Love's Labour's Lost

Summary

Love's Labour's Lost opens with a young king making a promise he cannot keep. Ferdinand of Navarre persuades three lords, Berowne, Longaville and Dumaine, to sign a statute turning his court into "a little academe": for three years they will study, fast one day a week, sleep three hours a night, and see no woman. Berowne signs under protest, warning that the oath forgets the nature of youth, and within the same scene it is discovered that the Princess of France is on her way to Navarre on a diplomatic errand about Aquitaine and a debt of a hundred thousand crowns. The King lodges her in a field outside his gates rather than break his decree, and the ladies treat this pedantic hospitality with the scorn it invites. A comic underplot keeps pace with the courtly one. Don Adriano de Armado, a Spanish braggart whose letters are swollen with ornament, loves the dairymaid Jaquenetta, as does the clown Costard. Holofernes the schoolmaster and Sir Nathaniel the curate trade Latin tags and admire each other's learning, while the constable Dull understands nothing. Misdelivered letters bring the two plots together. The great scene is Act IV, Scene iii. Each lord, thinking himself alone, reads a love poem aloud while the others hide and listen, until Berowne's own sonnet to Rosaline is brought in by Jaquenetta and Costard and all four stand convicted. Berowne then argues them out of their oath: women's eyes, he says, are the true books and academes, and it is "religion to be thus forsworn" because charity fulfils the law. The lords woo in the disguise of Muscovites; the ladies, warned, exchange favours and mock them into confusion. The rustics present the Nine Worthies, and the noble audience heckles them until Holofernes rebukes their bad manners. Then the messenger Marcadé enters with news that the Princess's father is dead, and the play turns. The ladies will not make a "world-without-end bargain" in an hour. The King must spend a year in a hermitage; Berowne must spend a twelvemonth jesting to the sick in a hospital, to learn whether his wit can serve anyone in pain. Berowne admits that the ending is not "like an old play": Jack hath not Jill. Two songs, of spring's cuckoo and winter's owl, close a comedy that defers its weddings and asks what speech and learning are for. The library attaches the full public-domain text (Project Gutenberg #1510), so every line cited here can be checked against the play itself.

Plot or Argument

• Act I: Navarre signs away the world

  Ferdinand proclaims his academe and the lords subscribe to its statutes. Berowne mocks the scheme in rhyme ("Light seeking light doth light of light beguile") yet signs, and at once points out that the Princess's embassy makes the clause against women unkeepable. Dull brings Armado's letter accusing Costard of being found with Jaquenetta; Armado confesses to his page Moth that he too is in love with her.

• Act II: An embassy left standing in the field

  The Princess arrives with Rosaline, Maria, Katharine and the old lord Boyet. Because of his oath the King receives her outside his court, and their dispute over Aquitaine and the hundred thousand crowns is postponed for want of documents. Each lord privately asks Boyet the name of one lady, and Boyet tells the Princess that the King is already infected with love.

• Act III: Letters given to the wrong hands

  Armado frees Costard to carry a letter to Jaquenetta; Berowne, in a soliloquy against Cupid, pays Costard to carry a sonnet to Rosaline. The clown exchanges the two letters, setting up both the comic reading of Armado's prose before the Princess and the exposure of Berowne.

• Act IV: Four sonnets overheard

  The ladies hunt deer and laugh at Armado's misdirected letter; Holofernes and Nathaniel parse Berowne's misdirected verses. In Scene iii the King, Longaville and Dumaine each read their poems while the others hide, Berowne mocking all three from above until Jaquenetta brings his own sonnet. Exposed, he delivers the long speech that releases them all from the oath.

• Act V: Masks, Worthies and a messenger

  The lords visit the ladies disguised as Russians and are outwitted by exchanged favours; Berowne forswears "Taffeta phrases" for plain speech. The pageant of the Nine Worthies dissolves in heckling and in the quarrel between Armado and Costard over Jaquenetta. Marcadé announces the King of France's death; the ladies impose a year's trial on each suitor, and the play ends with the songs of Spring and Winter.

Characters

• Ferdinand, King of Navarre, founder of the academe

  Proposes the three-year vow out of a desire for lasting fame and is the first of the lords to be overheard breaking it. The Princess sets him a year in a hermitage as the test of his love.

• Berowne, lord attending the King

  The play's sharpest tongue, who sees through the vow from the beginning but signs it anyway; author of its great defence of love and its renunciation of fine phrases. Rosaline sends him to a hospital to learn whether his wit can help the suffering.

• Longaville and Dumaine, lords attending the King

  Eager signatories of the oath who fall in love with Maria and Katharine and are each caught reading their verses aloud in Act IV, Scene iii.

