• 2 Desiderius Erasmus, Praise of Folly, trans. Betty Radice, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1971, p. 94.

Is there any duty throughout life which you can perform [asks Folly], unless you have Self-love at hand to help you, Self-love who is so prompt to take my place on all occasions that she is rightly called my sister? What is so foolish as self-satisfaction and self-admiration? But then what agreeable, pleasant or graceful act can you perform if you aren’t self-satisfied?2

5The figure who has overseen and overheard everything without yet being exposed is Biron, whose scorn is significantly more vitriolic than the previous two exposers of folly. Where Longueville and the King talk about being shamed in terms of blushing, Biron talks about whipping and hypocrisy: ‘Now step I forth to whip hypocrisy.’ (IV.iii.149). Biron’s aggressive Juvenalian satire makes a proverbial mountain out of a molehill. It makes a catastrophe of folly. By contrast, the thought that the appropriate response to being found out is ‘merely’ to blush normalises folly. Folly is cause for ‘only human’ comic embarrassment rather than tragedy. Biron, as the King points out, has struck the wrong tone; his ‘jest’ is too ‘bitter’ (IV.iii.172).

8When the scholars turned lovers in Love’s Labour’s Lost find out that each one of them has forsworn their vow to devote themselves exclusively to the life of the mind, they turn to Biron to justify their about-turn. ‘Now prove / Our loving lawful’, says the King ‘and our faith not torn’. Dumaine follows suit: ‘Ay, marry there, some flattery for this evil’ and Longueville in similar vein pleads for ‘some authority how to proceed, / Some tricks, some quillets how to cheat the devil’ (IV.iii.282-86). Some fake, trumped-up show of authority, based on ‘tricks’ and ‘quillets’ (meaning quibbles) will do, it seems. Some illusion of authority is all that is required because uppermost in the courtiers’ minds is the imperative not to lose face. At the same time, there is a sophisticated knowingness on the part of the courtiers of the fact that their faces are faces which are continually at risk of being seen through and which might in fact be interesting to lose, or at least to contemplate losing. Why interesting? Because to put identity at risk is to create suspense, and in the case of romantic comedy, to create the conditions for play and foreplay. Part of the flirtatious banter which occurs between the two principal groups is a form of verbal striptease in which a covering or disguise is unveiled, only for another layer to stand in the way of complete nakedness.

9When the courtiers disguise themselves as Russians, for the benefit of the women who are themselves masked, appearances are layered one on top of another:

ROSALINE: How many weary steps,
Of many weary miles you have o’ergone,
Are numbered in the travel of one mile?

BIRON: We number nothing that we spend for you.
Our duty is so rich, so infinite,
That we may do it still without account.
Vouchsafe to show the sunshine of your face,
That we, like savages, may worship it.

ROSALINE: My face is but a moon, and clouded too.

KING: Blessed are clouds, to do as such clouds do.
Vouchsafe, bright moon, and these thy stars, to shine,
Those clouds removed, upon our watery eyne.

ROSALINE: O vain petitioner, beg a greater matter!
Thou now requests but moonshine in the water.

(V.ii.194-207)

10Beneath the appearance of the Russian is Biron the courtier speaking romantic clichés about the dazzling appearance he imagines seeing beneath the mask worn by Rosaline who then exposes the revelation desired by the courtiers as insubstantial: nothing but ‘moonshine in the water’. These are ‘sign[s] of she’ to borrow a phrase of Biron’s, not the ‘she herself’ (V.ii.468-9). But the comedic play of signs, replete with mistaken identities, category errors, and metaphorically missing persons have kindled the fires of desire at the same time as they have opened love to playful uncertainty. For underneath one ‘sign of she’ may be another sign, and then another, ad infinitum. It is a relatively easy and obvious point to make that the courtiers routinely replace the actual objects of their devotion with clichéd, textual versions of them, versions which are more in keeping with the bookish ways they are supposed to have relinquished than with ‘real life’. But this kind of unmasking once again seems untimely. To appeal soberly to some ‘real’ Rosaline beneath the signs she is taken or mistaken for does not seem, at this point in the play, the right kind of move. The festive spirit of the play makes any such quest for ‘reality’, ‘truth’, ‘authenticity’ and foundations seem inappropriately, or to recall the phrase I used earlier, unseasonably leaden. Yes, it is true, that the romantic illusions of the men are habitually punctured by the women, but simple oppositions between appearance and reality, illusion and truth, authenticity and inauthenticity, the substantial and the insubstantial, the disembodied and the down-to-earth, are not immediately enforced. After Rosaline has wittily implied that the courtiers’ romantic idealisations are empty, instead of ending the dance of words and signs whose relation to reality is no doubt always in doubt, she begins another ‘game of wit’:

