FIVE FIVEFor revels, dances, masques, and merry hours
Forerun fair Love, strewing her way with flowers.
It seems likely that when in Love’s Labour’s Lost Shakespeare turned to festivity for the materials from which to fashion a comedy, he did so because he had been commissioned to produce something for performance at a noble entertainment. There can be no doubt about this in the case of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, though just what noble wedding was graced by Shakespeare’s dramatic epithalamium no one has been able to determine.1 But though nothing in Love’s Labour’s Lost points unambiguously out across the dramatic frame to an original occasion, the way the fairy blessing does at the end of the later comedy, the whole character of the piece marks it as something intended for a special group, people who could be expected to enjoy recondite and modish play with language and to be familiar, to the verge of boredom, with the “revels, dances, masques and merry hours” of courtly circles. Part of the character of the piece can be laid to the influence of Lyly. To use fantastic elaboration and artifice like Lyly’s would be a natural thing in addressing Lyly’s select audience. And whether or not the original occasion was an aristocratic entertainment, Shakespeare made a play out of courtly pleasures. Professor O.J. Campbell, and more recently Professor Alice S. Venezky, have pointed out that the pastimes with which the French Princess’s embassy is entertained, the dances, the masque of Muscovites, the show of the Nine Worthies, the pageant of Winter and Summer, are exactly the sort of thing which was a regular part of court life.2
Although he probably worked initially on commission, Shakespeare’s professional interests naturally led him to produce a piece which could be used afterward in the public theater. So instead of simply building make-believe around an audience who were on holiday, as the authors of parts and shows for entertainments were content to do, he needed to express holiday in a way that would work for anybody, any day. Topical reference that might violate the privacy of the original occasion had to be avoided, or taken out by revision—hence, probably, the bafflement of efforts to determine what the original occasion was. And there had to be protagonists whose experience in a plot would define the rhythm of the holiday, making it, so to speak, portable. When one considers the theatrical resources Shakespeare commanded in 1594 or thereabouts, the company’s skilled team of actors accustomed to play up to each other, and the dramatist’s facility with dialogue and plot, what is striking about Love’s Labour’s Lost is how little Shakespeare used exciting action, story, or conflict, how far he went in the direction of making the piece a set exhibition of pastimes and games. The play is a strikingly fresh start, a more complete break with what he had been doing earlier than I can think of anywhere else in his career, unless it be where he starts to write the late romances. The change goes with the fact that there are no theatrical or literary sources, so far as anyone has been able to discover, for what story there is in the play—Shakespeare, here and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and nowhere else, makes up everything himself, because he is making up action on the model of games and pastimes.
The story in Love’s Labour’s Lost is all too obviously designed to provide a resistance which can be triumphantly swept away by festivity. The vow to study and to see no woman is no sooner made than it is mocked. The French Princess is coming; the courteous King acknowledges that “She must lie here of mere necessity.” And so Berowne can gleefully draw the moral:
Necessity will make us all forsworn
Three thousand times within this three years’ space;
For every man with his affects is born,
Not by might mast’red, but by special grace.
(I.i.150–153)
We know how the conflict will come out before it starts. But story interest is not the point: Shakespeare is presenting a series of wooing games, not a story. Fours and eights are treated as in ballet, the action consisting not so much in what individuals do as in what the group does, its patterned movement. Everything is done in turn: the lords are described in turn before they come on; each comes back in turn to ask a lady’s name; each pair in turn exchanges banter. The dancing continues this sort of action; the four lords and four ladies make up what amounts to a set in English country dancing. We think of dancing in sets as necessarily boisterous; but Elizabethan dancing could express all sorts of moods, as one can realize from such a dance as Hunsdon House, at once spirited and stately. The evolutions in Love’s Labour’s Lost express the Elizabethan feeling for the harmony of a group acting in ceremonious consort, a sense of decorum expressed in areas as diverse as official pageantry, madrigal and motet singing, or cosmological speculations about the order of the universe. John Davies’ Orchestra, which runs the gamut of such analogies, is a poem very much in the spirit of Love’s Labour’s Lost.
A crucial scene, Act IV, Scene iii, dramatizes the folly of release taking over from the folly of resistance. Each lord enters in turn, reads the sonnet love has forced him to compose, and then hides to overhear and mock the next comer. As the last one comes in, Berowne describes their antics as a game of hide and seek:
All hid, all hid—an old infant play.
Like a demigod here sit I in the sky
And wretched fools’ secrets heedfully o’er-eye.
More sacks to the mill. O heavens, I have my wish!
Dumain transform’d! Four woodcocks in a dish!
(IV.iii.78–82)
Having wound them into their hiding places one-by-one, Shakespeare unwinds them one-by-one as each in turn rebukes the others. Berowne caps the King’s rebuke of Dumain and Longaville with:
Now step I forth to whip hypocrisy.
(IV.iii.15I)
But he too is betrayed by Costard, so that he too must confess
That you three fools lack’d me fool to make up the mess.
He, he, and you—and you, my liege—and I
Are pickpurses in love, and we deserve to die. . . .
Dumain. Now the number is even.
Berowne. True, true! We are four. . . .
(IV.iii.207–211)
The technique of discovery in this fine scene recalls the sotties presented by the French fool societies on their holidays, where the outer garments of various types of dignified pretension were plucked off to reveal parti-colored cloaks and long-eared caps beneath.3 The similarity need not be from literary influence but from a common genesis in games and dances and in the conception that natural impulse, reigning on festive occasions, brings out folly. Berowne summarizes it all with “O, what a scene of fool’ry I have seen!”
Such comedy is at the opposite pole from most comedy of character. Character usually appears in comedy as an individual’s way of resisting nature: it is the kill-joys, pretenders, and intruders who have character. Molière’s great comedies of character distortion, Tartuffe, Le Misanthrope, are focussed primarily on the pretender or the kill-joy; the celebrants, those who can embrace nature, are generally on the periphery until the resolution. But with Shakespeare, the celebrants are at the center. And when merrimakers say yes to nature, taking the folly of the time, the joke is that they behave in exactly the same way: “More sacks to the mill.” “Four woodcocks in a dish!” The festive comedies always produce this effect of a group who are experiencing together a force larger than their individual wills. Berowne hails it, when the treason of all has been discovered, with
Sweet lords, sweet lovers. O, let us embrace!
As true are we as flesh and blood can be.
The sea will ebb and flow, heaven shows his face;
Young blood doth not obey an old decree.
(IV.iii.214–217)
In the early festive plays, one touch of nature makes the lovers rather monotonously akin; they tend to be differentiated only by accidental traits. But Shakespeare gradually learned to exhibit variety not only in the way people resist nature but also in the way they accept it.
