My progress:
Shakespeare Reading Project
Henry VI, parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus
The Comedy of Errors

Love’s Labour’s Lost

It’s been a long time since I’ve read this one. My main memory is its symmetry and almost pageantry-style: a group of men declaim things from one side of the stage and an equal number of women declaim things from the other side. Almost like a game. You could stage it on a chessboard. It takes place in a single location. There are contests and games played, and it calls to mind later plays – like Midsummer, although I think they were written around the same time – but also things like As You Like It, where love is a game (or a “madness” as Rosalind says). The later plays, though, give us memorable characters with distinguishing characteristics. Rosalind is ALIVE. Bottom is ALIVE. Love’s Labour’s Lost seems stiff by comparison.

As I said, this is just my memory of it.

But in this recent re-reading, I fell in love with it! It’s ridiculous! And kind of radical too. It’s a comedy which doesn’t end in marriage. In fact, the women banish their beloveds to live in hardship and isolation for one year – tasting poverty and caring for the sick – and maybe when they come back, maybe then, and ONLY then, will these ridiculous men be ready – and worthy – for the love of the women. It’s wild! And the men agree and off they go. I can’t speak to the larger context of other comedies going on in the Elizabethan era, but methinks it’s pretty much a rule that tragedy ends in death and comedy ends in marriage.

So Shakespeare was up to something different here.

But what, exactly?

In reading about the play, I think I now have an idea.

Love’s Labour’s Lost is a play about words and language. There’s a sonnet contest at one point. There are performances and courtship rituals. Everything is very formal: the men declaim they are swearing off women and they sound very sure of themselves, their language is airtight, they’ve been listening to manosphere podcasts. Or reading Plato’s Symposium, which Shakespeare probably was, too. So they want to wall themselves off from women and devote themselves to airy intellectual pursuits, and blah blah. Naturally the moment the women show up they forget their vows of no-women. Sonnets are passed back and forth between the sex-segregated groups as are love notes. Everyone critiques the language of whatever note they receive. Nothing is really up to par: nobody is truly satisfied with the language at hand, the language of courtship and love.

This COULD be seen as the young Shakespeare’s withering critique of his contemporaries. Is he saying, “I have seen how you write love stories and, sorry, but I think it needs to be updated.” It’s a satire, not a comedy! He’s satirizing his peers? This is just a guess, but I feel like everything makes more sense if you read this as satirical and/or bitchy. He’s mocking people who declaim love in sonnet-form. Meanwhile, right around this time he himself is writing a series of sonnets which …. the world will never stop talking about.

So he knows of what he speaks, sonnet-wise.

But maybe the sonnet can’t contain the feelings. Maybe the sonnet is too limiting. You can sense behind his sonnets all the things he is NOT saying.

There’s speculation the play was written when all the theatres were closed due to the plague (1591), and the play was designed for a special production, maybe outside, or at some nobleman’s house. An audience of literate elites who would recognize the satire, knowing the joke was on them.

Love’s Labour’s Lost feels like an exercise, but an important one, if you go with the theory that Shakespeare – in this play – was basically “killing off” the sentimental-sonnet-love-language in vogue at the time, so that he could speak more forthrightly from that point forward.

Quotes on the play

 

