Love's Labour's Lost

"The naked truth of it is, I have no shirt."

"I have seen the day of wrong through the little hole of discretion."

"A heavy heart bears not a nimble tongue."

"To wail friends lost Is not by much so wholesome-profitable As to rejoice at friends but newly found."

"Honest plain words best pierce the ear of grief."

"A world-without-end bargain."

"That instant shut My woeful self up in a mourning house, Raining the tears of lamentation."

"To move wild laughter in the throat of death? It cannot be; it is impossible: Mirth cannot move a soul in agony."

"A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear Of him that hears it, never in the tongue Of him that makes it."

"When daisies pied and violets blue And lady-smocks all silver-white And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue Do paint the meadows with delight, The cuckoo then, on every tree, Mocks married men; for thus sings he, Cuckoo; Cuckoo, cuckoo: O word of fear, Unpleasing to a married ear! When shepherds pipe on oaten straws, And merry larks are ploughmen’s clocks, When turtles tread, and rooks, and daws, And maidens bleach their summer smocks, The cuckoo then, on every tree, Mocks married men; for thus sings he, Cuckoo; Cuckoo, cuckoo: O word of fear, Unpleasing to a married ear!"

"When icicles hang by the wall, And Dick the shepherd blows his nail, And Tom bears logs into the hall, And milk comes frozen home in pail, When blood is nipp’d and ways be foul, Then nightly sings the staring owl, Tu-whit; Tu-who, a merry note, While greasy Joan doth keel the pot. When all aloud the wind doth blow, And coughing drowns the parson’s saw, And birds sit brooding in the snow, And Marian’s nose looks red and raw, When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl, Then nightly sings the staring owl, Tu-whit; Tu-who, a merry note, While greasy Joan doth keel the pot."

"The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo."

"Love's Labour Lost! I once did see a play Y-cleped so, so called to my paine, Which I to heare to my small joy did stay, Giving attendance on my froward dame: My misgiving minde presaging to me ill, Yet was I drawne to see it 'gainst my will. This play no play, but plague, was unto me, For there I lost the love I liked most; And what to others seemde a jest to be, I that in earnest found unto my cost. To every one, save me, 'twas comicall. While tragick-like to me it did befall. Each actor plaid in cunning wise his part, But chiefly those entrapt in Cupid's snare; Yet all was fained, 'twas not from the hart, They seeme to grieve, but yet they felt no care; 'Twas I that griefe indeed did beare in brest: The others did but make a shew in jest."

"I have sent and bene all thys morning huntyng for players Juglers & Such kinde of Creaturs, but fynde them harde to finde, wherfore Leavinge notes for them to seeke me, Burbage ys come, & sayes ther ys no new playe that the quene hath not seene, but they have revyved an olde one, Cawled Loves Labore lost, which for wytt & mirthe he sayes will please her exceedingly. And Thys ys apointed to be playd to Morowe night at my Lord of Sowthamptons, unless yow send a wrytt to Remove the Corpus Cum Causa to your howse in Strande. Burbage ys my messenger Ready attendyng your pleasure."

"In this play, which all the editors have concurred to censure, and some have rejected as unworthy of our Poet, it must be confessed that there are many passages mean, childish, and vulgar; and some which ought not to have been exhibited, as we are told they were, to a maiden queen. But there are scattered, through the whole, many sparks of genius; nor is there any play that has more evident marks of the hand of Shakespeare."

"The characters in this play are either impersonated out of Shakspeare’s own multiformity by imaginative self-position or out of such as a country town and schoolboy’s observation might supply,—the curate, the schoolmaster, the Armado (who even in my time was not extinct in the cheaper inns of North Wales) and so on."

"If we were to part with any of the author’s comedies, it should be this. Yet we should be loth to part with Don Adriano de Armado, that mighty potentate of nonsense, or his page, that handful of wit; with Nathaniel the curate, or Holofernes the schoolmaster, and their dispute after dinner on “the golden cadences of poesy”; with Costard the clown, or Dull the constable."

"Biron is too accomplished a character to be lost to the world, and yet he could not appear without his fellow courtiers and the king: and if we were to leave out the ladies, the gentlemen would have no mistresses."

"Still we have some objections to the style, which we think savours more of the pedantic spirit of Shakespeare’s time than of his own genius; more of controversial divinity, and the logic of Peter Lombard, than of the inspiration of the Muse. It transports us quite as much to the manners of the court, and the quirks of courts of law, as to the scenes of nature or the fairyland of his own imagination. Shakespeare has set himself to imitate the tone of polite conversation then prevailing among the fair, the witty, and the learned, and he has imitated it but too faithfully. It is as if the hand of Titian had been employed to give grace to the curls of a full-bottomed periwig, or Raphael had attempted to give expression to the tapestry figures in the House of Lords."

"It is this foppery of delicate language, this fashionable plaything of his time, with which Shakspere is occupied in Love's Labours Lost. He shows us the manner in all its stages; passing from the grotesque and vulgar pedantry of Holofernes, through the extravagant but polished caricature of Armado, to become the peculiar characteristic of a real though still quaint poetry in Biron himself, who is still chargeable even at his best with just a little affectation. As Shakspere laughs broadly at it in Holofernes or Armado, so he is the analyst of its curious charm in Biron; and this analysis involves a delicate raillery by Shakspere himself at his own chosen manner."

"As happens with every true dramatist, Shakspere is for the most part hidden behind the persons of his creation. Yet there are certain of his characters in which we feel that there is something of self-portraiture. And it is not so much in his grander, more subtle and ingenious creations that we feel this — in Hamlet and King Lear — as in those slighter and more spontaneously developed figures, who, while far from playing principal parts, are yet distinguished by a peculiar happiness and delicate ease in the drawing of them; figures which possess, above all, that winning attractiveness which there is no man but would willingly exercise, and which resemble those works of art which, though not meant to be very great or imposing, are yet wrought of the choicest material. Mercutio, in Romeo and Juliet, belongs to this group of Shakspere’s characters — versatile, mercurial people, such as make good actors, and in whom the “Nimble spirits of the arteries,” the finer but still merely animal elements of great wit, predominate. A careful delineation of minor, yet expressive traits seems to mark them out as the characters of his predilection; and it is hard not to identify him with these more than with others. Biron, in Love’s Labours Lost, is perhaps the most striking member of this group. In this character, which is never quite in touch, never quite on a perfect level of understanding, with the other persons of the play, we see, perhaps, a reflex of Shakspere himself, when he has just become able to stand aside from and estimate the first period of his poetry."

"Here is a fashionable play; now, by three hundred years, out of fashion. Nor did it ever, one supposes, make a very wide appeal. It abounds in jokes for the elect. Were you not numbered among them you laughed, for safety, in the likeliest places. A year or two later the elect themselves might be hard put to it to remember what the joke was."

"And why anybody should ever say that Love’s Labour’s Lost is a bad play, the Lord He knoweth; for to my mind it is one of the most réussi things of its kind ever made."

"I take more unmixed pleasure from Love’s Labour’s Lost than from any other Shakespearean play. ... [It] is a festival of language, an exuberant fireworks display in which Shakespeare seems to seek the limits of his verbal resources, and discovers that there are none."