When he thinks he’s alone, Ferdinand reads out his love letter to the princess. The contents of the letter are a parody of florid love language:
KING reads
[...] Thou shin 'st in every tear I do weep.
No drop but as a coach doth carry thee;
So ridest thou triumphing in my woe.
Do but behold the tears that swell in me,
And they thy glory through my grief will show.
But do not love thyself; then thou <wilt> keep
My tears for glasses, and still make me weep.
O queen of queens, how far dost thou excel
No thought can think, nor tongue of mortal tell.
Ferdinand says that the image of the princess shines in every tear that he cries, which carry her like a metaphorical coach away from him. She takes pleasure (“triumphing”) in his sorrow. He offers his tears as proof of her “glory,” but notes that, if she doesn’t love him back, his tears will merely be a mirror for her. His emotions will become a trivial show of her dominance rather than a meaningful expression of feeling. Ferdinand closes by affirming that his beloved is greater than all other women and more worthy than words can express.
Shakespeare plays with the trope of love as torture common in romances of his era, which depict the lover as totally at the mercy of the love-object (usually a woman). Ferdinand, who had soberly dismissed love as a distraction from “real” work, has completely fallen victim to the princess's charms. Overcome by his emotions, he falls back on clichés to express himself. His metaphor of his tears as “coaches” bearing her away is particularly over the top, and his constant emphasis on his own feelings and her power over them fly ironically in the face of his previous reserve. The love letter is so overblown that Berowne later muses that he has seen “a king transformed to a gnat.”
The use of parody here is important not only because it signals a change in Ferdinand’s feelings about love, but also because it points back to Shakespeare’s interest in the limits of language. Unmoored by his own emotions, Ferdinand relies on borrowed, tired language about love to express himself. The joking, parodic presentation of his letter makes its language seem silly, woefully inadequate for serious conversations about emotion. But Ferdinand, Dumaine, and Longaville all compose similar letters, nonetheless. It’s as if talking about love in a new, honest way is impossibly difficult, even for these highly educated men.