Already in Love’s Labour’s Lost Berowne stands out, not by not doing what all do, but by being conscious of it in a different way. Where clownish wit calls a spade a spade, Berowne calls a game a game. He plays the game, but he calls it too, knowing what it is worth because he knows where it fits within a larger rhythm:
At Christmas I no more desire a rose
Than wish a snow in May’s newfangled shows,
But like of each thing that in season grows.
(I.i.105–107)
It is Berowne who is ordered by Navarre to “prove / Our loving lawful and our faith not torn” (IV.iii.284–285). The set speech he delivers is Praise of Folly such as we have seen in Nashe. It is often quoted as “the young Shakespeare’s philosophy,” despite the fact that it is deliberately introduced as equivocation, “flattery for this evil . . . quillets, how to cheat the devil” (IV.iii.288). In proving that it is women’s eyes which “sparkle still the right Promethean fire” (IV.iii.351), Berowne adopts the same mock-academic manner and uses many of the same genial arguments as Nashe’s Bacchus, the same used later by Falstaff in proving sack “the first humane principle.”4 The high point of Berowne’s speech has a fine lyric force as he pleads the case for the creative powers that go with release in love. Then as he moves into his formal peroration, he heaps up reduplicative sanctions in a recklessly punning way which keeps us aware that his oration is special pleading—true, yet only a part of the truth:
Then fools you were these women to foreswear;
Or keeping what is sworn, you will prove fools.
For wisdom’s sake, a word that all men love;
Or for love’s sake, a word that loves all men;
Or for men’s sake, the authors of these women;
Or women’s sake, by whom we men are men—
Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves,
Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths.
It is religion to be thus forsworn;
For charity itself fulfills the law,
And who can sever love from charity?
(IV.iii.355–365)
He has turned the word “fool” around, in the classic manner of Erasmus in his Praise of Folly; it becomes folly not to be a fool. After reciprocally tumbling men and women around (and alluding to the sanctioning fact of procreation), the speech concludes with overtones of Christian folly in proclaiming the logic of their losing themselves to find themselves and in appealing from the law to charity. But Berowne merely leaps up to ring these big bells lightly; there is no coming to rest on sanctities; everything is in motion. The groups are swept into action by the speech—holiday action. Longaville breaks off the game of the oration with
Now to plain-dealing. Lay these glozes by.
Shall we resolve to woo these girls of France?
King. And win them too! Therefore let us devise
Some entertainment for them in their tents.
Berowne. First from the park let us conduct them thither;
Then homeward every man attach the hand
Of his fair mistress. In the afternoon
We will with some strange pastime solace them,
Such as the shortness of the time can shape,
For revels, dances, masques, and merry hours
Forerun fair Love, strewing her way with flowers.
(IV.iii.370–380)
The final joke is that in the end “Love” does not arrive, despite the lords’ preparations for a triumphal welcome. That the play should end without the usual marriages is exactly right, in view of what it is that is released by its festivities. Of course what the lords give way to is, in a general sense, the impulse to love; but the particular form that it takes for them is a particular sort of folly—what one could call the folly of amorous masquerade, whether in clothes, gestures, or words. It is the folly of acting love and talking love, without being in love. For the festivity releases, not the delights of love, but the delights of expression which the prospect of love engenders—though those involved are not clear about the distinction until it is forced on them; the clarification achieved by release is this recognition that love is not wooing games or love talk. And yet these sports are not written off or ruled out; on the contrary the play offers their delights for our enjoyment, while humorously putting them in their place.
It is in keeping with this perspective that masquerade and show are made fiascos. Of course, to put shows or masques on the stage effectively, things must go in an unexpected way. Benvolio glances at the hazard of boredom in planning the masque in Romeo and Juliet, a play written only a year or two after Love’s Labour’s Lost:
The date is out of such prolixity.
We’ll have no Cupid hoodwink’d with a scarf,
Bearing a Tartar’s painted bow of lath,
Scaring the ladies like a crowkeeper;
Nor no without-book prologue, faintly spoke
After the prompter, for our entrance . . .
(Romeo I.iv.3–8)
One way to make pageantry dramatic is to have what is pretended in masque or game actually happen in the play. This is what Shakespeare did with the masque in Romeo and Juliet, where the conventional pretense that the masquers were strangers asking hospitality is used in earnest, along with the fiction that, once disguise is assumed, anything can happen.
Benvolio. Away, be gone; the sport is at the best.
Romeo. Ay, so I fear; the more is my unrest.
(I.iv.121–122)
The other way to make masquerades dramatic is to have the fiction of the game break down, which is the way things consistently go in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Moth, drilled to introduce the Muscovite masquers, is just such a halting prologue as Benvolio scorns. And the masquers’ dance scarcely gets started:
Rosaline. Since you are strangers, and come here by chance,
We’ll not be nice. Take hands. We will not dance.
King. Why take we hands then?
Rosaline. Only to part friends.
Curtsy, sweet hearts—and so the measure ends.
(V.ii.218–221)
In breaking off the dance before it begins, Rosaline makes a sort of dance on her own terms, sudden and capricious; and clearly the other ladies, in response to her nodded signals—“Curtsy, sweet hearts”—are doing the same pirouette at the same time. The Princess describes this way of making a variation on a theme:
There’s no such sport as sport by sport o’erthrown—
To make theirs ours, and ours none but our own.
(V.ii.153–154)
Though there is a certain charm in this patterned crossing of purposes, it is itself too often predicted and predictable. The King and his company, returning without their Muscovite disguises after being shamed hence, are unbelievably slow to believe that they were “descried.” Berowne especially ought not to take so long to see the game:
I see the trick on’t. Here was a consent,
Knowing aforehand of our merriment,
To dash it like a Christmas comedy.
(V.ii.460–462)
When the commoners in their turn put on the Show of the Nine Worthies, the lords have their chance to join the ladies in dashing it, and the Princess gives a rationale for enjoying another kind of comic failure:
Their form confounded makes most form in mirth
When great things labouring perish in their birth.
(V.ii.520–521)
If all we got were sports that fail to come off, the play would indeed be nothing but labor lost. What saves it from anticlimax is that the most important games in which the elation of the moment finds expression are games with words, and the wordplay does for the most part work, conveying an experience of festive liberty. It is all conducted with zest and with constant exclamations about how well the game with words is going. Wordplay is compared to all sorts of other sports, tilting, dueling—or tennis: “Well bandied both! a set of wit well played.” Or a game of dice:
Berowne. White-handed mistress, one sweet word with thee.
Princess. Honey, and milk, and sugar: there is three.
Berowne. Nay then, two treys, an if you grow so nice—
Metheglin, wort, and malmsey. Well run, dice!
There’s half a dozen sweets.
