• 1 Giordano Bruno, On the Heroic Frenzies. A Translation of De Gli Eroici Furori, by Ingrid D. Rowland (...)

It is truly, O most generous Sir, the work of a low, brutish and filthy nature constant to become the admirer, and have attached a devote thought to or around the beauty of a woman’s body.1

• 2 William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. John Arthos, ”Introduction”, New York, The New Ameri (...)

1Giordano Bruno’s anti-Petrarchan address to Sir Philip Sidney in De gli eroici furori (1585) must serve as my incipit to the intriguing relationship between Bruno and Shakespeare in Love’s Labour’s Lost. In one important respect the play is a typical Shakespearean comedy in its focus on courtship and an abundant use of witty wordplay, according to John Arthos, one of “the happiest.”² At the same time, however, Shakespeare works against the conventions of courtship by avoiding customary closure and the establishment of a comic society. It is also one of three plays for which we have no definite sources – the others being A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest.

• 3 Jill L. Levenson, “Introduction,” Romeo and Juliet, ed. Jill L. Levenson, The Oxford Shakespeare, O (...)
• 4 See France A. Yates, “The Emblematic Conceit in Giordano Bruno’s De gli eroici furori and in the El (...)
• 5 Gordiano Bruno, De gli eroici furori, London, Antonio Baio, 1585 and Il Candelaio, Commedia, Paris, (...)

2More importantly, however, Love’s Labour’s Lost also strikes a note of high seriousness, by posing basic questions about truth and love, topics that indeed would seem to compromise any attempt at construing a finale of comic merriment. In spite of the play’s surprising toned-down conclusion, where a possible round of marriages is postponed for a year, I would still argue against emphasizing too much its “apartness”, and rather draw attention to the fact that the play, in the manner of Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night, owes a lot to the Elizabethan aristocratic sonnet culture. For the characters in Love’s Labour’s Lost, too, “understand one another in terms of sonnet conceits and postures, Petrarchan and anti-Petrarchan.”³ I therefore propose that in addition to a general engagement with the courtly game of sonnet writing associated especially with Sir Philip Sidney and his circle, the play draws more specifically on the particular brand of Petrarchism and poetic emblematics that Giordano Bruno propagated to London’s cultural elite in 1583-85.⁴ The work that especially bears on Shakespeare’s critique of Petrarchan courtship conventions is first and foremost the avant-garde dialogue De gli eroici furori, published in London in 1585, from which Shakespeare lifts the procession and pilgrimage of the heroic lovers. The play also seems to owe something to Bruno’s only dramatic work, Il Candelaio, Commedia (1582),⁵ and together these works provide a matrix for the courtship game unraveled in Love’s Labour’s Lost.

• 6 Peter M. Daly, The Emblem in Early Modern Europe: Contributions to the Theory of the Emblem, Ashgat (...)
• 7 Andrea C. Castagno, The Early Commedia dell’Arte 1520–1621. The Mannerist Context, New York, Peter (...)
• 8 Robin Raybould, An Introduction to the Symbolic Literature of the Renaissance, Oxford, Trafford Pub (...)
• 9 Cf. Vicenzo Cartari’s Gli imaginini dei dei degli antichi (1533), Barthélémy Aneau’s Pictura poesis (...)

