The Comedy of Melancholy in Love’s Labour’s Lost
p. 47-64
Texte intégral
1“How canst thou part sadness from melancholy, my tender Juvenal?” Armado asks Moth at the beginning of Love’s Labour’s Lost (1.2.6-7). Absurd as it may seem at first, the distinction reveals an anxiety about the nature of what was probably the most fashionable disease of the early modern period: melancholy (also called black humour). Adapted from a quote by Italian scholar John Florio (“We need not so much speake of love, al books are ful of love, with so many authours, that it were labor lost to speake of love1”), the title of the play itself denotes wasted efforts, with a sense of loss and regret that is echoed by the alliteration in [l]. Several characters–most notably the courtiers of Navarre and Armado–insist that they suffer from melancholy, but the codified language of Petrarchan love poetry which is universally repeated, the swift move from reclusion to seduction and the coexistence of characters who voice the same feelings with more or less refinement, invite us to view melancholy in the play as a performance. Rather than giving us a glimpse of the characters’make-believe interiority, the play stages a sort of competition between contestants in the art of playing melancholy as they attempt to fit the Renaissance idea of the melancholy genius. Both performing and ridiculing the fashionable disease, Love’s Labour’s Lost can be seen as a comedy of melancholy. At the end of the play, however, the news of the King of France’s death shatters the pastoral world in which the characters had been living to reveal an enduring melancholy. In retrospect, the whole comedy seems to be driven by the need to disguise an essential melancholy through the veil of an affected one.
2In its various guises, melancholy in Love’s Labour’s Lost serves as a structuring principle that this article will seek to expose. As the play scrupulously conforms to the representational codes of melancholy in the period, however, it simultaneously turns the black humour into something of a riddle. Defined as it is by a series of specific behaviours and attributes, is melancholy a folly to make fun of, or a pathetic response to man’s awareness of his own transience–or both? Is Love’s Labour’s Lost a comedy made at the expense of melancholy, or does it betray a fundamental despair at any comedy’s hopeless attempt–that to make us forget mortality, even if only for a little while? This article will first examine the various species of melancholy in the play, then analyse its nature as a performance, and will finally question the ability of comedy to work as a remedy for the disease.
The species of melancholy in the play
Love is a species of melancholy.
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (16212)
3What Robert Burton phrased so clearly in his widely successful study of melancholy was self-evident for Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Love and melancholy were strongly connected, but they were not quite one and the same, for there were also two other types, or “species”, of the same disease, scholarly melancholy and religious melancholy. All three species were derived from the same cause–an excess of black bile (also called melancholy) which disrupted the balance of the humours, the bodily fluids central to Galenic medicine3. The three species of melancholy produced the same effects, or rather, symptoms: melancholics were pale, lean, slow of movement (but not necessarily, as we shall see, of wit); they were solitary, prone to insomnia, and enjoyed obscurity4. These symptoms were “plain, obvious and familiar” according to Burton5, and audiences could all the more easily recognise melancholics on stage as the disease was also associated with a number of dramatic gestures, such as crossing one’s arms and leaning one’s head on one’s hand6.
4In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the courtiers of Navarre repeatedly display these symptoms, first adopting a behaviour which suggests scholarly melancholy before moving on to love melancholy when they meet the ladies of France. This move is highly surprising, as these two types of the disease were generally seen as opposites7. The characters’swift move from seclusion to seduction invites us to question the species of their melancholy. Does love function as a remedy or as an alternative to scholarly melancholy? Or do the characters take on the attitudes of seduction after having failed in their first attempt to play their roles as scholars convincingly?
5While love is the most prevalent species of melancholy exhibited in Love’s Labour’s Lost, the play actually starts by showing the courtiers of Navarre wilfully embracing scholarly melancholy. The King vows to turn his court into a “little academe” (1.1.13) and suggests that his goal can only be reached by shutting himself and his “fellow scholars” (1.1.17) out from the world for three years. This enterprise is formalised by a series of coercive measures comically bemoaned by Berowne:
But there are other strict observances:
As not to see a woman in that term,
Which I hope well is not enrolled there;
And one day in a week to touch no food,
And but one meal on every day beside;
The which I hope is not enrolled there;
And then to sleep but three hours in the night,
And not be seen to wink all of the day–
When I was wont to think no harm all night,
And make a dark night too of half the day–
Which I hope well is not enrolled there.
O, these are barren tasks, too hard to keep,
Not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep. (1.1.36-48)
6These measures produce the same symptoms as melancholy, as three years of that diet could only turn the would-be scholars into lean, pale, slow and lonely creatures who would not be able to fit easily in society–just like the actual melancholics of the time. While these symptoms are the natural manifestations of the disease, the pact artificially induces them and forces the characters to look like, even though they may not be, melancholics in the medical sense. The comic sense of regret which transpires from the repetition of the same line–which is repeated three times, ironically reminding the audience of the duration of the oath–makes it clear enough from the start, however, that if Berowne and his companions were to respect their pact, they would definitely become melancholics. By expressing his reluctance to give up worldly pleasures, Berowne makes his own quick renunciation rather transparent, while his companions’later one comes as (slightly) more of a surprise.
7Further irony appears in Navarre’s insistence on signing a contract which repeats the oath. An oath is usually an oral pledge in which God serves as witness8. Not only was there no need for any written word to confirm the oath, but the use of such a document, together with the emphatic manner in which each protagonist signs it in turn, suggests that for the King, the oath is not enough. Both the oral and the written pacts are thus demeaned: using one to reinforce the other suggests that each has little value, as the rest of the play will confirm. This double pact already introduces “the problem of the separation rather than the fit between verba and res” which Armado’s inflated rhetoric pinpoints throughout the play, as Patricia Parker has shown9. The signature of a binding contract in the exposition scene can only mean that the play will deal with the characters’failure or unwillingness to match its conditions. Moreover, this contract may be seen as a parodic inversion of the one signed by Faustus, in a play which had been performed while Love’s Labour’s Lost was “being written10”. The lords of Navarre, indeed, vow to devote three full years of their lives to study, while Faustus gives away his soul to the devil in exchange for “four-and-twenty years” in which Mephistopheles grants him all of his wishes11. The subtext of Faustus’s tragic outcome could only be a warning to early modern audiences who probably had Marlowe’s play in mind, as it endows the comedy with a rather dark undertone from the start. The play thus begins by staging the irreconcilable difference between the oral and the written word, instilling doubt instead of certainty.
8Such distrust in the validity of any utterance is rooted in the awareness of living in a fallen world, where the perfect adequation between word and thing which defined the Adamic language has been lost12. The double oath designed by the King of Navarre demonstrates its own fragility by underlining this discrepancy. Navarre unwittingly asserts that this is a fallen world and symbolically lets melancholy in. His insistence in severing the court’s existence from the rest of the world can also be seen as an attempt to recreate a bookish garden of Eden and possibly to redeem original sin. The opening lines of the play, however, call his motives into doubt:
Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives,
Live registered upon our brazen tombs,
And then grace us in the disgrace of death; (1.1.1-3)
9There is no sign of penitence in Navarre’s project. His goal is for his court to gain fame in and after this life. As William Carroll notes in his edition, “‘Fame’ is a noble concept here, a power that can defeat mutability and produce a kind of immortality […] In the play’s later instances of the word, ‘fame’ means little more than ‘rumour’ or ‘report’ making ‘noise […] Navarre’ s invocation of this term, then, is a misappropriation of a central idea in Renaissance honour culture13”. Navarre’s desire is to make his name by succeeding where others have failed and by being remembered beyond the limits of mortality14. Montrose notes that: “Though the lords’method resembles that of the contemptu mundi tradition, their object is not transcendence but mastery of the world on its own terms; their motivation is the desire for public recognition, not for wisdom15”. Navarre’s enterprise betrays pride, the capital sin which itself led to the Fall. In that respect, while the “little academe” might have seemed to try and recreate Eden through study, it turns out to work, rather, as a parody of Eden. It may not be so for the characters, but it can be understood as such by audiences able to work out Navarre’s choice of words. The discrepancy between what Navarre sets out to do and what the audience is likely to understand creates further irony, as it repeats the distinction between object, or action, and language: the situation and the words Navarre uses to describe it take different directions, suggesting, on the one hand, a Christian attempt to redeem original sin, and on the other, self-interested motives. Instead of causing a deep-felt melancholy in himself and his companions, Navarre unwittingly establishes an atmosphere of melancholy by reminding the audience of the fallen state of the world–a world in which solemn promises are doomed to be broken.
10As could be guessed from the start, the lords’oath “not to see a woman in that term” is soon forsworn. The arrival of the ladies instantly reveals Navarre’s lack of will, or even perhaps his hypocrisy. Even though he refuses to let them in, he and his courtiers do meet them and promise to “visit [them] again” (2.1.174). Moreover, the ladies’presence instantly prompts the lords to forsake the rhetoric of scholarly melancholy in favour of that of love melancholy. While the King resorts to the formal language due to a monarch in his first encounter with the Princess, he still vows to keep her “lodged in [his] heart” (2.1.171). In doing so, he already introduces a courtly metaphor which may also implied in a pun on the word “tender”, which is used as a verb in the line “[honour] may tender of thy true worthiness” but which can also remind the audience of the identical adjective.
11After Navarre’s departure, Boyet even notes that: “By the heart’s still rhetoric disclosed with eyes, / Deceive me not now, Navarre is infected. […] With that which we lovers entitle ‘affected’” (2.1.225-228). In the Neoplatonic understanding of love, beauty touched the soul through the eyes of the beholder, by a process called “intromission16”. External beauty was thus received by the organs of perception and converted into an internal image. According to Boyet, the Princess’s beauty entered Navarre’s mind through his eyes, eliciting tender feelings which they then gave away, through a process of contagion. By underlining the paronomasis between “infected” and “affected”, Boyet makes even plainer a metaphor which was so common at the time that both the Princess and the audience could only have understood it already. The pun, however, not only refers to “affection” as a euphemism for love; it may also suggest that Navarre “affects” love, rather than being sincere. Boyet’s reference to “we lovers” is also ambiguous: does he count Navarre in, or does he rather oppose himself, as part of a group of sincere lovers, to Navarre and those who merely pretend to be in love?
12The hackneyed metaphor of love as a disease had already been introduced in the same scene, as Berowne instantly engaged in a battle of wits with Rosaline:
Berowne: Lady, I will commend you to my own heart.
Rosaline: Pray you, do my commendations; I would be glad to see it.
Berowne: I would you heard it groan.
Rosaline: Is the fool sick?
Berowne: Sick at the heart.
Rosaline: Alack, let it blood.
Berowne: Would that do it good?
Rosaline: My physic says ‘ay’. (2.1.177-184)
13Berowne’s reference to the heart is the first of a number of allusions to melancholy. “Groan[s]” were indeed one of the symptoms of the disease17, but Berowne here creates a mixed metaphor (a person groans, not their heart) which renders the formulation comic and debunks the positive connotations of love. Although Berowne and Rosaline have met earlier, the rapidity with which he turns to the language of love and melancholy seems to point to habits of mind, as if any encounter with a beautiful woman would prompt similar words from the courtier. Even if Berowne later insists on the uniqueness of Rosaline’s beauty, at this stage he does not make any specific references to her, but only talks about love in general18. This cheeky exchange, with its short, tit-for-tat answers, can either be read as proof of Berowne and Rosaline’s compatibility, or of their mutual use of a codified language which can be used without expressing personal feelings.
14With his mixed metaphor, Berowne distances himself from the language of melancholy. The disease was, moreover, attributed to a fault of the liver (rather than the heart) even in the case of love melancholy19. This initial “mistake” shows a corruption of the reference to melancholy, which is used by Berowne as a metaphor for love. At the beginning of the play, Navarre sought to impose a state of melancholy over his courtiers so as to gain fame; now Berowne, and later his companions, resorts to the same strategy in order to woo a lady, referring to one of the symptoms of the disease, “groan[ing]”.
15The comic dimension of this exchange, however, lies in Rosaline’s cheeky refusal to understand Berowne’s metaphor. Rosaline bluntly calls Berowne a mere fool, asking about his sickness without any reference to his love20. While another hackneyed phrase refers to hearts bleeding for love, Rosaline–instead of showing any sympathy–encourages his heart to bleed more. The phrase suggests one of the main remedies used by physicians in the early modern period, blood-letting, simultaneously introducing the sadistic pleasure Rosaline and the Princess will plainly express later: “[Princess.] We are wise girls to mock our lovers so. / [Rosaline.] They are worse fools to purchase mocking so” (5.2.58-59). This passage, therefore, is not really about love melancholy. It uses, rather, love melancholy as a discourse of seduction, paving the way for the sexual innuendoes in which it culminates: “[Berowne.] Will you prick’t with your eye? / [Rosaline.] Non point, with my knife” (185-18621). Berowne also refers to the doctrine of Neoplatonic love, according to which the eye of the beloved emitted rays with which the beholder’s own eyes were touched and his soul moved to feel love, and simultaneously introduces a phallic allusion with the verb “to prick”. Rosaline in turn appropriates the metaphor by transforming it into a more aggressive, though similar, image, that of the knife. Berowne is thus defeated when Rosaline literalises his own metaphor by using a more graphic one. As this battle of wits reaches its comic climax, it appears that the discourse of melancholy is hardly a sad one–it even becomes the very stuff of comedy. Rather than functioning as the visual and verbal expression of feelings, melancholy in the play is a performance which the characters use to reach their own motives.
16Melancholy is played (both in its seductive and scholarly guises) to reach two goals which may look different at first, but can both be traced back to ambition and pride. Not unlike the pedants Holofernes and Nathaniel, the courtiers of Navarre initially aim at being acknowledged as scholars. The two groups, however, use different means to reach the same goals: while the pedants make a ludicrous show of their supposed precious knowledge, the courtiers perform the fashionable attribute of learning, melancholy. When they discover that their initial desire is superseded by another, more potent one, they use the same means to reach their new ends: they now perform love melancholy so as to woo the ladies. The play debunks this attempt by mirroring the courtiers’project in Armado’s buffoon-like figure; but it also symbolically ties all these figures of melancholy together by mirroring the courtiers’love masque with the pedants’scholarly masque, and by having Armado integrate the latter group towards the end of the play. Rather than being opposed, love and study are presented as two facets of one and the same disease. In this play, each group of male characters, and so to speak each character in each group, is someone else’s buffoon: the ladies make fun of the courtiers who make fun of Armado who is also made fun of by the pedants. Holofernes makes fun of Nathaniel, Moth of Armado, Armado of Costard (and vice-versa), and the great eavesdropping scene shows how each of the courtiers could make fun of one another. Each character works in turn as actor and as audience, taking part in masques or attending them, playing parts for or at the expence of other characters. Melancholy creates its own scene of action, like a kaleidoscope or a stage which constantly revolves to reveal more actors in its great game.
Performing melancholy
17Armado’s early exchange with Moth once again highlights a key aspect of melancholy in the play: “Boy, what sign is it when a man of great spirit grows melancholy? / A great sign, sir, that he will look sad” (1.2.1-3). Armado’s peculiar phrasing works wonders here to reveal the nature of melancholy as a language and as an act. Armado does not ask what sign enables one to recognize melancholy in a fellow human being, but he identifies the disease as a sign (“what sign is it22”). The word invites several interpretations, and it suggests that melancholy is something that can be identified through a system of signs, or that these signs can be made to signify melancholy. Melancholy appears as a coded language, a text which must be deciphered. The language of melancholy thus seems to be performative: by putting on a show of melancholy, one says–or is said to be–melancholy. In a play that is almost entirely composed of plays-within-the plays, sincerity is not at stake. What matters is one’s skill at speaking the language of melancholy, one’s ability to perform the act convincingly by following a set of social rules. As Montrose observes, “in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Shakespeare experiments with a rather special case of ludic speculation: playwright, actors, and audience are engaged in the purposeful playing of a play whose fictional action is generated almost entirely by characters at play23”. Melancholy is one of the numerous games played at the court of Navarre.
18In that respect, it comes as no surprise that Armado immediately specifies that the melancholy he is interested in is that which affects “m[e]n of great spirit”. Armado, who displays a constant fascination with wit through-out the play, could only be attracted to the figure of the melancholy genius, the epitome of which was Sir Philip Sidney’s persona, the lovelorn Astrophil. Astrophil and Stella had circulated in manuscript for over a decade before being published in 1591, and had recently been reprinted as an appendix to the second edition of Sidney’s Arcadia (1593). Despite the similarity between their names, Armado blatantly fails to attain Astrophil’s genius and wit24. The Spaniard also appears as a parodic version of Don Quixote–another famous melancholy lover, of which Armado only retains the grotesque manners25. However, while Quixote is unable to distinguish his world from that of the chivalric romances he so enjoys reading, Armado remains aware of the roles he wants to play and tries to manipulate the codes of social conduct to his advantage so as to fit in the court of Navarre–but of course patently fails to do so.
19Armado, indeed, immediately reveals that: “I have promised to study three years with the Duke” (1.2.30), without realising that the court expects him only to make fun of him26. Throughout the play, Armado and Navarre evolve in different social circles. Even in the masque of the Nine Worthies, the metadramatic stage on which Armado performs for his courtly audience serves as a symbolic barrier between them. He rather belongs to the group of the grotesques, somewhere between the rustics and the pedants, parodically mirroring the lords at the same time. In his first appearance on stage, Armado encompasses the lords’evolution, abruptly moving from scholarly to love melancholy: “I will hereupon confess I am in love; and as it is base for a soldier to love, so am I in love with a base wench” (1.2.48-49). His lack of subtlety highlights the lords’, although they may conceal theirs with more elegance. He immediately resorts to the language of melancholy, “think [ing] scorn to sigh”, “vow [ing] to outswear Cupid”, and finding that his “spirit grows heavy in love” (1.2.53, 99). Armado functions as a distorted image of the courtiers of Navarre, and for that reason he can never enter their circle. From the start, Armado invites us to question the lords’melancholy, and beyond that, the nature of the disease itself.
20The nature of melancholy as an act is underlined by Moth’s response: a melancholy person is not one who is sad but who “will look” sad, displacing focus from state to appearance, from feeling to pretence. The auxiliary “will” is equally revealing as it suggests not only the certainty of the fact but also the person’s desire (or will) to look sad. Moth thus takes on the assumption already present in Armado’s line and makes it explicit, presenting melancholy as a part that can be played. By repeating Armado’s words with a difference, Moth makes melancholy itself a sign and thus overturns his master’s question. If Armado did inquire what sign could help one recognise melancholy, Moth answers that melancholy itself is a sign. Rather than an inner state entailing a number of outward signs, melancholy remains on the surface, like a garment one can put on or off.
21Melancholy becomes an autonomous language which shows rather than means something. When Armado answers “sadness is one and the self-same thing”, he uses the verb “to be” again, and even suggests a distinction between the “sign” and the “thing”, or, to use anachronistic terms, the signifier and the signified. Armado thus posits that the behaviour he identifies as sadness/melancholy means something, and that something would be love, as William C. Carroll points out27. Armado infers from the courtly association of love and melancholy that the former is the essence of the latter. In that case, however, the question is the wrong way around: melancholy was, indeed, often considered to be a sign of love, but Armado’s question is phrased in such a way that the answer would read “love is a sign of melancholy”. Armado’s assertion that “sadness is one and the selfsame thing” thus implies an equation between melancholy, sadness and love. Moth’s surprising insistence against such an equation (“No, no, O Lord, sir, no”) may be better understood if one considers that he objects to the ability of sadness (or, for that matter, melancholy) to be anything at all. Moth, indeed, pointedly refrains from using the verb “to be” throughout the exchange. To him, melancholy is only a matter of pretence, a set of orchestrated attitudes rather than the sincere expression of feelings. In that respect, sadness can never be one and the same, as Armado suggests, because it is rooted in dissemblance, in looking what one does not feel.
22Moth later on confirms the nature of melancholy as a performance by giving a grotesque list of symptoms:
“No, my complete master, but to jig off a tune at the tongue’s end, canary it with our feet, humour it with turning up your eyelids, sigh a note and sing a note, sometime through the throat as if you swallowed love by singing love, sometime through the nose as if you snuffed up love by smelling love, with your hat penthouse like o’er the shop of your eyes, with your arms crossed on your thin-belly doublet like a rabbit on a spit, or your hands in your pocket like a man after the old painting, and keep not too long in one tune, but a snip and away. These are compliments, these are humours, these betray nice wenches that would be betrayed without these, and make them men of note–do you note me?–that most are affected to these.” (3.1.8-19)
23Scattered throughout this speech are words associated with melancholy (“humour”, “love”) and its symptoms (“sigh”, “with your crossed arms”). The speech also evokes the attitudes of the lover, whose eyes (hence his nose, too) are fixed up to the sky as he gazes upon a star (“Stella”) or a saint in the rhetoric of neo-petrarchan poetry, and who spends much of his time singing his love and dancing at court. In Moth’s words, melancholy becomes a dance, a choreography whose moves are carefully registered and can therefore be reproduced. However, his description deflates the fashionable disease by turning its sufferers into clowns, by playing on the sexual connotation of the “French brawl” (which, as Drew Daniel notes, derives from the French “bransle28”), and finally, states the absurdity of the whole thing. If melancholy is played to seduce “nice wenches”, they would still “be betrayed without these”, which suggests that any men attempting to become “men of note” by performing the disease would fail. Melancholy is a show that is performed for its own sake.
24Armado and Moth are not the only characters who reveal melancholy as a performance. Berowne himself–the epitome of the courtier in the play–echoes this vision of the black humour when he cries: “By heaven, I do love, and it hath taught me to rhyme, and to be melancholy” (4.3.9-10). Berowne literally presents melancholy as something which can be taught, similar to the skill of poetry writing. His statement echoes Moth’s description of the melancholy dance with which he attempted to instruct Armado, drawing a parallel between the courtier and his grotesque double. Of course Berowne’s love has instructed him in the art of melancholy; but his insistence, even if rather mild, about the truth of his feelings (“I do love”) invites suspicion. In sighing for his mistress, writing poetry, and being (or looking) melancholy, Berowne performs the series of set gestures expected of the courtly lover, taking the audience as witness: “here is part of my rhyme, and here my melancholy” (4.3.11). The deictic “here” clearly works as an embedded stage direction for the actor to show a piece of paper in the first part of the line. One can assume that he will draw the audience’s attention to his countenance by a gesture of the hand showing his face, and/or by exaggerating the glum looks of the melancholic. By equating his body and an object that stands as an emanation of his inner state (the paper that bears his lines), Berowne (even if unwittingly) shows his divided self–a separation he had already suggested when he said “I am coursing myself” (4.3.1). Melancholy is a skill that can be learnt and showed for performance to an audience who needs to be convinced, be it a woman or the spectators at the theatre29.
25By presenting melancholy so insistently as a performance rather than a condition affecting both body and mind, the play turns the disease not only into a paradox, but into an impossibility, leaving us to question whether such a thing as melancholy exists out of its own representation. Melancholy is indeed a sign in the play, an autonomous figure which refers to nothing outside itself, prompting an interpretation which can only fail as there is actually nothing to interpret. The apparent opposition between scholarly melancholy and love melancholy, or between sadness and melancholy, is subsumed into an ontological questioning revolving around the difference between appearance and essence. In the play, contrary to the medical literature of the time, melancholics are not defined by a condition which surfaces in spite of themselves; they are those who carefully stage their own performance. The melancholics are always putting on a show, even if only for themselves–as such, melancholy is a highly theatrical disease.
26If the melancholics wear their characters on their sleeve, it is because their sleeve is their character: the interiority melancholy seems to announce has no existence outside its appearance. On the contrary, the two characters who reveal true grief–the Princess and Katharine–do not act as melancholics, as they refuse the performance: Katharine briefly mentions her sister’s death (as we shall see later) and the Princess almost immediately ends the revels and her visit after hearing her father’s death. Sadness is precisely out of melancholy’s bounds, or as Drew Daniel puts it: “This parting of sadness from melancholy is, in a sense, what the narrative energy of the play itself will eventually achieve when the death of the King of France forces the separation of the bereaved court of the Princess from the love-melancholic court of Navarre30.”
27It is certainly tempting to view this opposition as a gendered one, in the words of the same critic: “Men falsely express a melancholy that they do not feel, while women suffer and die from a “genuine” (feminine) form of love melancholy whose seriousness is not subject to debate31.” He goes on to argue that: “If Armado and Biron’s manic performances configure melancholy as discursive, Aristotelian, ‘light,’ genial, and masculine, the anecdote of Katherine’s sister reconfigures melancholy as somatic, Galenic, ‘heavy’, morbid, and feminine32.” Although the play contrasts men and women as two distinctive groups with specific attitudes, and although the women refuse to perform melancholy, it does not follow so clearly that the sadness which leads to death is essentially feminine. Daniel’s opposition between Aristotelian and Galenic melancholy is too clear-cut. Aristotle’s definition of melancholy derives from Galen, rather than being distinct from it, as Daniel suggests33. Both Aristotle and Galen were, of course, heavily influential on Renaissance medicine; the works devoted to melancholy at the time did not choose between two interpretations of the disease but used elements from both thinkers. Melancholy was not either “‘light’, genial and masculine” or “‘heavy’, morbid, and feminine”: it was all these things at the same time, except that Renaissance physicians were much less interested in women than in men (one must bear in mind that it was the men who paid them or bought their books). When they did describe melancholic women, they attributed similar symptoms to them as to men, but in addition associated their condition to greensickness and hysteria34. It seems, therefore, that there is not sufficient evidence to identify a specifically feminine form of melancholy in Love’s Labour’s Lost. The opposition rather appears to be between those who perform melancholy and those who refuse to do so–which is not to say that the women refuse all kinds of performance, as their behaviour during the Masque of the Muscovites shows. With their refusal to participate in the men’s game, the women show that the limits of the comedy have been met by its reaching beyond the performance of melancholy.
The comedy as impossible remedy
28Love’s Labour’s Lost, however, is not only a comedy about melancholy. It can also be seen as a comedy of melancholy. As the concern with the black humour keeps coming up time and again, the play seems to be gradually contaminated by the disease it stages, as if pretending led to melancholy itself. Or could it be, rather, that this whole mise en scène was driven in itself by the urge to disguise an essential melancholy? After all, the play does start with the mention of “the disgrace of death” and of “cormorant devouring time” (1.1.3-4). At first, it may seem that Navarre is only uttering hackneyed terms to justify his enterprise, but it may be the other way around: repeating clichés for want of better words.
29The anguish of mortality actually surfaces several times in the play. When Armado asks “What sign is it when a man grows melancholy?”, the choice of the word “sign” may be a nod to the astrological sign of melancholy, which traditionally belongs to Saturn. Melancholy subjects were often said to be of a saturnine disposition, and the planet was often associated with great men35. The allusion to Saturn would also make sense in keeping with Navarre’s opening speech, in which he expresses his fear of “cormorant devouring time” (1.1.4), since Saturn was the god of time who devoured his children alive. Navarre, like all the characters in the play, is literally a child of time because of his finite nature.
30The hunting scene (4.1), in which mortal men literally prepare to shorten the lives of other living creatures, also serves as a symbolic reminder of the presence of death36. The Princess vows to “play the murderer in” (4.1.8), and the forester designates “a stand where you must make the fairest shoot” (10). What follows is a dialogue at crossed purposes in which the Princess plays on the symbolic meaning of the hunt in early modern culture while still referring to the actual sport, establishing a form of double entendre the forester fails to catch (10-16). Hunting traditionally represented courtship in Petrarchan and neo-petrarchan poetry, since the beloved could be assimilated to Diana killing the deer (with a pun on “dear”), and her eyes to arrows piercing her lover’s heart37. The allegorical dimension of the hunt prevails upon its literal meaning, therefore, so that the reference to death almost disappears behind the rhetoric of love.
31The play’s concern with time resurfaces more clearly when Berowne wishes for:
A woman, that is like a German clock
Still a-repairing, ever out of frame,
And never going aright, being a watch,
But being watched that it may still go right! (3.1.167-170)
32Berowne’s cheeky, misogynistic outburst actually makes sense in the context of the play’s representation of time. A woman who was like a (sophisticated) German clock would work as an instrument to measure time, presumably through her ability to bear children; but by being “out of frame”, hence out of time, she would also be able to deny time’s inevitability, while being still able to (or to make the world) go right by “being watched”, meaning both by being set on time and by being looked after or controlled by a man. What Berowne asks for is a measure of time that allows him to forget time–maybe not always, but at least repeatedly, by giving in to pleasure. In the end, while time had seemed suspended throughout the play, Marcadé’s entrance forces the comedy back into the realm of mortality. Thus Armado’s early question about the sign of melancholy ultimately appears as part of a network of allusions that work as a reminder of time and mortality.
33The most striking reference to death, however, takes the form of a character’s entrance on stage. Marcadé’s arrival is, indeed, often described as a surprise38. Catherine M. Mc Lay thus writes that “the entry of Marcade casts a shadow not only over the maidens as well39”. The character has specifically been linked to a folkloric “dance of death” in Renaissance France40. In the 1930s, Tyrone Guthrie’s production emphasised the play’s shift in tone when the black-clad Marcadé entered the stage41. Peter Brook’s 1946 version also “established darker, more melancholy and elegiac, reading of the play than had been seen before42”, creating a sharp contrast between the Watteau-esque atmosphere and Marcadé’s sudden entrance. The messenger’s arrival has been described as a sign of the “tragedy [that] is always there, felt, if not seen” or of the play’s “serious mind at work43.” In other words, the directors used all their creative powers to exacerbate the unforeseen presence of death in the dream-like world of the play. But if audiences were (and are) surprised, indeed, by the play’s ending, it is not because nothing could have led them to expect such an event; it is, rather, because they had forgotten its very beginning.
34Between Navarre’s initial speech and Marcadé’s entrance, the comedy seems to be built so as to make us forget its first words. In this extended middle part, melancholy is played in such an emphatic, often ludicrous manner that it draws our attention to the performance, away from any actual causes of the disease. As we focus on the quality of the act, gauging one character’s attempt against others, we are blinded to anything beyond the surface. It is necessary, therefore, to read the play backwards, to be on the lookout for any hints of actual melancholy. The most striking is the reference to Katherine’s sister in 5.2. Katherine calls Cupid “a shrewd unhappy gallows” and explains, in veiled terms, how her sister came to die:
He made her melancholy, and sad, and heavy,
And so she died. Had she been light, like you,
Of such a merry, nimble, stirring spirit,
She might ha’been grandam ere she died.
And so may you, for a light heart lives long. (5.2.14-19)
35It should be noted that Katherine uses the same distinction between sadness and melancholy that was used at the beginning of the play–only the grim context now takes away any absurdity and rather makes the three adjectives “melancholy”, “sad”, and “heavy” synonymous44. In the medical books of the time, sadness and heaviness were symptoms of melancholy, so that the line functions both as a gradation and as an anatomy, revealing the extent of the lady’s condition, going into the specifics of the disease as if to try and get to its cause. The run-on-line, with its blunt statement, is all the more devastating in its simplicity as the ternary rhythm had seemed to provide a sense of harmony. However, the apparent balance between the terms was already belied by the fact that, instead of progressively reducing the length of the words (“melancholy, and heavy, and sad”, in a line that would symbolically end on what would be the most meaningful term, turning it even more clearly into an understatement), the effect is made more unexpected by inserting the shorter term in between two longer ones. It seems that grief disrupts the logical arrangement of terms, making feeling come first. The apparent failure of dispositio (the rhetorical arrangement of terms so as to produce the most potent effect on the audience so as to convince them) is thus really an achievement. In these very short lines (the run-on-line making this either a very long line or one and a half, the second one being broken up by emotion), the audience is made to sympathise with Katherine and to share in the fate of her sister because, for once, feeling has prevailed over rhetoric.
36In the same way, the Princess’s reaction at Marcadé’s news takes the form on an interrupted line:
Marcadé: The King your father–
Princess: Dead, for my life!
37While emotions (or, in the language of the time, affections45) have been affected throughout the play, the language of true emotion turns out to be silence, with a world of meaning in the dash. On stage, the Princess usually interrupts Marcadé–an interpretation which is corroborated by her preceding lines: “Welcome, Marcadé, / But that thou interruptest our merriment” (5.2.691-692). However, one could also imagine this dash in the text to be played on stage by a (long or short) moment of silence which is actually Marcadé’s message, the silence providing the Princess time to understand the news. Just as for Katherine’s sister, the worst is uttered in straightforward terms: “dead”, “she died”. While love melancholy leads to a form of verbosity shared by all the lovers in the play, true grief (or its performance on stage) takes a minimal form, reminding us that, in early modern England, “broken heart and broken speech went hand in hand46.” The female characters’expressions of grief ironically confirm the lords’lack of “true” feeling in providing a sharp contrast to their elaborate discourses.
38The Princess’s spontaneous ejaculation not only sets up a balance between the opposites of life and death, but more importantly presents them as an exchange, as a form of currency (“for my life”). Her exclamation of pain is also a reminder of the nature of kingship, which is only transmitted by death, and thus functions as an image of the circle of life: a monarch’s heir is there to await their parent’s death. The Princess’s life–her reign–derives from her father’s death; as such she could be offering her life in a bargain to resurrect her father–but this is, of course, impossible. This hypothetical exchange is made highly ironic by the fact that is offered in terms not unlike those used by Costard: a “remuneration” is also a bargain, a commercial exchange while that proposed by the Princess suggests that life is a form of currency. Once again, the way terms resurface in the play is quite striking, creating disturbing echoes between the most obvious aspects of the comedy and its darker subtext. Marcadé’s news is “heavy in [his] tongue” (694), anticipating melancholy and death as the word had been formerly used about Katherine’s sister.
39Another hint to mortality, another surprising moment in which absurd and serious meet happens a few minutes earlier in the same scene, when Armado interrupts his performance as Hector to respond to the courtiers’jest: “The sweet war-man is dead and rotten. Sweet chucks, beat not the bones of the buried. When he breathed, he was a man” (644-666). Anticipating Hamlet’s remembrance of Yorick, Armado voices a brief but apt definition of the warrior, and more generally of humankind. He also uses the simple word “dead” which will be used about the King of France, unwittingly commenting upon the latter’s yet unknown death. While Armado has constantly delighted the audiences on and off stage with his “antics”, he now suddenly seems to shed off the mask to take on a role of authority, patronising his social superiors (“sweet chucks”) to remind them of an inescapable truth. Armado is unexpectedly revealed to be more than the buffoon he has so effectively portrayed.
40The masque of the Nine Worthies, which was conceived as “some delightful ostentation, or show, or pageant, or antic, or firework” (V. 1.90-1) turns out to “teach”, as well as to “delight”, following Sir Philip Sidney’s definition of poetry47. Interestingly, the masque which Holofernes had called “some entertainment of time” (V. 1.96) contains a lesson about time, bringing the courtiers back to the initial concern of the play while anticipating its materialisation in the King’s death. The fact that Armado interrupts his performance to explain the lesson to be drawn from it is also consistent with the association between interruption and death which will be made clear when Marcadé enters the stage. It is the Princess, moreover, who “bestows on [Armado] the sense of hearing” (V. 2.646-7) by saying: “Speak, brave Hector. We are much delighted” (V. 2.648). She thus enables him to get back to his role and simultaneously asserts that only half of the poetic mission has been accomplished: the courtiers are, indeed, delighted by the performance (rather at the players’expense than for their benefit), but they have not received the slightest instruction from it. The play, with its various plays within the play, has succeeded in making its own characters forget what it was all about. In that respect, it is correct that both characters and audience are surprised by Marcadé’s news–but only because they had been blind to the reminiscences of death that are concentrated in the last scenes of the play.
***
41Starting out as a satire of a fashionable attitude (more than an actual disease) in Elizabethan England, Love’s Labour’s Lost ultimately appears to be torn between its comedic outlook and a deeper anguish. Using a more recent terminology, Drew Daniel thus argues that:
“[T]here is something manic-depressive about Love’s Labour’s Lost. The glittering, manic surface of volubility and courtly manners that makes up the ostensible action of the play works to ward off the depressive pull toward still and contemplative paralysis at its core. The play constitutes a series of manic entertainments that struggle to defer the final, inevitable plunge into depression48.”
42Though psychoanalysis may indeed prove helpful to understand Shakespeare’s plays, one must bear in mind that such a conception is entirely at odds with early modern understandings of body and mind. At the time, melancholy subjects could only give themselves away because it was the nature of the black humour to induce a set of symptoms and behaviours. Using early modern tools to understand an early modern play such as Love’s Labour’s Lost is necessary to get to the conception of mankind which is developed there. The play stages the discrepancy between appearance and essence, between a superficial melancholy and an essential one, representing the former as it tries, and ultimately fails, to conceal the latter. The comedy of melancholy is a tribute to the power of the theater, and one of the many representations of the theatrum mundi in Shakespeare’s works. Simultaneously, however, it reveals a violent skepticism which derives from the awareness of living in a fallen world. Deferring and denying the happy, romantic ending expected of comedies49, Love’s Labour’s Lost desacralises its two central affections: love and melancholy, making them no more by empty shows. The “glittering surface” of these shows makes them thoroughly enjoyable, but as a form of guilty pleasure, as we temporarily forget the darker realities which are reaffirmed at the end of the play.
Notes de bas de page
1Florio John, John Florio His First Fruites, London, 1578, p. 71.
2Burton Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Faulkner Thomas C., Kiessling Nicolas K. and Blair Rhonda L. (ed.), Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994, vol. 3, p. 2.
3See for instance Bright Timothy, A Treatise of Melancholy, London, 1586, p. 1-3, and Burton Robert, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 162.
4See for instance Burton Robert, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 381-393 and vol. 3, p. 139.
5Ibid., vol. 1, p. 381.
6Gurr Andrew, The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001 [1992], p. 100-103.
7Burton, for instance, suggests reading as a cure for melancholy, “provided alwaies that [the] malady proceede not from overmuch study, for in such cases he addes fuell to the fire, and nothing can be more pernitious”. Lovers should particularly avoid reading romances, since the love stories they contain will only aggravate the disease; op. cit., vol. 2, p. 90.
8“A solemn of formal declaration invoking God (or a god, or object of reverence) as witness to the truth of a statement, or to the binding nature of a promise or undertaking”, “oath, n.”, in OED Online, June 2014, Oxford University Press, [http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/129495?rskey=JqbCd2&result=1] (accessed August 06, 2014).
9Parker Patricia, “Preposterous Reversals: Love’s Labor’s Lost”, MLQ, December 1993, p. 435-482, p. 436-437.
10Brown Eric C., “Shakespeare’s Anxious Epistemology: Love’s Labor’s Lost and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus”, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Spring 2003, p. 20-41, p. 21.
11Marlowe Christopher, Doctor Faustus, ed. Kastan David Scott, New York, Norton, 2005, (1.3.91), p. 17.
12in Genesis, God has Adam name every creature in the world: “And out of the ground the Lord God formed every best of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof” (2.19, The Bible. Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha, Oxford, Oxford University Press, ed. Carroll Robert and Prickett Stephen, 1997, p. 3). After the Fall, however, the perfect identity between object and language is shattered, and God destroys the unity of language in the world (Genesis, 11, 1-9, ibid., p. 11-12).
13Carroll David (ed.), Love’s Labour’s Lost, n. 1, p. 61.
14Louis Adrian Montrose similarly remarks that: “The King’s announced aim is to transcend the limits of mortality through the achievement of lasting fame and honor”. Montrose Louis Adrian, “‘Folly, in wisdom hatch’ d’: The Exemplary Comedy of Love’s Labour’s Lost”, Comparative Drama, vol. 11, no 2, Summer 1977, p. 147-170, p. 148.
15Ibid., p. 149.
16See for instance Coeffeteau Nicolas, A Table of Humane Passions, London, 1621, p. 91-97, and Du Laurens André, A Discourse of the Preservation of Sight, London, 1599, p. 12-13.
17Burton, for instance, refers to the “groans, griefe, sadnesse, dullnesse” of melancholy lovers; op. cit., vol. 3, p. 139.
18As Goldstein points out, “Berowne seems to submit to the conventions of suffering as a formality. The stress is decidedly upon sexual acquisition […] he evidences a certain worldly indifference to such a thing as the identity of his beloved, accepting almost as an axiom that every man must direct his attentions somewhere, be it to his own lady or to ‘Joan’. The line succeeds in pointing out that for Berowne, certainly at this stage in the play, the beloved is little more than an object to be won in the conventional manner and used”, Goldstein Neal L., “Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Renaissance Vision of Love”, Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 25, no 3, Summer 1974, p. 335-350, p. 342.
19Burton Robert, op. cit., vol. 3, p. 139.
20Sonnet 137 also starts with a reference to “thou blind fool love”; Shakespeare William, The Oxford Shakespeare: Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Burrow Colin, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 655.
21For a detailed analysis of the sexual innuendoes in this passage, see Parker Patricia, op. cit., p. 456-457 and p. 472-473.
22My emphasis.
23Montrose Louis Adrian, “‘Sport by sport o’ erthrown’: Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Politics of Play”, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 18, no 4, Winter 1977, p. 528-552, p. 529.
24it is difficult not to agree with Neal L. Goldstein’s comment that “like Astrophil and Stella, Shakespeare’s play seems in its entirety a vehicle for the discarding of the higher ideals of another age–and Love’s Labour’s Lost, if it does anything at all, goes about its iconoclastic business with a good deal more fervour than Sidney’s vacillating Astrophil” when one compares Armado’s grotesque figures with the complexities of Sidney’s persona. Goldstein Neal L., “Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Renaissance Vision of Love”, Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 25, no 3, Summer 1974, p. 335-350, p. 339.
25Gisèle Venet makes the connection between Armado and Quixote; Venet Gisèle, Shakespeare: Comédies, Paris, Gallimard, coll. «Bibliothèque de la Pléiade», vol. I, p. 1315.
26see 1.1175-179.
27Carrol William C., op. cit., n. 1-2, p. 74.
28Daniel Drew, The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance, New York, Fordham University Press, 2013, p. 75.
29Ibid., p. 83.
30Ibid.
31Ibid., p. 88.
32Ibid. See also Di Mazzio Carla, The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvannia Press, 2009, p. 144, for a similar analysis.
33See Dandrey Patrick (ed.), Anthologie de l’humeur noire. Écrits sur la mélancolie d’Hippocrate à l’Encyclopédie, Paris, Gallimard, 2005, p. 142-143.
34Hodgkin Katharine, “Scurvy Vapors and the Devil’s Claw: Religion and he Body in Seventeenth-Century Melancholy”, Studies in Literary Imagination, vol. 44, no 2, Fall 2011, p. 1-21, p. 5.
35On this tradition, see Kliblansky Raymond, Panofsky Erwin and Saxl Fritz, Saturn and Melancholy, Nendeln (Liechstenstein), Kraus Reprint, 1979 [1964], p. 127-194.
36Roesen Bobbyann, “Love’s Labour’s Lost”, Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 4, 1953, p. 411-426, p. 419-420.
37See for instance Thomas Wyatt’s poem, “Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind”, Anthologie bilingue de la poésie anglaise, ed. Bensimon Paul, Brugière Bernard, Piquet François and Rémy Michel, Paris, Gallimard, coll. «Bibliothèque de la Pléiade», 2005, p. 58.
38See Carroll William C., op. cit., Supplementary Note V. 2.690 SD, p. 178-179.
39Mc Lay Catherine M., “The Dialogues of Spring and Winter: A Key to the Unity of Love’s Labour’s Lost”, Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 18, no 2, Spring 1967, p. 119-127, p. 124.
40Graziani René, “M. Marcadé and the Dance of Death”, RES, New Series, vol. 37, no 147, August 1986, p. 392-395.
41See David Carroll’s Introduction, p. 45.
42H. R. Woudhuysen (ed.), Love’s Labour’s Lost, London, Methuen, The Arden Shakespeare, 1998, Introduction, p. 94.
43Carroll David, op. cit., Introduction, p. 45.
44La Primaudaye’s influence can be traced here, as he writes that: “we often see melancholy men very sadde, although no harme hath befallen them, neither can they give reason of their heaviness”; The French Academie, London, 1618 [first French edition 1577]. Following the Galenic tradition, however, La Primaudaye insists that melancholy has no exterior cause, while Katherine’s sister died of a broken heart. It can also be noted that in this, as in most contemporary studies of melancholy, the subject is presented as male.
45Paster Gail Kern, Rowe Katherine and Floyd Wilson Mary (ed.), Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotions, Philadelphia, Univeristy of Pennsylvannia Press, 2004, p. 2.
46di Mazzio Carla, op. cit., p. 143.
47“Poetry therefore is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis–that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth–to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture–with this end, to teach and to delight”, Sidney Philip, The Defense of Poesy, in The Major Works, ed. Duncan-Jones Katherine, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002 [1989], p. 217.
48Daniel Drew, op. cit., p. 68.
49Berowne states that: “Our wooing doth not end like an old play: / Jack hath not Jill. These ladies’s courtesy / Might well have turned our sport into a comedy” (5.2.842-844).
Auteur
-
Aurélie Griffin
Agrégée d’anglais, est maître de conférences en littérature britannique (xvie-xviiie siècles) à l’Université Jean Monnet, Saint-Étienne. Elle est l’auteur d’une thèse intitulée « L’Urania de Lady Mary Wroth (1587 ?-1651 ?) : une poétique de la mélancolie » réalisée sous la direction de Line Cottegnies à l’université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, à paraître chez Classiques Garnier, ainsi que de divers articles sur Lady Mary Wroth et Sir Philip Sidney. Elle s’intéresse particulièrement aux rapports entre pastorale et mélancolie et aux femmes écrivains de la première modernité.
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Creative Commons - Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International - CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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