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Discuss the major differences between the lords of Navarre and the ladies of France. How does Shakespeare dramatize these differences?
The differences between the lords and the ladies drives much of the play’s comedy. In general, the lords hold tight to lofty ideals associated with their pursuit of scholarship. The earnestness of these ideals, along with their obsession with poetry, often leads them to lose sight of reality and deprives them of a sense of humor. The ladies, meanwhile, possess a grounded intelligence that endows them with a playful and flexible sense of humor. Though they are more materialistic than their male counterparts, they are also more in touch with reality, which makes them much better judges of character. Shakespeare dramatizes these differences between the lords and the ladies from their first encounter in act 2. Whereas the lords aim to impress the ladies with their heightened rhetoric, the ladies flirtatiously deflate their ambitions by coyly taking all their figures of speech literally. This basic pattern repeats throughout the play, with the men inflating themselves and the women making a mockery of them. At the play’s end, the ladies defer marrying the lords to ensure that the men have time to grow up a bit and match their level of maturity.
Describe the role poetry plays in Love’s Labor’s Lost. What status does the sonnet have in particular?
It’s generally agreed that Shakespeare ranks among the most accomplished poets in the English language, and that some of his most compelling verse comes from his plays. Love’s Labor’s Lost doesn’t feature his best poetry. Even so, verse plays a central role in this work, which submits the conventions of love poetry to an inspired critique. The King, his three lords, and Armado all try their hand at writing love poems. Indeed, their overwhelming feelings of love spur them to put pen to paper. As Berowne puts it: “By heaven, I do love, and it hath taught me to rhyme” (4.3.12–13). But these men don’t just pen any old poems; they opt for the most sophisticated type of poem at all—the love sonnet. Shakespeare was famously writing his own sonnet sequence during the same period he drafted Love’s Labor’s Lost, and some of the poems written by the lords share similar themes. In general, though, the quality of the lords’ verses is uneven at best—a fact the ladies are quick to note. Yet even as he mounts a gentle critique of it, Shakespeare ultimately celebrates the wonderful folly of verse, which he’s made come to life on the stage.
Many critics have claimed that Love’s Labor’s Lost is fundamentally a play about language. Do you agree with this statement? Discuss why or why not.
On the surface of things, Love’s Labor’s Lost would appear to be a play about love. After all, the word is right there in the title. And indeed, much of the play’s action is taken up with the fumbling romance between the noblemen of Navarre and the noblewomen of France. From another perspective, however, we might say that it’s the fumbling part of the romance that is truly central. Most of the play’s action doesn’t involve much action at all. Rather, it’s full of long and often confusing dialogues filled with wordplay and multilingual jokes, in which characters either intentionally or unintentionally misunderstand each other. In this sense, the play becomes a comedy about the perils of miscommunication and the inherent slipperiness of language. Examples abound, such as the early scene where the fool Costard misunderstands Armado’s use of the word l’envoi, which leads to a long and bewildering digression. Later in that same scene Costard mistakes the words remuneration and guerdon as the Latin names for different types of coins. Significantly, this mistake foreshadows his mix-up of two love letters, which he then misdelivers—a potent metaphor for what happens when language fails to communicate.
