• 1 Anne Barton, Introduction, Love’s Labor’s Lost, The Riverside Shakespeare, General and textual ed., (...)

1In her introduction to Love’s Labour’s Lost in the Riverside edition, Anne Barton states that “As though conscious of the fact that in this resolution the arts of language have been subjected to an unfriendly scrutiny, Shakespeare allows them a restitution in the final song” – a song which “in a sense [she claims] recapitulates the entire development of the comedy.” Barton emphasizes the balance and harmony that the songs embody, bringing together as they do the charms and harsher realities of each season, both of nature and of human life. The symmetries built into the songs reflect those of the play, with its balanced pairs of lovers and of fantastics. Considering the two songs as a single entity, she posits that it “presents a wholeness of outlook in which fact and fancy, youth and age, life and death are held in equilibrium.” Yet she tellingly concludes that although “the unifying effect of the music must not be underestimated, […] still the harmony is essentially verbal”.¹ The music performed during the play thus seems less relevant than the concept of dance as a potentially structuring metaphor. While the play relies heavily on a dialectic opposing words and music, it ultimately seems to challenge the Orphic power of music as much as that of words, be it through its opposition of verbal harmony to minstrelsy, through the types of song it showcases, the dances it alludes to, the mythological associations it evokes and the musical metaphors it plays on.

• 2 Quoted by Vincent Giroud, Nicolas Nabokov: A Life in Freedom and Music, Oxford, OUP, 2015, p. 393.

2Barton’s lines reflect the very crux posed by this play, of which the poet and librettist W.H. Auden stated that it was the most apt of the canon to be used as a basis for an opera: “Love’s Labour’s Lost is the only Shakespeare play that will do as an opera. It is structured like an opera and so much of it is already in rhymed verse.”2 It is a play that has been continually praised for its musical language – and yet it contains fewer references to music or diegetic songs than many other of Shakespeare’s plays. The difficulty is perhaps most clearly encapsulated in the first reference to Armado made by the King, very early on in the play:

• 3 Cf. Christopher Marsh, Music and Society in Early Modern England, Cambridge, CUP, 201,3 p. 76. Mars (...)

3However, the King is deceived, for Armado himself needs Moth, the word incarnate, to provide music to soothe his own ennui, requiring the child to “Warble” in order to “make passionate [his] sense of hearing” (iii.i.1). In addition, the obviously derogatory formulation of the King’s statement suggests that the simile favours music over language, for Armado as speaker is perceived a mere minstrel. In other words, little better than a vagabond and beggar. While it is well known that rogues and actors were equated in both legal and moral early modern discourse, it should also be noted that the legal statutes published in 1572 and 1598 identified travelling musicians as vagrants too, although there had been some discussion in Parliament as to whether they should be included in the list. One result of the publication of the 1572 statute was that the term “minstrel”, which had been quite neutral until then, became derogatory, and was quickly dropped by most music-makers and employers.³

• 4 Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, Fundamentals of Music, translation by Craig Wright. Translated (...)

4Part of the derogatory associations of the word minstrel derives from the old-European distinction between “three types of individuals versed in the art of music: one is the person who plays an instrument; another that composes songs; and the third is the individual who evaluates the work of the performer and the songs. But those who are in the instrumental class and spend all their time there — […] these are excluded from the knowledge of the science of music and made servants, as said, devoid of all reason and destitute of all speculative thinking.”4 These are the words of Boethius, the early 6^th century philosopher whose De Institutione Musica, a compilation of surviving Greek musical theory, was the standard “textbook” for the study of music in most European universities throughout the Middle ages and the Renaissance. As such, although it is not explicitly stated, the King and his fellow-students would have included the study of Music, one of the liberal arts, in their three years at the Academe, just as students at Oxford would have done.

