Love’s Labour’s Lost
Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
In Love’s Labour’s Lost Shakespeare uses the most transparent of silly plots as a pretext for pyrotechnics with the raw material of his craft. On a sudden whim, a king and three courtiers dedicate themselves to scholarship and celibacy. A princess and her companions arrive and duly scupper this plan. Diversions en route are afforded by a fantastical Spaniard, and a schoolmaster and curate who are living proof of the futility of the courtiers’ aspirations to academe.
Much of this looks like parody of such contemporaries as John Florio, Thomas Nashe and Walter Ralegh, but it’s clear that Shakespeare’s also mocking his own facility. The play’s ‘great feast of languages’, its conceits and abstruseness were probably concocted to delight a first audience of aristocratic connoisseurs. In part it prefigures the greater achievement of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written shortly after, the hilarious pantomime of the Nine Worthies surely a rehearsal for ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’.
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