Love's Labours Lost The Queen liked it. First printed in 1598, Loues Labors Lost was identified on the title page as a "Conceited Comedie," i.e., a witty play, performed before the Queen "this last Christmas," i.e., 1597, and "Newly corrected and augmented." Shakespeare may have revised it for the performance at court, whence the reference to "a Christmas Comedie" (5.2.506) and the extra lines in the Appendix to the New Folger edition (pp. 223-25), apparently left over from an earlier version. Does it seem apt that the Virgin Queen would enjoy a play where "Jack hath not Jill" (5.2.948)? It is typical of Shakespearean comedy that "Jack shall have Jill"—so Puck sings when he administers the love potion in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (3.2.461). A coterie play? There are signs that the play was written during 1593 or another plague year, when the public theaters closed and troupes of players toured the provinces. Thus Berowne’s remark to Rosaline that the love-struck courtiers "haue the Plague, and caught it of your eyes" (5.2.459). Some scholars think that the play was first produced at Tichfield House, home of the Earl of Southampton, and that Don Armado and Mote, or Moth, are modelled on two members of Southhampton’s circle: the writers John Florio and Thomas Nashe. Those who identify Southampton with the fair youth of Shakespeare’s sonnets are inclined to see his reluctance to marry reflected in the King’s plan to avoid women for three years, and to see a similarity between the "dark lady" of the last sonnets and black-eyed Rosaline. A companion play? The earliest critical notice of Shakespeare, published the same year as Loues Labors Lost, referred to "his Loue Labours Wonne." Scholars tend to regard this as an alternate title of a known play such as All’s Well that Ends Well, but it seems possible that Shakespeare wrote a sequel, showing the King and his courtiers after a one-year "cooling off" period. Lots of word play. Critics have counted two to three hundred puns in the play. Quite a few of them are sexual double entendres—for example, in the "greasy" exchange of Costard and Boyet after Rosaline leave the stage in 4.1. The quibbles with words, like the absurd constructions offered by the "braggart" Armado and the "hedge-priest" Holofernes and like the outrageous verbal conceits in the courtier’s billets-doux, raise questions about the adequacy of language to express emotion as well as the reliability of the vows that people make. The eyes have it. Notice the recurrent imagery of eyes and eyesight, beginning with Berowne’s speech on the vanity of study (1.1.74-95). In Renaissance psychology, the soul was vulnerable to the influence of "phantasms" striking the eye, sometimes with good effect like love at first sight but sometimes with dangerous, even malicious consequences. (If you’d like to learn more about this, see Ioan P. Couliano, Eros et magie à la Renaissance [1984], available in English translation.) The men in LLL are more readily influenced by physical appearance than are the women. Film adaptations. The BBC-Time/Life version, directed by Elijah Moshinsky, was first aired in May 1984 and is available on VHS in the library’s media center. (David Warner is wonderful as Armado.) A new version, directed by Kenneth Branagh (who plays Berowne) and featuring Alicia Silverstone (as the Princess) and Gwendolyn McEwan (as Holofernia), is making a limited run. The trailer, which can be viewed at www.imdb.com, says, "No romance. No sex. No way."

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