Mark Colvin, thanks a lot for coming back. Today, I'm going to talk about Love's Labour's Lost. So I think I've done about 25 plays. Now, the all the other lectures are on I. You can come in yet and you can see that I'm getting out of my comfort zone week by week by week and loves that has lots of the play never really written about until this lecture and really thought about all that much. It's not particularly easy play. I'm not sure it's yet a play that I absolutely love.
But I got more interested in it as I was thinking about it and hope I can try and convey some of the ways in which it might be interesting for you. Working, working on it. So even the title of Love Love's Labour's Lost is something of a tongue twister. And as I was working on it over the last week, I wondered whether the question I should have directly approached is whether it has to apostrophes or one, which seems to be one of the big questions of the 20th century. What does the title mean?
Where did the apostrophes come in the title? But we're not going to go. There are a lot of mysteries about this play. And one of the things that I think talking about this play today will help us to think about is Shakespearean mysteries quite topical, given that some of you may have seen the claim that a new portrait of Shakespeare has been found, but that's a claim which rests entirely on a kind of cryptographic decoding secret kind of rebus sort of way of thinking about Shakespeare.
Which of which there's been a lot about Love's Labour's Lost. Maybe you can think about that as a kind of methodology. The question that I've tried to cluster my thought around doubt is what is lost? What's the idea of loss which hangs over this play? What role does loss play in its construction and how? What might we be able to use the idea of loss to think about a play which many critics have been willing to lose? The 19th century critic and essayist William Hazlett was one such.
If we were to part of any with any of the authors comedies, it should be this. If we were to part with any of the authors, comedies should be this. OK, so firstly then the plot of Love Labours Lost the King of Navarre vows with three of his noble friends that they will devote themselves to study and that they will abjure the company of women.
The ink is still wet on that promise. When a party arrives at the court, the French princess has come with her three ladies in waiting on the pretext of negotiating some kind of territorial status about the province of Aquitaine on behalf of her father. So a king and his three noblemen, a princess and three ladies. What could possibly happen? Yep, they're all in love before we know it.
In fact, they've actually met before, so they already know they are happily they don't fall in love with the wrong person. So they're all happily set out into full couples. Of course, the men can't admit to each other that they have broken their promise. Of course, the ladies make them beg for it by covering their faces with masks so that they will make promises to the wrong one. There's a side plot of a crazy Spaniard, a pedantic schoolmaster and a stupid constable called dull.
Some people pretend to be Russians. It's not quite clear in what sense they're Russians or what Russian quite signifies. But they pretend to be Russians all the same. And another group acts out a play of the nine Worthy's of antiquity. And they all talk. They talk a lot. They punt a lot and they talk more. But that's actually pretty much it. If there was ever a comedy that revealed its hand a bit too early.
Love's Labour's Lost. Must be it. As soon as the King says in his opening speech in the play that they are going to give up women. We pretty much know who's waiting in the wings by the act. By the end of Act one, it's clear where this is headed. Act two, three and four. They're followed for pretty much time fillers until we get to Act five.
It's hard to imagine a play where characters and waste more time talking, playing bowls, which must be an absolute, you know, the epitome of time-wasting, put on plays, argue about etymology and stuff. That's all they do really all the way through. Okay, so to an extent, this is kind of true of all comedies. Girl meets boy, sometimes disguised as boy. They can't be together. Unsupportive parents. Magic problems in forest. Dressed in male clothing. Boo. But then. Oh, they can harrar the end.
Shakespeare takes the structure of comedy, as we've discussed many times before in these lectures from the Roman new comedy structure and new comedy is most striking, perhaps in its presentation of the blocking figure. This is a figure completely recognisable to us from the modern incarnation of romantic comedy genre, which we still pretty much have pretty much entirely the same muchly as Shakespeare had it.
So the blocking figure is a usually unreasonable anti comic patriarch who is trying to prevent the happy ending. Now, Shakespeare is adept in developing the blocking figure function so that we see a range of such figures, e.g. Aegeus, the angry father in Midsummer Night's Dream, is one example. The vengeful Use Your Shylock in the Merchant of Venice is another Malvolio who won't allow cakes and ale is yet a third.
