Twenty-five ideas about Love's Labour's Lost

War, death, wit, festivity, Arcadia, lyricism, satire

You can find all the Shakespeare essays here, and the schedule for future meetings here. We meet on Sunday 3rd March, 19.00 UK time to discuss Love’s Labour’s Lost. Paid subscribers can also join this chat about the play.

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1. Directors have often set it in the pre-First World War (or pre-Second World War) period, a tiresome, obvious cliche that oversimplifies to the point of error. The death at the end is not warlike; it is the normal course of things; the old generation gives way to the new; it is time to grow up. “Death will not wait for youth’s chatty utopia” is a much darker ending than “the interruption of war”. As ever, Shakespeare is far ahead of his interpreters.

2. With that reading in mind, I find this play newly topical. In our own time, the delay of marriage and children, the dreams of a better world being more spoken about than performed, serve to make this a very relevant play indeed.

3. Love’s Labour’s Lost is also topical as regards language. Post modernism saw language as a system of infinitely deferred meaning, like the piling up of puns and ambiguities in the speech of Navarre and his men. Against this, we have the reaction that words are relatively fixed in meaning, rooted in the real world, which relates to the way the Princess and her women use speech. Deconstruction cannot be infinite: death is one great certainty of a fixed reality.

4. Shakespeare was writing in response to the work of the aristocratic poet-courtier Philip Sidney. The Arden introduction by H.R. Woudhuysen has many good details on this point. Sidney says plays must not mix kings and clowns; Shakespeare does so. Sidney disapproves of making the sinful ridiculous; Shakespeare does so. Sidney wants decorum; Shakespeare gives us bawdy.

5. Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophil ad Stella is, in Woudhuysen’s words, “a story of erotic obsession without resolution.” So is Love’s Labour’s Lost. Several times, characters speak in sonnets. And Sidney’s sonnets were published in the 1590s, perfect timing for Shakespeare to be influenced by them.

6. There are multiple other points of comparison, even down to the presence of Muscovites. As Woudhuysen says, “Shakespeare is showing that he has mastered Sidney’s writings and can overgo them.”

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