Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,
Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation,
Figures pedantical; these summer-flies
Have blown me full of maggot ostentation…
Oy, what a dandy dish of verbal bonbons. The confectioner is Berowne, protesting to his lady love Rosaline that he is more than just a ready spouter of witty one-liners and a self-fashioned cynic before his time. He claims: "My love to thee is sound, sans crack or flaw." To which the relatively clear-headed Rosaline retorts: "Sans sans, I pray you."
Minority opinion though it may be, I consider Love’s Labours Lost to be one of Shakespeare’s most enticing concoctions. Stuffed to overflowing with wordplay, puns, and verbal jousting, reveling in the quicksilver eloquence and chameleon virtuosity of English, it’s a treasure trove of quotable goodies. It isn’t for everybody, to be sure. Essentially it’s a screwball comedy for word wonks: dizzy, ditzy, and delirious, constantly in danger of disintegrating into a sparkling pile of diamond-edged morphemes but hanging together somehow to the very last vowel.
Most readers/listeners/viewers are likely to react to LLL much the same as the pedantic schoolmaster Holofernes does to Don Armado’s over-the-top flourishes: "He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument." The LLL cast out-chatters, out-gabbles, and out-jabbers even the most morphologically incontinent denizens of a George Bernard Shaw play. What with four horny young men, four equally itchy women, a schoolmaster, a local parson, and a preening Spanish grandee, all of them bubbling with wit and bursting with blab, we may expect a session of brazenly unbuttoned chitchat. In LLL, even the servants speak poniards and rapiers. Only the aptly-named Dull talks normally, albeit infrequently. He stoically endures the hysterical posturing of Holofernes, Nathaniel, Armado, and Moth as they plan a presentation on the Nine Worthies, after which Holofernes exclaims: "Via, goodman Dull! Thou has spoken no word all this while."
Dull replies flatly: "Nor understood none neither, sir."
That may be the reaction of some audience members as well, and what a shame. LLL is worth performing, and performing well. A recent video from the restored Globe Theatre in London does the play up proud, the whole moving at express-train speed, funny and loud and talky. The plot is little more than a hat-rack for all of the wordplay to come: three high-born young men join the King of Navarre for three years of fasting, celibacy, and study. (The young of Shakespeare’s day were just as prone to fits of high-minded self-denial as in any other era.) But that’s just the setup; the Princess of France and her three ladies-in-waiting arrive shortly thereafter. So of course feathers start flying almost immediately as each young man falls madly in love with the appropriate young lady. Along the way the servants get involved, as does the deliriously over-the-top Don Armado of Spain, together with a cerebral Laurel & Hardy in the form of a pompously pedantic schoolmaster and his sidekick, the windbag local parson.
If LLL has a moral (which I doubt), then perhaps it could be You can’t talk yourself into love. Except for the two lower-class servants Costard and Jaquenetta, the LLL folk are in love with the idea of being in love, but while everybody talks and talks and talks and talks, Costard and Jaquenetta cut to the chase, going to it lustily and often. She’s pregnant by the end of the play. Oh, Don Armado wants her, but Costard gets her. So when cold reality enters during the last scene, as the Princess of France learns that her father the King has died and she must return home immediately, the party is over and the four faux-lovesick young men must accept an enforced separation of a full year. We know, as they do not, that a year is a vast expanse of time for a young man, and their passions will have found another outlet by then. So it has all been midsummer madness, but how utterly sweet it has been for the while.
Dumaine, Longaville, the King, and Berowne: four silly guys having a silly ball
The Globe production nails the spirit, the joy, and the life of this rarely-performed play. They even bring in the idea that four young men entering a pact to eschew female companionship just might come up with some substitutes: Longaville is played as being unable to keep his hands off the other three guys, including the King. The BBC Shakespeare series from the 1980s did a wonderful job with LLL as well, settting it in 18th century France and featuring the great actor David Warner as a droll, almost sleepy Don Armado who never quite inhabits the same planet as everybody else.
But avoid the Branagh movie version at all costs. In a well-intentioned but disastrous attempt to make LLL "approachable" to the masses, Branagh eviscerated, beheaded, and castrated the poor thing by turning it into a glitzy musical and extracting reams and reams of the text.
Or just read LLL, preferably aloud, maybe with friends so you can share the parts and have fun with all of the wild verbal pyrotechnics. Just try to get through this grandiloquently overblown faux-literary rant without snickering:
Why, all delights are vain; but that most vain,
Which with pain purchased doth inherit pain:
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:
Light seeking light doth light of light beguile:
So, ere you find where light in darkness lies,
Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.
In short, LLL awaits. Let the melancholy Dane mope by himself, leave Verona’s teenaged lovers back in their boudoir, allow Scotland to rule itself for a while. Have some fun playing word darts at the court of Navarre in the company of four geeky guys, four sharp-tongued ladies, and a supporting cast of screwballs. They’re all a wee bit crazy, but only from our point of view, not theirs. As Don Armado says at the closing, in his stilted and broken English:
You that way: we this way.