love’s labour’s lost

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John Dowland, Shakespeare, and Courtly Love

January 12, 2008 in Analyzing Shakespearean Plays | No comments

I was listening to Classic FM, a fantastic UK radio station, and I heard someone being interviewed compare the lyrical qualities of the music of John Dowland (1563-1626) to the writings of Will Shakespeare. From what I can tell, Dowland was all about longing, heartbreak, desire unfulfilled, and other elements of courtly love that are depressing but have nonetheless entertained us for centuries. (If you think about it, many modern pop songs are about pining for love unattainable or as yet unattained. We’re addicted to this stuff!)

Wikipedia reproduces a snippet from one of Dowland’s songs, Flow my Tears:

Flow, my teares, fall from youre springs,
Exiled for ever, let mee mourn
Where night’s black bird hir sad infamy sings,
There let mee live forlorn.

Without citing examples, I’m going to take a chance and say Shakespeare didn’t take courtly love very seriously in his plays. Most of the examples of courtly love I can remember happened in Shakespeare’s comedies like Merry Wives of Windsor where the practice was rather mocked. But when it comes to his sonnets, my goodness! They’re all positively packed with melodramatic, bittersweet yearning and restrained desire. Here, I’ll flip to a random page in my book o’ sonnets and you’ll see…

Sonnet 75

So are you to my thoughts as food to life,
Or as sweet seasoned showers are to the ground;
And for the peace of you I hold such strife
As ‘twixt a miser and his wealth is found:
Now proud as an enjoyer, and anon
Doubting the filching age will steal his treasure;
Now counting best to be with you alone,
Then bettered that the world may see my pleasure:
Sometime all full with feasting on your sight,
And by and by clean starvèd for a look;
Possessing or pursuing no delight
Save what is had or must from you be took.
Thus do I pine and surfeit day by day,
Or gluttoning on all, or all away.

…it makes me want to gag myself. I seriously just randomly flipped to that sonnet and the last two lines of it happen to more or less define courtly love.

I think the sonnets were like Shakespeare’s little diary that he kept hidden in his top drawer. You know, the one bound in pink with the little space for you to write your name (”This is the secret diary of _______… keep OUT!”) and the little lock on the side that your younger brother breaks open to get at your private thoughts. And there are little hearts doodled on the page margins.

Yeah.

I, for one, am glad that Will didn’t often make courtly love a dominant element of his major works (besides the obvious like Romeo and Juliet or Love’s Labour’s Lost, but I hesitate to call that love courtly, either, per se).

When I shop for music CD’s* at Newbury Comics I make my purchase based on 3 things:

  1. Personal recommendations or previous listens. Or, in the absence of either of those…
  2. Cool cover art, and most importantly
  3. Non-love-themed track titles.

I always, always check to make sure the songs aren’t all called Hey baby or I want you, baby or Be my baby, baby, etc., because I want something more creative than your typical love song. I want music that’s got a few good ideas, and while love songs can have amazing ideas the bulk of them are just chanting the same mantras of desire, lust, and heartbreak that you can find in 100 other places.

Yes, Will Shakespeare included a love story in almost every single one of his plays. But when you think of Titus Andronichus or Richard III or Macbeth or even The Winter’s Tale, do you think of a love story? I don’t. Each has its own emotions and motivations and messages that use love as a tool but don’t exist solely for the telling of the love story. And I think that’s good. People who live their whole lives for love miss out on some of the most exciting thoughts, endeavors, and personal journeys that exist outside of romance. There’s more to life than wooing and procreation. Those drive us, but other things steer us. Don’t be content with going in a straight line, focusing all your energy on the game of love.

That being said, try not to go entirely without love, either. I’m okay if the CD I buy at Newbury Comics has one or two love songs on it.

My point is, Shakespeare seemed to treat love in two distinct ways when he wrote, depending on whether he was writing a play or writing a sonnet. Sonnet Will is definitely Dowlandesque. And even though I seem to have an unhealthy aversion to love songs, I’ll give John Dowland a listen anyhow.

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*I intentionally put that apostrophe in “CD’s.” Writing “CDs” looks weird to me. It’s like writing “I got all As on my report card” or “I grew up in the 1950s.” It just seems wrong without the apostrophe, even though you’re writing plurals and not possessives. “I got A’s.” “I’m from the 90’s.” Much better.

Love’s Labour’s Lost

January 7, 2008 in Analyzing Shakespearean Plays | No comments

The ending of Love’s Labour’s Lost is kind of a downer. It’s this carefree romantic comedy in the spirit of Much Ado About Nothing, only in the end the guys don’t get the girls. The ladies bugger off to France at the last moment, leaving the disappointed men with a task ahead: go to a remote location and study and remain celibate for one year. After that, the ladies will be theirs.

