Of Wit and Wordplay: Love’s Labour’s Lost
Important issues first: I had a discussion with my wife about the apostrophes in the title in this play, as it seems ambiguous at best how many there should be and in which words they should be located. This has apparently been a longstanding issue, as it varies between the First Quarto (1598), the First Folio (1623) and the Second Quarto (1631). The modern version of the title (as above) dates from the Third Folio of 1663. The First and Second Quartos had no apostrophes at all:
But they felt the need for at least one apostrophe in the First Folio (as well as a ‘u’ in Labour):
So which should it be? I can make sense of different options. If it’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, then the play is about the way the labour of love (as a general concept) is lost. It doesn’t seem to work without any apostrophes or as Loves Labour’s Lost (as in the First Folio, above), but it could also be rendered, presumably as either Loves’ Labour’s Lost or as Loves’ Labours Lost if the labour (or labours) relates to a number of individual loves (there are multiple characters in the play who are in love) and the manner in which that gets lost. We can’t blame Shakespeare, because the apostrophe was pretty new in his day, so we just need to make our own decision, I guess. I like it with the two apostrophes where they conventionally get put these days.
The play itself, once you get past the vital apostrophe issue, concerns Ferdinand, the young King of Navarre, who, along with some of his colleagues, has made a perhaps rash vow to give up the company of women and other delights of the flesh to concentrate on academic study:
Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives,
Live register’d upon our brazen tombs
And then grace us in the disgrace of death;
When, spite of cormorant devouring Time,
The endeavor of this present breath may buy
That honour which shall bate his scythe’s keen edge
And make us heirs of all eternity.
Therefore, brave conquerors, — for so you are,
That war against your own affections
And the huge army of the world’s desires, —
Our late edict shall strongly stand in force:
Navarre shall be the wonder of the world;
Our court shall be a little Academe,
Still and contemplative in living art.
You three, Berowne, Dumain, and Longaville,
Have sworn for three years’ term to live with me
My fellow-scholars, and to keep those statutes
That are recorded in this schedule here:
Your oaths are pass’d; and now subscribe your names,
That his own hand may strike his honour down
That violates the smallest branch herein:
If you are arm’d to do as sworn to do,
Subscribe to your deep oaths, and keep it too.
You just know that this isn’t going to work, and Berowne, the wittiest and most cynical of the king’s friends, knows it too. As soon as they’ve made their oaths they get news that the Princess of France is on her way, along with her ladies in waiting, and they’re immediately looking for loopholes (it’ll be okay if we meet them out in a field…).
It turns out that, coincidentally enough, the ladies have all met the men before and rather fancy them. They’re going to relentlessly mock them and string them along before they’ll admit as much, however. Apart from the Princess (who is earmarked for the King, of course), the most notable of the ladies is Rosaline (Shakespeare liked her name enough to give her a bit part in his soon-to-be-written Romeo and Juliet as well), who is more than a match for the witty Berowne. Their exchanges (a “civil war of wit”) make them very much precursors of Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing.
At the same time as the aristocrats are blundering their way into love, there are the ‘low’ characters who have their own issues. These include the Spaniard, Don Armado, who is hopelessly in love with the maid Jaquenetta, his boy, Moth, and the clown, Costard. The latter is a kind of ‘wise fool’ like Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and gets some of the best lines in the play, such as when Don Armado pays him to deliver a love letter to Jaquenetta and says, “There is remuneration,” leading Costard to think that “remuneration” is the Latin word for “three farthings.” When Berowne does similar for getting him to deliver a love letter to Rosaline and says, “there’s thy guerdon,” Costard concludes that a guerdon is “better than remuneration, elevenpence-farthing better.” As you might expect, Costard gets the letters mixed up anyway, leading to much mirth amongst the ladies when they hear Don Armado’s hilariously inept love letter to Jaquenetta:
‘By heaven, that thou art fair, is most infallible;
true, that thou art beauteous; truth itself, that
thou art lovely. More fairer than fair, beautiful
than beauteous, truer than truth itself, have
commiseration on thy heroical vassal! The
magnanimous and most illustrate king Cophetua set
eye upon the pernicious and indubitate beggar
Zenelophon; and he it was that might rightly say,
Veni, vidi, vici; which to annothanize in the
vulgar, — O base and obscure vulgar! — videlicet, He
came, saw, and overcame: he came, one; saw two;
overcame, three. Who came? the king: why did he
come? to see: why did he see? to overcome: to
whom came he? to the beggar: what saw he? the
beggar: who overcame he? the beggar.
