“A curious foppery of language”
We talked in the podcast about the affected, highly stylised language employed in the play, especially by the young noblemen. The Victorian critic Walter Pater described the self-conscious artifice of their speech as “a curious foppery of language”. The play is full of men who count their eloquence as one of their chief attributes. They indulge in continuous bouts of wit combat – each trying to outdo the other. The rhythms of their exchanges are built from much repetition and punning, where they pick up on what was last said and play on the variable meanings of words. The effect of this banter is enhanced by rhyme being interwoven in sequential lines shared between multiple characters. There is also lots of sexual innuendo of course in the men’s banter. The result is a strong sense that these men inhabit a closed, self-consciously performative world, sharing a private language that we can only observe, and may not even fully understand. This self-referential sense is underscored by characters picking up and repeating each other’s use of words or rhymes.

As we noted in our conversation, 65% of the dialogue in the play is in verse, and two-thirds of that is in rhyme. This elaborate language is mainly employed by the courtiers; the prose in the play is largely spoken by the country people. There is a thematic point to this divide. Shakespeare is satirising the pretension of these young men, particularly when it comes to their approach to love and courtship. I was fortunate enough to attend a talk about the play given by Shakespearean scholar Hester Lees-Jeffries, in which she painted a picture of life in London in the 1590s, and especially of the interests of young men living in the city. Shakespeare himself was a young man in his early thirties when he wrote the play, and Hester pointed out that the theatre audience of the time would have skewed male, in line with the general composition of the population of the city – there were 139 men to 100 women in London in that time. So Elizabethan men were naturally preoccupied by the challenge of finding love and marrying well. The play is therefore holding up a mirror of sorts to Shakespeare’s audience, a somewhat satirical one, showing how men went about love. And one of the things wannabe male lovers did at the time was write love poetry. They wrote Sonnets. Often even just to imaginary lovers. They were partly showing off to each other. And in the play, there are no fewer than 5 standalone sonnets – Berowne’s letter to Rosaline is a sonnet. And when Don Armado believes that he is in love with Jaquenetta, he fears that he will succumb to writing poetry in the accepted form, “for I am sure I will turn sonnet”.

Of course, as Tom pointed out in our conversation the poetry the men produce is not all good. In fact, that is part of the point. Their use of language is not only an affectation, it is also not effective. It fails to communicate honestly or clearly. To use Don Armado’s apt phrase, “the sweet smoke of rhetoric” obscures meaning rather than makes it clear. The misdirected letters are a metaphor for the failure to communicate; and their generic form underlines their lack of personal honesty. The women, of course, disdain the men’s high-flown language, all bemoaning that the letters are too long, and their disguised identities reiterate the point that the men’s notional romantic targets may as well be interchangeable.

To underscore the contrast with the women as the voices of sincerity or common sense, the Princess and Rosaline use the least amount of rhyme of any characters in the play in their speech.  There is little doubt that the women win the “merry war” of wit with the men (to borrow from Much Ado). And it is a war – military metaphors abound. Berowne calls the courtiers to be “affection’s men-at-arms”, love’s soldiers. While Boyet urges the women to “Arm, wenches, arm! Encounters mounted are / Against your peace. Love doth approach disguised,/ Armed in arguments. You’ll be surprised. / Muster your wits, stand in your defence” (5.2.82). The women can also be as deadly, as Boyet again avers, “The tongues of mocking wenches are as keen / As is the razor’s edge invisible.” 2.256-7

The love battle is also framed in the language of the hunt, with literal reference to the King hunting the local deer, along with the customary innuendo around the male’s horns. It is the women, however, who control Cupid’s arrows. I recall that in a production of the play at Shakespeare’s Globe theatre a number of years ago, the women all carried bows over their shoulders. They aim to make the men dance attendance on them. Rosaline vows to taunt and torture Berowne, “That he should be my fool, and I his fate.” 5.2.68

Berowne is finally made to recognise the folly of his ways and his fate, as represented by the required change in his language. He is renowned for his eloquence – “So sweet and voluble is his discourse”. Coleridge described his speech as “logic clothed in rhetoric”, and it often feels like the reasonable argument of his speech is overtaken by his penchant for the lyrical. As Tom pointed out in the podcast, he comes to understand the falsity of his ornate language – and speaks quite plainly of his and his companions’ love. A love that is real and unexpected, compelled by their beauty: Your beauty, ladies, / Hath much deformed us, fashioning our humours / Even to the opposed end of our intents”. Surely one of the challenges that he and his companions must rise to in their trial to win the women in the end will be to abandon their “foppery of language.”