Lines 512-735: Costard arrives to ask whether the pageant may begin and, despite the king's concern that the entertainment will "shame" them in front of the ladies, Berowne sends Costard to fetch the actors. He argues that " 'tis some policy / To have one show worse than the king's and his company." The pageant, as a performance within a performance, draws our attention to issues of theater and acting and consequently to the disguise and artifice in the wider play. The "dual audience," like the one in Act 4 Scene 3, reinforces the preoccupation with sight/observation. Comedy is generated not only by the ineptitude of the performance but also by the comments of the onstage "audience," who interrupt and mock the actors (although the princess tries to be kind and encouraging). The performance is interrupted by Costard announcing that Jaquenetta is pregnant by Armado, who denies it and challenges Costard. As they prepare to fight, however, he changes his mind, explaining that he has no shirt on and cannot disrobe. As they wrangle, a messenger, Monsieur Marcade, arrives from the French court.
Lines 736-903: Marcade tells the princess that her father has died, creating a moment of tragedy that seems in tension with the comic conventions of the play so far. She tells Boyet that they will leave that night, and the king tries to persuade her to remain. His language, however, is too complicated, causing Berowne to comment that "plain words best pierce the ear of grief" and to explain that they are all in love. The princess says that they all believed that the men only courted them as "bombast and as lining to the time," and thus met their loves in the same vein "like a merriment." The men claim that their "letters" and their "looks" "showed much more than jest" and the king urges, "at the latest minute of the hour," that the ladies grant them their loves. This reinforces the sense of the power of time, one of many motifs in this final scene that evoke those in Act 1 Scene 1, creating a cyclical structure to the play. The princess' reference to "frosts and fasts" that might "nip" the love of the king, for example, echoes the king's comment about the "sneaping frost" of Berowne's wit at the beginning of the play, and there are many references to sight/observation. Abstinence is also returned to, as the princess agrees that she will marry the king, but only if he will wait one year in "austere insociable life" to test his love for her. The other ladies impose similar conditions of waiting on their suitors: Rosaline, for example, instructs Berowne to use his wit to entertain "the speechless sick." In some ways, then, this cyclical nature pattern reflects the careful structuring throughout, but the balance is disturbed by a lack of resolution that undermines the traditional comedy genre, as Berowne comments: "Our wooing doth not end like an old play: / Jack hath not Jill."
Lines 904-954: Armado returns to take his leave, having vowed to Jaquenetta to "hold the plough for her sweet love three years" (another unresolved courtship), and suggests that the king and his company might like to hear a "dialogue" between the cuckoo and the owl, written by Nathaniel and Holofernes. The play ends with the dialogue (in the form of a song) contrasting spring and winter, which reflects the tensions of the play.
LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST
IN PERFORMANCE:
THE RSC AND BEYOND
The best way to understand a Shakespeare play is to see it or ideally to participate in it. By examining a range of productions, we may gain a sense of the extraordinary variety of approaches and interpretations that are possible--a variety that gives Shakespeare his unique capacity to be reinvented and made "our contemporary" four centuries after his death.
We begin with a brief overview of the play's theatrical and cinematic life, offering historical perspectives on how it has been performed. We then analyze in more detail a series of productions staged over the last half century by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The sense of dialogue between productions that can only occur when a company is dedicated to the revival and investigation of the Shakespeare canon over a long period, together with the uniquely comprehensive archival resource of promptbooks, program notes, reviews and interviews held on behalf of the RSC at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, allows an "RSC stage history" to become a crucible in which the chemistry of the play can be explored.
Finally, we go to the horse's mouth. Modern theater is dominated by the figure of the director, who must hold together the whole play, whereas the actor must concentrate on his or her part. The director's viewpoint is therefore especially valuable. Shakespeare's plasticity is wonderfully revealed when we hear directors of highly successful productions answering the same questions in very different ways.
