37 Days of Shakespeare, Day 36: Love’s Labour’s Lost

Love’s Labour’s Lost, first broadcast January 5th, 1985

• When was it written? Maybe 1594 or 1595. Perhaps his 9th play.
• What’s it about? Ferdinand, the King of Navarre, and three companions swear off women for three years to devote themselves to study and fasting, but when the Princess of France and her ladies in waiting arrive, the boys break their vows and fall in love one by one. In the end, all the couples are about to marry, but the princess then finds out her dad has died so she declares a one year period of mourning and all of the other ladies decide to put off their men for a year as well.
• Most famous dialogue: None
• Sources: None! This seems to be mainly original.
• Best insult: Too many to choose from:
• “that low-spirited swain, that base minnow of my mirth, that unlettered, small-knowing soul, that shallow vassal”
• Or: “This wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy, This Signior Junior, giant dwarf, Dan Cupid, Regent of love rhymes, lord of folded arms, Th’ anointed sovereign of sighs and groans, Liege of all loiterers and malcontents, Dread prince of plackets, king of codpieces, Sole imperator and great general Of trotting paritors”
• Or: “His humor is lofty, his discourse peremptory, his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, his gait majestical, and his general behavior vain, ridiculous, and thrasonical. He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it.”
• Best word: Well, thrasonical is good, but I’ll go with “God dig-you-den” which was apparently a greeting?
• Best production of this play I’ve seen: I’ve never seen it nor read it before.
• Notable Names in the BBC Adaptation: David Warner is Don Armado and the always-lovely Jenny Agutter is Rosaline

How’s the cast?

• Excellent. Despite the unhappy ending announced by the title, the cast plays it as a very sprightly comedy until the very end, and they’re all very funny.

How’s the direction by Elijah Moshinsky?

• This is the fifth one Moshinsky has done and he’s always been good. He makes the rather brilliant decision to set this one 100 years after Shakespeare’s time, which makes it feel more like a Moliere play than a Shakespeare play, especially since it has a lot of rhyming dialogue. Being a big fan of Moliere, I didn’t mind at all.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: One Up Yourself

We really wish we knew for sure what was written first, this or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, because the two plays are so clearly in conversation with each other, and it would be great to know which was responding to which. Notably, both plays get their lovers together early, only to have them sit down to heckle a buffoonish play-within-a-play.

But they also contrast each other in key ways. In Midsummer, it’s implied the new lovers will marry right away, but this play puts off all the marriages by a year at the end. Puck in Midsummer says “Jack shall have Jill” but Berowne sums up this play as “Jack hath not Jill” (or to put it another way, Love’s Labours have been Lost). The best guess we can hazard is that this play came first, which is fascinating because it really feels like this one is a twist on that one, but I guess that’s just because that’s the order I encountered them. If this one came first and Midsummer is the rewrite, then it’s an even-better rewrite of an already-excellent original.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Spying Upon Spying Is a Good Source of Comedy

The funniest scene is a scene that Shakespeare went back to over and over, and other playwrights would borrow from him (even for non-comedic plays, such as The Lion in Winter). Each of our four scholars reveals his feelings of love in a soliloquy, only to have to hide as another enters, slowly filling up the hiding places in the room as they’re all spying on each other as each breaks their anti-love oath, then they get to leap out and accuse each other one by one, until they all realize that they’re fools. Double or triple-spying is a good source of comedy gold.

(Of course, this asks a lot of your set decorators, who have to create three believable hiding spots. This production fails to do that, and at least one could be easily spotted, harming the scene.)

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Satire is Superior to Spoof

Most of Shakespeare’s comedies would best be described as farces.  Is this the only one that could best be described as satire? 

Google offers some challengers to the title: Some call Troillus and Cressida a satire of heroic narratives in general, but I would consider it to be more of an (unsuccessful) spoof of Homer and Chaucer specifically (though I realize the distinction is fine). Some cynics find Romeo and Juliet so unconvincing as a serious love story that they declare it to be a satire (intentional or not) of romances. But no, I don’t count either of those, so I would declare Love’s Labours to be Shakespeare’s only true satire.

Shakespeare is lovingly mocking those who would have us live by reason alone. He’s essentially writing a satire of the Enlightenment, which hadn’t begun yet, which is why it’s so brilliant for Moshinsky to set the play late in the 17th century.

Satire is a higher art form than spoof because it doesn’t just make sport of pre-existing works, it explores the human condition, impeaching extreme characters in order to impeach milder impulses in that direction that we all have. Satires also tend to have happier endings, as everyone lives, loves, and learns to admit their faults now that they’ve been made fools of. It can be sharply barbed but is often gentler in the end.

This play looks forward to Moliere not merely because it rhymes more than any other Shakespeare play. Moliere was a master satirist. Shakespeare just dabbles at that here, but shows that he could have done more great work using those tools if he had chosen to.