“It is so great a leap from Shakespeare’s earlier comedies to the great feast of language that is Love’s Labour’s Lost that I doubt this early a date, unless the 1597 revision for a court performance was rather more than what generally we mean by a ‘revision.'”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Warring against one’s own affections is always a mistake in Shakespeare’s plays.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“The quest for forbidden ‘god-like’ knowledge is the bane of existence for more serious and substantial Renaissance dramatic figures from Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus to Shakespeare’s Prospero. ‘God-like’ is itself always a telling sign. From the beginning to the end of his dramatic career Shakespeare insists on the human place of human beings, neither god nor animal.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“A key theme in Love’s Labour’s Lost: The coming to life of written literary forms upon the stage. This is a play about young lovers caught with their sonnets down — revealing, both shamefacedly and joyously, that far from obeying the King’s stern and life-denying edicts, they have already fallen in love, and have the poems to prove it.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“The familiar theme of losing oneself to find oneself resonates throughout Love’s Labour’s Lost, as it has in The Comedy of Errors. It is the story of Shakespearean comedy writ little, and we will encounter it again and again.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“It is entirely characteristic of him that he should put the most ethically reproving remark of the play into the mouth of the character who is arguably his most ridiculous, Holofernes, the pedant. When Holofernes finds himself mocked by the courtly audience in the course of the pageant, he turns to them, and to us, with a sorrowful rebuke: ‘This is not generous, not gentle, not humble.’ A modern audience, like its Shakespearean counterpart, might well feel the sting.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“This is a young man’s play, full of the love of life, impatient with merely ‘academic’ ideas about beauty and desire … [the] high-minded smuttiness of a schoolboy kind (jokes on flatulence and erections, on women’s anatomy and sexuality).”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“One of the many remarkable pleasures of Shakespearean comedy, as of Shakespeare’s plays in general, is the way each play can be situated simultaneously in the past and in the present, in the time of Shakespeare the Elizabethan playwright and the time of Shakespeare the uncanny commentator on modern life. ‘You that way, we this way’ could be understood as pointing toward the past and the always changing future, regardless of what the playwright — or his fellow actors — may have intended by those enigmatic final words.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“It counts on contemporary occupations with style — occupations now generally forgotten — to keep it interesting. It is Shakespeare’s most topical piece.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“The movement of the play is as formal as a minuet.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“Shakespeare obviously likes Berowne and sees more life in him than the play can use. He will reappear in better plays
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“The play is literary but it is a delight to any listening ear. It is satire, but it has absorbed the best along with the worst of the manners which it satirizes. It is Shakespeare’s most artificial work, but it ends with his most natural song.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“If we were to part with any of the author’s comedies, it should be this. Yet we should be loath to part with Don Adriano de Armado, that mighty potentate of nonsense, or his page, that handful of wit; with Nathaniel the curate, or Holofernes the schoolmaster; and their dispute after dinner on ‘the golden cadences of poesy.'”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“Shakespeare has set himself to imitate the tone of polite conversation then prevailing among the fair, the witty, and the learned, and he has imitated it too faithfully. It is as if the hand of Titian had been employed to give grace to the curls of a full-bottomed periwig, or Raphael had attempted to give expression to the tapestry figures in the House of Lords.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“The play is satirizing excesses of language, these things are signs not so much of immaturity as of an outgrowing of immaturity …”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

^^ I like that.

“[Possibly] Shakespeare was holding up to ridicule a group headed by Raleigh and supposedly including Marlowe, Chapman, and others who with John Florio thought ‘it were labour lost to speak of Love’ (a possible origin of Shakespeare’s title).”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“It is a bit odd that this seemingly verbose and somewhat inconsequential work should state its theme with a clarity and brevity unsurpassed by any other the author ever wrote, and that the truth underlying this largely ephemeral piece should be so universal that there is no indication Shakespeare ever deviated from his belief in it to the end of his days. ‘What is the end of study?’ asks Berowne in the opening scene of the play, and from then on the drama is dedicated to answering the question.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“Only a lover and master of language who was at the same time something of a skeptic about it could have exposed the linguistic manias of his day so devastatingly and at the same time so merrily and genially.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“What is the matter with these creatures one and all? The trouble is that they have either divorced their heads from their hearts or their hearts from their heads. And so, as foil for them and as sun and center of his play, Shakespeare creates one of the most attractive figures he has given birth to up to this time: Berowne.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“In Berowne we catch a glimpse of Shakespeare as it were in the very act of shaking off some of his juvenile extravagances and resolving on a greater simplicity.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“The Greeks, Plato especially, took up this idea that human nature is hermaphroditic, and from them it passed into Western thought and has been expressed and re-expressed in countless forms down the centuries… The belief on which Love’s Labour’s Lost is founded, the doctrine that mental and spiritual, like physical, procreation is bisexual. An idea or a feeling, if it is to live and survive, must have two parents.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (published in 1951. Go, Goddard.)

“Love’s Labour’s Lost is not the greatest of Shakespeare’s plays, but it is one of the most perfect.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“Any society is in danger of dismissing the virtues of another society because of its vices, and a democracy is always in danger of not paying enough attention to manners and forms. We are born grave and honest, and the first step is to learn frivolity and insincerity. The second step is to learn to be serious about other people. Each stage involves suffering and we must progress from one to the other.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“The four men in Shakespeare try to be serious in a frivolous way and are exposed. The ladies arrive, their resolutions are forgotten, and a courtly romance ensues, partly a parody of Christianity and partly Platonic, with the sexes changed — the lovers are heterosexual, not homosexual as in Plato. It is a conscious game that can get too serious.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“Let’s turn to Cupid’s blindness and to the play’s preoccupation with eyesight (Berowne, Act IV, sc iii)… Cupid was not represented as blind before 1215 in a German work. Sight is the most intellectual of the senses: you can see possibilities, your sight is under the control of your will. Eve saw the apple was good to eat … In the sonnets Shakespeare often contrasts the eye and the heart as the outer and the inner.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“Berowne is a desperate, not a frivolous, man. Rosaline too is in danger from the courtly love tradition. Nobody expects her to be faithful, and if Berowne doesn’t change, he will corrupt her. She has the same vices as he does, and the malice of their wit covers a desperate anxiety about themselves.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“Love’s Labour’s Lost is perhaps the most relentlessly Elizabethan of all Shakespeare’s plays. Filled with word games, elaborate conceits, parodies of spoken and written styles and obscure topical allusions, it continually requires — and baffles — scholarly explanation.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

