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On the face of it, the structure of Love’s Labor’s Lost is unusual for a Shakespearean comedy. For instance, each of the first three acts are extremely short, which causes the initial plot to speed on at a very brisk pace. Acts 4 and 5, by contrast, are each quite long, and they both feature capacious scenes where characters go on about seemingly pointless subjects—indulging at length in sexual innuendo, jokes about grammar, and general tomfoolery. For much of the play, then, nothing much seems to happen other than flirtation and gentle mockery.
From another vantage, however, Love’s Labor’s Lost is a very neatly constructed play, composed as it is from various layers of mirroring. For instance, there’s the mirroring of the King and his three lords on one side, and the Princess and her three ladies on the other. The King and Princess act as the “chief couple” of the group, behind which the lesser nobles fall in line in their own couplings. Then there’s the mirroring that occurs between the play’s “high” and “low” plots. As the King, the Princess, and their consorts engage in their fumbling courtships, we also meet characters of varying degrees of ridiculousness who are equally caught up in their own romantic foibles. There’s Costard the clown, who’s arrested for breaking the court-wide rule against fraternizing with women. Then there’s Don Adriano de Armado, the verbose Spaniard who falls for Jaquenetta the dairy maid and, by the end, gets her pregnant. Additionally, there are several characters who, though not in pursuit of love, do engage in constant mockery that mirrors the ongoing battle of wits that plays out between the King’s lords and the Princess’s ladies. Ultimately, the lives and loves of the “high” and “low” prove more alike than different.
With these structural mirrors in place, Shakespeare can unfold his admittedly minimal plot. In brief, the play opens with the King of Navarre and his lords vow to withdraw for three years and deny themselves food, sleep, and women in pursuit of scholarship. Such a restrictive oath is bound to fail, and indeed it collapses immediately when the Princess of France arrives in Navarre with three attending ladies. She comes to discuss matters of state, but the political business quickly falls to the wayside as lords and ladies alike take a fancy to each other. In their inflamed love, the lords begin to write ridiculous love poems. Though they do this in secret, they eventually figure out that they’ve all “perjured” themselves in a scene that combines two tried-and-true plot devices: eavesdropping and misdirected letters. Now united in their abandonment of scholarship and the pursuit of women, the lords decide to woo the ladies by producing a pageant of the Nine Worthies. Playing the roles of the nine notable figures from history and legend are the play’s “low” characters, each of whom proves incompetent in his own way. In the end, the lords propose marriage, and the ladies defer their answer for a year.
As this brief overview suggests, the play’s main through-line centers on the lords, who must learn to overcome their own folly before they can successfully woo their beloveds. The very fact that the men all agree to swear such a self-abnegating oath shows, at the beginning of the play, that they don’t possess much self-awareness. Surely their commitment to scholarship at the expense of everything that supports an active and healthy life is bound to fail. And even when it does fail, the lords continue along in ignorance. They lose themselves in the writing of love sonnets and get so caught up in the tropes and conceits of romance that they neglect to see the very women they claim to be in love with. Their self-involvement also consistently puts them at a disadvantage with the ladies, who at every turn exceed them in both cleverness and maturity.
The play’s mockery of the lords reaches its climax with the pageant of the Nine Worthies, the play within a play the lords produce to impress the ladies with their own greatness. Here we have yet another mirroring device. The lords wish to imply their own greatness through the presentation of the “worthies,” but the poor performances of the commoner cast do just the opposite. For example, when the fool Costard comes onstage dressed as Pompey the Great, he fumbles the delivery and announces: “I Pompey am, Pompey, surnamed the Big” (5.2.607). Dumaine is quick to correct Costard, but the fool’s mistake is telling. Indeed, we can detect in his failed performance an echo of the lords, who, in attempting to write great poetry, succeed only in writing a lot of it. As with other comedies Shakespeare will write featuring a play within a play, here the pageant of the Nine Worthies functions as a metatheatrical conceit that draws the audience’s attention to the artificiality of performance. Though they don’t yet understand it, the lords must learn that their own poetic performances of love are equally artificial.
Love’s Labor’s Lost is bounded by intimations of death that, taken together, have a life-affirming effect. The play opens with the King declaring that his court shall henceforth become an “academe,” one where pursuit of a life of contemplation will ensure a certain immortality that makes the scholars “heirs of all eternity” (1.1.7). Yet to achieve immortality, the King institutes a surprisingly harsh and life-denying series of restrictions: limited food, minimal sleep, and no romance. In this way, immortality can only be achieved with a symbolic form of social death that’s closely related to monasticism. For such a group of ambitious and energetic young men, such intense self-abnegation is bound to fail. Life will out, and indeed, the remainder of the play traces the ups and downs that result from the almost immediate collapse of the lords’ oaths.
Whereas the play opens with an intimation of symbolic death, it closes with a real one as the messenger Mercade enters to inform the Princess that her father, the King of France, has died. This news brings a sudden end to the pageant of the Nine Worthies and immediately sobers the mood. Importantly, though, the mood doesn’t shift directly into mourning. Rather, it moves from frivolity to seriousness, as the King and his lords attempt to convince their beloveds to marry them before returning to France. The reminder of mortality speeds the men along in their efforts to woo the women. Thus, they propose marriage and invoke the idea of a future together as a symbolic recuperation of life in the face of death. The ladies famously deny the lords’ proposals, but they don’t reject them outright. Instead, they defer for a year, during which time the lords can mature and become better matches for the ladies. In this way, the play is in line with Shakespeare’s other comedies, which typically end not with the marriage itself, but with its future promise. The play is thus ultimately a resounding affirmation of life. For all the misunderstandings, mismatches, disappointments, and mockery, life and love both find a way.
