Love's Labour's Lost Read online

  2008 Modern Library Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 2008 by The Royal Shakespeare Company

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  “Royal Shakespeare Company,” “RSC,” and the RSC logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of The Royal Shakespeare Company.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-831-7

  www.modernlibrary.com

  v3.1

  The RSC Shakespeare

  Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen

  Chief Associate Editor: Héloïse Sénéchal

  Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro, Dee Anna

  Phares, Jan Sewell

  Love’s Labour’s Lost

  Textual editing: Eric Rasmussen

  Introduction and “Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater”: Jonathan Bate

  Commentary: Eleanor Lowe and Héloïse Sénéchal

  Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Esme Miskimmin

  In Performance: Karin Brown (RSC stagings) and

  Jan Sewell (overview)

  The Director’s Cut (interviews by Jonathan Bate and Kevin Wright):

  Terry Hands and Liz Shipman

  Reflections: Gregory Doran

  Editorial Advisory Board

  Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Artistic Director,

  Royal Shakespeare Company

  Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK

  Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University,

  Western Australia

  Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature,

  Université de Genève, Switzerland

  Maria Evans, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company

  Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, Japan

  Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA

  James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature,

  Columbia University, USA

  Tiffany Stern, Fellow and Tutor in English, University of Oxford, UK

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  A Great Feast of Languages

  The Park and the Worthies

  The French Connection

  Love’s Philosophy

  About the Text

  Key Facts

  Love’s Labour’s Lost

  List of Parts

  Act 1

  Act 1 Scene 1

  Act 1 Scene 2

  Act 2

  Act 2 Scene 1

  Act 3

  Act 3 Scene 1

  Act 4

  Act 4 Scene 1

  Act 4 Scene 2

  Act 4 Scene 3

  Act 5

  Act 5 Scene 1

  Act 5 Scene 2

  Textual Notes

  Scene-by-Scene Analysis

  Love’s Labour’s Lost in Performance:

  The RSC and Beyond

  Four Centuries of Love’s Labour’s: An Overview

  At the RSC

  The Director’s Cut: Terry Hands and Liz Shipman

  Approaching Love’s Labour’s: Reflections by Gregory Doran

  Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater

  Beginnings

  Playhouses

  The Ensemble at Work

  The King’s Man

  Shakespeare’s Works: A Chronology

  Further Reading and Viewing

  References

  Acknowledgments and Picture Credits

  INTRODUCTION

  A GREAT FEAST OF LANGUAGES

  Love’s Labour’s Lost is a play for Shakespeare connoisseurs. It is a great feast of linguistic sophistication on the theme of the inadequacy of linguistic sophistication. It is full of poetry—and mockery of poetry. Its preposterous academic posturing is either hilarious or incomprehensible, according to the disposition of the listener. Some of its jokes and puns are now so obscure that a modern audience frequently finds itself in the position of Dull, listening in bemusement as the others plan their play: “Via, Goodman Dull!” says Holofernes, “Thou hast spoken no word all this while.” To which the simple constable replies, “Nor understood none neither, sir.”

  The play was a favorite for the elite audience at court—Queen Elizabeth herself would without question have greatly enjoyed the authority, wit, and hunting skills of the princess. But she would also have taken pleasure in the “sweet smoke of rhetoric” that pervades the elaborate speechifying of the male courtiers. And she had the education to appreciate the comedy in the wordy academic humor of Holofernes and Don Armado. The reaction of some members of the general theatergoing public—“the base vulgar,” as the play itself calls them—might have been more like that of Dull. It comes as no surprise that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this was Shakespeare’s least-performed play.

  Its minimal plot, intellectual rigor, and architectural symmetry make Love’s Labour’s Lost seem to belong to some genre far from the popular theater—Enlightenment opera buffa, perhaps. There are, indeed, remarkable thematic and structural resemblances to Mozart and Da Ponte’s Così fan tutte. A Paris production of 1863 actually merged the two works, combining Mozart’s music with a text based on Shakespeare. In the following century, W. H. Auden and his lover collaborated with Vladimir Nabokov’s cousin on an operatic version of the play, perhaps inspired by the fictional composer Leverkühn in Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus, whose only opera is a setting of Love’s Labour’s “in a spirit of the most artificial mockery and parody of the artificial: something highly playful and highly precious.”

  Dr. Samuel Johnson thought that Love’s Labour’s was one of the most Shakespearean of Shakespeare’s plays. Like the characters of Berowne and Boyet (who dislike each other because they are so like each other), Shakespeare himself was famous for his verbal facility, for being “honey-tongued.” In no other play does he so fully indulge his gift for “Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise, / Three-piled hyperboles.” At the same time, in no other play does he so mercilessly expose that gift as a flyblown form of “maggot ostentation,” ripe for renunciation in favor of those “honest plain words” that “best pierce the ear of grief.”

