Claus-P. Buechmann
English, Gustavus Adolphus College
St. Peter, MN 56082-1498
cpb@gac.edu

Central Renaissance Conference Version, 1998

Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost as An Anatomie of Abuses

There is little agreement among the critics concerning the quality and objective of Shakespeare's

comedy Love's Labor's Lost. The play used to be considered among the weakest in the
Shakespeare canon. Hazlitt's view, that "If we were to part with any of the author's comedies it

should be this,"¹became a critical commonplace until our time. Agreeing that the play, for which
we know of no dramatic or narrative sources, has a satirical purpose which was readily accessible
to the original audience of insiders, many critics have contributed numerous articles to scholarly
journals, proposing a great variety of historical Elizabethans as the alleged originals for the male
characters Shakespeare meant to lampoon in the play. The favorites in these searches for topical
sources have varied much, and none of these ingenious efforts has ever resulted in a scholarly con-

sensus.²Nevertheless, all have noted that the play, though not exactly satirical, is, nevertheless,
replete with a gentle skewering of a number of kinds of abuses, such as affectation of language, af-
fectation of the heart, and affectation of apparel. The last of these affectations, however, has not
drawn much commentary. Likewise, it is a critical commonplace to note that this conceited comedy
marked by a suspended coda consists of a series of ballet-like movements which, the received

in the conven-

tional resolution of romantic comedy: love's labors are lost in the case of the courtly main charac-
ters. In other words, Shakespeare is perceived to have used a scatter-gun approach to lampoon
various kinds of largely unconnected topical kinds of abuses that cannot be recovered. Other critics
side with John Arthos, the editor of the Signet Classicedition of the play, who proclaims that

"Love's Labor's Lost is one of Shakespeare's earliest and happiest comedies. It is excellently
formed, moving easily towards its conclusion in a masque and a song, at the end recapitulating in
all the stage's beauty the courting warfare of the young noblemen and ladies that has made up the
chief part of the play, the sparrings and the surrenders and the victories. The play makes the point
the theater seems to live to make, that sooner or later love conquers all, and although the title tells
us that love's labor's lost, this we know is joking: the happy outcome is certain, and love and long

1_{Richard Davis, the editor of the Arden volume of Love's Labour's Lost, opens his Introductionwith that}
quotation from Hazlitt.
2_{For suport of this claim see the survey in the Arden LLL, pp. 25ff.}

cpb@gac.edu: CRC 98 Paper1January, 1998