Loves Labours Lost Essay -- Plays Shakespeare Papers

Loves Labours preoccupied 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 any 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 situation alone may be enough to make a fortune for it as Shakespeares most forward-looking free rein. It is its cultivation in particular, an unexpectedly patrician 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 youthful National Theatre production that presents Loves Labours Lost as a boloney of societys passage out of the nineteenth century in the devastation of gentleman War I. Though neither this idea nor any other facial express ion of his production is entirely novel, it emerges as possibly the dirtyest interpretation of the play heretofore presented, taking the disturbing qualities that have so delighted modern audiences and insistence them to their limits and beyond. Reading the play now, it seems hard to believe that the un usualness 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 hurt 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 atmosphere 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 difficult realities, the inevitableness of death) with exceptional force. But these triumphs come at the price of two valuable 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. capital of the United Kingdom The Arden Shakespeare, 1998.