Love's Labour's Lost

by William Shakespeare

  ACT 4 SCENE 2

  Dull, Holofernes, and Nathaniel discuss the hunt. The conversation illustrates two extremes of learning/understanding, as Dull fails to understand most of what is said and Holofernes and Nathaniel show off their knowledge and education. All characters generate humor, as Dull’s misunderstanding creates confusion and the others’ pedantic nature makes them ridiculous (and perhaps demonstrates the outcome of a life devoted to learning with no actual “living,” such as the one proposed by the king). Costard and Jaquenetta interrupt and Jaquenetta asks them to read the letter that Costard has just delivered to her, believing it to be from Armado. Costard has, of course, confused the letters and Nathaniel consequently reads out Berowne’s letter to Rosaline, which is a love sonnet. Holofernes analyses the technical merit of the poem and ignores its sentiment, again showing the distance between education and experience. When they realize that the letter is from Berowne to Rosaline, Nathaniel sends Jaquenetta to take it to the king.

  ACT 4 SCENE 3

  Lines 1–197: The hunting/courtship parallel is emphasized as Berowne observes that the king is “hunting the deer” while he himself is “coursing.” He expresses his reluctance to be in love but acknowledges that he is and that love has “taught” him “to rhyme and to be melancholy,” an instance of learning through experience, rather than through books. The king enters, holding a paper, and Berowne hides to watch him. Sighing, the king reads a sonnet that he has written to the princess. As he finishes, he sees Longaville arrive and hides to watch him read aloud a sonnet that he has written to Maria. The comedy generated by the circumstances, with Berowne watching the king watching Longaville, is added to as Dumaine arrives and Longaville hides to watch him read a sonnet to Katherine. The comedy is heightened by their asides, particularly Berowne’s cynical observations on the effects of love. Berowne’s comment that he alone sees everyone else, “Like a demigod” watching over “wretched fools’ secrets” creates awareness of observation/spectatorship as the theater audience becomes vicariously involved in the process of concealment, observation, and reaction. Once Dumaine has read his sonnet, Longaville comes forward and tells him that he overheard and would “blush” to be “taken napping” in this way. At this point, the king comes forward and tells Longaville not to “chide” Dumaine, as he has overheard him declare his love for Maria. He berates them for breaking their oaths and claims that Berowne will “scorn” and “triumph” at them both, adding that he is glad that Berowne does not “know so much” of him. Berowne steps out at this point to “whip hypocrisy” and reveals that he has seen all three of them declare their love. He claims that he has been “betrayed” by them all and that he is “honest” and has kept the oath. Jaquenetta and Costard enter, bringing Berowne’s letter to Rosaline to give to the king.

  Lines 198–393: The king gives the letter to Berowne to read aloud, but Berowne, recognizing it, tears it up. Everyone is surprised, but when Dumaine gathers the pieces of the letter he recognizes Berowne’s writing. Berowne is forced to admit that he is also a “fool” and asks that Costard and Jaquenetta leave so that he can tell his friends more. He confesses his love for Rosaline and the four men argue over which lady is the most beautiful. The king urges them to “leave this chat” and asks Berowne to construct an argument to “prove” that their love is “lawful” and that they have not broken their oaths. They urge him to find “Some salve for perjury” and Berowne makes a long speech that justifies their behavior. He argues that their oath was “Flat treason against the kingly state of youth” and claims that they would never have learned from their books what they have learned from “the prompting eyes / Of beauty’s tutors.” He argues that learning that solely occupies the brain is “barren” but that love learned through experience, “learnèd in a lady’s eyes,” stimulates the “power” of all the faculties. The king declares “soldiers, to the field!” reinforcing the earlier imagery paralleling love and battle, and they discuss how best to “woo these girls of France.” Berowne suggests that they entertain them with “revels, dances, masks and merry hours” and they go to prepare.

  ACT 5 SCENE 1

  Holofernes and Nathaniel criticize Armado for his “verbosity,” ironically analyzing every aspect of his speech in their long-winded way. Armado arrives, accompanied by Moth and Costard. Holofernes, Nathaniel, and Armado embark on a needlessly lengthy conversation, punctuated by Moth’s witty interjections and asides as he observes that the three men have “been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.” Armado announces that the king has charged him to produce some entertainment for the princess and that he has come to ask for their help. Holofernes suggests that they stage a pageant of “the Nine Worthies” and Armado agrees.

  ACT 5 SCENE 2

  Lines 1–161: The ladies compare the favors and messages that the men have sent, criticizing the verses for being too long and mocking the senders. Boyet arrives, laughing, and tells the ladies to “arm” themselves, as “Love doth approach disguised.” He explains that he overheard the king and his companions planning to visit the ladies, disguised “Like Muscovites or Russians,” to “parley, to court and dance.” Believing that the men “do it but in mocking merriment,” the princess decides to give back “mock for mock.” She instructs her ladies to wear masks and to exchange favors, so that she will appear as Rosaline, and vice versa, and Katherine and Maria will be mistaken for each other. A trumpet announces the arrival of the men, who are disguised.