Princess. Seventh sweet, adieu.
Since you can cog, I’ll play no more with you.
(V.ii.230–236)
Besides this sort of repartee, another aristocratic wooing game is the sonneteering. The lords each “turn sonnet” (I.ii.190); love produces rhyme by reflex. “I do love, and it hath taught me to rhyme,” Berowne confides to the audience, holding up a paper.
The aristocratic pastimes with language are set against the fantastic elaborations of the braggart and the schoolmaster, Armado puffing up versions of Euphuistic tautology and periphrasis, Holofernes complacently showing off his inkhorn terms, rhetorical and grammatical terminology, even declensions and alternate spellings. To play up to these fantasts, there are Moth, a quick wit, and Costard, a slow but strong one. And there is Sir Nathaniel, the gull curate, who eagerly writes down in his table-book the schoolmaster’s redundancies. Dull and Jaquenetta, by usually keeping silent, prove the rule of Babel. But even Dull has a riddle in his head which he tries out on the schoolmaster. The commoners normally speak prose, the lords and ladies verse; most of the prose is as artificial in its way as the rhymed, end-stopped verses. The effect is that each social level and type is making sport with words in an appropriate way, just as the lords’ infatuation with the ladies is paralleled by Costard’s and then Armado’s attentions to Jaquenetta. “Away,” says the schoolmaster, as he invites the curate to dinner, “the gentles are at their game, and we will to our recreation” (IV.ii.171). And when they come from dinner, still babbling, Moth observes aside to Costard that “They have been at a great feast of languages and stol’n the scraps” (V.i.39).
This comedy is often described as a satire on various kinds of overelaborate language. It is certainly true that the exhibition of different sorts of far-fetched verbal play becomes almost an end in itself. Armado is introduced as a buffoon of new fashions and “fire-new words.” He and the schoolmaster do make ridiculous two main Elizabethan vices of style. But each carries his vein so fantastically far that it commands a kind of gasping admiration—instead of being shown up, they turn the tables and show off, converting affectation and pedantry into ingenious games. “Be it as the style shall give us cause to climb in the merriness,” says Berowne in anticipation of Armado’s letter (I.i.201). For a modern reader, the game with high or learned words is sometimes tedious, because we have not ourselves tried the verbal exercises on which the gymnastic exhibition is based. Even the Princess and her ladies in waiting, when they talk in terms of copy-book letters, seem just freshly out of school:
Rosaline. O, he hath drawn my picture in his letter! . . .
Princess. Beauteous as ink—a good conclusion.
Katherine. Fair as a text B in a copy-book.
Rosanne. Ware pencils, ho! Let me not die your debtor,
My red dominical, my golden letter.
(V.ii.38–44)
This kind of thing does weigh down parts of the play; it is dated by catering to a contemporary rage, a failure rare in Shakespeare’s works, and one that suggests that he was writing for a special audience.
But the more one reads the play, the more one is caught up by the extraordinary excitement it expresses about what language can do—the excitement of the historical moment when English, in the hands of its greatest master, suddenly could do anything. Zest in the power of words comes out particularly clearly in the clown’s part, as the chief motifs so often do in Shakespeare. As Armado gives Costard a letter to carry to Jaquenetta, he gives him a small tip with big words: “There is remuneration; for the best ward of mine honor is rewarding my dependents.” When he has gone out, Costard opens his palm:
Now I will look to his remuneration. Remuneration—O, that’s the Latin word for three farthings. Three farthings—remuner ation. ‘What’s the price of this inkle?’ ‘One penny.’ ‘No, I’ll give you a remuneration!’ Why, it carries it! Remuneration. Why, it is a fairer name than French crown. I will never buy and sell out of this word.
(III.i.137–144)
O brave new world, that has remuneration in it! But the clown’s next exchange, with Berowne, promptly demonstrates that three farthings is three farthings still.
Berowne. O my good knave Costard, exceedingly well met!
Costard. Pray you, sir, how much carnation ribbon may a man buy for a remuneration?
Berowne. O, what is a remuneration?
Costard. Marry, sir, halfpenny farthing.
Berowne. O, why then, three-farthing worth of silk.
Costard. I thank your worship, God be wi’ you!
Berowne. O, stay, slave; I must employ thee.
(III.i.145–152)
Berowne has a letter of his own, for Rosaline, and he too gives money with it, a whole bright shilling: “There’s thy guerdon. Go.” Costard again opens his palm: “Gardon—O sweet gardon! better than remuneration! a ’levenpence-farthing better” (III.i.171–173). So words are good when they go with good things. By getting so literal a valuation of the words, Costard both imitates and burlesques the way his superiors value language.
Everybody in the play, however vain about themselves, is ready always with applause for another’s wit. “Now by the salt wave of the Mediterranean, a sweet touch, a quick venew of wit” Spanish Armado exclaims in praise of Moth, appropriately using dueling terms. “Snip, snap, quick and home! It rejoiceth my intellect. True wit!” (V.i.61–64). Costard is equally delighted, after his own fashion:
An I had but one penny in the world, thou shouldst have it to buy gingerbread. Hold, there is the very remuneration I had of thy master, thou halfpenny purse of wit, thou pigeon egg of discretion.
(V.i.74–78)
Holofernes has the grace to applaud a pass of wit of Costard’s, in a patronizing way, even though it turns against him a blunt thrust of his own, aimed at Jaquenetta:
Jacquenetta. God give you good morrow, Master Person.
Holofernes. Master Person, quasi pers-one. And if one should be pierc’d, which is the one?
Costard. Marry, Master Schoolmaster, he that is likest to a hogshead.
Holofernes. Of piercing a hogshead! A good lustre of conceit in a turf of earth; fire enough for a flint, pearl enough for a swine. ’Tis pretty, it is well.
(IV.ii.84–91)
Holofernes is fascinated by a release in language he himself heavily fails to find. After his absurd alliterative poem, his gull Nathaniel exclaims “A rare talent.” Dull throws in the dry aside: “If a talent be a claw, look how he claws him with a talent.” But Holofernes has been carried away by the joy of creation:
This is a gift that I have, simple, simple; a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions. These are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion. But the gift is good in those in whom it is acute, and I am thankful for it.
(IV.ii.67–74)
Here, as so often in Shakespeare, the outlines of a caricature are filled in with the experience of a man: Holofernes has a rhapsody of his own, an experience of the “fiery numbers” Berowne talks about—strange as his productions may be.
