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1 Word and Love Games Berowne and Ida’s Prince In love’s labor’s lost, Shakespeare shows what happens when the Princess of France and a bevy of her ladies visit the little academy of Navarre, a stronghold of young male courtiers and pedants resolved to woo their female guests with displays of extravagant erudition and wit. The young playwright celebrates his love affair with words while poking fun at their potential absurdity and excess. The play’s most brilliant adaptation, Tennyson’s The Princess, is an aspirant’s discovery of his own genius as a lyric poet. Tennyson also delights in the adolescent pranks of male transvestites, and gently satirizes the grand pretentiousness of Ida’s schemes for educational reform. Since the pretensions of Ida and her female colleagues are no less absurd than the pranks of the transvestite Prince and his fellow intruders, Tennyson, like Shakespeare, is able both to mock what he values and to celebrate what he mocks. Like Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech in Romeo and Juliet, Berowne’s discourse on light in Love’s Labor’s Lost is a spontaneous display of intellectual exuberance and wit. Ida’s exquisite songs and lyrics in The Princess function as the emotional counterpart of such esprit. They are specimens of “wordmusic ,” a phrase one critic uses to describe verse “with a minimum of meaning . . . (but of maximum emotional value . . . to the character that has to speak it)” (Granville-Barker, 1946–47, 2:418). Tennyson’s satire on women’s rights and educational reform is now as dated as Shakespeare’s attack on academic pedantry. But just as The Princess lives today in the acknowledged beauty of its songs and lyrics, so many of the dead jokes and lost topical allusions in Love’s Labor’s Lost are redeemed by flashes of poetic exuberance and wit. Amid his verbal gymnastics and brilliant antics as a poet, Shakespeare is learning his art as a dramatist. Tennyson’s very limits as a writer of satiric narrative and mock-epic verse also help him mature as a writer of songs and lyrics. In each case the weakness of the aspiring satirist is the strength of the evolving playwright or poet. 10 poetic beginnings $$$ The most artful youth in the retinue of Navarre’s king is Berowne, whose overflow of high spirits is both an exercise in sophisticated wit and a criticism of wit’s excess. Even in praising the female eye, Berowne is trapped in a toil of narcissism. Why! all delights are vain, but that most vain Which with pain purchas’d doth inherit pain: As, painfully to pore upon a book To seek the light of truth; while truth the while Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look. (Love’s Labor’s Lost 1.1.72–76) Addicted to couplets and snared by his use of four rhymes in two lines, Berowne is more enamored of the idea and language of love than of love itself. To fall in love with words that lack the light of reason and invention is to woo the mirror reflection of love, its shadow not its substance. In a riot of self-destructive wit, Berowne uses multiple meanings of light to show that the eye made blind by study beholds neither light nor knowledge but only darkness. Light seeking light doth light of light beguile: So, ere you find where light in darkness lies, Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes. Study me how to please the eye indeed, By fixing it upon a fairer eye. (1.1.77–81) Though the sixfold play on “light” is “the sheer exuberance of an athlete who has discovered that he can play what game he likes with words,” G. B. Harrison believes the speech is still important. “It is the answer of the ‘upstart crow’ whose Latin was little and whose Greek was less to those intellectual snobs who believed all learning lived in books” (1947, 890). Berowne never loves any woman as ardently as the Prince comes to love Ida in Tennyson’s version of Love’s Labor’s Lost. In truth, Berowne’s climactic speech, purportedly a celebration of love’s victory over learning, is little more than a triumph of special pleading and paradox. As Harold Bloom says, the speech “is superbly free of any concern for Rosaline, ostensible object of his passion” (1998, 130). O! we have made a vow to study, lords, And in that vow...

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