The big set piece in the play is the scene which starts with Berowne reflecting on the love sonnet he has sent to Rosaline. He sees the King approaching and hides to observe him expressing much the same feelings. The King does the same when Longaville approaches, and then Longaville repeats this for Dumain. The scene then unfolds itself as in turn they accuse each other of breaking their oaths to forswear love, each of them being exposed in turn. Berowne is the last to be shown up as a hypocrite when Jaquenetta and Costard turn up with a report of his misdelivered letter.
The other technique tried out in this play is the play-within-a-play. Much like the effort of the mechanicals in the later A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this is an inept effort that leads to much amusement among the aristocrats in the audience with the added layer that we in the audience are amused at their inept efforts at love in turn. It works well here, as it does in the later play. All this amusement is brought to rather a sombre conclusion, though, as a messenger arrives with news that the King of France has died. Instead of ending with joyful marriages, this comedy closes with death and a promised period of mourning. The marriages will come, but only after a “trial” of a year and a day, says the Princess, involving the King going to “some forlorn and naked hermitage / Remote from all the pleasures of the world” and Berowne sharing his wit with “the speechless sick” in a hospital. “That’s too long for a play,” observes Berowne, self-referentially.
This play was written about the same period as Shakespeare’s sonnets and it is full of the same wordplay and conceits about love that we see in those poems. It is full of sonnets itself, with Don Armado exhorting at one point:
Assist me, some extemporal god of rhyme,
for I am sure I shall turn sonnet. Devise, wit;
write, pen; for I am for whole volumes in folio.
In the final act, Berowne promises to Rosaline to give up artificial poetry and courtly compliments, but even as he does so he does it in the form of a sonnet:
O, never will I trust to speeches penn’d,
Nor to the motion of a schoolboy’s tongue,
Nor never come in vizard to my friend,
Nor woo in rhyme, like a blind harper’s song!
Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,
Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation,
Figures pedantical; these summer-flies
Have blown me full of maggot ostentation:
I do forswear them; and I here protest,
By this white glove; — how white the hand, God knows! —
Henceforth my wooing mind shall be express’d
In russet yeas and honest kersey noes:
And, to begin, wench, — so God help me, la! —
My love to thee is sound, sans crack or flaw.
This play is a wonderfully comic companion piece to the sonnets, undercutting the seriousness of love and the labours involved in trying to achieve it.
The BBC production screened in January 1985 and was the second to last of the series. The sets suggest the Eighteenth Century and were apparently modelled on the paintings of Watteau. That makes this the only play in the series to have a setting after Shakespeare’s death (no “Shakespeare in space” for the BBC, thank you very much; this is as wacky as they get). It’s a pretty effective staging that suggests pre-revolutionary France. The cast is solid, without many of the big names that appear in some of the other productions, with Mike Gwilym, a veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company, a standout in the role of Berowne. I’ll also be seeing Gwylim in Coriolanus and in the title role as Pericles, Prince of Tyre when I get to those plays. His lover/antagonist, Rosaline, is played well by Jenny Agutter, best known for her teenage role in Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971), as well as films like Logan’s Run (1976), Equus (1977) and An American Werewolf in London (1981).
This hasn’t been a popular film for other screen adaptations as a fair bit of the humour is based on obscure wordplay about things like Latin grammar that we tend not to be as proficient with these days. Kenneth Branagh had a stab at turning it into a 1930s musical, though it was apparently a bit of a box office disaster despite a cast that includes Timothy Spall, Richard Briers, Natascha McElhone, Alicia Silverstone and Nathan Lane and I haven’t seen it (mainly due to it being a musical, which I’m not a fan of as a genre). Apparently there is a forthcoming independent film adaptation of it set in a boarding school which could be interesting.
There is purportedly a lost sequel to Love’s Labour’s Lost titled Love’s Labour’s Won, although possibly this is an alternative title to another, known, Shakespeare play. I love the idea of a lost Shakespeare play and the possibility that it could one day emerge and there are certainly worse plays that you could want sequels for than this precursor to some of Shakespeare’s best work in comedy.
