he witnesses to Costard’s crime while professing to be “besieged with sable-colored melancholy” (I.i.225). Amused into mercy, Ferdinand sentences the malefactor to a week of bran and water and to the rule of Armado. Considering the evidence before him after the king and the other two attendants have left, Berowne tells Costard, “I’ll lay my head to any good man’s hat / These oaths and law will prove an idle scorn,” to which the rustic can only reply with similar humor, “I suffer for the truth, sir; for true it is I was taken with Jaquenetta, and Jaquenetta is a true girl” (I.i.287-291).
Costard won’t become Armado’s Don Pancho, as he already has one—his page, Moth. Armado wonders at his own melancholy; much badinage later (all of it to Moth’s advantage), he answers his own question, confessing his love for “a base wench,” none other than Jacquenetta (I.ii.57). His complaint against Costard was simply an attempt to eliminate his rival, a rival soon to be returned to him as a servant, despite his intention to get him out of the picture. Meanwhile, he begs Moth for examples of “great men” who “have been in love” (I.i.63). The examples the boy offers—Hercules and Samson—should be far from comforting. When Moth tells him that Samson’s beloved Delilah had a green complexion (for jealousy) and “a green wit” (an immature one), Armado insists that “My love is most immaculate white and red”—colors symbolizing purity and modesty (I.ii.86-87). This should be no source of confidence, master, as such colors mask “maculate thoughts” (I.ii.88). To illustrate, he breaks into a lyric, saying that blushing cheeks betoken faults, whiteness fear of their discovery. “A dangerous rhyme, master, against the reason of white and red” (I.ii.103). Rhyme or poetry sets prudent limits on a too-schematic rationalism that readily ossifies into convention.
When Constable Dull delivers Costard (Berowne evidently having delegated that duty), Armado decides to impose a fast on his rival and to take Jaquenetta to the royal park, where she’ll be the “day-woman” or dairy-maid (I.ii.125). He confesses his helplessness against Cupid, the boy-god whose “glory is to subdue men” (I.ii.167)—even men of physical strength such as Samson and Hercules, even a man of wisdom, Solomon. He can only appeal for strength to “some extemporal god of rhyme,” lest he “turn sonnet” (I.ii.169-70). Ex-temporal: beyond time. Turn sonnet: become transformed, as in an Ovidian poem, not into another form of nature but into a poem. Only prudence can save him now—a virtue absent from his moral repertoire.
Elsewhere in the royal park, a delegation has arrived from France, a delegation headed by the king’s daughter. The Princess (a fictional character, as King Henry III had no children) is accompanyied by attendant ladies Rosaline, Maria, and Katharine, Lord Boyet and two other lords. She has come to negotiate a dispute over the neighboring French province of Aquitaine, described tellingly by Lord Boyet as “a dowry fit for a queen” (II.i.8). Given the King of Navarre’s edict, she cannot approach him without permission, so she sends Boyet to request an audience. The Princess views Boyet with some suspicion, deprecating his flattery and telling him, when he says he is “proud of employment” in the mission, “All pride is willing pride, and yours is so” (II.i.35).
She prudently asks her attendants for character assessments of the principal members of the king’s court. Each has encountered one of them previously. Maria judges Longaville as “a man of sovereign parts, peerless esteem’d / Well fitted in arts, glorious in arms” (II.i.44-45), if a bit too sharp-witted, a man “whose edge hath power to cut” and does so too readily (II.i.50). Katharine considers Dumaine “a well-accomplish’d youth,” but one who has “most power to do most harm” because “least knowing ill” (II.i.56-58)—a certain hazardous naivete. As for Berowne, Rosalind admires his merry disposition and ready wit, his “sweet and voluble” discourse (II.i.76). The Princess suspects aloud that her ladies are “all in love” and, given Lord Boyet’s remark about Aquitaine being a fit dowry for a queen, the possibility of marriage indeed seems to waft in the spring air.
