Love's Labour's Lost by William Shakespeare

The Play Podcast

Host Douglas Schatz and director Tom Littler delve into the linguistic complexities and structural beauty of Shakespeare's 'Love's Labour's

Key takeaways

• The play is characterized by 'euphuism', an intricate style of balanced antithesis and complex wordplay.
• Tom Littler's production at Orange Tree Theatre connects characters like Berowne and Rosaline to Benedick and Beatrice from 'Much Ado About Nothing'.
• Shakespeare's use of rhyming couplets in this period reflects his recent work with narrative poetry during the plague closures.
• The play moves from a 'sunlit' experience of youthful pretense to a more somber, uncertain minor key by its conclusion.
• The production highlights the contrast between the high-flown language of courtiers and the grounded, often witty, presence of commoners like Don Armado.

Main topics

• Linguistic complexity in Shakespeare
• Theatrical 'play patching' techniques
• Comparison of Love's Labour's Lost and Much Ado About Nothing

Notable quotes

A writer almost drunk on his own talent... that matures and modulates into something plainer and sadder and more sincere.

Conclusion

The episode offers a profound appreciation for how Shakespeare uses li

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:06) Welcome to The Play Podcast with me, Douglas Schatz. Hello and welcome to episode 114 of The Play Podcast, where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. I'm Douglas Schatz, founder and host of The Play Podcast. The curtain rises on four men at the court of King Ferdinand of Navarre. The king and three of his courtiers are about to enter into a collective pact to devote themselves to academic study for the next three years. and during this time to also abjure all contact with women, to eat no more than one meal a day, and to sleep but three hours in the night. To ward off any distraction, the king decrees that no woman shall come within a mile of the court. However, the decree and their oaths are promptly tested by the arrival of the Princess of France and three of her ladies-in-waiting. Of necessity, they must be welcomed, of course, and the inevitable ensues. Each of the men fall in love and break their vow. This is the premise of William Shakespeare's pleasant, conceited comedy, Love's Labour's Lost. I use those adjectives, pleasant and conceited, because that is how the play is actually titled on the cover page in the first ever publication of its text, in 1598. I imagine that the epithets were intended to highlight the play's courtly aesthetic, its frothy merry-go-round of courtship, and above all, perhaps, the infectious, if ostentatiously intricate, wordplay that distinguishes it. For this last reason, it is not necessarily an easy play for modern audiences to access, but even without our understanding every nuance of its period comedy, it's hard to resist the preening labours of love on display. That is especially so... as when staged outdoors on a summer's evening in a garden near the Thames in Richmond by the joint talents of the Orange Tree Theatre and the Guildford Shakespeare Company. I'm delighted, therefore, to be joined to assay Shakespeare's conceited comedy by the esteemed director of this magical production, Tom Littler. Tom has been the Artistic Director and Joint Chief Executive of the Orange Tree Theatre since 2023, where his directing credits include Twelfth Night, Somerset Mom's The Circle, Churchill in Moscow by Howard Brenton, The Rivals by Sheridan, and Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer, the last of which loyal listeners may recall, Tom joined me to talk about so knowledgeably in episode 72 of the podcast. Welcome, Tom. Thanks so much for coming back to the podcast. Speaker 2 (2:51) Well, Speaker 1 (2:51) thanks for Speaker 2 (2:51) having me again. Speaker 1 (2:52) Tom, when we were exchanging messages to set up this meeting, you said, and I quote, that Love's Labour's Lost is a play that you dearly love. So I want to start by simply asking why you love it so much. Speaker 2 (3:04) Well, this was my second time directing the play. And both times I've had a completely wonderful experience. It's a beguiling play. And there's always something nice about taking up a play that is not everybody's favorite and championing it. You know, there's something lovely, of course, about doing a play like Twelfth Night and everybody telling you how much they love Twelfth Night. But there's a kind of conversion game that takes place if you take... Speaker 1 (3:28) a Speaker 2 (3:29) less loved play where people go, oh, Love's Labour's Lost. Why are you doing that? You take up the challenge. Yeah, and you get the pleasure of hopefully changing a few minds and a few hearts. So that's part of it, the lesser loved sibling. But the other and more important thing is that I think it's a wonderful play. And while you might not be able to make a plausible claim for it being one of William Shakespeare's greatest or most complete five plays or whatever, It has enormous charm. Speaker 2 (4:01) and poignancy. And you see within it the young writer growing up, I think, almost as he writes the play. And I'm sure we'll go on to talk about this in more detail, but as the play progresses, it's initially high-flown rhetoric and kind of superabundance of wordplay. And a writer almost drunk on his own talent, who is reflecting that in characters who are drunk on their own wit, that matures and modulates into something plainer and sadder and more sincere. And I find it incredibly Speaker 1 (4:45) moving. That's very well put. You're right, because it is the language that first strikes you, isn't it? And that in some respects, I think he's both relishing. the language and also it's satirical which we'll talk about as well but there's no question there's a huge amount of relish