• The Princess of France, royal ambassador

  Comes to negotiate over Aquitaine and keeps her judgment throughout the courtship games; on news of her father's death she becomes queen and turns the lords' wooing into a year of probation.

• Rosaline, lady attending the Princess

  Berowne's equal in wit, who knows his reputation for wounding mockery and demands that he test it against "the speechless sick".

• Maria and Katharine, ladies attending the Princess

  Partners in the ladies' counter-plot of exchanged favours; each defers her answer to her suitor for a twelvemonth.

• Boyet, old lord attending the Princess

  Go-between and courtly wit who overhears the lords' plan to come disguised and warns the ladies.

• Don Adriano de Armado, fantastical Spaniard

  A braggart of inflated vocabulary who loves the dairymaid Jaquenetta; plays Hector in the pageant and is shamed by Costard's revelation about her.

• Moth, Armado's page

  A small boy quicker than his master, who plays Hercules in the Worthies.

• Costard, clown

  Arrested for consorting with Jaquenetta and employed as letter-carrier by both Armado and Berowne, whose letters he mixes up.

• Holofernes, schoolmaster

  A pedant who loves Latin tags and alliteration, plays Judas Maccabaeus, and alone answers the lords' mockery with dignity.

• Sir Nathaniel, curate

  Holofernes's admiring companion, who plays Alexander and is laughed off the stage.

• Marcadé, messenger from France

  Enters late in Act V with news of the King of France's death and changes the play's key.

Lessons

• Vows that ignore human nature

  The King's statute treats the body and the affections as enemies to be outlawed rather than ordered. Berowne warns at the signing that the Princess’s coming makes the oath unkeepable, and later that "abstinence engenders maladies". The play does not mock study or self-denial as such; it mocks a rash vow made for fame and imposed without regard for duty, hospitality or the facts at hand.

  • What does the King hope to gain by the academe, according to his opening speech about fame and "cormorant devouring time"?
  • Why does Berowne sign an oath he has just argued against? Is that worse than refusing it?
  • How does Scripture's counsel about rash vows (Ecclesiastes 5:2-5) bear on the lords' situation?

• Berowne's argument for breaking an oath

  In Act IV, Scene iii Berowne claims that the lords "lose our oaths to find ourselves" and that "charity itself fulfils the law." The speech is dazzling and partly true, because the oath was foolish; but it also borrows the language of Romans 13 to excuse what the lords want to do anyway. Students should admire the rhetoric and test its reasoning.

  • List the steps in Berowne's argument. Which are sound and which are sleight of hand?
  • Is a foolish oath binding? Compare Jephthah in Judges 11 with the lords of Navarre.
  • Why does the King answer the speech with "Saint Cupid, then"? What has Berowne actually persuaded him of?

• Courtesy to those who perform badly

  The noble audience at the Nine Worthies pelts Holofernes, Nathaniel and Armado with jokes. The Princess had urged that "That sport best pleases that doth least know how," and Holofernes answers the lords with a line that stings: "This is not generous, not gentle, not humble." Wit that humiliates the weak is shown to be a failure of gentility.

  • Why does the Princess want to see the pageant even though she expects it to be clumsy?
  • Who behaves more nobly in this scene, the schoolmaster or the lords? Use the text.
  • When is laughing at another person's performance fair, and when is it cruelty?

• A comedy interrupted by death

  Marcadé's entrance turns games into grief. The ladies decline to make "a world-without-end bargain" in an hour, and each man receives a year of trial: a hermitage for the King, a hospital for Berowne. Rosaline's rule that "A jest's prosperity lies in the ear / Of him that hears it" makes his wit answerable to the suffering. The unfinished ending asks whether words and love can survive testing.

  • Why does Shakespeare refuse the expected weddings? What would be lost if the play ended with them?
  • What is Rosaline trying to cure in Berowne, and why does she choose a hospital?
  • Berowne says the ending is "too long for a play." What does he mean, and is the delay a punishment or a mercy?

Context

Love's Labour's Lost belongs to the early or middle 1590s, the years of Shakespeare's sonnets, Venus and Adonis and Romeo and Juliet, when sonneteering and euphuistic prose were fashionable at court. Its lords bear names close to those of real followers of Henri of Navarre (the Maréchal de Biron, the Duc de Longueville and the Duc de Mayenne), and the Princess's embassy has been compared with Catherine de' Medici's visit to Henri at Nérac in 1578, though the play is not a historical chronicle and its parallels are loose.

