Word Play and the Play: The Nature of Renaissance Humor
Kim Racon

Love's Labour's Lost, by William Shakespeare, written in 1594-1595 draws from the life of King Henry of Navarre (later King Henry IV of France in 1589) who formed a philosophical academy (Greenblatt 733). Despite being the work of a famous playwright, Love's Labour's Lost went unperformed between 1642 and 1839, and remained unpopular until the mid-twentieth century (Greenblatt 738). Most recently, Kenneth Branagh produced the play into a motion picture, where, in a mythical England just prior to World War II, young royals woo, battle, and fall in love to the tune of musical numbers performed in the style of Hollywood's classics of the 1930s and 1940s ("Love's Labour's Lost Soundtrack"). Contemporary evaluations cite the wordplay in the play as one of the factors contributing to Labour's reemergence in popular theatre. The wordplay stems from traditions in Renaissance comedy found in the comic and in the use of the Italian commedia dell' arte. Wordplay promotes the theme of error through the games both the lords and ladies play while they woo.

Before mentioning Renaissance comedy, one must understand comedy and the comic. Marie Swabey defines the comic in relation to the risible: "Broadly, the ludicrous, or the comic, signifies that which is worthy of exciting because of a certain inconsistency or absurdity in its referent" (Farley-Hills 6). Comedy, then, is defined in terms of laughter-commonplace among writers of the comic. However, laughter is usually evoked by some derivation from the norm, and normalcy is dependent on the individual. Laughter is too subjective as the basis for defining comedy. In his book The Comic in Renaissance Comedy, David Farley-Hills defines the comic and comedy as "[the comic] arises from a relationship between ideas, not from the ideas themselves. It is the juxtaposition of contradictory ideas that produces comedy" (14). He also adds that the comic can also "arise from the incongruities between opposed ways of regarding the same ideas or images" (20) and that in "Renaissance theories of the comic, the role of incongruity was thought to be crucial" (20). The first incongruity in Love's Labour's Lost is the conversation between the King and Biron, which establishes the comedy as an aggressive, satirical one. The King, who is establishing an academy for the education of the mind and not the carnality of the body, has his three friends swear "for three years term to live with me/…and to keep those statutes/That are recorded in this schedule here" (1.1.16-18). The statutes include seclusion from women and fasting from both food and sleep. Biron greatly dislikes the statutes, especially the one pertaining to women. He replies to the King, "I only swore to study with your Grace/and stay in your court for three years' space" (1.1.51-52). To the other regulations, Biron swore in jest, or so he claims (1.1.54). This exchange shows the incongruity of the oaths sworn by all the men, for they all begin to break them when the French ambassadors arrive and they begin to woo. The aggressive comedy is seen in the order in which contradictory images are presented to the audience (Farley-Hills 41). The progression in Love's Labour's Lost is "from good to bad, high expectations to low, acceptance to repudiation" (Farley-Hills 41). The establishment of the type of comedy was seen in the forswearing of oaths and continues throughout the play.

The comedy of Renaissance England is characteristically eclectic and unpredictable in form because English Renaissance comedy has no fixed source (Leggatt 3). One source of comedy is found in the English use of the Italian commedia dell' arte, which literally means "comedy of the [actor's] guild" (Salerno xiii). It had its beginnings in the middle of the sixteenth century, and had most of its successes in all of Europe, especially in France and Italy (Oreglia 1). Commedia dell' arte was to the Renaissance "a form of entertainment for both high-brow and low-brow, compromising tried and true situations endlessly varied, always undemanding intellectually, often raunchy and vulgar, and, at its best, vigorous and spirited as only popular art can be" (Oreglia xi). A commedia dell' arte troupe traditionally consisted of several stock characters: lovers, zannis who were clowns; an elderly parent or guardian figure; the docttore, a "doddering and gullible old crony" to the guardian; a hero and a heroine; and perhaps most notable, a braggart (Salerno xv).

The braggart, who is usually Spanish, was copied from the actual hatred of "foreign mercenaries who crowded sixteenth century Italy" (Smith 8). By definition, the braggart is a "boastful, cowardly bully, always in love and always unsuccessful" who takes a "small part in the plot except as an object for the wit of others to prey upon" (Smith 8). In Shakespeare's comedy, Don Adriano de Armado is such a character. The characteristics of a braggart are most noticeable in Armado's exchanges with Mote, his page:

Armado: Why 'tough senor'? Why 'tough senor'?
Mote: Why 'tender juvenal'? Why 'tender juvenal'?
Armado: I spoke it, tender juvenal, as a congruent epitheton appertaining to thy young days, which we may nominate 'tender'
Mote: And I, tough senor, as an appertinent title to your old time, which we may name 'tough' (1.2.10-16)
Armado: I do say thou art quick in answers. Thou heatest my blood
Mote: I am answered, sir.
Armado: I love not to be crossed.
Mote [aside]: He speaks the mere contrary-crosses love not him. (1.2.28-33)
Armado: I will hereupon confess I am in love; and as it is base/for a soldier to love, so am I in love with a base wench. If/drawing my sword against the humour of affection would/deliver me from the reprobate thought of it, I would take desire/prisoner and ransom him to any French courtier for a new-/devised curtsy. I think scorn to sigh. Methinks I should out-/swear Cupid. Comfort me, boy. What great men have been in/love? (1.2.53-60)

The braggart's functions are many, which reflect his mixed origin (Boughner 147). His functions include to "conduct the intrigue and provide merriment…takes the lead in assembling his fellow conspirators, running errands, delivering messages, and in weaving the snare about Mankind" (Boughner 147). Armado's functions in Love's Labour's Lost are many, and they are first displayed in Act 1, Scene 1 when the King reads a letter from Armado turning in Jaquenetta (1.1.213-260).

The wordplay in the play is central to the comedy of the love of women as mating game, as opposed to love as an individual's passion. The words used in the exchanges of wooing characterizes language's function in the play: "elaborate puns, quibbles and wordplay between Mote and Armado, Biron and the others, Boyet and the ladies themselves, all illustrate Shakespeare's use of language to further the theme of error and misunderstanding" (Newman 87). Wordplay promotes the theme of error and misunderstanding through the "games" both the lords and ladies play while they woo. This gaming starts when the lords enter the King's park and, one by one, confess their love only to hide and spy on the next. Biron notes this in Act 4, Scene 2 when he comments, "All hid, all hid-an old infant play" (4.2.73). Earlier in the same act, in the first scene, Boyet, Costard and the ladies put a play on hunting, archery and bowling, where sex becomes a matter of arrows hitting targets, showing that, in the end, all that matters is that "the shaft should hit its mark" (Leggatt 65). For example:

Maria: A mark marvellous well shot, for they both did hit it.
Boyet: A mark-O mark but that mark! A mark, says my lady/Let the mark have a prick in't to mete at, if it may be.
Maria: Wide o' the bow hand-I'faith, your hand is out.
Costard: Indeed, a must shoot nearer, or he'll ne'er hit the clout.
Boyet: An If my hand be out, the belike your hand is in.
Costard: Then will she get the upshoot by cleaving the pin.
Maria: Come, come, you talk greasily, your lips grow foul.
Costard: She's too hard for you at pricks, sir. Challenger her to bowl.
Boyet: I fear too much rubbing. (4.1.126-135)

The competition between the lords and ladies is sharp throughout the play. For example, the show put on for the Princess and her ladies-in-waiting is torn to pieces. The men are disguised, and they enter to find the ladies are disguised more deeply because they have essentially switched identities by switching love tokens: "The effect of my intent is to cross theirs./They do but in mockery-merriment,/And mock for mock is only my intent" (5.2.137-139). The ladies, then, are extremely determined to beat the men at their own game, and by ultimately switching identities, then men woo the wrong women, and the joke is on them. Love's Labour's Lost shows that conventions and words themselves as comically vulnerable, and this is the lover's problem (Leggatt 71). "Love depends for its fulfillment on expression, but the means of expression available to it are largely conventional and therefore open to mockery" (Leggatt, 72-73). For example, some metaphors used to describe love compare it to war:

