Summary
Costard finds the Princess and her company in the woods on a hunt, where he delivers the letter from Biron to Rosaline. Boyet reads the letter and realizes that it is the letter from Don Armado meant for Jaquenetta.
Meanwhile, Holofernes, Sir Nathanial, and Dull discuss the hunt, in which the Princess killed a small deer. Holofernes recites a poem about the deer.
Jaquenetta arrives and asks Nathanial and Holofernes to read the letter she received out loud. As they read, they critique the rhetoric in the letter, and everyone realizes that the letter is actually the one written from Biron to Rosaline. Holofernes and Nathanial advise Jaquenetta and Costard to bring the letter to the King.
At court, Biron, Dumaine, Longaville, and the King all recite poems they have written about their respective feelings of love, each believing that he is alone when he is actually being overheard by the other men.
The King attempts to punish Dumaine for his transgression until Biron points out that the King is also in love.
Costard and Jaquenetta arrive with the letter, forcing Biron to confess to the King that he, too, is in love. The men argue over which of them has the fairest lover.
Biron delivers a lengthy speech about how the knowledge of true beauty comes from looking at women, and their scholarly pursuits were therefore inhibited by the oath they took. The King accepts this reasoning and the four men decide to woo the French women.
Analysis
Act Four of the play serves as the play's climax in many ways.
First, it brings the internal tension that has been building – the temptation the lords feel to disobey their oath in the name of love – to a head, as all the lords and the King finally express aloud their feelings for their respective beloveds. Moreover, Act Four brings all of the lords and the King together in one place, as they each recite a poem they believe nobody else can hear but indeed, everyone can hear. Lastly, Act Four resolves the initial conflict of the men breaking their oath while introducing a new conflict to the lords and the King – how to woo the French women after having told them they were eschewing women entirely.
Shakespeare relies on a number of comic conventions to bring about this climax, namely the theatrical convention of overhearing: a character, assuming they are alone, announces their true feelings out loud on stage while others listen on. While this tends to happen to multiple characters at different times in a comedy, in Love's Labour's Lost it happens to every central character in succession, adding to the comic situation and ushering in the resolution to the play's conflict more quickly.
The solution that the lords and the King come to is a simple one: to break their oath, because – as Biron predicted early on – the oath is meaningless. Biron's speech at the end of Act Four helps reframe the notion of intellectualism and the pursuit of knowledge. He argues that while the King was attempting to garner an understanding of true beauty through scholarship, such a thing can really only be found in indulging in one's natural impulses – impulses like love and desire for women.
While on one hand Biron's speech can be interpreted simply as the work of a master rhetorician who can manipulate an audience with his words, it on the other hand challenges the audience – in this case, the Elizabethan court – to see famed intellectualism as a combination of scholarship and lived experience. On a deeper level, the play argues through these innocent affections that natural human impulses are an important aspect of knowledge.
