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Love’s Labours Won

Assuming it’s not the title to a lost sequel to Love’s Labours Lost, I’ve always favored the theory that it’s an alternative title to All’s Well That Ends Well, Shakespeare’s highly problematic romantic comedy. There is no play in Shakespeare’s canon, that I’m aware of, where love, if that’s what is won in the end, […]

Assuming it’s not the title to a lost sequel to Love’s Labours Lost, I’ve always favored the theory that it’s an alternative title to All’s Well That Ends Well, Shakespeare’s highly problematic romantic comedy. There is no play in Shakespeare’s canon, that I’m aware of, where love, if that’s what is won in the end, is so plainly the product of labor. And I think that, rather than either the aggressive forwardness of the heroine or the manifest unworthiness of the hero, is the reason for our dissatisfaction with this play.

To summarize the main plot: Helena is the daughter of a famous doctor, and is adopted by the Countess of Rousillon when her father dies. The Countess has a son, Bertram, with whom Helena falls hopelessly in love – all this before the play begins. When the King of France falls ill, Helena sneaks off to Paris, and promises to cure him with her late father’s medicines, venturing death if she fails and earning a husband if she succeeds. Succeed she does, and chooses Bertram. Bertram, appalled at being wedded against his will to a low-born girl, flees to the Italian wars, promising never to acknowledge Helena as his wife until she can get the ring off his finger and show him a child of hers begotten of him. Needless to say, some months and one bed-trick later, Helena is able to produce both, and wins her groom.

Shaw admired Helena as the first “Ibsenite” heroine on the English stage precisely for this forwardness: she picks her man; she undertakes the quest to win him; she, when her fairly-won prize is snatched from her, wrenches the plot around by sheer force of will to bring about her desired ending. And for some critics, it is precisely this aggressive pursuit of a man by a woman that makes the play unsatisfying.

For others, starting with Samuel Johnson, the problem is Bertram. In the Great Cham’s own words:

I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram; a man noble without generosity, and young without truth; who marries Helen as a coward, and leaves her as a profligate: when she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a second marriage, is accused by a woman whom he has wronged, defends himself by falsehood, and is dismissed to happiness.

That “dismissed to happiness” is a particularly delicious touch – but it’s a line that skates around the most important question left open in the play, which is not: why does Helena still want Bertram? (a good question, but not the most important one) but rather: can this marriage possibly be happy? The play gives ample reason to doubt in the language of the final scene. Here’s Helena and Bertram’s final exchange, after she has revealed herself to him, and that she has accomplished the impossible feats of getting his ring and carrying his child:

HELENA:

Will you be mine, now you are doubly won?

BERTRAM:

If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly,
I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly.

HELENA:

If it appear not plain and prove untrue,
Deadly divorce step between me and you!

That’s an awful lot of conditionals for a loving reconciliation. And then Helena turns to her mother – or, rather, Bertram’s mother, whom she rejected by that name earlier in the play, now finally acknowledged as her own, without condition. The King concludes: “All yet seems well; and if it end so meet/ The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet.” Which isn’t entirely reassuring either.

But why can’t it be happy? Is it that Bertram’s character is so incorrigible? Perhaps – but if it is so, then we haven’t looked closely enough at a number of other purportedly happy marriages in Shakespeare that won’t end well. Johnson could not reconcile himself to Bertram. Could he to Demetrius? Claudio? Bassanio? Heck, what about Romeo, who, far from being the ultimate true lover, throws over his beloved Rosaline like so much old newspaper at the first sight of Juliet, then proceeds to be the main culprit responsible for the pile of bodies at the end of the play, mostly because of his infatuation with his own infatuation than out of any devotion to Juliet?

No, I don’t think the problem is that Helena is the active one; everyone loves Rosalind, and she takes quite the active part in shaping her fate. And I don’t think the problem is that Bertram is undeserving; that fault is too common among Shakespeare’s male lovers. The problem is the love is not a labor – but in this play, it is.

