Love's Labour's Lost

In this section, Shakespeare develops the comedic plot through the deliveries of the wrong letters to the wrong people. This is a source of humor: The Princess is astonished by the strange and over-the-top letter apparently for Rosaline, before realizing it is an error, and Berowne is exposed by his letter after having just assured the other Lords that, unlike them, he would never be so weak as to fall in love. However, these mishaps also reflect a key theme of the play: The Complexity of Language is embodied by the complexities of communication more broadly in these interactions, showing how easily meaning is lost or goes astray.

This section also brings the plot and subplot into contact: They influence each other narratively, but are also juxtaposed against each other, revealing the very different worlds the characters inhabit. The Complexities of Language is again used comedically: The banter of the courtly characters in 4.1 uses complex wordplay, even where it refers to sexual innuendo; Boyet and Rosaline score points against each other. In contrast, Holofernes’s wordplay is dry and scholarly, with his pedantry and pride the source of humor rather than his jokes. His tongue twister for example (4.2.67) sounds complex but merely states events, rather than exploring an idea. Dull presents a riddle, but cannot understand Holofernes’s answer to it. The play highlights that the courtly characters share a common educational background and social code, which the other characters do not. Costard’s presence in 4.1 shows what happens when these worlds meet: He attempts to participate but misjudges, speaking crudely. His private satisfaction as he believes he has bettered Boyet (4.1.166) in wits is ironic, showing the gulf between him and the courtly characters.

An element of this plot is resolved within the same Act, as the letter reveals to the ladies that Rosaline has an admirer, and the reveal of Berowne’s letter to the King cements the realization that all the Lords have broken their oaths. This clarity is necessary in order to establish the Lords’ objective in the final Act, setting up the action of Act V. The Masculine Pursuit of Love is revealed as the driving force of both this comedic interlude and the approaching dramatic conclusion. Berowne concludes this section with a rousing speech in which he asserts the value of pursuing love, describing its enriching power and the impossibility of knowledge or art existing without it: “Never durst poet touch a pen to write / Until his ink were tempered with love’s sighs” (4.3.340-41). This assertion, made in verse, draws attention to the centrality of love to the play itself, which would not exist otherwise.

Shakespeare also develops the theme of Fantasy Versus Reality in this section by highlighting the fantastical nature of theatre. In 4.3, the Lords all watch each other, unaware that they too are being watched, mirroring the audience’s watching of them. Shakespeare builds a hierarchy of awareness in the plot: Where dramatic irony often involves one character not knowing information held by the audience and possibly another character, Shakespeare creates four layers in which each character who enters knows less than the one before. He suggests that there is a fine line between reality and fantasy: The Lords’ perceived reality is partly a fantasy. Their soliloquies have a theatrical quality that they are not fully aware of, as they unknowingly all use the same form (a sonnet) to express themselves, suggesting that their love itself is shaped by popular narratives, while they are all unknowingly being watched by the audience. The behavior of the Lords in 4.3 also counters the idea that their courtly manners make them better people: They not only break their oaths, but also lie about it, hypocritically censuring each other until they too are exposed. Costard suggests that he and Jaquenetta are morally superior: “Walk aside the true folk, and let the traitors stay” (4.3.232).

This challenging of social expectations and hierarchies is continued through the Lords’ discussion of the women’s beauty. Their conversation contains attitudes that reflect the prejudices of the period, primarily sexist and racist ideas connecting a narrow, European definition of beauty with a woman’s worth and character. Shakespeare does not offer a simple refutation of these ideas: Berowne challenges them but also displays them, both here and in Act II when he laments his attraction to Rosaline. For example, he argues that other women only fit societal beauty standards because of make-up and wigs, which are easily washed away (4.3.279-80).

Berowne’s statements critique women for their response to society’s rigid demands around appearance; however, such statements also suggests the shallowness of judging a person by their appearance—something later backed up in Act V when the men wrongly identify the women based on the tokens they are holding. Within a period-typical linguistic framework, Berowne vehemently defends Rosaline’s beauty when the other Lords mock her dark hair and complexion. Berowne argues that all her features are beautiful, and that she is so beautiful that the fashion will change, and people will wear make-up to look like her (4.3.282-85).

This argument about the women’s beauty acknowledges the fleeting nature of societal ideas of beauty, implying that they are a fantasy, whilst still imbuing them with importance. Though he engages in it extensively himself, Berowne at one point challenges the terms of the entire discourse, exclaiming, “Fie, painted rhetoric! O, she needs it not! / To things of sale a seller’s praise belongs” (4.3.259-60). Shakespeare suggests in this line that Rosaline does not need the men’s words to define her, and that she is not merely an object for them to value. Their conversation around the masculine pursuit of love thus shows that the complexities of language have a two-way relationship with the complexities of the values and constructs of the society they describe, with fantasy (such as a narrative defining beauty) and reality influencing each other.