Theatre
" Love's Labour's Lost." By William Shakespeare. Produced by Tyrone Guthrie. At the West- minster Theatre.
Love's Labour's Lost, the spoilt child of Baconian, is Shake- speare's earliest play. Its literary genealogy is not immediately recognizable. It is, indeed, unique among Shakespeare's plays in that the plot is substantially of the author's own devising. The details of characterization, however, admit of certain debts. Ferdinand of Navarre, the central figure of the play, in whose territory its action takes place, is drawn from the Navarre whose name would have been made familiar to an Elizabethan audience by the civil war which was in progress at the time of the play's composition. The King's attendants, Biron, Longaville and Dumain, proceed from the same source. Armado, god-fathered by the Spanish Expedition, would have recalled " fantastical Monarcho," an eccentric Spaniard well known in London a dozen years before. On the internal struc- ture of the play, the spoors of Lyly and Sir Philip Sidney are easily traceable. Lyly's allegorical drama, Endymion, in which he had co-ordinated the admiration of Endymion for Cythia with Anjou's courtship of Queen Elizabeth, provides a clue, even down to the composition of their dialogue, to the characters of Armado and Moth by the witness of Sir Tophas and his page boy, Epiton. Rombus, a figure in Sidney's precious masque, The Lady of the May, performs a like function
for the schoolmaster Holofernes, whose pedantry, to details of phraseology, is accurately reflected. The characters' dramatic progeny are unmistakably percep- tible. Armado's pursuit of the rustic Jaquenetta is reproduced in Touchstone's fantastic approach to Audrey : Dull retains constabular rank and manner to reappear as Dogbetty Rosaline is an immature Beatrice : Biron a Hamlet, without Hamlet's problems or Hamlet's priggishness : Sir Nathaniel and Holofernes, the first of a long line of maiden curates and schoolmasters, satirical portraits hung in a gallery where reproductions are comparatively common.
So much for archaeological matters. It is hardly necessary in addition to swell the chorus which protests at the substance of the humour, that much of what must have had a sharp and immediately recognizable point for the original audience has now interest and meaning only for the well-equipped analyst. Shakespeare's main object in writing the play was not to achieve, either satirically or other:wise, an elaborate study in the technique of Euphuism, an overdecked and fustioned Elizabethan Point Counter Point. It was not his policy either to hitch his waggon to a falling star or to bring up his heavy artil- lery to knock down a row of ninepins. Nor was his interest pri- marily in character or plot. The plot is unexceptional, managed by a slight variant on traditional device ; the characters are imprecisely sketched. Love's Labour's Lost is Shakespeare's first attempt to supply a dramatic solution to a problem of whose relevance he was perpetually aware : the conflict between studied intentions and natural impulses. And his approach to the question is that of the poet, not that of the traditional playwright.
There is evidence in many of Shakespeare's plays, and no- where more amply than in his earliest, that co-existent with the author's interest in plot and character there was the inten- tion to fix in the minds of the audience a formal and clearly- marked design. In Love's Labour's Lost this intention is un- mistakably apparent. Satire and lyricism are worked together into a symmetrical pattern, of which our appreciation is intel- lectual and emotional, but the stimulus literary through the medium of language. We are aware not of a number of inter- dependent but separate themes, but of a single form ; of a poem shaped for the stage. And our approach to it must be the same as our approach to a poem. It is impossible to dislo- cate language from character and plot.
Mr. Tyrone Guthrie, with judicious telescoping and cutting, emphasises this aspect of the play which provides the clue to its proper understanding. He presents it as a masque, investing it with that precise measure of the remote and the actual which the play demands and the audience can sanction. Aided by Miss McArthur's balanced and original designs, he produces an effect of spontaneity and grace which, to at any rate one member of the audience, was wholly acceptable.
The acting was, for the most part, excellent ; but the casting, in at least two places, was not.
DEREK VERSCHOYLE.
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