Camp on campus : love’s labour’s lost’s queer scholar

Abstract

This article reconsiders Love’s Labour’s Lost in view of contemporary antagonisms between experts and nonexperts. The link is both thought-provoking and illuminating. The first section explores this tension as it emerges through Shakespeare’s inchoate figure of ‘the scholar’, at once upheld and undermined. Here, the scholar-figure hovers between common and elite, erudite and buffoonish, utterly refined and hopelessly base. ‘He’ is also distinctively set apart from ‘she’: the women of the play who prove themselves much more worldly than their wordy counterparts. The second section furthers this particularly gendered portrayal and follows Berowne’s peculiar navigation of this dichotomy, noting his camp queerness as an ironic paradox that functions beyond binary dualisms and which points, through queer failure, to a possible method of dismantling today’s corrosive political rhetoric.