“Nay, to be perjured, which is worst of all;
And, among three, to love the worst of all;”
The first line of this couplet, that he is perjured in loving Rosaline may be taken as applying to the circumstances of the play; but Shakespeare also talks of himself in sonnet 152 as “perjured,” for he only swears in order to misuse his love, or with a side glance at the fact that he is married and therefore perjured when he swears love to one not his wife. It is well to keep this “perjured” in memory.
But it is the second line which is the more astonishing; there Biron tells us that among the three of the Princess's women he loves “the worst of all.” Up to this moment we have only been told kindly things of Rosaline and the other ladies; we had no idea that any one of them was bad, much less that Rosaline was “the worst of all.” The suspicion grows upon us, a suspicion which is confirmed immediately afterwards, that Shakespeare is speaking of himself and of a particular woman; else we should have to admit that his portraiture of Rosaline's character was artistically bad, and bad without excuse, for why should he lavish all this wealth of unpleasant detail on a mere subsidiary character? He goes on, however, to make the fault worse; he next speaks of his love Rosaline as—
“A whitely wanton with a velvet brow,
With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes;
Ay, and by heaven, one that will do the deed;
Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard:
And I to sigh for her! to watch for her!
To pray for her! Go to! it is a plague.”
It is, of course, a blot upon the play for Biron to declare that his love is a wanton of the worst. It is not merely unexpected and uncalled-for; it diminishes our sympathy with Biron and his love, and also with the play. But we have already found the rule trustworthy that whenever Shakespeare makes a mistake in art it is because of some strong personal feeling and not for want of wit, and this rule evidently holds good here. Shakespeare-Biron is picturing the woman he himself loves; for not only does he describe her as a wanton to the detriment of the play; but he pictures her precisely, and this Rosaline is the only person in the play of whom we have any physical description at all. Moreover, he has given such precise and repeated photographs of no other character in any of his plays:
“A whitely wanton with a velvet brow,
With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes.”
This is certainly the same Rosaline we found depicted in “Romeo and Juliet”; but the portraiture here, both physical and moral, is more detailed and peculiar than it was in the earlier play. Shakespeare now knows his Rosaline intimately. The mere facts that here again her physical appearance is set forth with such particularity, and that the “hard-heartedness” which Mercutio noted in her has now become “wantonness” is all-important, especially when we remember that Miss Fitton was probably listening to the play. Even at Christmas, 1597, Shakespeare's passion has reached the height of a sex-duel. Miss Fitton has tortured him so that he delights in calling her names to her face in public when the play would have led one to expect ingratiating or complimentary courtesies. It does not weaken this argument to admit that the general audience would not perhaps have understood the allusions.
It is an almost incredible fact that not a single one of his hundreds of commentators has even noticed any peculiarity in this physical portraiture of Rosaline; Shakespeare uses this realism so rarely one would have thought that every critic would have been astounded by it; but no, they all pass over it without a word, Coleridge, Mr. Tyler, all of them.
The fourth act of “Love's Labour's Lost” begins with a most characteristic soliloquy of Biron:
“Biron. The king he is hunting the deer; I am coursing
myself: they have pitched a toil; I am toiling in a
pitch—pitch that defiles: defile! a foul word.”