Love's Labour's Lost

by William Shakespeare

  Henceforth my wooing mind shall be expressed

  In russet yeas and honest kersey noes.55

  Other relationships in the 1990 production further highlighted the young men’s romantic posturing, especially the passionate portrayal of Don Armado by John Wood:

  From his first entrance, collapsing on to a heap of cushions, Wood’s Armado was madly illogical with a grasshopper mind. Yet his devotion to Jaquenetta was affectingly obsessive, passionately excited by her easy display of sexuality, as he crawled around after her exit [in Act 1 Scene 2], kissing the carpet wherever she had trodden.… As the stage cleared, Jaquenetta came on into the light previously occupied by Mercade, and Don Armado, happily ready for his three years’ vow as a ploughman, kissed her, a tender act that the other nobles would never approach.56

  In comparing the productions of Barton (1978), Kyle (1984), and Hands (1990), the theater historian Miriam Gilbert explored the essential difference in their handling of love:

  Kyle and Hands chose to underscore the sense in which the love is primarily an illusion at which we smile. If so, then the ending is less surprising and less painful than if the audience has been asked to believe, even fleetingly, in the reciprocal feelings of the men and women.… The disparity between the emotional and social maturity of the Princess and that of the King [in 1990] makes it difficult to believe that the Princess ever feels, or could feel, anything for him. A schoolboy crush on an older and more sophisticated woman is plausible, but not a reciprocal feeling.… Barton’s solution—showing both men and women as insecure to some extent—allows the audience to see the possibility of reciprocal love developing even though we also understand that whatever these people feel for each other needs time for testing and for growth. Later productions have been less successful in conveying such a possibility.57

  Peter Holland criticized Ian Judge’s 1993 production for supplementing the lack of genuine emotion with an overbearing musical score, which only created an artificial illusion of love. Like the soundtrack to a Hollywood movie, the music indicated what the audience should be feeling, overcompensating for the director’s lack of belief in the accessibility of Shakespeare’s plot and characters:

  Ample resources of comedy must in Love’s Labour’s Lost be balanced by an understanding of love and this production signally failed to provide it. Every expression of love was heavily underscored by Nigel Hess’s overscored music swelling beneath; the young men’s poems became songs and Don Armado’s farewell to valour … an excess of musical ardour. The saccharine sentimentalism of musical pastiche smothered any possibility of accurate depiction of emotion under its clichés. Judge’s versions of love were all of a piece with such faked romantic feeling.58

  It appears that key to any successful production of Love’s Labour’s Lost is a sense of emotional reality. Directors avoiding the pitfalls of the language often miss the point that so much of what the characters say is full of “airy nothings,” evasion, and intellectual posing. Dull’s succinct reply to Holofernes’ “Thou hast spoken no word all this while,” “Nor understood none neither, sir,” is often singled out as the greatest moment of hilarity in a production. The audience are relieved by his straightforward honesty and identify with him. It is the big moment of release from the verbal lunacy of the spheres of court and academia, love and intellect. As “John Barton’s [1978] production demonstrated … ordinary theatergoers can respond to the verbal pyrotechnics of a set of wit well played even when the historical dimension eludes them”59—and sometimes because it eludes them. The conditions of the women at the end are not just a love test, but a test of language and humanity. With knowledge and language comes responsibility, and the educated young men have to learn to wield their linguistic powers, whether in matters of the heart or the head, with greater care: “Gently but firmly, the men are sent away to learn something that the women have known all along: how to accommodate speech to facts and to emotional realities, as opposed to using it as a means of evasion, idle amusement, or unthinking cruelty.”60

  THE DIRECTOR’S CUT: TERRY HANDS AND LIZ SHIPMAN

  Terry Hands, born 1941, studied at the University of Birmingham and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In 1964 he established the Liverpool Everyman Theatre, then two years later he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company to run its touring group, Theatregoround. He became joint artistic director with Trevor Nunn in 1978, and was sole artistic director from 1986 to 1991. He has also directed many productions in Europe, notably at the Comédie-Française in Paris. His cycle of Shakespeare’s history plays, with Alan Howard in leading roles, was among the highlights of the RSC in the 1970s. In 1997 he became artistic director of Clwyd Theatr Cymru. Here he discusses his RSC production, which opened in Stratford in 1990 and transferred to the Barbican in London in 1991.

