TShakespeare - Popular Theatre

 

"O base and obscure vulgar!":
Popular Theatre and the Performance
of the First Scene of Love's Labour's Lost

 

Terence Smith | Professor Patricia Parker | Drama 359C: Shakespeare | May 1999

 


 

At the beginning of the play, the first sentence of the King's proclamation establishes a generalised "us" as the subject of the following action:

Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives,
Live register'd upon our brazen tombs,
And then grace us in the disgrace of death;
When, spite of cormorant devouring Time,
Th' endeavour of this present breath may buy
That honour which shall bate his scythe's keen edge,
And make us heirs of all eternity. (1.1.1-7)
He sets this generalised "us" in conflict with "Time" (as a proper noun) and presents an illocutionary act--"Th' endeavour of this present breath"--as the possible means to resolve the conflict. This resolution, achieved solely through the power of language, promises a possible future identity for "us" as "heirs of all eternity." In contrast to this possible future identity, the second sentence bestows the present identity of "brave conquerors." However, the address modifies the subject of the endeavour from "us" to "you." Though the physical presence of the other three actors provides the obvious referent for "you," at this point the addressees remain non-specific. The King provides two reference points in relation to which the addressees are to establish their identities. Firstly, the address sets them in conflict with "your own affections." Given the subsequent development of the play's themes, this is an ambiguous statement, since it implies either a conflict with their natural dispositions or with their affectations (as in the "Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise / Thee-pil'd hyperboles, spruce affection, / Figures pendantical" which Berowne opposes to "russet yeas and honest kersey noes" towards the end of the play [5.2.406-413]). More importantly, however, they are also set in opposition to "the huge army of the world's desires."
 

          At this moment a reference to a specific setting has not yet localised the stage, and the King's speech employs a similarly generalised, chorus-like verbal mode. On the bare platform stage of the Elizabethan theatre, the King initially addresses the audience as well as the other actors. The shift from "us" to "you," then, dissociates the address and its implied action from the audience, gradually building up the fiction of the play world. Dissecting the language of the speech in this way foregrounds the theatrical function of its constituent parts. An awareness of its theatrical functions allows us to discern a dimension of the dramatic meaning of the speech--and by extension of the play as a whole--that is otherwise obscured. Robert Weimann has argued that the interaction of the text with the stagecraft that it presupposes constitutes the dramatic meaning of Elizabethan dramas. This is so, he argues, because unlike the dramas of Ibsen or Chekhov, Shakespeare's plays presuppose a mode of performance in which the actor-audience relationship is a major element. A full understanding of a play's dramatic meaning consequently requires an analysis of the text as performed drama:

As long as the performance of the play is substantially enriched by the potential social significance involved in the actor-audience relationship, the full meaning of drama may be defined as an image of the impact of this relationship on the performed text. And the more the public is drawn into the world of the play and the more the play is drawn into the real world, the more the essence of the play is brought out in the course of performance. The relationship between actor and audience is, therefore, not only a constituent element of dramaturgy, but of dramatic meaning as well. (Weimann 1978, 7)
If we understand the dramatic reference points for the characters' identities in the opening speech of Love's Labour's Lost in relation to the theatrical functions of the different parts of the speech, we become aware of the possibility of another dimension of the references' meaning. As the reference points establish the fictional identity of the actor's roles in the drama to be in conflict with their "own affections" and "the huge army of the world's desires," the theatrical process begins to establish the world of the play in distinction to the reality of the playhouse. Perhaps, then, a gesture indicating the audience could accompany the reference to the "huge army." This possible identification of the audience as a referent from which the addressees are to disassociate themselves is supported by the localising function of the subsequent phrase, which identifies the symbolic location of the stage as the "little acadame" of the court of Navarre:
Our late edict shall strongly stand in force:
Navarre shall be the wonder of the world;
Our court shall be a little academe,
Still and contemplative in living art. (1.1.11-14)
As the speech positions the characters within the fictional space of the academy's "eternity," a gesture that identifies the audience's playhouse reality with the temporal world of desire would interpolate the audience in a subject-position implicitly defined in opposition to the values of the court. Though such a gesture might not have been performed with that line, an analysis of the rest of the speech and its interaction with those that follow support this sense that the play addresses its audience as though it evaluates the drama of the courtly characters from a perspective outside of the court's foundational assumptions. It is my contention that Love's Labour's Lost employs a number of dramatic and theatrical devices that encourage the audience to adopt such a critical perspective, and that we may identify these devices as the specifically "popular" elements of the dramaturgy of the play.
 

