Our wooing doth not end like an old play;
  Jack hath not Jill: 

and Shakespeare strikes a passionate note across it at last, in the entrance of the messenger, who announces to the princess that the king her father is suddenly dead.

The merely dramatic interest of the piece is slight enough; only just sufficient, indeed, to form the vehicle of its wit and poetry.  The scene — a park of the King of Navarre — is unaltered throughout; and the unity of the play is not so much the unity of a drama as that of a series of pictorial groups, in which the same figures reappear, in different combinations but on the same background.  It is as if Shakespeare had intended to bind together, by some inventive conceit, the devices of an ancient tapestry, and give voices to its figures.  On one side, a fair palace; on the other, the tents of the Princess of France, who has come on an embassy from her father to the King of Navarre; in the midst, a wide space of smooth grass.

The same personages are combined over and over again into a series of gallant scenes — the princess, the three masked ladies, the quaint, pedantic king; one of those amiable kings men have never loved enough, whose serious occupation with the things of the mind seems, by contrast with the more usual forms of kingship, like frivolity or play.  Some of the figures are grotesque merely, and all the male ones at least, a little fantastic.  Certain objects reappearing from scene to scene — love-letters crammed with verses to the margin, and lovers’ toys — hint obscurely at some story of intrigue.  Between these groups, on a smaller scale, come the slighter and more homely episodes, with Sir Nathaniel the curate, the country-maid Jaquenetta, Moth or Mote the elfin-page, with Hiems and Ver, who recite “the dialogue that the two learned men have compiled in praise of the owl and the cuckoo.”  The ladies are lodged in tents, because the king, like the princess of the modern poet’s fancy, has taken a vow

  to make his court a little Academe,

and for three years’ space no woman may come within a mile of it; and the play shows how this artificial attempt was broken through.  For the king and his three fellow-scholars are of course soon forsworn, and turn to writing sonnets, each to his chosen lady.  These fellow-scholars of the king — “quaint votaries of science” at first, afterwards “affection’s men-at-arms” — three youthful knights, gallant, amorous, chivalrous, but also a little affected, sporting always a curious foppery of language, are, throughout, the leading figures in the foreground; one of them, in particular, being more carefully depicted than the others, and in himself very noticeable — a portrait with somewhat puzzling manner and expression, which at once catches the eye irresistibly and keeps it fixed.

Play is often that about which people are most serious; and the humourist may observe how, under all love of playthings, there is almost always hidden an appreciation of something really engaging and delightful.  This is true always of the toys of children:  it is often true of the playthings of grown-up people, their vanities, their fopperies even, their lighter loves; the cynic would add their pursuit of fame.  Certainly, this is true without exception of the playthings of a past age, which to those who succeed it are always full of a pensive interest — old manners, old dresses, old houses.  For what is called fashion in these matters occupies, in each age, much of the care of many of the most discerning people, furnishing them with a kind of mirror of their real inward refinements, and their capacity for selection.  Such modes or fashions are, at their best, an example of the artistic predominance of form over matter; of the manner of the doing of it over the thing done; and have a beauty of their own.  It is so with that old euphuism of the Elizabethan age — that pride of dainty language and curious expression, which it is very easy to ridicule, which often made itself ridiculous, but which had below it a real sense of fitness and nicety; and which, as we see in this very play, and still more clearly in the Sonnets, had some fascination for the young Shakespeare himself.  It is this foppery of delicate language, this fashionable plaything of his time, with which Shakespeare is occupied in Love’s Labours Lost.  He shows us the manner in all its stages; passing from the grotesque and vulgar pedantry of Holofernes, through the extravagant but polished caricature of Armado, to become the peculiar characteristic of a real though still quaint poetry in Biron himself, who is still chargeable even at his best with just a little affectation.  As Shakespeare laughs broadly at it in Holofernes or Armado, so he is the analyst of its curious charm in Biron; and this analysis involves a delicate raillery by Shakespeare himself at his own chosen manner.

This “foppery” of Shakespeare’s day had, then, its really delightful side, a quality in no sense “affected,” by which it satisfies a real instinct in our minds — the fancy so many of us have for an exquisite and curious skill in the use of words.  Biron is the perfect flower of this manner: 

  A man of fire-new words, fashion’s own knight: 

— as he describes Armado, in terms which are really applicable to himself.  In him this manner blends with a true gallantry of nature, and an affectionate complaisance and grace.  He has at times some of its extravagance or caricature also, but the shades of expression by which he passes from this to the “golden cadence” of Shakespeare’s own most characteristic verse, are so fine, that it is sometimes difficult to trace them.  What is a vulgarity in Holofernes, and a caricature in Armado, refines itself with him into the expression of a nature truly and inwardly bent upon a form of delicate perfection, and is accompanied by a real insight into the laws which determine what is exquisite in language, and their root in the nature of things.  He can appreciate quite the opposite style —

  In russet yeas, and honest kersey noes;

he knows the first law of pathos, that

  Honest plain words best suit the ear of grief.

  So here you find where light in darkness lies,
  Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes: —

as with some German commentators on Shakespeare.  Appealing always to actual sensation from men’s affected theories, he might seem to despise learning; as, indeed, he has taken up his deep studies partly in sport, and demands always the profit of learning in renewed enjoyment.  Yet he surprises us from time to time by intuitions which could come only from a deep experience and power of observation; and men listen to him, old and young, in spite of themselves.  He is quickly impressible to the slightest clouding of the spirits in social intercourse, and has his moments of extreme seriousness:  his trial-task may well be, as Rosaline puts it —

  To enforce the pained impotent to smile.

But still, through all, he is true to his chosen manner:  that gloss of dainty language is a second nature with him:  even at his best he is not without a certain artifice:  the trick of playing on words never deserts him; and Shakespeare, in whose own genius there is an element of this very quality, shows us in this graceful, and, as it seems, studied, portrait, his enjoyment of it.

As happens with every true dramatist, Shakespeare is for the most part hidden behind the persons of his creation.  Yet there are certain of his characters in which we feel that there is something of self-portraiture.  And it is not so much in his grander, more subtle and ingenious creations that we feel this — in Hamlet and King Lear — as in those slighter and more spontaneously developed figures, who, while far from playing principal parts, are yet distinguished by a peculiar happiness and delicate ease in the drawing of them; figures which possess, above all, that winning attractiveness which there is no man but would willingly exercise, and which resemble those works of art which, though not meant to be very great or imposing, are yet wrought of the choicest material.  Mercutio, in Romeo and Juliet, belongs to this group of Shakespeare’s characters — versatile, mercurial people, such as make good actors, and in whom the

  nimble spirits of the arteries,

the finer but still merely animal elements of great wit, predominate.  A careful delineation of minor, yet expressive traits seems to mark them out as the characters of his predilection; and it is hard not to identify him with these more than with others.  Biron, in Love’s Labours Lost, is perhaps the most striking member of this group.  In this character, which is never quite in touch, never quite on a perfect level of understanding, with the other persons of the play, we see, perhaps, a reflex of Shakespeare himself, when he has just become able to stand aside from and estimate the first period of his poetry.

1878.