Lady Rosaline’s Darkness: Linguistic Games and Deep Meanings

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to show the aesthetic as well as philosophical complexity of the discourse led by Shakespeare in Love’s Labour’s Lost; a comedy that conveys, through a particularly sophisticated and sometimes paradoxical language, deeply “revolutionary” meanings. The process that takes place in the play consists in a double passage, the main symbol of which is the darkness of Lady Rosaline. On the one hand, Shakespeare makes Rosaline’s darkness the rock on which the traditional Petrarchan lyric founders. The falsifying character of the Petrarchan rhetorical language is in fact revealed to be misleading, while the Neo-platonic ideal at the base of the sonnet tradition, chromatically characterized as luminous and white, crashes against the obscure materiality of the lady’s body. On the other hand, the exceptionally complex linguistic game through which Shakespeare ambiguously intertwines light and darkness, expresses the play’s ontological and epistemological discovery. The initial denial of mankind’s “material parts”, associated by Navarre to an “ascetic” kind of knowledge, is followed by the recognition of matter’s profound value and of a new epistemological paradigm, according to which knowledge can be reached only by directly experiencing the darkness of the material world.