FOUR CENTURIES OF LOVE'S LABOUR'S:
AN OVERVIEW
Evidence about the play's earliest performances is scarce, consisting of little more than a few passing references and allusions.1 The title page of the 1598 Quarto of Love's Labour's Lost claims that "it was presented before her Highness this last Christmas" and, further, that it has been "newly corrected and augmented." The latter claim suggests the possible existence of an earlier Quarto, in which case the reference to performance before Queen Elizabeth may have been carried over from the earlier Quarto rather than relate specifically to the Christmas period 1597-98. If there were two Quartos in quick succession, that would suggest considerable demand: as a rule, Shakespeare's comedies were reprinted far less often than his histories and tragedies.
In 1598 Francis Meres, in Palladis Tamia: Wit's Treasury, listed both Love's Labour's Lost and Love's Labour's Won as examples of Shakespeare's excellence as a writer of comedies. The same year, Robert Tofte published his poem of unrequited love, Alba: The Month's Mind of a Melancholy Lover, which seems to refer to a performance of the play:
Love's Labour Lost, I once did see a play,
Ycleped so, so called to my pain,
Which I to hear to my small joy did stay,
Giving attendance on my froward dame.
My misgiving mind presaging to me ill,
Yet was I drawn to see it 'gainst my will.
This play no play but plague was unto me,
For there I lost the love I liked most:
And what to others seemed a jest to be,
I that (in earnest) found unto my cost.
To everyone (save me) 'twas comical,
Whilst tragic-like to me it did befall.
Each actor played in cunning wise his part,
But chiefly those entrapped in Cupid's snare:
Yet all was feigned, 'twas not from the heart,
They seemed to grieve, but yet they felt no care.
'Twas I that grief indeed did bear in breast,
The others did but make a show in jest.
Yet neither feigning theirs, nor my mere truth,
Could make her once so much as for to smile:
Whilst she (despite of pity mild and ruth)
Did sit as scorning of my woes the while.
Thus did she sit to see Love lose his love,
Like hardened rock that force nor power can move.
The poem provides a rare and suggestive glimpse into what might be described as Elizabethan "dating": a man taking his girlfriend to the theater and finding his reaction to the play entangled with his own feelings.
A letter from Sir Walter Cope to Sir Robert Cecil in 1604 indicates the play was still in the repertory in the following decade. Richard Burbage, the leading actor with Shakespeare's company, recommended it as suitable entertainment for the new Queen, Anne, wife of James I:
Sir--I have sent and been all this morning hunting for players, jugglers and such kind of creatures, but find them hard to find; wherefore leaving notes for them to seek me, Burbage is come, and says there is no new play that the queen hath not seen, but they have revived an old one, called Love's Labour's Lost, which for wit and mirth he says will please her exceedingly. And this is appointed to be played tomorrow night at my Lord of Southampton's, unless you sent [a note] to remove the corpus cum causa to your house in Strand.2
The play was also performed at court in January 1605. The 1631 Quarto refers on the title page to the play "as it was a
cted by his Majesty's Servants at the Blackfriars and the Globe," which confirms that it was performed publicly and that the King's Men continued to perform it after 1608, when they took over the smaller indoor Blackfriars Theatre. The theaters closed in 1642 during the Commonwealth. After the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Love's Labour's Lost was assigned to Thomas Killigrew's company, but there is no record of its performance then for nearly two hundred years.
In 1762 an anonymous adaptation, The Students, was published, but there is no evidence of its performance, nor of any staging of a musical version that was commissioned by David Garrick in 1771. Various theories have been put forward to account for the play's lack of theatrical appeal to generations of directors and theatergoers, chiefly its complex, often obscene, wordplay and lack of a conventional happy ending. For many years critical reception was likewise hostile, with certain scholars, such as Alexander Pope, asserting that it was not even by Shakespeare. Doctor Johnson defended the play as Shakespeare's work but drew attention to what he regarded as its shortcomings:
In this play, which all the editors have concurred to censure and some have rejected as unworthy of our poet, it must be confessed that there are many passages mean, childish, and vulgar; and some which ought not to have been exhibited, as we are told they were, to a maiden queen. But there are scattered through the whole many sparks of genius; nor is there any play that has more evident marks of the hand of Shakespeare.3
It was not until 1839 that the play returned to the London stage, when the opera star Lucia Elizabeth Vestris and her husband, Charles James Mathews, inaugurated their management of Covent Garden with a spectacular production designed in collaboration with James Robinson Planche. Madame Vestris played Rosaline. Although a critical success, the riots that followed the closure of the theater's shilling gallery brought its run to an end after only nine performances.
