Читать книгу Shakespeare and the Rose of Love - John Vyvyan - Страница 9

IT IS FORTUNATELY not necessary to our present enquiry to go into the vexed question of whether Love’s Labour’s Lost is Shakespeare’s first extant play. Traditionally, it has long been considered so – and dated about 1590; but among contemporary critics, there is a sharp conflict of opinion. The title-page of the first Quarto describes it as ‘Newly corrected and augmented’. It is clear that it has been augmented. There must, then, have been two versions. We may assume that the first of these was, at least, a very early work, and that important additions were made to it – possibly some years later. The augmentations show an evolution of thought, which is not the product of mere polishing, but of time. And so the tradition that places the first version – but not the full text we now possess – at the head of the list, may well be sound. Chronological certainty is not possible. But from the point of view of Shakespeare’s exploration of love, this may be taken as the beginning – ‘Incipit Vita Nuova’.*

The act-structure has suffered in consequence of the alterations. In the text we now have, there is great disproportion between the acts – the first having less than two hundred lines, and the last, nine hundred and forty. There may have been cuts as well as additions to the original. In spite of this, the Terentian plan is well marked. Naturally, the design was made for the simpler, earlier version; and it cannot be expected to display the deeper philosophy that was afterwards put in. It does a little to illuminate the play’s more significant ideas, and we will therefore present it briefly.

Act I

We find that the dramatic conflict of the comedy is to be between learning and love. The real battleground is, therefore, in the hearts, or minds, of the characters. And our sympathies are enlisted for love.

Act II

Learning makes a defensive move: the ladies are forbidden to enter the court. Love makes a counter-move: though shut out from the house, the ladies slip into the gentlemen’s hearts. This ends the protasis.

Act III

A knot of error is tied: the clown is entrusted with the love-letters of the lords, which he later delivers to the wrong ladies.

Act IV

The tide turns in favour of love: the young men discover each other’s attachments, and Berowne proves to them that all true learning begins with love. This ends the epitasis.

Act V

After some vicissitudes, the lovers are accepted by their ladies; but a preliminary penance is imposed on each. These penances are, in fact, a deeper sort of learning; so neither side has really lost. Some shallow notions, both of learning and of love, have been dismissed; and the profundities of each are shown as one.

Much more, it may be noticed, is implicit in this conclusion than we expect from a comedy; but Shakespeare is certainly employing the Terentian plan. He has not yet learnt to do so very deftly, and his subsequent alterations have put it sadly out of shape; but even so, it affords some clues which we must try to follow.

In this play, we find a number of young people on the threshold of life, and the question it poses could not be more appropriate. What is the aim of life? The question is framed, What is the end of study? But it is the deeper problem that Shakespeare is putting both to himself and to his audience.

The characters we meet first are the young King of Navarre, and three of his lords – the jeunesse dorée* of a Renaissance court; but the atmosphere is a blend of serious thinking and spirited fooling with which universities are familiar, and the audience easily participates in the emotional situation. Most of us have thought, at some time, that we should like to be famous, and that if we studied hard enough we might succeed; and most of us have had second thoughts, that it would be much more fun to dress up as Russians and tease the girls; and probably we have had third thoughts, that real love demands real sacrifices and that to make them is well worth while. The King of Navarre passes through these not unusual phases; and so, we may suppose, had Shakespeare; but on this familiar topic he has something out of the ordinary to say.

He does not say it, in full, until the last scene; and then it is more than we expect. Until near the end, the play had seemed to be a comedy. Abruptly we discover it is not:

Our wooing doth not end like an old play;

Jack hath not Jill: these ladies’ courtesy

Might well have made our sport a comedy.

If it is not a comedy, what is it? ‘Tragedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical…?’ But Polonius is mocking definitions, without providing the right one. And it may be that our usual terminology is inappropriate to Shakespearean drama; for if it leads us to assume standards with which Shakespeare was not attempting to comply, it will cause confusion. Perhaps our knowledge of his full aims is still inadequate to determine how far he fell short, as every artist must, of attaining them. But we will not pursue these questions yet. With regard to the present play, Shakespeare has simply told us that it might have been a comedy, but it is not; and we may class it provisionally as a play with a ‘message’.

The message turns out to be Shakespeare’s answer – not, of course, his final answer, but the one he had reached in sincerity as a young man – to a double question: What is the aim of life, and how is it to be attained? Whether the answer is important in itself is a matter of opinion; but since Shakespeare thought it was, it is important to an understanding of his future work: it is a foundation.

His way of persuading us that the aim he finally proposes is the right one, is to set up a number of others – plausible but inadequate – and to laugh these off the stage: what remains when we have ceased laughing, and we do cease laughing in the last act, is, in his view, the truth. As this is a method of weeding the brain which he uses elsewhere, it is worth notice. In this play, the hint is given to us by the Princess of France, when she says to her ladies:

We are wise girls to mock our lovers so.