“Stylistic affinities with Romeo & Juliet, Richard II and Midsummer Night’s Dream … the four lays seem to constitute a natural group. All of them are lyrical and ornate, various and highly patterned in their verse forms … Quintessentially Elizabethan, they share a kind of linguistic exuberance and also a delight in exploring and extending their particular dramatic genres.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

“Throughout the comedy the women are ruthless in their dismemberment of the airy rhetoric, the unexamined conceits and images offered by the men.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

“The problem of how to create a truly meaningful language of love may still be unresolved for the people of the play: the year of penance remains to be lived through, and its outcome cannot be predicted with confidence. Nevertheless, this final lyric stands as an encouraging indication of what language can do when handled rightly, of how finely — when it is honest and also disciplined by at — it can express the truth of the human condition.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

“I have never seen a production of this extravagant comedy that could begin to perform its vocal magnificence, but I always live in hope that some director of genius will yet deliver it to us.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“… [opera composition of Love’s Labour’s Lost] as un-Wagnerian as possible, and most remote from nature-daemony and the theatrical quality of the myth: a revival of opera bouffe in a spirit of the most artificial parody and mockery of the artificial: something highly playful and highly precious; its aim the ridicule of affected asceticism and that euphumism which was the social fruit of classical studies. He spoke with enthusiasm of the theme, which gave opportunity set the lout and “natural” alongside the comic sublime and make both ra]idicules in each other. Archaic heroes, rodomontade, bombastic etiquette tower out of forgotten epochs in the person of Don Armado, whom Adrian rightly pronounced a consummate figure of opera.”
— Thomas Mann, Dr. Faustus

“Berowne, Shakespeare’s protagonist, is a highly conscious male narcissist who seeks his own reflection in the eyes of women and meets his catastrophe in the dark lady, Rosaline, ‘with two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes.’ The centuries have conjectured that Rosaline is linked to the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, a surmise supported by the lack of any justification in the play’s text for Berowne’s anxiety of betrayal in regard to Rosaline.” (Act III, i, 170-202)
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“… the enigmatic, aggressive Rosaline seems a clue to the story of the sonnets.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“What is mysterious about Love’s Labour’s Lost is not its supposed hermetism but its occult relationship between Berowne and Rosaline, who seem to have a prehistory that Shakespeare evades foregrounding, except for a few delicious hints …”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“intellect seeking wisdom, cheats eyesight out of daylight”
— Harry Levin (on Berowne’s “Light seeking light doth light of light beguile.”

“Berowne, in his misdirected sonnet to Rosaline, says that her eye ‘Jove’s lightning bears,’ a rueful and masochistic recognition that the lovelorn wit adumbrates in a prose reverie (IV.iii.1-20)… The other three grace to groan lyrically, the King first in a sonnet on the Prince of France’s eye beams, followed by Longaville in a sonnet celebrating the heavenly rhetoric of his love’s eye, and Dumain in an ode a little lacking in the ocular obsession.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“The high comedy of fantastical language mounts to a crescendo in Act V, scene i, the funniest in the play, and clearly a favorite with James Joyce, who alludes to it, and in some sense is invented by Shakespeare in what I am calling the cognitive music that rises from the coming together of Armado, Moth, Holofernes, Sir Nathaniel, Dull, and Costard. The six zanies give us a Finnegans Wake in miniature.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“[Love’s Labour’s Lost is] a strikingly fresh start, a more complete break with what [Shakespeare] had been doing earlier.”
— C.L. Barber

“… part of Shakespeare’s final emancipation from Marlowe, since it was followed by the great enabling act of creating Falstaff, the anti-Machiavel and so anti-Marlowe there is a continuity between Faulconbridge the Bastard in King John (probably 1595), a first anti-Machiavel in Shakespeare, and Falstaff.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Berowne is certainly one of the roles that seem retrospectively to prefigure Falstaff.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Berowne has] precisely Shakespeare’s capacity to taste without swallowing, to dally with the tempter, until he is intimately acquainted with him, only in the end to resist the temptation.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Falstaff is larger than Henry IV plays, superb as they are, even as Hamlet seems to need a sphere greater than Shakespeare provides him.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

