Love Lessons … and Language in “Love’s Labor’s Lost”
Cover image and above: Princess of France, [character in Shakespeare’s] Love’s Labor’s Lost, by artist John William Wright (1802–1848), engraving by printmaker William Henry Mote. Source: Folger Shakespeare Library; LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection. License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC By-SA 4.0).
Despite its alliteration, the title of this early Shakespeare comedy does not exactly roll off the tongue. It trips and twists the tongue. Innocently, maybe, and yet I’m wondering now, having come to the end of the drama, if it’s a kind of trap meant to catch the eye and the mind. It’s suggestive and elusive. Part riddle, part nursery rhyme, it’s playful in a she-sells-seashells kind of way. Love’s Labor’s Lost. What exactly does this mean? Having trouble getting my head around it, simple meaning keeping its distance, I look to the apostrophes.
Guides to grammar tell us the apostrophe is used to indicate the possessive case, contractions, and omitted letters. Clearly, only the first applies; still, knowing this doesn’t immediately help. “Love’s Labor” might be understood to mean the effort of a would-be lover to woo another—for example, the writing of sonnets or the singing of songs to kindle a reciprocal affection in the object of desire. This is the work of love and seems straightforward but the meaning of the second part, as joined with the first, is harder to grasp. I realize now it’s because of the second apostrophe. If the title had only one apostrophe and read “Love’s Labors Lost,” though slightly odd as titles go, one could make the jump to understand this as referencing efforts toward love that have been wasted and unfruitful. “Labor’s Lost” taken as a separate element, considered alone, requires a bit of mental adjustment—at least for me. If the apostrophe here again indicates the possessive case, we must see “Lost” as somehow owned or possessed by “Labor.” It helps to imagine “Labor” a kind of person. We might then see the “Lost” as its children or its thoughts or, just for example, its sheep—as in Little Bo Peep’s Lost. Labor’s lost efforts or lost time or something along those lines. But maybe I make too much of an apostrophe?
Ferdinand, King of Navarre, [character in Shakespeare’s] Love’s Labor’s Lost, watercolor, 1891, by Edward Hamilton Bell. Source: Folger Shakespeare Library; LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection. License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC By-SA 4.0).
Looking to the play itself, it’s clear that language and games are central to this unusual work. In case you don’t know it or haven’t read it, the set up goes like this: Ferdinand, the king of Navarre, and his attending lords, Berowne, Longaville, and Dumaine, all in the flush of young adulthood, determine to achieve everlasting fame and glory, and perhaps the virtues that learning might bring, by dedicating themselves to study for a period of three years, during which, according to their sworn pact, they are to keep in a kind of seclusion—removed from those things that might tempt them from their lofty goal. They are to limit their meals to once a day; and, one day in a week, to fast entirely. Sleep too is to be curtailed, cut to no more than three hours per night. But the hardest charge is to see no women. (Women, with beautiful Shakespearean irony, will be the chief educators here and the source of whatever knowledge the king and his cohort manage to come by during the course of the play.) Berowne, the most eloquent protestor to these conditions, sums up the state of affairs:
“O, these are barren tasks, too hard to keep, / Not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep.” (I.i. 47–48)
He has agreed to study, not to these other restrictions, he says; he agreed only to stay and read beside the king and the others for three years, but Ferdinand—and Longaville, in support—will have none of it. And the involved parties debate the matter.
Longaville: “You swore to that, Berowne, and to the rest.”
Berowne: “By yea and nay, sir, then I swore in jest. / What is the end of study, let me know.”
King: “Why, that to know which else we should not know.”
Berowne: “Things hid and barr’d (you mean) from common sense.”
King: “Ay, that is study’s godlike recompense.” (53–58)
It is interesting to consider this “end of study,” a reward or fruit worthy of a god. It also smacks of original sin.
Eden, In the Morning of Creation. Plate no. 1 from The Beautiful Story. Philadelphia, PA, and Toronto, Canada: C. R. Parish & Co., 1888.
Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil and, as is well known, were kicked out of paradise for it, lest they “take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever” (Gen. 4:22). Such an aspiration—to be like a god—can only be met with failure, and indeed that’s what our young king meets. His failure, which comes early and quickly in the form of the Princess of France and her three attending ladies, Rasaline, Maria, and Katherine, is an intellectual disappointment and the inevitable consequence of lusty youth, which is not eager to be cloistered.
Love’s Labor’s Lost, Princess, Rosaline, &c. Print (c. 1830s?) by W. F. Starling from a drawing by artist William Hamilton. Source: Folger Shakespeare Library; LUNA: Folger Digital Image Collection. License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC By-SA 4.0).