'When icicles hang by the wall'
The song of Winter, the owl, that ends the play, paired with Spring and the cuckoo
Shakespeare · Comedies
Love's Labour's Lost
c. 1594–95
Comedy — no known narrative source; a courtly satire of fashionable learning and rhetoric
A king and three lords swear a three-year oath to study, fast and see no women, and an embassy of a princess and three ladies arrives the same afternoon. Each man forswears himself in secret, each is caught out, and the wooing collapses into wordplay, disguise and a botched pageant. Then a messenger brings news of a death, and the women impose a year's penance instead of marriage — the only Shakespeare comedy that refuses its own happy ending.
How to spot them
- ▸The park of the King of Navarre, and an academy sworn to three years of study without women
- ▸Each of four men in turn is overheard reading his own love sonnet aloud
- ▸A pageant of the Nine Worthies performed by a schoolmaster, a curate, a braggart and a clown
- ▸The bringing of news of a father's death, which stops the comedy dead in the last scene
- ▸The longest word in Shakespeare, of twenty-seven letters
Scenes, characters & lines
Four men are caught one by one reading their own love poems aloud
The overhearing scene, with Berowne up a tree watching the King, Longaville and Dumaine
Suitors disguise themselves as Muscovites to court masked ladies
The lords are outwitted when the women swap favours and each man woos the wrong one
'honorificabilitudinitatibus'
Costard's twenty-seven-letter word, the longest in Shakespeare, mocking Holofernes' Latin
A pedant, a curate, a braggart and a clown stage the Nine Worthies and are heckled off
Holofernes, Sir Nathaniel, Don Adriano de Armado and Costard, interrupted by news of a death
'The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo'
The last line, spoken after the songs of the cuckoo and the owl
A Spanish braggart's letter about a clown caught with a dairymaid
Armado's absurdly ornate report to the King, the first comic set-piece
Key ideas
- The play is an extended joke about rhetoric: the men lose because their language is all ornament, and are sentenced to a year of plain speech and real work
- Its ending — 'Jack hath not Jill' — deliberately breaks the comic convention, and the epilogue says so outright
Quick-fire facts
- •The 1598 quarto is the first printed play to carry Shakespeare's name on its title page
- •Francis Meres listed a play called Love's Labour's Won in 1598; it is either lost or an alternative title for a surviving comedy
- •Berowne (also spelled Biron), Longaville and Dumaine echo the names of real figures in the French wars of religion
- •Marcade is the messenger whose entrance brings news of the death of the Princess's father
- •Berowne's penance is to spend a year making the sick laugh in a hospital
- •It has the highest proportion of rhymed verse of any Shakespeare play and a famously large vocabulary
- •Kenneth Branagh's 2000 film recast it as a 1930s Hollywood musical set on the eve of war
- •The play was long thought unstageable and was rarely revived before the 20th century
Drill it — 9 cards
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Sources
- Folger Shakespeare Library — Love's Labor's Lost
- Royal Shakespeare Company — Love's Labour's Lost