Jesting in earnest

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.

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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’.

Extreme measures are sometimes taken to connect the play to modern groundlings boasting infinitely less Latin and Greek than Shakespeare owned up to. Stratford’s most recent showing hailed from Washington DC and satirised the 1960s. We were in an ashram with the king as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, his courtiers as the enlightenment-seeking Beatles, and the Princess and her ladies as sassy adventurers travelling through India on their Vespas. This was great fun, even if creating as many new credibility problems as those it sought to solve. More difficult is to wind the clock back to the original Elizabethan context. This is Gregory Doran’s way in his new RSC staging and it generated immense pleasure on its opening night.

John Barton, director of two previous Stratford productions (1965, 1978), reportedly said, ‘Think Chekhov, not Elizabethan.’