          The more specific, address "You three, Berowne, Dumain, and Longaville" continues the process of the localisation of the stage, since it particularises the generalised "you" by conferring upon the other three actors their fictional roles, and identifies them as the subjects of the following action. The theatrical gesture implied by the phrase's final "this schedule here" provides a parallel particularisation of the object of the action. The action of 'subscribing their names' to the schedule is a theatrical gesture that attempts to reconcile their living, physical selves with the subject-positions the King has proclaimed for them--as "brave conquerors" and as "My fellow-scholars"--within the a-temporality of the academy's "living art." Dumain's initial use of the third person in his reply--"My loving lord, Dumain is mortified"--supports this sense. It means that the actor playing Dumain is effectively referring to his character as if he were someone else. This--albeit slight--dissociation of the actor from his role opens up a distinction between the actor's physical presence and the character's fictional identity. Dumain's entire speech--moving from the third to the first person--enacts a dialectical resolution of this initial non-identity:

My loving lord, Dumain is mortified:
The grosser manner of these world's delights
He throws upon the gross world's baser slaves:
To love, to wealth, to pomp, I pine and die;
With all these living in philosophy. (1.1.28-32)
When Dumain adopts the first person, he situates himself as "living in philosophy," echoing the contradictory "living art" of the academy. The imagery he employs--"mortified . . . I pine and die"--emphasises the sense elaborated by the King's opening lines that the movement towards the fixed, abstract identities is a process of physical death which removes them to an idealised, a-temporal location. A sense of competitiveness between Longaville and Dumain structures the movement towards this extreme of a complete dissociation of identity from body. Longaville, eager to fulfil the King's demand, describes his acquiescence in terms of a thin body. If the actor playing Longaville were--as his name implies--tall and thin, while the actor playing Dumain were shorter and more portly, it would explain Dumain's motivation to push the dissociation to its extreme as an effort to outdo his competitor; Longaville boasts "I have a thin body" and Dumain tops it with "But I have no body at all." The movement implied in Dumain's initial use of the third person towards his latter adoption of the first person foregrounds the process of the subsumption of the actor's physical presence under the fiction of his character. This theatrical process serves to represent Dumain's dramatic movement towards a fixed, incorporeal identity in the unreal, abstract space of the "eternity" of "living art." This sense of awareness of the fictitiousness of the actor's role correlates to what is perhaps another reference to the reality of the presence of the audience in the central two lines: "The grosser manner of these world's delights / He throws upon the gross world's baser slaves." Again, this could be supported by a physical gesture indicating the audience as the "gross world's baser slaves," whom the dialectical movement of Dumain's character-formation supersedes. That would mean that as the actor playing Dumain dissociates himself from the audience of "baser slaves," they in turn are associated with a perspective opposed to the "living art" of the court.
 

          The King's introductory proclamation and Longaville and Dumain's replies establish a direct correlation between the theatrical and dramatic functions of their speeches. The theatrical process of building up the fiction of location in the neutral space of the platform stage, disassociated from the reality of the playhouse and its audience, and the dramatic process of identifying the academy as an idealised, a-temporal location divested of its living, physical dimension interact to produce a concrete correlation of the play's thematic opposition of ideal / material or artificial / natural. The implicit references to the audience associate the dramatic illusion of the play world with the ideal-artificial pole of the opposition, the reality of the playhouse with the material-natural. Consequently, here, as throughout the play, the actors' use of illusion-sustaining or illusion-breaking theatrical conventions, or their adoption of a position distanced from or near to the audience corresponds to--or even constitutes--the characters' dramatic attitude or position towards the thematic oppositions. Such uses also encourage the audience to evaluate the characters' actions from a perspective that privileges the material or natural aspects of the play's value system. It is the popular elements of the play that provide the illusion-breaking conventions and the positions of nearness to the audience, and which function as a means to develop the critical perspective. The full dramatic meaning of the play arises from the interaction of the dramatisation of the idealised, artificial world of the aristocratic characters and its critical evaluation from a position associated with the material, "natural" world of the audience, as elaborated by the play's popular dimensions in performance.
 

