Loves Labours Lost Essay -- Plays Shakespeare Papers

Loves Labours Lost The Elizabethans thought of it merely as a wittie and pleasant comedie Samuel Johnson remarked that all the editors have concurred to censure it and William Hazlitt opined, If we were to part with both of the authors comedies, it should be this. It was not until well into the twentieth century that Loves Labours Lost really came into its own, and this fact alone may be enough to make a facial expression for it as Shakespeares most forward-looking satisfy. It is its stopping point in particular, an unexpectedly grim conclusion in which nothing is actually concluded, that has appealed to modern sensibilities and made Loves Labours Lost the Shakespeare play for the twentieth century. Trevor Nunn makes this point emphatically in a recent National Theatre production that presents Loves Labours Lost as a tale of societys passage verboten of the nineteenth century in the devastation of World War I. Though neither this idea nor any other aspect of his production is entirely novel, it emerges as possibly the darkest interpretation of the play yet presented, taking the disturbing qualities that have so delighted modern audiences and pressing them to their limits and beyond. Reading the play now, it seems hard to imagine that the un popularness of the ending could have gone apparently unnoticed for so long. With the stage set for the usual comedic ending of multiple marriages, the news of the Princesss fathers death comes as a complete shock Marcad enters at a moment of such carefree mirth that the Princess playfully chides him, thou interruptest our merriment (5.2.712). A moment later, his news is told and the melody of the play has noticeably changed, as Berowne himself acknowledges when he says, The scene begin... ...ns. Ultimately, Nunn succeeds in making his dark vision of Loves Labours Lost convincing, and in using the play to make the usual points (the fleeting nature of happiness and happy endings, the necessity of confronting difficul t realities, the inevitability of death) with exceptional force. But these triumphs come at the price of two priceless aspects of Shakespeares ending its unanticipated overthrow of audience expectations and its startlingly modern open-endedness. BibliographyGilbert, Miriam. Loves Labours Lost. Shakespeare in Performance Series. Manchester and New York Manchester University Press, 1993.Holland, Peter. English Shakespeares. Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1997.Peter, John. Growing Pains, Sunday Times, Feb. 2003, p. 19.Woudhuysen, H. R., ed. Loves Labours Lost. 3rd series. London The Arden Shakespeare, 1998.