"Love's Labor's Lost owns the distinction of being the first play
printed under the Bard's name in 1598" (Farina 49). "This is a play that
reads 'hard' and plays 'easy'" (Garber 186). It includes considerable
punning and rhyming -- more rhyming than any other Shakespeare play --
and although signs of early composition, these matters may also be considered
appropriate to the play insofar as it is a satire on excesses of language:
"the coming to life of written literary forms upon the stage" (Garber 179).
Shakespeare writes here a farcical parody, pillorying linguistic arrogance
and affectations, but with "linguistic exuberance" (Bloom 121). "The play
was a satire on pedantry, and its complicated verbiage and intrusive Latinity
would appeal to the sense of humor of the educated" (Asimov 421). Thus the
play suffers from having a reputation of being "linguistically difficult
and so full of unfathomable topical allusions as to be incomprehensible"
-- some think undeservedly (Wells 58) -- and dated, particularly since the
topical allusions may place the work in the late 1570s. Some speculate that
it was written in 1593 when the theaters were closed, but that's a strain to
force it into the Stratford timeline's constrictions.
It feels as if "written for a special audience," intended for performance
in the court or the house of a nobleman rather than at the public theatres
(Goddard, I 48; cf. Chambers 324, Asimov 421). Oxfordians have postulated
that a 1579 masque served as a primitive version of what was revised later into
the play we have now: in January of 1579, a Double Maske was performed
for the English court and before Simier (Miller 136; Ogburn and Ogburn 193),
consisting of A Maske of Amazones and A Maske of Knightes (Ogburn
and Ogburn 173, 179-180).
Even Goddard senses something Oxfordian: "In Biron we catch a glimpse of
Shakespeare as it were in the very act of shaking off some of his juvenile
extravagances and resolving on a greater simplicity" (Goddard, I 51).
Ruth Loyd Miller has insisted that the play reflects Elizabeth's court in
the late 1570s and early 1580s in another respect: Elizabeth had issued an
edict from Ipswich in 1561 forbidding "all resort of women to the lodgings
of Cathedrals or Colleges" as she objected to their interrupting studies
(Miller 142; Ogburn 618). But of course she herself continued visiting within
days thereafter, lodging at Cambridge (Anderson 13, 29).
Thomas Churchyard arranged and performed a Pageant of Nine Worthies before
the Queen in 1578 (Farina 51).The "Academe" of Navarre, though originally
inspired perhaps by the 1577 French work Academie Française
dedicated to Henry III whom de Vere visited in Paris (Farina 50), may
in later revision be a ridiculing of a group headed by Raleigh and
including Marlowe, Chapman, and others who with John Florio thought "it
were labour lost to speak of Love"; they were interested in the new
science, especially astronomy and Copernicus (Goddard, I 49).
Other aspects are more accessible: figures from Roman satire and Italian
commedia dell'arte, such as Armado, a stock character fromwhose
name alludes to the eventually defeated Spanish Armada. Holofernes is
named for Gargantua's Latin tutor in Rabelais.
Closer to home, the play contains many connections to Shakespeare's
Sonnets. Shakespeare doesn't or can't distance himself from Rosaline.
Berowne and Rosaline have a prehistory, and amid the sado-masochism lite,
there is much poetical material about Rosaline being "dark" --
the Dark Lady of the Sonnets? Ogburn suggests that a reference to an
apparently missing sequel, Love's Labour's Won, may be indicating
a much earlier draft of Much Ado.
We encounter verbal and intellectual acrobatics at the sacrifice of
dramatic tension and excitement. He'll be committed to more energetic
plotting after this play, but this one contains a self-conscious
literariness (there's an embedded sonnet in I.i.). With language as its
theme, the play shows characters having idiosyncratic approaches to
language, and most are castigated for it. Ladies may be ideal. Jaquenetta
is largely unvocal. Moth parallels the ladies on a different level. All
others are reproached. The non-pretentious Dull and Costard mock and are
mocked too, so is this just a satire on pretension and pedantry? Verbal
high-wire acts are the chief glory of this play, and women use this form
of wit, so is language itself being satirized? Simpering wit is tiresome
in other characters, but when scintillating it is not denounced.
For the ladies: language symbolizes reality; for the clowns it symbolizes
things; for Holofernes and Armado, words are ends in themselves (French
94). The play takes pleasure in what is not fixed but ambiguous and
shifting, although the ideal is constancy of word and spirit, heart and
tongue. Only a lover and master of language and a skeptic could have
exposed the linguistic manias of his day so devastatingly and merrily
(Goddard, I 50).
Rima Greenhill also thinks Love's Labour's Lost has late 1570s
origins, but for reasons having to do with Russian topicalities still
in the play despite layers of revision: "From Russia with Love: A Case
of Love's Labour's Lost" [The Oxfordian 9 (2006): 9-32].