There’s no labor in Love’s Labours Lost. There is something lost – the lovers in Love’s Labours Lost don’t get to wed at the end of the play; death and royal obligations intervene – but not everything: they have fallen in love, we believe enduringly. But not by working at it. That play is play, is one long series of games, and it is through play that we see love blossom between the two quartets. And so it is in every story Shakespeare tells of a truly blossoming love. The labor by which Kate the Shrew is tamed consists of absurd games – and we know that love finally won when she joins in and plays along. Similarly with the verbal games played by Beatrice and Benedick – and the game played on both of them to trick them into acknowledging their mutual love. When Romeo and Juliet first meet, we know they have fallen in love at first sight because they spontaneously write a sonnet together.

If Bertram and Helena had a scene, early in the play, where they teased each other like siblings, and then Bertram was appalled at the prospect of actually marrying this girl – because she’s low-born; because she’s homely; because he’s always thought of her as a sister – then we’d believe that this is a romantic comedy, with an ending where “all’s well that ends well.” But there is no such scene. Instead, the only person whom Helena plays with is Parolles, the braggart and coward, with whom she has a brief verbal joust at the outset of the play. I think it is for this exchange, more than anything, that we are pleased to see Parolles survive his trial, and thrive, in his way – for all his faults, he’s the only one who can make Helena smile. And it strikes me as another inauspicious sign that Parolles is not merely unmasked (that had to happen), but is banished from Bertram’s company the same night that Helena accomplishes her impossible task via the bed trick.

We don’t believe this can end well because we have not seen our lovers together, even for a moment, showing us even the slightest glimpse of the play of love between them.

*   *   *

Needless to say, this makes the play a bit of a challenge to put on. The central problem – that this is a romantic comedy about two people who we have no reason to believe are actually in love – nags at us from the first. We keep waiting for that missing scene, for the evidence that will let us believe this story. And since we never get it, we are apt to get frustrated with the story rather than to reflect on it.

I’ve seen a couple of different solutions to this problem. One is to find an alternative emotional center in the relationship between Helena and the Countess of Rousillon. The two have a taut, Strindbergian scene early on in the play, where the Countess calls Helena her daughter and Helena flinches, refusing to acknowledge her as such. Ostensibly, Helena refuses because the only way she could be the Countess’s daughter would be by marrying Bertram, which is more than she can hope for – but this raises more psychological questions than it answers. Isn’t it more likely that she can’t be her daughter because then marrying Bertram would be incest? And who was Helena’s mother anyway – we hear a lot about her father, nothing about a mother; isn’t that suggestive? As noted above, the reconciliation between the Countess and her daughter-in-law is far warmer, and has far more of a suggestion of closure, of a completed movement, than the reconciliation between Helena and Bertram. So this is a viable way to read and stage the play: the story of a woman coming to accept a mother’s love by way of romantic catastrophe.

Another is to play up the seriousness of the military setting. Parolles can appear something of an obvious ridiculous figure – everyone but Bertram sees through him pretty quickly, after all – but he’s masquerading as something that everyone takes terribly seriously, and a production could play up this fact, the importance of martial honor in this world. This is a world at war. Bertram’s chief complaint, before he is wedded against his will, is that nobody will let him go to battle and win honor. What’s a woman’s place in this world? You would expect it to be exactly what Diana’s is: prey for the gallants of the wars, another object of conquest. And this is what Parolles avers – and Bertram as well. From Bertram’s social perspective, Helena and Diana are not terribly different. Let’s take Bertram’s complaint about Helena’s proposal at face value: it’s not that she feels like a sister, and it’s not that she is plain; it’s that she’s low-born. Made to be conquered by the likes of him, not mated with him as an equal. It’s not just snobbery; it’s a kind of militarist sexism: his manhood is offended by the match. Parolles is unmasked when he undertakes a parody quest to recover a lost drum; even Bertram is forced to acknowledge that he’s not a real man of honor.When Bertram is unmasked, at the end, what he learns, on this reading, is that he isn’t really a ladies man. He may want to love ‘em and leave ‘em – he may think that’s what a man does in this world of war – but he’s actually a faithful husband, in spite of all his efforts. Which actually has the potential to be a happy ending.

The recent production at the Delacorte Theatre goes in a third direction, one that doesn’t entirely work – though I honor the attempt.

In this production, the salient divide between Bertram and Helena – what we see and feel keeping them apart – isn’t class or the quasi-incestuous nature of their existing bond, but age. Annie Parisse’s Helena is an obviously mature woman, while Andre Holland’s Bertram is just barely of age. Bertram’s youth is noted in the play as well – he complains that his mother thinks he isn’t old enough to go to war, for example – but I had never thought of Helena as being distinctly older, nor did the loss of his youth jump out as a rationale for Bertram’s fury at the King’s matchmaking (indeed, in the text Bertram has had his eye on Lafew’s daughter all along).

The good thing about this choice is that it makes psychological sense to a modern audience, and enables us to sympathize a certain amount with Bertram. Bertram’s yearning to go to war, and his desperation to avoid this marriage, are of a piece: he wants to earn his own name before he is slotted into a social role determined for him by his elders. And it isn’t out of harmony with Helena either. While I had never thought of her as older than Bertram, she is the kind of young person the older generation – the Countess, Lafew, the French King – dote upon. Why can’t all the young people be like her?

And the age difference allows for one moment that has divided the critics. Before leaving Helena (as he purposes, forever, though she doesn’t know this), his new wife begs a little affection: “Strangers and foes do sunder, and not kiss.” There is no direction that he kiss her, and in most productions he declines or condescends at most to a peck on the forehead or some such. In this production, Bertram kisses Helena fully and lingeringly on the mouth.

It’s a puzzling choice in some ways, very much against the sense of the scene. But the sense I made of it is that Bertram doesn’t so much hate Helena specifically as hate the idea of being forced to marry – so young – and to someone older than him (spiritually older, more mature, as well as chronologically so). And so he does kiss her – and is surprised by her warmth and passion, almost to the point of repenting his decision to go. Almost, but not quite.

This doesn’t solve all problems. Helena, after all, still “wins” in the end – and total victory is not generally a prelude to a happy marriage. But the bigger problem is that, from where I sat, Helena’s passion and warmth was, well, not exactly manifest. I’m not sure this was a problem of her chemistry with Holland’s Bertram, however. Rather, I think the problem crept in with Tonya Perkins. I feel a cad for saying so, since nobody seems to agree with me, but I found her performance as the Countess to be inexplicably cold. And I didn’t feel I was dealing with aristocratic reserve; I just felt like she didn’t have genuinely strong feelings for Helena. That scene, when she calls herself her mother and demands why Helena will not accept to call her such – I’ve seen that scene played laceratingly, and in this production it was limp, Perkins interrogating Parisse with almost clinical detachment.

I felt the loss of the Helena-Rousillon dynamic keenly, but I think the greater loss was to the Helena-Bertram dynamic. If you want me to buy that this story has a happy ending – as director Daniel Sullivan plainly did – then you have to show me signs of love between the principals before the ending. You just have to. And that’s what the anomalous kiss was for. But the only thing that could justify that kiss was passion on Helena’s part, not Bertram’s. That’s something Bertram could respond to, with surprise. And that’s not what I saw. In which case – and this is a strange thing to say given that everyone else in the play is wondering what she sees in him – what does he see in her?

The rest of the play is ancillary to this central question, but it occupies a good deal of stage time, much of it enjoyable. John Collum was a less-tyrannical King of France than the one I carry around in my head, but he certainly was winning. David Manis was an appropriately acerbic Lavatch; Dakin Matthews well-timed as the quipping Lafew. Kristin Connolly didn’t really bring an additional dimension to Diana – which is a pity, I think; she’s so central to the plot, I’d like her to actually have a character, rather than being a prop for Helena’s designs. And Reg Rogers rather stole the show as Parolles, which is what Parolles is supposed to do, but the more he mugged and swaggered the stupider Bertram seemed for not seeing through this obvious fool. But that’s the usual challenge with this character: the funnier he is to the audience, and therefore the more he does to engage them in the play, the more he damages the central plotline by making Bertram seem an absolute idiot for not seeing what anyone with eyes could see.

But the heart of the play is the Helena-Bertram axis. I give credit to Parisse, Holland and Sullivan for trying a novel approach to making this romance plausible. And if it didn’t entirely work, I don’t blame them too much, as they were swimming against a current that Shakespeare himself set flowing.

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