1 00:00:00,030 --> 00:00:06,520 Mark Colvin, thanks a lot for coming back. Today, I'm going to talk about Love's Labour's Lost. 2 00:00:06,520 --> 00:00:11,460 So I think I've done about 25 plays. Now, the all the other lectures are on I. 3 00:00:11,460 --> 00:00:18,560 You can come in yet and you can see that I'm getting out of my comfort zone week by week by week and loves that 4 00:00:18,560 --> 00:00:26,640 has lots of the play never really written about until this lecture and really thought about all that much. 5 00:00:26,640 --> 00:00:32,370 It's not particularly easy play. I'm not sure it's yet a play that I absolutely love. 6 00:00:32,370 --> 00:00:39,690 But I got more interested in it as I was thinking about it and hope I can try and convey some of the ways in which it might be interesting for you. 7 00:00:39,690 --> 00:00:46,430 Working, working on it. So even the title of Love Love's Labour's Lost is something of a tongue twister. 8 00:00:46,430 --> 00:00:48,660 And as I was working on it over the last week, 9 00:00:48,660 --> 00:00:55,560 I wondered whether the question I should have directly approached is whether it has to apostrophes or one, 10 00:00:55,560 --> 00:00:59,910 which seems to be one of the big questions of the 20th century. What does the title mean? 11 00:00:59,910 --> 00:01:05,490 Where did the apostrophes come in the title? But we're not going to go. 12 00:01:05,490 --> 00:01:07,860 There are a lot of mysteries about this play. 13 00:01:07,860 --> 00:01:15,660 And one of the things that I think talking about this play today will help us to think about is Shakespearean mysteries quite topical, 14 00:01:15,660 --> 00:01:21,940 given that some of you may have seen the claim that a new portrait of Shakespeare has been found, 15 00:01:21,940 --> 00:01:34,500 but that's a claim which rests entirely on a kind of cryptographic decoding secret kind of rebus sort of way of thinking about Shakespeare. 16 00:01:34,500 --> 00:01:41,720 Which of which there's been a lot about Love's Labour's Lost. Maybe you can think about that as a kind of methodology. 17 00:01:41,720 --> 00:01:47,430 The question that I've tried to cluster my thought around doubt is what is lost? 18 00:01:47,430 --> 00:01:55,020 What's the idea of loss which hangs over this play? What role does loss play in its construction and how? 19 00:01:55,020 --> 00:02:05,250 What might we be able to use the idea of loss to think about a play which many critics have been willing to lose? 20 00:02:05,250 --> 00:02:10,320 The 19th century critic and essayist William Hazlett was one such. 21 00:02:10,320 --> 00:02:15,720 If we were to part of any with any of the authors comedies, it should be this. 22 00:02:15,720 --> 00:02:21,640 If we were to part with any of the authors, comedies should be this. 23 00:02:21,640 --> 00:02:29,100 OK, so firstly then the plot of Love Labours Lost the King of Navarre vows with three of his noble 24 00:02:29,100 --> 00:02:37,380 friends that they will devote themselves to study and that they will abjure the company of women. 25 00:02:37,380 --> 00:02:42,420 The ink is still wet on that promise. When a party arrives at the court, 26 00:02:42,420 --> 00:02:50,580 the French princess has come with her three ladies in waiting on the pretext of negotiating 27 00:02:50,580 --> 00:02:57,630 some kind of territorial status about the province of Aquitaine on behalf of her father. 28 00:02:57,630 --> 00:03:03,270 So a king and his three noblemen, a princess and three ladies. 29 00:03:03,270 --> 00:03:08,070 What could possibly happen? Yep, they're all in love before we know it. 30 00:03:08,070 --> 00:03:13,680 In fact, they've actually met before, so they already know they are happily they don't fall in love with the wrong person. 31 00:03:13,680 --> 00:03:20,910 So they're all happily set out into full couples. Of course, the men can't admit to each other that they have broken their promise. 32 00:03:20,910 --> 00:03:27,690 Of course, the ladies make them beg for it by covering their faces with masks so that they will make promises to the wrong one. 33 00:03:27,690 --> 00:03:35,640 There's a side plot of a crazy Spaniard, a pedantic schoolmaster and a stupid constable called dull. 34 00:03:35,640 --> 00:03:42,810 Some people pretend to be Russians. It's not quite clear in what sense they're Russians or what Russian quite signifies. 