6
Love’s Labour’s Lost (1595) and The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1591–2)
In the early romantic comedies, including the ones previously discussed, Shakespeare appears to be developing a structure, which will come to fruition in As You Like It and Twelfth Night. He experimented further in this direction in later plays, and in the process challenged the expectations of his audiences. Here we will examine briefly two relatively early plays, Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The limitation of this approach, however, is that the methodology can only be empirical, derived from actual readings of the plays that form the basis of our evaluations and suppositions.
Understanding the plays’ structure
Until now I have suggested that Shakespeare used a formula or underlying structure as the basis for the narratives or plots for some of his plays. That structure deviates significantly from the neoclassical rules of drama, and this allows him to tell a story, usually found in his sources, in a particular way. Whether he was consciously doing this or not it is impossible to say, since our knowledge of the structure is derived primarily from the texts we have. Just as we recognized that we confer meanings on these texts in our reading and performance of Shakespeare’s plays, so we derive an understanding of his structure empirically from the plays, assuming an authorial presence without knowing the details of how he constructed them.
This appears to be the formula for the plays we call the romantic comedies:
1 An opening statement of a dilemma or an impossible resolution, often but not always associated with the threat of death
2 A search deriving from the opening statement relating, firstly, to an individual or a number of individuals attempting to find identity or self-knowledge, and secondly to one or more couples seeking to surmount obstacles in their attempts to find some form of relationship
3 The requirement of certain characters, usually lovers, to remove themselves from the society that is responsible for setting up the obstacle to fulfilment, that removal often being signified by geographical relocation or physical disguise, or both
4 Through the adventures under disguise or in the area of relocation, a movement is made towards the resolution of the difficulties, which is usually effected through a contrived recognition scene – Aristotelian anagnorisis – in which misunderstandings of identity are rectified, multiple marriages result and a new revitalized society emerges that looks towards a future in which generations are now reconciled with each other.
In Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, we can see the elements of the formula taking shape – the initial problem, the journey and the disguise, the revelation and the reconciliation. However, in both plays the dramatist is already playing with the expectations of his audience, and in such a way that the structure being developed is already under some stress. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Shakespeare includes topical warm satire within a structure that has a stark conclusion. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, he uses song and an old comic routine as part of the entertainment within a narrative plot that is over-elaborate and which, with an attempted rape, threatens to undermine its comic genre. And yet at the same time this technique points towards complexities that will become more marked in later plays.
We have also already seen how Shakespeare experimented – in 1595 – with both the comic and the tragic genre, moving the fairy world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream into the poetic extravagance of Mercutio’s ‘Queen Mab’ speech in Romeo and Juliet, which presages the movement from comedy to tragedy that follows Mercutio’s ‘accidental’ death.
Relatively early in his career as a writer, Shakespeare is not afraid to experiment, pushing the boundaries, as if asking himself, and the narratives with which he is dealing, the question ‘What if?’ So ‘what if’ there is no magic potion to put right the mistakes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream? ‘What if’ Romeo arrives at the tomb without knowing that Juliet is not dead but only asleep? In The Two Gentlemen or Love’s Labour’s Lost, these experiments are pushed even further to suggest a questioning of elements of the very structure that we can detect in his other early comedies. The sudden reformation of the aptly named Proteus in the former is unsettling, while the failure in the formal ending of Love’s Labour’s Lost challenges the convention of a return to an ordered society.
We have also seen that during the 1590s Shakespeare is involved in writing a number of sonnets, at first to a young man and subsequently to a ‘dark lady’ with whom he (or his fictional persona as the poet) is involved in an affair, only to discover that she is also sexually involved with a young rival. There is also within the sonnets a sense of time passing, of the need to seize the day, a concept known as carpe diem. It is dangerous to read autobiography into fictional work but no writer can absolutely escape from him- or herself. The act of writing necessitates, in one form or another, the exposure of the self, although Shakespeare’s own ‘self’ is elusive.
Love’s Labour’s Lost
In this early comic play, Ferdinand, the King of Navarre, believes he can divorce himself and three of his courtiers from the world and create ‘a little academe,/Still and contemplative in living art’ (Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1.1.13–14). His plan is to vow to abjure the society of women for three years while he and his companions study together. This turns out to be impossible, since no sooner is the oath made than an emissary from the King of France, his daughter the Princess, accompanied by three ladies, arrives to negotiate with King Ferdinand. Thus the obstacle to resolution is constructed and the resulting comedy arises from the four men humorously trying to find ways, including going in disguise, of breaking their oath in order to woo the ladies, who are forced to remain outside the palace ‘gates’.
The breaking of an oath is a serious business in Shakespearean drama, but in this case the attempts to do so drive the King and his companions into the comic world of deception, self-deception and ‘merriment’, until a messenger, Monsieur Marcade, arrives from France to announce to the Princess the death of ‘The King, your father –’ (5.2.716). This change of mood, coupled with the failure of the men to reconcile themselves to the women, prepares the audience for an inversion of the customary comic ending.