Samuel Phelps finally mounted a successful production at Sadler's Wells in 1857. Set in a picturesque medieval court with painted backdrops of "wooded landscapes," it won critical acclaim. Phelps, who played Don Armado, was generally praised for his intelligent ensemble approach and his attention to detail. The play itself was finally rehabilitated: John Oxenford, in his review for The Times, commented that he thought the play one "over which a great deal of good acting may be diffused, for even the smallest parts are marked characters and some of them very strongly and very strangely defined.... [Mr. Phelps] has so well applied the talent of his company that there is not a single weakly acted part."4 His promptbook continued in use into the twentieth century. It was presented at the Old Vic in 1918, 1923, and 1928.
Augustin Daly directed a production in New York in 1891. The New York Times praised the acting and especially commended the set: "Indeed, no handsomer setting of a play by Shakespeare was ever seen in this country--or in any other probably. Every picture is a noble example of the scene painter's art."5 There were Stratford-upon-Avon productions in 1885, 1907, 1925, and 1934. Meanwhile Barry Jackson directed a production at the Birmingham Rep in 1919, revived in 1925.
It was Tyrone Guthrie's 1932 production at the Westminster Theatre, London, however, which marks the turn in the play's theatrical fortunes. Using a heavily cut text and a single set, it was played at top speed with great verve, lasting an astonishing ninety minutes. Gordon Crosse describes how precisely the set and the actors' movements were controlled: "with the king's pavilion draped in red on one side and the Princess's in green on the other, each group of characters dressed in the corresponding color and keeping strictly to its own side in all entrances and exits."6 The production was restaged at the Old Vic in 1936, but the color scheme softened with costumes in pastel shades of pink, green, and cream against an uncluttered set consisting of only a fountain, two tents on either side of the stage, and a wrought iron gate, topped by an arc of fresh leaves, that led into the domain of Navarre. The critic John Dover Wilson described the dramatic effect seeing this production had on his perception of the play: "Mr. Guthrie not only gave me a new play, the existence of which I had never suspected, which indeed had been veiled from men's eyes for three centuries, but he set me at a fresh standpoint of understanding and appreciation from which the whole of Shakespearian comedy might be reviewed in a new light." Crucially, Guthrie replaced the grand finales that had characterized the earlier productions of Vestris and Phelps:
The extraordinary impression left upon the audience by the entrance of the black-clad messenger upon the court revels was the greatest lesson I took away with me from the Guthrie production. It made me see two things--(a) that however gay, however riotous a Shakespearian comedy, tragedy is always there, felt, if not seen; (b) that for all its surface lightness and frivolity, the play had behind it a serious mind at work, with a purpose.7
This emphasis on the play's darker elements was to be realized most fully in Peter Brook's 1946 production at Stratford. Still in the shadow of the Second World War, the twenty-year-old Brook made his professional debut with this production. He recalled the rehearsal process in detail in his book The Empty Space (1968). He emphasized the play's painterly qualities by means of a set and costumes that drew on Antoine Watteau's eighteenth-century "fete champetre" paintings, with their sense of a gilded age tempered by a play of light and dark. The production was an unqualified success and established Brook's professional reputation. According to The Times (London),
His presentment of the play as a masque of youthful affectations shows a remarkably complete grasp of its somewhat elusive values, and is, from first to last, consistent with itself. He has given its movement on the stage a puffball lightness, handled the chiaroscuro with delicate, imaginative expertness, and once or twice succeeds in fading out a scene in such a way that color and grouping heighten its significance.8
