The 'Fox and Ape' Verse in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost

Abstract

THE verse in question, repeated twice in the play (c. 1594), once half and once in full, seems to be a satirical joke or riddle whose full meaning is lost to modern readers. The fox, the ape, and the humble-bee, Were still at odds, being but three. Until the goose came out of door, And stay’d the odds by adding four. (Love’s Labour’s Lost, III.i.79–92)1 The lines may contain a topical allusion to Walter Raleigh’s affair in 1591–2 with Elizabeth Throckmorton, one of the queen’s maids of honour. Raleigh was often judged a crafty Machiavellianist, and was called ‘fox’ by his opponents.2 But the rhyme also seems to have a general drift: All animals of the quatrain personify human vices—more specifically, typical vices of court life, particularly (as will be shown) in amorous matters. The fox, a notable fable character, stands for cunning, guile, dissimulation, and intrigue. In Shakespeare, the ‘humble-bee’ is emblematic, too, as analogies in All’s Well That Ends Well (IV.v.6) and Troilus and Cressida (V.x.41) show: the insect’s colouring and ‘buzzing’ indicate a foppishly dressed courtier busy in his lord’s love affairs.3 The goose also carries sexual overtones: Notorious are the ‘Winchester geese’, the prostitutes of the bankside brothels south of the City of London (Troilus and Cressida, V.x.53; 1 Henry VI, I.iii.53). And the ‘broad goose’ in a frivolously witty exchange in Romeo and Juliet (II.iv.72–84), paralleled by the ‘fat goose’ and ‘green goose’ in our play (Love’s Labour’s Lost, III.i.98 and IV.iii.71), is presumably meant to echo the obscene meaning of Italian ‘oca’.4 So three of the four animals in the verse stand for amatory escapades among courtiers and court ladies.