But in Love's Labour's Lost. It's hard to see what the blocking figure is in this play. There is absolutely no reason at all why these eminently well matched and symmetrical couples should not get married. There are no existing engagements, no parental interventions, no apparent inequality of rank, no problems with numbers. None of them is in disguise. As someone other than they are. And so that business with which comedy generally concerns itself.
The clever outwitting of the blocking figure that culminates in Merchant of Venice, for example, in the showdown in the courtroom. That business is pretty much entirely missing in Love's Labour's lost or a different way maybe of thinking about that is it's not so much missing as it is internalised. What's stopping these marriages is not some external blocking agent, but something we might want to guess out as more obviously psychological.
The reason the men cannot marry is because they have sworn willingly a vow not to. They're clearly not yet ready to break the homosocial bonds of study and to enter into into individual relationships. And that process, as we've talked before, is really the process of romantic comedy for Shakespeare. Not so much how women behave, although our tendency is to is to think about that.
But how do men behave? How do men break relationships? Their primary relationships with other men and instead make these relationships with women. So perhaps then this must apparently unsighted logical of place may hide a deeper truth about comic motivation. It takes inside the characters, those elements of prohibition. That comedy tends to project onto other figures. And in that perhaps it pre-empts the play where that's often said to be the case.
The only case or the first case in Shakespeare. Much ado about nothing. Claire Makarkin editing that play for the Odyn series, says Much Ado about Nothing is the first play where the blocking figure of the elements that block the relationships continuing is psychological rather than external. It's because Beatrice and Benedick can't bring themselves to admit that they love each other rather than that they are being blocked from outside.
That brings about the comedy. But Love's Labour's Lost predates much ado about nothing. May actually pre-date it in that in that way too. But without an obvious blocking agent, however, the play loses those self-imposed imposed difficulties by which comedy meshes out its dramatic lengths. In romantic comedy, romantic partnerships must be extended and tested before they are finally resolved.
People cannot just meet and fall into bed or not in Shakespeare's comedies, at least, we need to see the romantic relationship develop so that we can invest in it as our own narrative desire in the play. So comedies are all about desire, but only in part the desires of the characters. Perhaps the major desires, the desire of the audience to see things work out in a way which has been set up and established and signposted.
So we need to invest our narrative desire in the play, but we also need the confirmation of that desire to be deferred. Just like the characters in the play do so that there is a play for us to watch. Love's Labour's Lost. I think challenges many of these comic expectations. We've talked in the lecture on Romeo and Juliet about the notion of inevitability as a feature of tragedy.
So inevitability as a feature of tragedy. There we identified via the critic Susan Snyder the opposite concept of evitable, ability, Evatt's ability, the comic possibility to change, to take evasive action around obstacles. That becomes the leitmotif of comedy. So comedy and equitability, the doom laden trajectory of tragedy as inevitability. But here in Love's Labour's Lost, as we can see, it's comedy that's absolutely inevitable for women.
For men. Go figure. Perhaps all Shakespeare's plays are actually a little bit light in terms of plot. Or maybe, in fact, he keeps all the plot for histories which have too much plot and doesn't have enough left for comedies and tragedies. Certainly at fours are not usually a high point of Shakespeare's art. If you ever wondered why you're always flagging by nine 30 in the theatre. It's more likely to be his fault than yours.
But even in this wider context of how plot works for Shakespeare, think love letters lost is really definitely on the plot deficient side. Nothing really happens. The first loss then is plot. Perhaps this helps us make sense of one early reference and puzzling reference to the play. In a pairing with a now unknown companion piece writing in 15 Ninety-eight in his printed commonplace book, Paladin's Tanya Francis Memories gives an early appreciation of Shakespeare's talents.
And he also helps us to sort of stake out a chronology of Shakespeare's writing. By this point, by the end of the 16th century for comedy, says Mary's witness, his gentleman of Verona, his errors, his love labours lost his love. Labours won his Midsummer Night's Dream and his Merchant of Venice. In parentheses, mirrors also gives us for tragedy. Richard the second. Richard the third, Henry the fourth King John Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet.
