SHAKESPEARE'S WORD-PLAY AND PUNS.

B

II.

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST.

URBY'S quarto of 1598 speaks on its title-page of Love's Labour's Lost as "a Pleasant Conceited Comedie." The description suits well. For among all the plays this is the one in which the poet, free as yet from all constraint of serious thinking on any grave. problem, has given the widest range to his love of the fantastic element in life and in speech. Those critics are, indeed, very foolish that can see nothing but conceits in the comedy, and those readers are very stupid who fail to find the conceits pleasant. But, along with much daintiness in portrayal of character and large wealth of poetic effects, there is throughout the drama a youthful debauch of the poet in word-plays. In fact there is not perhaps in literature any other work of a great poet that contains within so small a compass so vast a variety of tricks with words. Of the eighteen characters, sixteen may fairly be called punsters, and the dialogue at all stages of the action is sparkling and flashing from all sides with puns.

Of these word-plays, which come so thick and fast as almost to blind observation, more than two hundred and fifty may be observed as noteworthy. The distribution of these two hundred and fifty among the sixteen characters is, for the study of Shakespeare's method in portraying character, so curious that it may be given in tabular form:

The only characters that do not play with words are the Forester and Lord Mercade. To them the poet gives the chance to say but a word, and they manage to say that word, simply and gravely, without a pun. The Forester, a bashful young man, country-bred, is awestruck by the Princess, perplexed and a little hurt by her punning upon his words. Lord Mercade, heavy with his message of death, delivers it with tender gravity. (V., ii., 726.)

Sir Nathaniel, the country-preacher, ventures shyly upon his single pun. He asks his idol, Holofernes, "where he will find men worthy enough to present the nine worthies." (V., i., 131.)

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Jaquenetta's pun is a somewhat ingenious play on Armado's love-making. The Don proposes to her an assignation at the lodge. That's hereby," she says. (I., ii., 141.) She means hereby to put him off without a serious answer; but Armado takes the adverb locally.

Longaville is Shakespeare's type of the tall, handsome, stupid soldier, the guardsman. of later fiction. He is honest and dull, the winner of woman's love by his good looks. He tries to catch from his society the fashion of word-play, but his puns are heavy and far-fetched, or utterly commonplace. When Biron inveighs so learnedly against learning, Longaville says:

"He weeds the corn and still lets grow the weeding." (I., i., 95.) When Katharine twits him, in the masquerade. with his stupid silence, he explains his own lack of tongue by saying:

"You have a double tongue within your mask." (V., ii., 244.) And, when she calls him calf, he answers with the coarse old play on horns:

"Look how you butt yourself in these sharp mocks! Will you give horns, chaste lady?" (V., ii., 251-2.)

Of course, as Longaville was big and handsome and stupid, his Maria, who was not beautiful, was clever. Theirs was the sort of union by contraries that serves, in Galtonian phrase, to keep up among mankind its average of mediocrity. All Maria's puns are good. When Dumain offered her himself and his sword, she replied, dropping into French,

"No point, quoth I." (V., ii., 277.)

When Rosaline taunts old Boyet with his domestic misfortunes, Maria tells him:

"You still wrangle with her, Boyet, and she strikes at the brow.” (V„, i., 119.)

When Boyet tries to kiss her,

"Taking pasture on her lips,"

she flashes out refusal :

"My lips are no common, though several they be." (II., i., 223.) Finally, in taking leave of her tall lover, she makes on the double meaning of long a kind of half pun that is very tender and graceful. Her lover says of the twelvemonth's waiting: "I'll stay with patience, but the time is long,"

and she replies :

“The liker you, few taller are so young." (V., ii., 846.) Among this gay company of lords and ladies, bred to such skill in the use and abuse of words, Dull is type of the stolid and illiterate rustic, to whom words are a trouble and a snare. He is far from being a fool, a man of sane and direct understanding. But language is too much for him, and, when he has to use language, he gets his syllables badly mixed. Hence his puns are all of the illiterate kind. He misses the word he aims at, and sometimes he stumbles upon one that has a grotesque unfitness for its place. He reprehends, instead of represents, the person of the King. (I., i., 184.) He orders Costard to be punished by cutting him off in prison from all penance. (I., ii., 134.) He takes Holofernes' Latin Haud credo for some kind of