Prompted by a few fragmented allusions mentioned by Miller and Clark (137),
Greenhill explains the relevance to the play of the English Muscovy Company
and the English court's dealings with Russia's Ivan the Terrible. She detects
a late 1570s original composition, updated later. [For other possible topical
allusions, see John Hamill, "A Spaniard in the Elizabethan Court: Don Antonio
Pérez." The Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter 45.1 (June 2009):
14-23.]
ACT I
SCENE i
Ferdinand, King of Navarre, has decided that Navarre will become an
Academe, a haven for the ascetic, celibate, contemplative life, where
intellectual fame will assure immortality and defy "Time" (a Sonnets
concern here from the very first lines). His lords -- Berowne,
Longaville, and Dumaine -- are expected to sign on for three years now,
although they have already sworn allegiance. Longaville and Dumaine sign
readily, and Longaville reasons, "Fat paunches have lean pates; and
dainty bits / Make rich the ribs, but bankrout quite the wits"
(I.i.26-27). Although the monk's life is really the only available model
for such a pursuit, Berowne is skeptical of the extremism and asks, "What
is the end of study" (I.i.55), pointing out the necessary backfiring of
the plan. "Light seeking light doth light of light beguile" (I.i.77)
means that "the intellect seeking wisdom cheats
eyesight out of daylight (Levin, qtd. in Bloom 126).
Berowne's lines (I.i.80-93) form a sonnet, exemplifying "the frequent
intellectuality of the play's style, the brilliance of its versification
and its self-conscious literariness" (Wells 58-59).
"How well he's read, to reason against reading!" says he King (I.i.94).
"The academy plan is a sign that the King and his friends don't fully
understand themselves or the nature of human nature, and it is thus,
from the beginning, doomed to fail" (Garber 177).
Berowne skeptically reads the boys' clubhouse rules and is surprised that
any woman (girls have cooties) coming within a mile of the court will
have her tongue severed. After all, the daughter of the King of France is
due on business, so he "draws his attention to the conflict between private
desire and public duty" (Wells 59).
"What is the end of study?" Berowne ponders, "and from then on
the drama is dedicated to answering that question" (Goddard, I 49).
But although he thinks the whole scheme is silly and
that they'll all have to break their own rules thousands of times,
Berowne submits to peer pressure and signs on. A goofy Spanish courtier,
Armado, will have to suffice as far as entertainment for them now.
The academe perhaps "referred to a group of amateur scholars who gathered
together in a secret group to study the new astronomy that had arisen out
of Copernicus' book in 1543, which held that the earth moved round the sun
and not vice versa.... Raleigh was supposed to patronize this wicked school"
(Asimov 436).
"In Don Armado we may well be seeing the Bard's first tentative attempt
at self-parody": he writes sonnets (I.ii.183) and "is both ridiculous
and likeable" (Farina 53).
SCENE ii
Armado's exchange with his page, Moth, reveals the former as a pompous
ass. For example, he prefers to say "one more than two" (I.ii.47) when
he means "three." He also reveals that he loves the country girl
Jaquenetta, and he wants to align himself in love with great heroes.
Moth supplies Hercules and Sampson; his name is pronounced "Mote,"
"an allusion to his small size" (Garber 178). Jaquenetta enters with
Costard and Dull and reacts to Armado either with scorn or with blankness.
Armado is put in charge of Costard's punishment (now reduced to three
days fasting each week). "Costard" is the name of a kind of apple (Garber
178). When all others depart, in a parody of courtly love, Shakespeare
has Armado soliloquize about his love for Jaquenetta: "I am sure I shall
turn sonnet" (I.ii.183-184). Thus Jaquenetta is his literary muse and
Armado is a clownish version of Oxford (Anderson 261), applying
his "gentle mockery" even to himself (Ogburn and Ogburn 180). Berowne
is Oxford, of course (Ogburn and Ogburn 196), but Armado -- an anagram
of "O. drama"? -- is Oxford's "fantastical" side (Ogburn and Ogburn 196).
A reference to "cipher" (I.ii.56) may also refer to Oxford's "O" (Ogburn
and Ogburn 198-199). Costard and Moth respectively note that Berowne and
Armado are poor at figures (Ogburn and Ogburn 204).
Moth's association with "Juvenal" and with the mention of the fox, ape,
and bee, suggests that he is a caricature of Nashe (who includes a long
parable with those animals in his work of the time) (Anderson 261; cf.