At first glance this ending seems to exist solely for the purpose of throwing off the cliche romantic comedy ending. Oops, not everything turns out the way you think it will. Oh, well. That’s life.

But really there’s a deeper message in this not-so-Hollywood ending. It sends an important message to all of us who’ve ever proclaimed ourselves free of love, even temporarily. The danger is that, like the four kinsmen starring in Love’s Labour’s Lost or Benedick and Beatrice from Much Ado About Nothing, we suddenly find ourselves enamored the man or woman of our dreams with or without the mind’s consent. It’s the shock of this sudden love that makes us forget, absolutely, the reasons we enjoyed being single only moments before.

So what does Love’s Labour’s Lost’s non-Hollywood ending teach us? Answer: to wait a moment.

Or a week. Or a month. Or a year.

When you think you’ve found the one, don’t obsess over it. Don’t fuel your hopes with dreams of new beginnings. You don’t have to be skeptical–in fact, I encourage you to be optimistic–but you should always remember that life is hardly ever so simple that you and this other person can suddenly and absolutely accommodate each other’s lives and love without having to overcome some major hurdles. To be more specific, they’re from France and you’re from Nevarre; it just can’t work.

The inspiration for this post came when I realized that, after enduring a heartbreak, just like the characters from LLL I find myself becoming a scholar. I lose myself in thought. I turn on the classical radio station and read Shakespeare and take notes. I read political journals. I start debates with my friends. I take long walks. I read more books.

After his big breakup with his girlfriend of five years, my best friend started playing the guitar. We started having better conversations, too. It was like he woke up a little bit. What is it that makes us undertake a personal renaissance after a romantic disappointment? Is it all about reinvention and improvement of ourselves since we’ve lost confidence in our ability to interest another human being? Or is it simply a distraction?

Perhaps, if used correctly, this tendency to grow our minds in times of sadness can be used not to help us get past relationships, but rather to ensure their longevity. Perhaps it doesn’t have to be about improving or distracting ourselves. Rather, perhaps we should use the urge to lose ourselves in thought as a device to slow ourselves down. Why rush into things? If you feel that you’ve found someone very special, someone you could spend the rest of your life with, and if you think that feeling may be requited, then why push? Before you get too carried away with the idea of love, marriage, and baby carriages, take a step back. Look at your life in context. Are you both living in Nevarre? Maybe not. And if not, then find a way to make yourself understand that things just won’t work out right now. Not the way they are.

It’s a disappointing thought.

But use that disappointment. Mash it up into coal and throw it in the fire; let it drive the engine that makes you think, read, write, take walks, and play the guitar. Let it distract you. Let it improve you. Then, after a week, a month, a year…

…come back and visit that love you felt. And you may be surprised at how much you’ve changed. Even more surprising may be how little you need that love now, contrasted with the memory of how much you needed it a year ago. And you can move on, free and happy, to find true happiness.

But.

If you still want what you were after a year ago… Now you know what you need to do. Now you know what you want. And isn’t that half of living well? If Ferdinand, Berowne, Longaville, and Dumaine still want the French girls after their year of celibate study, then they can have it with the knowledge that it’s truly right. Just imagine.

Photo by aussiegal

All the World’s a Stage, Except Study Hall

October 3, 2007 in Shakespearean Language | No comments

My younger brother is going to try out for Twelfth Night today after school. He had a couple of passages from it that he’ll be expected to speak aloud at the audition. His plan: go over those lines for the first time at study hall today.

One year at UNH I considered auditioning for a production of Much Ado About Nothing. It would have been the first time I was on stage since high school. The night before the audition I found a passage from Love’s Labour’s Lost I thought I’d recite the next day. I quickly discovered that it takes more than just a couple of silent readthroughs to be able to fully understand one of Will’s soliloquys. I was out on the Hetzel Hall porch past midnight reading the lines aloud and still my effort felt rushed and futile. I didn’t know what many of the words meant. I wasn’t going to have time to flesh out the attitude of the text. I didn’t really know the story of the play it came from so I couldn’t put it in context. In the end, I didn’t even go to the audition. (I know, I know… chicken…)

Will’s words sound goofy the first ten times you speak them aloud. Like when your Spanish teacher makes you read a paragraph from your textbook outloud for the class. It takes years of practice before you can do a cold poetry reeading and nail it.

Do not wait until study hall on the day of the audition to peruse your Shakespeare passage. You can’t even read it aloud in study hall. You might as well be admiring the artwork on the cover of the playbook. Give yourself some time to get down and dirty with Will before you try to be a host to his words.

That said… Good luck, Tom!