About the Author

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was a glove-maker's son from Stratford-upon-Avon who became, over the course of about twenty-five years, the most influential playwright in the English language. By the early 1590s, when Love's Labour's Lost was probably written, he was a working actor and shareholder in a London theatre company, paying close attention to court fashions in poetry and to the rhetorical games being played in the universities and the Inns of Court. He was also writing his sonnet sequence and his two narrative poems (Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece) during the same window, and the experiments in form he was doing in those poems leak conspicuously into this play.

Detailed Analysis

Love's Labour's Lost is best understood as the play in which Shakespeare is most openly showing off — and using the showing-off as material. It belongs to a group of early-to-mid 1590s comedies in which he is testing what blank verse, rhyme, sonnet form, and elaborate prose can do on stage. Compared with the earlier Two Gentlemen of Verona or The Comedy of Errors, the verbal density here is at another order of magnitude; compared with the slightly later A Midsummer Night's Dream or Much Ado About Nothing, the linguistic athleticism is foregrounded as a topic, not just a technique. Critics have long suspected that Love's Labour's Lost was originally written for a private aristocratic audience that would have caught its in-jokes about court culture, fashionable foreign affectation, and Italianate love poetry. There may even be a lost companion play — Francis Meres listed a Love's Labour's Won in his 1598 Palladis Tamia, and a 1603 bookseller's inventory records it as a printed title; it has been variously argued to be a now-lost sequel or an alternate name for Much Ado or All's Well That Ends Well. Whatever the truth, the gap is part of the play's biographical mystique: the comedy itself ends with a year of waiting, and the playwright may have written a now-lost answer to it.

Historical Background

The play was probably composed around 1594–1595 and first published in quarto in 1598 with the title-page note "Newly corrected and augmented" — language that suggests an earlier (perhaps amateur) printing or performance had already circulated. The setting is the court of Navarre, a small kingdom that bordered France and Spain, and the four lords' names (Ferdinand, Berowne, Longaville, Dumaine) have rough historical analogues in the actual French Wars of Religion of the 1580s and 1590s. The real Henry of Navarre had courtiers named Biron, Longueville, and Mayenne, and Henry himself converted to Catholicism in 1593 with the famous (apocryphal) line "Paris is worth a Mass." The play's English audience would have heard the names as topical.

Detailed Analysis

Two larger Elizabethan currents shape the play's surface. The first is humanism — the late-Renaissance enthusiasm for classical learning, rhetorical training, and the academies established to cultivate young gentlemen. The play's opening premise (a princely study circle modeled on continental Neoplatonic academies) is a recognizable Elizabethan fantasy of educated nobility, and Shakespeare's refusal to take it seriously is part of his point. The second is the fashion for elaborate prose, especially the "euphuism" of John Lyly, whose Euphues (1578) had set a vogue for sentences full of antitheses, mythological allusions, and balanced parallel clauses. Armado, Holofernes, and the lords' love letters are partly a parody of euphuism. Reception history has been uneven. The play was little staged after the seventeenth century — Samuel Pepys saw it in 1662 and called it "the dullest play I ever saw" — and remained marginal in the Shakespearean repertoire until the twentieth century. Modern productions, especially after Peter Brook's celebrated 1946 staging at Stratford and Kenneth Branagh's 2000 musical-film adaptation, have rehabilitated the play as a melancholy, lyrical comedy whose tonal complexity rewards careful staging. It is now one of the more frequently produced of the early comedies, partly because directors find the abrupt fifth-act darkening genuinely modern in a way the more conventional comic endings of Two Gentlemen or Comedy of Errors are not.