Love's Labour's Lost - About the text

What’s Love Got to Do with It?

by Bob Papsdorf

 

In your typical romantic comedy the audience is entertained by the spectacle of two characters who pretend to hate each other but who must finally admit that, in fact, they are madly in love. And that’s how things play out in many Shakespearean comedies, such as Much Ado About Nothing and The Taming of the Shrew. In any comedy about romance, love is practically a given, a force that pulls people together, often in spite of their conscious intentions. But something you may notice while watching Love’s Labour’s Lost is that the mysterious spirit of self-surrender and yearning that defines love is conspicuously absent.

The characters in Love’s Labour’s Lost are animated by an inexhaustible drive to pun, contradict, quibble, and dispute. They share an irrepressible verbal power, which erupts out of their conversations and negotiations. We can best understand these characters by recognizing that they are all quite young, perhaps too immature to be interested in anything beyond their relentless, self-conscious, nervous raillery.

TThe story deals with a king and his three attendants, who have taken a vow to lock themselves away from the company of women for three years in order to study and pray. This plan is derailed by the arrival of a princess with her three attendants, who have come on a somewhat obscure diplomatic mission. We might assume that the likely solution to the diplomatic problem is for the princess to marry the king. But after the initial formalities there is little talk of politics or affairs of state, as the entire group proceeds to flirt and verbally joust with each other like teenagers at a party. (Indeed, there cannot be a less royal, less businesslike king in all of Shakespeare.) The boys stay in their pack and the girls in theirs, engaging in a series of verbal skirmishes. The girls invariably inflict more damage than they receive. Here is how a servant to the girls describes their victory in one such skirmish:

The tongues of mocking wenches are as keen
As is the razor’s edge invisible,
Cutting a smaller hair than may be seen;
Above the sense of sense, so sensible
Seemeth their conference, their conceits have wings
Fleeter than arrows, bullets, wind, thought, swifter things.
(V/ii/256 – 261)

The language is more appropriate to a military engagement than to courtship, and when one of the girls calls off her comrades, a minute later, she might almost be speaking as the commander of a fighter jet squadron:

Not one word more, my maids, break off, break off.

Roger, one-niner! One of the boys sums up the damage done:

By heaven, all dry-beaten with pure scoff!

“Dry-beaten”—the Riverside edition of the play glosses this expression as: “beaten soundly without bloodshed.”

To read Love’s Labour’s Lost can be leave the modern reader feeling somewhat dry-beaten, as pregnant as the play is with odd wordplay and obscure references. In Act IV, for instance, the margin notes for scene 1 tell us how the characters are punning on terms from archery (including “prick,” “clout,” and “pin”); then in scene 2, we encounter terminology pertaining to deer (a “sore” is a three-year-old deer, a “sorel” a four-year-old deer, and a “buck of the head” a five-year-old deer). We can never expect to understand every nuance and allusion in Shakespeare, but Love’s Labour’s Lost is undoubtedly one of the most challenging plays, given the prominence of such verbal conceits and acrobatics. An initial reading of the play can be like breaking trail through thick underbrush; with a second reading, though, we begin to appreciate the virtuosity and exuberance the characters can muster in their exchanges, like this one between Lady Katharine and Lord Longaville:

Kath: What, was your vizard [mask] made without a tongue?
Long. I know the reason, lady, why you ask.
Kath. O for your reason, quickly sir, I long
Long. You have a double tongue within your mask,
And would afford my speechless vizard half.
Kath. “Veal,” quoth the Dutchman. Is not veal a calf?
Long. A calf, fair lady!
Kath. No, a fair lord calf.
Long. Let’s part the word.
Kath. No, I’ll not be your half
Take all and wean it, it may prove an ox.

Whew—in rhyme no less. We can recognize that these two are playing off sound and sense patterns to wrestle for control of the exchange, and we can get some of the jokes, though occasionally (veal? Dutchman? –apparently a Dutchman would pronounce “veal” to sound like “well,” which is what Katharine, in her roundabout way, intends), we lose the thread entirely. The experience is not unlike listening to a rap song, where rhyming and wordplay are also essential. And many of us have the same problem with rap that we have with Love’s Labour’s Lost —it goes by too fast and the English is rather different from the dialect we use in our daily lives.

As a text, then, it would not be unfair to rate Love’s Labour’s Lost as “difficult.” But as a piece for the theater, it turns out that Love’s Labour’s Lost affords skilled performers more than enough ammunition to keep us in our seats. The quickness of the exchanges is one reason; the impeccable quality of the language and the way the characters are able to volley sound and sense, is another. The ultimate mystery on display, though, is the source of the fierce passions that animate these characters and the evident emotion with which they spar. Why are the girls so fierce? Have the boys really deserved this treatment? We could wish for a continuation of the story to answer these questions—and in fact, a play entitled Love’s Labor’s Found is listed in one list of Shakespeare’s plays from the 1590s. But that play has never surfaced.