about the language. It's not a play I knew well actually. I think I've only seen it once before in my life and never studied it so I'm very glad to have the opportunity to learn about it and for you to convert me. You mentioned it being a young writer. Where does the play actually fit into the chronology of Shakespeare's career? Speaker 2 (5:16) Yeah, it's not super early. I think it's about 1594 or 5. So he's an established writer by this point. It's before your As You Like It. It's substantially before Twelfth Night. And it's 10 years before you get into the world of the really dark comedies like Measure for Measure, which barely qualify as comedies at all. So it's absolutely the work of a young writer. And it's inflected, I think, by a couple of things that are going on. culturally. And one of those is the writing of a contemporary writer called John Lilly. And he writes primarily for boys' companies, which were extremely fashionable at the time. And for those companies, Lilly is writing these sorts of plays of extraordinary wordplay and wit. So Shakespeare, I think, is partly writing out of that tradition and influence. And there's a play of Lily's called Euphues, out of which comes the term euphuism, which is to talk or to write in this extremely complex but balanced way. What I mean by balance is if you say the egg is salty, but the toast is buttery, you have a double antithesis. You have the egg and the toast and you have the salt and the butter. But in euphuism, you could extend that, and I'm not going to make an idiot of myself by trying to make one up for you, but you could extend that over line after line after line, such that by the end of it, you've got four or five or six things all balanced against each other, sometimes over many, many lines. And because of the balancing act, the audience is able to hear. how the logic of it fits together. So it's a very complicated thing to write, but it's quite a simple thing to hear to such an extent that you don't even really realise it's happening. It's just games of opposites. It's weighing things in scales. So all Shakespeare deals with antithesis as a literary device, dark against light and so on. But it's taken to an extreme in this period of Shakespeare's career. And that is part of the essential... grammar of the play. And it's part of how you can make it actually, I think, quite easy to communicate to an audience, even though it looks very complicated on the page. Speaker 1 (7:39) Yes, it is very complicated on the page. And as you say, it multiplies and multiplies the language, the repetitions and the playing on various different meanings of the same word. So I get that. I think what also was happening is it followed a period in 1594-95, of a couple of years where the theaters have been closed by plague, and Shakespeare had been writing his narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece, and this in turn influenced the style of four plays that he wrote shortly thereafter when the theaters reopened in 94-95, including Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night's Dream, and these all contain, as a result of the fact that he was writing poetry for a couple of years, much more rhyming verse or verse of various types than his previous plays. And this is certainly the case with Love's Labour's Lost. It's interesting, I also noticed on the title page of that quarto edition published in 1598 that it was newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespeare. So this was the first play with Shakespeare's name actually on the title page. But what's also interesting about this title page, I have to ask you about, Tom, is that The title is printed as Love's Labour's Lost, and there are no apostrophes in this first version of the title. We generally know the play now with apostrophes on both love and labour. So Love's Labour's. It may seem a pedantic point, but do the apostrophes make any difference to the meaning of the title, or how are we supposed to decipher them? Speaker 2 (9:07) I mean, engaging with Shakespeare in punctuation is a... A really dangerous game, isn't it? And people have lost, I think, many otherwise fruitful decades to that particular hobby. But we decided that we would have apostrophes over both. So that would make it mean the labour, singular, of love, singular, is lost. Speaker 1 (9:32) Rather than the labours themselves being lost. Speaker 2 (9:35) Yes, yes, exactly. Because that seemed to go with what the play... and codes. But Speaker 1 (9:40) I Speaker 2 (9:41) think you've probably got to have an apostrophe on the loves. But where you put it, if you put it on labors, I think is really up to you. Speaker 1 (9:48) As you say, I think it's a bit of a minefield. I shouldn't be wading into this anyway, because I believe there was a little punctuation in original performance text, and it could have just been inserted by printers. But I think it does make a slight difference, as in it's the result of the labors that's lost. if that second apostrophe is included. And as we'll come to see, these labors are lost in some sense. They don't come to fruition. I mean, they also talk about love in the title is actually Cupid, and it's Cupid's labors that are lost that have failed to hit the mark, for example. Further to the question of the chronology of Shakespeare's output in the title, I want to ask you also about the mystery around Love's Labors I. which may or may not be a complete missing play in Shakespeare's oeuvre, even as the title suggests, possibly a sequel to Love's Labour's Lost. Can you fill us in on the mystery of that missing play, so-called? Well, Speaker 2 (10:39) nobody knows. There is a record to this play called Love's Labour's One. There's a list that we have by somebody at the time who describes a list of plays by William Shakespeare, one of which goes by the title of Love's Labour's