So what's interesting here is the two parallel comedy titles. Love's Labour's Lost and Love's Labour's Won. We don't know now what this second play refers to, whether it's a lost play or an alternative title for one we already have. And the identity of Love's Labour's won has been one of the brilliant mysteries or gaps into which Shakespeare studies and Shakespeare preference various studies have happily world.
There's a rather great version of it in one of the doctor who episodes called the Shakespeare Code, Where Love's Labour's One is made up by witches. And it's going to kind of bring back, as things always are, in inductor. In the 2014 15 season, the Royal Shakespeare Company played these two plays, Love's Labour's Lost and Love's Labour's Won, with the second heading up a production of Much Ado about Nothing. Another common scholarly opinion is that the missing play now goes under the title.
All's well pretends well the same so of the pairing of Love's Labour's Lost and the Mysterious Love's Labour's one is that perhaps Love's Labour's lost the play we have. It's part of a double bill in which a second play provides a plot supplement or a balancing narrative. This is a common place of kind of mediaeval story collections or story structures where we tend to get paired stories, which shows two sides of the same question. So, for example, we might get.
A play about a nagging woman or a story about knocking woman on the one hand and then the next one is about a tyrannical husband or a violent husband. So this sometimes have to kind of extremes or to plots which together give us some sense perhaps of a harmony or a complete whole. So these stories such as we can see this in The Canterbury Tales, for instance, or in years to Kameron, stories that tend to be written in pairs, not by presenting the same characters in a Part two.
So it's not so much like Henry the fourth, part one and two. We've got continuing story and continuing characters across the two parts. But by deepening largely social themes, by private, by presenting an alternative take on the same question, we might perhaps think here about Johnson's every man in his humour and every man out of his humour as titles, which clearly are in that same kind of parallel relationship as Love's Labour's Lost and Love's Labour's One.
But in the Johnson case, we do not. But we're not getting is the same characters. Continuing the story where we left off, we got a different group of characters approaching these. The theme of the Huma's in different ways. So maybe what's lost is half of the play, the missing Love's Labour's won. And maybe what Francis Marius evidence suggests is that the loss in the first title is only temporary, is only provisional.
It awaits a winning in the second part. Lost and won are in a kind of balance across the two parts. So maybe it was lost in Love's Labour's Lost is its companion play something that comes after it and something which in some sense completes it. Now, what everybody says about Love's Labour's Lost is that it makes up for these two potential losses of plot and of its original play, supplement or companion. It makes up for these losses with language.
Now, of course, plot, like everything else in the theatre, is actually language, too. But if we were to ask about Love's Labour's Lost, what is it about? The answer would have to be it is about language. If the plot is simple, then the language is endlessly elaborated and characters are absolutely self-conscious about this. They all know this is what they're doing and they pointed out to us to make sure that we do too.
So we have quite different kinds of speech, but all of it exaggerated in different ways. The flowery rhetoric of the male courtiers, the preposterously Latinate pomposity of the schoolmaster Holofernes, the zany linguistic exuberance of the Spanish knight, Armato malapropisms by the country bumpkin co-starred on. One of the ways Love's Labour's Lost makes its drama is by bringing these kinds of language together into juxtaposition many scenes in which different kinds of language clash together.
And they make the play the difference between Armada's hyperbolic language and the reductive haughtiness of his rustic sweetheart, Jack Conetta. For the French ladies who get a letter mistakenly which was intended for someone else, language in this play obfuscates, decorates, elaborates much more than it illuminates.
The miscarried letters in the play are pretty obvious symbols for that failure of communication co-starred the messenger muddles his commissions and delivers them to the wrong recipients, just as communication between characters or between characters and audience is intercepted and interrupted. There are long punning routines in which every possible meaning of saw or light or juvenile is explored, and characters talk about their language explicitly as Holofernes and Armada trade polysyllables.
The boy notes wryly, They have been at a great feast of languages and stolen and stolen. The scraps had been at a great, great feast of languages and stolen the scraps. Barrone, the wisecracking leader of the King's friends, describes the Spaniard. Armando is a most illustrious white, a man on fire. New words, fashions own night does find new words is one of things. The place very interested in this is a play where two thirds of the lines are rhyming.
So it's it's not blank verse, blank meaning unwrapping, but rhyming couplets. And these emphasise both the kind of inevitability of the plot. So rhyming couplet is like. A really quick piece of plot. We know that once the runway is set up, there's a limited number of things that it can ride with and it's usually pretty obvious and rugged. But they also draw attention to the artificiality of language in the play.
But Barones couplet emphasises the importance of language in characterising Armando, but also draws attention to his own rather precisely archaic word for man. Quite so, even as Barrone mocks Armando on linguistic grounds, that's to say his own language is placed under particular and sceptical scrutiny at the end of the of the play. Barrone realises honest play plain words best pierce the air of grief. Honest plain words. Best pierce the air of grief.
A series of monosyllables which enact its own premise that to speak plainly is to be most clearly understood. But then he goes on to elaborate that in terms which show how difficult it is for characters in this play to step back from their own linguistic affectation. Oh, never will I trust to speeches penned nor to the motion of a schoolboy's tongue, nor never come Envisat to my friend nor wew in rhyme like a blind harp song.
Taffeta phrases sing silken terms precise three piled hyperboles spruce affectation figures pedantically. These summer flies have blown me full of maggot ostentation. I do foreswear them and I hear protest by this white glove white glove of Rosalind. How white the hand God knows. Henceforth my wooing mind shall be expressed in Rusick yays and honest kersley nose. And to begin Wenche so God help me law my love to these sound sounds crap or floor rosalind's dry retort sounds sounds.
I pray you shows how difficult it is for Barrone to break out of pretentious rhetorical forms. It's a speech all about how his language is going to be clear and straightforward, which is anything other than straightforward, which piles up images which enjoys rhetorical construction and which which takes a dozen lines to say to elaborate. The thing he said was simply in a single one. Not to mention it's one of the many glitches in the first quarter tax.
Quite problematic. Text of the play published in Fifty 98 is the Barrone delivers a version of this speech twice. So I mean, that's kind of an error, but it's an error which is very much in keeping with the play that Barrone can't stop talking and can't stop using these elaborate phrases. It speaks them to the plays and the character's preference for language over substance.
Now, we shouldn't take you to miss. I think if we acknowledge that the most successful play for this, the most successful setting, sorry for this play in modern performance, has tended to set it in Oxford. This has worked to emphasise the youth of the protagonists and some kind of sense of their life as sheltered and inward looking.
Navarros idea of a little academe, a little Akeda and that's what is going to set up with his friends is almost always envisioned as the enclosed, preferably close to the stage shared set of an Oxford quadrangle. Of course, we all talk here in an incomprehensible and affected argot. That is part Latin, part private slang and part unnecessary pretension.
Barry Kiles 1984 production described the young man as pompous highbrows in graduate gowns and 10 years later in Judge established established late Edwardian Oxford for his setting, complete with a college bar decorated with painted blades and team photographs and with dreaming spires, the backdrop to what one revue called a Rupert Brooke reading party.
When the men make their adolescent pack to study and to avoid women, Kenneth Brunner's musical film of 2000 created Quad's and punting scenes and a lovely musical number in a kind of inversion of the Rateliff camera. It's interesting that these kinds of readings tend to coincide with an idea that Love's Labour's Lost is a very early play. But as a play, we can't really date very easily at all.
It could be anywhere from 15, 92, three to fifteen ninety five, six, as if it is itself youthful, exuberant, undisciplined, unsophisticated, rather than perhaps being about those things. And as such, it might be. To look alongside other plays designated early on, we've talked before about the way early has quite different associations of value from a very established critical term late for Shakespeare's final plays,
the romances. So if you want to play that self-conscious about language and about the linguistic debates of the early modern period and about the uses and abuses of rhetoric, Love's Labour's Lost is exactly the play for you. It seems to me a play in which plot gives way almost entirely to style, and that language is its main topic. Rather than merely its formal vehicle. And one consequence of that linguistic texture is a tendency in the play and it's and in its performance towards stylisation.
