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Love's Labour's Lost - scene-by-scene summary & notes
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This document contains some notes on William Shakespeare's play Love's Labour's Lost, plus a scene-by-scene summary.
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Love's Labour's LostThis play feels like it was written effortlessly. It is a university and Renaissance comedy, taking place
in and discussing the ideas of the Renaissance. Although – or exactly because – it is a comedy, it has
to be played straight. You cannot play this too campy – all the characters must truly believe in their
actions. Everyone has to commit.
comedy
Comedy takes us to the essence of human life. It is profound because it pretends not to be. History
doesn't matter (that has passed), tragedy doesn't matter (everyone's dead at the end), but comedy
does. Comedy is pessimistic: life is like this, we cannot change it, and we are at our most human
when we realise this. Comedy is also conventional. It plays with convention, but you have the
standard tropes: sitcom, rom-com etc. The Big Bang Theory, F.R.I.E.N.D.S etc all work with the same
format, the same conventions.
lll
Love's Labour's Lost (LLL) was written at the same time as Midsummer Night's Dream. These are the
first plays of Shakespeare where you can really feel his confidence as a writer. They're early plays,
but not too early.
gross-ideal
The entire play has two ‘arms’: the ideal and the gross. The final song is deliciously gross and dirty,
past the point of being suggestive and full-on into as pornographic territory as Shakespeare would
have been allowed to be. The entire play is about desire, about sexual attraction. Act 4 Scene I, after
the Princess leaves, has a lot of very sexual banter. The imagery of the hunt, too, is highly suggestive.
This play reeks of sex, sexual insinuation and lust.
But there is also the ideal side: the play starts with a sonnet that remembers death and war. It
repeatedly emphasises the word ‘live’, and the king has a desire to leave something behind. He
wants to conquer time by leaving something behind – in his case, academic prowess. The idea of
death is introduced at the start of the play, and continues throughout: there are themes of clocks,
seasons, time passing.
The ideal always has to surrender to the gross. Grossness is reality. But the ideal is reinstated at the
end of this play. When the messenger arrives with the news of the death of the King of France,
serious reality enters the fun, playful puns, jokes and sexual banter of the play. The lords want to
continue their joke after the messenger arrives, but the ladies realise the seriousness of the
situation. Here, the ideal is reintroduced: the men have to wait for a year and a day.
words
Aside from sex, the play continually plays with words. Costard, early in the piece, quickly talks
himself out of the oath. Immediately upon signing it, so does the king: ‘We must of force dispense
with this decree; / She must lie here on mere necessity’. 1 Many scenes are just two characters
talking in wordplay. Additionally, the plot centres around letters. Everything is written down in
letters and poems, no one can just speak without reading aloud from a letter. The poems that are
read aloud feel stolen from random sources, as Berowne announces at the start of the play: ‘small
have continual plodders ever won / save base authority from others' books’.2
1
1.I.150-1.
2
1.I.88-9.
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