"Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives, / Live registered upon our brazen tombs"

Speaker: King Ferdinand of Navarre (Act 1, Scene 1)

The very first lines of the play. The king is announcing the academy to his three companions: by spending three years in disciplined study, they will earn a kind of immortality, their names engraved on tombs that survive their bodies. The speech is full of brave language about defeating "cormorant devouring time."

Detailed Analysis

Shakespeare opens the play with a manifesto against time and against the body, which is exactly the manifesto the rest of the play will demolish. Notice the diction — "brazen tombs," "scythe's keen edge," "heirs of all eternity." The king is not really talking about scholarship; he is talking about death and how to outflank it. Within minutes the Princess will be at the gate, and within hours every man will be writing love letters. The play sets up the king's grand opening as a target. By Act 5, when Marcadé delivers actual news of an actual death, the language of "fame" and "eternity" will sound thin against the silence that follows.

"Necessity will make us all forsworn / Three thousand times within this three years' space"

Speaker: Berowne (Act 1, Scene 1)

Berowne, signing the oath under protest, predicts that the lords will break it constantly over the three years it is supposed to last. The line is treated as comic exaggeration in the moment; by the end of Act 4, it has come true.

Detailed Analysis

This is the play's most efficient piece of dramatic irony, because it tells the audience the ending in Act 1 and dares us to enjoy watching it arrive. Berowne uses the word "necessity" precisely — he is not saying the men will be tempted, he is saying the conditions of their lives will compel perjury. The line also establishes Berowne's authority as the play's resident realist. Every later twist confirms his prediction; even his own conversion to love is one of the "three thousand" he predicted. Shakespeare gives him this prophetic position to make the audience trust him, which is what makes Berowne's eventual seduction by his own sophistry in Act 4 so much funnier.

"Navarre is infected."

Speaker: Boyet (Act 2, Scene 1)

Boyet, the elderly French lord attending the Princess, has been watching the king closely during their first diplomatic exchange. After the men exit, he warns the Princess: the king has fallen in love with her. Boyet means it half as a joke and half as professional intelligence.

Detailed Analysis

This compact line introduces the play's central diagnostic metaphor: love as illness, observable from the outside, requiring no confession to be detected. Boyet's framing speech ("By the heart's still rhetoric disclosed with eyes") gives him the role of the play's reader of bodies — he is the one who decodes the king's glances before the king has admitted anything to himself. The line also tilts the social power structure decisively. Once the women know the men are infected, they always have the rhetorical advantage: they will be addressed by people who cannot quite control what they are doing. From this point on, every conversation between the lords and the ladies has a layer the lords cannot see.

"And I, forsooth, in love! I, that have been love's whip, / A very beadle to a humorous sigh"

Speaker: Berowne (Act 3, Scene 1)

Alone on stage, Berowne admits to himself that he has fallen for Rosaline. The lines come from a long soliloquy in which he catalogues, with great relish, his former contempt for love and his current humiliation at being inside it.

Detailed Analysis

The image is precise: a "beadle" was a parish officer who whipped offenders, and Berowne is saying he has been the policeman of love, the man who punished other people for the very condition he is now in. The self-mockery is the soliloquy's mode throughout — "What, I love? I sue? I seek a wife?" — and it is the play's most honest moment. Berowne is not pretending he has discovered something noble; he is acknowledging that desire has overridden his sense of himself. Shakespeare uses the speech to set up the moral asymmetry of Berowne's later "From women's eyes" speech. When Berowne argues, in Act 4, that love justifies perjury, the audience already knows he is brilliant enough to talk himself into anything. This soliloquy is the moment we learned that.

"From women's eyes this doctrine I derive. / They sparkle still the right Promethean fire; / They are the books, the arts, the academes"

Speaker: Berowne (Act 4, Scene 3)

After the four lords have caught each other writing love sonnets, they ask Berowne — the wittiest of them — to argue that breaking their oath is in fact the right thing to do. Berowne delivers a long, dazzling speech reframing the academy as a misdirection: women's eyes were the real curriculum all along.

Detailed Analysis

The speech is one of Shakespeare's most accomplished early lyric set pieces, and it is also a piece of glittering rationalization. The metaphor system is carefully built — eyes as "books," women as "academes," love as "Promethean fire" stolen from heaven and returned to humanity. Every comparison flatters both speaker and audience. Notice what the speech does not address: the actual oath the men signed, the actual women's preferences, the actual question of whether love justifies perjury or simply explains it. The speech persuades because it is beautiful, not because it is true. Shakespeare loves the speech enough to write it at full volume and trusts the audience to notice the trick. It is the play's clearest demonstration that eloquent men can convince themselves of anything when their bodies have already decided.