On Rosaline, Act V, ii, 58-66:

“If that is the Dark Lady of the Sonnets speaking, then Shakespeare suffered perhaps even more than he intimates. The relationship of Berowne and Rosaline has sadomasochistic overtones that make us doubt the woman would ever yield the greater pleasures of her ambivalence to the simpler ones of acceptance.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“‘Honest plain words’ rapidly elaborate here into Berowne’s baroque style … Rather splendidly, he has learned nothing (or very little), as befits a hero of extravagant comedy.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“All Shakespearean marriages, comic and otherwise, are zany or grotesque, since essentially the women must marry down, particularly the peerless Rosalind in As You Like It.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Shakespeare … revised Love’s Labour’s Lost in 1597 after having achieved Falstaff, and so after fully achieving himself.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Berowne is rather clearly the author of Sonnet 127, which he either echoes or prefigures.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

Quotes from the play

When spite of cormorant devouring Time …
— FERDINAND, Act I, sc i, 4

Why, all delights are vain, and that most vain
Which with pain purchased doth inherit pain:
As painfully to pore upon a book
To seek the light of truth, while truth the while
Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look.
Light seeking light doth light of light beguile.
So, ere you find where light in darkness lies,
Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.
Study me how to please the eye indeed
By fixing it upon a fairer eye,
Who dazzling so, that eye shall be his heed
And give him light that it was blinded by.
Study is like the heaven’s glorious sun,
That will not be deep-searched with saucy looks.
Small have continual plodders ever won,
Save base authority from others’ books.
These earthly godfathers of heaven’s lights,
That give a name to every fixèd star,
Have no more profit of their shining nights
Than those that walk and wot not what they are.
— BEROWNE, Act I, sc i, 77-91

It’s so beautiful. And this is Act I, sc i. Berowne ARRIVES. Fully formed.

DUMAINE: In reason nothing.
BEROWNE: Something then in rhyme.
— Act I, sc i, 98-99

‘Tis won as towns with fire — so won, so lost.
— BEROWNE, Act I, sc i, 146

KING: “There did I see that low-spirited swain, that
base minnow of thy mirth,–”
COSTARD: Me?
KING: “that unlettered, small-knowing soul,–”
COSTARD: Me?
KING: “that shallow vassal,–”
COSTARD: Still me?
KING” “which, as I remember, hight Costard,–”
COSTARD: O, me!
— Act I, sc i, 247-257

Assist me, some extemporal god of rhyme, for I am sure I shall turn sonnet. Devise, wit; write, pen; for I am for whole volumes on folio.
— DON ARMADO, Act I, sc ii, 183-185

Berowne they call him, but a merrier man,
Within the limit of becoming mirth,
I never spent an hour’s talk withal.
His eye begets occasion for his wit,
For every object that the one doth catch
The other turns to a mirth-moving jest …
— ROSALINE, Act II, sc i, 66-71

He sounds like so much fun.

merry madcap lord …
MARIA on BEROWNE, Act II, sc i, 214

He is Cupid’s grandfather.
— KATHERINE, Act II, sc i, 254

Earlier in scene 1, the King reads Don Armado’s letter “with a child of our grandmother Eve”.

I will do it, sir, in print.,
— COSTARD, Act III, sc i, 72

Everything is in print in Love’s Labour’s Lost! Notes, letters, pieces of paper flying around the stage.

Most barbarous intimation! Yet a kind of
insinuation, as it were, in via, in way, of explication;
facere, as it were, replication, or rather, ostentare, to
show, as it were, his inclination, after his undressed,
unpolished, uneducated, unpruned, untrained, or
rather unlettered, or ratherest, unconfirmed fashion,
to insert again my haud credo for a deer.
— HOLOFERNES, Act IV, sc ii, 13-19

All those foreign words, thrown in there for no reason except to make himself sound learned, and the repetition of “as it were” is such a perfect expression of a pedant – which Holofernes, of course, is. It’s hilarious.

Sir, he hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book.
He hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink.
— NATHANIEL, Act IV, sc ii, 24-26

But Vir sapis qui pauca loquitur.
— HOLOFERNES, Act IV, sc ii, 80

Again with the Latin! So funny! And this is even funnier because it means “That man is wise who speaks little”, something that clearly doesn’t describe Holofernes.