King Ferdinand, however, dampens the mood when he arrives in the park, failing to extend his hospitality by inviting his visitors to the castle, given his decree to keep women at arm’s length. He is all business. Having fought on France’s side in the religious wars during his father’s time, Ferdinand expects France to honor the agreement to pay the expenses, half of which France still owes. In the meantime, Navarre holds part of Aquitaine as surety. The problem is that a letter from the French king intimates that the money has already been paid, and so Navarre should yield back the territory; yet Ferdinand has no record of the payment. “Dear Princess, were not his requests so far / From reason’s yielding, your fair self should make / A yielding ‘gainst some reason in my breast, / And go well satisfied to France again.” (II.i.149-53). He requests proof of payment, but Boyet has none, promising that the diplomatic pouch containing them will arrive tomorrow. Please then, Princess, “deem yourself lodg’d in my heart, / Though so denied fair harbor in my house” (II.i.173-74). He leaves, but Berowne stays behind to flirt with Rosaline, who rejects him; Dumaine and Longaville soon return to confess their interest in Katharine and Maria, respectively. Boyet answers them with courtesy laced with irony, then suggests to the princess that the king is in love with her.
It is easy for romantically-inclined modern readers to overlook the stakes, although the courtly audience of Shakespeare’s play would not. There is the potential for a serious diplomatic incident, here. The French king does not likely send his daughter to head a mission to the bachelor king of Navarre without political intent. Does he hope to marry her off and cement the alliance? Or does he hope to evade a debt by sending such a charming delegation of ladies? What is love’s labor? How might it be lost? What will be the consequences if it is lost? With no war against common enemies to unite them, will France and Navarre (now with a foothold on French soil) turn on each other? This comedy might or might not end happily.
In still another part of the forest, Armado grants Costard his liberty and money in exchange for carrying a letter to Jaquenetta, evidently trusting that these boons will overcome any feelings Costard may still entertain for the girl. On the way, Costard meets Berowne, who gives him a letter for delivery to Rosaline. One cannot expect these arrangements to end well, given Costard’s mixed motives, to say nothing of his doltishness.
In her part of the park, the Princess expects to leave soon, after proof of payment arrives. Meanwhile, she prepares, Diana-like, to hunt a deer, conferring with the forester who directs her to “a stand where you may make the fairest shoot” (IV.i.11). Pretending that he praises her beauty with the word “fairest,” she builds the exchange into a criticism of King Ferdinand’s policy. To accept praise for beauty would be vain; better to deserve praise for merit. Praise is a form of glory or fame, the ambition with which Ferdinand sought to fire the lords in support of his regime of austere pursuit of learning. But “Glory grows guilty of detested crimes, / When, for fame’s sake, for praise, an outward part, / We bend to that the working of the heart; / As I for praise alone now seek to spill / The poor deer’s blood that my heart means no ill.” (IV.i.31-35). The quest for honor interferes with more natural loves, great and small. As for the greater hunt she and her attendants evidently have undertaken, however, “praise we may afford / To any lady that subdues a lord” (IV.i.41-42). In that case, honor honors nature.
Speaking of which, Costard arrives, misdelivering Armado’s letter to Jaquenetta while announcing it’s a letter from Berowne to Rosaline. Badinage about arrows and pricking ensues. The Princess, her attendants, and Boyet now know more about ongoing love aspirations than anyone in Navarre. They have achieved a substantial diplomatic advantage, thanks to superior intelligence-gathering. How will they exploit it?
The final pair of characters now enter the play. The schoolmaster Holofernes and his curate friend, Sir Nathaniel, are passing the time with Constable Dull, a man neither of great learning or of conspicuous piety. Costard and Jaquenetta enter with the love-sonnet letter they suppose to be from Armado. They need someone to read it to them. Holofernes does so; in recognizing the real author, he tells them to deliver it “into the royal hand of the King,” who will find in it evidence of Berowne’s disobedience (IV.ii.134). Sir Nathaniel approves of this charge as a thing done “in the fear of God, very religiously,” an act of deference to a ruler, as commanded by Paul the Apostle (IV.i..138). But Holofernes cares more about the author’s literary style, which he deems “very unlearned, neither savoring of poetry, wit, nor invention” (IV.ii.149-50). He promises a thorough critique at dinner.
Scholars have identified in ‘Holofernes’ a demi-anagram for the name ‘John Florio,’ the famous scholar who first translated Montaigne into English. They point to the contemporary debate over the question, ‘Love or Learning?’—the theme of the play. The eminent Cambridge University scholar Gabriel Harvey was the leading polemicist among the defenders of learning, called the ‘Artists.’ Cambridge University graduate and satirist spoke for the ‘Villainists,’ who argued in favor of love and of experience generally—Nashe contending, for example, that the debtors’ prison from which he had also graduated offered more useful instruction than the university did. Florio was a learned man who translated the learned Montaigne, a man who nonetheless commended experience, subtly praising Machiavelli rather than the Renaissance humanists, whose vast learning both Montaigne and Machiavelli could be said to have matched. Shakespeare, well-acquainted with Florio’s translation, would have noted the paradox. And he would have known Florio’s stricture, “It were labor lost to speak of love,” since there are so many books about it. Obviously, Shakespeare disagreed, and his Florio-figure is a figure of fun. But will Shakespeare side with Machiavelli’s understanding of the lessons of experience, given the framework of geopolitical plotting of the story he tells?
It’s now the Navarrians’ turn to learn the truth about one another, about how they fought love with the law and love won. Berowne soliloquizes about his losing attempt to conquer his desires. “By heaven, I do love,” he confesses to himself, “and it hath taught me to rhyme, and to be melancholy”—the melancholy of the lover who knows not whether he’s loved in return, who must admit he cannot maintain his self-sufficiency, even in banding together with his peers in the study of books (IV.iii.11-12). Seeing the king approach, he hides, quickly seeing that Ferdinand too has turned sonneteer. In his poem for the Princess, the king takes up the traditional imagery of his lady’s eyes, which are something like the sun, making her lover’s tears shine in “thy glory through my grief” (IV.iii.33). “O queen of queens! how far dost thou excel / No thought can think nor tongue of mortal tell.” (IV.ii.36-37). The rhyme of love sets limits on the prose of reason.
The king himself now hides, as Longaville arrives, his own sonnet in hand, unwittingly to join the king’s “sweet fellowship in shame” (IV.iii.45). Against courtly and scholarly rhetoric, “the heavenly rhetoric” of Maria’s eye, “‘gainst whom the world cannot hold argument,” has “persuad[ed] my heart to this false perjury,” this evasion of the king’s law (IV.iii.56-58). If rhymes set limits on reason, they also set limits on love as “guards on wanton Cupid’s hose,” in attentive Berowne’s words (IV.iii.53). To make rhyme requires the speaker to set his passion to music, to give it measure, to form unreason to a rule of reason. Set to rhyme, love’s reason is not the king’s ‘rationalist’ or book-learned reason; it is rather the kind of reason right for loving and for lovers. For Longaville, poetry enables him to justify his love as lawful: “A woman I forswore; but I will prove, / Thou being a goddess, I forswore not thee. My vow was earthly, thou a heavenly love; / Thy grace being gain’d cures all disgrace in me, / Vows are but breath and breath a vapor is; / Then thou, fair sun, which on my earth dost shine, / Exhal’st this vapor-vow, in thee it is. / If broken, then it is no fault of mine; / If by me broke, what fool is not so wise / To lose an oath to win a paradise?” (IV.iii.61-69). Berowne immediately spots the fallacy, which consists of the argument’s false premise, “which makes flesh a deity / A green goose a goddess—pure, pure idolatry” (IV.iii.70-71). The argument will need a natural, not a theological premise, if it is to hold.
No time for that, as Longaville too hides and Dumaine (as he supposes) soliloquizes on Katharine. “Once more I’ll mark how love can vary wit,” Berowne remarks (IV.iii.96). Dumaine is a man of fewer words than the others. His imagery isn’t sunlight or tear-water or the earth, nor does he attempt initially to reason either legalistically or theologically. For him, the ruling image is another element, air. “Love, whose month is ever May, / Spied a blossom passing fair / Playing in the wanton air.” (IV.iii.98-100). Love “wish’d himself the heaven’s breath,” so that he could blow on the cheeks of his beloved: “Air, would I might triumph so!” (IV.iii.106). The theology comes at the conclusion of Dumaine’s sonnet, not at the beginning, as he pleads, “Do not call it sin in me / That I am forsworn for thee,” since Jove himself loved Juno, “turning mortal” for her love (IV.iii.112-16). Like Dumaine, Jove loved one who resisted his advances. He won her heart by transforming himself into a helpless little bird, which the kindly goddess did love; he then transformed himself back into a god, and his lady’s love kept on. Dumaine’s sonnet is the intended bird, singing to his lady. He will send “something more plain,” too, more prosaic, “express[ing] my true love’s lasting pain” (IV.iii.117-18)—as pitiable, he hopes, as Jove in a form of helplessness.
In turn, each hidden man steps forward, Longaville to accuse Dumaine, Ferdinand to accuse Longaville, Berowne to accuse the king and the others. He justly rebukes their “inconstancy,” asking rhetorically, “When shall you see me write a thing in rhyme?” (IV.iii.177). Right away, as it happens, as Costard and Jaquenetta pop up, his love-sonnet to Rosaline in hand.
This calls for a conference to settle on a change of policy and to formulate a justification for the correction. Fortunately, Berowne already had argued against the king’s regime, and so has an argument ready, this time addressing an audience eager to give its consent.
“Sweet lords, sweet lovers, O, let us embrace: / As true we are as flesh and blood can be,” he begins (IV.iii.210). Since “young bloods doth not obey an old decree” (IV.iii.213); since beauty makes old age feel “new-born,” giving “the crutch the cradle’s infancy,” being “the sun that maketh all things shine” (IV.iii.240-42); since all these things are true, Berowne is more than happy to fulfill the king’s request to “prove our loving lawful, and our faith not torn” (IV.iii.280-81). It is really quite simple, Berowne explains. For young men to swear “to fast, to study, and to see no women” in obedience to a king who rules by convention is nothing less than to commit “flat treason ‘gainst the kingly state of youth” (IV.iii.288-89)—that is, against nature, which ordains the seasons of life. His companions have spoken of nature’s light, earth, water, and air, but they have forgotten nature’s other element, fire. “From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive: / They are the ground, the books, the academes, / From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire” (IV.iii.298-300). “Where has any author in the world / Teaches such beauty as a woman’s eye” (IV.iii.308-09). Where did you, who came so recently to sonneteering, find “such fiery numbers as the prompting eyes / Of beauty’s tutors have enrich’d you with?” (IV.iii.318-19). Surely not in “leaden contemplation” (IV.iii.317). Love “first learned in a lady’s eyes / Lives not alone immured in the brain, / But with the motion of all elements / Courses as swift as thought in every power, / And gives to every power a double power, / Above their functions and their offices.” (IV.iii.323-27). Love is what sets the other elements of nature in motion, harmonizing and vivifying all the senses, and also every virtue, whether it be courage, wisdom, or moderation. Love civilizes the savage and, with respect to justice, “plant[s] in tyrants mild humility” (IV.iii.345) by teaching them the happiness of unforced reciprocity. Therefore, let us “lose our oaths to find ourselves” (IV.iii.357). As the Gospels teach, “charity itself fulfills the law, / And who can sever love from charity?” (IV.iii.360-61).
Having declared war on love, which he’d conceived as low, unworthy of the human mind, newly-converted King Ferdinand now declares war for Saint Cupid: “Soldiers, to the field!” (IV.iii.362). Newly respectful of nature’s time, and timing, the king urges haste in preparing for the campaign, “some entertainment for them in their tents” (IV.iii.369), “for revels, dances, masks, and merry hours / Forerun fair Love, strewing her way with flowers” (IV.iii.375-76). He drafts none other than Quixote-Armado for the task, who in turn engages Latin-mangling pedant Holofernes and the English-bungling curate Sir Nathaniel for the task—men who “have been at a great feast of language and stol’n the scraps,” as impish young Moth remarks, men who “have liv’d long on the alms-basket of words,” as plain-speaker Costard puts it (V.i.35-38). Under Holofernes’ direction, they will present a pageant of the Nine Worthies, famous conquerors from Joshua to Pompey the Great. As there are nine worthies but only four players to represent them, Holofernes will play several. Never will so many owe so little to so few.