• 5 Thomas Morley, Canzonets, or Little Short Songs to three voices, London, Thomas East, 1593. Availab (...)
• 6 A staff can mean “A stanza or set of lines” or “A ‘verse’ or stanza of a song. Now stave.” OED, 19. (...)
• 7 Christopher R. Wilson and Michela Calore, Music in Shakespeare, a Dictionary, London, Bloomsbury, 2 (...)

8Holofernes refers to the poem as a “canzonet”, in other words a musical piece, one such as the three-part songs published by Thomas Morley in 1593, the last song of which may be referred to when the King asks Berowne “Whither away so fast?” (iv.iii.1785). Holofernes also refers to a “staff”6 in the poem (in line 92), then to the “accent”, making a clear connection with singing notes (which he does at line 88) and the musical imagery in the sonnet. He criticizes Nathaniel’s diction and delivery and the fact he has not respected the metre, using the word “cadence” in the sense of rhythmical measure, but implying that the word could be understood in its musical meaning, ie the falling pattern at the end of a musical phrase or piece. Thus, as Christopher Wilson underlines it, although Holofernes is in fact critiquing the work as a Petrarchan “canzone”, the presence of other musical words (accent, numbers, fancy) point to a conscious overlaying of music and poetry into a joint ideal.7

• 8 Cf Note to l.859, William C. Caroll, Love’s Labour’s Lost, p. 176.
• 9 Ross W. Duffin, Shakespeare's Songbook, New York, Norton, 2004, p. 442-3 and 446-7.

9The King of Navarre’s academy, however, fails in the end to create anything but fairly rustic songs, whose texts have presumably been written by the pedant Holofernes and/or the braggart Armado, for which no tune is provided and of which we are not told who is expected to perform them. As a result, directors have been known to assign them indifferently to Moth and Jaquenetta, or Holofernes and Nathaniel, or Dull and Costard; to have them spoken rather than sung; to have new music written to them – or to reuse well known ballad tunes, as was the custom at the time.8 This is the suggestion made by Ross Duffin in his book of Shakespeare songs, where he sets both ditties to the tune of a well-known ballad called Packington’s Pound, claiming that its chorus easily accommodates the “cuckoo” and “To whit-Tu whoo” calls.9 Duffin proposes to use the same tune for at least two other songs in the Shakespeare canon, so it is safe to assume that other tunes may have fitted just as well.

• 10 in Documents of Performance in Early Modern England, Cambridge, CUP, 2009, p. 135-172.

10It is impossible to tell whether music was specially commissioned for Love’s Labour’s Lost as it may have been for The Tempest or Twelfth Night, since there are no traces of the songs under the titles “When Daisies Pied” or “When Icicles Hang by the Wall”, either in printed volumes or manuscripts of the time. However this is not an uncommon situation for songs, as Tiffany Stern has discussed at length, since they were often disconnected from the playhouse book, either because they were given to a composer so that he could set the words to music, or to a performer so that he could learn the piece.10 This is the case, for instance, of Desdemona’s Willow Song, which is present in the First Folio but not in the Quarto of Othello, although the situation is quite different since there are many available versions of the song outside the playbook.

• 11 Thomas Campian, Two Bookes of Ayres, London, [c.1613], ‘To the Reader’. Available online at http:// (...)