This is what Shakespeare is also doing to these characters – mocking them, but not unkindly. In intention, it is a wise mockery, with the purpose of removing their imperfections and leaving them true men. And he is particular, in several places, to distinguish it from sarcasm and scorn. Rosaline, for instance, says to Berowne:

… the world’s large tongue

Proclaims you for a man replete with mocks,

Full of comparisons and wounding flouts,

Which you on all estates will execute

That lie within the mercy of your wit.

This habit, she tells him, is wormwood, which he must weed from his character before she will accept him:

A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear

Of him that hears it, never in the tongue

Of him that makes it…

So Shakespeare, I suggest, has defined for us the principle he is now following: he makes fun of the affectations of these characters, so that they may be rid of them and discover themselves. He gets a great deal of enjoyment from their foibles; but even to the most preposterous of them – Armado, Nathaniel and Holofernes – in spite of their absurdities, he is not unkind. A number of fine-seeming but unfruitful ideas are being put to the test of life and laughter.

In the opening scene, the aim of life that the king proposes to the three young lords is to be famous when they are dead:

Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives,

Live register’d upon our brazen tombs,

And then grace us in the disgrace of death…

This immortality in brass is to be won by study; and like all great victories it will be costly. The programme for the pursuit of fame that the king has drawn up, and in which the others have promised to keep him company, requires, in effect, the sacrifice of present life and all its disturbing emotions. They are to spend three years in monastic devotion to learning. During that time they will have one meal a day and fast altogether one day a week, they will sleep only three hours each night and not doze in between, and they will see no ladies – indeed, no woman is to be allowed within a mile of the court on penalty of losing her tongue. This is more than a plan, it is a command performance; and so the king exhorts them:

Therefore, brave conquerors – for so you are,

That war against your own affections

And the huge army of the world’s desires –

Our late edict shall strongly stand in force:

Navarre shall be the wonder of the world…

The edict is reinforced by a document, setting out these forbidding rules, which each of them is to sign:

You three, Berowne, Dumain, and Longaville,

Have sworn for three years’ term to live with me,

My fellow-scholars, and to keep those statutes

That are recorded in this schedule here:

Your oaths are pass’d; and now subscribe your names,

That his own hand may strike his honour down

That violates the smallest branch herein…

Dumain and Longaville sign submissively. Berowne also signs, but it is his part to protest. The king’s goal lies in the future, so far off that it is beyond the horizon of mortality: Berowne therefore – on the assumption that ‘the future was invented to spoil the present’ – puts the case for living now:

At Christmas I no more desire a rose

Than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled shows,

But like each thing that in its season grows.

The season of this play, in every sense, is spring: it is the month of May. And so Berowne is naturally putting the case for love, ‘whose month is ever May’. The audience is led to feel that this point of view is right: the king, with his concern for autumn fruit, is trying to live at the wrong time of year. But Berowne is not opposed to learning, provided that the subject be well-chosen:

Study me how to please the eye indeed,

By fixing it upon a fairer eye…

To do this, he suggests, will illuminate the student, instead of damaging his sight. It will be pleasanter and more valuable, since little is to be won from words:

These earthly godfathers of heaven’s lights,

That give a name to every fixed star,

Have no more profit of their shining nights

Than those that walk and wot not what they are.

Too much to know is to know naught but fame;

And every godfather can give a name.

In view of what is to come, we may notice that Shakespeare implies more by these lines than the meaning that suffices in this context. The name is not the star, the word is not the truth. And it is to the real nature of the star – love, in this play – that he will lead his characters at last. Meanwhile, Berowne has put the case for living in season, and enlisted the sympathies of the audience, although the king’s rejoinder is undeniably apt:

How well he’s read, to reason against reading!

Although they all laugh at him, Berowne is not silenced; he carries the argument deeper: this studious seclusion, to which they are now in honour vowed, is a dereliction of duty. This is his best card, with which he will take the act. He has already predicted that natural temptations will make them all foresworn; now he reminds the king that the oath, if kept to the letter, will conflict with his obligations. For reasons of state, he must receive the Princess of France, who is coming on a special embassy from her father. Berowne thus exposes the vow as a monstrosity:

So study evermore is over-shot;

While it doth study to have what it would,

It doth forget to do the thing it should…

And the thing it should is not the pursuit of fame, recorded on a brazen tomb, but first of all the discharge of human responsibilities and the exploration of the possibilities of life. The king admits that he had forgotten the princess, and will have to meet her; and henceforth the oath is merely a joke – the question is not whether it will be broken, but when and how. It is altogether shattered, in the end; and yet learning itself is not discredited, but only the kind of learning that is divorced from loving and living. And we are left with the impression that these things should not be fragments, but a whole: each has need of the others.

Since temptations become immensely important in Shakespeare’s mature work, it is interesting to see that even at this stage he has begun to take notice of their dramatic possibilities; but, which is surprising, the first use he makes of them is for laughter. The young men have taken an oath which they ought not to have taken; and so, when they are tempted to break it, they are really being ‘tempted’ to do right. This is ingenious and amusing; and it alerts us to a more important point: Shakespeare’s structural principles remain remarkably similar whatever kind of play he is writing. And as his work proceeds, we begin to suspect that he is aiming to create an ideal dramatic form – founded on Terence, but vastly enriched – that will suit all the purposes Polonius could think of, or even that Shakespeare himself had in mind.

Postponing consideration of the sub-plot, we may now pass to the second act. The Princess of France and her retinue, including three provocative ladies – one for each of the king’s lords we rightly guess – have arrived. But her gentleman-in-waiting, Boyet, informs her:

Navarre had notice of your fair approach…

… Marry, thus much I have learnt:

He rather means to lodge you in the field,

Like one that comes here to besiege his court,

Than seek a dispensation for his oath…

In this, there is a clear ring of challenge; for she is not only a brilliantly witty princess, but also, we must certainly infer, the allegorical figure of Love and Beauty; and it is presumptuous for a young man, king though he be, to keep her waiting in the fields.

The king is still resolved to keep his oath to study. In point of fact, his true education is about to begin, but not in the way he has planned; nor is it in the way we expect, if we are thinking of an éducation sentimentale.* The king is to be instructed in love; but we must beware of putting a present-day construction on that word. Shakespeare is thinking of it, in this context, as many poets of the Middle Ages did – that is, religiously. This is not at once apparent; but it becomes so, when the penances are imposed at the end of the play.

We are being led, here, to the conclusion that learning without love is pedantry; and this may be a first step towards the much greater affirmation of later plays that justice without love is tyranny. In all Shakespeare’s work, love is the star by which his characters must set their course; when they do not, their power and their learning only assist the storm that drives them to disaster. And however lightly Shakespeare seems to be writing, he is illustrating this philosophy.

The king and his lords now visit the princess and her ladies ‘in the field’. His intention is to arrange a quick settlement of the affairs of Aquitaine, which was the purpose of the embassy, and to part; but while he and the princess are discussing business, the lords and ladies are falling for each other. Fortunately, the most important state-document is missing; and as no agreement can be reached without it, the princess must stay. She is to be kept, however, at what seems to be a safe distance; but when the king takes his leave, he makes a slip of the tongue which betrays to the audience how much he is endangered:

You may not come, fair princess, in my gates;

But here without you shall be so received

As you shall deem yourself lodged in my heart,

Though so denied fair harbour in my house…

To-morrow shall we visit you again.

Though debarred from his court, the princess has slipped into his heart; and her ladies have been equally successful with his book-mates. The young men are now all in love. They are ashamed of being so, and are at great pains to hide the fact from one another. But theirs is still a very light kind of love – not nearly good enough for Shakespeare or his heroines. The men are looking down on this divine quality, and Shakespeare is determined that they – like all his characters, except those he has doomed – shall look up to it. They have now reached the stage of sighs and sonnets, which is all very well for a while; but they are by no means ready for the sacrifices that real love entails.

In the brief third act, Berowne is the first to give himself away to the audience; but he commits the much greater indiscretion of making Costard, the rustic clown, his postman. He gives Costard a shilling, and a letter to be delivered to one of the princess’s ladies, Rosaline:

… ask for her,

And to her white hand see thou do commend

This seal’d-up counsel.

Costard has another letter to deliver, and being unable to read, he gives them to the wrong people, with the consequence that Berowne’s love-letter finds its way, in the next act, to the king. This seal’d-up counsel concludes with the couplet:

Celestial as thou art, O, pardon love this wrong,

That sings heaven’s praise with such an earthly tongue.

An earthly tongue would have been pardonable enough, but what is not to be excused is an insincere one. Berowne does indeed suppose himself to be in love; but his true opinion of Rosaline is that she is anything but celestial; and he has no sooner dispatched Costard with the letter, which purports to sing heaven’s praises, than he discloses his opinion to us, in a soliloquy of the utmost candour:

What! I love! I sue! I seek a wife!

A woman, that is like a German clock,

Still a-repairing, ever out of frame,

And never going aright…

Which is she, a celestial being or a German clock? We may form an opinion later; in the meantime, it is certain that Berowne is a hypocrite, and his love-letter a composition of vanity. But his education, like the king’s, is in progress, and part of it is gradually to discover these unflattering facts. His next soliloquy shows some advance:

Well, I do nothing in the world but lie, and lie in my throat. By heaven, I do love: and it hath taught me to rhyme, and to be melancholy… Well, she hath one o’ my sonnets already; the clown bore it, the fool sent it, and the lady hath it: sweet clown, sweeter fool, sweetest lady!

