Love’s Labour’s Lost: Shakespeare’s Anatomy of Wit

Love’s Labour’s Lost (1598) stages four young aristocratic suitors courting four French ladies in an improbable Arcadia. Anticipating on Joyce’s language games, this play cannot be seen as yet another festive comedy of love. It is a laboratory piece which reverses our initial expectations, poised as it is between comedy and tragedy, merriment and spleen, copia and nihilism. Here, Shakespeare paves the way for some of the major themes he will explore later on in his career, such as the value of knowledge, the problems of inheritance, or female power. He also examines the arbitrary relationships between verba and res in a dazzling series of puns and quibbles that bring language, letters and ciphers to the fore. A virtuoso comedy, Love’s Labour’s Lost keeps juggling with bawdy words as it puts dramatic codes upside down, so that it somewhat perversely fails to reach the expected happy ending.
Love’s Labour’s Lost: Shakespeare’s Anatomy of Wit reassesses this exuberant and extravagant piece through a close study of its political background, its religious overtones and its transgressive wordplay while also enhancing the play’s multiple resonances in the world of today.