Nature and art

Nuttall describes Love’s Labour’s Lost as manifesting an “hysteria of style” like the hysteria of Titus , but with a concentration on a “feast of languages.” The setting for the play is a humanist academy, but one that also follows a medieval rule of renunciation of the flesh in favor of the mind, the replacement of nature by art and philosophy. He suggests that “we are dealing with profound, simple antinomies: action and contemplation, nature and art, body and mind, and by an elementary logic it would seem to follow that, if sex is an affair of the body, the life of the mind must be asexual.”

That is the nub of the play’s action: Berowne is skeptical about this assumption from the beginning, and his viewpoint is vindicated in the end. As soon as the ladies show up, as we know they will, nature confronts art and the men begin to realize they have things to learn in love that they cannot learn in books: “Theory is error, overtaken and displaced by fact.” Or, again, “Theory is nothing, practice is all; words are no match for things; art is vain, nature is supreme.” This is the “message” of the play.

Yet, Shakespeare cannot develop this message without artifice, without employing the very tools that he is attacking. He cannot attack the absurd erudition of Holofernes without employing the artifice of language. He uses art to question art and to celebrate nature. This comes to a climax in Berowne’s highly intricate, rhetorical poetic denunciation of “taffeta phrases” and “three-piled hyperboles,” after which Rosaline asks him to do with without the Frenchifying it: “Sans ‘sans,’ I pray you.” The irony is sharper than that, though, because Shakespeare not only cannot help but use language, but he writes a play where language floats free from nature and becomes a world unto itself. Because language is “a formal system,” it “makes possible flights of verbal ingenuity that can make us forget material reality. This is the thought that haunts the effortlessly witty Berowne and it haunted Shakespeare too.”

Especially when death intrudes at the end with the announcement that the King of France has died, they play reveals a Shakespeare who is “seriously disturbed.” According to Nuttall, “His fear is not the Nominalist fear that verbal abstractions refer to nothing at all. Shakespeare’s worry is ethical. He grasps the psychological truth that even if words are variously engaged with the extra-verbal world, we can, by a trick of the mind, focus on the formal expression and so lose full engagement, even while we are still applauding our own cleverness. Of this he is ashamed.”