This is a play that actually works really well and interestingly in performance. And it's one way I'd encourage you to look at it. There's one critic who says that the developments in Shakespeare in performance have really given only two things to substantial things, to Shakespeare criticism. One is that the history plays do well in a sequence. I'm not so sure about that. But the second is that Love's Labour's Lost is a play which works on the stage.
So these are the only two games for scholarship from the long history of Shakespearean performance. But it's quite interesting in Love's Labour's Lost I, it is a play very much worth trying to see or to see bits of. So one consequence is a tendency towards stylisation as kind of Brunner's film ably expresses.
The four couples at the play centre already give Love's Labour's lost the feeling more of a dance than of a drama, as if stage symmetries are more important than the distinctiveness of comic individuals where Shakespeare gives us multiple common comic couples in other plays. The effect is usually one of differentiation or contrast.
So we compared the robust relationship of Rosalind and Orlando against the more timid encounter of Celia and Oliver, or the more pragmatic coupling up Touchtone and Audrey in as we like it, for instance. Or we set a hero and Claudio, the kind of inexperienced, innocent, kind of high romantic lovers of much ado about nothing against the sort of screwball comedy of Beatrice and Benedict.
So the point of the couples seems in those plays to give us a contrast, contrasting views of marriage, contrasting views of courtship. Here, though, in Love's Labour's Lost, the effect of having multiple couples is the effect of duplication rather than contrast. Writing in the 1920s, the theatre director, Harley Gramble Barker described Love's Labour's Lost as akin to the artifice of a ballet akin to a ballet and suggested that the actor should think of the dialogue in terms of music.
Lots of subsequent critics have likened the play to a comic opera such as Mozart, Mozart's Marriage of Figaro. In the early 1970s, W.H. Auden and his partner, Chester Coleman, worked on an opera with Nicholas Nabokov, cousin of Vladimir. Based on the play they described the play.
Auden is very interesting on the play, saying it's absolutely light and light and frothy until the very last scene, which he calls a morality play ending in Thomas Mann's novel, Dr Fasters, the imaginary composer has written one opera based on Love's Labour's Lost. There are lots of settings of Love's Labour's Lost songs by Stravinsky and by Finzi, amongst others.
Brunner's film of 2000 develops this musical impulse, drawing out from extant songs in classic Hollywood musicals, a kind of counterpoint to Shakespeare's play. He recognises that the these set piece linguistic moments are quite easily translatable in in the genre of the musical.
So one way to think about the play's detailed linguistic texture has been compared to other art forms, to music particularly, and to to alter dance or the combination in opera, or sometimes the detailed linguistic texture of the play has been compared to the texture of painting, particularly perhaps to baroque artists like Watto and and Quite Chino, who particularly painting these kind of Arcadian settings, these aristocrats at leisure in these sort of rustic or rural Arcadian settings.
What's important to think about these art forms and as parallels to or translations of love labours lost is that they're all. Quite radically antenarrative, they're not narrative forms. They recognised that the value of the play is in texture rather than plot. As the theatre director Carol Brahms' wrote, Love's Labour's Lost is less a play with a beginning, a middle and an end than a pervasive atmosphere, a pervasive atmosphere.
OK, so so far that we've been talking about an absence of plot substituted by self-conscious experimentation in the linguistic sphere. One major lost then in the play. A play about loss is plot. But let's just challenge that description of the play for a moment. If fact something quite important does happen in Love's Labour's Lost.
The play does have one rather significant twist up its sleeve almost at the last minute in Act five, a character we've never met before called Misty in my car day enters with a sombre message for the princess. She presents this message perhaps because of what he looks like. This is my card. I'm sorry, madam, for the news I bring is heavy on my tongue. The king, your father, dead for my life. Even so, replies my party. My tale is told. We don't hear anything else from him.
A it is an interesting figure. He's like a kind of reverse deus ex machina. The figure from classical drama who steps in unannounced at the very end to bring an apparently irresolvable situation to final judgement. What my country does is to step in at the same point, but to do exactly the opposite. He brings an apparently entirely resolved situation that that's been resolved since the very beginning of the play. The four couples have recognised their affection for each other.
So he begins. He brings that resolve situation into turmoil. So he undoes the resolution rather than bringing it only at the end of the play. That's to say, do we get that grit. The blocking figure, we might have expected to be its main business. It's a real an unexpected challenge to generic expectations.
Bringing death into comedies is not really on the point about comedy is that the data usually pretending death is threatened, but not in acting enacted because the genre is all about ongoing life. The early modern playwright Thomas Haywood characterised in a nicely formalistic way the difference between tragedy and comedy by means of a kind of inversion in comedies, he writes. Turbulent Premer Tranquila Ultima in Tragedies Tranquila Premer Turbulent.
Ultima comedies begin in trouble and end in Peace. Tragedies Beginning CALM's and End in Tempest. By this measure, Love's labours lost. Having spent four and a half acts looking like the most obvious comedy ever. Suddenly turns tragic at the end. It's a more problematic M.V. in structural terms than those comedies, often given serious stage treatment because of their unresolved conclusions. Plays like all's well that ends well or measure for measure.
Responding to the death of her father, the Princess of France, now its queen wants to leave Novar immediately. All is revealed. The men confess their loves, and the king asks. Now at the latest minutes of the hour, granters. Your Love's response, though, is unexpected. The princess's reply is distinctly uncommon. A time methinks too short to make a world without end bargain. In nice phrase, a time methinks. Too short to make a world without end bargain.
And again, this is a shock to expectations. Comic romantic couples never seem to feel that they've done things in a in a terrible hurry or that there isn't time to make such a momentous decision. It's part of the rush about comedies that they're immediately in love and immediately married. They cheerfully get together within minutes of meeting and by the by the end of the play two hours later, they're absolutely firm, unbreakable couples.
But what the princess does here is to introduce a quite other timescale scale right at the end of the play. If my love. Is addressing the king of Navarre, it for my love as there is no such cause. You will do all this. Shall you do for me. Your oath I will not trust but go with speed to some forlorn and naked hermitage remote from all the pleasures of the world that stay until the 12 celestial signs have brought about the annual reckoning.
If this austere in sociable life change not your offer made in heats of blood. If frosts and fasts, hard lodging and thin weeds nip not the gaudy blossoms of your love, but that it bade this trial and last life. Then at the expiration of the year, come challenge me challenged me by these desserts and by this virgin palm now kissing vine.
I will be thine. So sending the king off for 12 months of monastic living returns him pretty much to the state of sombre solitude with which he attempted to to begin the play. The other women instruct their suitors similarly. And Rosalind. Rosalind adds to barrooms obligations. And they're all to win me, if you please. Without the witch. I am not to be one. You shall have this 12 month term from day to day. Visit the speechless sick and still converse with groaning wretches.
And your task shall be with all the fierce endeavour of your wit to force, to enforce the pain and impotent to smile. Barones answer to move while laughter in the throat of death. It cannot be. It is impossible. Mirth cannot move. So in agony, having turned romantic comedy into something else, Rosalind instructs the sardonic and humorous Barrone to try to turn real life tragedies into laughter.
The consciousness of generic conversion. It's everywhere. Our wooing does not end like an old play, Verrone says ruefully. Jack half not Jill. These ladies courtesy might well have made our sport a comedy. The King's answer comes, sir, at once 12 month and a day. And then we'll end. It gets Piros wry reply. That's too long for a play. The ending of the play is a song by winter, spring and by winter, capturing an unexpectedly bittersweet conclusion.
What is lost in the end is the promised pairings of romantic comedy, The Labours of Love that the play had seemed so complacently to endorse. So far, then, we've talked about the absence of plot and the play's extravagant displacement of action with language and about the pleasures of stylising the play acting for us. As, for example, in music or dance. And then we've talked about the generic instability that comes unexpectedly with the figure of death. Marc-Andre, at the end.
Those idealised Arcadian pictures of what home Pusan often carried a memento mori such as a skull or a tomb or the motto etched in Arcadio. I go I. Death also. I mean Arcadia Marc-Andre is that memento mori the grim reaper watching the beautiful young things, playing croquet in the quad. So what's lost here registers a more existential sense of life's transience, a loss of innocence or something like that. The end of Branagh's film.