ROSALINE: O vain petitioner, beg a greater matter!
Thou now requests but moonshine in the water.

KING: Then in our measure do but vouchsafe one change
Thou bid’st me beg; this begging is not strange

ROSALINE: Play music, then! [Music plays] Nay, you must do it soon.
Not yet? No dance! Thus change I like the moon.

(V.ii.207-11)

11Rosaline is not, at this stage, a killjoy. She does not want the play to stop in the name of some sobering truth about who she really is. What she wants is better and faster play, play that moves the game of love beyond the tired, worn-out clichés wittingly or unwittingly recycled by the courtiers. In a trice, Rosaline asks for dance music, demands an instant response - ‘you must do it soon’ - then immediately cancels the request as if to suggest that the courtiers are just too sluggish, too slow off the mark. If there is to be a play of appearances, a comedy of mistaken or half-mistaken identities, then let that play be more fleet-footed and energetic, with a view, perhaps, to exhausting itself more quickly than at the slower pace set by the men.

12The guises and disguises of lovers are not so much unmasked in the name of truth, then, as transformed into different faces. What applies to the ostensible objects of the lovers’ devotions also applies to love itself. For love itself rapidly changes face. It changes hue just as quickly as the scholars-turned-lovers-turned-Russians do. Love is a gallimaufry of infatuation, idolatry, tyranny, narcissism, compassion, folly, blindness, madness, drunkenness, giddiness, religion, fine feeling and agent of civilisation. When Biron in Act 3 declares himself in love it is as one who has been smitten by that ‘wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy ... Dan Cupid’:

And I, forsooth, in love! I that have been love’s whip,
A very beadle to a humorous sigh,
A critic, nay, a night-watch constable,
A domineering pedant o’er the boy,
Than whom no mortal so magnificent!
This wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy.
This Signor Junior, giant dwarf, Dan Cupid
Regent of love-rhymes, lord of all folded arms,
Th’anointed sovereign of sighs and groans [...]
[...] O my little heart!
And I to be corporal of his field
And wear his colours like a tumbler’s hoop!

(III.i.169-83)

13Love here is folly, and unambiguously so, it seems, with no redeemable wisdom about it, as far as Biron is concerned. Yet called upon a few scenes later to justify the courtiers’ disavowal of their life of scholarship, Biron rises to the occasion by venerating love and turning it into a form of religion:

[Love] adds a precious seeing to the eye –
A lover’s eyes will gaze an eagle blind.
A lover’s ear will hear the lowest sound
When the suspicious head of theft is stopped.
Love’s feeling is more soft and sensible
Than are the tender horns of cockled snails. [...]
And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Make heaven drowsy with the harmony.
Never durst poet touch a pen to write
Until his ink were tempered with Love’s sighs.
O, then his lines would ravish savage ears,
And plant in tyrants mild humility.
From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain, and nourish all the world,
Else none at all in aught proves excellent.