  Lines 162–282: Moth delivers a greeting, interrupted by both Berowne and Boyet, and is ignored by the ladies. Rosaline, pretending to be the princess, instructs Boyet to ask what the “strangers” want. Rosaline thwarts all attempts at gallantry or courtship by the king, cleverly parrying all his flattery and refusing to dance. Eventually, however, she agrees to speak with him and they draw aside, although the king still thinks that he is speaking to the princess. Sustaining the careful structuring of the play, Berowne speaks with the princess (believing that she is Rosaline), Dumaine talks with Maria (thinking that she is Katherine), and Longaville talks to Katherine (thinking that she is Maria). The women continue to rebuff the men’s advances until Rosaline declares, “Not one word more.” Berowne observes that the men have been “dry-beaten with pure scoff” and they leave.

  Lines 283–511: The ladies are pleased by the success of their plan and continue to mock their suitors. Boyet suggests that the men will come back “In their own shapes” and that, when they do, the ladies should pretend not to have recognized them earlier and “complain to them what fools were here, / Disguised like Muscovites.” The ladies retire and the king and his companions return, without their disguises. The king asks Boyet to fetch the ladies and when they arrive he tries to persuade the princess to return with him to his court. She refuses, saying that she does not wish to cause him to break his oath. When he argues that they have “lived in desolation” in the field, “Unseen” and “unvisited,” she says that this is not so: they have just been visited by “a mess of Russians.” Rosaline adds that the Russians were fools who did not speak “one happy word.” When Rosaline asks Berowne which of the “vizards” he wore, the men realize that they have been recognized all along. Berowne declares that he will never again “woo in rhyme” or dress up his feelings in excessive language: “Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,” but instead his “wooing mind shall be expressed / In russet yeas and honest kersey noes.” The king confesses to the princess that he was there in disguise but is confused when she asks Rosaline what he whispered in her ear, still believing that he had been speaking to the princess. The ladies reveal their “disguises” (the switched favors) and Berowne realizes that the men have been outdone and accuses Boyet the “carry-tale” of telling the ladies of their plan so that they could “dash it like a Christmas comedy.”

  Lines 512–735: Costard arrives to ask whether the pageant may begin and, despite the king’s concern that the entertainment will “shame” them in front of the ladies, Bero
wne sends Costard to fetch the actors. He argues that “ ’tis some policy / To have one show worse than the king’s and his company.” The pageant, as a performance within a performance, draws our attention to issues of theater and acting and consequently to the disguise and artifice in the wider play. The “dual audience,” like the one in Act 4 Scene 3, reinforces the preoccupation with sight/observation. Comedy is generated not only by the ineptitude of the performance but also by the comments of the onstage “audience,” who interrupt and mock the actors (although the princess tries to be kind and encouraging). The performance is interrupted by Costard announcing that Jaquenetta is pregnant by Armado, who denies it and challenges Costard. As they prepare to fight, however, he changes his mind, explaining that he has no shirt on and cannot disrobe. As they wrangle, a messenger, Monsieur Marcadé, arrives from the French court.

  Lines 736–903: Marcadé tells the princess that her father has died, creating a moment of tragedy that seems in tension with the comic conventions of the play so far. She tells Boyet that they will leave that night, and the king tries to persuade her to remain. His language, however, is too complicated, causing Berowne to comment that “plain words best pierce the ear of grief” and to explain that they are all in love. The princess says that they all believed that the men only courted them as “bombast and as lining to the time,” and thus met their loves in the same vein “like a merriment.” The men claim that their “letters” and their “looks” “showed much more than jest” and the king urges, “at the latest minute of the hour,” that the ladies grant them their loves. This reinforces the sense of the power of time, one of many motifs in this final scene that evoke those in Act 1 Scene 1, creating a cyclical structure to the play. The princess’ reference to “frosts and fasts” that might “nip” the love of the king, for example, echoes the king’s comment about the “sneaping frost” of Berowne’s wit at the beginning of the play, and there are many references to sight/observation. Abstinence is also returned to, as the princess agrees that she will marry the king, but only if he will wait one year in “austere insociable life” to test his love for her. The other ladies impose similar conditions of waiting on their suitors: Rosaline, for example, instructs Berowne to use his wit to entertain “the speechless sick.” In some ways, then, this cyclical nature pattern reflects the careful structuring throughout, but the balance is disturbed by a lack of resolution that undermines the traditional comedy genre, as Berowne comments: “Our wooing doth not end like an old play: / Jack hath not Jill.”

  Lines 904–954: Armado returns to take his leave, having vowed to Jaquenetta to “hold the plough for her sweet love three years” (another unresolved courtship), and suggests that the king and his company might like to hear a “dialogue” between the cuckoo and the owl, written by Nathaniel and Holofernes. The play ends with the dialogue (in the form of a song) contrasting spring and winter, which reflects the tensions of the play.

  LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST

  IN PERFORMANCE:

  THE RSC AND BEYOND

  The best way to understand a Shakespeare play is to see it or ideally to participate in it. By examining a range of productions, we may gain a sense of the extraordinary variety of approaches and interpretations that are possible—a variety that gives Shakespeare his unique capacity to be reinvented and made “our contemporary” four centuries after his death.

