The Love’s Labours Lost Garden

Video guide transcript

[Shakespeare]: Here is the Love’s Labours Lost Garden.

[Interlocutor]: I know, Will Shakespeare, that you included quite a number of plants in Love’s Labours Lost.

[Shakespeare]: Yes, indeed. Roses, violets, lilies, columbines, daisies, cuckoo-buds, and lady-smocks; grass, corn, oats, and peas; lemon, pomewater, crabs – that is, apples, you know – mint and wormwood; plantain and cockles; thorns, osiers, elder, oaks, and sycamores; cedar and ebony; sugar and ginger and nutmeg and cloves.

[Interlocutor]: Your company performed Love’s Labours Lost for Queen Elizabeth herself, at Christmas in 1597.

[Shakespeare]: It was quite a new play then. Its story does not come from an earlier work; it begins with us. The form in which we played it for Her Highness was not its first form; we played it at Blackfriars and the Globe, and took occasion to better it as we went.

[Interlocutor]: At the commencement of the play, young King Ferdinand of Navarre has persuaded three friends, Berowne, Longaville, and Dumain, to join him in a vow to devote themselves solely to study for three years, totally renouncing the company of women.

[Shakespeare]: At first Berowne calls in question the wisdom of such a vow. He prefers to undertake the years of study without such severe constraint. Longaville declares that such loose conditions defeat the purpose:

He weeds the corn and still lets grow the weeding.

Berowne retorts that young men should not remove themselves from the natural business of their time of life:

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.

But when the King offers to send him away, Berowne undertakes the vow with the rest of them.

[Interlocutor]: In the same scene there is a mention of the King’s “curious knotted garden”.

[Shakespeare]: Yes. The king’s decree extends to all men at the court of Navarre. Don Adriano de Armado, a Spanish soldier of ridiculous eloquence, accuses the simple-tongued peasant Costard of consorting in that garden with Jaquenetta, a wench whom Armado himself desires. Costard’s simple tongue speaks home truths: “Such is the simplicity of man,” says he, “to hearken after flesh.”

[Interlocutor]: So Costard has already broken the decree not to associate with women. Now I think of it, so has Armado; he keeps custody of Jacquenetta, promising the King to produce her whenever she may come to trial.

Oh, and then the Princess of France arrives as ambassador for her royal father, bringing her ladies Rosaline, Maria, and Katherine. The King and his three companions immediately fall in love, the King with the Princess, and the other men each with one of the three ladies.

[Shakespeare]: Each struggles at first to conceal the failure of his vow, but cannot forbear to send his lady a love letter. By these letters they are discovered, and soon they all know that all are forsworn.

[Interlocutor]: Even Berowne?

[Shakespeare]: Aye. The king mocks him, saying:

By heaven, thy love is black as ebony.

But Berowne is not ashamed, and replies:

Is ebony like her? O wood divine!
A wife of such wood were felicity.

Dumain likewise compares his lady to a tree, saying she is “As upright as the cedar.”

Neither the cedar nor the ebony grew in England in my time, but we knew of them. Then as now, ebony—a name used for the wood of several different trees—was the emblem of darkness. The cedar we learned of from Holy Writ, wherein we find that they are unsurpassed in beauty and majesty.

[Interlocutor]: And do their letters persuade the ladies to return their love?

[Shakespeare]: Hardly. The letters were poorly written. The young men are in love with falling in love, just as they were in love with the idea of dedication to study. In the schoolmaster Holofernes we see the fruits of excess of study. He thinks it an admirable virtue to prolong the simplest sentence, that is, “deer is bleeding”, to a scholarly exposition, calling everything by three or four different names at once:

The deer was, you know, sanguis, in
blood; ripe as pomewater, who now hangeth
like a jewel in the ear of caelo, the sky, the welkin,
the heaven; and anon falleth like a crab on the face of
terra, the soil, the land, the earth.

[Interlocutor]: Er — pomewater?

[Shakespeare]: In my time, both pome and crab were words meaning apple. Holofernes compares the fall of the deer to the fall of an apple seen first against the sky as it hangs in the tree, and then on the ground.

[Interlocutor]: So the King and his companions are no longer in love with study, as Holofernes is; but is it any better to be in love with falling in love?

[Shakespeare]: They pass from playing at love of study, with its pretence of forswearing love, to playing at love; but at length they grow beyond that too, and each openly courts the lady of his heart. As they move past pretence, they move toward what might be love truly.

[Interlocutor]: And then the ladies welcome their love?

[Shakespeare]: Nay, the air is full of quick and smarting jests, not sighs or loving glances. Armado, Holofernes, Costard, and others present a pageant, wherein Armado plays Hector; and the young men return to the language of the plants to make their jests with his eloquence. He begins:

The armipotent Mars, of lances and almighty,
Gave Hector a gift,--

[Interlocutor]: A gilt nutmeg.
[Shakespeare]: (cries Dumain.)
[Interlocutor]: A lemon.
[Shakespeare]: (says Berowne.)
[Interlocutor]: Stuck with cloves.
[Shakespeare]: (adds Longaville.)

“Peace!” Armado demands, and then begins again; but they interrupt him afresh:

The armipotent Mars, of lances the almighty,
Gave Hector a gift, the heir of Ilion;
A man so breathed, that certain he would fight; yea,
From morn till night, out of his pavilion.
I am that flower,--

[Interlocutor]:

That mint.
That columbine.

[Shakespeare]: At the height of this merriment, word arrives that the King of France has died. The Princess and her ladies must go home immediately.

Each lover earnestly and hastily presses his suit as they prepare to go. The ladies do not easily believe the lover’s vow of men so recently forsworn; but each grants her suitor a task to perform. If the lover fulfills his task, he has his lady’s leave to come to her again after the year of mourning for the dead King.

[Interlocutor]: And it ends there. Love’s Labors Lost is a comedy; but it doesn’t end in the marriages that end most comedies.

[Shakespeare]: True. It ends in a song:

When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smock all silver-white
The cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,…
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men

And they return to the idea that there are seasons of life as in the year, each filled with what it proper to it.

[Interlocutor]: That picture of spring isn’t entirely pleasant.

[Shakespeare]: Nor is the picture of winter which follows entirely unpleasant.

When icicles hung by the wall,…
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipped and ways be foul,
...roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
When nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-whit, to-who, a merry note

[Interlocutor]: So there is mockery in the freshness of spring, and wassails and merriment in the painful cold of winter. It feels distant from the joyous weddings at the end of other comedies.

[Shakespeare]: Perhaps the nuptials will yet come to pass. If the young men come through their trials victorious, that might be a matter of a play called Love’s Labours Won.