11Even more mysterious than the closing songs of Ver and Hiems is the song Armado requests Moth to sing in act III scene 1, which is simply denoted as “Concolinel”. Although some editors have suggested that this foreign-sounding title refers either to an Irish ballad or a French ditty, it is difficult to determine whether Shakespeare intended the line “sweet air” pronounced by Armado in response to the song as a joke or a serious appreciation. If the song were meant to be perceived as genuinely sweet, as a “food of love”, then Moth should probably sing a lute-song like the ones that were becoming fashionable in the late 1590s following the publication of John Dowland’s First Book of Ayres in 1597. According to Thomas Campion, a prolific author of such songs, “Short Ayres, if they be skilfully framed, and naturally exprest, are like quick good Epigrammes in Poesie, many of them shewing as much artifice, and breeding as great difficultie, as a larger Poeme”.11 There was considerable demand for such musical material and Dowland’s book was reprinted several times, so it is quite possible that the company performing Love’s Labour’s Lost, which must have employed at least five boys to play the parts of Moth and the four ladies, had some skilled musicians available to perform such a song. If, on the contrary, Armado is portrayed as a purely ridiculous character, he may well be tricked into admiring a song that has no Orphic value. Thus, choosing a humorous song can inflect the meaning in a very different way from the indisputably melancholy songs used in Twelfth Night or Measure for Measure. This was the case at Shakespeare’s Globe in the 2009 production, where Moth sang one verse from Clément Janequin’s Chant des Oiseaux in French, making sure the audience understood the onomatopoeic punning on the cuckoo’s name (a homonym of cuckold):

• 13 Wilson and Calore, op. cit., p.27. Ross Duffin has recently persuasively argued that "Concolinel" i (...)

12Since Shakespeare employs ‘air’ whether he means the song type or simply a tune, relying on other occurrences in the canon is not helpful. According to Christopher Wilson, “the description ‘sweet’ is commonly used to imply a pleasant pretty air.” Yet there is particular relevance in the context of the French court, since he mentions that “English music was described as ‘sweet’ notably by French writers, because of the concordant sound of its thirds and sixths in contrast to the more open harsher fourths and fifths of continental polyphony” – typically the intervals exemplified in Janequin’s mimetic music13.

• 14 Cf. Angus Gowland, “The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy”, Past & Present, vol.191, May 2006, p. (...)
• 15 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Printed by Iohn Lichfield and Iames Short, for Henry Crip (...)

13Armado is, of course, presented as a caricature of the melancholy lover, since the object of his attentions is a promiscuous dairy-maid. But his melancholic state may have been classified as scholarly, a condition said to be brought about by sedentary life allied to excessive and solitary intellectual activity, that caused mental fixation, led to anxiety and sometimes ended in madness.14 In As You like It, Shakespeare’s malcontent Jaques states that the scholar’s melancholy “is emulation” and opposes it to that of the musician, “which is fantastical” or the courtier’s “which is proud” (iv.i.10-11), as though he were critiquing the different characters in Love’s Labour’s Lost. The ability of music to cure sadness and grief was a commonplace both of treatises on melancholy and on music, but there was also a great deal of writing devoted to the risk that music might on the contrary generate or entertain an unhealthy melancholy. In the Anatomy of Melancholy, for instance, Burton states that music “hath diverse effects: and Theophrastus right well prophecied that diseases were either procured by Musicke, or mitigated”.15 The ambivalence of Armado’s exclamation after Moth has sung is therefore congruent with the contradictory discourses on the reciprocal effects of music and melancholy upon one another.

• 16 As suggested by Frances Yates, quoted by Wilson and Calore, op. cit., p. 63.
• 17 Thoinot Arbeau, Orchésographie et traicte en forme de dialogue par lequel toutes personnes peuvent (...)

14However, the many confusions in the play would seem to suggest that the humorous interpretation is the correct one. For instance, Armado does not understand that Moth is referring to a dance when he mentions a “French brawl” (l.6) in the same scene (though this may be a topical allusion to riots that had taken place in London in 1593 against the French Huguenot refugees, who were accused of usurping housing and employment¹⁶). And Moth proceeds to describe the best way of wooing Jaquenetta in a string of musical puns that underline the Spaniard’s ineptitude (the words “compliments” and “men of note” both have secondary musical meanings), culminating with the allusion to the song of the Hobby-horse. Thus the tune Armado sings should not be too “long” (the name of a type of note) to gain Jaquenetta’s love, implying that it should not be a lengthy mournful ballad. Armado should alternate different expressive vocal techniques like sighing and singing, singing through the chest or the nose, which implies a constant variety in vocal techniques (and displays competent appreciation of the different means available to singers). Above all, he should resort to different types of dance, including the lively canary, a Spanish dance commonly associated with licentiousness, which Thoinot Arbeau describes in his Orchesography as gay but strange, fantastic and barbaric: “notterez que lesdits passages sont gaillards, & neantmoins estranges, bizares, & qui resentent fort le sauvage”.17 The Morris Dance, or Morisque, suggested by the Hobby-Horse, is presumably another dance he might employ in his courtship as an alternative to the Brawl, one of the most common dances of the time.