King: Saint Cupid, then, and soldiers, to the field!
Biron: Advance your standards, and upon them, lords./Pell-mell, down with them; but be first advised/In conflict that you get the sun of them. (4.3.340-343)

Others compare it to hunting, as mentioned earlier:

Boyet: Who is the suitor? Who is the suitor?
Rosaline: Shall I teach you to know?
Boyet: Ay, my continent of beauty.
Rosaline: Why, she that bears the bow. Finely put off.
Boyet: My lady goes to kill horns, but if though marry/Hang me by the neck if horns that year miscarry/Finely put on.
Rosaline: Well then, I am the shooter.
Boyet: And who is your deer? Rosaline: If we choose by the hors, yourself come not near. (4.1.102-111)

These examples compare love to something it is not, and "the bawdry in the references to war and hunting also reduces love to its physical expression, seen as a subject of mechanical jokes" (Leggatt 72). This desire to perfect the gamesmanship of love leads to the play's overriding theme of error and misunderstanding: "love letters are read by the wrong people, who comment disapprovingly on the style, protestations of love are either misdirected (as in the Masque of the Russians), or rebuffed, or both" (Leggatt 67).

Love's Labour's Lost is a comedy that breaks from conventions: that, despite the wordplay and wooing of royal lovers, the comedy is not the traditional celebratory one. As mentioned before, laughter in the play is not evoked through pleasure-from circumstances going from bad to good to better-but it is evoked from biting satire used by lords and ladies alike. The event prompting the suspension of celebratory activities is the news from France that the King has died. The ladies prepare to leave for Navarre without their men, prompting Biron's lament, "Our wooing doth not end like an old play./Jack hath not Jill. These ladies courtesy/Might well have made our sport a comedy" (5.2.851-853). Wordplay in the play can be analogous to a weapon: a player teaches another how to use the weapon and then sees for himself if he can use it better (Leggatt 66). The lesson this wordplay weapon evokes from the men of Navarre is that of the necessity of both transformation and transmutation. The play, and the ladies, insist that the men must change both their actions and their attitudes, altering forever their perceptions of themselves and the world around them, to truly gain the ladies favor (Curtis 120).

Undoubtedly, Love's Labour's Lost creates a language all its own through its use (and subsequent misuse) of words in wordplay. Words as weapons are used to correct the attitudes and behaviors of the men in the play. The comedy in Love's Labour's Lost functions as a teaching device: it tells us that there are no simple answers and that comedy can be used as a corrective function.

Works Cited
Boughner, Daniel C. The Braggart in Renaissance Comedy. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1954.

Curtis, Harry Jr. "Four Woodcocks in a Dish: Shakespeare's Humanization of the Comic Perspective in Love's Labour's Lost." Southern Humanities Review 13 (1979): 15-124.

Farley-Hills, David. The Comic in Renaissance Comedy. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1981.

Greenblatt, Stephen, ed., et al. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: Norton, 1997.

Leggatt, Alexander. Introduction to English Renaissance Comedy. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999.

Leggatt, Alexander. Shakespeare's Comedy of Love. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1974.

Newman, Karen. Shakespeare's Rhetoric of Comic Character. New York and London: Methuen Inc., 1985.

Oreglia, Giacomo. The Commedia dell' Arte. New York: Hill and Wang, 1968.

Pathe's Official Site. <http://www.guildpathe.co.uk/LLL/>

Salerno, Henry, ed. Scenarios of the Commedia dell' Arte. New York: New York University Press, 1967.

Smith, Winifred. The Commedia dell' Arte. New York: Benjamin Bloom, 1964.

Works Consulted
Fulton, Robert C. "Love's Labour's Lost and the Marx Brothers." The Upstart Crow 5 (Fall 1984): 125-134.

Love's Labour's Lost. Dir. Kenneth Branagh and Alex Thomson. Pref. Kenneth Branagh, Matthew Lillard, Alicia Silverstone, Alessandro Nivola, Nathan Lane. Miramax, 2000.

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