          A discordance between the verbal modes of the characters' speeches signals the first dramatic conflict of the play. This discordance in the structure of the speeches and the language that the characters employ has specific correlatives: (1) in their physical organisation on the stage; (2) in the visual action that the speeches imply; (3) in the thematic oppositions that the language and action develop; and (4) in the characters' maintenance or disruption of the theatrical illusion and the relation to the audience that this produces. These elements combine to develop the dramatic interaction that the speeches--of the King, Longaville and Dumain on the one hand and of Berowne on the other--generate. The use of popular conventions--wordplay and proverbial speech, patterns of inversion and modes of perception rooted "in practical life and in the common man's concrete world of objects and ideas,"[*1] direct address and allusions to the presence of the audience--structures this network of correlations between the verbal, visual, thematic, and theatrical modes of the scene. They function as a means to incorporate into the play's dramatic action the critical perspective from which it assumes the audience evaluates the drama. The first dramatic conflict of the play figures this perspective negatively, as a critical attitude towards the establishing action. As the scene progresses, the perspective acquires substantial positive presence as a fully dramatised position.
 

          The concluding lines of the King's proclamation shift his verbal mode from blank verse to rhyming couplets, setting a precedent for the others. Longaville and Dumain's acquiescent use of rhyme demonstrates their willingness to adopt the King's subject-positions.[*2] If the King initially adopts a centre-stage position for his declaration, then Dumain and Longaville could signal their acquiescence by moving from the upstage area down to positions that presuppose a symmetrical stage grouping of the three lords around the King in the centre, thereby achieving a unity of dramatic, verbal and physical action.[*3] A subsequent moment of silent action would emphasise the dramatic interaction of the speeches. They all look to Berowne, who could have remained in the low-focus upstage area, expecting him to comply as well. Like an actor missing his cue, however, Berowne fails to follow suit. A silence would produce the threat of the actor having forgotten his lines; it would give the recently-established dramatic illusion a sense of precariousness that would concur with the illusion-breaking patterning of his eventual reply. With their interest in preserving the illusion, the other actors / characters would silently prompt him and a double-take by Berowne in response would comically highlight his interruption of the smooth patterning of verbal exchange. A highly effective theatrical tension, produced by his perpetuation of the incomplete symmetry of the stage grouping, would support this sense of interruption visually.[*4] I believe that an analysis of the structure of Berowne's speech corroborates the validity of this description.
 

          Berowne's first lines substantiate the sense that this is an over-tardy reply:

I can but say their protestation over;
So much, dear liege, I have already sworn,
That is . . . (1.1.33-5).
He seems to want the first line to serve as an illocutionary act in lieu of actually repeating the oath. Although it professes Berowne to be in accordance with the others, the precedent of rhyming couplets requires more than this from him: the form of what he says is as important as its content. The fact that he continues speaking suggests that the reception of the first line by the others has indicated its insufficiency. I assume that when Berowne comes downstage to deliver the speech, he retains a certain distance from the group, moving instead towards a closer proximity with the audience; the structure of the rest of the speech implies as much. An a-symmetrical position in relation to the others--distant from them but near to the audience--would highlight the disparity between the acquiescence that the first part of the speech apparently demonstrates in its content and his actual continued evasion of his reserved place in the verbal patterning of the group. That he feels the need to ingratiate himself through the punctuation of the second line with "dear liege" supports the sense that he is buying time while he prepares his response. When it comes, however, the disparity between the verbal mode that it employs and that which the group expects establishes the dramatic conflict that drives the action of the first 160 lines of the play:
That is, to live and study here three years.
But there are other strict observances;
As not to see a woman in that term,
Which I hope well is not enrolled there;
And one day in a week to touch no food,
And but one meal on every day beside;
The which I hope is not enrolled there:
And then to sleep but three hours in the night,
And not be seen to wink of all the day,
When I was wont to think no harm all night,
And make a dark night too of half the day,
Which I hope well is not enrolled there.
O, these are barren tasks, too hard to keep,
Not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep. (1.1.35-48)
The similarity of the general structure of the speech to the King's opening proclamation--blank verse concluding with a rhyming couplet--means that it seems to have ambitions to function as an alternative introduction to the play. The theatrical movement of Berowne's actor-audience relation, however, is in reverse to that of the King's. As I have shown, the King's introduction moves progressively away from the audience. Weimann argues that Shakespeare's plays presuppose a correlation between the relationship with the audience, the structure of a character's speech, and the actor's position on-stage:
We can say, however, that as a general rule the localization and neutralization of scene and action in downstage acting reflects, respectively, a dissociation from or identification with the audience, and that the structure and style of speech are largely determined by this relationship. (1978, 221)
In Berowne's speech, the repetition of "Which I hope well is not enrolled there" frames a progressive expansion of his objections--from one to two to four lines each--through which his assertion of a conflicting perspective develops from the stumbling hesitancy of the first lines with an increasing confidence towards the direct rejection in the final couplet. His objections assert the claims of that which the court abjured in their declarations--which were in the process implicitly aligned with the audience. The perspective that Berowne's speech develops, therefore, is the audience's. In keeping with Weimann's correlation, the actor delivering the speech would increasingly address the lines that detail the "strict observances" to them, not the court (in reverse to the theatrical movement of the King's introduction). The allusion to a proverb--"to think no harm all night"--confirms this sense of alliance with the audience's world of everyday experience. Varying the actor's relationship with the audience by alternating his mode of delivery would build the comic tension implicit in the structure of the speech. On the one hand, by exaggerating the acetic ideals, Berowne mocks their absurdity to the audience for their amusement. On the other, with mock-seriousness, he addresses each of the "Which I hope well is not enrolled there" back to the other characters on-stage. Given the organisation of the public playhouse and its differentiation of its audience into three blocks by the thrust stage, he could use each of the different sections of his objections (ladies, food, sleep) to address each of the blocks of audience, until the final summarising couplet takes in everyone with a generalised address. Berowne circling the stage could support this shift of address--each time presenting a promise to complete the symmetry of the stage grouping that is subsequently broken, until the final couplet confirms his discordance. Whereas the concluding couplet of the King's introduction defined the relation of the characters to the oaths, the generalised verbal mode of Berowne's couplet ("these are . . . ") defines the audience's attitude to them. The verbal mode that Berowne adopts in his first speech mimics and inverts the King's opening introduction. The meaning of the first dramatic conflict of the play, then, lies in its relativisation of the perspective of the court by Berowne's complimentary perspective, which his relationship with the audience in this speech elaborates.
 

          An attention to the actor-audience relation implicit in Berowne's language reveals a pattern of disruption of the representational integrity of the action that runs throughout the scene and the play as a whole. If Berowne's "introductory" speech established a negative, critical attitude to the values of the court, then those that follow elaborate, through their use of popular conventions, his alternative position in positive terms. After failing to limit the number of observances to which he would be bound ("You swore to that, Berowne, and to the rest"), Berowne attempts a more subtle evasion by proposing to interrogate "the end of study." Berowne clarifies the nonplussed King's obfuscatory answer ("Why, that to know, which else we should not know") with "Things hid and barr'd, you mean, from common sense?" (1.1.56-7). In his Shakespeare Glossary, Onions uses this passage to define "common sense" as "ordinary or untutored perceptions," which accords well with the play's differentiation of its social strata through the possession of learning (as in Nathaniel's lines explaining Dull's character: "his intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts" [4.2.25-6]). The Arden editor similarly glosses the line with "ordinary perception, average intelligence." Within the context of the establishment of the academy, however, the word "common" has a greater resonance--it suggests the presence of the commoners watching the action unfold. As in his "introductory" speech, Berowne's position remains on the borderline between the representational space of the academy and the real space of the audience. Consequently, the line "Things hid and barr'd, you mean, from common sense?" points both ways. Again, the language used to structure the court's endeavour suggests an opposition between stage and auditorium that would find an appropriate embodiment in a gesture indicating the audience as the possessors of "common sense." The felt need to gloss the line indicates an editorial identification with the representational integrity of the court's perspective that misses the illusion-breaking purport of the more common understanding of the phrase; "sense" not as perception but as "reason." In accord with his mockery of the strict observances a few lines previously, it implies that the object of their studies is not only recondite but so obscure as to be practically nonsensical; things not only barred from untutored perception, but against good judgement. In the following scene, Moth has a similar moment when he comically applies a common-sense evaluation to Armado's florid vocabulary:

MOTH: Then I am sure you know how much the gross sum
            of deuce-ace amounts to.
ARMADO: It doth amount to one more than two.
MOTH: Which the base vulgar do call three.
ARMADO: True. (1.2.42-6)
Again, Moth's reference to the "base vulgar" implies a gesture indicating the audience, and the import of Moth's attitude suggests that he is satirising Armado for their entertainment. By indicating the audience with the line "common sense," Berowne parodically mimics the King and Dumain's previous gestures of dismissal. Like Moth, he pretends to denigrate the audience for their stupidity for the purposes of illuminating the foolishness of the values articulated by the characters contained within the representational space, from a position on its borderline.
 

          As Weimann has shown, this position is particularly suited to the delivery of wordplay.[*5] When Berowne launches his speech interrogating the object of their endeavours, he begins it with a pun. Though modern editions consign the pun to an editorial footnote, given its proximity to the double meaning of "common sense," the quarto spelling of "Come on, then" as "Com'on, then" suggests a formulation of the interrogation in terms of the audience's perspective.
 

          Understood as a moment within the verbal exchange of the representational space, the repetition of "common / Com'on" makes no logical sense--the pun seems entirely superfluous. Understood from its borderline, however, it is possible to integrate the pun with the structure of the rest of the speech into a moment in the development of a coherent perspective formed in relation to the audience. His response to "Ay, that is study's god-like recompense" seems to indicate that Berowne effectively ignores the King's terms of description, preferring to invert "god-like" with a belligerent insistence on his own "common" perspective. If Berowne seems to ignore the King within the logic of "realistic" dialogue, then we may assume that his attention is focused elsewhere. Within the logic of the primacy of the actor-audience relation, we may read his speech as a dialogue with the audience:

Com'on, then; I will swear to study so,
To know the thing I am forbid to know;
As thus,--to study where I well may dine,
When I to feast expressly am forbid;
Or study where to meet some mistress fine,
When mistresses from common sense are hid;
Or, having sworn too hard a keeping oath,
Study to break it and not break my troth.
If study's gain be thus and this be so,
Study knows that which yet it doth not know:
Swear me to this, and I will ne'er say no. (1.1.54-69)
The second line elaborates clearly the implications of the first, giving the impression that he is making sure that all of the members of the audience will follow the means by which he intends to evade the logic of the academy's oaths. The punctuation of its steady rhythm with the rapidity of "I am forbid" underscores the prospect of his transgression. A knowing wink or some similar sign made to the audience with this phrase--indicating that they will enjoy his imminent subversion of the academy's principles--would support the line's sense of anticipation. Together, these elements suggest a performer encouraging the audience to prepare for a stunning feat of rhetorical evasion, rather like a circus turn, whose beginning he signals with the first demonstrative "thus." Weimann argues that the Elizabethan "thus" or "such" is "associated with a theatrical movement that it underlies, while at the same time it signals a change in 'voice' without disrupting the smooth flow of verbal and physical action" (1978, 89). It implies "some form of audience address" and functions "to present and to comment on the play in performance" (292). This suggests that the actor would mark the framing of the section of the speech that begins and ends with "thus" with some kind of gesture or physical movement, highlighting the shift from Berowne's impugnation of the court's values to his expression of an alternative. This section restates the academy's principles according to his own common-sense interpretation, which he delivers to the audience with an assumption of their complicity in his enjoyment of the images of transgression. The rhythmic patterning of the section suggests that he addresses one line to the audience and the next to the court, reversing the order in the third image. This switch of address would support Berowne's on-going function as a figure who mediates the demands of the representational space and an implied attitude of the audience. His reiteration of the tortuous syntax of the King's "Why, that to know, which else we should not know" in "Study knows that which yet it doth not know" signals a moment of return to the representational space that the second "thus" initiated. The idiom of the final line, however, preserves his contact with the audience. It suggests a self-congratulatory tone in response to his accomplished demonstration of subversion--to the apparent bewilderment of the King and the implicit admiration of the audience. The performer taking a bow to the King on the line "Study knows that which yet it doth not know" would comically highlight the disparity between the apparent acquiescence to the academy's values that his mimicry of its formal mode of reasoning implies and the actual subversion of its values that it achieves.
 

          The return to representational space signalled by Berowne's reiteration of the King's syntax in this line anticipates the verbal and theatrical mode of the first part of his subsequent speech. When Berowne interrogates the academy's version of study, he speaks in their idiom--he employs what Ruth Nevo identifies as the King's favourite rhetorical figure.[*6] The complicated sentence construction indicates a shift in theatrical mode towards a greater respect for the integrity of the representational space. Unlike Berowne's previous statements, moments of audience contact or allusions to their presence are conspicuously absent from this section. When he offers his alternative, he formulates it in terms of a woman's gaze: "Study me how to please the eye indeed, / By fixing it upon a fairer eye" (1.1.81-1). Given the correlation between Berowne's alternatives and a theatrical mode in contact with the audience, it is reasonable to assume that Berowne might flirtatiously address this section of his speech to a female spectator, whom he may have singled out with the earlier line "Or study where to meet some mistress fine" (1.1.63). These shifts in Berowne's verbal and theatrical modes demonstrate his continuing development of his dismantling of the principles of the academy in terms of a contrast between stage and audience. This speech is Berowne's longest yet, comparable only to the King's initial proclamation, and it exploits all of the three verbal modes the play has employed so far--the final section returns to the generalised verbal mode of the introductions--concluding with a final inversion of the King's triumphant opening image: "Too much to know is to know nought but fame" (1.1.92).
 

          The rapid succession of lines from each character which follows signals Berowne's eventual entry into the verbal symmetry of the group:

KING: How well he's read, to reason against reading!
DUMAIN: Proceeded well, to stop all good proceeding!
LONGAVILLE: He weeds the corn, and still lets grow the weeding.
BEROWNE: The spring is near, when green geese are a-breeding. (1.1.94-97)
The verbal mode of Berowne's completion of the patterning, however, is akin to an illusion-breaking aside, which a perplexed Dumain overhears and attempts to integrate into the representational exchange:
DUMAIN: How follows that?
BEROWNE: Fit in his place and time.
DUMAIN: In reason nothing.
BEROWNE: Something then in rhyme. (1.1.98-99)
Not only does the reference to "geese" anticipate its bawdy use by Costard in act three, it also introduces the first festive, seasonal reference, suggesting a mode of perceiving time in contrast to the King's eternity, which Berowne's next speech develops further.[*7] This prompts the King's abrupt, direct invitation for Berowne to leave the drama, which forces his acquiescence.
 

          The sudden shift in Berowne's dramatic position from nonconformist dissenter to obedient votary induces an analogous shift in his theatrical position. In visual terms, I assume he moves to a position that completes the physical symmetry of the court's stage grouping, in preparation for his signing of the schedule. His actor-audience relation, though, is less emphatically compliant. In general, he appears to address most of his subsequent lines to the other characters on-stage. The occasional punctuation of the integrity of the representational space by momentary shifts into his previous verbal modes indicates, however, that Berowne's "yielding" has not extinguished completely the threat of his complimentary perspective. The challenges are more indirect though. The exclamation "A dangerous law against gentility!" (1.1.127) is as much a competitive rebuke to Longaville as a sly comment to the audience. His parenthetic remark "A maid of grace and complete majesty" (1.1.135) serves both as a recommendation, when addressed to the King, for their prospective wooing and an expository function for the audience; the irony of this evaluation--in light of the perspective we gain of the Princess through the Forester in act four--could inform the actor's delivery of the line, but the text does not emphasise this sense. Instead of the direct impugnation characteristic of the earlier sections of the scene, the other moments in which he adopts a different verbal mode in this section tend to offer prescient hints about the consequences of their proposed actions. With the speech that concludes "And when it hath the thing it hunteth most, / 'Tis won as towns with fire, so won, so lost" (1.1.144-5), Berowne introduces the first of many images of the main action that are formulated in terms of hunting, and alludes to the lost labours of love that the play's ending produces. His caveat "For every man with his affects is born, / Not by might master'd, but by special grace" (1.1.150-1) anticipates the terms of their "salve for perjury" at the end of act four. More importantly, though, in terms of his relation to the audience, we may also read the caveat as an appeal made from an egalitarian perspective that brings "prebourgeois standards of social equality"[*8] to bear on the court's presumption of superiority over the "gross world's baser slaves," which is a recurrent ideological position in the tradition of the popular theatre. The final moment of this section in which he departs from the representational integrity of the scene offers a couplet prophesising the action of the "eavesdropping" scene:

Suggestions are to other as to me;
But I believe, although I seem so loath,
I am the last that will last keep his oath. (1.1.158-9)
I assume that he signs his name to the schedule on the first line, to the approval of the rest of the court. That they do not acknowledge the import of the couplet, however, suggests that Berowne delivers it to the audience as an aside--preserving the threat of transgression verbally even as his gesture proclaims his submission to the court's demands visually. Its qualification of the apparently absolute quality of his submissive gesture supports the sense of the somewhat muted presence of the audience's perspective throughout this section.
 

          The entry of the plebeian characters to the stage, however, severs Berowne's relationship with the audience. For the duration of the second half of the scene, Berowne's theatrical position, though not identical with that of the other aristocratic characters, no longer functions as a link between dramatised world and auditorium, and a means of interaction for their associated value systems. It is Costard, the rural clown, who supplants his position and its function. Costard's lowly position in the social stratification of the play suggests that his dramatic function is to provide an external threat to the integrity of the aristocratic academy. The terms of his preconization by Longaville directly prior to his entry, though, qualify this sense of a confrontation between separate and clearly distinguished entities. Longaville refers to him as "Costard the swain" (1.1.178)--a word that means both peasant and lover. This verbal association between Costard and the role of lover alludes to a connection with the lords that his structural function as the "mighty precedent" for their transformation of identities from scholars to lovers dramatises. "Swain" is also the first of the series of "congruent epithetons" that Armado's letter assigns to Costard: "that low-spirited swain, that base minnow of thy mirth, . . . that unlettered small-knowing soul, . . . that shallow vassal" (1.1.243-8). This series links a number of values to Costard's position as peasant and lover: "low-spirited" and "unlettered small-knowing soul" suggest a contrast to the idealised, incorporeal identities "singled from the barbarous" by study that the King establishes with his opening proclamation and Holofernes and Nathaniel attempt to validate later in the play; "base minnow of thy mirth" and "shallow vassal" associate a position as entertainer ("vassal" as a synonym of "clown" and "country bumpkin") with a low social status. The verbal association between the role of lover, the role of performer-entertainer, and a lowly position in the social hierarchy anticipates the peripetian destruction of the high status of the courtly characters in the eavesdropping scene. Their forced adoption of the theatrical position that Costard consistently inhabits produces this destruction of the hierarchial differentiation of social status. Costard's identity as clown reveals the meaning of this theatrical position. As Weimann argues, the tradition of popular theatre produced a mode of characterisation for its clowns and fools that serves a particular dramatic function:

[T]he type retains not simply a continuity of attitude but a dramatic consistency that is associated with a particular social, verbal, and spatial position which in turn reinforces a special relationship between the play world and the real world. . . . Irreverence becomes the method, and disrespect the principle of the fool's comic inversion. It should be stressed that this subversive function has theatrical and structural correlatives and supports a specific process of staging and a particular actor-audience relationship. . . . In this way the fool creates a complementary perspective that (down to Shakespeare's day) counterpoints the attitudes of the heroic or romantic characters. His perspective reflects a dramatic and social position that rejects the assumptions of the mythical or heroic theme in favor of the common sense attitude of a plebeian or secularized audience. (Weimann 1978, 11-14)
The dramatic process of eavesdropping and exposure that structures act four, scene three forces the aristocratic characters to adopt the clown's theatrical position. The mode of characterisation which it presupposes acts to dissolve the identities constituted in the opening of the play by a theatrical position which respects the dramatic illusion. They never quite recover from this experience. In terms of the actor-audience relations that this scene creates, its general structure is remarkably similar to the first scene of the play. They are the only scenes, with the exception of Berowne's two soliloquies, in which an aristocratic character occupies this theatrical position. In both cases, Costard supplants that position. What, then, is the structural meaning of Berowne's occupation this theatrical position in the first part of the first scene and of Costard's subsequent supplantation?
 

          As Weimann has argued, "the assimilation of popular elements in the actions and attitudes of the main characters themselves" is a popular form of dramatic composition (238-9). He suggests that through the use of these popular forms, "Shakespeare could now express moral evaluations in terms of structural organization" (176). I suggest that such an expression is at work in Berowne's adoption of a popular theatrical position in the first part of the play. For this brief moment, the play holds out the promise of a reconciliation of the values of the court and those of a "common-sense" perspective--from which, as I have shown, the play assumes the audience assesses the action. The failure of the aristocrat's drama to "end like an old play" (5.2.866), and the related failure to achieve the reconciliation of the court's values and a realistic relation to the world within the dramatic framing of the action ("BEROWNE: That's too long for a play" [5.2.870]) suggest a sense of the irreconcilability between the courtly world and that of the audience. In the eavesdropping scene, Berowne's line referring to Costard "O! dismiss this audience" (4.3.206) implies Costard's alliance with the audience's perspective. Costard's response--"Walk aside the true folk, and let the traitors stay" (4.3.209)--aligns "truth" with that perspective. In contrast to Berowne, Costard's lowly position--despite his connection to the aristocratic characters--and the theatrical position that he consistently adopts suggests a sense of reconciliation between the dramatised world and the audience. The songs with which the play concludes confirm the sense of alliance between the common characters and the audience's perspective. It is from the common characters' perspective, as developed by the use of popular conventions, that the dramatic meaning of the play should be assessed. The interaction between the Princess and the King in the last scene of the play implies that the aristocratic characters exit together: "PRINCESS: Ay, my sweet lord; and so I take my leave. / KING: No, madam; we will bring you on your way" (5.2.864-5). The last words of the folio text of the play--"You that way: we this way"--then, perhaps indicate a theatrical staging of this assessment. The aristocrats exit by the doors in the tiring-house, while the common characters leave through the audience.
 

oNotes
 

o[*1] Weimann 1978, 206.
 

o[*2] The King establishes the precedent with "sworn to do . . . keep it too" and Longaville and Dumain follow with "dainty bits . . . quite the wits" and "I pine and die . . . philosophy."
 

o[*3] Both the de Witt drawing of the Swan and the Peecham drawing of a scene from Titus Andronicus suggest that the theatrical exploitation of the possibilities of contrast between formal arrangements of stage groups and figures who unbalance the former's harmony was a common practice of Elizabethan staging.
 

o[*4] I imagine that Berowne could be eating something quietly, while maintaining his low-focus upstage position, from the moment he enters. This would provide a realistic justification for his non-attendance to the dramatic action and tardiness in replying, as well as a striking theatrical image of the incongruity of his natural disposition and the subject-position demanded of him. Given the pressure for him to inhabit the symmetrical grouping, it would make theatrical sense were he to be so absorbed by his eating that some time passes before he notices. Firstly, he notices the audience's focus on him, which then guides him to the other characters' attention--giving the opportunity for a double-take between the characters and audience, and a comically inadequate attempt to hide the food behind his back. His eventual swallowing of the last mouthful--with relief--on his flattering "dear liege," would provide justification for the stuttering quality of his first lines. Berowne eating, then, could conceivably be quite funny. Unlike the other descriptions of the possible staging of this scenic unit, however, this idea has no support in the text, and so properly belongs to a directorial interpretation.
 

o[*5] "This extremely effective alternation between rhetorical and mundane language, stylization and directness, presupposed and helped to perpetuate specific stage conditions such as those offered by the large and variable platform. A downstage position, for instance, allowed for a smoother transition from dialogue to monologue and facilitated the delivery of wordplay and proverbs directly to the audience--a mode of delivery with obvious precedents in the popular theater" (Weimann 1978, 217).
 

o[*6] As Nevo explains in "Navarre's World of Words," Renaissance rhetoricians called this figure "Polyptoton." She gives as examples the King's "And then grace us in the disgrace of death" and "Your oath is passed to pass away from these" (1980, 70).
 

o[*7] Also, it possibly contains an allusion in the word "spring" to "springe," anticipating the image of the four as "woodcocks in a dish" in act three, scene four.
 

o[*8] Weimann 1978, 240.
 

Terence Smith ©1999