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Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives,
Live registered upon our brazen tombs,
And then grace us in the disgrace of death,
When, spite of cormorant devouring time,
Th’ endeavor of this present breath may buy
That honor which shall bate his scythe’s keen edge
And make us heirs of all eternity.
Therefore, brave conquerors, for so you are
That war against your own affections
And the huge army of the world’s desires,
Our late edict shall strongly stand in force.
Navarre shall be the wonder of the world;
Our court shall be a little academe,
Still and contemplative in living art. (1.1.1–14)
The King of Navarre opens the play with this speech, which is meant to rouse the excitement of his lords—Berowne, Longaville, and Dumaine—regarding their plan to withdraw for three years of focused study. Curiously, the King peppers his speech with military metaphors. He suggests that he and his companions will become “brave conquerors” whose scholarly pursuits will, like army campaigns, confer honor and “fame” on them, allowing them to cheat death by becoming “heirs of all eternity.” Yet there’s a certain irony in this military language, given that what he’s proposing isn’t an advance to explore new territory, but rather a retreat along well-worn paths of study. Even so, the King believes that their shared commitment to scholarship will enable Navarre to become “a little academe”—that is, an intellectual center that will transform his court into a “wonder of the world.”
It is characteristic of Shakespeare that the first words of the play already tell us much about what to expect in the action that follows. In this case, the sheer loftiness of the King’s vision prepares us to expect everything to come crashing down. Key here is an implicit contradiction between the aspiration for immortality and the life-denying restrictions that required to achieve it. As we will learn as the scene unfolds, the King’s vision will require him and his lords to live like sequestered monks. To achieve optimal focus, he has proposed that they eat but one meal a day. And, to ensure maximum study time, he’s dictated that they get minimal sleep. Above all, the King has declared that he and his lords must avoid all contact with women, thereby freeing themselves from the temptations of the flesh. But such a high-minded vision can only succumb to the baser necessities of embodied existence. To deny these necessities is to deny life itself, and these men are all young of vigorous enough to make such self-abnegation virtually impossible. As Berowne will put it much later in the play: “Young blood doth not obey an old decree” (4.3.236).
Why, all his behaviors did make their retire
To the court of his eye, peeping thorough desire.
His heart like an agate with your print impressed,
Proud with his form, in his eye pride expressed.
His tongue, all impatient to speak and not see,
Did stumble with haste in his eyesight to be;
All senses to that sense did make their repair,
To feel only looking on fairest of fair.
Methought all his senses were locked in his eye[.] (2.1.246–54)
The Princess and her ladies arrive at court at the top of act 2, and the scene that follows stages an amusing encounter between these French noblewomen and the lords of Navarre. From the very first meeting, the ladies playfully mock the lords by taking their figures of speech literally, leading to the men’s confusion and mild humiliation. Yet this atmosphere of flirtatious mockery provides ideal conditions for the flowering of romance. In the lines quoted above, the French lord Boyet reflects on how this atmosphere has led the King of Navarre to take a fancy to the Princess. He has apparently watched the King closely and observed how his physical presentation expressed internal desire. In particular, Boyet notes the tell-tale sparkle in the King’s eyes. As he describes it, the King’s eyes were so intensely “peeping thorough desire” it was as if he channeled all his feelings of love and lust through them. Thus, in his eyes he saw signs of the heart’s pride, as well as the stumbling impatience of his bungled attempts at speech. Everything is in the eyes.
Boyet’s speech to the Princess is significant for several reasons. First, his emphasis on the King’s eyes marks the beginning of a major motif in the play, where eyes are understood to be the ultimate sources of truth, beauty, and love. Yet eyes can also deceive. For instance, when the lords later agree to abandon their oath and woo the ladies, they embark on a new course of study centered symbolically on the women’s eyes. Berowne will claim that knowledge of love was “first learnèd in a lady’s eyes” (4.3.321), and he’ll insist that love also “adds a precious seeing to the eye” such that “a lover’s eyes will gaze an eagle blind” (327–28). However, it turns out that the lovestruck lords fail to see the ladies for who they really are. Their obsession with the tropes of love poetry prevents them from peering through what Armado calls the “sweet smoke of rhetoric” (3.1.65). This brings up a second point about Boyet’s speech, which is self-consciously poetic with its carefully rhymed couplets and singular focus on the motif of the eye. In this way, his words foreshadow the many poems the lords will read onstage in later scenes.
Tush, none but minstrels like of sonneting!
But are you not ashamed? Nay, are you not,
All three of you, to be thus much o’ershot?
. . .
O, what a scene of fool’ry have I seen,
Of sighs, of groans, of sorrow, and of teen!
O me, with what strict patience have I sat,
To see a king transformèd to a gnat!
To see great Hercules whipping a gig,
And profound Solomon to tune a jig,
And Nestor play at pushpin with the boys,
And critic Timon laugh at idle toys. (4.3.165–78)
In act 4, scene 3, each of the lords trots out to read his love poems aloud and lament how he’s broken his oath. Shakespeare orchestrates this scene like a brilliant situational comedy, such that when each new lord approaches, the one already present hides himself and eavesdrops. Berowne starts onstage alone, only to hide when the King approaches, who in turn hides when Longaville enters, who is finally displaced with Dumaine’s arrival. The order then reverses, as Longaville steps forth to confront Dumaine. The King then comes forward to chide both men. Finally, Berowne leaves his hiding place. It is then that he addresses the lines quoted above to his companions. Berowne’s words encapsulate the spirit of self-righteousness that animates each lord before he is exposed as a hypocrite. The irony of this self-righteous attitude drives the comedy of this scene, which becomes even more hilarious as Berowne launches into his lofty declamation about the lowliness of sonnets. He taunts the men by recounting the “fool’ry” of their sighs and groans of sorrow, then shames them by casting them as great heroes—Hercules, Solomon, Nestor, Timon—whose reputations have regrettably collapsed.
Of course, Berowne’s own fall is imminent. Soon Jaquenetta will enter with the misdelivered letter Berowne penned for Rosaline, which will expose him for the forsworn hypocrite he really is. The audience takes pleasure in anticipating this reversal, and we relish it when he gets his humiliating comeuppance. This is a pattern that appears at other points in the play, where lofty ideals are exposed for their foolishness. For example, take the characters Holofernes and Nathaniel. Despite both priding themselves on their vast stores of knowledge, their Latin is riddled with obvious errors, and they constantly misquote the great poets they claim to idolize. But perhaps the most prominent example of such reversal is the botched pageant of the Nine Worthies, in which commoners take on the personas of great men from history and legend. At every turn they mess up their lines or allow the hecklers to get the best of them, resulting in a decidedly unworthy performance. Shakespeare seems to be emphasizing the folly of self-righteousness—particularly when used as a tool to assert power and moral superiority over others.
O, never will I trust to speeches penned,
Nor to the motion of a schoolboy’s tongue,
Nor never come in vizard to my friend,
Nor woo in rhyme like a blind harper’s song.
Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,
Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation,
Figures pedantical—these summer flies
Have blown me full of maggot ostentation.
I do forswear them, and I here protest
By this white glove—how white the hand, God knows!—
Henceforth my wooing mind shall be expressed
In russet yeas and honest kersey noes.
And to begin: Wench, so God help me, law,
My love to thee is sound, sans crack or flaw. (5.2.438–50)
Berowne makes this speech after the debacle in which the lords visit the ladies disguised as Russians, only to find out that they were tricked into wooing the wrong women. He begins by announcing his loss of trust in “speeches penned.” This is a reference to the speech that had been written to announce the approach of the “Russians.” Mote bungled this speech and gave up the jig, which in turn gave the ladies time to concoct their humiliating trick. But Berowne isn’t just claiming to give up on written speeches; he’s claiming to give up poetry and the florid language in which it’s written. Poetic language, he says, is like high-priced fabrics such as taffeta, silk, and high-piled velvet. Though lovely, such language gives rise to “hyperboles,” “figures pedantical,” and other forms of “maggot ostentation.” Just as he forswore his earlier oath to scholarship, he now “forswear[s]” poetic language. In its stead, he commits to using more ordinary language, represented here through references to coarse types of fabric known as “russet” and “kersey.” And, as if to kick off this new commitment, he ends by plainly declaring his love for Rosaline.
Of course, the apparent earnestness of Berowne’s declaration falls apart when we realize that it takes the form of a Shakespearean sonnet, complete with the usual rhyme scheme: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Ironically, Berowne’s farewell to poetry is itself a rigorously structured poem, and his invocation of “three-piled hyperboles” and “maggot ostentation” are the very “figures pedantical” he claims to forswear. Admittedly, it would be very difficult for the audience to identify this speech as a sonnet in performance, so the irony of the moment is something that only readers of the play are likely to notice. But the moment is no less significant for this fact. It’s almost as though Berowne has integrated the logic of verse so thoroughly that he doesn’t recognize it himself. Seemingly unbeknownst to himself, he has, in Armado’s suggestive phrase, “turn[ed] sonnet” (1.2.184)—that is, he’s written a sonnet and perhaps even become one. In this way, his ironic farewell to poetry should be understood as an example of Berowne’s lack of self-awareness.
They are worse fools to purchase mocking so.
That same Berowne I’ll torture ere I go.
O, that I knew he were but in by th’ week,
How I would make him fawn, and beg, and seek,
And wait the season, and observe the times,
And spend his prodigal wits in bootless rhymes,
And shape his service wholly to my hests,
And make him proud to make me proud that jests!
So pair-taunt-like would I o’ersway his state,
That he should be my fool, and I his fate. (5.2.64–73)
Rosaline addresses these lines to her fellow ladies near the beginning of the play’s long final scene. At this point, the lords have not yet come to them in disguise, and the pageant of the Nine Worthies is still on the horizon. Even so, the ladies are already feeling quite unimpressed by the lords. They have each received gifts from the men, including letters with love poems. In general, they enjoy the gifts, though Katherine is somewhat confused at having received just one glove without its twin. However, they all find the poems completely ludicrous—both overwrought and overlong. Here, Rosaline ridicules the men’s “bootless rhymes.” Yet it’s equally clear that, despite her irritation with Berowne, Rosaline also fancies him. In her description of how she’d like to see him reformed, she foreshadows the conclusion of this scene, when, nearly 1000 lines later, the ladies defer marriage so the lords will have a year to mature.
Rosaline’s complaint is also important for the way it echoes a recurring motif in the play, where the women express a desire to dominate the men. Indeed, she fantasizes here about subduing Berowne through “torture.” Calling to mind the psychodynamics of sadism, she envisions the pleasure she would derive from “mak[ing] him fawn, and beg, and seek.” The sexual charge of such a fantasy is potent, and it strongly recalls the Princess’s words from the hunting scene earlier in the play. There, she thrilled at the gender inversion involved in her acting as the skilled archer hunting the vulnerable deer. She then slyly likened the praise she received for her skill to the “praise we may afford / To any lady that subdues a lord” (4.1.41–42). Rosaline echoes this desire to subdue a man here. And in the scene that follows, the ladies concoct a plan to subdue the lords by subjecting their attempt at disguise to mockery. As the Princess will joyfully declare as they prepare to enact this plan, “There’s no such sport as sport by sport o’erthrown, / To make theirs ours and ours none but our own” (5.2.160–61). The desire to subdue and possess couldn’t be clearer.
