Abstract
Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost opens with the king of Navarre and three of his lords firmly forswearing women, but when the princess of France and her three ladies come to town, the courtiers’ resolve promptly crumbles. In a complicated scene at the end of act 4, each of the lords, unaware that he is being observed, recites a poem revealing his love for one of the ladies of France. In reverse order, each then steps forward to chastise his compatriots—only to have his own hypocrisy revealed.
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Notes
Bernard Shaw, Shaw on Shakespeare: An Anthology of Bernard Shaw’s Writings on the Plays and Production of Shakespeare, ed. Edwin Wilson (London: Dutton, 1961; repr., New York: Applause, 1989), 114. The production was staged in 1886.
Felicia Hardison Londré, “From a Theatregoer’s Notebook: The RSC’s Love’s Labour’s Lost,” in “Love’s Labour’s Lost”: Critical Essays, ed. Felicia Hardison Londré (New York: Garland, 1997), 411–14. The production, directed by Barry Kyle, starred Kenneth Branagh as the King. Similar visual conventions are evident in the film version Branagh later directed, in which Alessandro Nivola as the King hides beneath a table and holds a tiny potted plant up to his face.
Kenneth Branagh, Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shepperton, UK: Pathé Pictures et al., 2000), 35 mm film.
Miriam Gilbert, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Shakespeare in Performance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 7.
Charles Gildon, “Critical Remarks on His Plays,” in The Works of Mr. William Shakespear [sic], ed. Nicholas Rowe, 7 vols. (1709–10; repr., New York: AMS, 1967), repr. in Londré, “Love’s Labour’s Lost”: Critical Essays, 45–48.
Although I focus on visuality, I have been influenced by scholarship on the other senses. See David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, eds., The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 1997);
Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999);
Wes Folkerth, The Sound of Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 2002);
Elizabeth D. Harvey, ed., Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003);
Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007);
and Holly Dugan, The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).
See, for example, Anne Righter [Barton], Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962), 150–51;
G. R. Hibbard, ed., Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 19;
and J. L. Styan, Shakespeare’s Stagecraft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 31, 104.
Quoted in Barbara Hodgdon, “Rehearsal Process as Critical Practice: John Barton’s 1978 Love’s Labour’s Lost,” Theatre History Studies 8 (1988): 11–34, repr. in Londré, “Love’s Labour’s Lost”: Critical Essays, 387–409, 392.
R. A. Foakes, ed., Henslowe’s Diary, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 319–20.
Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson, A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 236.
Gilbert, Love’s Labour’s Lost, 21. See also Miriam Gilbert, “The Disappearance and Return of Love’s Labor’s Lost,” in Shakespeare’s Sweet Thunder: Essays on the Early Comedies, ed. Michael J. Collins (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997), 155–75.
On property trees, see Werner Habicht, “Tree Properties and Tree Scenes in Elizabethan Theater,” Renaissance Drama 4 (1971): 69–92;
Bernard Beckerman, Shakespeare at the Globe, 1599–1609 (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 81;
E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923), 3:89;
and Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 189.
Alan C. Dessen, Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 59–63, argues against Habicht’s view that property trees were put onstage to enhance the “atmosphere.”
See John Kerrigan, ed., Love’s Labour’s Lost, The New Penguin Shakespeare (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1982);
and Harry Levin, “Sitting in the Sky (Love’s Labor’s Lost, 4.3),” in Shakespeare’s “Rough Magic”: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, ed. Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 113–30.
Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 78.
On this holiday and related performance traditions, see Clifford Davidson, Festivals and Plays in Late Medieval Britain (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 4–24;
Thomas P. Campbell, “Liturgy and Drama: Recent Approaches to Medieval Theatre,” Theatre Journal 33 (1981): 291–93, 299–301;
Joel Fredell, “The Three Clerks and St. Nicholas in Medieval England,” Studies in Philology 92 (1995): 181–202;
and Nicholas Orme, “The Culture of Children in Medieval England,” Past and Present 148 (1995): 70–73.
Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 25.
E. K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903), 1:374.
Records of Early English Drama: Herefordshire, Worcestershire, ed. David N. Klausner (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 674.
As Robert Nelson puts it, “In other places and times,” vision could be “an ethical, a moral, theological, and even political issue,” not primarily a biological one. Robert S. Nelson, ed., introduction to Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1–2.
Translations in Peter Meredith and John E. Tailby, eds., The Staging of Religious Drama in Europe in the Later Middle Ages: Texts and Documents in English Translation (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1983), 300. For more on the Lucerne stage plans, see ibid., 283–85;
John E. Tailby, “Die Luzerner Passionsspielaufführung des Jahres 1583: zur Deutung der Bühnenpläne Renward Cysats,” in The Theatre in the Middle Ages, ed. Herman Braet, Johan Nowé, and Gilbert Tournoy (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 1985), 352–61;
and M. Blakemore Evans, The Passion Play of Lucerne: An Historical and Critical Introduction (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1943).
For the Donaueschingen plans, see Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, 2:84; and A. M. Nagler, The Medieval Religious Stage: Shapes and Phantoms, trans. George C. Schoolfield (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 41.
A more detailed discussion of staging may be found in M. Blakemore Evans, “The Staging of the Donaueschingen Passion Play,” parts 1 and 2, Modern Language Review 15 (1920): 65–76 and 279–97.
