It is a matter of historical record that, at a dinner in Oxford in 1593, Southampton sat with the four principal patrons of the English theatre — the Earl of Essex, Lord Strange, the Earl of Pembroke and the Lord Admiral Howard. No account of Elizabethan society, or the Elizabethan theatre, can omit this almost claustrophobic sense of belonging. That claustrophobia, or closeness of association, is echoed in a play that Shakespeare wrote during this period. Love’s Labour’s Lost is something of a puzzle. It seems in part to be a satire on some of Shakespeare’s more notable contemporaries, and is so highly allusive and ironic that it hardly seems designed for the public playhouses. It has sometimes been assumed that it was commissioned in some sense by Southampton, and there has even been speculation that it was first performed in Southampton House or at Titchfield. In a ground-plan for Titchfield House there is an upstairs chamber designated as the “Playhouse Room,” just to the left of the main entrance.
With its cast of young noblemen and noble ladies, its affected pedants and its schoolmasters, its nimble wits and its dunces, it has been variously interpreted as a playful satire upon Southampton and his circle, upon Lord Strange and his supporters, upon Thomas Nashe, upon John Florio, upon Sir Walter Raleigh and the notorious “school of night.” There are references to a thundering rival poet, George Chapman, and to other Elizabethan notables who are now less well known than the characters in the play. And it may indeed refer to all of them. But if it is so densely allusive a play, then it could really only have been intended for a very knowing audience. Shakespeare even went back to the work of John Lyly, the court dramatist par excellence, for the tone and structure of his play. He was also thinking of Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella. This was the courtly and noble milieu in which his mind and imagination were working. It was played before Queen Elizabeth in 1597, and Southampton staged it for the royal family of King James I at Southampton House eight years later. Southampton had a particular, and perhaps proprietorial, interest in the play. Yet it was not only a coterie drama. It was also performed at a public theatre, and there is a poem of 1598 which begins:
LOVES LABOR LOST, I once did see a Play
Yclepéd [called] so …
The essential plot is a simple one. Ferdinand, King of Navarre, persuades three of his courtiers to join him in three years of study during which they will renounce all contact with women. At the same time, however, the Princess of France and three of her noblewomen arrive in his kingdom, with predictable results. The King and his nobles fall in love, and forswear their oaths. At the close of the play a messenger arrives to announce the death of the Princess’s father, and all the revels are ended. It is a strong yet slender thread upon which to hang a range of allusions, characters and witticisms as well as assorted comic business. The range of parallels and references is indeed a wide one. The dramatic court is loosely established upon the real court of Navarre, from whom Shakespeare even borrowed the names of his courtiers. The names of Berowne, Longauille and Dumaine are taken from the Due de Biron, the Due de Longueville and the Due de Mayenne. It is unlikely that Shakespeare was alluding to the internecine rivalries of French politics; it is much more probable that he found the names in contemporary pamphlets and lifted them out of their immediate context. That was his characteristic practice, which may be described as one of inspired opportunism. The character of Armado, who is described as “an affected Spanish Braggart,” seems to be based upon Gabriel Harvey, a notably affected scholar and poet. There is little doubt that his page, Moth, is a caricature of Thomas Nashe; when Armado calls Moth “my tender Iuuenal” it is a pun on Nashe’s assumption of the role of the Roman satirist Juvenal. The joke is that Harvey and Nashe were in fact bitter enemies, and for several years engaged in a pamphlet war with one another. To have them appear on stage as a Spanish grandee and his witty page was a stroke of great comic invention. Shakespeare had a keen eye for the vagaries of his contemporaries. It is also relevant, perhaps, that in this period Nashe was vying with Shakespeare for the patronage of Southampton. His was a good-humoured way of dealing with a rival.
The part of Holofernes, or “Pedant” as he is described in the list of characters, is no less clearly based upon John Florio; he talks as if he had swallowed Florio’s dictionary, quotes some of its definitions and also employs Italian phrases to be found in Florio’s Second Frutes. There are other connections with the life of the time. To give the name “Ferdinand” to the King of Navarre is to pay passing reference to Ferdinando, Lord Strange, who may have watched the play in the company of Southampton. There is also a reference in the text to “the school of night,” although some scholars believe it to be the “scowl” or “suit” or “stile” of night. If it is indeed a school it is likely to be a reference to the scholarly coterie around Sir Walter Raleigh, whose adventures in alchemy and speculation led to their being known as a “school of atheism”.
Love’s Labour’s Lost is written in Shakespeare’s most artificial style, reminiscent of the sonnets and the longer poetic narratives that he had written or was in the process of writing. Of all Shakespeare’s plays, it is the most heavily rhymed; the use of rhyme in couplets, in particular, emphasises the closed nature of the experience that the play offers. It is a world of artifice in which pattern and symmetry are the single most noticeable features. But the word “wit” is also used more than forty times. It is a world of play. That is why it is also a play of puns. As evidence of Shakespeare’s dramatic and linguistic virtuosity it is little short of a wonder. As he rushes forward in composition, he sometimes stumbles on an image which he will recall later. Will Kempe, playing the clown Costard, utters the line: “My sweet ounce of mans flesh, my in-conie lew”(865) in anticipation of The Merchant of Venice.
In Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus, the composer Adrian Lev-erkuhn conceives this play, in musical terms, as “a revival of opéra bouffe in a spirit of the most artificial mockery and parody of the artificial; something highly playful and highly precious.” The narrator of the novel describes it as “Leverkuhn’s exuberant youthful composition,”4 like the play itself. Yet Love’s Labour’s Lost is almost opéra bouffe already. With its extravagance and lasciviousness, its rush of inventiveness, its prolificity, its ornamentation and decoration, its rapid changes of verse-scheme, its general testing of sixteenth-century English to the very bounds and limits of its capacity, it is one of the cleverest plays ever written. As one of the French courtiers admits of female wit (2010-11):
… their conceites haue winges,
Fleeter then Arrowes, bullets, wind, thought, swifter thinges.
Shakespeare wrote some sonnets for the play itself, and these were later incorporated within an anthology, The Passionate Pilgrim, which included two of Shakespeare’s “real” sonnets. The “dark lady” of those sonnets seems to have some connection with one of the Princess’s entourage, Rosaline, who is described as being “as blacke as Ebonie”(1487). The connections are there. Whether they are real, or fanciful, is another matter.