ABSTRACT
In theatricalizing the dynamic of master–scholar interactions outside the formal educational space, Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, like Sidney's The Lady of May, represents the associational shifts of teacher figures through the medium of festive play. Performance also serves to illuminate the connection between authority – political as well as pedagogical – and the purpose of learning, particularly its oblique relationship to social utility. The play's ludic atmosphere magnifies its derogatory imputations on and critique of the authority of classical scholarship through the defeat of its principal proponents: the pedant character Holofernes, like Sidney's Rombus, is an impresario and petty schoolmaster exhibiting his social ineptitude through self-undermining displays of imagined, abstruse, and misapplied erudition; the King of Navarre's courtly academy divorced from state affairs, its aim being the vain pursuit of dynastic honour and fame. For Navarre and his fellow academic oath-takers and breakers, the power of feminine allure conquers the allure of scholarly prowess. Formal learning is abandoned for play, play characterized by disguising and witty verbal sparring. Furnishing an arena for exercising emergent individualities and, possibly, a new social order, masking and linguistic combat also transpose conventional hierarchic patterns that enable the princess and her ladies, Shakespeare's vehicle for critiquing problematic relationships, to educate their would-be masters, the king and his vassals, in the true nature and ends of humanistic learning.