However, see Joseph A. Dane, Abstractions of Evidence in the Study of Manuscripts and Early Printed Books (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 41–49, especially 46–48, for a discussion of potential problems with Chambers’s plans, including the one for the Donaueschingen Passion play. The play itself is usually presumed to have been performed around 1485, but the only extant manuscript of it is from the sixteenth century, and Nagler has argued that the plan was actually for the Villingen Passion play, also found in the Donaueschingen library but dating to about 1585 (Medieval Religious Stage, 36–47).
See David M. Bevington, Action Is Eloquence: Shakespeare’s Language of Gesture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984);
and George R. Kernodle, From Art to Theatre: Form and Convention in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), 130–53.
On the staging of soliloquies, see my argument about Weimann’s influence in chapter 1. On the development of the “downstage” convention, see Edward A. Langhans, “The Post-1660 Theatres as Performance Spaces,” in A Companion to Restoration Drama, ed. Susan J. Owen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 3–18. For a useful corrective, see Smith, Acoustic World, 213–14, which argues that soliloquies were spoken from the middle of the platform, halfway between the stage pillars—the amphitheatre’s most acoustically powerful position.
Derek Peat, “Looking Back to Front: The View from the Lords’ Room,” in Shakespeare and the Sense of Performance: Essays in the Tradition of Performance Criticism in Honor of Bernard Beckerman, ed. Marvin Thompson and Ruth Thompson (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989), 182, 185.
David Wiles, A Short History of Western Performance Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 165.
John R. Elliott Jr., “Early Staging in Oxford,” in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 71.
Translations in David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 149.
Eric Mercer, English Art, 1553–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 55.
Grammaticus Musaeus, The divine poem of Musaeus. First of all bookes, trans. George Chapman (London, 1616), A3r. On Jones’s incorporation of English architectural practices into his classical designs, see Christy Anderson, Inigo Jones and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Pauline Kiernan, Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 9, 133–34, 138–39.
For further examples, see Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983);
and Lucy Gent, ed., Albion’s Classicism: The Visual Arts in Britain, 1550–1660 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).
Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, 4th ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 247.
Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).
Caroline van Eck, ed., British Architectural Theory, 1540–1750: An Anthology of Texts (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), 53–54.
Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 178–253.
Carl Horstmann, ed., Minor Poems of the Vernon Manuscript, 2 vols. (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1892–1919), 1:175,
quoted in Leah Sinanoglou, “The Christ Child as Sacrifice: A Medieval Tradition and the Corpus Christi Plays,” Speculum 48 (1973): 499.
Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400– c. 1580, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 100.
Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 152.
Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 20.
Katharine Park, “Impressed Images: Reproducing Wonders,” in Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison (New York: Routledge, 1998), 264.
Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early-Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 19.
Bob Scribner, “Ways of Seeing in the Age of Dürer,” in Dürer and His Culture, ed. Dagmar Eichberger and Charles Zika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 109.
Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, ed., A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, 2 vols. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978), 2:447, quoted in Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 161; on saints as friends and neighbors, see Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 160–63.
Eamon Duffy, “Devotion to the Crucifix and Related Images in England on the Eve of the Reformation,” in Bilder und Bildersturm im Spätmittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Bob Scribner (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 1990), 29.
Records of Early English Drama: Oxford, ed. John R. Elliott Jr. et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 1:387.
On tragic affect and pity, see Marissa Greenberg, “The Tyranny of Tragedy: Catharsis in England and The Roman Actor,” Renaissance Drama 39 (2011): 163–96.
On treason, see Rebecca Lemon, Treason by Words: Literature, Law, and Rebellion in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006);
Peter Lake and Michael Questier, “Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric Under the Gallows: Puritans, Romanists and the State in Early Modern England,” Past and Present 153 (1996): 64–107;
and John H. Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Régime (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
Christopher Marsh, Popular Religion in Sixteenth-Century England: Holding Their Peace (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), 11. See also Diehl, Staging Reform, 96.
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, ed. John T. McNeill, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 4.17.14, quoted in Diehl, Staging Reform, 106–7.
On consubstantiation, see Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England: A Collaborative Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 26.
“Mankind,” in Medieval Drama, ed. David Bevington (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 901–38.
On speech acts producing discontinuous subjectivity in morality plays, see Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985), 18–32.
“The Croxton Play of the Sacrament,” in Medieval Drama: An Anthology, ed. Greg Walker (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 212–33.
On the exposure of criminals by an omniscient God, see Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
See Dessen and Thomson, Dictionary of Stage Directions, 128. For discussion of theatrical conventions related to darkness and light, see also R. B. Graves, “The Duchess of Malfi at the Globe and Blackfriars,” Renaissance Drama 9 (1978): 193–209;
and R. B. Graves, Lighting the Shakespearean Stage, 1567–1642 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999).
Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedie Containing the lamentable end of Don Horatio, and Belimperia: with the pittifull death of olde Hieronimo (London, 1592), K4v; Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy , ed. David Bevington (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 4.4.118.
Alan C. Dessen, Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 53.
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© 2012 Erika T. Lin
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Lin, E.T. (2012). Staging Sight: Visual Paradigms and Perceptual Strategies in Love’s Labor’s Lost. In: Shakespeare and the Materiality of Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137006509_3
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