Bluff Your Way Through the Play: Love’s Labour’s Lost

 

Loving the Language of Love

As noted Shakespeare scholar Bloom wrote, Love’s Labour’s Lost is filled with verbal pyrotechnics. Be on the lookout for word play, puns and complex language. Shakespeare is presenting an educated class, royalty and nobles, so their verbal agility is going to be on display.

Words, Words, Words

Love’s Labour’s Lost has plenty of them! It’s one of Shakespeare’s most talkative plays. According to some scholars, it uses more “new” words (words that the playwright hadn’t ever used before) than any of Shakespeare’s previous plays.

Speaking of Words…

Love’s Labour’s Lost contains the longest word in any of Shakespeare’s plays: honorificabilitudinitatibus. Spoken by Costard, it means “with honorableness.”

In for the Long Haul

The play also contains Shakespeare’s longest single scene clocking in at 1016 lines.  Just to compare, the entirety of The Comedy of Errors runs just 1786 lines.

Hey, this is kind of familiar…

If you’ve seen or read other Shakespeare plays, you’ll notice that Love’s Labour’s Lost has some situations and characters that will seem similar:

• Like The Two Gentlemen of Verona, we get two clowns in Love’s Labour’s Lost
• You’ll find shades of Beatrice and Benedick’s squabbling from Much Ado About Nothing in the banter between Berowne and Rosaline. 
• The buffoonish Prince of Aragon in The Merchant of Venice could very well be the brother of the bragging Spaniard Don Armado. 

Two by Two by Two by Three

You just know that the “He-man Woman Avoiders Club” set up at the start of the play by the King and his buddies is not going to last after the arrival of the Princess and her ladies. One by one the boys give up their vows of abstinence to pursue their loves, resulting in three different couples with three different exploits that we get to follow. And on top of that, there’s the rivalry between Don Armado and Costard for the hand of Jacquenetta. Make sure you keep track of who’s pairing up with whom.

Yeah, I Invented That

Shakespeare borrowed and adapted much of the plots to his plays from other literary sources, but the action in Love’s Labour’s Lost is entirely his own creation. 

The Comic Toybox

Several of the more exaggerated comic characters in Love’s Labour’s Lost can trace their ancestry back to the classic Italian commedia dell’arte tradition. Audiences at the time could easily hook into the habits and motivations of these character types while Shakespeare could then use them to elaborate on his own themes.

You Call That a Happy Ending?

Usually Shakespeare’s comedies end happily; there’s a wedding or two or three, people dance, there’s much merry making. But Shakespeare’s a sly one. He leaves us hanging at the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost wondering if the newly minted couples actually will live “happily ever after.” Or, was he setting us up for a sequel?

What Happens After a Year and a Day?

With all the unresolved romances and promises to meet again, Love’s Labour’s Lost was screaming for a sequel. There is evidence Shakespeare wrote a play called Love’s Labour’s Won, possibly resolving the stories in Love’s Labour’s Lost, but no copies of it are known to exist.