Twenty-five ideas about Love's Labour's Lost

War, death, wit, festivity, Arcadia, lyricism, satire

You can find all the Shakespeare essays here, and the schedule for future meetings here. We meet on Sunday 3rd March, 19.00 UK time to discuss Love’s Labour’s Lost. Paid subscribers can also join this chat about the play.

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1. Directors have often set it in the pre-First World War (or pre-Second World War) period, a tiresome, obvious cliche that oversimplifies to the point of error. The death at the end is not warlike; it is the normal course of things; the old generation gives way to the new; it is time to grow up. “Death will not wait for youth’s chatty utopia” is a much darker ending than “the interruption of war”. As ever, Shakespeare is far ahead of his interpreters.

2. With that reading in mind, I find this play newly topical. In our own time, the delay of marriage and children, the dreams of a better world being more spoken about than performed, serve to make this a very relevant play indeed.

3. Love’s Labour’s Lost is also topical as regards language. Post modernism saw language as a system of infinitely deferred meaning, like the piling up of puns and ambiguities in the speech of Navarre and his men. Against this, we have the reaction that words are relatively fixed in meaning, rooted in the real world, which relates to the way the Princess and her women use speech. Deconstruction cannot be infinite: death is one great certainty of a fixed reality.

4. Shakespeare was writing in response to the work of the aristocratic poet-courtier Philip Sidney. The Arden introduction by H.R. Woudhuysen has many good details on this point. Sidney says plays must not mix kings and clowns; Shakespeare does so. Sidney disapproves of making the sinful ridiculous; Shakespeare does so. Sidney wants decorum; Shakespeare gives us bawdy.

5. Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophil ad Stella is, in Woudhuysen’s words, “a story of erotic obsession without resolution.” So is Love’s Labour’s Lost. Several times, characters speak in sonnets. And Sidney’s sonnets were published in the 1590s, perfect timing for Shakespeare to be influenced by them.

6. There are multiple other points of comparison, even down to the presence of Muscovites. As Woudhuysen says, “Shakespeare is showing that he has mastered Sidney’s writings and can overgo them.”

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7. Shakespeare is also clearly responding to the Petrarchan fashion of his time, the voguish mockery of “inkhorn” terms, and the Renaissance obsession with mutability. As many critics have observed, though, some of the satire was clearly an in-joke, about particular people. If we knew who was being mocked in the Holofernes character, it would be funnier.

8. We do not know what commentary, if any, this play was supposed to make upon the court of Elizabeth I. To those critics for whom everything is political, scraps of evidence serve to show a critical interpretation. Clearly, some mockery of courtiers is intended—but of the French, or the silly ones, or of those close to the Queen… we cannot say.

9. For a long time, this was perhaps Shakespeare’s least popular play. It seems not to have performed at all between 1700 and 1839, perhaps not at all after the opening of the theatres in 1660.

10. Because many critics thought it his worst play (Hazlitt included), it was assumed to be Shakespeare’s earliest, based on the fallacy that writers make progress in smooth, linear, or timely fashion. Critics also saw it as plotless and not conforming to classical rules, and therefore amateur—those are now seen, rightly, as signs of Shakespeare’s originality and creativity.

11. Samuel Johnson, I am glad to say, was a rare example of someone who understood the play’s brilliance, (and was the first person to see the link to Philip Sidney).

12. A cluster of non-conclusive evidence (the re-opening of the theatres, Will Kemp joining the company (he played clowns), a performance at Gray’s Inn with similar stage directions which Shakespere may have borrowed, and so on) suggest the play was written in 1594-95.

13. This puts it at the same time as Romeo and Juliet, another play of youthful exuberance where death defeats a utopian dream.

14. Shakespeare’s comedy, though, as C.L. Barber demonstrated in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (a truly first-rate work) is essentially festive: it is about “the experience of moving to humorous understanding through saturnalian release.”

15. The Elizabeth holidays, involving morris-dances, sword-dances, wassailing, mock ceremonies of summer kings, lords of misrule, masques, and many games and shows are the context for these plays. Comedy and festivity are two ways in which “men cope with life.”

16. Barber: “Wishful absolutes about love’s finality, cultivated without reserve in conventional Arcadia, are made fun of by suggesting that love is not a matter of life and death, but of springtime, the only pretty ring time. The lover’s conviction that he will love “for ever and a day is seen as an illusion… a symptom of the festive moment.”

17. Love’s Labour’s Lost (and to some extent Midsummer Night’s Dream) is made out of pastimes, the high day and holiday play, game play. The lords’ resistance to love is “swept away by festivity.” What they give way to, though, is not love as much as “the folly of amorous masquerade.”

18. Barber says the wordplay saves the play from anticlimax. The lords talk sonnets and the braggart Armado and Holofernes talk inkhorn terms and blustering rhetoric. All overelaborate language is satirised. But, it goes so far to make us gasp in admiration—it is festive language.

19. (Nor is the satire the point of the play: "Satire is not the theme and aim of the play: it is romantic love. Satire is a means to dramatizing that theme, as it is in all Shakespeare's romantic comedies.” Peter G. Phialas)

20. Whereas the folly in Romeo and Juliet was deadly, in Love’s Labour’s Lost it is witty and benign. Barber argues the renouncing of the three-piled hyperboles in the lords’ language at the end is not permanent: it will be revived for festivities.

21. There are no marriages because this is a community play, not one about private lives. It was, as the Princess says, “a merriment.” The songs provide what marriage usually does, “an expression of the going-on power of life.”

22. So exuberant is the play’s language, Harold Bloom said, “Even John Milton and James Joyce, the greatest masters of sound and sense in English after Shakespeare, are far outdone by the linguistic exuberance of Love’s Labour’s Lost.”

23. Along with Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Merchant of Venice, Love’s Labour’s Lost is part of a group of “lyrical plays”, that mark a crest in Shakespeare’s output, between 1594-1597. For Bloom, this was Shakespeare’s “final emancipation from Marlowe.” Berowne is a proto-Falstaff, perhaps Shakespeare’s highest creation.

24. A.D. Nuttall points to Love’s Labour’s Lost’s relationship to The Taming of the Shrew. In Shrew the man educates the woman; Lost it is the reverse. Katherine has what Nuttall calls a “mind virginally intact”; in Lost, that applies to Navarre. Nutall draws a simple moral from this play: “Theory is nothing, practice is all; words are no match for things; art is vain, nature is supreme.”

25. For a cynical view, try this: “Love’s Labour’s Lost, I have already suggested, is a uniquely English treatment of the vision of love born in Renaissance Italy. With some notable exceptions—Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes, for example—which do not concern us here, a major aspect of English poetic practice in the sixteenth century is the denigration, or at last, the questioning, of the spiritual nature of love. Wyatt’s translations of Petrarch, for example, are marked by his usual alterations of Petrarch’s stress upon the divine-Petrarch’s “heaven” very often becomes Wyatt’s “sky.” Wyatt’s own poetry evidences rather frequently a cynical outlook which is not to be found in Petrarch: an anti-feminism and a stress on sensuality which will not allow him to accept entirely the role of the Petrarchan sufferer. The same kind of questioning of spirituality in love, and the same kind of tongue-in-cheek treatment of Petrarchan commonplaces are to be found in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella. The “renunciation of artifice” which one critic writes is shared by Sidney and Berowne tells just part of the story: Berowne is a vehicle for doubt and cynicism, but he does not stand alone; like Astrophil and Stella, Shakespeare’s play seems in its entirety a vehicle for the discarding of the higher ideals of another age—and Love’s Labour’s Lost, if it does anything at all, goes about its iconoclastic business with a good deal more fervor than Sidney's vacillating Astrophil.”