Asimov 427). Moth may have become the "fair youth" in a 1589 revision
and before a 1598 touch-up (Ogburn and Ogburn 193). Some think Armado
is Gabriel Harvey; "The Armado-Moth quibbling might therefore be taken
to represent, with satiric inadequacy, the Homeric polemics of Harvey
and Nashe" (Asimov 427). Armado and Moth are typically involved in
exchanges of quipping, reflecting Oxford and Nashe's relationship
(Anderson 262). Nashe's nemesis, Gabriel Harvey, seems to be caricatured
in Holofernes (Anderson 261), and Armado eggs on the contentiousness there
(Anderson 262). Costard, a caricature of William Shakspere of Stratford
(Anderson 260), is an "ambitious country gentleman" and therefore "De
Vere used his country clown as an envoy to satisfy the author's longing
for the literary delights and public fame that he cannot himself taste"
(Anderson 262). The Don Armado - Costard - Jaquenetta triad will show
up in less pleasant form in As You Like It (V.i.) (Anderson 325).
"And unregenerate nature is represented by the swain Costard and the wench
Jaquenetta" (Wells 59). Jaquenetta may partly be Elizabeth, whom "Oxford
was obliged to court in a clandestine manner" (Ogburn and Ogburn 198).
Others have thought that Armado sends up Don John of Austria (Miller 138f)
and perhaps Alençon (Clark 168); Raleigh has also been suggested
(Asimov 426). An "Armada" earlier than the famous 1588 Spanish fleet was
the combined Venice/Spain/Rome fleet under the command of Don John in
1571 against the Turks (Clark 172). His success led to his becoming
"the darling of the Western World" though he wanted Elizabeth off the
throne. He was called "dramatic" and "extravagant" (qtd. in Clark 173).
Armado's first name, Adriano, comes then from Adrianople, where the Sultan
was at the time of the attack in 1571 (Clark 174). But Greenhill detects
an original depiction of Ivan the Terrible in Armado -- thinking himself
great but really the subject of mockery at the English court (Greenhill
20-21). Jaquenetta in this scheme would be the low-born seventh wife
of Ivan, Mariya Nagaya (Greenhill 21).
Dull's first name, Anthony, is that of Antonio de Guaras, the King of
Spain's agent in England at the time of Don John being Governor-General
of the Netherlands (Clark 175). Letters revealing duplicity were at stake
(Clark 176).
Love's Labour's Lost implies a corresponding belief on the author's
part that he who would master the means of expression must be acquainted
with all its exaggerations and perversions, that he who would achieve wit
in its old sense of wisdom must know every quirk and turn of "wit" in its
degenerate estate, and finally that he who would attain love must be
acquainted with "love's" romantic follies. (Goddard, I 49-50)
For an intricate read-through of the topicalities of this play, see Eva
Turner Clark's book, incorporated into Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare's
Plays (163-238) and Ruth Loyd Miller's Introduction (125-161). An actual
Berowne (or Biron), Longaville, and Dumain were French nobles involved in a
historical struggle between Henry of Navarre -- France's future King Henry IV,
from whom Oxford, we know, received correspondence (Miller 127; Farina 50) --
and the Catholic League. Armand de Gontaut, Baron de Biron was an associate
of Henry of Navarre and a military leader, who died in battle in 1592 (Asimov
424). Oxford may have liked the prominent E.O. vowel sounds in his name (Ogburn
and Ogburn 194). A Duc de Longueville was also a general of Henry's (Asimov 424).
And a historical Princess of France, Marguerite de Valois (sister to
Alençon), visited Henry late in 1578 (too early for it to have mattered
to the Stratford Shakspere) to discuss matters pertaining to towns in the
Acquitaine being held as part of a dowry settlement (Miller 130; Clark 183f).
Henry refused to receive them until a remarriage with the Protestant ritual,
the dowry paid, and towns returned. Catherine de' Medici, mother of the
Princess Marguerite, also visitedat this time with her maids of honor, called
the Flying Squadron (Ogburn and Ogburn 182-183) -- although Marguerite and
Alençon were allied against their mother, the Guises, and Henry III
(Ogburn and Ogburn 195). Mention in the play of the word "malcontent" alludes
to the anti-Guise party in France opposing Catherine de' Medici (Ogburn and
Ogburn 194). Oxford's brother-in-law Peregrine Bertie, Lord Willoughby, also
had extensive interaction with Henry of Navarre (Farina 50). Henry of Navarre,
"with a sigh and a shrug, agreed to turn Catholic" in 1593 in order to ascend
the French throne; "It is doubtful if Love's Labor's Lost could possibly
have been written in its present form after 1593, for that reason" (Asimov 424).
Constable Dull brings in local yokel Costard who has been making time
with a woman. Costard explains in a patter à la Marx Brothers.
The King reads aloud an affected letter from the puffed-up Don Armado
which contains the accusations. Costard tries to weasel around with
language to avoid the punishment, but he is sentenced to a week fasting
(although the proclaimed punishment was to have been a year's
imprisonment). Berowne begins to see vindication already.