One. So this has invited people to ponder what that play might be. Is it a completely lost play or is it a different title for a play that we do know? And many of Shakespeare's plays did have more than one title, Twelfth Night or What You Will. Speaker 1 (11:12) So Speaker 2 (11:12) it's not a dumb question to go, OK, if there isn't a totally lost play, which other play by Shakespeare could have been described as Love's Labour's one? And the play that everybody always comes back to is Much Ado About Nothing. Speaker 1 (11:25) So you actually, interestingly, this summer, you mounted both these plays in repertory and you've leaned into the possible connection between them, even to the point of, for example, merging characters' names to suggest continuity in the stories between these two plays. So what did you see in these two plays that led you to the idea that there's at least a connection potentially? Speaker 2 (11:45) That's exactly right. So within Much Do About Nothing or Love's Labour's One, if we allow it to be called that, we see couples getting back together. We see couples greatly challenged by circumstance and by the plots of others and managing to get together despite everything. So I'd done both plays about a decade ago and I was struck by the fact that Love's Labour's lost. seems to happen before some kind of cataclysmic event. We're never quite told what that is, although there is a bereavement that comes at the end of the play, which shatters everybody's hopes and romantic dreams. Much Ado About Nothing comes after a war, and it features a troop of returning soldiers and the women who have been waiting for them to come back. So I began to think, could you... put these two plays together, not just side by side, which has been done once before in a very good pair of productions by Christopher Luscombe for the RSC. Chris's productions left the texts largely untampered with, so far as I remember. What these have done is to actually imagine it is the same group of people. So the character of Barone in Love's Labour's Lost is the same man as the character of Benedict. in Much Do About Nothing, Rosaline is Beatrice, Catherine is Hero, and so on and so on and so on. So I changed a lot of names, and there's a fair bit of rewriting involved to make things line up. Essentially, it was what the 17th and 18th century theatre people would have called play patching. You take the play and then you put a little bit of extra material on top in order to join things up. Now, all directors do this with all Shakespeare plays. anyway, because you're always going, well, no one's ever going to understand that joke. I'll have to substitute a word that people do know, or indeed that word we would now judge to be completely inappropriate to hear in a public context. I'll change it. And of course, we very rarely have the number of actors available to us. that Shakespeare's companies seem to have done. So we double and we cut and we prune and we edit and we go, oh dear, the scene change is taking longer than we thought it would, so we'll rearrange. You know, these are living texts. But this is certainly the most robust I've ever been with Do Shakespeare Plays because there is quite a bit of new material in the plays. Speaker 1 (14:11) So I'm very impressed by the boldness of your play patching. As you say, actually, the end of Love's Labour's Lost. There are four couples, and it feels like there may be some event like the outbreak of war is to come. And Much Ado starts with four men returning from war. I hasten to say, not with the same names as you have done, but there are also similar themes being about love. And they both spotlight how women can be equals or more in intelligence and passion than the men. And they feature the central. couple, Benedict and Beatrice in Much Ado, and Rosaline and Barone in Love's Labour's Lost. So an interesting idea. I think we'll just have to leave it that we'll never know really whether there was another play Love's Labour's won. Whatever the truth, I think it made true to say that Love's Labour's Lost is less often staged than many of Shakespeare's other plays. In fact, there was a period for more than 200 years from the 17th to 19th century when there is no record of it being performed at all. Why do you think it may be that even in our own time it is less frequently produced? Speaker 2 (15:10) Well, it's a more difficult play to understand than Much Do About Nothing. It is, as you've referred to, a play of language. And some of those language jokes no longer land to an audience. And so you have to make it as intelligible as you possibly can, but without cheapening the experience. And you have to cut the ones that... aren't going to work. So the editing job is demanding on Love's Labours. And if you take a pair like Rosaline and Barone, Rosaline and Barone get some wonderful scenes together in Love's Labours Lost of sparring and facing off against each other. And Barone gets some absolutely knockout speeches. And indeed, Shakespeare's longest speech, I think, is given by Barone. But partly because they're in verse and not just any old verse, but in ornate rhyming couplets. Virtually the whole play takes place in rhyming couplets with amazing skill and facility. That is not the same for a contemporary audience as the opening of Much Ado and Beatrice and Benedict coming in and slinging insults at each other. So the characters of Much Ado are that bit more developed and accessible. And I think in Love's Labours, you have to lean into the patterning of the play and the pleasure of that patterning rather than looking all the time for complex psychological realism. It's a different kind of pleasure that it offers. That being said, as we said at the beginning, it sheds that ornateness as the play develops. And that is one of the extraordinary things about watching it, particularly