Love’s Labor’s Lost, along with the need for those handy plot-mapping worksheets we had in elementary school

Due to the travails of the holiday season, the four of us met a little late to talk about this play. We were due to finish reading the play on Christmas Eve. Typically, we discuss by the end of the week, but what with visiting families, road trips, and New Year’s Eve parties, we couldn’t find a time until three weeks after we supposedly finished. As it was, I read up to Act IV, Scene 3 before Christmas… and then read the rest the day before we met. Thus, I had a difficult time picking out particularly interesting bits from this one, but I’ll do my best.

During that last reading session—amidst the seemingly endless dialogue about who loves whom, my sidelined pondering about how I should feel about the treatment of women in the play, and the realization that very few significant events have taken place and I’m nearly to the end of the play—a frightening thought crossed my mind.  I hope that this play wasn’t the Twilight of the early seventeenth century. Wouldn’t that be terrible? That we revere as a father of the English language a man who produced something akin to poorly-written, misogynistic teenage vampire literature? And we think it’s great now merely because he uses words like “sirrah” and “i'” (short for “in,” of course)?

In order to say and write something sensible about this work, I’ll just have to suspend my doubts. All four of us agreed that there isn’t much plot. We could summarize what actually happens somewhat like this:

1. King and three buddies take rather unreasonable oath not to do anything fun, including sleep, and just study for three years.
2. Uh-oh! Princess and her three friends arrive to see king (sadly, must camp outside as they aren’t allowed in the court due to oath).
3. All four men fall in love with all four women but are embarrassed about it in front of each other and also (very slightly) perturbed that they took an oath not to have anything to do with women for four years.
4. Men say, “Tough!” to oath and decide to woo women.
5. Women will have nothing to do with it, but men keep trying.
6. Princess’s father dies and her whole party must go back to France. Women tell men that if they’re good for a year, they have a chance.

I’m not leaving a lot out. Here is much the same thing written into a plot diagram. Note that I didn’t run out of boxes.

I just realized that I left the “conflict” box (oval, rather) empty. I won’t fix it now, though, because it is difficult to get words to fit right in Paint. Use your intelligence, or, if that fails, your imagination.

The point is: if we decide that Shakespeare is actually an at least passable writer, why would he write an entire play that could be told in the space of  a children’s board book? The key to answering this question lies in all that stuff that makes the play look like it’s substantive: all those words.

Language is a huge part of this play. Liz remarked that we might have gotten more out of it had we seen rather than read it, and I think that’s true. Of course, as twenty-first-century readers, we understand more when we read out of our annotated editions, but it seems that the vast majority of the play consists of witty banter that is best perceived and appreciated when spoken. Almost every character is full of words, insults, and retorts, with the exception of some very minor characters like Dull and Mote; even Costard the clown has a surprising store of puns and euphemisms. This constant play with words gives the illusion that something is actually happening in the play, which, as we reviewed, isn’t true. There are some categories of banter according to who is providing it. The men are often insensitive; Holofernes and Nathaniel use it to exclude; and the women tend to be encouraging but will bite back when necessary. Especially visible in the women’s use, Shakespeare implies that language, no matter how brilliant or flourishing, isn’t always good. Biron (as spelled in my edition but more commonly as “Berowne”), the most vicious of the men with his words, has a special penance to pay in order to win Rosaline: while the others must merely wait a year in solitude, Biron must spend his year with hospital patients—clearly not an appropriate venue for his degrading sort of wit. When he learns to use his speech with conscience and kindness, he will make a suitable groom.

The case of Holofernes and Nathaniel provides another angle of the language/action issue. Until the end, these two literally don’t do anything. Biron can at least say that he’s written some poems, spied on his friends, etc., but the pedants do nothing but talk (and, for the most part, I can’t remember anything they talk about). Anne Barton, in her introduction to the play in the Riverside edition of Shakespeare’s works, points out that Holofernes is the end result of what the king wants to do at the beginning of the play, that is, study almost without ceasing. Holofernes has a great deal of knowledge, certainly, but he can hardly relate to anyone but the almost-as-learned curate and seems to have no hobbies or, for that matter, joy. I can’t imagine what sort of woman would want to marry him, either. With this example, the play suggests that loving learning and especially loving language so much that it excludes everything else reaps the reward of a life void of many very important things: family, true friendship, and charity, to name a few.

To get back to the original point—why hardly anything happens in Love’s Labor’s Lost—if we consider the relationship between the lack of the plot and the proliferation of dialogue, we see that it comments on our tendency to cover up voids, especially voids of our own making. There are a few voids that I see in this play, the least of which is the very real space between the king’s court and the princess’s tent. We can infer a void in the original oath: surely if the king and his men had something better to do—say, spend time with their wives and children—they wouldn’t want to give all that up for three years. The men’s love also reveals itself as empty when they go to court the women. None realize that the women have switched favors and are talking to the wrong man, and I would suspect a person genuinely in love to recognize the voice of his or her paramour and to have some idea of what he or she looks like even without the face. But they think they’re doing okay in part because they have fancy speeches and declarations of love to win the ladies; never mind which lady, as such words should work equally well on each of them. Shakespeare invites us to compare these interchangeable vows with the women’s descriptions of what each of the men is like at the beginning of Act II. When substance is lacking, humans often talk to fill up the space and make it look real. The whole play, in a sense, has been lacking, and that is perhaps the reason that this comedy ends with an unusually marriage-free resolution.

Next week we will take a look at Hamlet, a play so full of everything that we may not know where to start.

As an item of interest related only loosely to this post, I searched in vain for a plot diagram of Twilight. How can no one have done that yet? (I am not going to; sorry.) But I did find a diagram on someone’s blog that includes the binary of comedy/tragedy (pertinent to Shakespeare and thus pertinent to this blog). Clicking on it goes to the blog from whence it came. I did not read more than two paragraphs of the “essay” because it seemed to take Twilight as literature.

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