Love's Labour's Lost and the Nature of Comedy

Abstract

MOVE'S Labour's Lost, says M. C. Bradbrook, as near as Shakespeare ever came to writing satire;' and what, in addition to fine manners, pedantry, and the disguises of love, is being satirized in it is, I would suggest, the infirmity of human purpose. Its fable, which turns on vows sworn and then forsworn under the pressure of circumstance and necessity working hand in hand, is the sufficient proof of this. The treatment of the fable is dry, elegant, and highly mannered, and this is as it should be. In the terms which the play sets up, an artificial style is the only appropriate means of purveying-and in the same moment commenting on-an artificial view of life. The action of Love's Labour's Lost is directed at righting the balance of nature, which the proud in their simplicity would upset; it is concerned with undeceiving the self-deceived, thereby making clear the gulf that separates human intentions from deeds. In achieving so much-in enlightening the foolish without destroying them-it accomplishes the purpose which comic drama is uniquely capable of bringing to pass. What is being imitated, in comedy and tragedy alike, are the actions of men, and the crucial fact about man is his dual nature. His duality makes him an incongruous figure, and if there were nothing incongruous in the human condition, there would be nothing to dramatize. The union of a spiritual essence and a material body poses the initial incongruity, and from this all others flow. Infinite aspirations are subject to a finite capacity for achievement; immortal longings break upon the fact of mortality; the rational purpose gives way to irrational impulse. Incongruities such as these are the warp and the woof of human experience, and the fabric of human life which together they weave yields up a pattern shot through with discrepancies: the discrepancy between the ideal and the reality, between the intention and the deed, to name those which subsume all others. To dramatize the discrepancy between the ideal and the reality, the intention and the deed, is the purpose of tragedy and comedy equally, and this, I would suggest, is the reason why the true artist in the one will be an artist in the other also. In the process of dramatization, the discrepancies that I have named may appear terrible, as in Oedipus or Lear; humorous, because they are so very human, as in Love's Labour's Lost or Twelfth Night; or grotesque, as in Measure for Measure or Volpone. It is in the context of these observations that I wish to consider Love's Labour's Lost and the nature of comedy, suggesting at the same time the manner in which some of the issues which this