3 Review(s)

Love’s Labour’s Lost, in five-acts, was written sometime between 1588 and 1597, and published in a quarto edition in 1598, with a title page suggesting that an earlier quarto had been lost. The 1598 quarto was printed seemingly from an authorial working draft showing signs of revision. It was first performed at the Inns of Court before Queen Elizabeth I. While there are no obvious sources for the play’s plot, the four main characters are loosely based on historical figures. The play draws on themes of masculine love and desire, reckoning and rationalization, and reality versus fantasy. At the date of its first performance, audiences in Shakespeare’s day were familiar with the characters as their contemporaries. But as time passed it became less performed as the characters were less accessible to theater goers. The play’s sophisticated wordplay, pedantic humour, and dated literary allusions may also be cause for its relative obscurity, as compared to Shakespeare’s more popular works. However, in modern times the play has been performed innumerable times and adapted as an opera, a musical, and in several different radio, theater, and television productions. The play’s central comic device is that four young men, the king of Navarre and three of his noblemen, dedicated to study and renounce the women, meet four young women and inevitably abandon their unrealistic ideals. After vowing to avoid women, the King and three of his friends have to host a princess and her three ladies. The four men fall in love and decide to court the women. To be sure, the audience is given a promise that the marriages will ultimately take place, after the gentlemen have had a year to think about themselves and come to maturity. Thus, the play ends with hope, perhaps the best kind of happy ending.