My "baby William", which is seven years old next week, is the Complete Works of William Shakespeare International Student Edition. I bought it from William Shakespeare's childhood giftshop, adjacent to his birthplace, for thirty-five quid. It was my big souvenir from that trip and it has been my go-to version of Shakespeare. This is a deliberate choice, as I have a host of copies of the Complete Works. One is the Barnes and Noble discount version. Another is the first copy that I ever remember trying to read, one gifted to me from my maternal grandmother. Another is an illustrated version. I also have the one given to me for my 18th birthday. (That was the first edition that I read completely--poetry excluded.) Despite having so many editions that mean a lot to me, I've focused on "baby William" as the one that I mark and annotate, creating cross-references as they appear and appeal to me; it is the version of Shakespeare that I read for enjoyment. Since 2019, I decided to reread that entire book. I'm on no timeline--there's no rush to complete the canon. I'm simply going through as often as I can, reading when it strikes me, and writing up my thoughts about the play when I'm finished. With that recap of what this string of essays is all about, I'll now give a few thoughts about Love's Labour's Lost. I like it. I mean, it's not the best thing I've ever read, but it has a lot to commend it. There are some enjoyable scenes, and the premise is too ludicrous to hate. After all, who doesn't see the immediate dramatic result of four bachelors declaring that they will avoid all worldly contact--especially of women--for three years in order to become better scholars? The arrival of the princess and her entourage is the arrival of the best parts of the play, with the women not only being more engaging and interesting, but also better sports, more clever characters, and generally worth much more than the attention that they get. The princess of France gets a total of 10% of the lines--her match, the King of Navarre, gets 11%. Those lines are almost always the better ones, and though Biron is supposed to be the main wordsmith and primary protagonist (and he's also the gabbiest character, with 25% of the lines), he always strikes me as a bit of a bore. Take, for example, how the princess talks with her servant. Boyet is a sly observer of people, and he knows that his place is as a server to his princess. Nevertheless, the two will deliver lines of ease and familiarity, though always with the correct distinctions of class maintained. At the beginning of the second act's first scene, Boyet and the ladies are talking about where they are. Boyet explains that it's the princess' role to speak with Ferdinand, the king of Navarre. He urges her to Be now as prodigal of all dear grace Admittedly, I repunctuated the first line of the princess, so that it reads, "Good Lord, Boyet, my beauty, though but mean…", thus giving it a tinge of good-natured exasperation. The point, however, I think still stands. She is incredibly quick-witted and she lets that shine in almost every scene. She and her female companions are able to easily see through the gifts and love-notes the smitten males have sent them, and they recognize that these attempts to woo are just as laughable as they appear to the audience. They play along, just as eager for a good time as those in the theater's seats, all the while knowing the score. There's an insouciant indulgence that I get from the princess ("We are wise girls to mock our lovers so" (5.2.58)) and I really wish there were more lines from her and quite a bit less from the men. Indeed, the male lovers are essentially all interchangeable in a play where interchangeability is a part of the theme. (Interestingly, the next play is A Midsummer Night's Dream where this theme is drawn in even clearer lines.) After all, we have duplicates galore: Holofernes and Nathaniel are both erudites (though the latter is perhaps a more sycophantic version of what he sees in the former); Dull and Costard (and Mote, to an extent) all occupy a similar position in the society; who, save the actors who play them, can differentiate between Longueville and Dumaine? Stand out moments are often derived out of a bit of wordplay rather than pure character, with a possible exception of Costard's confusion about the word remuneration during 3.1. Now will I look to his remuneration. Remuneration! O, that's the Latin word for three farthings: three farthings--remuneration.--'What's the price of this inkle?'--'One penny.'--'No, I'll give you a remuneration:' why, it carries it. Remuneration! why, it is a fairer name than French crown. I will never buy and sell out of this word. (125-130) This play has a tendency--in part because of Holofernes and Nathaniel--to tend toward sesquipedalian expressions. Shakespeare sends up this tendency, parodying it by parroting it with the misunderstanding of the lower class. Since this is seen better (and with more examples) in Much Ado About Nothing's Dogberry, I won't comment more here. Maybe this is where Shakespeare first started down the path that ends with the confounded constable? At any rate, I love the way that Costard does with remuneration what any of us might do with an unfamiliar word: Try to use the context for some sort of meaning. Granted, this may lead us astray--I teach my students the word prodigal every year because there's an assumption that it has to do with a fall from grace or a grievous sin. That it has to do with being a spendthrift isn't really as clear the title of Parable of the Prodigal Son might seem. (It's also refreshing to see some of the characters on the stage being as equally confused about the language as the people in the audience can be: I'm not going to lie, the footnotes and marginalia were crucial in my understanding and appreciation of this play.) Shakespeare also experimented with poetry a bit here, using a lot of rhymes and even different metrical standards throughout. I'm less of a fan of Shakespeare's lyrical period. Some of it has to do with Milton's observation in the second edition of Paradise Lost: "Rhime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially…" (though I might disagree with him that it was "the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter"). There's already a great deal of artificiality to Shakespeare's language, where so much of the syntax is warped to better express his thoughts and to fit within the blank verse's syllabic requirements. When those poetical tricks are amplified by rhyming, my own attention wanes. The bigger issue, for me at least, is it seems to cheapen whatever the character is trying to say, making the rhyme become more important than the substance. While this isn't always the case, it is often enough--especially in this play--that it distracts me. There is one thing that I'm rather curious about, though, and that's how Rosaline is described. Save for two references to her "white hand", Rosaline is commented on with enough racially coded language that I can't help but think that she's Black. An editor of my Norton Edition, Walter Cohen, argues that "only Rosaline's hair and eyes are black" (page 773). The ending of 3.1 describes her as "A whitely wanton with a velvet brow, / With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes" (181-182), which certainly fits for the latter half of Cohen's argument. (I don't know how he got to the conclusion about her hair color.) However, this is turns into a matter of deciding which details have more weight and which have more metaphor. As I mentioned, there are two instances of her hand being called "white" or "snow-white" (3.1.153 and 4.2.121 respectively), and a reference to her brow (as mentioned above). These seem to point toward the idea that she's white--for obvious reasons. But when the men start teasing each other about the women they've fallen for, Biron (who is in love with Rosaline), rejoins the king: FERDINAND These to me seem much more direct a description than the potentially-metaphorical descriptions of her "white hand" and brow. It could easily be a mistake on Shakespeare's part--he's never been one to care a great deal for continuity--to have left in small descriptions of Rosaline's hand; it could also be his inclusion of the romantic ideal that Biron is voicing, rather than describing her actual aspect. If this really is an example of a (presumably) white male wooing and seeking the affections of a Black woman, it's something that I haven't seen explored in all of the literature I've read on the play. (Full disclosure: I've not explored a lot of scholarship on this particular play, and I don't really remember much of what others have said.)
As far as representation goes, I've seen a great many "color-blind" castings of plays. Often, it's a fitting choice, as the character's race doesn't affect the story in deeply noticeable ways. However, having Rosaline be "canonically" Black really makes a large difference in how race in Shakespeare can be discussed, to say nothing of the fact that she would be the only Black female character in the oeuvre (Cleopatra, being from Egypt, may necessitate splitting the claim in two). Aaron the Moor, from Titus Andronicus, the prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice, and Othello in his play make up the primary characters of color. There's a valid and worthwhile argument to put Caliban (from The Tempest) in that category, too, as well as Shylock and Tubal (the two named Jews from Merchant, though whether or not Jessica would count is a matter for a different essay). I may be wrong here, but I think that's the entire list of people of color in the plays. I find this sort of thing really important. Shakespeare as a product of white nationalism and British imperialism is one of the more uncomfortable aspects of his legacy that I struggle with. It's hard to love something so unabashedly when I know that the thing I love has been the means of hurting other people, even those far removed in time and place from me. And while I operate under no delusions that Shakespeare was some sort of proto-progressive or in any way looking to provide token characters of a different race or religion, I find a lot to unpack in the conversation between Ferdinand and Biron about a Black woman. There are so many cultural assumptions that Biron is refuting as he confesses his love for her, and the idea that Rosaline is a clever, complete human never fails to come across to the reader. Despite white supremacists' claims to the contrary, there most definitely were Black people--and other people of color, too--that lived in the highly metropolitan and economically-vibrant London during the Elizabethan and Jacobean time period. Though it's fair to say the majority of people were white, it's ahistorical to think that everyone in England was white at that time. The slave trade in England began just two years before Shakespeare was born (which was 23 April 1564, if you were curious), meaning that his entire life was spent with his country trading in the lives of human beings as if they were cattle. Not only were Liverpool and Bristol slave ports, but as Reni Eddo-Lodge points out, so were "Lancaster, Exeter, Plymouth, Bridport, Chester, Lancashire's Poulton-le-Fylde and, of course, London" (Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race, page 5). Black people have always been a part of European history. Reflecting the world around him, Shakespeare seems to have incorporated a minority-race character, a Black woman. Who knows? Perhaps she was inspired by any of the sundry "sources" of the Dark Lady in the Sonnets--"Lucy Negro, [a] bawdy-house keeper of Clerkenwell's stews, or Hundson'd mistress Aemilia Lanyer, or else Pembroke's silly paramour Mary Fitton" (Park Honan's Shakespeare: A Life. Page 230). Personally, I doubt that. It makes more sense that he bumped into people of color throughout his life in the red-light district of London and that filtered into his art. While I would like to put more time and thought into this argument, I think I'll end with a final bit about the second play in this reread: Love's Labour's Won. We have two references to this "sequel" (who knows if it actually continued the story from the first play): One from a man named Francis Meres in 1598 (meaning he saw it when it was a brand new production), and another from a bookseller in 1603 (when the play would've been comparatively older). Neither lists the author of the plays, nor what they were about. Considering the unorthodox ending--the princess and her entourage leave unmarried, as the death of the princess' father necessitates her departure, meaning that the recent lovers never get married--it isn't a surprise to think that there's a sequel somewhere out there. Like Cardenio, another lost play by Shakespeare, we only have vestigial wisps that float around the historical landscape, evanescent and intangible. Maybe if we had that play, I would be able to assert my interpretation about Rosaline more fully. As it stands, this play is on its own. It's light and strange, a valuable if faulty addition to the Complete Works. Definitely worth checking out… …unless you're thinking of picking up Kenneth Branagh's musical version. That one is not good. At all. Read it instead, if you have to choose. |
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