Shelter-In-Place Reading Roundup: Smarty-Pants in Love
“The Garden of Opportunity” triptych by Maxfield Parrish, 1913
More reviews of plays we’ve read in my Shakespeare book club, this time with a theme of witty intellectuals who surprise themselves by falling in love.
Much Ado About Nothing
by
William Shakespeare
My rating:
5 of 5 stars
I’ve always thought of
Much Ado About Nothing
as a delightful play featuring the charming and witty enemies-to-lovers couple of Beatrice and Benedick and the malaprop-spouting cop Dogberry. But the older I get, the more their story has the power to touch my heart, not just tickle my funny bone. Yes, B&B share a sense of humor and a sparky sexual tension. But what’s really powerful is that Benedick is the only male character to believe that Hero has been slandered and try to do something about it. A dude who, even if he seems a little cocky and annoying at first, is ready to #believewomen and violate the Bro Code for the sake of the woman he loves? That’s
really
sexy.
(I also enjoy the theory that
Jane Austen
cleverly stole elements of this plot structure for
Pride and Prejudice
: i.e., the way Darcy wins Lizzy's heart is through going to great lengths to help out her disgraced sister, Lydia.)
Like
Twelfth Night
, this is a comedy that gains its power from skirting very close to the tragic edge of life before veering away. (I note that both plays feature thwarted duels and a character who “comes back to life” after being presumed dead.) As Beatrice says, exquisitely, “No, sure, my lord, my mother cried; but then there was a star danced, and under that was I born.”
Love's Labor's Lost
by
William Shakespeare
My rating:
3 of 5 stars
The premise of
Love’s Labor’s Lost
is one of my favorite comic themes: how love can make smart, confident people into self-deluding dopes. As the Princess of France puts it in the final act, “None are so surely caught, when they are catched / As wit turned fool.” Four young noblemen agree to a three-year vow of celibacy in order to engage in scholarly pursuits. But even before four attractive young ladies show up, we know that the men’s intellectual pride is due for a fall, that their vow is ridiculous and breaking it in the name of love will only make them more ridiculous.
This is a battle of the sexes, but a gentle and un-problematic battle in comparison with other early Shakespeare rom-coms like
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
or
The Taming of the Shrew
. The men fall hard and fast, but the elaborately crafted love poems that they write suggest that perhaps they’re more in love with the idea of love than with the women in front of them. The women enjoy the flirtation as “courtship, pleasant jest, and courtesy / As bombast and as lining to the time.” They seem wiser and more mature than the men, cautious not to make any rash vows that they may forswear. The ending (foreshadowed in the title) is bittersweet, but appropriate to the scenario. It is a Watteau painting of a play: frivolous and mannered, but with an underlying melancholy.
After reading the first few scenes, I started to think that
Love’s Labor’s Lost
should be produced more often. (And if you do, I insist that you cast a woman of size as the “thick and tall” Princess and a woman of color as the “black” Rosaline.) Trouble is, the play is weirdly structured—its final scene takes up 1/3 of its length—and it spends a lot of time with a group of comic characters who have little bearing on the plot and mostly make obscure quibbling puns about Latin grammar. No matter how hard-working the actors, I don’t think modern people can enjoy these scenes without footnotes. I would still be interested in seeing it staged; but because its central theme remains timeless while its line-by-line dialogue has become obscure, what I’d like even more is a modern rewrite à la
10 Things I Hate About You
that retains the basic plot, but updates all the references.
BONUS: I was going to illustrate this post with a Watteau painting because of the comparison I made in my Love’s Labor’s Lost review, but then I discovered this Maxfield Parrish painting. It also feels very LLL to me, and I love it because, like the painting I used to illustrate my As You Like It post, it’s a triptych. And I’m convinced that As You Like It is the answer to the riddle of “what the heck is Love’s Labor’s Won?” (Some contemporary sources list Shakespeare as the author of a play called Love’s Labor’s Won, and to this day scholars debate whether this is a lost play, or an alternative title for an extant Shakespeare play.) Both AYLI and LLL take place in pastoral settings and have themes of love and education, of learning how to woo properly. AYLI ends in a quadruple wedding—LLL ends in four thwarted weddings. I know that the question of Love’s Labor’s Won will likely never get officially resolved in my lifetime, but it’s fun to have a new headcanon.