With the gentlemen absent, the ladies are beginning to bicker amongst themselves, with Rosaline and Katharine exchanging barbs. Pronouncing the exchange “a set of wit well play’d,” the Princess redirects their hostilities toward the suitors, asking them to compare the love-sonnets they’ve received (V.ii.29). Rosalind deprecates Berowne’s flattery: his “numbers” or metres are “true,” but his “numbers” or reckoning exaggerated; according to him, “I were the fairest goddess on the ground” (V.ii.36-37). With characteristically greater asperity, Katharine dismisses Dumain’s effort as “a huge translation of hypocrisy, / Vilely compil’d, profound simplicity” (V.ii.52-53). As for Longaville, Maria confines herself to opining that she wishes his poem shorter, the accompanying chain of pearls longer. The Princess finds the King Ferdinand’s poetry equally verbose, although she has kinder words for the diamond necklace he enclosed with it. (“We shall be rich ere we depart” [V.ii.1]). In all, “We are wise girls to mock our lovers so” (V.ii.59), and as for the young men, “none are so surely caught, when they are catch’d / As wit turn’d fool; folly, in wisdom hatch’d / Hath wisdom’s warrant and the help of school, / And wit’s own grace to grace a learned fool.” (V.ii.69-72). As one scholar has observed, in Love’s Labor Lost “the word wit is used more often than in any of the other plays” [2]; among other things, the play is a witty meditation on wit. When learning outpaces prudence it acts as an accelerant to “fool’ry’s” fire, providing false proofs of stupid thoughts (V.ii.76).
The lovers have arrived, Boyet announces, and they have disguised themselves as Russians. He overheard their planning session—quite by accident, or so he says. He advises the ladies to prepare their defenses, and the Princess is battle-ready: “Saint Dennis to Saint Cupid!” (V.ii.87). The Cupidians of Navarre will meet the forces of Saint Denis, the third-century martyr who brought Christianity to Gaul, was eventually named Bishop of Paris, then martyred by the Romans. One might have expected the Princess to invoke St. Louis, patron saint of the French monarchy, but instead she chooses the patron saint of the French people. A republican at heart? Perhaps rather a just sharer in monarchy. The real French king who preceded Henry of Navarre, Henry III, provoked a popular uprising after murdering his brothers; his criminal attempt to secure his authority undermined it. Under those circumstances it is better to invoke the saint of the people instead of the so-recently betrayed saint of a monarchy turned unsaintly.
Be this as it may, she tells her attendants to confuse the invaders by posing as—one another, masking themselves and claiming each other’s identities (Rosaline will play the Princess). Each man will woo the wrong woman. Crucially, based on Boyet’s somewhat slanted account, the women assume that the men come only to mock them. Just as there’s no fool like a learned man, so “there’s no such sport as sport by sport o’erthrown” (V.ii.153).
The Navarrians walk into the trap and exit soon after, verbally cut and bruised. “The tongues of mocking wenches are as keen / As the razor’s edge invisible,” Boyet gloats (V.ii.256-57). The Romans beheaded Saint Denis; his devotees have beheaded the followers of Saint Cupid. The Princess pronounces it to have been an unequal battle: “Better wits have worn plain statute-caps,” the headgear of commoners (V.ii.281). After his beheading, Saint Denis was said to have carried his head in his arm, continuing to preach sermons; Boyet predicts that the Cupidians will be equally resilient. When they do return, Rosaline advises the Princess, we should mock them for their silly disguises, and so they will.
