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The Lords’ Oath
In the play’s opening scene, the King and his lords swear an oath in which they agree to withdraw from society and commit themselves to study. For the King, this oath symbolizes his commitment to an idealistic vision of transforming his court into a center for contemplative arts: “Navarre shall be the wonder of the world; / Our court shall be a little academe” (1.1.13–14). As his phrase “wonder of the world” suggests, the goal is to ensure that he and his noble companions win “fame” (1.1.1) and, in doing so, become “heirs of all eternity” (7). However, the severity of the restrictions involved in the oath imperil the immortality the King and his lords wish to gain. The key constraints for their scholastic retreat include eating just once per day, sleeping only a few hours per night, and avoiding all contact with women. For such robust young men, it seems strangely self-abnegating to commit to minimal rations and nominal rest. Even more disconcerting is the pledge to have no contact with women. Over and again in Shakespeare this kind of life-denying retreat proves disastrous. The lords’ oath therefore symbolizes their folly and lack of self-knowledge.
Sonnets
Over the course of the play, the King and his lords each pen sonnets that they dispatch to their beloveds. On a superficial level, these sonnets symbolize the lords’ affection for the ladies—after all, they are love poems. As Berowne puts it: “By heaven, I do love, and it hath taught me to rhyme” (4.3.12–13). But though the lords all believe themselves to be expressing their love for the ladies, it seems likelier that they are simply indulging in their own obsession with the conventional conceits of poetry. This becomes clear when the ladies, having received the lords’ voluminous verses, laugh at how poorly the men have captured their purported beloveds. Rosaline, complaining of Berowne’s poetry, says wryly: “I am compared to twenty thousand fairs” (5.2.40). In this way, the sonnets offer another symbol of the lords’ folly and lack of self-awareness. Shakespeare makes this symbolic valence literal in the scene where each lord reads his poem aloud, only to be overheard by the others. In this scene, literature comes to life, but in doing so it also reveals a certain absurdity—one that incriminates the lords, with their “guilty rhymes” (4.3.144) revealing that each one has broken his oath.
The Nine Worthies
In the play’s lengthy final scene, the lords present a pageant of the Nine Worthies for the ladies’ entertainment. The ostensible reason for the production is to impress the ladies, which may explain why the schoolmaster Holofernes suggests this particular type of pageant. Ever since the Middle Ages, it had been common to present pageants and masquerades featuring a selection of nine noteworthy figures from the Bible, the classics, and more recent romances. The lords seem to think the “Worthies” they present will make them appear worthy of their beloveds. However, the performance that ensues does just the opposite. First of all, the cast playing the Nine Worthies are all commoners who prove hilariously ill-suited to their roles. The fool Costard, for instance, announces himself as Pompey the Big, rather than Pompey the Great. In this bungled performance we can detect an echo of the lords, who, in attempting to write great poetry, succeed only in writing a lot of it. In this way, the play within a play offers an amusing mirror that reflects the lords’ folly back at them. Ironically, then, the pageant of the Nine Worthies symbolizes the lords’ unworthiness of the ladies they purport to love.
