1. The Failure of the Academy

Is the king's plan to establish a three-year academy of study presented as a noble ideal that fails because of human weakness, or as a misguided fantasy that the play wants the audience to laugh at from the beginning? Argue one or the other.

The most obvious approach is to treat the academy as ironic from page one — Berowne calls it doomed within fifty lines, the men violate it within hours, and Shakespeare clearly intends the audience to side with Berowne. Use Berowne's "These are barren tasks" speech and the king's almost immediate "We must of force dispense with this decree" as evidence that the play never asks us to take the academy seriously. Build a thesis around the idea that the play is a critique of monastic withdrawal as a form of self-deception.

Detailed Analysis

A more sophisticated argument resists the easy answer. Shakespeare gives the king's opening speech real lyric force — "Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives, / Live registered upon our brazen tombs" — and the language of fame, learning, and the conquest of time is not simply mocked. Several of Shakespeare's later plays (The Tempest, Henry V) take the question of disciplined self-formation seriously. A stronger thesis would argue that the play sets up the academy as an ideal whose content is genuinely valuable but whose form is impossible: the men want to be better than they are, and the play takes that desire seriously even while showing that it cannot be achieved by signing a piece of paper. The Princess's year of penance at the end is, after all, a reinstatement of the academy's basic premise — extended discipline as the price of becoming a serious person — only this time imposed by the women instead of self-imposed by the men. The play does not reject the idea of self-discipline. It rejects the men's particular version of it.

2. Berowne and Rosaline as a Prototype

To what extent does the relationship between Berowne and Rosaline anticipate Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing? Argue that the comparison illuminates one of the two pairs in particular.

Begin with the obvious parallels. Both pairs are witty, both engage in verbal sparring as a substitute for direct emotional admission, both feature a man who has loudly declared he will never love and a woman who appears to be his equal in mockery. Build the case that Berowne and Rosaline are a first draft — Shakespeare working out the type that he will perfect a few years later. Use specific verbal echoes (Berowne's catalogue of his former contempt for love; Beatrice's similar speeches in Much Ado) as evidence of continuity.

Detailed Analysis

A deeper argument must take seriously what Love's Labour's Lost does that Much Ado does not. Beatrice and Benedick end paired off in marriage; Rosaline and Berowne end with Rosaline assigning Berowne a year of unaccompanied service in a sickroom. The difference is the whole point. Love's Labour's Lost is asking whether wit-based attraction is a sufficient foundation for marriage, and answering, hesitantly, "not yet." Much Ado is more confident — Benedick has fought a war, has friendships in the play that ground his identity, has reasons to trust his perception of Beatrice that Berowne does not have. A strong essay would argue that Rosaline's assignment of penance is not a comic deferral; it is Shakespeare's diagnosis of what is missing from the early version of his own type. He returns to the pair in Much Ado with the missing pieces in place. Quote Rosaline's "A jest's prosperity lies in the ear / Of him that hears it" speech as the play's own verdict — wit alone is not yet enough.

3. The Function of the Comic Subplot

The Armado–Costard–Jaquenetta subplot occupies more stage time than any subplot in Shakespeare's other early comedies. Argue for what the subplot adds — or fails to add — to the play's central concerns.

The straightforward case is that the subplot mirrors and intensifies the play's main themes about language and desire. Armado is what the lords look like with the dignity stripped away — a man who inflates lust into chivalric vocabulary because he cannot tolerate the plainness of his actual feelings. Costard's malapropisms ("guerdon" for a tip) parody the lords' love-of-language. Jaquenetta's pregnancy at the end is the closest the play comes to a real consummation, and Armado's final vow to plough the earth for her is the play's truest love declaration. Use the parallels between the subplot and the main plot to argue that the comedy is constructed as a single set of variations on one set of questions.

Detailed Analysis

A more challenging essay would interrogate whether the subplot actually achieves what it aims at. The Pageant of the Nine Worthies in Act 5 is one of Shakespeare's most morally awkward set pieces — the lords mock the rustics with a cruelty that the play does not entirely justify. Some critics have argued that the subplot exposes the lords' class snobbery and gives the audience a reason to side with the women's eventual rebuke; others have argued that the play participates in the cruelty rather than critiquing it. Choose a side. Quote Costard's deflating line after the lords mock Pompey ("I made a little fault in 'great'") and Nathaniel's "A foolish mild man; an honest man, look you" as moments where the rustics' dignity briefly registers. A serious essay must decide whether the play knows that mocking Holofernes is not so different from what the four lords have been doing to one another in their sonnets.

4. The Tonal Shift in Act 5

The arrival of Marcadé with news of the King of France's death produces one of the most abrupt tonal shifts in any of Shakespeare's plays. Argue for what this shift does — both structurally and morally — and whether the play earns it.

The clearest argument is that the shift is deliberate and brilliantly engineered. Shakespeare has spent four and a half acts conditioning the audience to expect a conventional comic ending — masques, mistaken identities, paired marriages — and then ruptures the convention to make a moral point about the lords' unseriousness. The death is a reality the lords' rhetoric cannot absorb. Use the speed of the transition (within roughly a hundred lines, the play moves from mocking the pageant to imposing year-long penances) and the women's immediate change of register as evidence that Shakespeare is delivering a verdict on the play's own genre.

Detailed Analysis

A more sophisticated essay would address two harder questions. First, does the play earn the shift? Some critics argue that the death is too convenient — a deus-ex-machina that imports gravity the play has not generated organically — while others argue that the seeds of the shift have been planted from Act 1, in the king's opening speech about the conquest of time. Second, what does the shift do to our reading of comedy as a genre? Love's Labour's Lost is one of the earliest English plays to use a comic structure against itself, and the technique becomes a key feature of Shakespeare's later "problem plays" (Measure for Measure, All's Well That Ends Well) and tragicomedies (The Winter's Tale). Argue that Love's Labour's Lost is the experimental precursor to Shakespeare's mature handling of generic friction. Quote Berowne's metatheatrical line — "Our wooing doth not end like an old play" — as the play's own consciousness of what it is doing.

5. Power and the Women's Authority

The women in Love's Labour's Lost end the play with the rhetorical and moral upper hand, despite having less institutional power than the men. Argue how Shakespeare engineers this reversal and what it suggests about the play's politics of gender.

The accessible version of this argument focuses on observable facts. The women are physically excluded from the court; they are addressed in flowery nonsense; they are made the targets of disguised wooing. They convert each form of disadvantage into a tool — exclusion becomes external observation, flattery becomes data, the masque becomes a chance to swap favors and humiliate the lords. By Act 5 they impose terms the men must accept. Use the favor-swapping scene and the assignment of penances as the structural climax of the women's strategic intelligence.

Detailed Analysis

A stronger essay would frame the gender politics in terms of what the play withholds rather than what it grants. The women are never fully developed as individual characters in the way Beatrice or Portia later are; some critics argue that Shakespeare is more interested in them as a chorus of perception than as four distinct personalities. Engage that critique. A possible counter-thesis: the women's slight under-individuation is the point — Shakespeare needs them to function as a single corrective body, the social order against which the lords' fantasy crashes, and individuating them too sharply would weaken the corrective force. The Princess's namelessness in the Folio supports this reading. Use Boyet's role as a male attendant whose function is to relay information to the women as evidence that Shakespeare is constructing a deliberate alternative power structure — observation rather than authority, reception rather than command. Connect this to the broader question of where Shakespeare's comedies typically locate the moral intelligence of a play (often, but not always, with female characters), and argue that Love's Labour's Lost is a particularly clear case.