Berowne has now understood Boyet, that “ape of form, Monsieur the Nice” (V.ii.325); he sees what the Princess had seen, that Boyet wears a mask of flattering words. When the king worries that the ladies see through the men’s disguises and now will “mock us downright,” Dumaine recommends, “Let us confess, and turn it to a jest” (V.ii.389-90). Very well, but this will only reinforce the ladies’ conviction that they are being toyed with. They in turn reveal their ploy of disguise to the still-unsuspecting men, to which intelligence Berowne can only scold Boyet: “Might not you / Forestall our sport, to make us thus untrue?” (V.ii.472-73). Boyet smirks, “Full merrily / Hath this brave manage, this career, been run” (V.ii.483-84).
As the men prepare to retreat a second time, Costard arrives, announcing the approach of the Nine Worthies. When the king worries that the impending farce will only “shame us” further, Berowne cogently replies that that can scarcely happen, given the ignominy of their defeat. What is more, “’tis some policy / To have one show worse than the King’s and his company” (V.ii.509-11). As for the Princess, her appetite for watching men make fools of themselves has yet to be sated: “That sport best pleases that dost least know how” (V.ii.514); and most acutely, when “zeal strives to content, and the contents / Dies in the zeal of that which it presents,” such “confounded” form “makes most form in mirth,” as “great things laboring perish in their birth” (V.ii.515-18). “A right description of our sport, my lord,” Berowne tells Ferdinand (V.ii.519), and indeed it is a fine assessment of the nature of incompetence in love and poetry, to say nothing of philosophy, piety, and play-writing. The Princess has explained how love’s labor is lost, how any kind of labor can be lost.
As hapless Holofernes and his troupe essay their entertainment, the forces of saints Dennis and Cupid unite for the first time in heckling them. Eventually, the Princess takes pity on the poor players; she is less thoroughly merciless than she has seemed. Even Armado begins to see how silly he is. Player and audience alike have moved toward self-knowledge—the purpose of all true comedy, which holds up the mirror to human nature.
Human nature is political, and a messenger arrives to remind everyone of that. “Thou interruptest our merriment,” the Princess complains, but the news is grave: her father, the king of France, is dead. Graciously excusing herself from Navarre, with both an apology for any offense given and a reminder that the men had earned it, she thanks the King Ferdinand for granting her “great suit” for recovering Aquitaine (V.ii.727)—the first mention of it since the beginning of her embassy. She has successfully completed the diplomatic mission her father sent her to accomplish. The French ladies will leave in triumph.
Ferdinand now presses his own mission, the love-suits undertaken by himself and his attendants. Offering an apology in both senses of the word—a defense and an expression of regret—he argues that “your beauties, ladies, / Hath much deformed us, fashioning our humors / Even to the opposed end of our intents,” making we lovers seem both ridiculous and cynical (V.ii.744-46). This being so, “ladies, our love being yours, the error that love makes / Is likewise yours. We to ourselves prove false, / By being once false for ever to be true / To those that make us both” (V.ii.760-62). Our falsehood, our Russian gambit, admittedly was “in itself a sin,” but the true intent behind it purifies, “turns to grace” the foolish and sinful attempt at deception (V.ii.763-64). “Now, at the last minute of the hour, / Grant us your loves” (V.ii.775-76). Do not let the cormorant of time devour us.
The Princess repeats her own defense, that her party had interpreted the king and his court as mockers, pretenders in love. A most politic woman, she will not be pressured into a hasty decision, become an idolater of time. The last minute is “a time, methinks, too short / To make a world-without-end bargain in” (V.ii.777-78). She intends to observe the right form, to mourn her father’s death for the next twelve months. If you, King, will yourself retreat “to some forlorn and naked hermitage,” then I shall marry you at the end of that time (V.ii.782). Rosaline, Katharine, and Maria make the same guarantee—Katharine characteristically with more reserve (“then, if I have much love, I’ll give you some,” Lord Dumaine [V.ii.818]), and Rosaline characteristically with more rigor. Berowne is not merely to seclude himself but to reform himself, learn to bridle his sarcasm by visiting the sick and dying, to learn that “a jest’s prosperity lies in the ear / Of him that hears it, never in the tongue / Of him that makes it” (V.ii.849-51). If Berowne finds his jesting ill-met by ill men, “throw away that spirit, / And I shall find you empty of that fault, / Right joyful of your reformation” (V.ii.855-57). Navarre is Protestant, a man of the Reformation; French Catholic Rosaline would reform the Reformer, who has too often deployed his wit to reform others, seldom turning it on himself. His love must become Christian, charitable.