  Liz Shipman is cofounder and associate director of the Kings County Shakespeare Company (KCSC) in New York. She served as its co–artistic director from 1985 to 2001 and has directed many Shakespearean productions there. She also teaches in the Theatre Arts program at the University of San Diego, specializing in a movement-based approach to acting. The production that she discusses here was performed as part of the 1998 Kings County Shakespeare Festival in Brooklyn, New York. Because the action is seemingly set entirely out of doors, Love’s Labour’s Lost is a play that has been peculiarly amenable to outdoor production.

  Whereas most Shakespearean plays sweep across many locations, this one is confined in an enclosed space—an enclosure that seems very important to what the play is about. Directors and designers have re-created the “little academe” as, say, an eighteenth-century aristocratic fête champêtre (Peter Brook suggesting the paintings of Watteau) or—perhaps more predictably—an Oxford college. What did you and your designer go for, and why?

  Hands: Love’s Labour’s Lost is set in a park—an open space where gentry and villagers can meet easily and informally. The “little academe” is an improvisation—as unexpected as it is improbable. It fails very quickly, and part of that failure is the reality of the country life that impinges upon it, and sex. In 1990 the designer Timothy O’Brien created a world that was inspired by Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, but also, in its execution, by Signac, Seurat, and Monet. His idea was that the world of nature should be represented as vibrantly as possible with colors mixing in the eye of the beholder rather than on the palette. If Navarre’s artifice were to be overwhelmed by nature, then that nature should be overwhelming. Frankly I don’t think the period matters much. The world is probably, and not for the last time, Charlecote [the aristocratic house and park just outside Stratford, which Shakespeare knew well].

  Shipman: The production was set in the early twentieth century at Navarre’s “country estate.” It was presented in the round with each entrance (four voms*) leading to an outdoor courtyard of sorts. There was a large, central, raised hexagonal platform surrounded by three large movable benches that could be shifted in the space according to the needs of the scene. The entire space was a “marbleized” white and extended throughout the audience areas. One of the four entrances into the courtyard arrived from the “outer world.” One led to the king’s parklands. One opened into the courtyard from the main house where Navarre and his close comrades reside. The last came from an outer building reserved for guests—Don Armado and Moth. The idea was that Navarre’s estate was the centerpiece of the surrounding community. His grounds and park were open to the people, hence the traffic that passes through during the events of the play. The playing area was open and expansive. Scenery was minimal—limited to a simple set element in each vom, such as a few broad steps flanked by urnlike planters, a garden gate, the suggestion of a large tree, and the set was dressed with occasional greenery. The overall impression was of lightness, warmth, and springtime. Costumes were of natural fabrics and were in whites, creams, and warm colors. The arrival of Marcadé in formal funereal black offered a stark contrast and, appropriately, signalled the end of illusions and youthful fan
cies and the reemergence of reality. Our intent in setting the play in the graceful environs of a wealthy country estate just prior to the First World War was to capture the audience’s imagination with a time within a not-too-distant past that stood on the edge of a major sociopolitical change—a time of promise that was interrupted by a tragic event that ended an “age of innocence.” I felt that this setting was consistent with what I understand to be the themes central to the play.

  7. The men are constantly in competition with one another. The women are more successful because they always work together as a group. Boyet is their spokesman: from left, Rosaline (Janet Suzman), Maria (Katharine Barker), Boyet (Brewster Mason), Katherine (Jessica Claridge), and the Princess of France (Glenda Jackson) in John Barton’s 1965 production.

  This is the Shakespeare play that almost reminds us of a Mozart comic opera. It has a kind of musical structure, with all sorts of symmetries and counterpoints. A nineteenth-century production once combined it with the music of Così fan Tutte (which also has paired lovers and Muscovite disguises). And in Thomas Mann’s great novel Dr. Faustus, it is the play that the composer Leverkuhn is turning into an opera. To approach it in a quasi-musical way, structurally, perhaps helps draw attention away from all the recondite language, the Elizabethan in-jokes. Did you have any thoughts along these lines?

  Hands: Love’s Labour’s Lost is an early play with a tableau structure, clumsy in the beginning but flowing once the whole world of village and courtier is established. The language again is early—experimental, but understandably real to those who speak it. A great deal depends upon the actors. It is a truism that a director has done 80 percent of the production by the time the casting is finished. I was lucky. The 1990 cast included John Wood, Ralph Fiennes, Simon Russell Beale, Paterson Joseph, Amanda Root, Carol Royle, Alex Kingston, Lloyd Hutchinson, and David Troughton—all capable of bringing idiosyncratic emotional depth to reading the dictionary.

  Shipman: Musicality, the rhythmical interplay of the text, the constant games of wordplay and combative wit combine to define the experience of hearing this play. The language of Love’s Labour’s Lost requires that particular attention be paid to rhythm, melody, and timing. It is an intricate song and dance of words and interpersonal action. I found that the language stirred action and thus the KCSC production was full of movement. There was a sense that the characters and the action swept through the playing space—the text and the context mobilizing the actors. Time seemed to fly. There was a kind of building momentum that could only be interrupted by the arrival of Marcadé. I cast very large and masculine men as Navarre and his friends. Their interplay was sometimes very physical so that they were nimble physically as well as verbally. Even their commitment to the ideals of Navarre’s “little academe” was undertaken in a visceral manner, and yet the music of the interactive dialogue had to be maintained. I did make certain cuts in the text and with them some of the obscure references were eliminated. But, I find that when actors know and understand clearly what they are saying and what is being said to them and when they engage with the text actively, the meanings become quite clear, and even when the audience did not understand the exact frame of reference, they were able to understand the gist of it and certainly the intent of the character who spoke the words. Additionally, songs and instrumental music were an integral element in our production. A traveling musician character was ever-present, leading into and out of the scenes and accompanying all of the songs included throughout the text.

  The poems and sonnets used in the wooings are tricky, aren’t they? Sometimes they seem deliberately bad, sometimes not. For the more sophisticated members of Shakespeare’s original audience, versed in all the Petrarchan love poetry of the age, a lot of the fun would have come from this. Trickier for a modern audience who are unfamiliar with the poetic conventions that Shakespeare is working both with and against?

  Hands: The same is largely true of the competitive poems and sonnets. We know from performance which is gold and which pinchbeck. In any case there is invariably a commentary to guide us—whether it is Berowne’s ribald observations on his fellows’ efforts or the collective sigh that greets the best (Berowne’s sonnet to Rosaline), read by Sir Nathaniel and heard by Holofernes, Costard, and Jaquenetta. Part of Shakespeare’s genius was his ability to combine thought with feeling—what T. S. Eliot called the association of sensibility. In the theater the audience can take one or the other, or—if the actor is good enough—both.

  Shipman: I believe that the wooing poems are intended to be as ridiculous as the actors can make them. These are opportunities for lovers to show themselves as clowns. Their verses, though not as outrageous as Don Armado’s, are quite as silly. Certainly the characters are gushing in the first throes of intense infatuation. Their verses, good or bad, are less important than the circumstances of the scene. The fact that the king, Longaville, and Dumaine are unknowingly exposing themselves for their questionable poetry, their susceptibility to love, and their oath breaking in a single act makes this scene potentially hilarious. As they, in turn, are “caught out,” we revel in their public exposure and subsequent chagrin and we fully endorse the practical Berowne’s justifications and the king’s new “plan of action.” Audiences love it, whether they are aware of the stylistic references or not. We have different audiences today. but the situation is a comically classic one that we love to savor.

  8. Terry Hands’ 1990 production: the king (Simon Russell Beale, left) and Berowne (Ralph Fiennes) consider the vow to abjure female company for the sake of academic study.

