Love's Labor's Lost – William Shakespeare, c. 1588-94 ★★

Losing the Game of Love

Shakespeare comedies are often tough reads; you need to be aware of the difficulty of humor to translate well across the centuries.

Even with that necessary caveat, Love's Labor's Lost seems overly dense and caught up in itself; the thin plot begs a title the Bard used in another of his works: Much ado about nothing.

The title page of the earliest edition of this work, published in 1598 some four to ten years after it first ran on stage, identifies it as "A Pleasant Conceited Comedie Called Loves labors lost." Then "conceited" would have been seen as a synonym for "clever," but it's hard for me not to attach the more modern meaning here, too. Shakespeare was a brilliant young man, well-versed in all sorts of classic verse and whimsy, and it seems he's in too much of a hurry to show off.

The plot is as follows: In medieval Navarre, King Ferdinand and three of his lords take a vow to self-improvement for three years, through study, fasting, and the avoidance of sleep and especially women. Just then a princess from France arrives with three ladies-in-waiting, expecting to pay an official visit. Ferdinand tells them to cool their heels awhile.

You may not come, fair princess, within my gates;

But here without you shall be so received

As you shall deem yourself lodged in my heart,

Though so denied fair harbor in my house. (II.i.171-74)

Upon learning of the king's chaste vow with his nobles, the women are made cross and decide to lay waste to the men's plans by making them fall in love and abandon their vow. This all falls into place rather easily. Hijinks become more pronounced as the men undertake to hide their amorous feelings for the ladies from each other.

The Signet Classics edition includes an introduction by John Arthos calling this "one of Shakespeare's earliest and happiest comedies." I found the introduction annoying because it really cuts against my experience reading it. To throw out a spoiler, the play isn't one of Shakespeare's happiest comedies; it suffers from a rather downbeat ending that doesn't make sense even within the tortured logic of the play. Arthos makes some points about this tying into core Shakespearean themes of the impossibility of love and the cross-purposes of men and women, which is great if you want to study the play but not if you wish to enjoy it.

There's also Shakespeare's unusually heavy use of classical allusion, with characters making assorted puns in Latin. Some of it can be excused as attempted mockery of a couple of rather pedantic scholars, but it goes on and on, for pages and pages of blank verse at a time, employing Latin quotes and alliteration and occasionally, a nice turn of phrase or rhyme that reminds us of the genius who struggles to be discovered. The extensive footnotes in my Signet edition helped me understand what Shakespeare was driving at, but the effort didn't merit the result.

I will something affect the letter, for it argues facility.
The preyful princess pierced and prick'd a pretty
pleasing pricket;
Some say a sore; but not a sore, till now made
sore with shooting.
The dogs did yell: put L to sore, then sorel jumps
from thicket;
Or pricket sore, or else sorel; the people fall a-hooting.
If sore be sore, then L to sore makes fifty sores –
o' sorel.
Of one sore I an hundred make by adding but one more L. (IV.ii.56-62)

Sometimes the difficulty of reading Shakespeare is on us the readers for not trying to bridge the gap in time; here I didn't really feel at fault. No word choice is too great a reach for Shakespeare here; in the final act he even drops one of the biggest ever seen before Mary Poppins in “Honorificabilitudinitatibus,” Latin for “the state of being able to achieve honors.”

Hunting puns abound in Love's Labour Lost. From a 2019 Buffalo N.Y. production performed at Shakespeare In Delaware Park festival. Image by https://buffalonews.com/2019/07/30/engaging-loves-labours-lost-is-perfect-for-shakespeare-in-delaware-park/.

It's hard not to concur with that famous Shakespearean scholar, Roger Ebert, who in reviewing a rare film adaptation back in 2000, called this "probably the weakest of Shakespeare's plays" and concluded: "It's not about anything." More friendly scholars have noted a revue-show quality to the way the play works, its various scenes designed chiefly to amuse like “Saturday Night Live” blackout sketches while kicking the can of the plot a few feet further. This could be okay; the dense rhyme schemes and pleasant scene-setting offer brilliance in composition if not in structure. There are wonderful lines, like when one of the lords, Berowne, extemporizes on love late in Act IV to bring his comrades to their collective senses.

"It is religion to be thus forsworn/For charity itself fulfils the law,/And who can sever love from charity?" (IV.iii.362-4)

Alas, what follows in the next act makes a hash of all the good that came before. Act V, taking up nearly half the entire play, is basically where Shakespeare spins his wheels and tortures all the good will he developed, with a lot of silly word play, role reversals, and a sudden tonal shift that leads to a surprising downbeat ending where the women decide to put off the men for a year and a day to test their worthiness as mates.

As one character puts it, breaking the fourth wall: "That's too long for a play!" Especially when it's now Act V, scene ii.

Shakespeare wasn’t always at his best in the final act; arguably The Tempest presents the biggest such letdown in his canon. This time it’s hard to be so put out given how uninteresting the storylines are. Except for Berowne and a Spanish lord Armado who makes for the butt of some good jokes early on, none of these characters make an impression. The women serve no driving purpose other than infecting their would-be mates with desire and then leaving them flat. The whole point of romantic comedy, at least this time around, seems to be giving Shakespeare excuse for bawdy jokes largely obscured by the mists of time and some high-toned ruminations about mortality that feel more labored than heartfelt, especially when used as an excuse to deny the audience a happy ending.

I get that some people find this play compelling, though more for subtext than what's on the page directly. The problem is the business on the page repels all but the most ardent student from giving it the kind of chance it needs to get that subtext across. This is one play of Shakespeare's that seems unlikely to have reached us had another writer's name been on the title page.