Berowne reflects. “Our wooing doth not end like an old play: / Jack hath not Jill. These ladies’ courtesy / Might well have made our sport a comedy,” but it hasn’t (V.ii.862-64). The men’s foolish and conventional love-labors have been lost, new and more austere love-labors imposed. As one scholar puts it, the ladies’ final commands, their final love-test, will discover whether the Navarrian aristocrats can love after they’ve endured a year outside courtly conventions. [3] The king is ready for the challenge; after all, a year is only one-third of the time his men had agreed to. Berowne remains as skeptical as ever in assessing such vows. “That’s too long for a play,” he concludes (V.ii.867). It is indeed too long for a theatrical play, a fiction, and also too long to sustain a self-deceiving vow. This love-test will uncover the reality of the men’s vows (and the women’s), one way or the other.
The play isn’t too long for a closing song. Newly-sobered Armado returns, this time with a shorter, simpler, and much more pointed performance by his players. During the time of the love-test, and for the rest of their lives if they pass it, the men will know the anxiety love’s exclusivity necessarily brings. The first song, sung by “Spring,” reminds them that in that season “The cuckoo then on every tree / Mocks married men, for thus sings he: ‘Cuckoo,'” cuckhold (V.ii.885-86), “a word of fear, / Unpleasing to the married ear” (V.ii.897-98). The second song, sung by “Winter,” “when icicles hang on the wall,” reminds them that in that season every night “the staring owl” sings “Tu-who, Tu-whit, Tu-who”—a “merry note” heard indoors, out of the cold (V.ii.900-07). While the anxiety of unknowing, unsure love comes with summer, winter brings men indoors, where they know, can say, can name (to-wit) those to whom they can truly address their love. To say ‘tu’ is to say ‘you’ with intimacy. It bespeaks knowing love of one’s own, one’s own household—the persons there, the warming fire, the food cooking on the stove.
The song reprises Berowne’s prosaic initial critique of King Ferdinand’s planned regime, sets it to music. Nature imposes the cycle of seasons, over time. Both the not-knowing and the knowledge of love will occur and recur, throughout every human life. Contra Florio, there is always more to write about love, because love is the fire that moves the elements of nature, and nature cannot forever be denied by philosophers, theologians, or rulers. For commoners like Armado, Holofernes, Sir Nathaniel, Jaquenetta, Costard, Moth, Dull, and the Forester, the outdoor nature of the summer meadow and singing birds and the indoor household amidst the winter snow (where “birds sit brooding” [V.ii.910]) will limit the pretensions of those who would rise above their station with self-inflating talk. For aristocrats like the Navarrian gentlemen and the French ladies, each season will limit the pretensions of those who would rise above their station as rulers, to suppose themselves Platonic philosophers minus Socratic irony, pretensions both impolitic and unnatural, ruinous both to rule and to philosophizing. For rulers, the harsh realities of war, territorial disputes, and succession crises jar them out of the pretensions peculiar to the prominent, the thought that their sayings must make things so.
“The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo,” Armado says, to both sides (V.ii.917). Mercury’s words come from the gods; Apollo, god of music, makes reality seem sweeter than it is. And finally, Armado delivers himself justly of a thing he had longed to deliver unjustly and foolishly: a command. “You that way: we this way” (V.ii.918). You aristocrats, we commoners. You French devotees of Saint Denis, we Navarrian devotees of Saint Cupid. You Catholics, we Reformers. If unity comes, it will need to be an articulated unity, the hard-won unity of lovers who remain distinct from one another—not a rushed and thoughtless amalgamation but a unity founded on practical wit, not on the unsteady show-wit of learning for fame’s sake.
Note
- There may also be a critical glance at the Protestant emphasis on book-learning in the form of Book-learning, Bible study.
- C. L. Barber: Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1963), p. 99.
- Barber, p. 112.
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