  We begin with a brief overview of the play’s theatrical and cinematic life, offering historical perspectives on how it has been performed. We then analyze in more detail a series of productions staged over the last half century by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The sense of dialogue between productions that can only occur when a company is dedicated to the revival and investigation of the Shakespeare canon over a long period, together with the uniquely comprehensive archival resource of promptbooks, program notes, reviews and interviews held on behalf of the RSC at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, allows an “RSC stage history” to become a crucible in which the chemistry of the play can be explored.

  Finally, we go to the horse’s mouth. Modern theater is dominated by the figure of the director, who must hold together the whole play, whereas the actor must concentrate on his or her part. The director’s viewpoint is therefore especially valuable. Shakespeare’s plasticity is wonderfully revealed when we hear directors of highly successful productions answering the same questions in very different ways.

  FOUR CENTURIES OF LOVE’S LABOUR’S:

  AN OVERVIEW

  Evidence about the play’s earliest performances is scarce, consisting of little more than a few passing references and allusions.1 The title page of the 1598 Quarto of Love’s Labour’s Lost claims that “it was presented before her Highness this last Christmas” and, further, that it has been “newly corrected and augmented.” The latter claim suggests the possible existence of an earlier Quarto, in which case the reference to performance before Queen Elizabeth may have been carried over from the earlier Quarto rather than relate specifically to the Christmas period 1597–98. If there were two Quartos in quick succession, that would suggest considerable demand: as a rule, Shakespeare’s comedies were reprinted far less often than his histories and tragedies.

  In 1598 Francis Meres, in Palladis Tamia: Wit’s Treasury, listed both Love’s Labour’s Lost and Love’s Labour’s Won as examples of Shakespeare’s excellence as a writer of comedies. The same year, Robert Tofte published his poem of unrequited love, Alba: The Month’s Mind of a Melancholy Lover, which seems to refer to a performance of the play:

  Love’s Labour Lost, I once did see a play,

  Yclepèd so, so callèd to my pain,

  Which I to hear to my small joy did stay,

  Giving attendance on my froward dame.

  My misgiving mind presaging to me ill,

  Yet was I drawn to see it ’gainst my will.

  This play no play but plague was unto me,

  For there I lost the love I likèd most:

  And what to others seemed a jest to be,

  I that (in earnest) found unto my cost.

  To everyone (save me) ’twas comical,

  Whilst tragic-like to me it did befall.

  Each actor played in cunning wise his part,

  But chiefly those entrapped in Cupid’s snare:

  Yet all was feignèd, ’twas not from the heart,

  They seemed to grieve, but yet they felt no care.

  ’Twas I that grief indeed did bear in breast,

  The others did but make a show in jest.

  Yet neither feigning theirs, nor my mere truth,

  Could make her once so much as for to smile:

  Whilst she (despite of pity mild and ruth)

  Did sit as scorning of my woes the while.

  Thus did she sit to see Love lose his love,

  Like hardened rock that force nor power can move.

  The poem provides a rare and suggestive glimpse into what might be described as Elizabethan “dating”: a man taking his girlfriend to the theater and finding his reaction to the play entangled with his own feelings.

  A letter from Sir Walter Cope to Sir Robert Cecil in 1604 indicates the play was still in the repertory in the following decade. Richard Burbage, the leading actor with Shakespeare’s company, recommended it as suitable entertainment for the new Queen, Anne, wife of James I:

  Sir—I have sent and been all this morning hunting for players, jugglers and such kind of creatures, but find them hard to find; wherefore leaving notes for them to seek me, Burbage is come, and says there is no new play that the queen hath not seen, but they have revived an old one, called Love’s Labour’s Lost, which for wit and mirth he says will please her exceedingly. And this is appointed to be played tomorrow night at my Lord of Southampton’s, unless you sent [a note] to remove the corpus cum causa to your house in Strand.2

  The play was also performed at court in January 1605. The 1631 Quarto refers on the title page to the play “as it was acted by his M
ajesty’s Servants at the Blackfriars and the Globe,” which confirms that it was performed publicly and that the King’s Men continued to perform it after 1608, when they took over the smaller indoor Blackfriars Theatre. The theaters closed in 1642 during the Commonwealth. After the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Love’s Labour’s Lost was assigned to Thomas Killigrew’s company, but there is no record of its performance then for nearly two hundred years.

  In 1762 an anonymous adaptation, The Students, was published, but there is no evidence of its performance, nor of any staging of a musical version that was commissioned by David Garrick in 1771. Various theories have been put forward to account for the play’s lack of theatrical appeal to generations of directors and theatergoers, chiefly its complex, often obscene, wordplay and lack of a conventional happy ending. For many years critical reception was likewise hostile, with certain scholars, such as Alexander Pope, asserting that it was not even by Shakespeare. Doctor Johnson defended the play as Shakespeare’s work but drew attention to what he regarded as its shortcomings: