Shakespeare

THOMAS M. GREENELove’s Labour’s Lost:The Grace of SocietyThe qualities of Love’s Labour’s Lost determine its limitations. The arabesquesof wit, the elaborations of courtly artifice, the coolness of tone—these sources ofits charm contribute to that brittleness and thinness and faded superficiality forwhich some critics of several generations have reproached it. For its admirers, aheavy stress upon these limitations is likely to appear irrelevant. But evenadmirers must acknowledge that, placed against its author’s work, Love’s Labour’sLost is distinguished by a certain slenderness of feeling, a delicate insubstantiality.It is most certainly not a trivial play, but its subtlety remains a little disembodied.One source of that impression may be the play’s lack, unique in Shakespeare,of any firm social underpinning. Not only is there missing any incarnation ofresponsible authority, any strong and wise center of political power, but there isequally missing any representative of a stable and dependable citizenry. There isnobody here who, however quirky or foolish or provincial, can be counted on,when he is multiplied enough times, to keep society functioning. Or if there is sucha figure in the person of Constable Dull, we are struck with how very marginal arole his creator has permitted him. The patently comic figures—Armado,Holofernes, Costard, Nathaniel, Moth—are all too thin or specialized or sociallyperipheral to suggest any sort of living society. They may be contrasted with themechanicals of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who, for all their splendid ineptness,do persuade us that a kind of Athenian proletariat exists. The earlier play may oweits peculiar airiness in part to a lack of that social solidity.From The Vulnerable Text: Essays on Renaissance Literature. © 1986 by Columbia University.67