Mercury, Boy yet, and the ‘harsh’ words of Love’s Labour’s Lost 1 Frederick W. Clayton Margaret Tudeau-Clayton If there is a god who might challenge Cupid’s place as the presiding deity of Love’s Labour’s Lost it has to be Mercury. Obsessed with the use, and abuse of words, the play closes with the gnomic utterance, ‘The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo’ (5.2.914-15), which, as they appear in the Folio, may be taken proleptically to refer to the announcement of separation which follows: ‘You that way, we this way’(line 915). 2 The utterance has attracted a diversity of interpretations, predictably given its enigmatic and sentential character, but there is a more or less general consensus that Mercury and his harsh words represent some form of reality principle which breaks up the Arcadian fantasy world of (the) play, and which is embodied in the figure of Marcade, the messenger who brings the news of the death of the princess’s father. Not only does Marcade correspond to contemporary versions of the god’s name, as several critics have pointed out, but his function corresponds to Mercury’s functions as messenger and psychopomp. 3 There is, however, a more 1 What follows is a truly collaborative effort. At his death, my father, Professor F.W.Clayton (1913-1999), a brilliantly original classicist, left a vast amount of unpublished research including notes on Berowne’s speech on Boyet and the ‘harsh’ words of Mercury in Love’s Labour’s Lost. To these I have added research of my own and arguments that I trust are in the spirit of his work. But the piece could never have been written without the assistance of Vicky Stevens, honorary research fellow of the Department of Classics at the University of Exeter, who sifted through piles of papers and chased up references with exemplary generosity and efficiency. The Clayton family is deeply indebted to her. 2 References to Shakespearean texts throughout will be to Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (eds), The Complete Works (Oxford, 1986). To save space, citations from classical texts will be taken in all cases fom the Loeb editions, which will not be specifically identified. In quoting from early modern texts I have modernised i/j u/v spellings. 3 Anne Barton, ‘A Source for Love’s Labour’s Lost’, TLS, 24 November 1978, 1373-4; J.M.Nosworthy, ‘The importance of being Marcadé’, Shakespeare Survey 32 (1979), 105-14; Joseph A. Porter, Shakespeare’s Mercutio: His History and Drama (Chapel Hill and London, 1988), pp.208-09. 1