THE THEME: A PROCESS TO BE TAKEN
Protestations by the men that ‘Honest plain words best pierce the ear of grief;’ (5.2.749) are rejected by the Princess and her women. Death has produced a different perspective on the humour of the men’s perjury, and no commitment to marriage can take place until each has served a term in which they will be forced to understand the realities of the world. So one of them, the iconoclastic Berowne, known for his disarming comic wit, is told by his new love, Rosaline, to spend a year with the sick, helping them to laugh before she can consider him:
| ROSALINE |
You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day |
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Visit the speechless sick and still converse |
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With groaning wretches; and your task shall be |
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With all fierce endeavour of your wit |
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To enforce the pained impotent to smile. |
| BEROWNE |
To move wild laughter in the throat of death? |
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It cannot be, it is impossible. |
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Mirth cannot move a soul in agony. |
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(5.2.841–8) |
But to his protests she replies (849–59) that until now his laughter has been ‘shallow’ and that, if he cannot make the sick laugh, he should ‘throw away that spirit’ as part of his ‘reformation’. In other words, he has to go through a process to make him worthy of love. In this, the play comments on the purpose of the formula that Shakespeare is developing to underpin both theme and plot within an innovative aesthetic structure. Shakespeare is signalling, thereby, the seriousness of his comedy – the movement into a world of error, confusion, even death in order to comprehend the realities of the world itself – and our experience of it.
As critics such as Derek Traversi in An Approach to Shakespeare (1969) have noted, the sentence the women impose on the men forces them back into a severity that reminds them that vows are not to be made lightly since they are part of the bedrock of language, and hence important in holding society together. There are hints here, in this otherwise frivolous play, of the Shakespearean vision that was later to produce the great tragedy of King Lear, which some have called a grotesque comedy. In that play, Lear in old age plays games with his daughters’ affections and attempts to elicit vows from them that have disastrous consequences.
TOPICALITY
Love’s Labour’s Lost also contains a satire on court life, and shows a familiarity with ‘local’ characters such as Holofernes the pedantic schoolmaster and Nathaniel the curate, both of whom, with the clown Costard and a comic Spaniard, Don Adriano de Armado, present an entertainment of the Four Worthies – Hector, Pompey, Alexander and Judas Maccabeus – at the end of the play. It is a comic sketch within the play, with a Spaniard, described as the Braggart, being reduced to ridicule along with the curate and the schoolmaster. As topical entertainment, the ridiculing of pedantry and the satirizing of Spain after the defeat of the Armada are set pieces that Shakespeare’s Elizabethan audience would no doubt have enjoyed.
The construction of the overall plot and themes of Love’s Labour’s Lost have serious implications that are concerned with appropriate conclusions to all things as well as the tribulations of life. The fact is that illness and death often do strike suddenly and unexpectedly. In contemporary society we try to isolate or contain this fact through material insurance and welfare systems. We know that death is unavoidable, but generally we do not see it in quite the same way that the Elizabethans did. Illness, paupers and public executions were part of the fabric of society embedded in the daily consciousness of people such as Holofernes and Sir Nathaniel and, indeed, the aristocracy and the monarchy. As much as the threat from Spain, the Elizabethans faced the continuing threat of widespread sickness, especially outbreaks of plague. They lived with poverty and disease in their streets and their homes, although Elizabeth I’s government did introduce taxes to help fund the poor.
‘From 1578 government orders directed that infected houses must be quarantined, and their inhabitants were supported from the poor rates and prevented from making further contacts. Plague victims died in the streets and fields, and even outside the houses of terrified countrymen who barricaded themselves in and would not give them water. Such treatment was inhumane, even though it was for the general good. The outbreak of 1625 (nine years after Shakespeare’s death) was the worst of all: more than 40,000 died in London, one in eight of the total population.’
Briggs, J. (1997, 2nd edn: 30–31), This Stage-play World: Texts and Contexts, 1580–1625. Oxford: Oxford University Press
‘YOU THAT WAY, WE THIS WAY’
Despite Elizabethan London’s familiarity with death, however, comedy is clearly a requirement. Shakespeare therefore compensates for the unsatisfactory irresolution of the lovers with a conclusion in which ‘This side is Hiems, winter; this Ver, the spring’. The songs of the two seasons are sung: the spring with the cuckoo and the winter with the owl. ‘The words of Mercury’, the messenger of the gods, we are told, ‘are harsh after the songs of Apollo. You that way, we this way’ (5.2.882f.).
In the seasons there is movement between scepticism and optimism, which give way to each other. Comedy is usually associated with the spring and with ‘rebirth’, and although ‘love’s labour’ has been ‘lost’ on this occasion, there is always the promise of regeneration in the future, inscribed in that movement of the seasons. Sadly, perhaps ironically, unless it was renamed and exists as another play, Love’s Labour’s Won, recorded by Francis Meres in 1598 as a play by Shakespeare, remains ‘lost’ to us.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
A serious undertone is also present in the earlier play The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
The two gentlemen of the title are close friends Valentine and Proteus. Their names are deliberately appropriate: Valentine after St Valentine, patron saint of lovers, Proteus after the Greek god who could quickly change his shape at will, thereby associating the name with deceit. Proteus stays in Verona because of his love for Julia – the name relating to July signifying ‘passionate love’ as in, for example, Juliet – when Valentine goes off to Milan. Proteus’s father, Antonio, however, instructs his son to follow Valentine to the Duke of Milan’s court. Valentine, already there, has fallen in love with the Duke’s daughter, Silvia. The Duke wishes her to marry Thurio, whose name denotes a young shoot. So Valentine and Silvia plan to elope.