In fact, the lady has not got it; and it will shortly be returned by the clown to the fool, to prick the bubble of his deception; but before that happens, he will have the consolation of finding himself in good company.

The scene which follows is a parody of the ridiculous convention – one more inheritance from Roman comedy – of a number of characters being on stage together, and not merely failing to see one another, but declaiming their secrets aloud. Shakespeare himself was no realist in the theatre; he makes serious use of asides, soliloquies, allegory and more; but it is likely that he laughed at this convention of Terence, and here, in one of his moods of mockery, he shows it as preposterous.

The king enters, with a paper. Berowne steps behind a bush. The king heaves a sigh, and Berowne, delighted, murmurs, ‘Shot, by heaven! Proceed, sweet Cupid…’ The king does proceed, reading aloud a sonnet he has composed to the princess. Only a little less unearthly than Berowne’s, it ends with the couplet:

O queen of queens! how far dost thou excel,

No thought can think, nor tongue of mortal tell.

This he drops, in the simple hope that she will pick it up. Then he too hears a step, and hides behind a second bush. Longaville enters, with a paper, and the king whispers, ‘In love, I hope…’ He is not disappointed. Longaville recites a sonnet he has written to Maria, in which he exonerates himself from oath-breaking on the grounds:

A woman I forswore; but I will prove,

Thou being a goddess, I forswore not thee;

My vow was earthly, thou a heavenly love;

Thy grace being gain’d cures all disgrace in me.

Berowne mutters a sardonic aside:

This is the liver-vein, which makes flesh a deity,

A green goose a goddess: pure, pure idolatry.

So now a green goose has joined the German clock. And Berowne is still ‘much out o’ the way’. Adding a sneer to an affectation has not brought him nearer to the truth; for there is a deity, we shall find, and it is through the earthly love that the heavenly will be discovered. Once more, a step is heard. Longaville hides; and the third lord, Dumain, enters moaning, ‘O, most divine Kate!’ After this, they expose each other; but Berowne, the biggest humbug of them all, comes out last:

Now step I forth to whip hypocrisy.

There is no one, he supposes, who can show him up; and so he flays his fellow-sinners without mercy:

I am betray’d, by keeping company

With men like you, men of inconstancy.

When shall you see me write a thing in rhyme?

Or groan for love? or spend a minute’s time

In pruning me? When shall you hear that I

Will praise a hand, a foot, a face, an eye,

A gait, a state, a brow, a breast, a waist,

A leg, a limb?

The contriving of such situations – where the accuser is guilty of the offence for which he condemns others – is one of Shakespeare’s favourite devices, which he never ceases to use. In comedy, we may call it a trick. But when we find it in tragedy, employed with deep seriousness, we must surely lift it to the status of a principle. Berowne’s own reference to the ‘mote’ and the ‘beam’ shows that even here, in Shakespeare’s mind, it is related to deeper things; even in this seemingly frivolous context, he is beginning to ponder the nature of justice; and the problem, which is inseparable from his enquiry into the nature of love, becomes one of the great preoccupations of his maturity. If the judge is morally no better than the person he condemns, and often – as in Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale – worse, then where is justice? There is no light answer to this question; and Shakespeare wrestles with it in his major work, to come, as I think, to a momentous conclusion. It would be astonishing to find the beginnings of it – together with the temptation theme, and other of his basic concepts shortly to be displayed – in comedy, if we had not already been alerted to the fact that he is seeking, among so many other things, an ideal dramatic structure adaptable to every need.

When Berowne has blown his bubble of censorious hypocrisy to its maximum, Costard the clown enters, with Jaquenetta. She is carrying the sonnet that should have been delivered to Rosaline, and she naively hands it to the king. He orders Berowne to read it aloud. Instead of doing so, Berowne tears it up:

A toy, my liege, a toy: your Grace needs not fear it.

LONGAVILLE: It did move him to passion, and therefore let’s hear it.

DUMAIN (gathering up the pieces): It is Berowne’s writing, and here is his name.

BEROWNE (to Costard): Ah, you whoreson logger-head! you were born to do me shame…

Guilty, my lord, guilty; I confess, I confess.

And then to them all:

Sweet lords, sweet lovers, O, let us embrace!

As true we are as flesh and blood can be:

The sea will ebb and flow, heaven show his face;

Young blood will not obey an old decree.

It is not Berowne, but Shakespeare, who has whipped hypocrisy – but only with mirth. The lords are now agreed that their ‘guilt’ is equal, and that none of them has the moral right to condemn another. Once again, a principle has been established in comedy which will be used in tragedy with tremendous power.