(IV.iii.309-30)

14Biron’s command of words is such that he can do what he will with them, here re-creating the meaning of love as occasion demands, in response to Longueville’s plea to Biron to conjure up ‘some authority how to proceed, / Some tricks, some quillets, how to cheat the devil’ (IV.iii.285-6). Here, then, is another appearance, or so it might seem, except for the fact that at some indeterminate point or another, we might become weary of the endless substitution of one signifier of love for another. We might begin to want more substance, and probably at the prompting of characters (like Rosaline, for example) who play, but play semi-seriously, with a view to discriminating between more or less substantial and more or less shallow appeals to love. And perhaps Biron’s speech does not itself present just another ‘appearance’ of love. Perhaps we might say, in imitation of the play’s own propensity for paradox, that what Biron’s speech offers is a ‘seeming appearance’, an appearance masquerading as a profound reality about love but one which might have some truth to it. As is well-known, rhetorical training in the Renaissance involved arguing in utramque partem, either side of a case. As Aristotle and subsequent theorists of rhetoric proposed, rhetoric produced knowledge that was probable rather than certain. Rhetorical love - love subjected to continuous rhetorical treatment – is in danger in Love’s Labour’s Lost of becoming empty love, love in which style reigns permanently over substance, manner over matter, eloquence over wisdom. Yet the ‘sweet smoke of rhetoric’ (III.i.61), including amorous rhetoric, which is clearly the object of the play’s satire is not always and only an object of ridicule, for there is sometimes just enough ‘probability’ in what is said about love to make us wonder what truths might lie hidden or half-hidden in the play’s various rhetorical excursions.

16Biron himself uses the language of self-loss and self-renewal – ‘Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves, / Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths’ (IV.iii.338-9). In so doing, he nudges the play into becoming an existential quest-narrative, whereby an inauthentic self is shed in favour of a more authentic one, and the superficialities to which lovers are prone are cast aside to reveal a deeper wisdom about love. For all Biron’s verbal showmanship, which in festive manner releases language from the necessity of ‘meaning’, the other comedic register present in the play is invoked in this semi-serious quest for renewal and rebirth. I emphasise semi-serious because Biron’s grandiose elevation of love can be simultaneously read as a mock-elevation. The doubling of comic perspective means that we are again made to wonder when we should begin to weigh love’s claims. Has Biron yet proved himself worthy to be taken seriously? Has he earned the right to be earnest?

17It is not easy to say exactly when or where we should begin asking such truth-questions about love as: is love de-sublimated as sexual desire, ‘flesh’ made ‘deity’ (IV.iii.71-3), as Biron puts it, the truth about love? Or is the neo-platonised version of love he invokes in his later speech the truth that gives the lie to the reductive materialism of the flesh? Love, so Biron claims, deepens perception, adding ‘a precious seeing to the eye’ (IV.iii.309); it sensitises – ‘Love’s feeling is […] soft and sensitive’ (IV.iii.313); love also civilises, ravishing ‘savage ears’ (IV.iii.324); it humbles by planting ‘in tyrants mild humility’ (IV.iii.325) and brings ‘harmony’ (IV.iii.321). Are these all throw-away lines which affirm nothing but the extensiveness of Biron’s verbal repertoire? Or do some of them make affective and ontological claims upon us? It is tempting to be drawn in by at least some of these apotheoses, such as the idea that ‘love adds a precious seeing to the eye’, for this statement evokes a metaphysics of engagement. I emphasise ‘evokes’ because Biron does not spell out what precious seeing might involve. He may fancy himself a philosopher but he is not a systematic one. Nevertheless he hints at a philosophy of love, based upon engagement. To turn the probable knowledge of a foolish lover’s rhetoric into something more substantial I want to turn briefly to one of the most illuminatingly synoptic perspectives on love to have emerged recently, which is that of the philosopher Simon May. ‘If we all have a need to love’, writes May,

it is because we all need to feel at home in the world: to root our life in the here and now; to give our existence solidity and validity; to deepen the sensation of being; to enable us to experience the reality of our life as indestructible (even if we all also accept that our life is temporary and will end in death.)

18May places these various wants and needs under his ur-category, ‘ontological rootedness’. The need to feel ontologically rooted can according to May be met in different ways:

• 12 Simon May, Love: a History, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2011, p. 6.

At first, home is our mother and father; gradually its possibilities become larger and more complex: they might include our work, our friends, our children, nature, God. Or places, ideas, and ideals. Or contrary to common prejudice – money or status and the people who offer us access to it. For these can powerfully root, even if they are less noble and more obviously instrumental than other objects of love.12

19The promise of love, as philosophized by May, is that it acts as a solution to the perplexities, uncertainties and divisions of existence by rooting us and deepening ‘the sensation of being’ as he puts it. May’s idea is close to Biron’s idea of precious seeing, seeing that is precious because it makes us feel fully engaged in the world rather than at odds with it.

20To begin with, as is common with romantic love, ontological rootedness takes place inside the lover’s narcissistic imagination. There is someone, seemingly out there, who makes the world seem less alien, less hostile, and worth living in. But the love object is an image or ideal that exists in the mind of the lover and bears little relation to reality. Narcissistic romantic love and ego-humour, humour designed to bolster the self at the expense of another, go hand in hand in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Both have to be relinquished. The narcissism of love has to be abandoned through the realisation that the romantic perception of the person and the person herself (whoever that might be) may not coincide. And ego-humour, in the case of Biron, has to cede place to humour sensitive to the condition of the sick and the dying. This is the love-test set by Rosaline for Biron, one which now definitely injects seriousness into the ‘sport’ of the play. Of the many proverbs in Love’s Labour’s Lost, often used glibly – sportively – as possible containers for experience, Rosaline’s at the end of the play stands out as one demanding unambiguously serious consideration: ‘A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear / of him that hears it, never in the tongue / Of him that makes it’ (V.ii.847-9). Rosaline’s emphasis on reception rather than production instructs Biron that the tellers of jokes are dependent on their listeners, that listeners should be regarded as more than a pair of admiring ears and that this should be reflected in a more intimate knowledge of one’s audience/s. Transferred to the domain of love, this means that Biron will need to subject the ‘ontological rootedness’ that he desires from love to the risk of an actual relationship rather than one that exists in his head. If love is a ‘precious seeing’ because it engages us meaningfully in and with the world, then this ‘seeing’ will have to be more attentive, and accept that love beyond narcissism does not come with absolute guarantees.

21The labour of love might have been lost in this comedy if its sole comic mode was festive, but its other comic mode, involving a search for clarification and wisdom, means that love is not only a laughing matter and sign of human folly. We do need to acknowledge the folly of taking ourselves, especially our romantic selves, too seriously, and the play implicitly warns against premature philosophising. Yet the play, especially at the end, lays down conditions for being taken seriously as a lover, and these conditions may then make us seriously – and even anxiously – wonder what remains of love beyond the many appearances it has assumed during the course of the play.

22Injecting another sombre note into the comedy, the Queen has this blunt message for the men:

We have received your letters, full of love,
Your favours, the ambassadors of love,
And in our maiden council rated them
At courtship, pleasant jest, and courtesy,
As bombast and as lining to the time.
But more devout than this in our respects
Have we not been, and therefore met your loves
In their own fashion, like a merriment. (V.ii.769-76)

23Dumaine’s response to this is: ‘Our letters … showed much more than jest’ (V.ii.777). ‘So did our looks’ (V.ii.778) is Longueville’s supporting comment. Rosaline’s response is curt: ‘We did not quote them so’ (V.ii.779). Easy protestations of serious intent are not good enough.

24Here and elsewhere in Shakespeare’s plays (Rosalind in As You Like It, Paulina in The Winter’s Tale, Cordelia as the albeit initially ignored spokeswoman for love in King Lear), women are empowered in relation to love and men disempowered. Women are educators, sages and judges and men, novices. While this might be read as reinforcing gender stereotypes by relegating women to a private rather than public sphere of influence, such is the importance of love to worlds that are often presented in Shakespeare’s plays (comedies and tragedies alike) as heartless, that to be an arbiter of love is to be significantly empowered. Moreover, love is hardly ever just a private matter between two people, for its significance is constantly being amplified. In the world of Shakespearean comedy, people not only fall in love (or think that they do), they talk about it, reflect upon it, justify their falling in love and expand their self-justifications into heavyweight existential statements. For women to intervene in matters of affection, and stipulate the conditions for being taken seriously as a lover, is therefore to intervene in no ‘merely domestic’ affair.