On seeing Sylvia, Proteus immediately falls in love with her and, learning of the planned elopement, betrays his friend Valentine to the Duke. Valentine is banished into the wilderness where he becomes the leader of a band of outlaws. Julia disguises herself as a boy, Sebastian, and follows Proteus to the court of Milan, where she overhears him declare his love for Silvia. Disguised as Sebastian she serves as a page to Proteus, who sends her with a message to Silvia, who continues to reject Proteus because of her fidelity to Valentine. Silvia escapes to join Valentine in the forest. The Duke and Thurio pursue them, as do Proteus and Julia. Silvia is captured by the outlaws but rescued by Proteus, who attempts to force his love on her in the form of an attempted rape. Valentine appears and Proteus’s betrayal of his friend is discovered, but Julia reveals herself in order to facilitate a reconciliation.
This play has something of the sonnets’ story about it. Here, the madness of love is a force working within what is otherwise a rambling comedy, renowned for a comic scene (2.3) with Proteus’s servant Launce and his dog Crab. This episode is possibly based on a comic routine reworked by Shakespeare for Will Kempe.
The convoluted plot has many elements found in other, later comedies – A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It and Twelfth Night – but without the clear structural discipline characterized by those works.
‘[At the time of the formation of the Chamberlain’s Men in the early 1590s] one of Shakespeare’s first acts was to take an old play and to construct a part in it for Kemp [sic] based on Kemp’s routines or “merriments”. Kemp’s scenes…are only loosely tied to the narrative, and give him the freedom to improvise if he chooses.’
Wiles, D. (1987: 73), Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Critics have noted that the relationship between Launce and his dog Crab – whose name is associated with sexual disease – offers a parallel perspective on issues of loyalty and disloyalty that occur in the main narrative. Satirical comedy abounds, particularly in Act 3, Scene 1 through the interaction of Launce and the clown Speed, possibly played by a boy, which offers a parody of a courtly lover’s ‘complaint’: the praise and evaluation of a courtly lover’s mistress – who in Launce’s case is a milkmaid. Among her virtues are that she can ‘milk’, brew ‘good ale’, ‘sew’, ‘wash and scour’ and ‘spin’ and among her vices are her ‘sour breath’ and that ‘she doth talk in her sleep’. You might like to compare ‘greasy Nell’ in The Comedy of Errors who has a similar comic function. It is a satire on a literary tradition as well as on the upper classes.
BEYOND THE CONVOLUTED CONSTRUCTION
The Two Gentlemen of Verona is written as an entertainment and, as well as the humour, contains the famous song ‘Who is Silvia? What is she/That all our swains commend her?’ (4.2.38–52). In its variety and convolutions, some might regard it as a ‘slight play’, overworked in its desire to be successful and therefore overloaded in its comic entertainment, which jars with the violence that Proteus displays.
Nevertheless, despite all this and its strained construction, we can see at a relatively early stage in Shakespeare’s career the presence of themes such as ‘constancy’ and the ‘violent’ male temperament that will later develop, with more careful handling, in Twelfth Night and in the satirical ‘tragedy’ Troilus and Cressida, as well as in Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well, and, of course, throughout the sonnets.
‘Shakespeare seems to have set out to write a play about friendship. The essential quality of friendship, wrote Sir Thomas Elyot, is constancy…Proteus’s inconstancy, his failure in both friendship and love…could have made him the most interesting character, and perhaps the most sympathetic…if…Shakespeare’s sympathies hadn’t moved elsewhere – to Julia, Launce and Speed. These characters have a charm, a magnetic power that Proteus lacks.
‘…Launce takes on himself the blame for his dog’s physiological impertinence, and asks the audience “How many masters would do this for his servant?” (4.4.28–9)…Julia, a mere woman, is able to uphold the standard of constancy to which Proteus merely gives lip service.’
French, M. (1983: 89–90), Shakespeare’s Division of Experience. London: Abacus, Sphere Books
The idea that Shakespeare is just a ‘natural genius’ is belied by the fact that in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love’s Labour’s Lost he is developing his craftsmanship. Signs of this may be more clearly seen in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Comedy of Errors but we can also consider his craftsmanship in the context of two further romantic comedies, As You Like It and Twelfth Night. In these later plays we see his comic formula aligning within his narrative plots, producing complex thematic issues and requiring more sophisticated interpretation. But even so, Love’s Labour’s Lost and the earlier The Two Gentlemen of Verona demonstrate his ability to create comic entertainments for a public theatre and they can therefore be evaluated as such. We should, perhaps, follow Shakespeare’s example and not become too precious about ‘rules’ but rather admire and enjoy these comedies for what they are.
