Love's Labour's Lost

In this final section, Shakespeare builds the dramatic tension with several plot reveals. The audience knows that two of these are coming: The women’s reveal that they know the men were in disguise, and the reveal of their own trick. This creates comedy and anticipation, as the audience knows that the Lords’ confident assertions will be undermined. The Lords imbue The Masculine Pursuit of Love with great importance: The King laments, “[Y]ou have lived in desolation here / Unseen, unvisited, much to our shame” (5.2.390-91). He imagines that his attentions and those of his Lords define the existence of the women.

The women, however, assert their independent selfhood by creating a twist in the narrative, which they are in control of revealing to the Lords. Rosaline reveals that she knows about the Lords’ prank in answer to Berowne’s declaration of love. Shakespeare uses this moment to connect the comic fare of disguises to the theme of Fantasy Versus Reality: To the women, it suggests that the men are inhabiting a fantasy of love. Berowne realizes that the Lords’ advances through stereotypical language and gestures (such as sonnets and tokens) have seemed like a performance of love rather than a true expression; he vows to only use simple words (5.2.449-50) from now on. This shows that The Complexities of Language can be a double-edged sword: As with the comedic subplot characters, verboseness can appear insincere.

Berowne’s rapid series of questions (5.2.421) shows how flustered he is when it’s revealed the women knew about their disguises. Rosaline’s quick response, in which she references each specific question (5.3.422), shows her wittiness. It also shows their characters’ compatibility, as she mirrors his speech pattern. Rosaline and Berowne also complete each other’s meter and rhyme in this scene (5.2.413-19) just as they did in Act II. Shakespeare uses these moments to highlight that the comedic wordplay and trickery is a form of courtship, enabling the two of them to explore their attraction and compatibility playfully.

The next reveal exposes that the Lords have all sworn love to the wrong people, recalling the start of the play: The Lords are again held to impossible oaths they will be forced to break. This adds to the play’s ironic comedy, but also highlights the fallibility of language and the dichotomy of Fantasy Versus Reality: The Lords have verbally promised something that exposes their disconnect from reality. Before this can be resolved, the main plot action is interrupted by the subplot characters, who come to perform the Nine Worthies. This creates dramatic tension by deferring the resolution of this issue, but the tension retains a light-hearted tone. The rest of the play’s compliance with the genre conventions of a comedy promises a happy ending, and the interruption itself is a comedic set piece, a play within a play.

This interlude is another example of Shakespeare’s use of comedy to explore his main themes, and his use of meta-theatre to draw analogies between the subplot characters, the main players, and the audience themselves. The humorous disconnect between the idealized nobility of the Worthies and the flawed people representing them highlights the fantasy world of theatre, contrasting it with the imperfections of the real world. The Lords lampoon the “actors” for their poor performances, but they too have presented fantastical versions of themselves in their disguises and sonnets, which have failed to convince their audiences.

Dumaine even recognizes that the Lords’ witty heckling is also a bit of a fantasy, as he worries that Katherine will censure them for it later (5.2.706). The women are not impressed by them picking on the performers (the Princess is sympathetic throughout their show), and have in fact bested them in their own wordplay throughout the rest of the play. The Lords’ fantasy of their own intellect is played out in a contained environment in which they challenge less articulate, less educated people, who are in a socially subservient position to them, rather than in reality. Shakespeare draws parallels between the “actors” in the play within a play, the characters watching them, and the actors onstage and the audience watching them. He suggests that imperfection is universal, and that everyone is performing in some way, whether socially or in theatre.

The interruption of this set piece is the final reveal in the play: the sudden announcement of the death of the Princess’s father. Unlike the others, this is a twist that the audience is not prepared for: The play has been building toward a neat comedic ending by playing into genre conventions and maintaining a light-hearted tone, all of which is suddenly disrupted by the messenger’s blunt announcement. The news breaks the Princess out of a fantastical courtly comedy and into the real world. In contrast to her complex, poetic language through the rest of the play, she uses simple syntax and plain language to directly address what is happening. The tensions over the Lords’ swearing to the wrong people has been built up to be the closing action; instead, this part of the plot is forgotten, showing the unimportance of these events: They are a game compared to the harsh real world. Furthermore, the ladies’ stipulation that the men must wait a year before seeking to marry them also brings a touch of realism into the proceedings, with the women setting aside the wordplay and disguises of the earlier scenes to instead challenge the men to prove their love in earnest.

The narrative is thus left suspended, as the courtship of the couples will not be resolved onstage. This breaks with the conventions of the romantic comedy genre, enabling the play to draw attention to its own fantastical quality as a piece of fiction and suggesting that, in the real world, there is often not an easy resolution to be found. Shakespeare includes two songs to close the play, thereby retaining some traditional elements of a comedy play. The songs’ focus on the seasons of spring and winter encapsulate the co-existence of love and death, suggesting that the passing of time allows for recovery and rebirth and offering a note of hope about the play’s deferred romantic ending.