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References to Eyes and Sight
Love’s Labor’s Lost features many references to the senses. However, references to eyes and sight are by far the most numerous and significant in the play. Eyesight is most closely associated with notions of truth and beauty. For one thing, eyesight is the key sense used in the pursuit of scholarship. Early in the play, when he’s questioning the point of study, Berowne develops a complicated metaphor to describe how easy it is for scholars to misperceive the truth: “As painfully to pore upon a book / To seek the light of truth, while truth the while / Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look” (1.1.76–78). The scholar seeks truth, but the truth may well blind him. These words turn out to be prophetic. When Berowne falls in love with Rosaline, he blames it on her eyes: “O, but her eye! By this light, but for her eye I would not love her” (4.3.9–10). The other lords also discourse about the ladies’ eyes, citing them as the essence of the women’s beauty and the cause of their own love. But as it turns out, the beautiful “truth” of love supposedly revealed by the eyes is little more than a trope that prevents the lords from truly seeing their beloved noblewomen.
Language of Perjury
As the King and each of his lords break the oath committing them to the avoidance of women in pursuit of scholarship, they frequently express their anxiety using the language of perjury. Perjury is a legal term that refers to a criminal offense in which a witness lies while giving testimony under oath. Thus, as they contravene their vow, the King and the lords become, as they frequently say, “forsworn.” On one level, the legal origin of this terminology is appropriate, since the oath these men signed seems to have an official status in the King’s court. Hence why Armado has Costard and Jaquenetta arrested early in the play. But on another level, the language of perjury strikes the audience as rather fanciful, given that no one aside from Costard ever suffers any consequences for their oath breaking. Shakespeare illustrates the point through Longaville, who transforms this legalese into poetry. In act 4, scene 3, Berowne notes how he “comes in like a perjure, wearing papers” (4.3.45). In Elizabethan courts, the perjurer would wear a description of his offense pinned to his back, but here the “papers” are sonnets in Longaville’s cap. The poem he proceeds to read aloud then mounts a fanciful defense of his own perjury.
Seasons
References to the seasons play a significant role in the play, and particularly in the opening and closing acts. Consider act 1, scene 1, when Berowne questions the point of scholastic retreat. The other lords poke fun at his skepticism, but Berowne retorts, “The spring is near when green geese are a-breeding” (1.1.99). The phrase green geese refers to geese hatched in the autumn, but in this case it also means immature people who, like his fellow lords, are gullible enough to do whatever the King asks. The King protests that “Berowne is like an envious sneaping frost / That bites the firstborn infants of the spring” (1.1.104–105). But Berowne insists on the importance of every person being “fit in his place and time” (1.1.101), an idea he emphasizes in the language of the seasons: “At Christmas I no more desire a rose / Than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled shows, / But like of each thing that in season grows” (1.1.109–110). Ultimately, his point is to ward against the untimeliness of the King’s proposal to cloister men who are in their prime. Similar seasonal references return in the charming poetic dialogue between Spring and Winter in the play’s closing moments.
