Love's Labour's Lost (1925) Yale/Appendix A
APPENDIX A
Sources of the Play
The central idea of Love's Labour's Lost—that a scholarly prince binds himself and his chosen associates to a quasi-monastic scheme of life, which is immediately shattered by the intrusion of amorous sentiment[1]—would seem much too obvious to be the original invention of Shakespeare; yet no earlier work, either of fiction or of history, has been discovered which can reasonably be regarded as a source of the play, and modern scholarship can only repeat, as regards the main plot, the confession of the first great detector of Shakespearean sources, Langbaine (1691): 'Loves Labour Lost (sic), a Comedy: the Story of which I can give no Account of.' Even more, then, than A Midsummer-Night's Dream and The Tempest, Love's Labour's Lost stands out as an example of Shakespeare's rare practice of inventing rather than adapting a dramatic plot.
Like the main plot, the constituent elements which make up the play owe little, apparently, to Shakespeare's reading. They seem rather to be drawn from two non-literary sources upon which the play depends in nearly equal degree. The less conspicuous half of it—involving the characters of Costard, Jaquenetta, Dull, Holofernes, and Nathaniel, and the show of the Nine Worthies—is a heightened study of English country types, evidently founded upon personal observation. The other half, dealing with the French lords and ladies, seems based—in so far as it has a basis outside the poet's imagination—upon the political talk of London in the period about 1589.[2] In 1880 (Sir) Sidney Lee pointed out three features of this part of the play which bear an analogy to contemporary history:
(1) The King of Navarre, Berowne, Longaville, and Dumaine have names which are identical or practically so with those of four conspicuous leaders in the French civil war of 1589–1593: Henri IV (Henry of Navarre); his two generals, Marshal Biron and the Duke of Longueville; and his great opponent, the Duke du Maine, or de Mayenne, brother to the Duke of Guise.[3]
(2) In 1586 Catherine de Medici, Queen-Mother of France, conducted a diplomatic conference with Henry of Navarre at St.-Bris, at which the Queen attempted to influence the course of negotiations by means of a band of gay and charming ladies in waiting.[4]
(3) In 1582–1583 an official deputation of Muscovites was at Queen Elizabeth's court to treat concerning the marriage of the Czar Ivan to a kinswoman of the English Queen. They made themselves ridiculous and became the butt of a practical joke. (See V. ii. 121 and note.)
The pertinence of these parallels is hardly questionable, but the flippancy and vagueness with which Shakespeare utilizes the historical incidents certainly suggest that his knowledge comes from current talk rather than from definite printed accounts. The dramatist, of course, was not purporting to write contemporary history, as Marlowe was when he produced his Massacre at Paris. Doubtless Shakespeare first devised his fiction of Navarre and France at a period when it was possible to weave into it recent names and incidents still too vague in their connotation for English auditors to jar against the playful spirit of the comedy.[5] He seems to have conceived of his Navarre, Berowne, Longaville, and Dumaine as living in some pleasant remote time, and it is entirely possible that the real nucleus of the Navarre-France portion of the story is to be found in some such passage as that of Monstrelet's history,[6] cited by Hunter in 1845, the relevancy of which Lee and nearly all subsequent critics have denied. Monstrelet writes as follows: 'At this same season [ca. 1403], Charles king of Navarre came to Paris to wait on the king. He negotiated so successfully with the king and his privy council, that he obtained a gift of the castle of Nemours, with some of its dependent castlewicks, which territory was made a duchy. He instantly did homage for it, and at the same time surrendered to the king the castle of Cherbourg, the county of Évreux, and all other lordships he possessed within the kingdom of France, renouncing all claim or profit in them to the king and his successors, on consideration that with this duchy of Nemours the king of France engaged to pay him two hundred thousand gold crowns of the coin of the king our lord.' In this rather complicated transaction Shakespeare may have found the suggestion for the still more complex business of the play, in which likewise a deceased King Charles (cf. II. i. 162) of Navarre and a total sum of two hundred thousand crowns (cf. II. i. 128–134) are involved.[7]
The French and English halves of the play are joined together by the characters of Armado and his page Moth, who are neither French nor convincingly English. In these two figures literary precedent is more evident than elsewhere, and it is clearly John Lyly whom Shakespeare is following. Compare the talk of Armado and Moth in II. i with the following scene between a braggart and his page in Lyly's Endimion.[8]
'Sir Tophas. Epi, loue hath iustled my libertie from the wall, and taken the vpper hand of my reason.
