Genre pragmatics of Shakespeare’s comedy: Love’s Labour’s Lost

Abstract

By genre pragmatics the author understands the combination of all the external conditions that determine “the immediate orientation of the word in the surrounding reality” (Bakhtin/Medevedev). The pragmatics of Shakespearean comedy depends on the fact that most of his plays in this genre initially must have been commissioned for performance in a private house, or at court. Their wit, in at least one of its functions, had to represent an immediate reaction to circumstances known and intriguing to the audience. This was a short-lived response, either lost beyond this particular place and time, or dependent on scholarly commentary in academic editions. But the modern audience, completely unaware of the “immediate orientation” of the genre, is doomed to lose its pointedness and wit, and, consequently, to consider the play as not worthy of interest. There is a need then for a process similar to the one undergone in the 20th century by Lοve’s Labour’s Lost, restored in its anti-Petrarchan actuality. New arguments in favor of this restoration are further advanced in this article. Love’s Labour’s Lost is one of the most pragmatically loaded Shakespeare’s plays. Its reactions cover a vast field of European history, English court intrigue, and literary fashion where domestic and foreign politics are embodied in the parody of literary conventions. The religious unsteadiness of the French King Henry IV, famous in Europe, is doubled in the plot with its initial situation of a broken oath by the King of Navarre and his four courtiers who start by swearing not to see a woman for 3 years, devoted by them to study and meditation, but immediately break their pledge when obliged to meet the French Princess and her beautiful companions. Politics serves as a pretext for the demonstration of the fragility of Petrarchian conventions played out in real life.