3The poetic ideal of ut pictura poesis, including ekphrasis, is a commonplace that underscores the focus on visuality in Elizabethan poetry and Love’s Labour’s Lost shows this influence to a high degree. The increased emphasis on printed visual media on the Continent that followed the publication of Andrea Alciati’s seminal Emblematum liber (1531) was no less than remarkable: the explosive rise in the printing and distribution of illustrated books, the circulation first in Europe, then in England, of prints of artworks, buildings, and city prospects in the second half of the sixteenth century contributed to changing age-old conventions of communication also in England, even if the first highly derivative emblem book was not printed until 1586.⁶ A new genre that focused on the marriage of illustration and text, it provided topoi, images, and patterns for poets and visual artists to imitate, precisely when artists in accordance with the new mannerist style to a lesser degree imitated nature itself but emulated and tried to outdo the work of other artists. Mannerism has been variously defined but it is essentially “a historical period existing from 1520 to 1620, in Europe, centered in Italy but with a number of foreign manifestations both contemporary and historical, during which a characteristic style emerged.”⁷ In this context, Robin Raybould writes that the Emblemata “was destined to begin a literary revolution, a revolution that in hindsight, with the background and in the context of the times […] seems to have been almost inevitable.”⁸ Of course, that revolution was equally strong, if not stronger, in the visual arts. Although many of the emblem books that followed in the wake of Alciati have relatively crude illustrations, they were cherished pattern books, providing topoi or motifs for the arts, being aids to invention. ⁹ In addition, they enriched the meaning and aesthetic pleasure due to the synaesthetic complementarity of the resulting art works – of which the stage with its speaking and moving pictures constitutes the fullest expression, as is indeed evident in Love’s Labour’s Lost.

• 10 See Castagno’s illuminating survey of the chief “historical approaches” to rise of Mannerism and it (...)
• 11 Jean-Pierre Maquerlot, Shakespeare and the mannerist Tradition. A reading of five problem plays, Ca (...)
• 12 Ibid.
• 13 John Shearman, Mannerism. Style and Civilization, Harmondsworth, Penguin,1967, p. 169.
• 14 John Shearman translates part of Lorenzo Giacomini Malespini’s funeral oration on the mannerist poe (...)
• 15 Diane Bodart, Renaissance and Mannerism, New York, Sterling Publishing, 2008, writes that “Nature w (...)
• 16 Mannerist painters “consistently borrowed images taken from High Renaissance and atique works of ar (...)

4Although critics have debated the origins of Mannerism as a style and cultural movement,¹⁰ there is great consensus about what constitutes the formal traits of mannerist style in art and literature, although Jean-Pierre Maquerlot writes that is hard to define the style narrowly as “a combinatory order of recurrent schemes,”¹¹ because “the Mannerist style is even more protean than the Baroque.”¹² John Shearman terms it the stylish style with an emphasis on elegance, decoration and rejection of emotional excess, but also stresses the preference for indirection and deliberate difficulty. It inverts “the classical […] relation of form and content,” he writes, and “cultivates style at the expense of its expressive function.”¹³ The style of Torquato Tasso is typical: It was “artificially interwoven more than is normal, and adorned with varied figures suitable for tempering that excessive clarity, such as caesuras, convolutions, hyperbole, irony, displacement.”¹⁴ The emphasis on excessively ornamented surfaces and on the parts rather than the whole, entailed repeated changes of focus and less focus on clarity, naturalness, and pictorial depth. Also, there is a clear tendency to quote or allude to the work of earlier artists and poets. This was done with the aim to create complexity of form and polysemousness.¹⁵ In short, Mannerism is an art of allusion and quotation,¹⁶ depending on the special knowledge of its audiences and their ability to recollect and recognize complexities of form and content. In this respect, Love’s Labour’s Lost exhibits many features of the Italianate style.

• 17 The brand of anti-Petrarchism we encounter in Bruno’s “Argomento” is related to that of Domenico di (...)
• 18 Yates, op. cit., p. 101-121.
• 19 From the frontispiece of Il Candelaio, op.cit.

5The many refined conceits in Petrarch’s Il Canzoniere provided a treasured model for the emblematist, but the multiplication of Petrarchan conceits and stylistic features in the poetry of his Italian and English imitators, eventually triggered a reaction against stylistic excess.¹⁷ As Frances Yates showed in her seminal article on “Giordano Bruno and the Emblematic Tradition,”¹⁸ Bruno and Sidney were among the leading critics of contrived and superficial Petrarchism in the 1580s, and Shakespeare followed suit in Love’s Labour’s Lost (and e.g. Romeo and Juliet) by putting the abuses of Petrarchism hilariously on display. Shakespeare did not, however, neglect the more sombre and humane aspects of Bruno the philosopher, the academico di nulla academia, who used “In tristitia hilaris, in hilaritate tristis” [“In sadness merry, in merriment sad”] for his personal motto.¹⁹

• 20 Samuel Daniel, A Defense of Ryme, London, 1603, p. 15.

