"Love's Labour's Lost" by William Shakespeare

 One of Shakespeare's comedies. 

The King of Navarre persuades three of his Lords to abjure women and study philosophy together for a period of three years; they all swear to do this although Berowne is reluctant. They then realise they must immediately break their oaths because the Princess of France and three ladies have arrived on a diplomatic mission. They meet the ladies and fall in love but, before they can  all go off happily into the sunset, or to bed, a messenger tells the Princess that her dad is dead so they must all endure a period of mourning for a year and a day. These courtly romances, enlivened by the usual mistaken identities and misdirecting of love letters, are repeatedly interrupted by the lower class.

Much of the humour relies on wordplay, making this play a challenge for the reader (I often needed to check the notes) and the audience. On the whole, it was heavy going and it is generally regarded as one of Shakespeare's lesser works. 

There's a lot of poetry in it (including a sonnet in Alexandrine hexameters). Well over one third of all the lines are rhymed , more than any other Shakespeare play (the next contenders are Richard II and The Midsummer Night's Dream). 

It also contains 189 proverbs, beaten only by Romeo & Juliet (223) and King Lear (197). 

Most of Shakespeare's plays are clearly sourced but LLL isn't and it shares the same number of scenes (9) as the other unsourced plays: The Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest.

Some of the lower class characters seem to share characteristics with the Commedia dell'Arte. For example, Armado is a Braggart and Holofernes a Pedant.

Selected quotes:

• "O, I am stabbed with laughter." (5.2.80)
• "Light seeking light doth light of light beguile." (1.1.77) It was thought that eyes saw by shining a light out of themselves.
• "Small have continual plodders ever won,/ Save base authority from others' books." (1.1.86 - 87)
• "Assist me, some extemporal god of rhyme, for I am sure I shall turn sonnet. Devise, wit; write, pen; for I am for whole volumes in folio." (1.2.175 - 177)
• "To jig off a tune at the tongue's end, canary it with your feet, humour it with turning up your eyelids, sigh a note and sing a note, sometime through the throat as if you swallowed love with singing love, sometime through the nose as if you snuffed up love by smelling love, with your hat penthouse-like o'er the shop of your eyes, with your arms crossed on your thin-belly doublet like a rabbit on a spit, or your hands in your pocket like a man after the old painting; and keep not too long in one tune, but a snip and away." (3.1.10 - 20)
• "A lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind." (4.3.308)
• "Love's feeling is more soft and sensible/ Than are the tender horns of cockled snails." (4.3.311 - 312)
• "A time methinks too short/ To make a world-without-end bargain in." (5.2.782 - 783)

One of my mum's favourite poems comes from a song at the end of LLL:

When icicles hang by the wall

And Dick the shepherd blows his nail

And Tom bears logs into the hall

And milk comes frozen home in pail,

When blood is nipped and ways be foul, 

Then nightly sings the staring owl:

'Tu-whit, Tu-whoo!' A merry note,

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

When all aloud the wind doth blow

And coughing drowns the parson's saw

And birds sit brooding in the snow

And Marian's nose looks red and raw,

When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl, 

Then nightly sings the staring owl:

'Tu-whit, Tu-whoo!' A merry note,

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

I saw a production of LLL by the Eastbourne Operatic & Dramatic Society at the Eastbourne Royal Hippodrome on Friday 26th January 2024. My review is here.

I also saw a more or less straight-from-the-text LLL streamed on Digital Theatre from a 2015 Stratford Festival production. 

Other Shakespeare plays that I have reviewed can be found here.

January 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God