Idleness Working: the Discourse of Love's Labor from Ovid through Chaucer and Gower

Conclusion

Conclusion Your brother and my sister no sooner met but they looked; no sooner looked but they loved; no sooner loved but they sighed; no sooner sighed but they asked one another the reason; no sooner knew the reason but they sought the remedy; and in these degrees have they made a pair of stairs to marriage, which they will climb incontinent, or else be incontinent before marriage. —Shakespeare’s Rosalind Work is love made visible. —Kahlil Gibran Rosiland’s description in Shakespeare’s As You Like It of the progress in the relationship between Oliver and Celia encapsulates in many ways an ideal paradigm in the discourse of love’s labor.1 While the lovers fall in love at first sight, they are not prostrated by overwhelming emotion. On the contrary, love sets them to work in a reasonable and purposeful manner. The dart of love enters through a glance; the glance leads to sighs, but the sighs immediately lead to a search for both reasons and remedies. Shakespeare’s remedy, however, is not a rejection of love in the tradition of Ovid’s Remedia amoris or Gower’s Confessio Amantis . On the contrary, the remedy includes analysis and determined effort: the building of a set of stairs, a series of discrete but ascending steps leading to the fulfillment of their love, which is the marriage that occurs at the end of the play. Contrary to the assertion of Denis de Rougemont, happy love does have a history. Shakespeare’s comedies present a part of that history, and the ancient and medieval literary tradition that has been the focus of this study presents another. In the earlier tradition, however, marriage is not presented as the top of love’s stairway; that end comes later, further along in the “embourgeoisement de l’eros.” The end in the 1. As You Like It: Comedies: The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997) 5.2.29–35 (643).  ancient and medieval tradition is either successful courtship or reproduction or both. Indeed, a notable tradition of constructing love as a form of labor begins with Ovid and continues through the Middle Ages. The tradition is saturated with the labor ideologies of the times and cultures of the various authors who contributed to it. More correct, however, two literary traditions of love’s labor were created. One starts with Ovid, a literary figure who had an impressive and continuous influence on medieval writers. In the Ars amatoria, Ovid writes an ars erotica, a manual of love’s labor. He begins a tradition in which constructing such labor is “rhetorical ,” playful, and centered on the labor of courtship. In contrast, the second tradition is centered on the labor of procreation, and it tends to be, at least in its beginnings, philosophical, conservative, and serious. The first begins with Ovid and continues through the De amore, Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la rose (RI), and the Troilus. The second begins with the De planctu naturae and then is put into dialog with the first in Jean de Meun’s Roman de la rose (RII), the Confessio Amantis, and the Parlement of Foules. In the first, the object is to “work” at courtship, which is ultimately a game, and the anticipated results include finding a lover, winning a lover, and keeping a lover, the three major labors of the Ars amatoria. In this tradition, the labor discourse is double-voiced and, in the earlier texts, often subversive not only of the mainstream labor ideologies but also of orthodox moralities. In the second, the object is to labor to produce children. Here the writers picture the genitals as tools. The work is serious, and it plays a key role in the communal effort to build human population. Those who refuse to perform this work, because they are homosexuals , celibates, or just too old, are either condemned or corrected. The labor discourse in the second tradition supports or even goes beyond the prevailing labor ideologies in that it always considers labor a positive value and judges labor by means of what it can produce. Although progressive in its labor ideology, it is conservative in its morality, usually supporting traditional natural law sexual ethics. Marriage, however, plays no overt role even in this second tradition. This dual tradition is starkly highlighted in a comparison of the first two medieval works discussed in this book: the De amore, representing the first tradition...