8Mannerist art works do precisely baffle and unsettle by drawing the spectator’s eye and attention to “strange shapes” and “varying […] subjects,” frequently displaying the serpentine movements of figures (figure serpentinate). The surprising turns and changes of identity, behaviour, and shifts in linguistic registers in mannerist drama similarly engage and confuse spectators by begetting “conceit beyond expectation.”²⁰ Verbal coils thus mark Berowne’s speech, when a series of word repetitions in sequence produces at the same time dynamic and arresting movements (full formed / the eye; the eye / full/ forms; varying / subjects / the eye / varied / object).

• 21 Muriel Bradbrook, The School of Night, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1936, and Frances A. (...)
• 22 Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, London, Kegan Paul, 1964, p. 357.
• 23 Yates, “The Emblematic Conceit,” op. cit., p. 112.

9In 1936 Muriel Bradbrook in The School of Night and Frances A. Yates in A Study of Love’s Labour’s Lost related Shakespeare’s comedy to Bruno and to ideas at work in Elizabethan intellectual circles in which Bruno moved, but their studies were not received with general approval.²¹ Yates, who had been the most daring and detailed investigator of the play in relation to Bruno’s policies of religious reform, did not write extensively on the play again, but returned to the issue briefly in her seminal work Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), in which she states that “an entirely new approach to the problem of Bruno and Shakespeare has to be made.”²² She suggests that the answer to the problem may lie in “Shakespeare’s profound preoccupation with significant language.”²³

• 24 See Shearman, op. cit., p. 163-164, and Castagno who notes that in Rosso “there is no depth through (...)
• 25 Duc de Biron (Berowne) and Duc de Longueville (Longaville) fought alongside the Protestant Henri of (...)
• 26 On the topic of self-sovereignty and Bruno, see Gilberto Sacerdoti, “Self-sovereignty and Religion (...)

10It is precisely language, poetic or literary, as well as the visual language of scenic representation that aims to deceive or mask the truth, confusing the relationship between verba and res, style and meaning, outward show and inner essence, that is under attack in the play, a typical characteristic of mannerist style.²⁴ The potential and allusiveness of language, together with Shakespeare’s reconfiguring of comic form, constitutes the main focus of the present article, even though I acknowledge the element of topicality so evident in Shakespeare’s choice of names for his characters,²⁵ and in the symbolism of the hunting-scene in Act Four.²⁶ However important, the allusions to contemporary political events and pressing issues can but serve as the backdrop for the negotiations of love in the main plot and should, I propose, not be allowed to obfuscate the emphasis that Shakespeare puts on the theme of individual responsibility and sincerity in the play.

• 27 Shearman points to “the inversion of the classical […] relation of form and content” in mannerist a (...)
• 28 Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1969, p. 225-226.
• 29 Ibid, p. 120f.
• 30 Ibid., p. 242-44.

11Love’s Labour’s Lost is probably the first Shakespeare play to engage consistently with the sonnet phenomenon that had developed in England during the 1580s and 1590s, a vogue that in its superficiality and artifice produced the characteristic mannerist dissociation of the verbal surface from the core, or form from content,²⁷ turning all into display and play at the expense of meaning and morality. The comedy is designed to appeal especially to the members of a cultural elite familiar with Italian and French literary culture, that had a taste for Neo-Platonist aesthetics and concepts like discordia concors, “a principle that Bruno’s De gli eroici furori played a crucial role of naturalizing among Elizabethan writers.”²⁸ Another of these philosophical concepts is that of the infolding of three qualities into one, famously portrayed in Botticelli’s dancing graces in La Primavera, in Bruno’s discussion of the choice of Paris in De gli eroici furori (I.xi.84-5), or in the intricate plot of Il Candelaio, written and produced for a sophisticated Parisian audience. Edgar Wind terms such “trinities” examples of a trinitas productoria,²⁹ a principle that prominently resurfaces at various points and levels in Love’s Labour’s Lost, and whose roots are found in Plato and his translator, Marsilio Ficino.³⁰

• 31 Catherine Bates, “Love and Courtship,” in ed. Alexander Leggatt, The Cambridge Companion to Shakesp (...)