Fast forward through this time of abstinence, figuring the couples separated by war time by the Second World War and ultimately reunited. This is all in a kind of wordless tableau at the end. Ultimately reunited older, sadder, wiser and thankful to be together. All those Edwardian settings for the play performance are redolent with that sense that in Philip Larkin's phrase about the First World War, never such innocence again. It's not just us to say the men who have to grow up.
There's something about age. Something about the time that has to mature. Of course, this is an argument that only can justify an aesthetic of lightness or emptiness or frippery by making it serve and ultimately serious philosophical points. That is one of the problems about the study of comedy. The play's fripperies become all the more poignant in the shadow of the trenches. The silliness of the plot is pointed up by the suddenness of the conclusion.
Perhaps we can only really justify comedy to ourselves by uncovering its occluded darkness. Certainly, the dominant trend in early 20th century scholarship on the play was to uncover a seriousness that was allegorical. This is the play those critics felt that cannot possibly be taken at face value. There must be something hidden deeper underneath the idea that Love's Labour's lost is a mystery to be solved.
It's very evident in its critical history introducing the play in the 1940s for the Ardern series. Richard David believed hopefully that the that tricky play had found its moment in the golden age of detective fiction as if it were a kind of poetic Agatha Christie. Many of the related interpretive attempts have focussed on the idea that the characters in the play are disguised or satirical portraits of real Elizabethans.
The title page of the 15 Ninety-eight Quarto indicates that the play was performed before Queen Elizabeth, the attempt to identify a courtly or coterie audience rather than the general audience of the public stage has been one way that critics have tried to understand or to construct its deeper meaning.
Francis Yates, for instance, wrote extensively about the play's links to the so-called School of Night, a phrase which exists which appears in Love's Labour's Lost, who were a group of atheistic free thinkers, gathered around Walter to rally, including George Chapman and the Italian thinker Giordano Bruno. Secich Yates suggests that Barrone is a portrait of Brunete.
She makes the unlikely name of the schoolmaster. Holofernes plays into an anagram for John Florio, the Italian translator, dictionary maker and transmitter of Montaigne's essay's, who clearly Shakespeare did know. She's one of many scholars to puzzle over the nonsense word in the play, honorific Carpin. The two did not tip us custards. Word has been variously translated to reveal secret messages in the play, including that it was really written by Francis Bacon.
In fact, this is an am I gonna read it again? It's an enjoyably long word. A bit like Mary Poppins. Supercalifragilistic all the places that impossibly long named Village in Wales that has a certain comic currency and works at the 15 nineties and beyond. But the argument here is that something important and topical has been lost in the play's transmission into the modern period.
That Love's Labour's Lost is a play peculiarly dependent on a knowing coterie audience and that these important resonances have been lost over historical time. In some ways, the specifics of these arguments are less important than their overall thrust that the play must be pointing to something beneath its elaborately decorative linguistic surface that this plotless. Yeah, that sprey is not sufficient. Not complete without a detailed political or interpersonal subtext.
So this is a play then apparently thought incomplete had at its time of publication and performance and supplemented by that companion play Love's Labour's One, which has been given an alternative method of completion or supplement through these busy scholarly allegorical readings. Somehow, the primary meaning of Love's Labour's Lost often looks to be somewhere other than the play itself.
This turns it into a helpful Shakespearean case study. Should we take our lead from the play's own self-conscious sense of formal structures and linguistic linguistic variation and thus give it a kind of formalised analysis? Is that what it wants? Does it want close reading and understanding of rhetoric, a kind of aesthetics of the detail? Or should we hear, after its apparent allusions outward to construct a contextual, allegorical or more topical one coded interpretations of Shakespeare?
Seemed to me generally pretty unconvincing, although some fun. But one last interpretation of the play is a kind of off key Romagna Clef does seem to me suggestive writing in 2014. Gillian Woods argues that there is something inescapably topical about the names in Love's Labour's Lost. The King of Navarre was the prominent Protestant figure in the French wars of religion during the fifteen eighties and the fifteen nineties.
The success of his French Protestant cause was regularly prayed for in Elizabethan liturgy. In July 15 93, Novar took the politically expedient decision to convert to Catholicism in order to secure Paris. Marlow's massacre at Paris, with which Love's Labour's lost might be said to be in a kind of extended into textual dialogue, had already depicted this topsy turvy religious violence and conversion on the stage.
The name Novar then was associated with oath breaking in a brutally sectarian context. And this revelant name is flanked in Shakespeare's play by numerous other names from the religious politics of the period Barrone longer veiled domain, Moth McHardy and boy are all names that have topical allusions and real life people to attach them to. It can't be a coincidence. And of course, the oath breaking that is so associated with the historical Novar is one of the play's own major themes.
Novar promises to abjure women circumstances immediately conspire to make this valley impossible to keep, and the play echoes with the repeated word words. Swear, foreswear, oath. Vow, promise, break. Searching for these words in the play reveals a network of illusions that keep the breaking of a promise. At the centre of Love's Labour's Lost. You remember the queen. The princess tells Novar she can't marry him.
Your oath. I will not trust. He is already established as somebody who is not who does not keep his word. I don't think that is to say that in some way, Love's Labour's Lost is an allegory of the French wars of religion. But there is something going on in this juxtaposition of this stylised and stylish plot and the violently political on a Mastech associations of Shakespeare's characters names. It's as if a slapstick plot in a modern film gave its goofy characters the names. Bush and Blair.
It would have a meaning, even if that meaning was something about the jarring of the illusion of the names in an apparently light-hearted context. Something similar is happening here. Either the allusion to the sectarian wars of religion deepens the play and adds a topical dimension. Or it points up the absolute absence of such dimensions in Love's Labour's Lost. That debate between substance and style that is intrinsic to the play. That's to say, is also intrinsic to its criticism.
So then we've been thinking about a play about which critics have struggled to know what to say, and perhaps that's the point of Love's Labour's lost. But given that this play is itself in danger of dropping out of the working repertoire of most readers and students of Shakespeare, including me, it's in danger of being itself lost. And not much looked for. Let's finish by trying to knit it back into the canon and suggest some of the ways it could connect with other Shakespearean plays.
Taking up the play's musicality and stylisation alongside, say, Romeo and Juliet Richard. The Second Midsummer Night's Dream could work. I think so that rather than seeing it as a disappointing romantic comedy, we view it as a formal structure which explores non naturalistic forms of speech and interaction in a ballistic or operatic way. Branagh's film was a terrible flop, but its premise?
Seeing the play's linguistic set pieces as musical numbers is a good one, I think, and one that could be extended elsewhere in the canon. There's a generic playfulness or uncertainty about the ending of this play that we tend to associate more with the so-called problem plays,
or at least with later comedies. It's interesting to see it done here. And the idea that verbal events are more important in Love's Labour's lost than active or gestural ones points this play towards the great dilemma of Hamlet. Similarly punctuated by linguistic happenings when we might expect that something real ought to be done. It's discussion of art, nature and life. And where these big Toppo overlap or are juxtaposed also anticipates the painterly qualities of the Winter's Tale.
A couple of last suggestions. There is a play within a play here, the pageant of the nine Worthy's that is very rarely put alongside the mouse trap and Pyramus and this big. But it's something that might enliven what sometimes a slightly tired debate about better theatricality in those two plays. And part of that, a play that play introduces in stage directions.
UNspeak in characters called Blackmore's silent but presumably highly visible outsiders that are their counterparts to Aaron and Othello, but almost never discussed in accounts of Shakespeare's treatment of race. So these elements are all themselves, I think, in danger of being lost when the play is routinely dismissed as lacking interest, maturity or psychological insight. Next week is the last of my lectures for this term, and I'll be talking about Timon of Athens.
And the central point I'm going to try and explore is what can we do about collaboration in this play? A play written with Thomas Middleton. How should that. How does that affect the way we read this play? And what are the ways you could extend that outwards in the canon? That's enough.