Customer Reviews

Love's Labor's Lost (Folger Shakespeare Library)

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The Folger Library editions are absolutely the best for scholarship, due to their extensive notation. My preference for Love's Labor's Lost is for the Pelican Books version, with sufficient but abreviated notation. The lighter notation gives wings to Shakespeare's most ponderous romantic comedy.

This is the story of three gentlemen who pledge themselves to three years of intellectual rigor in the court of the King of Navarre, who joins them in their sober enterprise. When the four of them determine that their scholarship must not be interupted by vice, the reader readily understands that their ill-considered commitments can only end in ribald hippocracy. Temptation arrives immediately in the form of the Princess of France and her three ladies in waiting.

The story moves along more or less predictably, though in a style that is almost a parody of Shakespeare. There are scores of allusions, silly, bawdy, and sharp, which apparently would have been recognized by the audience of the time, but which have not travelled well through the intervening four centuries. The result is five acts of mostly turgid iambic pentameter, interrupted by some lilting, if not particularly memorable lines. Such as when Dumaine and Berone start and finish one another's thoughts:

Dumaine: In reason nothing.
Berone: Something then in rhyme.
Dumaine: How follows that?
Berone: Fit in his place and time.

And here are some usages and allusions which you might need to pause to look up:

"misprision" = error
"woodcock" = stupidity
"festinately" = quickly
"dig you den" = give you good evening
"intellect" = purport
"jerks of invention" = strokes of wit
"in print" = to the letter

One of the few lines for which the book is known is, "Where fair is not, praise cannot mend the brow," meaning that compliments cannot make an unattractive person less so.

All in all, Love's Labor's Lost is unlikely to become anyone's favorite Shakespearean comedy. It is for the advanced reader who is willing to take the time to penetrate the subliminal and archaic humor. For that dedicated reader, however, it is worth the effort.

But the man pretending to be wise is the fool and the apparent fool the wiseman, and the those who most ardently wish to appear wise are shown to be the fools they are. A king pursuing wisdom scorns the company of women for three years, but finds he must spend time in the company of a wise woman despite his oath. A wiseman who plays the fool shares the oath and suffers along with the fools, though understands the nature of men and women better than the one seeking wisdom. The lady in question is by turns astounded and offended. In the end, the ladies whose honor is offended return the favor to the fools who offended them.

The Bard was on his game when he wrote this. Without even reading the surviving historical documents, I will wager that this play was well received by Queen Elizabeth. Despite the relavence to Shakespeare's current events, the appreciation for human nature makes this as relevant and humorous today as 400 years ago. They don't write them like they used to (except when they plaguarize the Bard of Avalon).

E.M. Van Court

Thank goodness for the Folger Shakespeare Library. For a Shakespeare class I recently purchased this book Love's Labor's Lost and it's perfect to carry to class, to underline (I don't recommend this) and to read for the rich pleasure of the Master's words. We saw a small clip of Ken Branagh's film, which he filmed as a musical, and we have been reading it aloud in class. I plan to visit Ashland Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where this play and Measure for Measure will also be performed. I had not read this play, nor seen it performed on stage so I have a lot to look forward to.

The King of Navarre is going to embark on three years of monk-like studying. The trouble in the play comes from the fact that the king doesn't do anything by halves, and when he says he wants to study, he means that he'll spend years avoiding ladies (distractions!) and scarcely eating or sleeping (hindrances!). His three attendant lords, Longaville, Dumaine, and Berowne are determined to sign on with him for this unnecessarily strict lifestyle. They swear upon their honor that they'll stay away from earthly comforts and shun the company of women. Naturally, women show up to complicate the vows: the Princess of France approaches with her three ladies-in-waiting who each conveniently know one of the King's lords. It's a crime against hospitality and civility for the King to keep the Princess from entering his court, but he has made a law he can't break, and then there's the complication that arises when all four men instantly fall in love with the visiting women.

Rather than hating the guys or swooning over the guys, the ladies are mainly amused by the whole thing. They can't take the men seriously while they are breaking an over-ambitious oath they were foolish to make in the first place. The King mistakenly thinks that he can ignore his duties of state and become a sequestered scholar, and his three lords support his plan basically because they have nothing better to do. So the girls don't view the guys as legitimate suitors, and it's reflected in their language. The guys are all smart, particularly Berowne, but the girls are head and shoulders witter than their male counterparts.

Language, and its uses and misuses, seems to be one of the big focuses of the play. The guys write sonnets and use love language to win the girls, but the girls can talk circles around them. The servant characters use malapropisms, mispronunciation jokes that are difficult for modern audiences to fully enjoy. For example, when Dull says he is a "fullborough," we don't automatically know that he's trying to say "thirdborough" but is getting the word wrong, so we have to just assume that the less educated characters are getting their words and meanings mixed up on a regular basis. Don Armando never stops talking, and his words are flowery and over-descriptive even within the context of a Shakespeare play, but for all his puffed-up silliness, he does deliver one of the more important questions in the play: "How can that be true love which is falsely attempted?" (Act I, Scene 2). Meaning, how can his adoration of Jaquenetta and the lords' adoration of the French ladies be in any way sincere or meaningful if they have to lie and break their promises in order to pursue their love interests? The play's answer is that they can't. In the end, love's labors are "lost" and the wooing doesn't result in any weddings.

This play isn't terribly popular in performance, partly because it doesn't have a romantic ending. The girls head back to France saying that the guys have zero obligation to them, but if they're truly serious about their intentions, they'll minister to the poor and sick for a solid year and then come see their sweethearts. When the play ends, it's doubtful if these four fellows can ever possibly stick to an agreement for a whole year. I actually like the ending just fine. The guys are charming, but while you don't want anything bad to happen to them, you don't really want them to achieve their objective either, because they will have gotten a reward without learning anything. Berowne (who's the stealth male lead of the play since he's wittier and more interesting than the King and has more lines), especially needs to learn a lesson because he despises his lady-love Rosaline. He delivers a monologued flurry of insults about her that show that though he's attracted to Rosaline, he also actively dislikes her and is disgusted by his own lovestruck behavior. Additionally, Berowne just doesn't understand why oath-breaking is wrong. He seemingly solves everybody's problems with this rhetoric: "Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves,/ Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths" (Act IV, Scene 3). Eh, that's not really how it works, Berowne. You don't just break promises when something cooler comes along.

The subject matter of Love's Labor's Lost seems very current. Most romantic comedy movies rely on misunderstandings, mistaken identity, and outright fibs to create their plots, but one thing that's always concerned me is how after the Big Reveal, the protagonist of these movies (either male or female) usually ends up telling their love interest to accept them despite their incessant deceptions. In a few cases this is justified, but often it's not. A whirlwind of lies isn't usually a demonstration of the depths of a character's love, but an indication of how far they're willing to go to obtain whatever they want. In Love's Labor's Lost, not only does deception not get you what you want, it makes you look bad for even trying.

This is one of WS's most original comedies, in which the King of Navarre is about to begin a three years' intellectual retirement to the countryside, along with three of his knights, a period of study and reflection. The four men have made solemn vows not to have any contact with women during those three years (to avoid "vice"). But of course at that precise moment there arrives an embassy headed by the Princess of France herself, plus her three ladies-in-waiting. Soon, sexual attraction and misunderstandings begin, all of them mediated by a crazy troupee composed of a mad Spanish gentleman and his page (where have I heard about one of those?), a teacher, a priest, a sheriff, and a buffoon. The main characters are Biron, one of the king's gentlemen, and Rosalin, lady to the queen. To them belong the most poetic, cynical, and sarcastic passages, adn their exchanges exemplify the inevitable misunderstandings present in any love relationship. Biron's interventions are a masterpiece of the masculine interpretation of love and attraction as basically visual phenomena, while Rosaline incarnates the feminine resistance to that puerile perception. The ridiculousness of which is exposed in the scene where the guys, oddly disguised as Russians, court the girls, who in turn have exchanged identities. Boys, of course, make fools of themselves. This is perhaps Shakespeare's only comedy without a happy ending, and to me that is a plus.

As in the rest of his comedies, plot is the least important. What matters most are the characters' parliaments and the revelation, through them, of their personalities and of billiant glimpses on human nature. I enjoyed it pretty well.

Barbara Mowat's work is always exceptional. For students wanting to appreciate Sakespeare, to really appreciate the man and his work, it's a shame that she left the classroom, but her work in these editonss potentially helps a much larger, much broader audience to understand appreciate the Bard.

Trouble is, there's not much to understand and appreciate in this play. Light hearted comedy it is, but it is not his best, and even Barbara, at her editing and expository best, can't overcome that.

Still, however, it is Shakespeare, and that alone give it much redeeming quality.