12The play has three interwoven plots set out in nine scenes, but I shall only consider the main plot which is a fairly simple one in terms of action: it moves from an initial vow to study and remain chaste for three years, a pledge Navarre extracts from of his three courtiers, Dumaine, Longaville and Berowne, and it ends with a series of vows elicited from and accepted by the same by the Princess of France and her three ladies-in-waiting. In the action between these pledges we witness the process by which the men first fall in love and then mount a campaign to win the ladies, but are soundly defeated. The male courtship game fails miserably and instead a female discursive space is opened. In Catherine Bates’ view, “by relentless deflation, Shakespeare pokes cruel fun at the claim of amour courtois to ennoble men through love.” The witty and resourceful women win the verbal duels and dictate their own conditions, as it were, which Bates sees as an “injection of seriousness, which puts content back behind the form.” This, she claims, may be said to go against “the more playful spirit of the play,” ³¹ but rather than introducing something new and serious into the plot, it makes, I suggest, evident the inherent limitations and potential dangers of pacts the imposed by patriarchy.

• 32 Giordano Bruno, La cena de le ceneri (London, 1584), in ed. Giovanni Gentile, Opere italiane, 2 vol (...)

14While the witty reference to Doctor Faustus is well-known, critics have missed the fact that Marlowe’s line is lifted from Bruno’s attack on academic pedants, i.e. men like Navarre, Dumaine, and Longaville; for when Faustus wishes to “live and die in Aristotle’s works” and is “”ravished by “sweet Analytics” (I.i.5; 6), he is translating directly from Bruno’s dialogue: “Quegli che vogliono vivere e morire per Aristotile, e non sanno i titoli de’ libri d’Aristotile” [“those who desire to live and die for Aristotle, and do not even know the titles of his books].”³² As I shall argue in the following, it is no coincidence that it is Berowne, whose name echoes that of the philosopher, who alludes to the fatal compact of Marlowe’s magus.

• 33 Yates, “The Emblematic Conceit”, op. cit., p. 115.

16In this, Shakespeare’s characters display the emblematic mode seen in the poetry of Bruno and Sidney in the 1580s.³³ One by one, the King, Dumaine and Longaville recite and perform their creations unaware of the fact that they are watched and overheard by Berowne who in the end steps into the open to castigate his fellows, assuming the role of an anti-Petrarchan chider – “Tush, none but minstrels like of sonneting!”(IV.iii.150):

• 34 Cyrus Hoy, “Jacobean Tragedy and the Mannerist Style”, Shakespeare Survey 26 (1973), 49-67 (56).

17Hypocritically he assumes the sprezzatura attitude of a mannerist courtier and hides his real self: being in the words of Cyrus Hoy about such a character in general, “cool, poised, utterly self-absorbed – though in fact, of course, never so self-absorbed that [he] does not have an eye ready to detect any betrayal of intention or motive in others.”³⁴ Shortly before Costard exposes that Berowne, too, is a perjurer, the latter gloats over his companions’ perjury:

• 35 He also discusses beauty in painting in relation to obscurity and light at II.i. 214-215.
• 36 Bruno, Eroici furori, op. cit., p. 8-9. In Canticles, Solomon’s bride is described be both as black (...)
• 37 In Canticles the bride is repeatedly compares to a dove or turtle (4:1; 281recto), whereas it is So (...)
• 38 The mention of the cedar immediately bring to mind the central image of the cedar in Canticles, whe (...)
• 39 See Camilla Caporicci’s discussion elsewhere in this publication, “Lady Rosaline’s Darkness: Lingui (...)

