Love’s labour…

…is not lost when it is done for true love. Love’s labour is itself the reward.

So a saturday night in between 2 shows as a comic, i took to my i-pod and the shakespeare application (god bless you guys) to choose a play. Pericles had leapt into mind and scrolling forth i stumbled with chubby thumb on this silly play on words. 

Oh fortunate importunate! What frills and fancies filled my cranium’s brain. Our dear author attempting to set down the court of his mind in figures dull and yet refined. Assist, gods extempore, for i’m sure, this is what turned his sonnets.

The parallels twixt one and th’other with such sweet sighs did smother. and with no delight to pass away the time, but merry meetings of unlike minds.

3 Lords make a pact to court nothing but learning for a 3 year spread and 3 Ladies arrive from France to change their hearts’ instead. Along with a slew of servants and learned guests, the play becomes a-whirl with rhyme and jests.

Such is the meat of the tale, that vows forsworn, fashion for this sort a jail. The main is sailed by saucy barks, each attempting good turns unto the other, and love itself within itself doth smother. 

Mocks arrive from France and mocked again they bounce in another play to Henry Five’s dismay. The black wanton parallels a self-named lass drawn as you might like it. Renowned Berowne’s wit, as icy as Jacques ire will ever be in Arden or Navarreden forest. The intriguing Boyet appears in other forms in other plays.

A youthful work one well might say and now to stop this rhyme!

I awoke this morning realising that this play is a play about playing, as it is about words, as it is about versifying. The author captured all in one, which his craft and keen eye noted as his life.

One may ask how does he know about the Court of Navarre and these thinly disguised nobles and what could be a true conceit? But then i might ask, is his imagination so limited that he cannot project such simple souls with goodly words?

The whole smacks of conceits that any schoolboy/intelligent audience member would have known. The mythological figures and references were common enough, as seen by their continually being dissected and speared and held up to the light. Then to be cast away like a chewed on piece of hay. (damn the rhyme, though i might say, a thrasonical simile)!

There is latin a-plenty and some of it correct. There is speculation on the pronouncing of words and words coined for the occasion. There are playlets with masks and masques within the play. Plus rehearsals where one must perfectly say lines learn’d by characters pretending to be actors. These same actors put besides their part by plots, on purpose laid to make their bringers mad.

Ink is spilled and paper marked with wrinkl’d wooing, (something else of the day) as sonnetteers sprinkl’d love like showers to the ground. And the whole finishes with a death; a very unsatisfying death filled with unattained desire, not unlike the lovers’ unfulfill’d promised petty deaths.

Let us wait a year and a day

You that way; we this way.

Exeunt, followed by a jig?