By heaven, I do love, and it hath taught me to rhyme.
— BEROWNE, Act IV, sc iii, 12

^^ this reminds me of Robert Burns, a quote from him I love: “For my own part I never had the least thought or inclination of turning poet till I got once heartily in Love, and then Rhyme and Song were, in a manner, the spontaneous language of my heart.”

O, but for my love, day would turn to night!
— BEROWNE, Act IV, sc iii, 229

Fie, painted rhetoric! O, she needs it not.
— BEROWNE, Act IV, sc iii, 235

Abstinence engenders maladies.
— BEROWNE, Act IV, sc iii, 291

Never durst poet touch a pen to write
Until his ink were tempered with love’s sighs.
O, then his lines would ravish savage ears
And plant in tyrants mild humility.
From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive.
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire.
They are the books, the arts, the academes
That show, contain, and nourish all the world.
— BEROWNE, Act IV, sc iii, 294-301

Learning is but an adjunct to ourself
And where we are our learning likewise is:
Then when ourselves we see in ladies’ eyes,
Do we not likewise see our learning there?
— BEROWNE, Act IV, sc iii, 310-314

It adds a precious seeing to the eye.
— BEROWNE, Act IV, sc iii, 330

Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves,
Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths.
— BEROWNE, Act IV, sc iii, 362-363

(seriously, the whole speech is incredible, I’m just pulling out things that particularly struck me)

HOLOFERNES: Satis quod sufficit.
NATHANIEL: I praise God for you, sir.

^^ This is how Act V starts. It’s so funny.

O, they have lived long on the alms-basket of words.
— COSTARD, Act V, sc i, 41

He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.
— HOLOFERNES, Act V, sc ii, 16

MOTH: They have been at a great feast of language and stol’n the scraps.
COSTARD: O, they have liv’d long on the alms — basket of words.
— Act V, sc i, 36-38

ARMADO: Do you not educate youth at the charge-house on the top of the mountain?
HOLOFERNES: Or mons, the hill.
ARMADO: At your sweet pleasure, for the mountain.
— Act V, sc i, 82-86

ARMADO: … in the posteriors of this day, which the rude multitude call the afternoon.
HOLOFERNES: The posterior of the day, most generous sir, is liable, congruent and measurable for the afternoon: the word is well cull’d, chose, sweet and apt, I do assure you, sir, I do assure.
— Act V, sc i, 89-94

The tongues of mocking wenches are as keen
As is the razor’s edge invisible,
Cutting a smaller hair than may be seen,
Above the sense of sense; so sensible
Seemeth their conference; their conceits have wings
Fleeter than arrows, bullets, wind, thought, swifter things.
— BOYET, Act V, sc ii, 256-261

BEROWNE:
O, never will I trust to speeches penn’d,
Nor to the motion of a schoolboy’s tongue,
Nor never come in vizard to my friend,
Nor woo in rhyme, like a blind harper’s song!
Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,
Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation,
Figures pedantical; these summer-flies
Have blown me full of maggot ostentation:
I do forswear them; and I here protest,
By this white glove;–how white the hand, God knows!–
Henceforth my wooing mind shall be express’d
In russet yeas and honest kersey noes:
And, to begin, wench,–so God help me, la!–
My love to thee is sound, sans crack or flaw.
ROSALINE:
Sans ‘sans‘, I pray you.

^^ This is my favorite (and also reminds me of Jaques’ famous monologue in As You Like It). People keep throwing in foreign words. Rosaline – and the other women – are merciless in wanting the men to STOP fancy-ing up the language and speak plain. Sans sans. So good.

The extreme parts of time extremely forms
All causes to the purpose of his speed,
And often at his very loose decides
That which long process could not arbitrate.
— KING, Act V, sc ii, 740-743

Honest plain words best pierce the ear of grief.
— BEROWNE, Act V, sc ii, 753

KING:
Now, at the latest minute of the hour,
Grant us your loves.
PRINCESS:
A time, methinks, too short
To make a world-without-end bargain in.

The women are so smart! They will not be bamboozled!

It’s all very meta, if you think about it. If Love’s Labour’s Lost is a commentary on contemporary language and how it is used, and piercing through the artifice of it, then the play really shuffles into place as a work of satire.

Our wooing doth not end like an old play;
Jack hath not Jill: these ladies’ courtesy
Might well have made our sport a comedy.
— BEROWNE, Act V, sc ii, 874-876

KING:
Come, sir, it wants a twelvemonth and a day,
And then ’twill end.
BEROWNE:
That’s too long for a play.
— Act V, sc ii, 877-878

The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of
Apollo. You that way: we this way.
— ARMADO, closing out the play.