  It’s his most courtly and self-consciously “poetic” play, but also—when you really pick away at the double entendres—one of his rudest. Did that high/low juxtaposition help shape your production?

  Shipman: Absolutely. I have heard this play described as lyrical and full of elegant poetry. Rhymes, yes. Plenty of verse, yes. And the place is at Navarre’s court. But I do not experience the text as lyrical or courtly. I find it laced with testosterone, fully satirical in its point of view as it illuminates the blindness of youth and the follies of “love.” In this play the clowns become lovers and the lovers become clowns. It’s a game. It’s fun. Politeness is a facade and wit is often quite rude. The base and the noble interact. Verse and prose can be spoken by either. It is informal in its seeming formality. The images and metaphors that leaven the script reference games, sports, warring and battles, hunting and pursuit. In this play, perhaps, the challenge is everything—an end in itself. It is all about the game—word games, games of disguise and the sport of falling in love. Sport is rough and competitive and played to win. If and when love is gained, the “game” is over, but I think it is significant and perhaps hopeful when Berowne responds to the one-year waiting period set by the women at the end of the play by saying, “That’s too long for a play.” Is he also saying, “We’ll have to get serious and work at it because we can’t keep the play or the game going that long”? Time will bear it out in the end. There is plenty of room for cynicism, but we can hope and imagine that at least some of the lovers end up marrying in one year’s time.

  Berowne is a jewel of a role, isn’t it? What kind of discoveries did you and your actor make about his language—and maybe his nimble, improvisatory gifts? Some people have been tempted to see him as a Shakespearean self-portrait …

  Hands: It is possibly as difficult to date a Shakespeare play as it is to interpret one. But somewhere around the composition of Love’s Labour’s Lost Shakespeare was either writing, or at least thinking of, plays like Titus Andronicus or even Richard III. Is it altogether fanciful to imagine that he himself was facing a career choice? Whether to be a “court jester” like Berowne (and later Benedick [in Much Ado About Nothing]) the purveyor of wit and poetry to the aristocracy, or a major player in one of the new Elizabethan playhouses? It is to all our benefit that he chose the latter.

  Shipman: Berowne is a realist, an observer, one who stands outside—usually immune to th
e follies of those around him. His wit derives from this ability to see the world as it is and to use humor as his response to it. He masks himself behind his wit. It is the tool of his detachment. That is until he meets his match in Rosaline. The actor (Ray Virta) I was fortunate enough to cast in the role was a natural wit and clown, able to move adroitly between the subtleties and the broader aspects of the character and the text. Mr. Virta gave the character realistic form and substance based on the text and his own instincts. He was immensely helpful during the rehearsal period, especially when I was making cuts to move the action along. He seemed to have a deep understanding of who Berowne, the man, is. He knew that Berowne’s rhetorical flourishes and game-loving wit had to be about who he is and how he lives in the world. One of Ray’s mantras is “sound is sense.” His pursuit of Berowne and his interpretation of the character began then with the sounds of his text.

  Technically (not least as a living demonstration of the meaning of the phrase “dramatic irony”), the multiple overhearing scene, in which the men are successively caught out professing the love they purport to disdain, is utterly brilliant—how did you stage it?

  Shipman: Staging this scene was quite a challenge since it was presented in the round with very little by way of structural elements in the setting. The audience was seated on risers viewing the action from four sides. Each of the gentlemen hid, in his turn, within sight of the audience, but with the illusion that they were all hidden from one another. As each of the gentlemen arrived in the courtyard, his predecessor quickly found a clever hiding place. Berowne hid aloft (we imagined he had climbed a tree), moving up through the audience to the top corner of one of the risers. Navarre secreted himself behind one of the slightly oversized benches, which had been shifted to the outer edges of the space for this scene. Longaville slipped into one of the voms, or, if possible, into a vacant seat in the audience—hiding behind a book (his poetry journal). From these hiding places, the subsequent reveals flowed easily.