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The Perils of Miscommunication
In a play that spends so much time on language games and playful mockery, it’s no surprise that miscommunication abounds. Language frequently shows itself to be slippery in ways that comically derail conversations and lead to insurmountable confusion. In act 3, for instance, Armado’s use of the poetic term l’envoi gets misunderstood by the fool Costard, whose response is further misunderstood by Armado and leads to such disorientation that Armado must eventually ask, “How did this argument begin?” (3.1.111–12). Later in this same scene, when Armado and Berowne each employ him to deliver love letters, Costard will misunderstand the words remuneration and guerdon as Latin terms for common coins. His misunderstanding foreshadows his failure to deliver the letters to their proper addressees. This, too, must be understood as a metaphor of miscommunication, with words becoming garbled as they pass from sender to receiver. Over and over in this play, characters use and misuse words in ways that sow confusion, waste time, and lead to humiliation. Yet this is also a key source of the play’s humor, as suggested by Berowne’s amusing phrase, “Sweet misprision” (4.3.102).
Whereas much of the miscommunication among the play’s commoners occurs due to misuse and misunderstanding of individual words, the miscommunication among the nobles is slightly more complex. In many of their encounters, the lords and ladies find themselves in battle of wits. If the women typically come out on top, it’s because they tend to be more aware of a distinction between the figurative and the literal. The lords, as scholars, often aim to impress with florid, poetic language. Yet the ladies find this language ridiculous and inflated. As such, they often respond as though the lords aren’t using metaphors and other figures of speech. The first example in the play is telling. When the King initially greets the Princess, he says: “Fair Princess, welcome to the court of Navarre” (2.1.92). The Princess quips: “‘Fair’ I give you back again, and ‘welcome’ I have not yet” (2.1.93–94). The Princess underscores the literal meaning of the King’s own words to express her dissatisfaction. Her tone is playful yet curt, and the King has a difficult time reading her. This dynamic continues to play out in all the communication between the lords and ladies until their final reckoning in the play’s last moments, when they part ways, their romances still unconsummated.
The Importance of Self-Awareness
As with many of Shakespeare’s other plays, a key theme in Love’s Labor’s Lost relates to the importance of self-awareness. The significance of this theme can already be felt at the beginning of the play, when it’s clear that the King and his lords aren’t self-aware enough to distrust the strictness of their own scholarly venture. The King opens the play with lofty discourse about how their study will bring them “fame” (1.1.1) and make them “heirs of all eternity” (1.1.7). Ironically, however, the achievement of such eternal fame rests on a plan that involves the strict self-denial of a monk. This contradiction between self-realization and self-abnegation suggests that the oath is bound to fail. However, only Berowne has the sense to question the restrictions on food, sleep, and romance. He holds out on swearing to the oath for a long time, attempting to convince his companions that their baser instincts and needs will inevitably lead them all to “forswear” their vow. Eventually, and against his better judgment, he signs on.
The rest of the play follows the lords as they fumble along in self-ignorance. As they each fall in love with one of the French noblewomen, they struggle individually with their failure to uphold their oath. They recognize their own perjury, but they refuse to admit it to each other. And even when the truth begins to come out, each lord attempts to maintain a self-righteous moral superiority for as long as possible, until his personal perjury is revealed, forcing him to relent. But even then, the lords fail to know themselves. Once they’ve admitted their love to each other, they get carried away arguing about poetry. Though they purport to be in love with the French ladies, it increasingly seems like they’re in love with love—that is, with the idea of love as its described in love poetry. Several further episodes continue to demonstrate that the lords fundamentally don’t know themselves, and at every turn this lack of self-knowledge prevents them from impressing the ladies. Thus, when they propose marriage at the end of the play, all the ladies insist on deferring. The lords all need to spend a year in self-reflection to figure out who they really are and what they really want.
The Limited Efficacy of Scholarly Pursuits
Much of the comedy in Love’s Labor’s Lost results from the contradiction between the apparent loftiness of scholarly pursuits and the obvious foolishness that results from them. Shakespeare highlights this contradiction primarily through the King of Navarre and his lords, who begin the play with a proposal to withdraw into something akin to a monastic retreat. By drastically reducing their food intake and their sleep, as well as eliminating all contact with women, they aim to achieve eternal glory with three years of intensive study. The exalted nature of this aim gives the audience immediate cause for suspicion, since it isn’t at all clear what their scholarship will achieve. Berowne gives voice to this concern when he points out that the accumulation of knowledge may confer fame, but neither fame nor knowledge can fundamentally change the experience of everyday life. By way of example, he cites the vast knowledge astrologers have of the sky, then points out that their wisdom doesn’t enable them to enjoy the “shining nights” (1.1.92) any more than commoners.
Berowne’s objection bears out in the rest of the play, where Shakespeare repeatedly shows the limited efficacy of scholarly pursuits. Importantly, it isn’t just that the knowledge accumulated through study is self-indulgent or ineffective. More often, we see how the lords delude themselves into thinking they understand more than they really do. Believing their scholarship to be the source of broad knowledge and awareness, they nonetheless demonstrate severe limitations in practical affairs. For instance, their study of love poetry has led them to think they know all about love. Hilariously, though, they only really know about the poetic tropes of love, and to the very end they fail to see through the “sweet smoke of [their own] rhetoric” (3.1.65). We see a similar phenomenon of book knowledge obscuring truth in characters like Holofernes, Nathaniel, and Armado. These men show themselves to be pretentious, pedantic, or both, resulting in ludicrous displays that reveal each to be little more than a “learnèd fool” (5.2.77).
