The lyric image of sun worship in Sonnet VII. 1–4,

"Lo, in the Orient when the gracious light
Lifts up his burning head, each under eye
Doth homage to his new-appearing sight.
Serving with looks his sacred majesty,"

reappears in heightened colour in Biron's speech in "Love's Labour's Lost" (IV. iii. 221-228):

"Who sees the heavenly Rosaline,

That, like a rude and savage man of Inde,
At the first opening of the gorgeous East,
Bows not his vassal head, and strucken blind
Kisses the base ground with obedient breast?
What peremptory eagle-sighted eye
Dares look upon the heaven of her brow,
That is not blinded by her majesty?”

Another conceit which Shakespeare develops persistently, in almost identical language, in both sonnets and play, is that the eye is the sole source of love, the exclusive home of beauty, the creator, too, of strange delusions in the minds of lovers.1

1 Mr. C. F. McClumpha, of the University of Minnesota, in Modern Language Notes, Vol. XV. No. 6, June, 1900, pp. 337-346, has collected a large number of suggestive parallelisms between the sonnets and the play. Cf. Sonnet XIV. 9: "But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive."

L. L. L. IV. iii. 350:

“From women's eyes this doctrine I derive,” etc.

Sonnet XVII. 5, 6:

"If I could write the beauty of your eyes
And in fresh numbers number all your graces."

Furthermore, the taunts which Biron's friends address to him on the black or dark complexion of his lady love, Rosaline, are in phrase and temper at one with Shakespeare's addresses to his dark lady in the sonnets. In his comedy and in his poems Shakespeare plays precisely the same fantastic variations on the conventional theme of Renaissance lyrists, that a black complexion, though often the sign of a sinful disposition, is not necessarily the negation of virtue.

More might be said of the play's irregularities and imperfections, of its breaches of metrical, moral, and artistic law. Such imperfections are all assignable to the dramatist's inexperience, and are inevitable in experimental work. It is pleasanter to dwell on the compensating features which are likewise inherent in poetic genius at its first stage of development. There is in the comedy something far more welcome and of nobler promise than aught which formal obedience to prescrip

L. L. L. IV. iii. 322-323:

"Such fiery numbers as the prompting eyes
Of beauty's tutors have enriched you with."

Sonnet CXIV. 2–7:

"Or whether shall I say, mine eye saith true,
And that your love taught it this alchemy,
To make of monsters and things indigest
Such cherubims as your sweet self resemble,
Creating every bad a perfect best,
As fast as objects to his beams assemble?”

L. L. L. VII. 750-753:

"As love is full of unbefitting strains,

All wanton as a child, skipping and vain,
Form'd by the eye, and, therefore, like the eye,
Full of strange shapes, of habits, and of forms."

tive rules of art could of itself in any circumstance achieve. There is the charm of freshness, the gusty relish for the stir of life, above all, the flashes of perfect vision, the intuitive apprehension of the essential conditions of human existence, which comes, when it comes at all, as often to poetic youth as to poetic age.

Through all the jesting and extravagance of the play there runs a serious argument, — an argument thoroughly sound and useful at the core, though it is liable to distortion through excess of emphasis. The central theme illustrates how the natural instincts of man are entitled to respect and not to scorn; how those instincts inevitably defy artificial or academic restraint; how life is more important to men and women than literature; how books and learning may become the objects of a false worship, and how an over-estimate of their value in the human economy ends in ludicrous disaster. The satire at the expense of study which finds repeated expression in the play has a philosophic significance and is of wide application. The "reasons" advanced “against reading' by the hero Biron are echoed by the rank and file of the dramatis persona, who are of different and inferior calibre to him. The boy Moth and the clown Costard wax merry over the culture of their masters. But it is at the misuse, not at the true use, of culture and learning that Shakespeare tilts; it is the irrational exaltation of literature and of artificial styles of speech above natural wisdom and natural language that moves the young dramatist's disdain. The excessive concentration of energy in any one direction-be it intellectual or

physical-is fatal to humanity's equilibrium. That is the illuminating truth which fired the mind of Shakespeare when he wrote "Love's Labour's Lost."

V

Powerful as is the light that "Love's Labour's Lost casts alike on Shakespeare's training in youth, and on his attitude to his art and to his environment in those early years of manhood when he designed and wrote the play, there is a third point of view from which the work claims examination. It illustrates future developments in Shakespeare's artistic career as well as those which either were past or were contemporary with it. Some characters, some dramatic devices, some philosophic reflections which were lightly or crudely sketched with experimental pencil in "Love's Labour's Lost" dwelt in his mind, and when his powers had attained fuller vigour, he worked on them anew. The immature sketches came again from his hand as finished pictures, and a careful comparison of the sketches and the pictures offers us a somewhat precise measure of the rate at which Shakespeare's genius progressed.

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In the lower grades of the dramatis persona of Love's Labour's Lost," Constable Dull was remoulded, and emerged again in the ampler figure of Constable Dogberry. The country wench, Jacquenetta, was redrawn with maturer humour as Audrey, in "As You Like It." A touch of Armado's wooing vein is traceable,

1

too, in Touchstone's mode of courting. The Princess's chamberlain, Boyet, whose personality Biron describes with exceptional vividness (Act V. ii. 316–335), adumbrates no less a figure than Polonius; for Boyet is a shadowy image of Polonius - of Polonius in the heyday of youth, when he was a self-conscious and licentious young wag to whom age had not yet brought its full weight of pomposity and tediousness.

Among characters of higher rank in "Love's Labour's Lost," the Princess and Rosaline might each be regarded as the preliminary sketch of the most spirited and selfreliant of all Shakespeare's youthful heroines: Beatrice, in "Much Ado about Nothing." Beatrice's type of womanhood clearly appealed to Shakespeare; it was his early ambition to depict it in drama and he did not rest satisfied until he had achieved the aim in perfection. No hero in the Shakespearean realm of subsequent days can be exactly described as a reincarnation of Biron. But some of his valiant spirit lived again in Romeo and some even in Hamlet.

Among dramatic devices which Shakespeare reproduced from "Love's Labour's Lost" when he had gained fuller mastery of his craft, the show of the nine worthies stands out conspicuously. That device reappears in ripened excellence in the moving tragi-comedy of Pyramus and Thisbe, in " Midsummer Night's Dream." The "rude mechanicals" of Athens exhale in full measure that rude breath of life which only flickers uncertainly on the lips of the village actors in the earlier comedy. But the ground plan is there, and the later play re