Love's Labour's Lost

Love’s Labour’s Lost engages explicitly with the literary conventions of the Elizabethan period, in particular the sonnet. Shakespeare’s own collection of sonnets were written in the same time period as Love’s Labour’s Lost. Sonnets are usually 14-line poems with variable rhyme schemes. The 14th-century Italian poet Petrarch finessed and popularized the Petrarchan, or Italian, sonnet, and created the enduring association of the sonnet with the theme of love. Shakespeare’s use of the sonnet in Love’s Labour’s Lost references this long-standing literary tradition: The Lords’ pursuit of the women utilizes, and is shaped by, literary convention.

Sir Thomas Wyatt, an English politician, ambassador, and lyric poet, is credited with bringing the sonnet to England and developing the English sonnet, along with his contemporary Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. His poem “Whoso List to Hunt, I Know where is an Hind” was a famous piece using the analogy of hunting a deer for The Masculine Pursuit of Love. The hunting of the deer in Love’s Labour’s Lost refers to an established literary convention, which specifically compares love to a difficult and potentially distressing pursuit, in which one or more party could be damaged.

The English sonnet is also known as the Shakespearean sonnet due to Shakespeare’s extensive work with the form. Where the Petrarchan sonnet generally splits the lines into two stanzas, the Shakespearean sonnet typically uses four quatrains and a final couplet, often with the following rhyme scheme: ABABCDCDEFEFGG. The Shakespearean sonnet often uses iambic pentameter, the same syllabic rhythm and line length found in his plays when the characters use verse (ten beats per line). However, all these form conventions are flexible: In Shakespeare’s own collection, he explores the use of different variations.

The poems in the play reflect this. Berowne’s sonnet is the classic Shakespearean sonnet of 14 lines, finishing with a rhyming couplet. The King’s sonnet has two extra lines, though the last quatrain has a rhyme scheme of GGHH, so it still ends on the conclusive flourish of a rhyming couplet. This detail reflects his tendency to overwrite, as the Princess notes in his letter later—his pursuit of love is a chance for self-expression. Longaville’s sonnet is the same classic Shakespearean sonnet as Berowne’s, but Dumaine’s poem is very different: It is longer, with much shorter lines, and a simpler, repeated rhyme scheme, which gives it a more childlike tone, evoking a nursery rhyme. This last poem suggests that Dumaine is struggling to use The Complexities of Language to express his love in the sophisticated form he feels is appropriate.

However, the women (and Holofernes) find the sonnets unoriginal and formulaic, with Shakespeare lightly satirizing the potential of an established form to become cliché. The Lords’ sonnets were actually published in a contemporary collection, The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), compiled by William Jaggard. This shows that though Shakespeare humorously critiques the Lords’ use of the form, the poems fit contemporary literary standards well enough to be taken seriously outside the context of the play.

Certain imagery also reoccurs in typical Elizabethan poetry and Shakespearean sonnets: for example, hyperbolic language comparing women to goddesses or celestial bodies such as stars, or the moon, imagery the Lords all utilize in their poems. Shakespeare often subverts these ideas in his sonnets, exploring whether convention and idealization can express truth. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, he uses the sonnets in the same way, exploring where societal and literary constructs sit on the scale of Fantasy Versus Reality.

Juxtaposition is also a common tool in Shakespeare’s sonnets. The King’s sonnet uses imagery associated with grief (tears are referenced four times, weeping twice), which contrasts with the theme of love in an attempt to show the depth of his emotions and the impact they have on him, but also foreshadows the ending of the play. Both Love’s Labour’s Lost and Shakespeare’s sonnets explore the struggle to reconcile the co-existing forces of love and death.

Finally, the character of Rosaline, the subject of Berowne’s poem and pursuit of love, also shares common ground with a reoccurring figure in Shakespeare’s sonnets: the famous “dark lady,” whose beauty is unconventional according to the period’s conventions. This figure is threaded through many of Shakespeare’s challenges to literary and social conventions in his sonnets, just as Rosaline inspires Berowne’s sonnet in the play.