  What is so Shakespearean is this capacity to have it both ways. “Taffeta phrases” are ostentatiously rejected and yet the simple rustic language that supposedly replaces them is equally thick with allusion—or, as Dull has it, “collusion” and “pollution.” Berowne’s “russet yeas and honest kersey noes” puns on “eyes” and “nose,” so reintroducing the figure of Ovid, surnamed Naso (Latin for “nose”), who is not only Holofernes’ but also Shakespeare’s master in the art of verbal pyrotechnics. For “the elegancy, facility, and golden cadence of poesy,” “Ovidius Naso was the man: and why indeed ‘Naso’, but for smelling out the odoriferous flowers of fancy, the jerks of invention?”

  Ovid taught Shakespeare how to write love poetry but also how to parody love poetry. If ladies are conventionally praised for being blond and pale-skinned, Ovid and Shakespeare know how to offer paradoxical praise of blackness. Where lesser poets catalogue the body parts of the beloved in smoothly predictable blazons (blue eyes, creamy breasts), Ovid and Shakespeare turn the convention on its head: “two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes” and a piercing glare not at the bosom but at the dark place between the legs. Though Dr. Johnson was too polite to say so, one of the reasons why Love’s Labour’s is Shakespeare at his most Shakespearean is that it is simultaneously one of his
most elegant plays (rivaled only by As You Like It) and his most filthy (rivaled only by Troilus and Cressida). The exchange in the fourth act concerning prickets, shooting, sores, ells, and sorrels is on the surface about deer hunting, but beneath the veneer it alludes unmistakably to inflamed genitalia and sexually transmitted disease.

  At the climax of the play, the mood changes with the entrance of Marcadé, ambassador of death. Immediately before his entrance, the play-within-the-play has dissolved into a brawl between a clown and a braggart knight on the subject of a pregnant dairymaid who is named after the Elizabethan term for a toilet. The knight is accused of wearing a “dishclout” of the maid’s as a favor next to his heart. A stinking dishcloth is enough to prick the bubble of chivalric romance, but the word also seems to have been a slang term for a rag strapped on to soak up menstrual blood. To hold that image in conjunction with the memento mori figure of Marcadé is to understand something of Shakespeare’s taste for extremity and paradox.

  THE PARK AND THE WORTHIES

  In contrast to those Shakespearean comedies that turn on a movement between a court and a green world, Love’s Labour’s Lost is confined within the single location of a court that has turned itself into a green world. The action all takes place within the King of Navarre’s park, in a very short time frame and with only a few (sometimes not so short) scenes. The setup could hardly be simpler. The king and his courtiers have forsworn love in the name of academic study, but the arrival of the Princess of France and her charming attendant ladies proves something of an inconvenience for this plan. Green is the color associated with retreat to a garden for the purposes of intellectual contemplation. In his lyric “The Garden,” the mid-seventeenth-century poet Andrew Marvell imagined “Annihilating all that’s made / To a green thought in a green shade.” But, as Don Armado comes to realize when prompted by Moth, his clever page, green is also “the colour of lovers.” The play is a demonstration of the triumph of love over intellectual labor. True wisdom belongs not to the intellectuals but to the clown Costard, who is of the view that it “is the simplicity of man to hearken after the flesh.” Neither academic aspiration nor poetic elaboration will save man from this elementary truth.

  Being sophisticated, Navarre and his three fellows only learn the truth by being embarrassed. In the play’s most theatrically effective scene, plotted like the best of farces, each of the four men is caught with his metaphoric trousers down—not just falling in love, but writing abysmal love poetry. George Bernard Shaw summarized the dramatic effect neatly: “No.1 being inaudible to 2, 3 and 4; No.2 audible to No.1, but not to 3 and 4; No.3 audible to 1 and 2, but not to No.4; and No.4 audible to all the rest, but himself temporarily stone deaf.” There is further delight when the men, now working in unison, disguise themselves as Russians in order to woo the ladies, but the ladies run rings around them because the disguise is so easily seen through. At this point we anticipate an unmasking, universal forgiveness, the forgetting of foolishness, multiple marriages, and everyone living happily ever after. First, however, the lower-ranked characters must perform a celebratory entertainment for the court.

  Just as “the most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe” echoes the main plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so the pageant of “The Nine Worthies” offers a commentary on that of Love’s Labour’s Lost. Navarre begins the main action with the premise that he and his courtiers will achieve immortal fame by means of their academic prowess, but, in a striking analogy to the opening sequence of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the unfolding of the plot suggests that falling in love and reproducing oneself sexually is the only real means of guaranteeing survival after death. It is “women’s eyes,” not books and academes, that “contain and nourish all the world.”

  Shakespeare turns the raw material for his play-within-the-play so that it fits with this theme. The Nine Worthies were traditionally three figures from each of the three traditions that constituted Shakespeare’s cultural inheritance: the Bible (Joshua, David, Judas Maccabaeus), classical antiquity (Hector of Troy, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar), and the romances of the Middle Ages (Arthur, Charlemagne, Godfrey of Bouillon). All nine had achieved immortality by means of heroic military action. This in itself is a rebuke to the court for its presumption that “fame that all hunt after in their lives” could come from something so passive as academic study.

