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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2012
At the end of Love's Labour's Lost Biron is given a task by his lady-love Rosaline, to spend a twelvemonth visiting ‘the speechless sick’:
your task shall be
With all the fierce endeavour of your wit
To enforce the painèd impotent to smile.
The clever man, who has talked his way out of many difficult situations, is taken aback:
To move wild laughter in the throat of death?
It cannot be, it is impossible.
Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.
(5.2.834–9)We might guess that the role of Biron is Shakespeare's fantasy version of himself as a young man obsessed by language and its relation to the real world of power, love, sex, class, and community. What is the role of wit? Can it have any power to do good? Biron would like to think so, but it is a big call. The ladies, fully aware of the real world and its demands – suffering, death, and the ‘world-without-end bargain’ of marriage (5.2.777) – have chosen not to make this play's ‘sport’ a ‘comedy’. So the audience has had both a comedy and not a comedy, both laughter and frustration. Perhaps, from this young writer early in his career, what is being signalled here is the possibility of a new version of comedy – more complex, emotional, unpredictable.
Not long after writing Love's Labour's Lost Shakespeare undertook a major experiment in expanding the parameters of comedy: The Merchant of Venice.
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