Love’s
Labour’s Lost
Revision Sheet
A very Elizabethan comedy: ‘A
jest’s property lies in the ear / Of him that hears
it…’ (5.2.861-862). Verbal humor often depends upon a detailed and specific use
of language that supposes, amongst other things, a shared vocabulary, shared
cultural references and a sensitivity to homophonic words (topical humor, or puns
for example).
A play
about language and the use of language. How practical is language, how formal, how conventional? When is it an
aid to communication, when a barrier? (This play contains several instances of
undelivered or misdirected mail).
Find, for example, these
‘types’ of language:
Sonnets
Doggerel
verse
Puns,
jokes, witticisms
Malapropisms
Epideitic
and deliberative speeches
Etymologies
Foreign
languages, pedantic Greek and Latin
Courtesies
and the formal rubrics of address
Rhetorical compositions
Love’s Labour’s Lost is an extremely formal play linguistically. It is constituted
of 38% prose, 21% blank verse (iambic pentameter), and the highest percentage
of rhymed verse of any Shakespeare play, 41% (Juilus Caesar and Corialanus
contain 1% of rhymed verse each, Hamlet
3%).
Consider the apparent incomprehensibility
of verbal communication in these scenes:
1.2 Armando and Moth have to
ask each other what the other means
2.1. The men of
Genre
A comedy,
but one that ends strangely and abruptly. The play finishes under the shadow of death and the inevitability of
adultery. All labour’s are lost.
A play
about wasted effort (Shakespeare’s sonnet, number 129, calls sex ‘The expense
of spirit in a waste of shame’).
A play that
raises comic tension by continually keeping men and women apart and insisting
on their difference.
The Life of the Heart vs.
the Life of the Mind
Perceived incompatibility of
women and study (1.1.36-124) and the associated division of mind and body
The Academe and male homosocial worlds, exclusively male environments that seek
to promote bonding through the exclusion, demeaning and ‘othering’
of women.
Secular monasticism and the
renaissance love of study.
The Princess’
pragmatic/cynical diplomatic mission 2.1.1+
Masques and Masks
Mistaken
identities and concealed nationalities, 5.2.157 SD.
With-held
intentions and accidental overhearings, 4.3.
Masked
faces, 5.2.157 SD.
The Conventionality of Love
4.2.81. Holofernes
reads the sonnet and reduces love to formulas and conventions.
4.3.285-339.
Biron’s speech on the endless similes of love.