20Bruno repeatedly likens the image of divine beauty and majesty, l’unica Diana (i.e. Queen Elizabeth), to Solomon’s beautiful black bride in Canticles, who is upright like the palm, savours of the cedar, and whose neck is like ebony.³⁵ Bruno quotes the Vulgate text repeatedly and informs us that he first had wanted to call his work Cantica. ³⁶ We note that the same imagery crops up in Berowne’s praise of Rosaline and in his quibble on the words “foul” (punning on “fowl”) and “raven” (79-80),³⁷ as well as in Dumaine’s description of the black-haired Katherine “As upright as the cedar” (81).³⁸ Shakespeare dwells long on the paradox of light in darkness, drawing attention to a deeper meaning, and he also foregrounds its strangeness: “O paradox! [...] Dark needs no candles now, for dark is light” (IV.iii.252, 267).³⁹

• 40 Wind, op. cit., p. 52.
• 41 See Bruno’s exposition of the myth in De gli eroici furori (II.v.xi.184-89), as a comment on Emblem (...)
• 42 Wind, op. cit., p. 74. Wind sees these games as being disinterested, but that would only had been o (...)
• 43 Levenson, op. cit., p. 54.

Besides, Navarre himself constitutes the male counterpart to this ideal of perfect female sovereignty, being – in Boyet’s words – “the sole inheritor/ Of all perfections that a man may owe” (II.i.5-6). Such distinction in Navarre’s view only belongs to royals and he therefore reminds Berowne in the later scene that Rosaline merely is a lady-in-waiting, an “attending star” (222) on his love. Berowne passionately replies that eminent qualities are infolded in Rosaline, too, because “in her fair cheek, / […] several worthies make one dignity” (226-227), being suggestive of yet another reference to trinitas productoria, that was so central to the cult of the universality of Queen Elizabeth. A good of example of such intellectual play in England is Bruno’s interpretation of the Judgement of Paris in De gli eroici furori (II.v.184-85), a topic already seen in the works of Lyly, Peele, and Sabie, and illustrated in the Windsor Castle portrait of Elizabeth I and the Three Goddesses (1569).40 In these works, the golden apple is presented to the Queen, not Venus, as in the classical myth, the implication being that Elizabeth embodied in her person the wisdom, chastity, and beauty of the three goddesses; i.e. the contest between Pallas, Diana, and Venus “produces” the trinary perfection of Elizabeth.41 At court it was an integral part of chivalrous tournaments, masques and elaborate courtship games imbued with “the dialectical language of Neoplatonism” in the decades before Bruno launched his politico-religious campaign.42 Levenson argues that “at the highest reaches of Elizabethan social life, courtly love had become a complex mode of play,”43 so that Bruno’s repeated compliments in De gli eroici furori to Elizabeth as a perfect prince exploits this cultural and cultic ambience.

• 44 Maria Rika Maniates argues that De Vinculis in genere is the first comprehensive mannerist aestheti (...)
• 45 Paolo Giovio, Dialogo delle imprese militari et amorose, Rome, Antonio Barre, 1555.
• 46 Samuel Daniel, The Worthy Tract of Paulus Jovius, containing a Discourse of Rare Inventions … calle (...)
• 47 Geffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes and other Devises, for the moste parte gathered out of sundri (...)
• 48 Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica. The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox, Princeton, Princeton Univ (...)
• 49 See Roy Eriksen, “Real and Virtual Illustration: Visual Memory and Early Modern Speaking Pictures”, (...)
• 50 See my analysis of some of his circular poems, The Forme of Faustus Fortunes, op.cit., p. 59-102 (e (...)