So far, the young men have discerned nothing but the surface of love, and their ensuing conversation looks like a return to the ‘liver-vein’ – pure, pure nonsense. Each maintains that his own mistress is ‘heavenly’, but that no other qualifies for this distinction. Shakespeare may be mocking the common notion of lovers that their sweethearts are all divine exceptions; but possibly, for even in a light context an under-meaning is not to be ruled out, he may be seeing each of these ladies as a dual figure – as a woman of flesh and blood, and as a symbol. He does this so frequently in a serious way, that even here, I think, it is the correct explanation.

This idea of the duality of love – mortal form and eternal essence – is not, of course, his own. We might call it a convention, if that chilly word were not so inadequate for something deeply felt, of the medieval ‘religion’ of love. Shakespeare owes much to this tradition, according to which the beloved is something more than herself: she has also a sacramental quality, partly revealing, partly veiling love’s transcendence.

As this principle is important, we must briefly digress. I apologize for breaking off to explore tributary streams; but unless we do so, the main river of Shakespearean thought may remain as mysterious as the Nile before its sources had been mapped; and the dual nature of heroines is a contribution from the past. The idea is expressed in a variety of ways by medieval poets. Dante speaks of, ‘La seconda bellezza che tu, cele’,* the second beauty that is concealed within you. Chrétien de Troyes shows his hero worshipping his mistress, in a way that can be understood only if we see that the act is conceived as a sacrament; otherwise it would be a blasphemy, which it certainly is not. And in Roman de la Rose, to Chaucer’s translation of which Shakespeare was, I believe, indebted, the symbolic nature of this devotion is made clear by introducing the god of love as well as the lady. Even with these poets, of course, the idea is not original; but we cannot pursue an indefinite regression, and from our present point of view they may be treated as origins.

The Romaunt of the Rose appears to me to be a pervasive presence in Shakespeare’s early love-plays. This Chaucerian version of part of the old French Roman de la Rose was first printed by William Thynne, in 1532, and it is likely that Shakespeare used that edition.* It is true that the ideas it presents could have reached him indirectly; but as Thynne’s edition was available, it is a fair assumption that he found them there.

At the moment, I wish only to establish the relationship, in The Romance of the Rose, between the god of love, the lover and the lady. When the hero of the poem is pierced by the five arrows – that is to say, when he falls in love – it is not to the lady that he kneels. In fact he turns away from her, to the god of love who commands his service. From this moment, more than courtship is involved. Even if the lady were to die – as Dante’s Beatrice did – the lover would still be a person dedicated to an ideal. Once smitten, he addresses the god as his liege lord:

And I answered ful humbly

Gladly sir / at your byddyng

I wol me yelde in al thyng

To your seruyce I wol me take

For god defende that I shulde make

Ayen your byddyng resystence

I wol not don so great offence

For if I dyd / it were no skyll

Ye may do with me what ye wyll

Save or spyll / 1953

And if ye lyst of me to make

Your prisoner / I wol it take

Of herte and wyll fully at gre

Holy and playne I yelde me… 1970

He then kneels, and would have kissed the god’s feet, but he is prevented from doing this. He has made the right answer; and therefore Love kisses him on the mouth, telling him this is a special grace:

For curteys / and of fayre manere

Well taught / and ful of gentylnysse

He muste ben / that shal me kysse 2006

For I am of the selfe manere

Gentyll / curteys / meke / and fre… 2021

What, we may ask, has all this to do with falling in love? Simply that the point of view of the Middle Ages was a religious one. From the moment when the young man in the poem becomes the lover, he embraces a new way of life; and this will change his relationship to everything. We tend to confine love to a concentration of emotion – sometimes of devastating passion – on an individual; but for the medieval lover this might be only a beginning. The conclusion might be the Divina Commedia, or some other diffusion of love’s essence through a wider sphere. It is therefore necessary to recognize the god, or his equivalent, as well as the lady. And having done that, it is not illogical to regard love as a power which brings harmony to a discordant world. But the god is, of course, a convenient symbol for a principle – in Shakespeare’s view, the sovereign principle – which ultimately resides in the self. So it need not surprise us that to be true to oneself and to be true to love become, in Shakespeare’s usage, interchangeable expressions.

It may be thought inopportune to sound this deeper note at a moment when Shakespeare is entertaining us with light music. But I do so to emphasize a point: the dual nature of his heroines – and of some other characters as well – is not confined to the portentous plays, tragedies and resolutions of tragedy; it is safer, in fact, to look on it as an habitual element in his technique, and even in apparently unlikely places to bear it in mind. Richard David says of Love’s Labour’s Lost that, ‘beneath the shimmering surface the waters are deep’.* And we may accordingly suspect the presence of those devices that Shakespeare uses to explore the deeps.

This suspicion is strengthened when we find that two, at least, of the men begin with a debased idea of love. In later plays, this becomes an infallible indication with Shakespeare that a man is on the wrong track – Hamlet, Angelo and Othello, for instance, blacken the women who love them, and this is a necessary step in their fall. The germ of this perversion is clearly present in Love’s Labour’s Lost, notably in the sub-plot. Armado says of Jaquenetta:

I do affect the very ground, which is base, where her shoe, which is baser, guided by her foot, which is basest, doth tread…. Love is a familiar; Love is a devil; there is no evil angel but Love.

