—Act V, scene i, lines 128-30
We can only suppose that Pompey the Great is substituted for Julius Caesar, and if this is so, it is a great mistake, for Caesar was far the greater man (see page I-257).
The last scene in Love's Labor's Lost is the longest in the play and, for that matter, in Shakespeare. It begins with the ladies coming together to talk about the fact that they have all received love tokens from the men. Boyet arrives to say he has overheard the men speaking and they have decided to woo the ladies in earnest.
The Princess says, lightly:
—Act V, scene ii, line 87
It is to be a merry war between the sexes in the tradition of courtly love. The men come to woo and the French ladies will resist. Saint Denis, the patron saint of France (see page II-515), will be opposed to the assaults of love, here represented as Saint Cupid.
Boyet tells the ladies that the gentlemen will come to them in exotic costume, for they
—Act V, scene ii, lines 120-21
In Shakespeare's time, Russians were exotic and popular in England because of Chancellor's voyage (see page I-640).
The ladies therefore decide to wear masks and to switch their characteristic ribboned decorations ("favors") with one another, so that each man might think the wrong girl his and court at cross-purposes. This is done and the ladies utterly thwart the men first when they are disguised as Russians and then in their own persons.
Berowne in particular is forced, in frustration, to forswear the complexities of courtly love, at which the ladies win every time, and vows to be an honest lover henceforward. He says:
—Act V, scene ii, lines 413-16
Russet and kersey are the color and material of homemade peasant clothing and Shakespeare thus expresses (as he usually does in his plays) his opinion of the superiority of plain Englishness over foreign ways and customs.
But it is time now for the masque of the Nine Worthies to be presented by the various eccentrics of the play.
Costard comes in with a sonorous Pompey the Great. Nathaniel is a hesitant and easily rattled Alexander the Great, and then in come Holofernes and Moth as Judas Maccabeus and Hercules respectively. Holofernes speaks first for Moth with the expected scraps of Latin, saying:
—Act V, scene ii, lines 586-89
The trite Latin rhyme of canus (dog) and manus (hand) reduces pedantry to its most foolish.
Hercules' twelfth and climactic labor was that of bringing into the upper world the three-headed hound Cerberus (see page I-101), who guarded the entrance to the underworld. He did not kill it, but brought it up alive as proof of the successful completion of the labor, then returned it.
When Hercules was a year old, according to legend, the jealous Juno (who was angry because Hercules was the offspring of one of Jupiter's many extramarital ventures) sent two serpents to kill him in the cradle. The infant Hercules seized each serpent in one of his baby fists and strangled it. The diminutive page is therefore not so ridiculous a representation of Hercules as might be thought. He represents Hercules, the Heroic Babe.
The rest of the masque of the Nine Worthies is reduced to a shambles. Holofernes, trying to make the Judas Maccabeus speech for himself, is teased into silence. Armado, who comes next as Hector, can make no more headway.
Costard is urged on by Berowne to accuse Armado of making Jaquenetta pregnant, and for a minute the audience is made to think there will be a mock duel between the two, but all is interrupted by the arrival of a messenger. He comes with news of the Princess' father, the King of France. The Princess guesses at once:
—Act V, scene ii, line 721
Henry III was stabbed on August 1, 1589, and died the next day. This may have nothing to do with the play at all, for there is a good chance it was written before then.
The French King's death, in the play, is a convenient device to end the developing and increasingly intense game of courtly love before it is forced to graduate into something else. The unreal world of the Navarrese court is forced to face reality, for the Princess must return to Paris to face the difficulties of a succession.
The men insist that though the game is over, their love is real. The ladies order them to remain austere, as they had originally planned to do, for one year anyway and if, at the end, they are still in love, that love will be returned.
And so love's labor is lost-for a year. Yet the audience may suppose that the year will pass and that love will then win.
15. The Taming Of The Shrew
The taming of the shrew, written, possibly, in 1593 or 1594, is a play within a play. At least it starts out so with what Shakespeare calls an "Induction" ("Introduction") representing the frame within which the play proper is presented.
The Induction begins with Christopher Sly, more than half drunk, being thrown out of an alehouse by an irate landlady who demands money for the glasses he has broken; money he refuses to pay.
With the owlish gravity of drunkenness, he rejects the names she calls him. He says:
—Induction, scene i, lines 3-4
Christopher Sly is, as he says later, a tinker, a profession lost to the modern world. A tinker was a solderer and repairer of kettles, pots, and other such household metalware, the name of the profession coming from the tink-tink of a small hammer against the utensil.
It did not take much capital or much intelligence to be a tinker, and while tinkers acted as though they were general handy men, they usually couldn't go much beyond solder or a nail, so that we now have the verb "to tinker," meaning "to fiddle with, rather unskillfully."