IN spite of Archibald MacLeish’s dictum that “A poem should not mean / But be,” the readers of Shakespeare’s poem-plays do expect to understand what is, in fact, going on in a given text, “to know,” as the King says, “what else we should not know.” Such knowledge about the “meaning” (as well as “being,” both inextricable) of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, particularly its character and plot development, has been elusive for many readers and audiences of the drama. H. R. Woudhuysen, whose Arden edition I am using, complains that the cast includes “fantastic and strange figures whose language is almost impossible to understand. Is the play really about these people or has it some hidden meaning which can be recovered only if the right key is found?” Reaction to the plot has been equally uncertain. G. R. Hibbard, for example (cited by Woudhuysen), found the play to have “less story interest than any other play that Shakespeare ever wrote.”

In the following essay, encouraged by Helen Vendler’s theory and practice in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets as well as by her work at large with its close attention to how poets match intricate, internal verbal forms with states and changes of emotional response, I shall give principal attention to character, in particular to the puzzling, “fantastic and strange figures” of Armado, Moth/Boy, and Boyet. In looking at their literal being in the play, their material formation, made up of letters and words which relate to and interlink with each other, I propose that Shakespeare deliberately interlocked their identities and that the plot emerges indirectly but palpably from the verbal energies of these most odd and fantastical players.

Shakespeare leads us gently but deliberately into queries about the psychology of his characters in the play’s first ten lines, which the King of Navarre delivers, by exposing, in the midst of the King’s renunciation of “affections,” an embedded sequence of words that undercut high-minded intentions, words such as “hunt after,” “keen edge,” “heirs,” “brave conquerors,” “desires,” “stand in force” (1.1.1– 11).