And Berowne says of Rosaline:

And, among three, to love the worst of all;

A whitely wanton with a velvet brow,

With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes;

Ay, and, by heaven, one that will do the deed,

Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard:

And I do sigh for her! to watch for her!

To pray for her! Go to; it is a plague…

But it is these base-seeming creatures who will re-educate the scornful lords.

It may also be well to notice, parenthetically, that what I have termed technique and device is by no means wholely artificial; it has a correspondence with psychological facts that seem to have been better understood in the thirteenth century than in the nineteenth, although psychoanalysis is now beginning to rediscover them. The object of love needs to be distinguished from love’s power or cause, for they are disproportionate; and a tradition which recognizes a transcendence, conveniently symbolized as a god, although many other symbols will serve, is in some degree a safeguard against certain devastating emotional states – such as that which poor Hazlitt records of himself in the Liber Amoris – which may occasionally become suicidal or insane.

After the ludicrous dispute on the divinity of sweethearts, the king calls for calm:

Then leave this chat; and, good Berowne, now prove

Our loving lawful, and our faith not torn.

Dumain also requests, ‘Some salve for perjury’, and Berowne supplies it in his celebrated speech.

This is of particular interest from several points of view. In the first place it is really two speeches. The original ends at line 317,* and at some unknown later date, Shakespeare expanded it. What we now possess is two versions running consecutively. When Shakespeare refashions his earlier work in this manner, it is never for the sake of padding, but usually to present some new idea to which he has come to attribute special importance. By separating the two versions, we see immediately what the fresh conception is:

But love, first learned in a lady’s eyes,

Lives not alone immured in the brain,

But, with the motion of all elements,

Courses as swift as thought in every power,

And gives to every power a double power

Above their functions and their offices…

Never durst poet touch a pen to write

Until his ink were temper’d with love’s sighs:

O, then his lines would ravish savage ears,

And plant in tyrants mild humility…

It is religion to be thus forsworn;

For charity itself fulfils the law,

And who can sever love from charity?

These lines carry us far away from romantic comedy: Shakespeare is saying that love is power. It is a power that can quell tyranny, a power that in itself fulfils the law. We cannot be sure that at this period he foresaw the mighty employment to which he would put this assertion; but it contains the principle by which, in his culminating plays, he resolves tragedy, not simply by arresting its course, but by transforming it into regeneration. In Measure for Measure, for instance, it is self-knowledge and love which transmute seeming virtue into forth-going virtue, that is, into the power by which, and by which alone, the death-ward movement is brought to a stop, and an impulse towards life is imparted.

To speak of love as power may be commonplace; but to believe it is astonishing. In fact, one has to look to the great religious figures – the Christ or the Buddha – to find a consistent application of love to human affairs. Neither Church nor State believes it to be practicable; and both enforce their decrees by other means. Did Shakespeare really have this faith? We can only say that his plays proclaim it, and that he resolves tragedy on that assumption. Whatever his personal belief may have been, the proposition that love is power becomes an important part of what we may call his ‘dramatic’ religion.

The inserting, at a later date, of this new conception into Berowne’s speech, shatters the logical continuity of Love’s Labour’s Lost. If Berowne had really reached this pinnacle by the end of the fourth act, then much of the fifth, which is designed to bring the lovers to a realization that never becomes as great as this, would be irrelevant. To follow the original development of the play, we must therefore confine our attention to the earlier version of his speech, concluding with the lines:

Then when ourselves we see in ladies’ eyes,

Do we not likewise see our learning there?

This part is entirely in character; and without being profound, it is none the less a stage in the gradual deepening of the ideas of love and learning which Berowne was merely toying with in act one:

Study me how to please the eye indeed,

By fixing it upon a fairer eye…

He did this when he met Rosaline; and the consequences were so disturbing that he tried to defend himself from them by denigration – ‘two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes!’ But nothing can save him from Shakespeare’s decision that his understanding is due to be quickened. As he gazes into the balls of pitch, they are transmuted to crystal, in which he beholds a vision:

From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive:

They are the ground, the books, the academes

From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire.

It may be that one’s sweetheart’s eyes are a natural source of revelation; but Shakespeare is certainly not copying nature in this context; he is observing, without parody or satire, an established rite in the ‘religion’ of love.