22As an exponent and theorist of literary Mannerism, Bruno combines genres and forms in a truly innovative manner.⁴⁴ In De gli eroici furori, he breaks the established emblem book formula producing an innovatory moral dialogue that is also “illustrated” by scripted or “naked emblems” with inscriptiones and sonnet subscriptiones with commentaries. Instead he relies on or alludes to already well-known emblems, which he expects his implied readers to fetch from memory, or recreate visually in their imagination, but for which he provides new interpretations. The innovatory work appears when England had not yet seen the first publication of the type. Samuel Daniel published his translation of Paolo Giovio’s Imprese⁴⁵ – also without illustrations – in the very same year (1585),⁴⁶ and before Geffrey Whitney in 1586 had his highly derivative, but illustrated, A Choice of Emblems printed at Leyden.⁴⁷ As an exponent and theorist of literary Mannerism Bruno combines genres and forms in a truly innovative manner. The missing visual emblems thus are virtual illustrations, used as vehicles for his quest for truth and beauty, and as such were available to Shakespeare. Rosalie Colie comments on this playful working out and presentation of ideas and stresses that “Bruno delights by establishing literary topoi as steps to his teaching […] abstract[ing] literature as he does so many elements of his thoughts, into its signs and symbolic values.”⁴⁸ I would like to stress that this also true in the case in his prominent use of visuality and mnemonics. He underscores that the frenzies (furori) described are not examples of forgetfulness, but of memory (“non son oblío, ma una memoria”), and a “desire for beauty and goodness” (I.iii.82-83). Additionally, De gli eroici furori is the best example of what I term Bruno’s combinatory and dynamic “rotational aesthetic,”⁴⁹ realised in individual poems as well as in the combined totality of parts in that work.⁵⁰

• 51 Muriel C. Bradbrook,“Courtier and Courtesy: Castiglione, Lyly and Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Ve (...)

24This campaign, exclusively male in character and scope, will fail gloriously because its message does not take into account the mind-set nor consider the feelings of the women they are courting. John R. Mulryne argues that “the nature of the service proffered by the King of Navarre and his servants is misinterpreted as a ‘game’ by the Princess of France and her ladies,”⁵¹ but how could they interpret it differently? It backfires because of its one-sided maleness and focus on conquest, rather than on mutual and shared love, and its vehicle, the ornamented language of artificial courtship, does not constitute a suitable and expedient means for establishing relationships based on sincerity. Having been forewarned about the men’s courtship, the ladies scathingly and wittily rebuff the allegorical language of their suitors, when they stage the play’s second paradramatic inset, the masque of Muscovites and Blackamoors (V.ii.157-264), the first being the play-within-the-play of Navarre, Longaville, and Dumaine as sonnet lovers (IV.iii.16-142), who are overheard by Berowne.

• 52 Rowland leaves out the translation of the phrase ”vacati tutti mari” (341), which is supplied here.
• 53 Edward Berry, “Laughing at ‘others’”, in Leggatt, ed., op. cit., p. 121-138 (130).

25Without going into details about the women’s mastery of stichomythia, one cannot avoid noticing that the Muscovites closely echo Bruno’s description of the heroic lovers’ strenuous pilgrimage in the final dialogue of De gli eroici furori. After having sailed all oceans,⁵² crossed every rivers, climbed every mountains, and traversed every plain plains” (“varcati tutti mari, passati tutti fiumi, superati tutti monti, discorse tutte pianure”, II.v.340-41) in order to reach the island of Britain, Bruno’s lovers are received by the nymphs of the grassy banks of the Thames (“leggiadre Ninfe, ch’a l’erbose sponde / Del Tamesi gentil fate soggiorno” [“gracious Nymphs, who make your gentle stay / Along the grassy banks of the Thames”], II.v.346-47). Navarre and his party claim to have made a similar “weary” journey asking Boyet to tell the Princess that they “have measured many miles / To tread a measure with her on this grass” (V.ii.184-185); but their plea is rejected, because the women obviously feel that they “are inept role-players, puffed up with […] narcissistic desire.”⁵³ The women therefore refuse to drop their masks and allow even “one change” (209), whereas Bruno’s nine furiosi, who worship the face of the goddess whose majesty combines high wisdom, noble chastity, and beauty (“alta sagezza e nobil castità giunte a bellezza” [“rare sagacity / With beauty joined, and noble chastity”], II.v.344-45), join the nymphs in a circular dance, i.e., they are engaging in a “change.” This trinity of qualities is also the culminating example of infolding in the work.

• 55 Wind, op. cit., p. 82.

