Love's Labour's Lost Research Articles

The Shakespearean Venus and Adonis

A LTHOUGH NOT A GREAT POEM, VENUS AND ADONIS is still fully and repays examination as a pivotal work in its author's technical as well as intellectual development. It is from this double perspective that I want to read the poem. My argument is thus composed of two different elements, though they are not rigorously separated: the two aspects, form and content, are so closely linked that I shall view the poem as if it were the consequence of decisions which are basically formal and generic. The paper offers, first, a reading of the poem which emphasizes the conceptual maturity of Shakespeare's new understanding of love. His impetus for examining the subject came, I think, from the decision to write an Elizabethan Ovidian poemi.e., to write a love poem that would be a poem about love, and that, like Marlowe's Hero and Leander, would take the dark underside, the witty salaciousness, and the possibility of pain (all available in Ovid, in one place or another) as simultaneously necessary to a description of love. Intellectually, the new interest in the emotional complexity of love is itself significant for Shakespeare's later work. But the complexity of understanding, combined as it is with the formal narrowness of the Ovidian tale, also calls for new technical resources to realize it. The most interesting and seminal of these is the handling of tonal shifts, an important factor for the first time in Shakespeare's work. A discussion of shifts in tone, perspective, and sympathy forms the second, technical, part of my argument. Both parts are necessary to understanding how Venus and Adonis is pivotal in Shakespeare's development, for, in both content and form, Venus and Adonis is a Shakespearean poem in ways that have not before been appreciated. In attempting to show this, my desire is not to redefine our notion of what is Shakespearean, but rather to place a seemingly marginal or curious specimen of his work in fruitful relation to the canon. Venus and Adonis, written in 1592-93, seems to present an especially interesting moment in Shakespeare's development. The period of retirement forced by the closing of the theatres created a hiatus between the plays of his comic apprenticeship (probably The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and The Taming of the Shrew) and the plays that are the artistic culmination of the early period (Love's Labor's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Romeo and Juliet).1 If we accept this chronology, Venus and Adonis be-

The Theatre: Love's Labour's Lost

The Theatre: Love's Labour's Lost

The Theatre: Love's Labour's Lost

The Theatre: Love's Labour's Lost

King of Tears: Mortality in Richard II

King of Tears: Mortality in Richard II Dorothea Kehler San Diego State University Love's Labor's Lost, which initiallydepicts an attempttodefeatdeath through fame, comes to a remarkable comedie close as Marcade enters to announce the French king's death, displacing courtship with mourning. Death also stalks Richard II, contemporaneous with Love's Labor's Lost, transforming it from a parvum opus, a lesser history play important chiefly as prologue to the masterly Henriad, to the selfcontained story of a pitiful and terrifying confrontation with mortality . However much England's fate is bound up with its king's, however much dramatic importance accrues to Bolingbroke, our interest is focused above all on the eloquent, tormented individual who dominates the play. As Larry S. Champion observes, "conceptually Richard II is more nearly tragedy than history" (70). Expanding the boundaries ofearlier Shakespearean history plays, Richard //diffuses into what Polonius calls "tragical-historical," presenting a de casibus protagonist whose plight is Everyman's. By mid-play Richard knows that he is going to die, and soon: a deposed monarch is unlikely to live long. The distance between a heretofore unengaging protagonist and his audience is lessened by the intensity of Richard's anguish. Thus, to observe the anguish of the king at bay is to risk an unwelcome confrontation with our own feelings towards death. Examining the psychology of death, Robert Kastenbaum and Ruth Aisenberg write, "Admission or exposure of our thanatophobia marks us as immature, weak, or morbid. It is childish. It is unmanly." They conclude, "We seem to fear the fear of death" (43). Perhaps because critics are no less immune than anyone else to fearing the fear of death, discussions of Richard //by and large sacrifice the tragical to the historical, the psychological to the ceremonial and linguistic. Yet only by entering Richard's deathcentered world can we fully understand our peculiar sympathy for so callously self-absorbed, unfit a king, whose crimes against his kin, indifference to the commonweal, and reluctance to admit guilt should bar that sympathy. Richard does not move us as a ruler (albeit a gifted actor-poet) deservedly facing loss of power, but rather as our congener , publicly enacting his thanatophobia and despair. Death is an opponent Richard had not anticipated. Kingship, prolonging solipsistic childhood, has shielded him from recognition of 8 Rocky Mountain Review his own mortality. Is he not semi-divine, God's substitute on earth? Then, shattering his complacency, comes the realization that the king is not Death's substitute, that Divine Right is not synonymous with divine immortality. No less than those he has victimized, Richard is a victim of the hypostatization of a political theory; his wholehearted belief in the Divine Right rationale for absolutism1 allows his part in the human condition to take him by surprise. Even in his blind security, however, the king is Everyman writ large. With less excuse, all men see what they wish to see. Few still young and in health look on their deaths as other than a remote, insubstantial eventuality. Under Bolingbroke's compulsion, Richard makes a psychic pilgrimage delineated by the association of death and tears in the play's iterative verbal and stage imagery.2 References to death, preparing for the powerful fifth-act stage images of the assassination and the coffin, are earlier made concrete by the sight of the weeping king whose tears express a gamut of emotions: grief, loss, betrayal, anger, humiliation, fear, and defeat. Unmanned by the prospect of death, Richard cries like a child, not only tearful in himself but the cause of tears in Isabel, York, Aumerle, Carlisle, and finally even Bolingbroke. Tears, falling as the king falls, evoke our continual awareness of death and, far more than the allied vertical imagery first noted by Jorgensen, grip us emotionally. A major directorial cue, the textual indications of weeping control the actors, eliciting in performance, if not always actual tears, at least the cracking voice, the contorted face. As time runs out for the unready king, such insistent stage imagery, reinforced by verbal references to weeping and death, creates the sense oftragic inevitability. These tears are discomforting, especially Richard's out-of-control, lachrymose writhings, ineffectual...

Love's Labor Lost and Rediscovered

Love's Labor Lost and Rediscovered

The Theatre: Love's Labour's Lost

The Theatre: Love's Labour's Lost

Love's Labour's Lost: A Primer for Educational Technologists

Love's Labour's Lost: A Primer for Educational Technologists

Love's Labour's Lost

Love's Labour's Lost

The Second Reformation in Brandenburg: Aims and Goals

James L. Harner (ed.), The World Shakespeare Bibliography on CD-ROM, 1983-1995, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998 £390, ISBN: 052162536XAmongst the premier British academic presses, Cambridge University Press has been the most innovative in exploring the possibilities of electronic publication, and The World Shakespeare Bibliography on CD-ROM is an important addition to their list. This database, taken from the comprehensive annual bibliography published in Shakespeare Quarterly, cries out for electronic treatment, as anyone who has laboriously tracked through those volumes knows. The present release contains the bibliography for thirteen years, and future releases will extend the coverage to create a conspectus of the century's entire work on Shakespeare. Since this CD contains over 38,000 entries - many with further references embedded in them - the eventual size of the archive will be little short of astonishing.The data is accessed by powerful 'DynaText' software, which allows a range of search possibilities. One can undertake simple searches of the whole database, or more limited searches centred on author, title or keyword, or proximity searches of multiple terms. Navigation is aided by a contents table which indicates the user's present situation in the archive. Users can customise the database by creating their own links and adding bookmarks or annotation. The only technical difficulty I encountered is that hits on individual words are displayed at the top of the text window, making it frequently necessary to scroll back to read the whole entry. In future releases, CUP ought to revise the software to display each hit in its full context. It's also slightly annoying that essays in collections are linked to the volumes in which they appear but that the links don't work in reverse, so if you want to know the full contents you have to search on the name of the volume or editor. And you have to be wary about American/British inconsistencies: for Love's Labour's Lost you must search under both 'labour' and 'labor'.The database's usefulness can easily be exemplified. A standard on 'Hamlet' throws up 9635 hits. A proximity search of 'Hamlet' and 'source' 62. You can use searches to measure the ups and downs of critical fashion. 'Cultural materialism' occurs 246 times, but is easily outflanked by 'historicism' at 348 occurrences (though you can't look for 'New Historicism' since 'new' is a 'stop word', occurring too frequently to be searchable). …

Shakespeare's Styles: Essays in Honour of Kenneth Muir

Preface 1. Rhetoric and insincerity L. C. Knights 2. Some aspects of style in the Henry VI plays Wolfgang Clemen 3. Poem and context in Love's Labour's Lost G. K. Hunter 4. The declaration of love Philip Edwards 5. Juliet's Nurse: the uses of inconsequentiality Stanley Wells 6. Language most shows a man...? Language and speaker in Macbeth Nicholas Brooke 7. Poetic language and dramatic significance in Shakespeare R. A. Foakes 8. Feliciter audax: Antony and Cleopatra, 1,i,1-24 G. R. Hibbard 9. 'My name is Marina': the language of recognition Inga-Stina Ewbank 10. Leontes and the spider: language and speaker in Shakespeare's Last Plays Anne Barton 11. Shakespeare's 'bombast' E. A. J. Honigmann 12. The defence of paradox Geoffrey Bullough 13. 'True, gallant Raleigh': some off-stage conversations in Shakespeare's plays A. C. Sprague 14. Shakespeare's recollections of Marlowe M. C. Bradbrook 15. Shakespeare's Dark Lady: a question of identity S. Schoenbaum 16. Checklist of writings by Kenneth Muir, 1937-1979 Index.

Artifice and Realism in Lyly, Nashe, and Love's Labor's Lost

Artifice and Realism in Lyly, Nashe, and Love's Labor's Lost

SHAKESPEARE AT WORK: THE KATHARINE-ROSALINE TANGLE IN LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST

Journal Article SHAKESPEARE AT WORK: THE KATHARINE-ROSALINE TANGLE IN LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST Get access JOHN KERRIGAN JOHN KERRIGAN Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XXXIII, Issue 130, May 1982, Pages 129–136, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XXXIII.130.129 Published: 01 May 1982

The ‘Rosaline-Katherine Tangle’ of Love's Labour's Lost

The ‘Rosaline-Katherine Tangle’ of <i>Love's Labour's Lost</i>

Love's Labor's Lost and Shakespearean Revision

IT IS NOW GENERALLY AGREED that the Quarto edition of Love's Labor's Lost (Imprinted at London by W[illiam] W[hite] I for Cutbert Burby. / 1598, as the title-page declares)' was set from Shakespeare's foul papers,2 that the loose ends duplicates scattered throughout the text derive from authorial revision.3 Evidently, V. ii. 847-81 replaces 827-32,4 IV. iii. 296318 is superseded by what follows, my selfe, and at V. i. 133 is a scrap of rejected dialogue.5 It has been suggested, perhaps implausibly, that V. ii. 132-33 reworks the preceding couplet.6 I have argued elsewhere that Shakespeare substituted II. i. 180-93 for 11428 at a late stage in the composition of the foul papers that compositorial misunderstanding of his revision produced the notorious Katharine-Rosaline tangle. Agreement is far from general, however, where a second, post-foul-paper, stage of Shakespearean revision is concerned. I think that Stanley Wells is right to demand respect for the Folio

Printer's copy for the Quarto of Love's Labour's Lost (1598)

Printer's copy for the Quarto of <i>Love's Labour's Lost (1598)</i>

The Myth of the Countess of Pembroke: The Dramatic Circle

Writing about literary circles has always been a tricky business, and writing about literary circles in the Renaissance has proved singularly unfortunate. First the Areopagus, a circle supposedly dedicated to the promotion of quantitative verse in English, was invented from a chance remark of Spenser's, grounds soon generally recognized as exceedingly flimsy.' Then the School of Night, a group devoted to the study of science and suspected of atheism, was born from a phrase in Love's Labour's Lost and from ingenious identifications of the characters of that play with real persons of the time.2 Finally, from the same period of turn-of-the-century criticism emerged the Countess of Pembroke's dramatic circle, a concept which has continued to flourish. It is the purpose of this article to expose the unlikelihood of the existence of this group as it has been described in the critical literature. My motive is not to point out the flaws in the work of an older generation of critics who, after all, made tremendous contributions to our understanding of Renaissance literature, but to assess more accurately the Countess of Pembroke's actual influence on dramatic works. Patronage, or at least the hope for patronage, was a vital force in the work of many Renaissance

Shakespeare in France

Shakespeare in France often resembles a legless cripple. Apart from Richard II, Julius Caesar, a few well-known comedies, and four major tragedies relentlessly performed (three Hamlets running concurrently in and around Paris in November 1977, four King Lears forthcoming in 1982), more than half of Shakespeare's plays get performed only once every thirty or forty years. It is to be hoped that the presentation at summer festivals in 1980 of Love's Labor's Lost, The Winter's Tale, and two versions of Henry VI (with and without Richard III) will herald a new era of rediscovery for the lesser-known plays. (I will mention merely for reference's sake Jacques Rosner's Macbeth, set in Nazi Germany and put on at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris. This production was noteworthy only for Michel Bouquet's interpretation of the title role as an aloof, sophisticated, cold-blooded monster, a prey to his intelligence.) One of the major events in recent French Shakespearean production was Dens Llorca's spellbinding nine-hour spectacle based on the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III but looking back, in its first narrative part, to Richard II's deposition.

Love's Labour's Lost

Love's Labour's Lost

Shakespeare's Navarre

ON THE FIRST LEAF of Gabriel Harvey's copy of An Excellent Discourse upon the Now Present Estate of France, which the Huntington Library possesses, its original owner lists some of the more impressive texts on France current in 1592, such as the essays of Montaigne. He concludes from this evidence that Varieties of accidents, and many pregnant practiques have refined divers French wittes even above the sharpest Italians, or Spaniards at this instant. ' Harvey's compatriots agreed, for the religious civil wars in France were then reaching their climax, as the fortunes of the Protestant Henri IV prospered with the aid of subsidies and troops from Elizabeth, led for a time by her favorite, the earl of Essex.2 Around the period of Henri's accession in 1589, hundreds of pamphlets explaining the relevant circumstances began to appear in France, and many of these were quickly translated into English.3 The Elizabethans felt vastly more interest in France than any other foreign country, since Henri appeared on the verge of duplicating the Tudor compromise in France. The strong impression arises that the English only wanted to hear good news; hence the immense multiplication of newsletters when Henri IV won his famous victories in 1589-1590. Indeed, from this stage it appears evident that Henri has become a folk-hero of the English . . . with their ineradicable taste for romance on horseback. s4 There was every reason for fashionable young playwrights to exploit this popularity in the early 1590's, and Shakespeare was no exception. Love's Labour's Lost is thus in part an

Shakespearean Counterpoint: Stage Technique and the Interaction between Play and Audience

N THE FIRST SCENE of Love's Labor's Lost, poor Costard is hauled before the King of Navarre for violating the proclamation that no man within the immediate province of Navarre's court shall consort with a woman for three years. The officious Spaniard, Don Armado, having discovered Costard with the fair Jaquenetta, has sent Navarre a long letter detailing the circumstances of Costard's indiscretion. As the King reads this epistle aloud, Costard cannot keep quiet: