Love's Labour's Lost

Love's Labour's Lost by William Shakespeare
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This probably works really well on stage but I found it a bit of a slog to read – it felt like an awful long time for love's labours to get lost. The feel of the play is close to The Importance of Being Earnest via Jane Austen – gentility trading witty barbs and wasting time on dressing up and playing silly games. Woudhuysen's introduction in the Arden third edition provides a comprehensive guide to the way the jokes comment on the instability inherent to the use of language. Shakespeare is poking fun at booksmart narcissists, and engineers an ending that defers the marriages and undermines the expectations of the comic genre. Death and reality gatecrash the party and leave conclusions open. It should feel like a more radical break than it does, maybe because all the characters are so unserious that you can't invest much in their fates. The problem plays this gestures towards have higher stakes and are more effective in discomforting the audience.

View all my reviews