Quiller-Couch has remarked: ‘The reader who takes the trouble to go through Love’s Labour’s Lost marking every allusion to women’s eyes will be positively confounded by their number until it breaks on him that however many, however puzzling, its separate topical riddles may be, here – and precisely here – lies the secret of the play.’ The final form of the play is concerned with a deeper secret; but eyes might have been the secret of the first version, to which it would have been appropriate. But a secret, even a little one, invites us to do more than take note of its existence, it requires penetration. Berowne derives his doctrine from Rosaline’s eyes, but Shakespeare had it from other sources. It is worth while to take a glance at them, because this is not the only occasion on which their influence is considerable.

A possible source for the ritual of the eye is, once again, Chaucer’s fragmentary translation of The Romance of the Rose. As this poem is cast in the form of a dream, we may call its young hero the dreamer, until, after being struck by the arrows, he becomes the lover. When he enters the garden of the Rose, he is invited to join the dance; and when that is over, he is left alone. The other dancers drift away in couples, and as he sees them go, he thinks that only a great fool would not long for such a life, since to have the love of one’s choice is heaven:

For better lyfe durst him not care

For there nys so good paradyse

As to haue a loue at his deuyse… 1326

He wanders through the garden alone; but all the while the god of love is stalking him, an arrow ready for his bow. The dreamer feels apprehensive at this; he senses that there may be more to love than delight, that there may be much peril in it and pain; and he prays that if the god should loose the arrow, it will not cause a mortal wound:

Nowe god that sytteth in maieste

Fro deedly woundes he kepe me

If so be that he had me shete

For if I with his arowe mete

It had me greued sore ywis… 1343

It seems as if, like Berowne, he would prefer to take love lightly. When he has explored all the beauties of the garden, he comes to the spring of Narcissus, and again feels a pang of alarm. Narcissus was punished for selfishly withholding love, and the dreamer is at first reluctant to look into the water. Then he reassures himself that, as he is not disdainful, he will be in no danger, and he approaches the fountain. Whoever looks into it is sure to fall in love.

For Venus sonne / dan Cupido

Hath sowen there of loue the sede… 1617

Dan Cupid, we may notice in passing, is a somewhat uncommon title that Berowne also uses in recalling the moment when he was likewise smitten. The dreamer is now certainly in danger:

And for the sede that here was sowen

The welle is cleped / as is wel knowen

The welle of Loue… 1627

He looks in; and at the bottom of the well he sees the two marvellous crystals that reflect and contain the whole garden in themselves. These are the lady’s eyes, into which he gazes for a long while. A rose garden is revealed in their depths, and one of the rosebuds is particularly captivating:

Whan I had smelled the sauour swote

No wyl had I fro thence yet go… 1707

He is caught, first by the fascinating crystals and then by the perfume of the rosebud, her eyes and her love; so the god’s moment has come, he looses his arrows – five of them – and the dreamer becomes the lover. Thereupon, as we have already noticed, it is not to the lady that he kneels, but to the god; and he receives, in a very long speech, Love’s commandments, which are by no means easy to keep.

We might fairly say that, in the ‘religion’ of love, the lady’s eyes represent the baptismal font. And in Dante, for whom love takes on a mystical significance, which can hardly be attributed to The Romance of the Rose, this subtle meaning becomes more evident. I am not affirming that Shakespeare was directly influenced by Dante, but that both of them – together with Guillaume de Lorris, Chaucer and many more – were nourished by a common tradition, virtually a faith, to which each made a unique contribution. They share the idea that falling in love is something more than a romantic experience; it is also a rite of initiation into a new life.

On the first page of the Vita Nuova, Dante speaks of the moment – ‘When first the glorious Lady of my mind was made manifest to mine eyes.’* And in association with this event, he tells us – ‘There is a rubric, saying, “Here beginneth the New Life”…’ Incipit Vita Nuova. Since Dante’s relations with Beatrice were always of ‘fino amore’, imaginative and mystical, we may detect the baptismal nature of this experience more definitely than in that of the dreamer at the fountain. Dante was no doubt precocious in entering on this higher love-life at the age of nine! But he did not begin to write the Vita Nuova until he was twenty, and he was at least thirty before he finished it; so that the work itself, especially by the standards of poetic genius, is mature. As it proceeds, what we may call the ritual significance of the eye becomes even greater.

In the sonnet beginning:

Amore e ‘l cor gentil sono una cosa,†

Dante introduces the theme of love as power. And explaining the sonnet himself, he says that in the first part – ‘I speak of him according to his power. In the second, I speak of him according as his power translates itself into act.’* This theme he expands; and the following sonnet,

Negli occhi porta la mia donna Amore,†

is thus interpreted – ‘I say how this lady brings this power into action by those most noble features, her eyes; and … I say how she with power makes noble that which she looks upon; and this is as much as to say that she brings love, in power, thither where it is not … I say how she brings love, in act, into the hearts of all those whom she sees … I tell what she afterwards, with virtue, operates upon their hearts.’