  At the same time, Shakespeare changes the traditional cast: Julius Caesar is replaced by Costard the clown playing the part of Pompey the Great and, more significantly, Moth as Hercules stands in for one of the biblical or medieval figures. This is partly a joke about size: Hercules is the archetypal big man, whereas Moth is compared to an insect or a dust particle. In addition, the introduction of Hercules highlights the motif of heroic endeavor brought low by desire. He was famous not only for his labors, such as stealing golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides (alluded to in Berowne’s long speech on love near the end of the fourth act), but also for the losses caused by his loves. Hercules was humiliated and unmanned by his love for Omphale, then driven mad and murderous by his desire for Deianira. “What great men have been in love?” Armado asks Moth. “Hercules, master” comes the reply. The biblical Samson and his catastrophic love for Delilah is invoked at the same point. One suspects that if the pageant of Worthies had run to its conclusion, he too would have muscled his way into the cast.

  As in “Pyramus and Thisbe,” the noble audience are unnecessarily rude to the ignoble players. They subvert the illusion on which theater depends: “I Pompey am—,” “You lie, you are not he.” And they make rude jokes at the expense of the actors: “For the ass to the Jude? Give it him: Jud-as, away!” Holofernes engages our hearts when he offers the dignified response: “This is not generous, not gentle, not humble.” The lords must undergo a further humbling before they prove their gentility and gain their reward: after all the linguistic labor, their loves are not won. Berowne is set the task of moving wild laughter in the throat of death and, in contrast to the traditional comic ending where Jack shall have Jill and nought shall go ill, here “Jack hath not Jill.” There is a kind of suspended animation, intended to last for a year, heralded by the closing song of spring and winter.

  With its rhymes and dances, its four pairs of lovers and curious-knotted garden, the play has a symmetrical structure that seems to demand harmonious resolution, and yet it ends with interruption—the unfinished pageant, the unfinished courtship, and finally another unfinished performance. Armado announces that Holofernes and Nathaniel will stage an epilogue in the form of an academic dialogue, but we never get to hear it. The haunting simplicity of the song intended to introduce their debate brings Armado, the embodiment of verbosity, to one final rejection of language-feasting: he calls a halt to the show and dismisses the audiences onstage and off with the conclusion that more words would be harsh after such music.

  THE FRENCH CONNECTION

  At the beginning of a long book called The French Academy, wherein is discoursed the institution of manners, and whatsoever else concerneth the good and happy life of all estates and callings, by precepts of doctrine, and examples of the lives of ancient Sages and famous men, by Peter de la Primaudaye, published in French in 1577 and translated into English by one T. B. C. in 1586, the reader is introduced to four (fictional) young gentlemen of Anjou. Their encounter is set at the time of the religious civil war that tore France apart in the second half of the sixteenth century. The young men withdraw from the stress of war and sectarian dissension, retreating to the country house of an elderly nobleman who puts them under the educational care of a learned man. “He propounded for the chief part and portion of their studies the moral philosophy of ancient Sages and wise men, together with the understanding, and searching out of histories, which are the light of life.” La Primaudaye’s long book purports to be a record of the young gentlemen’s discussions concerning the nature of “the good and happy life.” Each chapter begins with a dialogue among the f
our and then turns into a little essay on moral philosophy. There is much talk of the necessity of controlling the emotions and cultivating a Stoical detachment of mind. At the end of “the first day’s work” in their little “academy,” the student called Aser, who embodies happiness or “felicity,” comes up with the proposition that “philosophy,” by which he means the Stoic philosophy of self-restraint in particular, “purgeth pride, presumption, ambition, choler, revenge, covetousness, injustice.” Philosophy also teaches us “not to be carried away by lust.”

  The cultivation of temperance, with a particular emphasis on sexual restraint, becomes a major theme of subsequent discussion, with the invocation of numerous positive and negative examples, mostly out of classical history and literature. The emphasis on sexual sin is an indication that la Primaudaye is propounding a typically sixteenth-century combination of classical Stoicism and Christian, specifically Pauline, theology. He was a product of what intellectual historians call the “neo-Stoic revival” of the period.

  1. Design for a knot garden: there is an elegant analogy between the symmetrical formality of Elizabethan garden design and the patterns of repetition and variation in rhetorically ornamented speech, so it is fitting that a “curious-knotted garden” (see Armado’s letter, as quoted by the king on this page) is a key location in this most verbally elaborate and garden-centered of Shakespeare’s comedies.

  La Primaudaye’s compendium of commonplace philosophical and moral thought was widely read in France and, following its translation, in England. But there was a flaw in its premise. The device for dispensing large doses of neo-Stoic exhortations to prudence, temperance, fortitude, and justice was to sequester the young men in the academy of the title. But, as is pointed out in the preface to the English translation of 1586, true virtue must be practiced “in life.” As Aristotle had reminded the ancient Greeks, “bare knowledge and contemplation thereof in [the] brain” is insufficient. The theory was that, having studied history and philosophy and contemplated the nature of virtue in the academy for, say, three years, one would emerge into the world ready to practice what one had learned. Yet the inevitable consequence of the structural device was to create an image of leisured ease, in which the good life could be cultivated without any awkward intrusions from the day-to-day realities of politics, social inequality, religious contention—or women.