LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST –The One With Honorificabilitudinitatibus

And if you are wondering just what on earth ”honorificabilitudinit-atibus” is, it just happens to be longest word found in Shakespeare! A latin construction, it means ”the state of being able to accept honours”, and is uttered more or less as a joke by the character Costard the clown as an ironic counter to some of the long, long sentences of what seems like gobbledegook spoken by the pedantic schoolmaster Holofernes. The word also, apparently, is an anagram of Hi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi –which translates into English as ”These plays, F. Bacon’s offspring, are preserved for the world” –and thus often presented as evidence that Francis Bacon was the true writer of this and all the other plays attributed to Shakespeare. Well, let’s not get into THAT debate right now!

However, the use of honorificabilitudinitatibus does seem to me to point to the salient feature of Love’s Labour’s Lost –one that both demonstrates its uniqueness AND its weakness: its cleverness. For it is a very clever play; too clever for its own good. And by clever I don’t mean in terms of plot, because that is extremely simple, but in its use of language. It is full of playful, witty and tricky twists and turns of language, and so much so that this ultimately gets in the way of a many people’s enjoyment of the play’s genuine sentiments. It is thus an acquired taste, not a play that is digested without close attention, and it is easily dismissed as too obscure for most modern audiences unless heavily edited or adapted. It’s certainly worlds apart from the preceding play The Comedy of Errors and obviously written for a completely different audience, for much of its humour is sophisticated and elaborate, whereas the previous play relied much more on in-your-face situational and farcial comedy for its laughs.

And yet Love’s Labour’s Lost does contains some very funny scenes, and some terrific humoristic characters –including one of Shakespeare’s most interesting creations Don Adriano de Armado –the fantastical Spaniard who seems at first so outrageously over-the-top that laughing at him seems too little, but who then emerges as a character who appeals to our sympathy through his incredibly touching earnestness. A character both comic and melancholic; brash, yet tender, and totally without the cynicism that marks some of Shakespeare’s other comic characters.

Though I have come to admire and appreciate the deftness involved in its writing, I cannot say that this play is among my favourite of Shakspeare’s comedies, and reading it has taken me longer than all the others I have read up until now –simply because the language is so elaborate, and checking meanings at every other word takes away the instant enjoyment of other, more ”flowing”, works. It is a play that demands a lot of the reader/audience on a language level, especially in the comic exchanges, but let’s not forget, this is above all a romantic comedy, and it is in its romantic passages that we, today, probably find most delight. For there are some truly wonderful and beautiful reflections on romance and love and wooing to be found here, and these passages are far more accessible to us than much of the dated comic material. With A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet following this play in the chronology, Shakespeare’s mind is now clearly filled with a need and desire to examine ideas about love and romance, that find expression in such wonderfully different forms. A lost play known only by its title, Love’s Labour’s Won, may have been a continuation of this play, or a further examination of the ways of love, but that's another of those vexing Shakespeare mysteries that we shall probably never know the answer to.

I do recommend anyone wishing to tackle Love’s Labour’s Lost for the first time to read Harley Granville-Barker’s brilliant introduction to the play. His is a practical and sensible viewpoint, valuable to both reader and theatre-goer, and provides a refreshingly readable explanation of much that is obscure in the text. Some of the more academic editions have a field day with this play, with their footnotes covering more page area than the text itself, and though perhaps of interest to dedicated students, these footnotes seem often as bloated as the long-winded utterences of Holofernes himself! In conclusion: not to everybody’s taste, but fascinating nonetheless.

Favourite Line:

Berowne:
And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Make heaven drowsy with the harmony.
(Act IV, Sc.3)

Character I would most like to play: Don Armado