Here, in extreme compression, as within a seed, is a philosophy of love as a transforming principle – power, act, and virtue. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Shakespeare announces in his own way (I do not imply a conscious connection) the same theme, and he never forgot it; by the time he comes to Measure for Measure, the theme is in its third phase, forth-going virtue; and by this he resolves tragedy. If, then, the lady’s eyes are conceived symbolically, as the font of love, where these tremendous possibilities begin, they may well have been the point of the earlier version of Love’s Labour’s Lost; and the affirmation of love as power is, perhaps, the additional point of the second version.

It is not necessary to affirm that Shakespeare was in debt to Dante; nor need it be denied. The first printing of the Vita Nuova was made in Florence in 1576. At that time, when England was looking to Italy as the land of culture, nothing that the Italian presses turned out passed unnoticed. And in the cultivated circles which Shakespeare undoubtedly frequented, he may well have heard these fecund ideas discussed. I will not rate this higher than a possibility, but that an idea that has an affinity with Dante’s was a dynamic part of his own philosophy can, I think, be shown.

At the end of the fourth act, then, we may say – irrespective of Dante – that the young men have entered on a new life. The fact that they have done so in a lighthearted manner does not make it less novel; but as Shakespeare’s intention is to bring the play to a serious conclusion – probably more serious in the second version than in the first – he must show this levity to be inadequate, and then change it into something else. At this time, perhaps, he had not himself experienced the torments of love that may change it into a destructive force; if that is so, part of the importance of these early plays may be that he is creating, in relative calm, an ideal to which he himself was able to hold when the storm broke on his own life. We have no biographical details; but his poetry is enough to tell us that he had lived through the hell as well as the heaven of the heart. Here, however, he seems to be personally at peace. And he ends the act with a glorious battlecry!

LONGAVILLE: Shall we resolve to woo these girls of France?

KING: And win them too…

BEROWNE: Advance your standards, and upon them, lords;

Pell-mell, down with them!

But the girls of France are not to be conquered in this crude manner. Again, perhaps, Shakespeare is remembering the allegory of the Rose. Acceptance by the god of love is a privilege, and it is granted only under certain conditions:

For curteys / and of fayre manere

Wel taught / and ful of gentylnysse

He muste ben / that shal me kysse… 2006

And first of o thyng warne I the

That payne and great aduersyte

He mote endure / and eke trauayle

That shal me serue / without fayle: 2012

In the fifth act, Shakespeare makes, in effect, the same stipulations. And he goes on to strip the last insincerities from love, in order that the quality itself may shine out clearly.

The young men begin by sending jewels to their ladies, accompanied by:

… as much love in rhyme

As would be cramm’d up in a sheet of paper,

Writ o’ both sides of the leaf, margent and all…

That will not pass; it is only good for laughter, and the girls dismiss it as:

A huge translation of hypocrisy…

The lords then come in person; but they are in disguise, dressed up as Russians. Clearly, this is part of a parable on semblance and reality. Boyet has heard the plan being hatched, and he warns the princess:

Love doth approach disguised…

The penalty for this little trick is that the ladies also mask themselves, and exchange the jewels that have just been sent to them. When the men arrive, each woos the girl who is wearing his own gift, and so vows fidelity to the wrong one. The king proposes to Rosaline, assuming her to be the princess; and when asked why he thought her to be so, he replies:

I knew her by the jewel on her sleeve.

They are all, in fact, making love to illusions; all…

Following the signs, woo’d but the sign for she.

If we accept the hypothesis of the duality of Shakespeare’s heroines, then the undermeaning of this scene is clear: the young men do not yet know what love is. Their conception of it, and their courtship are those of the conventions, they are merely wooing the signs; and that, Shakespeare is saying, goes for the audience as well, until some awakening experience reveals the deeper truth. We should no doubt concede, in view of the diversity of love-conventions in different societies and periods, that this is so, and also that there is a permanent power in the background. Whether Shakespeare succeeded in elucidating its nature, or whether he merely arrayed it in a vision of his own, is another matter: all we can attempt to do is to establish what he believed himself to have discovered, and what he affirmed. It is at least certain that he pursued the enquiry with high seriousness – even in comedy – throughout his work, and reached some astonishing conclusions. And I am sure we ought to grant – as some critics do not – that Shakespeare was sincere.

Love’s labour is lost in this play because it is a labour of affectation and not sincerity. But it will be won – so we are promised at the end – by service and sacrifice. Shakespeare is winnowing the chaff from the wheat. His present method of doing this is satirical: he makes the protestations of affectation ridiculous, and when they have been laughed off the stage, that which remains can be relied upon. At last, the characters begin to see into themselves; and this is so important to Shakespeare’s future work that it must be stressed. Beneath the fancy-dress is the true self. And when this is revealed, it is not only the ladies who will be reassured: the lords will also have found something, hitherto unknown, that they can rely on in themselves. Their discovery is not, of course, complete; but it is towards this inner simplicity that they are tending: