Last performed in 2001
Synopsis | Smart Guide
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Synopsis
The plot of Love’s Labour’s Lost is just as high-spirited as its language. The story revolves around a vow taken by four arrogant young men to give up the company of women for three years in order to further their education. Shortly after they swear allegiance to this scheme, all four aspiring scholars fall in love, creating the four aristocratic couples, headed by a king and a princess, who propel Shakespeare’s main plot. The subplot introduces a fifth couple—a vain Spaniard and a befuddled dairymaid—along with a company of commoners who provide entertainment for the royal pair and their attendants.
Shakespeare puts almost every comic device he knows to its full use in the story: disguise, mistaken identity, oath-taking and oath-breaking, eavesdropping, declarations of love which fall into the wrong hands, and various forms of merriment conceived as courting rituals. The story line also incorporates a masked ball and a village pageant, which effectively link the main plot and subplot.
Love’s Labour’s Lost portrays love and marriage as an ideal, “a world-without-end bargain” not to be entered into lightly. While the play suggests that lofty learning and inflated language have no place in genuine love, it does not judge the follies of young lovers harshly.
Shakespeare’s title reveals the outcome of the story: Love’s labor is lost, at least for a time. In the end when all pretensions have been exposed, the women suspect that the men are unable to distinguish infatuation from true love. Thus the men’s labors must take on a different character for a year and a day so that their faithfulness can be tested.
Although the resolution to the plot does not include the celebration of betrothal or marriage that audiences have come to expect at the close of a Shakespearean comedy, the play’s ending is both satisfying and promising concerning romantic love. Lines Berowne has spoken earlier in jest take on new meaning in the play's finale:
We number nothing that we spend for you;
Our duty is so rich, so infinite,
That we may do it still without accompt.
The audience has good reason to hope that the men, realizing the true worth of the women they love, will willingly and well perform their new labors of love.
Janie McCauley, Dramaturg