As a “great feast of languages” (5.1), Love’s Labour’s Lost testifies to the period’s “obsessive cultivation of linguistic forms” (Keir Elam). The play celebrates the power of naming by turning words into its main protagonists. This article proposes to focus more precisely on the smallest and most primitive building block of language after the sound, i.e. the monosyllabic word, in this early Shakespearean comedy. It looks at the intricate conflict at the core of the use of monosyllables. On account of their smallness (and Saxon origins?), these were often disparaged as inadequate to express the complexity of new discoveries in science and geography and insufficiently eloquent for poetry, as opposed to the deemed excellent Latinate phraseology. This essay argues that Shakespeare transforms monosyllables, combining Latin and Saxon etymologies, to emphasize all the poetic possibilities they contain.
Clémence Lescoutre (Wed,) studied this question.