Epiton. Let mee then trippe vp the heeles of your affection, and thrust your goodwill into the gutter.
Sir. To. No, Epi, Loue is a Lorde of misrule, and keepeth Christmas in my corps.
Epi. No doubt there is good cheere: what dishes of delight doth his Lordshippe feast you withal?
Sir To. First, with a great platter of plum-porridge of pleasure, wherein is stued the mutton of mistrust.
Epi. Excellent loue lappe.
Sir To. Then commeth a Pye of patience, a Henne of honnie, a Goose of gall, a Capon of care, and many other Viandes, some sweete and some sowre; which proueth loue to bee, as it was saide of in olde yeeres, Dulce venenum.
Epi. A braue banquet.
Sir To. But, Epi, I praye thee feele on my chinne, some thing prycketh mee. What dost thou feele or see?
Epi. There are three or foure little haires.
Sir To. I pray thee call it my bearde. Howe shall I bee troubled when this younge springe shall growe to a great wood!
Epi. O, sir, your chinne is but a quyller yet, you will be most maiesticall when it is full fledge. But I maruell that you loue Dipsas, that old Crone,' etc.
The chief literary influence in Love's Labour's Lost is certainly Lyly's, poor though the latter's work seems by contrast. Shakespeare at once differentiates himself from the artificial prose comedy of Lyly by his vindication of common sense against affectation and by his deep interest in sonorous verse effects. It is not unlikely that the play is also related superficially to Marlowe's Massacre at Paris (written toward the end of 1589), in which the historical Navarre and Dumaine are both introduced, and which opens with Navarre's marriage to the Princess of France.[9]
- ↑ This idea is evidently a kind of reverse of that in Tennyson's poem, The Princess.
- ↑ Several recent writers see English topical references in the Princess of France's visit to Navarre. Thus Mr. Arthur Acheson (Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1920, p. 119, 165 ff.) conjectures that Love's Labour's Lost 'was written late in 1591, or early in 1592, as a reflection of the Queen's progress [August, 1591] to Cowdray House, the home of the Earl of Southampton's maternal grandfather, Viscount Montague, and that the shooting of deer by the Princess and her ladies fancifully records phases of the entertainments arranged for the Queen during her visit.' Cf. note on IV. i. 112.
- ↑ Dumaine is prominent in Marlowe's Massacre at Paris as an enemy of Navarre. It is very likely, as Hart and Charlton diffidently suggest, that Shakespeare confused him with Marshal d'Aumont, who, though originally anti-Huguenot, was one of the first to recognize Navarre after Henri III's death (1589) and shared with him in the victory at Ivry (1590). Longueville gained a great victory for the Huguenots at Senlis in 1589. Lee's further assumption that Moth is named after La Motte, a French ambassador at Elizabeth's court in earlier days, lacks probability.
- ↑ Lefranc would substitute for the meeting at St.-Bris an earlier meeting of Catherine and Navarre at Nérac in 1580.
- ↑ See Appendix B.
- ↑ Monstrelet, who died in 1453, continued the Chronicles of Froissart from the year 1400. The passage quoted comes near the commencement of his work (bk. i, ch. 17). A number of French editions were available in Shakespeare's time, but there appears to have been no translation into English before that of Thomas Johnes in 1809.
- ↑ Professor Lefranc (Sous le Masque de 'William Shakespeare') makes an important addition by showing that discussions concerning Navarre's holdings in the province of Aquitaine were rife between him and the King of France about 1580.
- ↑ Act V, sc. ii. The date of Endimion is probably 1586.
- ↑ Dr. Johnson made the plausible conjecture that Shakespeare's character of Holofernes owes something to the pedantic schoolmaster, Rombus, in Sir Philip Sidney's pastoral play, The Lady of May, acted before Queen Elizabeth in 1578.