Locating the production within the historical context of work at the Stratford Memorial Theatre, theater historian Sally Beauman argued that the adjective "Watteau-esque" most usually applied to the production might work as an "interesting correlative for the aristocratic young lovers, journeying from illusion and artifice to greater maturity," but was inadequate when applied to other characters:
The production teemed with ideas that owed nothing to Watteau. The Princess was accompanied by a chalk-faced commedia dell'arte clown, who never spoke; Constable Dull was a Punch-and-Judy policeman with a truncheon and a string of sausages; Armado was a sixteenth-century grandee whom Velazquez might have painted. The play began with insolent aplomb by confronting the audience with a gigantic drop on which was painted a great barred gate and the words of the King of Navarre's proclamation banning women, writ large like a song-scroll in a pantomime. The production was far more heretic, rag-bag, and anarchic than the adjective "Watteau-esque" conveys. It was played fast, except for the famous long silence that greeted that messenger of death, Mercade; it had a delight in artifice as great as that of any of the characters, and it was funny, belying the play's reputation for difficult-to-comprehend jokes.9
2. Paul Scofield as Don Armado in Peter Brook's landmark 1946 production. How does humankind overcome "devouring time"? Through "fame" or philosophical study or love? Shakespeare meditates deeply on this question not only in the play, but also in his Sonnets, which he seems to have begun writing around the same time.
A few years later, there was another highly successful production in London. Hugh Hunt's 1949 staging was the greatest success of the Old Vic season. The reviewer Lionel Hale described how in his view the director had
put exactly the right movement into the play: it skates charmingly over the thin ice of the glittering words: and it is decorated throughout with a full invention but without any infuriating fuss. Mr. Berkeley Sutcliffe's settings--lakes, summer houses, gay pavilions, and overhanging trees in the manner of an Elizabethan miniaturist--catch all the lyric quality of this "April comedy." His costumes have a sheen, a rich shimmer. He and Mr. Hunt have worked rarely to make a success even of the scene when the King and his courtiers arrive disguise
d as Muscovites: they have seen it as a picture. And, when we come to the "elegiac close," they have ... made it a thing of pure enchantment.10
Despite the success of such productions, the play is still performed less frequently than most of Shakespeare's plays. Most of the revivals in recent years have been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company. These are discussed below in greater detail. In 1968 Laurence Olivier directed a production at the National Theatre in London, which critics complained lacked the vitality of earlier productions. Critic Helen Dawson thought the set, which had been much admired, problematic: "The trees in the royal park may float rather captivatingly, but otherwise they are merely props in a chocolate box fairy glade. The decor, like the production, lacks the delicate shading of menace to hint at the darkness beneath the sparkling surface."11 London Times reviewer Irving Wardle thought the "sumptuous blaze of Renaissance costumes" responsible for the slow pace of the production since it hampered the actors' movements, but he was mainly critical of the final scene: "It is only in the great scene of Mercade's announcement of the King's death that the production falters. It is equal to the fantasy and the games, but not to the fact of death from which it turns away in favour of a Christmas card ending."12
3. Painterly set and Elizabethan costume: the Old Vic production of 1949.
Critic and theater director Charles Marowitz was more caustic, calling it "slow-footed" and "sugar-coated," "a production that preens and cosmeticizes a play which can only work today if wrung firmly by the neck." He went on to argue that it failed to make itself relevant to the times:
A play that concerns the sensual distractions of a band of men devoted to the rigors of scholarship would seem to be thumpingly appropriate in the late 1960s, but in opting for artifice and elegance, Olivier has sealed the play off from contemporary resonance. One is left with a lot of fussy staging, eccentric vocalism, and a Christmas-card finale which forcibly brings back the festering Old Vic days of the 1950s when Shakespeare was conceived entirely in terms of fudge sundaes and whipped cream.13