Berowne

Play

Love's Labour's Lost

Summary

Berowne (or Biron) is the most articulate and self-aware of the King of Navarre's four lords who swear to forgo women for three years of study. He is sceptical of the vow from the start, falls first and hardest for Rosaline, and delivers the play's central oration defending love as the truest source of learning. He is Shakespeare's most fully realised wit figure of this period — a prototype of Benedick — whose verbal brilliance is checked at the close when Rosaline tasks him to spend a year making the sick laugh before she will accept him.

Notable Quotations

"Love's feeling is more soft and sensible / Than are the tender horns of cockled snails." *(4.3)*

"A lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind; / A lover's ear will hear the lowest sound." *(4.3)*

"At Christmas I no more desire a rose / Than wish a snow in May's new-fangled shows; / But like of each thing that in season grows." *(1.1)*

Cross-references

• Love's Labour's Lost — the play
• Comedies
• character_king_navarre — his liege and fellow oath-breaker
• character_rosaline_lll — his love interest, who gives him his penance
• character_princess_lll — Rosaline's mistress, the King's counterpart