• 18 Ibid.

15That quaintness and licentiousness are the most frequent associations of music in Love’s Labour’s Lost is also apparent from the choice of the Muscovites and their attendant musical Blackamoors as a ploy to court the ladies. According to Thoinot Arbeau, this is the very origin of the Canarie: “elle a pris source d’un ballet composé pour une mascarade, ou les danceurs estoient habillez en Roys & Roynes de Mauritanie, ou bien en forme de Sauvages, avec plumaches teintes de diverses couleurs.”18

• 19 Wilson and Calore, op. cit., p.24.

16Both the failure of the Muscovites to bring the ladies to dance and the musical conclusion of the play would seem to point in the direction of a collapse in the Orphic power of music to achieve harmony and accomplish miraculous recoveries. Armado’s closing line, opposing the harsh words of Mercury to the songs of Apollo, actually structures the play in more pragmatic ways than is usually assumed. It has as much to do with Elizabethan theories of music and the bringing into question of the very essence of the play as with the practicalities of performers’ lives. In the background of the play, it is in fact the contest between Apollo and Pan and/or Marsyas that is constantly lurking. According to Christopher Wilson, the symbolic meaning of the God of music, poetry and eloquence’s contest is “essential to Elizabethan mythography, representing in the quiet string music of Apollo, order, sobriety and control in contrast to the less refined wind music of Pan, which symbolizes disorder, lust and strife.”19 Yet this frequently depicted Ovidian episode belies the gentleness of Apollo’s songs, focusing as it does on the savagery with which the god punished his competitor, whom he flayed alive for having dared to challenge the superiority of his art. The violence of the criticism aimed by the courtiers at the fantastics during the masque of the Nine Worthies is certainly an echo of this scene, while the touching protestations of Holofernes and Armado, the counterparts of Midas and his ass’s ears, are a reflection of the increasingly precarious status of performers.

• 20 Cf. Thomas L. Berger, “The Lack of Song in Love’s Labor’s Lost”, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 26, No (...)
• 21 Duffin, op. cit., p. 237.

17Thus it is possible to say that, in Love’s Labour’s Lost, the Orphic power of music is called into question as much as that of words: its theoretical power to ravish is never demonstrated. In fact, it is never really given a chance: when Moth is first asked to sing, he does not oblige – perhaps because music being associated with love and courtship, it would be inappropriate as long as women are not admitted to the court.²⁰ When he does sing, the only thing he achieves is the setting free of Costard, which smacks of the anti-climactic if one remembers that Orpheus’s achievement is to convince Hades to free Eurydice from the realm of the dead. When Rosaline poses as the princess (v.ii.211) and calls for music, she immediately dismisses it and never allows it to resume. And the main musical allusions are to popular ballads that lack the poignancy of the Willow Song, viz. the song of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, obviously a “hit” of the period, and a personal favourite of Shakespeare’s, since he cites it in five different plays. It is a lengthy ballad of an African king who inexplicably falls in love at first sight with “a beggar all in gray” although “From nature’s laws he did decline” – a perfect precedent for the King of Navarre and his courtiers.²¹

• 22 Music and Society in Early Modern England, Christopher Marsh, p.174 Though Marsh does not cite the (...)
• 23 Robert Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, London, Robert Jones, 1583 (last accessed 14 February 2015 from (...)
• 24 Cf. David Lindley, Shakespeare and Music, London, Arden/Thomson Learning, 2006, p.158.

18This challenge to the conventional belief in Orphic supernatural powers may have something to do with the ongoing debates about the legitimacy of practising music. Because of its commonplace association with love, both platonic and erotic, even within the courtly conduct books, members of the nobility were advised to abstain from it in public or at least in front of their inferiors, and above all to leave it to the young. According to the Earl of Northumberland, music was “but lost labour”, no better than playing dice or cards.²² Elizabethan attitudes to musical practice reveal an open contradiction, with one side advocating music as part of the gentlemanly ideal set out by Baldassare Castiglione or Henry Peacham, and a counter-discourse that warned against its effeminizing and even corrupting effects. While some, like Philip Stubbes, inveighed against music as a symptom of moral depravation and advised “‘[I]f you would have your daughter whoorish bawdie, and uncleane, and a filthie speaker, and such like, bring her up in musick”,23 the practise of music by young people of aristocracy and gentry seems to have been quite widespread, for their own recreation but also in the case of women as one of the desirable accomplishments of the ideal lady and a means of feminine appeal. Thus it is not surprising to see Rosaline and Boyet spar in musical terms to the tune of another lost song, “Thou canst not hit it, my good man” – although Rosaline may well be reckoned a “filthie speaker” here if she is using an innocent children’s song with bawdy intent.24 Nor is it surprising to hear Berowne make fun of Boyet’s allegedly deficient musical skills: when he claims that “He can sing / A mean most meanly” (v.ii.327-8), he is insinuating that the courtier is not as good as reading music as he should be (the mean is the middle part in a part-song, as opposed to the treble, which usually carries the tune). What in fact Berowne is suggesting is that Boyet is adept at creating discord – be it by revealing the real identity of the Muscovites or by putting Moth out with his unmusical interruptions. In effect, he does what Iago proposes to do: “Oh, you are well tuned now, / But I’ll set down the pegs that make this music” (Othello, ii.i.200-1). The erroneous singing of the gamut by Holofernes (“ut, re, sol, la, mi, fa”, iv.ii.88, instead of “ut, re, mi, fa sol, la”) also points to this preposterous untuning, a musical reflection of the unnatural exclusion of women which undermines the chances of success of Musica Humana, the Boethian promise of balance that Rosaline invokes and mocks when she quibbles at length on the “measures” that the Muscovites claim to have walked (v.ii.184-198): a measure is both a stately dance, the distance covered by the revellers and the golden mean, but the word “tread” carries a bawdy connotation which is very often found in connection with dance.

• 25 The cittern was a relatively cheap metal-strung instrument that was as ubiquitous as the lute in th (...)

19Shakespeare is adept at using metaphors and puns that spring from the polysemic terminology of music: words like measure, division, complements, air, tongues, base, or warbling all refer simultaneously to musical and physical substrates. And musical instruments are made of wood, metal, skin, frets, leather, gut, allowing for anthropomorphic or zoomorphic readings. Thus Love’s Labour’s Lost includes both a grotesque comparison of Holofernes’s face with a cittern-head,25 and its counterpart in the form of the metaphorical stringing of Apollo’s lute with his own hair: love is “as sweet and musical / As bright Apollo’s lute, strung with his hair” (iv.iii.311-2). This is an extravagant conceit typical of Berowne’s mock-Petrarchan imagery, but Shakespeare does elsewhere use similar images to praise the power of music:

• 26 Wilson and Calore, op.cit. p. 141. A modern speaker would call it a form of theme with variations.

20As a conclusion, I would like to put forward the idea that the music of Love’s Labour’s Lost resides as much in its words and structure as in the imagery and insertion of musical episodes. It is a play built on the principle of “sweet division” – a practice consisting in “breaking up long notes into much shorter florid movement”.²⁶ This is a metaphor Shakespeare was fond of, as in Juliet’s parting words to Romeo: