Dusty:

I have never been quite sure what the title means, or even how to spell it:  Love’s Labours Lost or Love’s Labour’s Lost. “Labor lost” seems to be a colloquial or proverbial phrase meaning something like ‘wasted effort’.  Is it a kind of reply to amor vincit omnia? The link between “love” and “labour” seems odd, but in fact “labour of love” is biblical (KJV). In any case, it’s an odd title for a comedy, though in fact it does point ahead to the fact that in this play love does not win (at least in the short run).

I imagine that the long opening scene might be played in several ways. To us today Navarre’s plan sounds foolish and destined to fail, and Berowne’s objections to the terms of the oath suggest that anybody with warm blood would find it difficult to comply. So a modern director might want to play the scene comically from the opening lines, with pompous/pretentious claims from Navarre and witty banter from Berowne about what they will accomplish in their three years of study.

But fame that would live on after one’s death apparently had a more powerful appeal to Shakespeare and his audience than to us, to judge by the continuing cultural eminence of Homer (think of Sarpedon’s words to Glaucus, later parodied in Rape of the Lock) and Shakespeare’s own sonnets, written right about the same time, with the ways in which immortality can be achieved. So I can imagine a stirring serious appeal from Navarre that he and his courtiers should aim at undying  fame.

On the other hand, what Navarre proposes is not to win fame by heroic deeds but by setting up “a little academe” and studying “philosophy” and “living art” [I suppose that means the art of living well]. It all sounds a little precious, quite apart from the appeals of the flesh that will have to be deferred. Did Shakespeare know about the Florentine “academies” that welcomed Milton forty years later?

In any case, the scene is based on a clunky idea: that they have all already agreed to the pact “which they themselves have devised,” and have taken an oath to observe its provisions, and Berowne is now at the last minute making some feeble objections (‘Oh, I was jesting when I took the oath . . .’). Maybe Shakespeare wanted to create some conflict, but did not want to devote the entire first act to a debate, and thus compresses the matter. We already know that Berowne is going to be sorely tested, and will probably fail. The scene creates a strong expectation of a comic reversal.

There’s more rhyme in this scene than, I think, in any other Shakespeare play. Not just summary couplets at the end of a speech or scene, but couplets divided between two speakers. And passages that sound like sonnets, often involving a sonnet-like rhyme pattern: ABABCC.

The second part of the scene offers obvious comedy. The report that Costard has been caught in flagrante delicto is another leading indicator that celibacy is not going to last long. And the letter from Armado makes clear that he is going to be a good comic character who will not only entertain the little academy but will also entertain us. On stage he could be a very funny combination of high (“high-borne words” and the latest “fashion”) and low (his lust for Jaquenetta).

In the shorter 1.2 we find that Armado too is subject to the urges of the flesh, but I don’t understand why he confesses this to his page. The obvious broad comedy continues, along with witty wordplay that would delight the Elizabethan audience but is presumably often lost to a modern audience.

Michael:

I’ve assumed that the title refers to the ending. The course of study that Navarre proposes seems acceptable enough, his “little academe,” but Berowne’s questions about fasting and sleeping seem reasonable. And the question of not seeing women, at the beginning of a comedy, is likely to raise questions. Berowne’s argument against the regulations slips into rhyme, which in the context of comedy may give it a certain authority. So when he begins to pick it apart, we see it’s already doomed. The idea of cutting out women’s tongues seems nutty enough, and then Berowne brings up the embassy of the French queen. And the arrival of Dull with Costard seems decisive. It’s hard to imagine anyone less likely to live in a philosophical academy than Costard, except perhaps Dull, so his very presence on stage threatens comedy. Then Armado’s letter brings language into the question. What relation can this have to Berowne’s rhyming?

The “set” between Armado and Mote, though the wit is frequently lame, seems to confirm the issue of language and comedy. Can a philosophical academy stand up to this? Worse, Armado is in love with Jaquenetta.

Michael:

In Act 2 the wit becomes more elevated, and perhaps more purposeful as the women discuss what they know of Navarre’s companions. In each of which case we learn of their interest, but also hear their critique of the men’s wit and personalities; there seems no likelihood of love at first sight. And when the king and his companions enter, we get the princess’s takedown of the king’s plan of excluding women. Berowne and Rosaline’s brief exchange of wit isn’t impressive, but it sets the direction, which seems to be difficulty. The political question of the money isn’t entirely clear, but the necessity of awaiting the packet of contracts and receipts will allow the exchanges of wit that will power the comedy. It seems this comedy will be set in a challenging context; there will be labor in its course.

Boyet’s suggestion that the king was already taken by the princess raises the question of whether we had seen it. She apparently didn’t and thinks Boyet is joking. I don’t find anything in the text to suggest she’s wrong. All three of the princess’s companions seem skeptical of Boyet. The symmetry of the characters suggests the romantic direction, but so far it’s only a projection.

Dusty:

Both Acts two and three have but one scene, and not a long one. They advance the two plots started in the first act, men who propose to live without women, and Don Armado in love. Yes, in 2.1 the women wittily critique the men, but don’t they seem to fancy them too? If not, what does the Princess mean by her comment that all her ladies “are in love,/ That every one her own hath garnished/ With such bedecking ornaments of praise”? Or is this just her irony? The men, for their part, seem to fancy the women more than they are fancied.

Dusty:

3.1 continues the Armado plot, but not by much. The only ‘plot’ is that Armado gets Costard to carry a letter to Jaquenetta. Again we have displays of witty talk from Moth, with his derisive asides about his master. Moth dominates the first part of the scene, and gets the longest speech. As Costard prepares to depart, Berowne stops him and he too asks to have a letter carried to a lady. Berowne closes the scene with a longish soliloquy in blank verse, not rhyme, in which he seems amused at himself for falling prey to Cupid.

Not much matter so far, and too much art.

The play runs for five acts, and some 2900 lines, so we still have 5/6 of the lines to go. Shakespeare doesn’t usually construct plays in this way, but editors suggest that the text we have is not a very good one, and that there were no act-scene divisions in the first Quarto.

Michael:

Yes, it’s clear that the play is weighted to Acts 4 and 5 –it’s Act 4 when the love plots take hold. At the end of Act 3 Berowne becomes the anticipation of the familiar figure of the former mocker of love who is now in love. Benedick is probably the closest, a more developed example than Berowne, but similar in his self-accusing wit. His soliloquy at 3.1.159-190 is a sort of prologue to what’s coming.

Costard seems to offer a mild insult to the princess in her joking about who’s in charge, indicating she’s the thickest and tallest of the four ladies. But it’s ignored, and we don’t hear anything more, I think, about her girth. The Renaissance feminine aesthetic differed from ours, of course, but this does seem a bit surprising. The misdirected letters provide most of the plot advancement at the beginning of Act, first Armado’s silly letter to Jaquenetta, then Nathaniel’s reading of Berowne’s better, but pretty conventional, six-stress sonnet to Rosaline. Six stresses were old fashioned by this point (early 1590s), and all the lines appear end-stopped. Holofernes criticizes Nathaniel’s reading but also finds the quality of the sonnet lacking. In any case, quality will be secondary to the revelation that will be its fate.

Michael:

4.3 is the center of the play and perhaps the best scene of the play in performance. Each lover overhears the next in reciting a poem, two sonnets, and a canzone, then Berowne is revealed to complete the undoing of the oath of study. The king’s sonnet has sixteen lines, no less conventional perhaps than Berowne’s, but having as its center the conceit of his tears as a coach conveying the beloved. The final line lets us know it’s directed to the princes, “Queen of queens.”

Wonderfully lucky that each of the lovers has picked out a lady that one of the others doesn’t fancy.

The scene moves quickly as Longueville comes in and reads over his sonnet, which has the regulation 14 lines. He makes the argument that he’s not in violation of the study agreement since the object of his affection is a goddess, not a flesh-and-blood woman, mocked in a couple of lines by Berowne, who immediately comes in to be overheard by the other three in his “sonnet,” which is actually a 20-line trimeter canzone. Berowne is allowed a bit of hypocritical castigation of the others before Jaquenetta comes in with the sheet of his sonnet to Rosaline.

Berowne’s praise of Rosaline’s beauty leads to the king’s judgment of her as “black as ebony,” which leads to characterization of her ‘dark lady’ appearance. Presumably this refers to her dark eyes and hair, but it leads oddly to further insistence on her darkness.

My text has a passage in italic, 291.1 to 291.23, which appears to repeat portions of 285-339. Its argument that women’s beauty is the true inspiration for art and study, something of a commonplace of course, is the rationale of the play and the response to the idea of the little academe with which the play began. “Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves” and embrace charity to fulfill the law become the landing spot for Berowne.

Holofernes and Nathaniel seem somewhat reduplicative of Armado and his crew, Costard, Mote, Dull. And the “wit” of their exchanges seem often labored. Of course Holofernes is more particularly directed at humanist learning, as if perhaps settling a score. Was Shakespeare twitting Ben Jonson?

Dusty:

Is it significant that the Princess and her ladies are out on a hunting expedition, and that they kill a stag? Does it suggest that they are not simply decorative court ladies, but are capable of disarming the men?

The witty banter is almost nonstop. I tried in vain to fit language to individual speakers, and began to think that everybody speaks wittily and often in rhyme — the lords, the ladies, Boyet, even Costard, who rhymes with his social betters.

I find it odd that new characters (Holofernes and Sir Nathaniel) get introduced in the fourth act. And I could not clearly distinguish between the way Holofernes speaks and the way Don Armado speaks. They both use Latin tags. Maybe Holofernes is supposed to be a parody of a “scholar” and a “book-man.” But his elaborate speech seemed quite similar to Armado’s. Maybe they are in the play because their language is inflated just as the lords’ sonnet rhetoric is inflated.

There is very little “plot” in the first two scenes of Act 4, just the silly business of the two letters being sent to the wrong girls. (Maybe that’s another indication that Don Armado and Berowne are more alike than they realize.) Yes, 4.3 is a big scene, but it doesn’t do much to advance the plot. It’s as if the action stops, and we get display pieces of love rhetoric. (Once the first poem is read, we know what the rest of the scene will consist of.) What I found most interesting was Berowne’s long speech at the end of the scene, in which he responds to Ferdinand’s request that he prove that the love of women is in fact lawful, and that they have after all not broken their oaths.

Dusty:

It seems to me that Act 5 is the really important part of the play, especially the extraordinarily long second scene of 930 lines. In 5.1 Holofernes and Sir Nathaniel speak alike. I wonder why Shakespeare did not seize the opportunity to set them in opposition. The scene also seems to confirm the idea that Holofernes and Armado are duplicates. They both take up the laborious “posteriors” of the day, and are both said to snatching crumbs from “the great feast of language.” (Maybe Shakespeare intended the play itself to be a “feast of language.”)

In 5.2 I continue to think that all the ladies speak alike: together they “bandy a set of wit.” You could probably reassign their speeches to other characters and not go wrong. There is much obvious comedy in having the ladies switch “favours” to fool the men, and much expected mockery. The women often complete the rhyming couplets that the men initiate. You could read that as riposte, as mockery. You could also read it as the women matching wits with the men, and speaking just as wittily and facetiously and punningly as they do. I have seen it suggested that the men in the play are preening wits whose love language is merely conventional, and thus insincere, and that the women are rightly skeptical of the men and looking for but not finding signs of serious intent. But, as I say, it seems to me that the women are no more serious than the men, and are eager to “mock them still.”

The men are thrown on the defensive, and at a key moment Berowne seems to abandon witty sonnet language for “russet yeas and honest kersey noes.” The women are not persuaded. Maybe the men are not really repentant.

