Whether or not Shakespeare specifically knew la Primaudaye’s book, his starting point for Love’s Labour’s Lost was the same: a French academy set up as a retreat from historical, political, and sexual engagement. The names of Shakespeare’s four young men were all well-known from the French wars. The play seems to have been written not long after the King of Navarre converted to Catholicism and took the French throne. “Paris is worth a mass,” he was reputed to have said. Biron, or Berowne, was the name of Navarre’s marshal, who had fought in the siege of Rouen alongside the Earl of Essex and a contingent of English troops. Longaville was a supporter of Navarre, and the Duke de Mayenne (Dumaine) a former opponent who became an ally following a truce in 1595.
Shakespeare imagines a group of courtly men of Navarre who share these names. He removes them from the world of politics and religious faction, and places them in a “little academe.” The king’s first speech is peppered with military language—“brave conquerors,” “war,” “huge army”—as if to say, “Now that we have won the war, let us win the peace by devoting ourselves to learning and Stoic detachment.” The premise of the exercise is that there is no place for love in intellectual life. Shakespeare, who did not of course spend three years in the all-male environment of an Oxford or Cambridge college, clearly thought that this was nonsense and set about mocking the idea. Love, he proposes instead, is at the center of intellectual life. The really interesting task is not to reject it, but to find the appropriate language to express it.
LOVE’S PHILOSOPHY
Dumaine is happy to sign up to the King of Navarre’s contract: he will mortify the flesh and be dead “to love, to wealth, to pomp,” and live only “in philosophy.” But Berowne immediately expresses a reservation: he agrees to sign up to the three years’ program of academic study but has grave doubts about the additional “strict observances”: to fast, to sleep but three hours a night, and “not to see a woman” for the entire three-year term. For Berowne, these are “barren tasks,” devoid of life. The essence of Berowne’s criticism of the king’s project is that the needs of the body—for food, for sleep, for sexual fulfillment—should not be denied. By his account, the pursuit of learning and fame are all very well, but not at the expense of natural instincts, “For every man with his affects is born, / Not by might mastered but by special grace.” The Stoic ambition of keeping the passions fully under control is an illusion. Only the “special grace” of divine intervention can prevent us from being the embodied, desiring human that we are. Divine intervention does not occur in the real world: as Shakespeare put it in another of his most thought-filled comedies, All’s Well That Ends Well, “miracles are past.”
In the absence of miracles, the “affects,” the passions, intrude into the academe. The unfolding action proves Berowne right. Wisdom, as so often in Shakespeare, comes from the mouth of a fool: the clownish Costard’s irrefutable statement that “it is the manner of a man to speak to a woman” comes to the core of the play. The presence of Jaquenetta the dairymaid is a reminder of the inescapable human body. The question of her pregnancy dominates the subplot and her very name—a female version of “Jaques,” which was pronounced “jakes”—conjures up a bodily function that is alluded to in the pageant of the Nine Worthies: Alexander the Great is imagined sitting not on a royal throne but on a “close-stool.” Ingesting and expelling are among the actions that make us human, whatever the Stoic philosopher may say about the primacy of “reason.”
Love’s Labour’s Lost is a play packed with wit, elegance, philosophical reflection, and filthy jokes. For Shakespeare, love meant immersing oneself in each of these four dimensions. The king turns his court into a little academe in the hope of finding philosophical wisdom. It comes in the very form that he has renounced: women, who prove themselves a great deal more intelligent and sensible than the men. The philosophical lesson that has to be learned is that “women’s eyes” have it in them to be “the books, the arts, the academes, / That show, contain and nourish all the world.” But the male courtly lovers make a double mistake. Having foolishly renounced love, they then foolishly embrace a false idea of love: they begin praising their ladies’ eyes (and other parts) in the affected language of the courtly poetic tradition that goes back to Petrarch in high Renaissance Italy. They write formulaic sonnets and love songs; they dance a ridiculous masque. The ladies have to teach them their further lesson, namely that those “Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise, / Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation, / Figures pedantical” may also be an impediment to love. They have to learn a plainer language that can cope with the harsh realities of life, including death. The men are accordingly not granted the customary ending of comedy: instead of the play concluding with multiple marriages, the courtiers are sentenced to a year’s community service, after which the ladies will assess the situation. That assessment presumably occurred in the lost sequel, Love’s Labour’s Won.
Berowne is the wittiest character in the play, but the princess is the wisest. “I hear your grace hath sworn out house-keeping,” she says to her opposite number, the king. “House-keeping” simultaneously means domestic business (Latin res familiares, “familiar things,” everyday worldly affairs) and “hospitality.” The renunciation of the former in the name of higher philosophical contemplation is not only unrealistic, since bodily needs are not to be denied, but it is also an abnegation of that duty to be hospitable which is a strong moral and social obligation in both classical and Christian thought. The princess concludes that, while it would be a sin for the men to break their solemn oath, it would accordingly be a more “deadly sin” to keep it.
Insight of a similar kind comes from one of the play’s several fools. “Society,” proclaims Nathaniel, citing a piece of proverbial wisdom, “is the happiness of life.” Whereas the play begins with a neo-Stoical aspiration to philosophical detachment, this suggests a movement toward the values of a different ancient philosopher, Epicurus, who called his school the “garden” and who argued that friendship—embodied here in the image of the “society” of a hospitable table—is the most important of all human virtues. Nathaniel’s is a fitting motto for that most communal of cultural events, the theatrical performance.
ABOUT THE TEXT
Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).
But because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, editors also have to make decisions about the relative authority of the early printed editions. Half of the sum of his plays only appeared posthumously, in the elaborately produced First Folio text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press by Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. The other half had appeared in print in his lifetime, in the more compact and cheaper form of “Quarto” editions, some of which reproduced good quality texts, others of which were to a greater or lesser degree garbled and error strewn.
Generations of editors have adopted a “pick and mix” approach, moving between Quarto and Folio readings, making choices on either aesthetic or bibliographic grounds, sometimes creating a composite text that Shakespeare never actually wrote. Not until the 1980s did editors follow the logic of what ought to have been obvious to anyone who works in the theater: that the Quarto and Folio texts often represent discrete moments in the life of a script, that plays change in the cours
e of rehearsal, production, and revival, and that many of the major variants between the early printed versions almost certainly reflect this process.
If you look at printers’ handbooks from the age of Shakespeare, you quickly discover that one of the first rules was that, whenever possible, compositors were recommended to set their type from existing printed books rather than manuscripts. This was the age before mechanical typesetting, when each individual letter had to be picked out by hand from the compositor’s case and placed on a stick (upside down and back to front) before being laid on the press. It was an age of murky rush-light and of manuscripts written in a secretary hand that had dozens of different, hard-to-decipher forms. Printers’ lives were a lot easier when they were reprinting existing books rather than struggling with handwritten copy. Easily the quickest way to have created the First Folio would have been simply to reprint those eighteen plays that had already appeared in Quarto and only work from manuscript on the other eighteen.
But that is not what happened. Whenever Quartos were used, as in the case of Love’s Labour’s Lost, playhouse “promptbooks” were also consulted and stage directions copied in from them. This means that Folio Love’s Labour’s Lost is superior to Quarto in some of its exit direction and speech headings, though Quarto is superior to Folio in some of its individual readings of words and phrases.
With several major plays where a well-printed Quarto was available, the Folio printers were instructed to work from an alternative, playhouse-derived manuscript. This meant that the whole process of producing the first complete Shakespeare took months, even years, longer than it might have done. But for the men overseeing the project, John Hemings and Henry Condell, friends and fellow actors who had been remembered in Shakespeare’s will, the additional labor and cost were worth the effort for the sake of producing an edition that was close to the practice of the theater. They wanted all the plays in print so that people could, as they wrote in their prefatory address to the reader, “read him and again and again,” but they also wanted “the great variety of readers” to work from texts that were close to the theater life for which Shakespeare originally intended them. For this reason, the RSC Shakespeare, in both Complete Works and individual volumes, uses the Folio as base text wherever possible. Significant Quarto variants are, however, noted in the Textual Notes.
The following notes highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition:
Lists of Parts are supplied in the First Folio for only six plays, not including Love’s Labour’s Lost, so the list here is editorially supplied. Capitals indicate that part of the name which is used for speech headings in the script (thus “Don Adriano de ARMADO”).
Locations are provided by the Folio for only two plays, of which Love’s Labour’s Lost is not one. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations (“another part of the park”). Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes, where they are given at the beginning of each scene where the imaginary location is different from the one before. In the case of Love’s Labour’s Lost, the entire action is set in the king’s park.
Act and Scene Divisions were provided in the Folio in a much more thoroughgoing way than in the Quartos. Sometimes, however, they were erroneous or omitted; corrections and additions supplied by editorial tradition are indicated by square brackets. Five-act division is based on a classical model, and act breaks provided the opportunity to replace the candles in the indoor Blackfriars playhouse, which the King’s Men used after 1608, but Shakespeare did not necessarily think in terms of a five-part structure of dramatic composition. The Folio convention is that a scene ends when the stage is empty. Nowadays, partly under the influence of film, we tend to consider a scene to be a dramatic unit that ends with either a change of imaginary location or a significant passage of time within the narrative. Shakespeare’s fluidity of composition accords well with this convention, so in addition to act and scene numbers we provide a running scene count in the right margin at the beginning of each new scene, in the typeface used for editorial directions. Where there is a scene break caused by a momentary bare stage, but the location does not change and extra time does not pass, we use the convention running scene continues. There is inevitably a degree of editorial judgment in making such calls, but the system is very valuable in suggesting the pace of the plays.
Speakers’ Names are often inconsistent in Folio. We have regularized speech headings but retained an element of deliberate inconsistency in entry directions, in order to give the flavor of Folio. Thus ARMADO is always so-called in his speech headings, but is sometimes “Braggart” in entry directions.
Verse is indicated by lines that do not run to the right margin and by capitalization of each line. The Folio printers sometimes set verse as prose, and vice versa (either out of misunderstanding or for reasons of space). We have silently corrected in such cases, although in some instances there is ambiguity, in which case we have leaned toward the preservation of Folio layout. Folio sometimes uses contraction (“turnd” rather than “turned”) to indicate whether or not the final “-ed” of a past participle is sounded, an area where there is variation for the sake of the five-beat iambic pentameter rhythm. We use the convention of a grave accent to indicate sounding (thus “turnèd” would be two syllables), but would urge actors not to overstress. In cases where one speaker ends with a verse half line and the next begins with the other half of the pentameter, editors since the late eighteenth century have indented the second line. We have abandoned this convention, since the Folio does not use it, and nor did actors’ cues in the Shakespearean theater. An exception is made when the second speaker actively interrupts or completes the first speaker’s sentence.
Spelling is modernized, but older forms are very occasionally maintained where necessary for rhythm or aural effect.
Punctuation in Shakespeare’s time was as much rhetorical as grammatical. “Colon” was originally a term for a unit of thought in an argument. The semicolon was a new unit of punctuation (some of the Quartos lack them altogether). We have modernized punctuation throughout, but have given more weight to Folio punctuation than many editors, since, though not Shakespearean, it reflects the usage of his period. In particular, we have used the colon far more than many editors: it is exceptionally useful as a way of indicating how many Shakespearean speeches unfold clause by clause in a developing argument that gives the illusion of enacting the process of thinking in the moment. We have also kept in mind the origin of punctuation in classical times as a way of assisting the actor and orator: the comma suggests the briefest of pauses for breath, the colon a middling one and a full stop or period a longer pause. Semicolons, by contrast, belong to an era of punctuation that was only just coming in during Shakespeare’s time and that is coming to an end now: we have accordingly only used them where they occur in our copy texts (and not always then). Dashes are sometimes used for parenthetical interjections where the Folio has brackets. They are also used for interruptions and changes in train of thought. Where a change of addressee occurs within a speech, we have used a dash preceded by a full stop (or occasionally another form of punctuation). Often the identity of the respective addressees is obvious from the context. When it is not, this has been indicated in a marginal stage direction.
Entrances and Exits are fairly thorough in Folio, which has accordingly been followed as faithfully as possible. Where characters are omitted or corrections are necessary, this is indicated by square brackets (e.g. “[and Attendants]”). Exit is sometimes silently normalized to Exeunt and Manet anglicized to remains. We trust Folio positioning of entrances and exits to a greater degree than most editors.
Editorial Stage Directions such as stage business, asides, indications of addressee and of characters’ position on the gallery stage are only used sparingly in
Folio. Other editions mingle directions of this kind with original Folio and Quarto directions, sometimes marking them by means of square brackets. We have sought to distinguish what could be described as directorial interventions of this kind from Folio-style directions (either original or supplied) by placing in the right margin in a smaller typeface. There is a degree of subjectivity about which directions are of which kind, but the procedure is intended as a reminder to the reader and the actor that Shakespearean stage directions are often dependent upon editorial inference alone and are not set in stone. We also depart from editorial tradition in sometimes admitting uncertainty and thus printing permissive stage directions, such as an Aside? (often a line may be equally effective as an aside or a direct address—it is for each production or reading to make its own decision) or a may exit or a piece of business placed between arrows to indicate that it may occur at various different moments within a scene.
Line Numbers are editorial, for reference and to key the explanatory and textual notes.
Explanatory Notes explain allusions and gloss obsolete and difficult words, confusing phraseology, occasional major textual cruxes, and so on. Particular attention is given to non-standard usage, bawdy innuendo, and technical terms (e.g. legal and military language). Where more than one sense is given, commas indicate shades of related meaning, slashes alternative or double meanings.
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