ABSTRACT
With its dance movements, its wit combats and its symmetrical teams of wooers, Love's Labour's Lost may claim to be Shakespeare's most formal play. The awareness of convention that characterized The Taming of the Shrew is here extended in a variety of ways. In that play, we saw the main action, initially at least, as a show put on for a drunken tinker. But that was a play put on by professional actors; Love's Labour's Lost is full of enthusiastic amateurs. The performing instinct affects the characters' normal behaviour: not only do they recite poems, adopt disguises and stage shows, but even in what purports to be normal conversation the style may be suddenly heightened and patterned, turned from casual talk into a self-conscious dance of language. When Navarre and his bookmen first meet the Princess and her ladies, they inquire their names of Boyet, one after another, in a passage of jingling rhymes and puns which begins calmly enough but rapidly accelerates, with shorter lines and faster repartee (II. i. 193–213). The same stylized, lilting, punning dialogue characterizes the encounter between the masked ladies and the men disguised as Russians (V. ii. 195–264). The two parties seem incapable of approaching each other informally; some convention of behaviour appears to dictate that relations between the sexes should be conducted in a stylized way. But this manner is not confined to the big ensemble scenes of courtship: over and over, individual characters will, at a moment's notice, stage their own little performances, set off by rhyme, and often by a special metre — as when Boyet describes the effect of love on the King, and makes quite a substantial set piece of it (II. i. 233–48). This capacity is not confined to the courtiers: the comic routines of the clowns, such as the play on the idea of Tenvoy5 (III. i. 75–111) may be coarser in texture, but they are equally stylized. Costard joins with the ladies and Boyet in their bawdy playing with hunting terms, and for the moment they all share the same style (IV. i. 101–32). The wit game, like village cricket, is a great social leveller.
