LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST

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.  So that we believe we may let the whole play stand as it is, and we shall hardly venture to ‘set a mark of reprobation on it’.  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.  Shakespeare has put an excellent description of this fashionable jargon into the mouth of the critical Holofernes ’as too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it’; and nothing can be more marked than the difference when he breaks loose from the trammels he had imposed on himself, ‘as light as bird from brake’, and speaks in his own person.  We think, for instance, that in the following soliloquy the poet has fairly got the start of Queen Elizabeth and her maids of honour;

Biron.  O! and I forsooth in love, I that have been love’s whip; A very beadle to an amorous sigh:  A critic; nay, a night-watch constable, A domineering pedant o’er the boy, Than whom no mortal more magnificent.  This whimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy, This signior Junio, giant dwarf, Dan Cupid, Regent of love-rimes, lord of folded arms, Th’ anointed sovereign of sighs and groans:  Liege of all loiterers and malcontents, Dread prince of plackets. king of codpieces, Sole imperator, and great general Of trotting parators (O my little heart!) And I to be a corporal of his field, And wear his colours like a tumbler’s hoop!  What?  I love!  I sue!  I seek a wife!  A woman, that is like a German clock, Still a repairing; ever out of frame; And never going aright, being a watch, And being watch’d, that it may still go right?  Nay, to be perjur’d, which is worst of all:  And among three to love the worst of all, A whitely