27The fact that each character possesses three qualities that vary in degree, so that the trio together exhibit nine qualities, provides a suggestive template for Shakespeare’s Worthies as presented by Costard at V.ii.7-8. The Neo-platonic principle of infolding is present at several points in Love’s Labour’s Lost, but its most memorable instance occurs in the characters that are comic versions of the three kinds of life, the contemplative, the active, and the pleasurable, namely Holofernes, Armado, and Costard. They parody “men who have chosen: wisdom, power, and pleasure.”⁵⁵ The brief dialogue between Berowne and Costard before the Worthies’ entry would seem to confirm the consistent play on the principle of three into one:

• 56 Christopher Cairns, “Ariosto’s Comedies and the Italian ‘Erasmian’ Connection in Shakespeare and Jo (...)

The entire comic plot “undoubtedly [is] of Italian descent”, Christopher Cairns writes, who sees a general influence in the play, possibly from Ariosto.56 This is a reasonable assumption, but more specifically the idea to let three characters each impersonate three Worthies, which is a comic version of infolding, the ludicrous version of infolding probably derives from Bruno’s deft and witty plotting of Il Candelaio. The fact that the pageant fails gloriously is quite another matter.

• 58 The allusions run deeper and more indirectly in Love’s Labour’s Lost than in Marlowe’s and Shakespe (...)

30She is generous in her verdict, but requires that Navarre and his men be tested and tempered by a trial of twelve months: the men’s initial pledge to study and live in celibacy for three years has been wittily contracted into one year, a final example of infolding of three into one. Then, too, the news about the untimely death of the Princess’s father, the King of France, allows room for a period of penance, an announcement that moreover is laden with political allusion and topicality.⁵⁸

• 59 We recall that Navarre, thinking the disguised Rosaline is the Princess, addresses her as “bright m (...)
• 60 For female space and female chastity, see Georgianna Ziegler, “My lady’s chamber: Female space, fem (...)

31Despite the obvious differences between the journey of the furiosi to prove themselves to be worthy and heroic lovers and that of the young men in Love’s Labour’s Lost, the ending of Bruno’s dialogue and the play’s finale also have some important features in common such as the works’ open endings. De gli eroici furori moves from a rejection of vain studies and a base desire for the female body to the veneration of the divine majesty embodied in the “unica Ninfa”[“the unique nymph”] who resides on the banks of the Thames (i.e. Queen Elizabeth) and who is equal to “Diana tra le ninfe”[“Diana among the nymphs”].⁵⁹ Bruno underscores this process of purification and reformation by establishing a unique feminine discursive space. For after nine dialogues between different male speakers, in the tenth and final dialogue the poet gives the final words to two women, Giulia and Laodomia (II.v.338-39), who serve almost as Beatrice to Dante. A rare case of female discursive space⁶⁰ is established when the two women present the author’s final vision of love and divine majesty, an obvious compliment to Elizabeth I. Bruno’s lovers join the nymphs in the above mentioned dance (“ballando in ruota” [“dancing in a circle”], II.v.354-355] and a song, thus performing the “change” that is denied the suitors in Love’s Labour’s Lost. However, Bruno’s work avoids closure, too, because the canzone illustrates the principle of discordia concors in the contention of Jove and Neptune, the sky and the sea, for supremacy (II.v.354-57). In short, Bruno’s ending stresses eternal strife, and it may not be too unreasonable to claim that Shakespeare provides a dramatic version of a similar contrast of opposites, when the allegorical figures of Hiems (“Winter”) and Ver (“Spring”) conclude the play with the songs of the cuckoo and the owl in a contest that can never be finally settled. In this manner, dialogue and play share a similar open ending, one that is quite in keeping with how Shakespeare in the courtship game of Love’s Labour’s Lost quotes and inventively stages Bruno’s militia of lovers in De gli eroici furori. The play’s sequence of comic dramatic insets and use of anti-Petrarchist conceits at the same time “quotes” and transforms the Neo-Platonizing encomiastic strategies in Bruno’s innovatory dialogue.