"A jest's prosperity lies in the ear / Of him that hears it, never in the tongue / Of him that makes it"

Speaker: Rosaline (Act 5, Scene 2)

Late in the play, after the lords have mocked the amateur Pageant of the Nine Worthies, Rosaline explains to Berowne why he must spend his year of penance trying to make sick people laugh. A joke, she says, only works if the listener can receive it; cruelty disguised as wit is not wit at all.

Detailed Analysis

This is the play's most quotable theory of language — and its quietest correction of the men. Rosaline reframes wit not as a property of the speaker but as a relation between speaker and hearer. Wit that ignores its audience is just noise. The line lands so heavily because it diagnoses the entire male economy of the play: the men have been talking past everyone — past the women, past the rustics, past the pageant-players — and treating their own pleasure in their own cleverness as evidence of merit. Rosaline's penance is the practical consequence of her theory. Berowne must take his speaking voice out of the salon and into a sickroom and discover whether, when nothing he says can pay him back, he has anything to say at all.

"To some forlorn and naked hermitage, / Remote from all the pleasures of the world, / There stay until the twelve celestial signs / Have brought about the annual reckoning"

Speaker: The Princess of France (Act 5, Scene 2)

After Marcadé arrives with news of her father's death, the Princess responds to the king's offer of immediate marriage with conditions. He must spend a year alone in a hermitage. Only if he is the same man at the end of that year may they speak of marriage.

Detailed Analysis

The Princess's penance for the king is the play's ironic completion of his Act 1 plan. He proposed three years of monastic study to defeat time and earn fame; she now requires one year of monastic solitude to earn her hand. The terms are almost identical, but the meaning has reversed. The king's academy was a defense against the world; the hermitage is a test by the world. The phrase "twelve celestial signs / Have brought about the annual reckoning" puts cosmic time — the actual movement of the heavens — into the deal, where the king had previously tried to use language to override time. By the end of the speech, time has won. The lovers cannot defeat it; they can only consent to live inside it.

"Our wooing doth not end like an old play. / Jack hath not Jill"

Speaker: Berowne (Act 5, Scene 2)

When the women refuse to marry the men on the spot and instead impose a year of penance, Berowne breaks the fourth wall to acknowledge that this comedy is not behaving the way comedies usually behave. "Jack hath not Jill" — the standard comic resolution of paired marriages — has not arrived.

Detailed Analysis

This is the play's most explicit metatheatrical moment, and one of the earliest examples in Shakespeare of a character commenting on his own play's failure to follow generic convention. The line is rueful rather than angry; Berowne is admitting that the comedic contract has been broken and naming the breach for the audience. The line has been quoted constantly in Shakespeare criticism since the eighteenth century, because it announces a Shakespearean technique that will become more sophisticated later — the playwright using a character to acknowledge the gap between expectation and event. Love's Labour's Lost refuses to give us Jack and Jill paired because it does not believe a forty-eight-hour acquaintance produces marriage. The line is also the play's affectionate goodbye to its own genre.

"When daisies pied and violets blue… / When icicles hang by the wall"

Speakers: Spring and Winter (sung at the close) (Act 5, Scene 2)

The play ends with two songs, performed by the comic-pageant characters before the company exits. Spring sings of cuckoos and shepherds; Winter sings of frost, owls, and red noses. The two songs frame the year the lovers are about to live through.

Detailed Analysis

The closing songs are Shakespeare's most beautiful early lyric, and they perform a structural job that nothing else in the play could. After the news of death and the imposition of penance, the audience needs language that can hold both the grief and the comedy without choosing between them. The songs do exactly this. Spring is desire and renewal — but also, in the cuckoo's call ("cuckoo, cuckoo!"), a reminder of cuckoldry, the comic shadow on every promise of love. Winter is austerity and cold — but also, in the image of "greasy Joan" stirring the pot, domestic warmth. By giving the play its formal close not in a marriage but in two songs about seasons, Shakespeare insists that the lovers' story will now be governed by time, weather, and ordinary life. The play ends as a calendar, not as a wedding.