In a world of words, the wine is wit. Festivity in social life always enjoys, without effort, something physical from the world outside that is favorable to life, whether it be food and drink, or the warmth of the fields when they breathe sweet. Exhilaration comes when the world proves ready and willing, reaching out a hand, passing a brimming bowl; festivity signals the realization that we belong in the universe. Now in wit, it is language that gives us this something for nothing; unsuspected relations between words prove to be ready to hand to make a meaning that serves us. All of the comedies of Shakespeare, of course, depend on wit to convey the exhilaration of festivity. But Love’s Labour’s Lost, where the word wit is used more often than in any of the other plays, is particularly dependent on wit and particularly conscious in the way it uses and talks about it. So it will be useful to consider general functions of wit as they appear in this comedy.
When Moth speaks of “a great feast of languages,” Costard continues the figure with “I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word; for thou art not so long by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus; thou art easier swallowed than a flapdragon” (V.i.42–45).
This is excellent fooling, and sense, too. For the people in Love’s Labour’s Lost get a lift out of fire-new words equivalent to what a tavern-mate would get from swallowing a “flapdragon”—a raisin floating in flaming brandy. Eating words is apt because the physical attributes of words are used by wit: a witticism capitalizes on “external associations,” that is to say, it develops a meaning by connecting words through relations or likenesses not noted or used in the situation until found. The “physical,” for our purpose here, is whatever had not been noticed, had not been given meaning, until wit caught hold of it and made it signify. The exploitation of physical features of language is most obvious where the wit is forced, where what is found does not really do very well after all. Little or nothing is really found when Jaquenetta mispronounces Parson as “Person,” and Holofernes tries to make an innuendo by wrenching: “Master Person, quasi pers-one. And if one should be pierc’d, which is the one?” By contrast, consider Berowne’s zooming finale in the speech justifying oath breaking, where successive lines seem to explode meaning already present in what went just before:
Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves,
Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths.
(IV.iii.361–362)
To appropriate physical relations of sound and position in language, so that it seems that language makes your meaning for you, as indeed it partly does, gives an extraordinary exhilaration, far more intense than one would expect—until one considers how much of what we are is what we can find words for. When wit flows happily, it is as though the resistance of the objective world had suddenly given way. One keeps taking words from “outside,” from the world of other systems or orders, and making them one’s own, making them serve one’s meaning as they form in one’s mouth.
In repartee, each keeps jumping the other’s words to take them away and make them his own, finding a meaning in them which was not intended. So elusive yet crucial is this subject that it will be worth while to quote a passage of wit where much that is involved in repartee is almost laboriously exhibited. As constantly happens in this play, the nature of wit is talked about in the process of being witty, here by hunting and sexual metaphors:
Boyet. My lady goes to kill horns; but if thou marry,
Hang me by the neck if horns that year miscarry.
Finely put on!
Rosaline. Well then, I am the shooter.
Rosaline. If we choose by the horns, yourself. Come not near. Finely put on indeed!
Maria. You still wrangle with her, Boyet, and she strikes at the brow.
Boyet. But she herself is hit lower. Have I hit her now?
Rosaline. Shall I come upon thee with an old saying, that was a man when King Pippen of France was a little boy, as touching the hit it?
Boyet. So I may answer thee with one as old, that was a woman when Queen Guinover of Britain was a little wench, as touching the hit it.
Rosaline. ‘Thou canst not hit it, hit it, hit it,
Thou canst not hit it, my good man.’
Boyet. ‘An I cannot, cannot, cannot,
An I cannot, another can.’
Costard. By my troth, most pleasant. How both did fit it.
(IV.i.112–131)
To reapply or develop a given metaphor has the same effect as to reapply or develop the pattern of sound in a given set of words. Costard’s comment describes the give and take of the repartee by the sexual metaphor—which the party go on to develop far more explicitly than even our freest manners would allow. The point they make is that to use one another’s words in banter is like making love; each makes meaning out of what the other provides physically. They notice in medias res that there is the same sort of sequence of taking advantage and acquiescing: the process of taking liberties with each other’s words goes with a kind of verbal hiding and showing. Boyet can go especially far in this way because he is the safe elderly attendant of the royal party of ladies, limited by his age and role to such peeping-Tom triumphs as “An I cannot, another can.” When there is a real prospect of going from words to deeds, words are more dangerous. So when the ladies encounter the lords, their game is to stand them off by denying them the “three sweet words” for which the men ask to get started.
A single speaker can of course develop his thought by witty reuse of verbal situations he himself lays out. Consider, for example, the soliloquy in which Berowne, at the opening of the discovery scene, confesses that he is in love:
The King he is hunting the deer; I am coursing myself. They have pitch’d a toil; I am toiling in a pitch—pitch that defiles. Defile! a foul word. Well, ‘set thee down, sorrow!’ for so they say the fool said, and so say I, and I the fool. Well proved, wit. By the Lord, this love is as mad as Ajax: it kills sheep; it kills me—I a sheep.
(IV.iii.1–8)
This is almost dialogue in the way it moves, like repartee, from a statement to the reapplication of the statement to “prove” something. The process of setting up and exploiting verbal situations is less obtrusive in more successful witty talk, but crucial in giving an exhilarating sense of power. Berowne has some excellent couplets mocking Boyet:
This fellow pecks up wit as pigeons pease,
And utters it again when God doth please.
He is wit’s pedlar, and retails his wares
At wakes and wassails, meetings, markets, fairs;
And we that sell by gross, the Lord doth know
Have not the grace to grace it with such show.
(V.ii.315–320)
How nicely the extension of the pigeon and pedlar metaphors goes with a complex pattern of alliteration, pecks to pease to pedlar, wares to wakes to wassails. It seems as though language had conspired with Berowne to mock Boyet. In such exploitation of the physical qualities of words, there are no hard and fast lines between wit and eloquence and poetry, a fact which is reflected in the broad Renaissance usage of the word wit. But one can observe that we now think of expressions as witty, rather than eloquent or poetic, when one is conscious of the physical character of the links through which the discourse moves to its meanings. And one must add that some of the wit in Love’s Labour’s Lost is, to our modern taste, tediously “conceited.” The play occasionally deserved Dryden’s strictures about Shakespeare’s “comic art degenerating into clenches.”
But though one cannot blink the fact that the wit is often a will-o’-the-wisp, the play uses its witty extravagance, moves through it to clarification about what one sort of wit is and where it fits in human experience. There are a number of descriptions of the process of being witty which locate such release as an event in the whole sensibility. These usually go with talk about brightening eyes: typically in this play a lover’s eyes catch fire just before he bursts into words. There is a remarkable description of the King’s first response to the Princess which defines precisely a gathering up of the faculties for perception and expression:
Boyet. If my observation (which very seldom lies),
By the heart’s still rhetoric, disclosed with eyes,
Deceive me not now, Navarre is infected.
Princess. With what?
Boyet. With that which we lovers entitle ‘affected.’
(II.i.227–232)
Notice that Boyet does not answer simply “with love.” Shakespeare is out to define a more limited thing, a galvanizing of sensibility which may or may not be love; and so Boyet goes round about to set up a special term, “affected.” He goes on to describe his observation of “the heart’s still rhetoric”:
Why, all his behaviours did make their retire
To the court of his eye, peeping thorough desire. . . .
His tongue, all impatient to speak and not see,
Did stumble with haste in his eyesight to be;
All senses to that sense did make their repair,
To feel only looking on fairest of fair.
Methought all his senses were lock’d in his eye,
As jewels in crystal for some prince to buy,
Who, tend’ring their own worth from where they were glass’d,
Did point you to buy them along as you pass’d.
(II.i.234–245)
This is extremely elaborate; but the dislocation of the language, for example in “to feel only looking” (which bothered Dr. Johnson),5 catches a special movement of feeling important for the whole play, a movement of awareness into the senses and toward expression. The next step, from eye to tongue, is described in Rosaline’s account of Berowne.
a merrier man
Within the limit of becoming mirth,
I never spent an hour’s talk withal.
His eye begets occasion for his wit;
For every object that the one doth catch
The other turns to a mirth-moving jest,
Which his fair tongue (conceit’s expositor)
Delivers in such apt and gracious words
That aged ears play truant at his tales
And younger hearings are quite ravished,
So sweet and voluble is his discourse.
(II.i.66–76)
The rhythm here, even some of the phrasing, anticipate, in a sketchy way, the description of the enchanting power of the mermaid in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath
That the rude sea grew civil at her song,
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres
To hear the sea-maid’s music.
(Dream II.i.151–154)
There are a series of such descriptions of the Orphic power of musical discourse in the plays of this period, including Berowne’s own climactic speech in this play. In Rosaline’s lines, as elsewhere, there is a metaphor of conveying meaning out into language, perhaps with a glance at child-bearing in “delivers.”6 When Rosaline is characterized, in her turn, the power of nimble expression to free the heart of its burdens is charmingly described. Katherine contrasts her with a sister who died of Love. Love
made her melancholy, sad and heavy,
And so she died. Had she been light like you,
Of such a merry, nimble, stirring spirit,
She might ’a’ been a grandam ere she died.
And so may you; for a light heart lives long.
(V.ii.14–18)
The fullest description of this kindling into Orphic wit and eloquence, at the climax of Berowne’s speech justifying folly, centers on the process of awareness moving out into the senses and powers:
For when would you, my liege, or you, or you,
In leaden contemplation, have found out
Such fiery numbers as the prompting eyes
Of beauty’s tutors have enrich’d you with?
Other slow arts entirely keep the brain,
And therefore finding barren practisers,
Scarce show a harvest of their heavy toil;
But love, first learned in a lady’s eyes,
Lives not alone immured in the brain,
But with the motion of all elements
Courses as swift as thought in every power,
And gives to every power a double power
Above their functions and their offices.
(IV.iii.320–332)
The speech is a perfectly fitting counterstatement to the ascetic resolutions with which the play began. The “doctrine” it derives from “women’s eyes” is a version of the Renaissance cult of love as an educational force, especially for the courtier. But notice how little Berowne is concerned with love as an experience between two people. All his attention is focussed on what happens within the lover, the heightening of his powers and perceptions. He is describing a youthful response of elation; the mere sight of “the prompting eyes” of the tutor beauty is enough to whirl pupil love into an almost autonomous rhapsody:
It adds a precious seeing to the eye:
A lover’s eyes will gaze an eagle blind.
A lover’s ear will hear the lowest sound
When the suspicious head of theft is stopp’d.
Love’s feeling is more soft and sensible
Than are the tender horns of cockled snails.
Love’s tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste.
For valour, is not Love a Hercules,
Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?
Subtle as Sphinx; as sweet and musical
As bright Apollo’s lute, strung with his hair.
And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Make heaven drowsy with the harmony.
Never durst poet touch a pen to write
Until his ink were temp’red with Love’s sighs.
O, then his lines would ravish savage ears
And plant in tyrants mild humility.
(IV.iii.333–349)
Can such delightful poetry, such rhapsody, be folly? There is a romantic response ready that would like to let go completely and simply endorse these lovely, vital lines. But the strength of Shakespeare’s comic form is precisely that the attitude Berowne expresses can be presented as at once delightfully vital, and foolish. The foolishness is of a young and benign sort, in which the prospect of love sets off a rhapsody that almost forgets the beloved. Consummation in physical union of the sexes is not envisaged; the lady is involved only as her eyes start another sort of physical union by which the senses and powers are invested with amorous meaning.
The lords’ quality of youthful elation and absorption in their own responses is what lays them open to being fooled as they are by the ladies when they try to set about revelry wholeheartedly. The game they are playing, without quite knowing it, tries to make love happen by expressing it, to blow up a sort of forced-draft passion by capering volubility and wit. A remarkable set-piece by Moth describes an Elizabethan hep-cat version of such courting: he tells Armado how to “win your love with a French brawl”:
. . . jig off a tune at the tongue’s end, canary to it with your feet, humour it with turning up your eyelids; sigh a note and sing a note, sometime through the throat, as if you swallow’d love with singing love, sometime through the nose, as if you snuff’d up love by smelling love, with your hat penthouselike o’er the shop of your eyes, with your arms cross’d on your thin-belly doublet, like a rabbit on a spit, or your hands in your pocket, like a man after the old painting; and keep not too long in one tune, but a snip and away. These are complements; these are humours; these betray nice wenches that would be betrayed without these, and make them men of note—do you note me?—that most are affected to these.
(III.i.11–26)
Such antics are more plebeian than the lords’ revels, but tellingly alike in purpose. The Princess and her ladies are not in any case the sort of nice wenches to be betrayed. The ladies believe, indeed, rather too little than too much. “They do it but in mocking merriment,” says the Princess. “And mock for mock is only my intent.” When the men have been “dry-beaten with pure scoff,” Berowne eats humble pie in an effort to get started on a new basis:
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-pil’d 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 yea’s and honest kersey no’s.
(V.ii.402–412)
Berowne abjures elaborate language, and it is for this alone that the lines are usually quoted. Part of the point of them lay in criticism of affected style. But a final, settled attitude toward such style has not been established. The lords’ trusting in speeches penn’d, with three-piled hyperboles, has been part and parcel of trusting in the masquerade way of making love, coming in a vizard, in a three-piled Russian habit. And these pastimes are not being dismissed for good, but put in their place: they are festive follies, relished as they show the power of life, but mocked as they run out ahead of the real, the everyday situation. The point, dramatically, is that the lords had hoped that festivity would “carry it,” as Costard hoped Armado’s fancy word “remuneration” would carry it. Now they must start again, because, as Berowne’s better judgment foresaw,
Light wenches may prove plagues to men forsworn:
If so, our copper buys no better treasure.
(IV.iii.385–386)
Perhaps the most delightful touch in the whole play is the exchange that concludes Berowne’s reformation, in which he playfully betrays the fact that his mockery of sophistication is sophisticated, and Rosaline underscores the point as she deftly withdraws the hand he has taken:
And to begin: wench, so God help me, law!
My love to thee is sound, sans crack or flaw.
Rosaline. Sans ‘sans,’ I pray you!
(V.ii.414–416)
Miss M. C. Bradbrook observes that “Berowne, who is both guilty of courtly artifice and critical of it, plays a double game with language throughout; the same double game that the author himself is playing. He runs with the hare and hunts with the hounds.”7 His control and poise in moving in this way goes with being able to call a game a game, as I have been saying. Another source of his mastery is the social perspective on the courtly pleasures which he gets by ironically dropping, at intervals, into homespun, proverbial speech. Of course there is a sort of affectation too in doing the downright in this way, and Berowne’s humor recognizes that he himself is no common man. But he does get the power to stand apart from elegant folly by being able to say things like
Sow’d cockle reap’d no corn,
And justice always whirls in equal measure.
(IV.iii.383–384)
The roles of the commoners provide the same sort of perspective, especially the illiterate commoners, who almost always come out best in the exchanges. No sooner has the Duke proclaimed his “continent cannon” than Costard proves its absurdity by being taken with Jaquenetta:
In manner and form following, sir—all those three. I was seen with her in the manor house, sitting with her upon the form, and taken following her into the park; which put together is in manner and form following. Now, sir, for the manner—it is the manner of a man to speak to a woman; for the form—in some form.
(I.i.207–215)
“In some form,” the truth about human nature comes out, despite the way Costard wrests the categories in a physical direction, or indeed because of this physical tendency. “I suffer for the truth, sir,” is the swain’s fine summary, “for true it is I was taken with Jaque-netta, and Jaquenetta is a true girl” (I.i.313–314). He is a thoroughly satisfactory “downright” style of clown, ironical about the follies of his betters half out of naïveté and half out of shrewdness. His role embodies the proverbial, homespun perspective Berowne can occasionally borrow. Moth, a pert page in the manner of Lyly, is less rich, but he too contributes comments which help to place what the lords are doing.
All of the commoners’ parts, indeed, contribute to placing the festivities. Almost all of them make telling comments, even Holofernes, who has the courage, when he is mercilessly ragged as Judas in his Show of Worthies, to say “This is not generous, not gentle, not humble” (V.ii.632). But comments are less important than the sense Shakespeare creates of people living in a settled group, where everyone is known and to be lived with, around the clock of the year. Though the different figures may have been shaped to some degree by examples in the commedia dell’ arte—the braggart and his quick zani, the pedant, the parasite priest, the rustic clown—the group function together to represent “his lordship’s simple neighbours.” Through them we feel a world which exists before and after to the big moment of the entertainment, and we see the excitement of the smaller people about the big doings. Holofernes honors the Princess’s success in hunting in strange, pedantical verse: “The preyful princess pierc’d and prick’d a pretty pleasing pricket” (IV.ii.58). Schoolmasters in real entertainments often furnished shows; Sidney wrote out a part for a comically pedantic schoolmaster in making an entertainment for Elizabeth, “The Lady of the May,” 1579. We see Armado courteously enlisting the help of Holofernes in designing “some delightful ostentation, or show, or pageant, or antic, or firework” (V.i.120). He understands, he says, that “the curate and your sweet self are good at such eruptions and sudden breaking-out of mirth.” Their talk is absurdly affected, but it is also winningly positive and hopeful. Goodman Dull, “his grace’s farborough,” wants to take part too:
Via, goodman Dull! Thou hast spoken no word all this while.
Dull. Nor understood none neither, sir.
Holofernes. Alons! we will employ thee,
Dull. I’ll make one in a dance, or so; or I will play
On the tabor to the Worthies, and let them dance the hay.
Holofernes. Most dull, honest Dull! To our sport, away!
(V.i.156–162)
Such a little scrap illustrates something that happens repeatedly in Shakespeare’s festive comedies. Characters who might be merely butts also win our sympathy by taking part, each after his fashion, in “eruptions and sudden breaking-out of mirth” (V.i.121). This genial quality goes with dramatizing, not merely a story, nor merely characters, but a community occasion: “I’ll make one,” says laggard Dull; “to our sport” says vain Holofernes.
When the show is actually produced, what we watch are not the Worthies but the people who are presenting them. Costard is self-respecting and humble enough to accept correction:
I Pompey am. Pompey surnam’d the Big—
Dumain. ‘The Great.’
Costard. It is ‘Great,’ sir.
. . . I here am come by chance,
And lay my arms before the legs of this sweet lass of France.
If your ladyship would say ‘Thanks, Pompey,’ I had done.
Princess. Great thanks, great Pompey.
Costard. ’Tis not so much worth. But I hope I was perfect.
I made a little fault in ‘Great.’
(V.ii.553–562)
What poise and sense of proportion, from which the lords could learn something, is concentrated in “ ’Tis not so much worth!” When the poor curate, Sir Nathaniel, is non-plussed in trying to be Alexander the conqueror, Costard makes an apology for him that has become a by-word:
Run away for shame, Alisander. [Sir Nathaniel stands aside] There, an’t shall please you! a foolish mild man; an honest man, look you, and soon dash’d. He is a marvellous good neighbour, faith, and a very good bowler; but for Alisander—alas! you see how ’tis—a little o’erparted.
(V.ii.583–589)
Shakespeare presents a gulf fixed, and then spans it by touches like “and a very good bowler.” It was part of his genius that he could do this; but it was also the genius of the society which he expressed and portrayed. As we have seen, festivities were occasions for communicating across class lines and realizing the common humanity of every level. And the institution of the holidays and entertainments was a function of community life where people knew their places and knew the human qualities of each in his place—knew, for example, that an illiterate Costard was more intelligent and more constructive than a polyliterate Holofernes.
Shakespeare can do without marriages at the end, and still end affirmatively, because he is dramatizing an occasion in a community, not just private lives. News of the French King’s death breaks off the wooing game. In deferring the question of marriage, the Princess says frankly but graciously that what has passed has been only “courtship, pleasant jest, and courtesy . . . bombast . . . and lining to the time . . . a merriment” (V.ii.789–793). When the King urges that the suits be granted “Now at the latest minute of the hour,” she can answer with common-sense tempered by goodwill:
A time, methinks, too short
To make a world-without-end bargain in.
No, no, my lord! Your Grace is perjur’d much,
Full of dear guiltiness; and therefore this:—
If for my love (as there is no such cause)
You will do aught, this shall you do for me:
(V.ii.797–802)
(Part of the delight of Shakespeare is that some of his people have such beautiful, generous manners! They can “do and say the kindest things in the kindest way.”) So the King must spend a year in a hermitage to test his love. And Rosaline prescribes that Berowne must spend a twelvemonth visiting the sick, trying to make them smile by “the fierce endeavour of your wit.” So he will have to recognize something beyond games and words, and learn the limits of a gibing spirit
Whose influence is begot of that loose grace
Which shallow laughing hearers give to fools.
(V.ii.868–869)
The ladies’ bizarre commands, by insisting that the men confront other types of experience, invite them to try separating their affections from the occasion to see whether or not their feelings are more than courtly sports. In the elation of the festive moment, the game of witty wooing seemed to be love: now comes clarification.
To draw the line between a pastime and a play is another way of marking limits. Berowne’s final ironic joke shows how conscious Shakespeare was that he had made a play out of social pastimes, and one which differed from regular drama.
Our wooing doth not end like an old play:
Jack hath not Jill. These ladies’ courtesy
Might well have made our sport a comedy.
(V.ii.883–885)
Sport would have become drama if something had happened. Berowne almost says what Will Fool said of Nashe’s pageant: “ ’tis not a play neither, but a show.” Love’s Labour’s Lost is not a show, because the sports in it are used, dramatically, by people in a kind of history; it is comedy, precisely because Berowne can stand outside the sport and ruefully lament that it is only sport. Berowne’s last line recognizes explicitly that to have brought these people from these festivities to the full-fledged event of marriage would have required a whole new development. The King observes hopefully about their unfinished courtship:
Come, sir, it wants a twelvemonth and a day,
And then ’twill end.
Berowne. That’s too long for a play.
(V.ii.886–888)
The pageant and songs of summer and winter are the finale Shakespeare used instead of a wedding dance or masque; and they are exactly right, not an afterthought but a last, and full, expression of the controlling feeling for community and season. The songs evoke pleasures of the most traditional sort, at the opposite pole from facile improvisations. Nobody improvised the outgoing to the fields in spring or the coming together around the fire in winter. After fabulous volubility, we are looking and listening only; after conceits and polysyllables, we are told a series of simple facts in simple words:
When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then on every tree. . . .
(V.ii.904–908)
We have observed in connection with the songs in Nashe’s seasonal pageant that the songs in Shakespeare’s festive comedies are usually composed with explicit or implicit reference to a holiday occasion. The cuckoo and owl songs are cognate to such compositions, a very high order of poetry and of imaginative abstraction. We can briefly summarize Shakespeare’s practice in composing festive songs to relate these in Love’s Labour’s Lost to simpler, more directly festive lyrics. When Silence suddenly sings out
Be merry, be merry, my wife has all,
For women are shrows, both short and tall,
’Tis merry in hall when beards wag all,
And welcome merry Shrovetide!
Be merry, be merry.
(2 H.IV V.iii.35–39)
he is singing a traditional drinking song customarily used on the occasion which it names. Usually, however, Shakespeare wrote songs like those used on holiday but serving more exactly and richly his own imaginative purposes. For example, he developed from the women’s vantage the same Shrovetide gesture, by which the sexes mock and dismiss each other, in the song that nettles Benedict in Much Ado About Nothing:
Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more!
Men were deceivers ever,
One foot in sea, and one on shore;
To one thing constant never.
Then sigh not so,
But let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into Hey nonny, nonny
(Much II.iii.64–71)
How well this fits Beatrice’s attitude—until the tide turns and she and Benedict experience a reconciliation all the more free-hearted for coming after their merry version of the war between men and women. The development of traditional moments of feeling into songs for particular moments in particular plays is of course a very complex process, sometimes random, and mostly beyond analysis. (No doubt Shakespeare did not think out what he was doing systematically; had he needed to, he could not have done what he did.)
One can see clearly enough where “It was a lover and his lass” comes from and how it fits into As You Like It at the moment (V.iii) when love is about to be “crowned with the prime.” So too with Feste’s love song in the reveling scene of Twelfth Night:
O mistress mine, where are you roaming?
O, stay and hear! your true-love’s coming,
That can sing both high and low.
(Twel. II.iii.40–42)
The “roaming” here may be to the woods; the true lover commends himself simply for the festive accomplishments of singing high and low, and addresses his mistress simply as “sweet and twenty.” What is mentioned and not mentioned gives the sense of neglecting individuality because of being wholly taken up in the festive moment, the “present mirth” and “present laughter.” There is a deliberate variation from the expected in the fact that it is a love song, about spring pleasures, and not the within-doors drinking song that would go with Toby’s Twelfth-Night-style drinking party. This is noticed by the dialogue:
Clown. Would you have a love song, or a song of good life?
Toby. A love song, a love song.
Andrew. Ay, ay! I care not for good life.
(Twel. II.iii.36–38)
By a similar variation, it is songs of good life that provide the pattern for “Blow, blow thou winter wind,” which is sung outdoors in the Forest of Arden.
Then, heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.
(A.Y.L. II.vii.182–183)
is a crystallization of the mood of Christmas cheer, when it was customary for the men to sing songs in praise of the holly as their emblem, against songs by the women in praise of ivy: “Ivy is soft, and meek of speech.”8 This custom explains why the As You Like It chorus begins with a vocative: “Heigh-ho, sing heigh-ho, unto the green holly!” Shakespeare uses the gesture of groups singing in the hall together to express the solidarity of the banished Duke and his merry men in Arden. And he takes the Christmas feeling of mastering the cold by good life around a great fire and uses it to convey the exiles’ feeling of mastering ingratitude by pastoral fellowship.
Now the spring and winter songs in Love’s Labour’s Lost primarily define moments in the year rather than particular festivals; they are a débat, conducted not by argument but by “praise of the Owl and the Cuckoo,” as the debate between men and women could go forward by matching praises of the holly and the ivy. It seems clear, as Mr. Dover Wilson points out,9 that Armado stage manages several disguised persons who form in two groups. The original stage direction reads “Enter all,” and Armado presents pageant figures of Winter and Spring as well as of the two birds:
This side is Hiems, Winter; this Ver, the Spring: the one maintained by the Owl, th’ other by the Cuckoo. Ver, begin.
(V.ii.910–903)
On the title page of the early Tudor printing of The Debates or Stryfes Betwene Somer and Wynter,10 Somer is shown as a gallant with a hawk; Wynter as an old man. Somer describes his antagonist with “Thou art very old, . . . go shave thy hair!” (Perhaps Shakespeare was thinking of the pageant figure in Love’s Labour’s Lost when he wrote of “old Hiems” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, II.i.109.) The Debates is a writing down of a kind of formal game of argument which had long been customary as a pastime at feasts. It is interesting in this connection that Armado introduces the songs as “the Dialogue that the two learned men have compiled in praise of the Owl and the Cuckoo.” The interchange between Somer and Wynter frequently turns on the pleasures of the two seasons:
Wynter. I love better good wines/ and good sweet meats upon my table . . .
Somer. Wynter, I have young damsels that have their breast white,
To go gather flowers with their lovers.
Wynter speaks of St. Martin’s feast, when great and small drink wine. Somer answers with “the month of May,” when there are “primroses and daisies and violet flowers” for “The true lover and his sweet leman,” who “go home singing and make good cheer.”
The magic of “When daisies pied and violets blue” and of “When icicles hang by the wall” is partly that they seem to be merely lists, and each thing seems to be dwelt on simply for itself; and yet each song says, in a marvelously economical way, where people are in the cycle of the year, the people of farm, manor or village who live entirely in the turning seasons. The only syntax that matters is “When . . . Then . . .”
When icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipp’d, and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl:
‘Tu-who!
Tu-whit, tu-who!’ a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.11
(V.ii.931–939)
Of course these songs are not simply of the world they describe, not folk songs; they are art songs, consciously pastoral, sophisticated enjoyment of simplicity.12 Their elegance and humor convey pleasure in life’s being reduced to so few elements and yet being so delightful. Each centers on vitality, and moves from nature to man. The spring song goes from lady smocks to the maidens’ summer smocks, both showing white against the green of the season, from turtle cocks who “tread” to implications about people. The old joke about the cuckoo is made so delightful because its meaning as a “word,” as a call to the woods, is assumed completely as a matter of course.13 In the winter song, the center of vitality is the fire. (Wynter says in The Debates, “For me they make a great fire to cheer my bonys old.”) The fire is enjoyed “nightly,” after the day’s encounter with the cold. Gathered together “When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,” it is merry to hear the owl outside in the cold—his “Tu-whit, tu-who” come to mean this moment. Even the kitchen wench, greasy Joan, keeling the pot to keep it from boiling over, is one of us, a figure of affection. The songs evoke the daily enjoyments and the daily community out of which special festive occasions were shaped up. And so they provide for the conclusion of the comedy what marriage usually provides: an expression of the going-on power of life.
1. See below, pp. 137–138.
2. O. J. Campbell, “ ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ Re-Studied,” Studies in Shakespeare, Milton and Donne, U. of Michigan Pubs., Language and Literature, Vol. I (New York, 1925), pp. 13–20. Venezky, Pageantry on the Elizabethan Stage, pp. 70, 139, 158–161, and passim. Professor Venezky presents customary pageantry and the dramatists’ use of it in a full, rounded way which brings out what was typical of the age in Shakespeare’s practice.
3. Welsford, Fool, pp. 218–229. Miss Welsford discusses the general relations of the sottie to misrule and the masque in The Court Masque, A Study in the Relationship between Poetry and the Revels (Cambridge, 1927), pp. 376ff.
4. See above, pp. 75–81, for the relation of Falstaff’s praise of folly to that of Nashe’s Bacchus. Berowne’s points, and even his phrasing, are often remarkably close to Falstaff’s: “abstinence engenders maladies” goes with Falstaff’s “fall into a kind of male greensickness” (2 H.IV IV.iii.100); “other slow arts entirely keep the brain” fits with “learning a mere hoard of gold kept by the devil, till Sack commences it”; “love . . . not alone immured in the brain . . . courses as swift as thought in every power” parallels “the sherris warms [the blood] and makes it course from the inwards to the parts extreme.”
5. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, ed. H. H. Furness (Philadelphia, 1904), p. 79. A few lines later we get a drastic collapse into a characteristic vice of this play, a kind of chop-logic with images:
I only have made a mouth of his eye
By adding a tongue which I know will not lie. (II.i.252–253)
This is bad taste, one of a number of places where the elaboration of fanciful paradox produces a result which can only be read abstractly: to form a physical image of a tongue in an eye spoils everything. An even more dramatic case is the draggle end of a wit combat over the beauty of Berowne’s “black” lady, Rosaline.
Longaville. Look, here’s thy love, my foot and her face see.
Berowne. O, if the streets were paved with thine eyes,
Her feet were much too dainty for such tread. (IV.iii.277–279)
To read Berowne’s talk of walking on eyeballs with full imaginative participation “would be to experiment in mania,” as I. A. Richards remarked about certain stanzas of Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis in Coleridge on Imagination (New York, 1935), p. 95. But one can forgive such failures in so enterprising a writer as the young author of Love’s Labour’s Lost; he is trying everything.
6. This meaning Holofernes also develops in talking of wit “nourish’d in the womb of pia mater, and delivered” (IV.ii.70–71).
7. Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry (London, 1951), p. 215.
8. Chambers and Sigwick, Lyrics, no. CXXXVIII. See also nos. CXXXIX–CXLI. The association developed in these songs is behind Titania’s lines when she says
the female ivy so
Enrings the barky fingers of the elm. (Dream IV.i.46–47)
9. Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson (Cambridge, 1923), p. 184. Mr. Wilson refers to Armado’s remark to Holofernes, while they are planning the Show of the Nine Worthies: “We will have, if this fadge not, an antic” (V.i.154).
10. Ed. J. O. Halliwell-Phillips (London, 1860). The original printer was Lawrence Andrew; S. T. C. estimates the original publication date as 1530.
11. The first “Tu-who,” set out alone as a line, is not in the original texts, but was added by Capell in order that both songs might be sung to the same tune (Variorum, p. 318). Once a rhythm has established itself for everyone the way this one has, there is no point in pedantically restoring the original reading, though it may well be the correct one.
12. See Walter W. Greg, Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama (London, 1906), pp. 1–8. I believe that “the sophisticated enjoyment of simplicity” is Sir Walter’s phrase, but I cannot now find it in the fine introduction where he makes that point.
13. Bottom handles the old cuckoo joke just the other way:
The finch, the sparrow, and the lark,
The plain-song cuckoo gray,
Whose note full many a man doth mark,
And dares not answer nay.
For, indeed, who would set his wit to so foolish a bird? Who would give a bird the lie, though he cry ‘cuckoo’ never so? (Dream III.i.133–139)
The stress on “who would give a bird the lie” separates men and nature with a comic literalness; and Bottom has a part of the right: one can worry too much. But the other part of the truth is in the Love’s Labour’s Lost song: that “cuckoo” is not just a bird’s song—it is a “word of fear,” because it means that all those flowers have sprung up, asking to be gathered.