At this point Shakespeare changes the tone, and throws in the pageant of the Nine Worthies. This could be good fun on the stage. The players are mercilessly mocked by the lords and Boyet, but not by the ladies. I can imagine that you could play the whole scene for laughs, or you might allow the wounded pride of the presenters to be highlighted. Maybe we wince at the cruel mockery and feel sympathy for the presenters. (Do we feel that Malvolio is cruelly mocked?)

Again Shakespeare changes the tone by introducing news of the death of the father of the Princess. (Presumably she guesses the news because the messenger is dressed in mourning.) This could be a shocking moment on stage, for the characters and for the audience.

After the king’s fulsome speech to the princess, Berowne again suggests that what is needed now are “honest plain words.” This echoes his earlier “honest kersey” but Rosaline still doesn’t buy it: she chastizes his “gibing spirit.”

The Princess resolves things by sending the King away for a year, and her ladies follow suit. One year’s penance seems a suitable waiting period, more manageable than three years in the academy. So the labors of love — mostly lightweight poetical labors — on the part of the men are “lost.” Well, not quite lost, since it looks like the women will accept the men in a twelvemonth.

Odd that Armado resolves to be a farmer for three years, in an echo of the three-year academy.

How do you stage the ending? Is it just a display piece? Is it festive, or does it invite any sober reflection? Everybody is called on stage for the “dialogue” in praise of owl (winter) and cuckoo (spring). I suppose it is sung by Holofernes and Armado,  but how is it linked to anything that has come before? Maybe, at minimum, it invites us to revise our view of Holofernes and Armado as language fools. Or maybe it’s designed to show that Shakespeare knows how to write a great poem, in its concrete seasonal detail well contrasted to the love sonnets.

Michael:

The witty banter is so pervasive (so continuous, so non-stop) that it might even seem to require the actual conclusion. Wit and comic language might make the encounter with death and reality the only proper conclusion to the comedy. In any case it seems, while surprising, even shocking, to be exactly the right response to all the unleashed wit.

I’d still argue for 4.3 as the central moment of the comedy and the memorable scene that reveals the correct reordering of the characters and what they are — youth. The whole academe scheme is tossed out and reordered, and the real business of comedy can begin.

But the extraordinarily long 5.2 reorders the reordering, and it creates a context which seems to need what comes at the end. I’m guessing that Holofernes and Nathaniel are added to supply enough personnel for the Nine Worthies pageant. It is awkward, and their schtick simply reduplicates Armado. Their addition though allows for the memorable lines, “They have been to the great feast of language and stolen the scraps,” and Costard’s agreement, “O, they have lived long on the alms basket of words.” (Here we must have the reaction of young guy who taught Latin to boys for the years before he escaped to London.)

Clearly there’s a lot of room for comic work in all the Nine Worthies material. I think we are meant to take seriously the putting Holofernes “out of countenance” and his exit from the pageant. If anything, it’s reminiscent of the lovers mocking the players of Pyramus and Thisbe, but here there’s some reference to — and sympathy for, it seems — the plight of the unskilled actors. Holofernes twice tells them he’s been put “out of countenance,” then scolds them as “not generous, not gentle, not humble.” And it’s clear he’s right.

The “wit” of the play would need considerable editing in a modern performance. The effectiveness of the wit is pretty evenly divided between the lords and the ladies, but it does seem the ladies are better able to see its limitations. And their response to the news of the King’s death seems stronger.

We note that the rhyme completely falls away when the news of the King’s death is announced, as if the rhetoric of the play pulls itself together and falls into blank verse.

Are the lowlife crew somehow vindicated by their singing response in the songs of spring and winter? — I assume that they are the singers of the four stanzas. The contrast of spring and winter also seem expressive of the play’s ending.

Dusty:

I still wonder whether the ladies are sufficiently distinguished from the lords. Much would depend on whether the director instructs them to be receptive to the male wooing.

Michael:

I sense more resistance in the ladies. But yes, much would be determined by the direction.