Love’s Labour’s Lost – William Shakespeare

“Love’s Labour’s Lost is a festival of language, an exuberant fireworks display in which Shakespeare seems to seek the limits of his verbal resources, and discovers that there are none.” Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, 1998

Shakespeare’s play, that makes love with too many words, features the longest scene, the longest single word—honorificabilitudinitatibus (the state of being able to achieve honors), and the longest speech in all his plays. It is literally and figuratively stuffed with words. It also has all the hallmarks of his greatest comedies—mis-delivered letters, outrageous disguises, and soulful soliloquies overheard. There’s a play within the play and a gaggle of fools to keep the humor bouncing. But more than anything else, Love’s Labour’s Lost is a play about the velocity, veracity, and verbosity of language.

All this biting banter and salacious wordplay hangs on a suspiciously familiar plot—four young men swear an oath devoting themselves for three years to reading, writing, and abstaining from food, alcohol, and women. Too bad they’ve forgotten that the Princess of France and her ladies are arriving to discuss matters of diplomacy. If one boy meets girl plot is funny then four must be hilarious, right? The payoff is a comedy of sexual politics that may be transported nearly four hundred years into the future and still illuminate the eternal debate between male and female.

Lead by the Princess of France, it is the women who rule the field. They bring depth, power, humanity, and intelligence to the fray. Their battle begins with the rejection of the word ‘fair’—a description used for every aspect of the women’s bodies, minds, voices, and complexions. To live only to be a thing gazed at, adored, and defined only by their physical charms, even in poetry, is unacceptable. They want a mate to work, to act, and commit to a promise to make the world a better place.

In our production, the battleground is the Sexual Revolution of 1960’s England where the king has set-up the “remote” court of Navarre at Cambridge University. Here four beautiful women meet four beautiful men in a totally groovy place and, of course, love happens. Until the real world, as it must, comes crashing in. Enjoy!