Composition

The usual dating is c. 1594-1595. The first surviving quarto (1598) calls itself "newly corrected and augmented" and says the play was presented before the Queen "this last Christmas," which suggests a court performance in 1597 and possibly an earlier printing now lost. Francis Meres listed it in 1598, alongside a "Love's Labour's Won" that has not survived. No single narrative source is known; the plot appears to be Shakespeare's own.

Reception

The play was printed in the 1623 Folio but was rarely staged after the seventeenth century; critics long found its topical jokes and wordplay obscure. Harley Granville-Barker's preface (1927) and Peter Brook's Stratford production (1946) restored its reputation, and later productions have often stressed the darkening of the final scene. Shakespeare's plays occupy volumes 26 and 27 of the second edition of the Great Books of the Western World (1990).

Comparisons

• Much Ado About Nothing

  Berowne and Rosaline are first sketches of Benedick and Beatrice: a scoffer at love and a lady who matches him jest for jest. Much Ado lets its pair marry after a crisis of slander; Love's Labour's Lost sends its scoffer to a hospital first.

• A Midsummer Night's Dream

  Both plays end with amateurs performing for a noble audience. Theseus graciously defends the mechanicals' Pyramus and Thisbe, while Navarre's lords jeer at the Nine Worthies and are rebuked by Holofernes, so the two scenes give opposite pictures of aristocratic courtesy.

• As You Like It

  Rosalind, like Rosaline and the Princess, takes charge of a courtship and makes her lover prove himself. In Arden the testing is playful and ends in weddings; in Navarre it becomes a year of penance imposed after a death.

• The Praise of Folly

  Erasmus satirizes the pedants, grammarians and quibbling scholars who mistake learning for wisdom; Holofernes, Nathaniel and the King's academe dramatize the same folly, though Shakespeare lets his schoolmaster keep a dignity the lords lack.

Quotes

Medical Lens

Medicine in this play works chiefly as metaphor and as the setting of its final penance, but the metaphors are precise and Elizabethan. Armado's letter uses humoral language for melancholy and prescribes fresh air as "physic"; Berowne jokes that Dumaine's love-fever could be let out by incision, as in bloodletting; and he likens the lovestruck lords to plague houses marked with "Lord have mercy on us" and the spots called "the Lord's tokens." Rosaline's sentence sends Berowne to an hospital for a year to entertain the sick and dying, which raises a real question about the place of humour in care of the suffering. These are readings of imagery, not a medical theme the play develops at length.

• Act I, Scene 1

  Armado's letter to the King describes himself as besieged with melancholy and commending "the black-oppressing humour" to the physic of the park's healthy air; a parody of humoral self-diagnosis.

  Melancholia Depression Humoral Medicine
• Act I, Scene 2

  Armado asks Moth what it signifies when a man of great spirit grows melancholy, and the page mocks the fashionable equation of melancholy with greatness.

  Melancholia Depression
• Act IV, Scene 3

  Dumaine calls his love a fever in the blood; Berowne answers that incision would let it out in saucers, a joke on therapeutic bleeding.

  Bloodletting Humoral Medicine
• Act IV, Scene 3

  Berowne argues that fasting at the lords' age breeds illness and that love quickens every bodily sense, a comic physiology of the passions.

  Mind Body
• Act V, Scene 2

  Berowne writes the plague-house inscription on the three lords, saying they caught the infection from the ladies' eyes and bear the plague tokens.

  Plague Epidemic
• Act V, Scene 2

  Rosaline imposes a twelvemonth of visiting the speechless sick and groaning patients, to see whether wit can make the pained smile; Berowne protests that mirth cannot reach a soul in agony.

  Nursing Caregiving Pain

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Write one of Berowne's days in the hospital, six months into Rosaline's twelvemonth. Show a jest that fails and one that helps, and let him discover why.

• Poetry

  Write a Shakespearean sonnet of the kind the lords read aloud in Act IV, Scene iii, then write a second sonnet in "russet yeas and honest kersey noes" on the same subject. Explain which is more honest.

• Classroom

  Stage Act IV, Scene iii with four readers and hiding places around the room. Afterward, discuss how the comedy depends on who knows what, and when.

• Essay

  Holofernes says the lords were "not generous, not gentle, not humble." Using the Nine Worthies scene and the ending, argue whether the lords have learned anything by the final exit.

Further Reading

• Prefaces to Shakespeare, Harley Granville-Barker

  His 1927 preface on this play argued for its theatrical life and helped return it to the stage.

• A Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare

  The closest companion play: courtiers, lovers and a clumsy pageant before a noble audience.

• Astrophil and Stella, Sir Philip Sidney

  The sonnet sequence that set the fashion for the courtly love poetry the lords imitate.

• Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, John Lyly

  The ornate prose style that Armado and the lords' "Taffeta phrases" parody.