35 00:03:42,810 --> 00:03:49,860 But they pretend to be Russians all the same. And another group acts out a play of the nine Worthy's of antiquity. 36 00:03:49,860 --> 00:03:56,100 And they all talk. They talk a lot. They punt a lot and they talk more. 37 00:03:56,100 --> 00:04:02,100 But that's actually pretty much it. If there was ever a comedy that revealed its hand a bit too early. 38 00:04:02,100 --> 00:04:10,560 Love's Labour's Lost. Must be it. As soon as the King says in his opening speech in the play that they are going to give up women. 39 00:04:10,560 --> 00:04:13,920 We pretty much know who's waiting in the wings by the act. 40 00:04:13,920 --> 00:04:18,870 By the end of Act one, it's clear where this is headed. Act two, three and four. 41 00:04:18,870 --> 00:04:23,160 They're followed for pretty much time fillers until we get to Act five. 42 00:04:23,160 --> 00:04:29,700 It's hard to imagine a play where characters and waste more time talking, playing bowls, 43 00:04:29,700 --> 00:04:37,500 which must be an absolute, you know, the epitome of time-wasting, put on plays, argue about etymology and stuff. 44 00:04:37,500 --> 00:04:45,060 That's all they do really all the way through. Okay, so to an extent, this is kind of true of all comedies. 45 00:04:45,060 --> 00:04:50,010 Girl meets boy, sometimes disguised as boy. They can't be together. 46 00:04:50,010 --> 00:04:54,030 Unsupportive parents. Magic problems in forest. 47 00:04:54,030 --> 00:05:01,090 Dressed in male clothing. Boo. But then. Oh, they can harrar the end. 48 00:05:01,090 --> 00:05:03,040 Shakespeare takes the structure of comedy, 49 00:05:03,040 --> 00:05:12,640 as we've discussed many times before in these lectures from the Roman new comedy structure and new comedy is most striking, 50 00:05:12,640 --> 00:05:15,680 perhaps in its presentation of the blocking figure. 51 00:05:15,680 --> 00:05:23,350 This is a figure completely recognisable to us from the modern incarnation of romantic comedy genre, 52 00:05:23,350 --> 00:05:29,260 which we still pretty much have pretty much entirely the same muchly as Shakespeare had it. 53 00:05:29,260 --> 00:05:40,510 So the blocking figure is a usually unreasonable anti comic patriarch who is trying to prevent the happy ending. 54 00:05:40,510 --> 00:05:47,900 Now, Shakespeare is adept in developing the blocking figure function so that we see a range of such figures, 55 00:05:47,900 --> 00:05:53,350 e.g. Aegeus, the angry father in Midsummer Night's Dream, is one example. 56 00:05:53,350 --> 00:06:04,110 The vengeful Use Your Shylock in the Merchant of Venice is another Malvolio who won't allow cakes and ale is yet a third. 57 00:06:04,110 --> 00:06:11,830 But in Love's Labour's Lost. It's hard to see what the blocking figure is in this play. 58 00:06:11,830 --> 00:06:20,110 There is absolutely no reason at all why these eminently well matched and symmetrical couples should not get married. 59 00:06:20,110 --> 00:06:29,620 There are no existing engagements, no parental interventions, no apparent inequality of rank, no problems with numbers. 60 00:06:29,620 --> 00:06:39,820 None of them is in disguise. As someone other than they are. And so that business with which comedy generally concerns itself. 61 00:06:39,820 --> 00:06:47,830 The clever outwitting of the blocking figure that culminates in Merchant of Venice, for example, in the showdown in the courtroom. 62 00:06:47,830 --> 00:06:54,280 That business is pretty much entirely missing in Love's Labour's lost or a different 63 00:06:54,280 --> 00:07:01,870 way maybe of thinking about that is it's not so much missing as it is internalised. 64 00:07:01,870 --> 00:07:14,200 What's stopping these marriages is not some external blocking agent, but something we might want to guess out as more obviously psychological. 65 00:07:14,200 --> 00:07:20,870 The reason the men cannot marry is because they have sworn willingly a vow not to. 66 00:07:20,870 --> 00:07:28,150 They're clearly not yet ready to break the homosocial bonds of study and to enter into into individual relationships. 67 00:07:28,150 --> 00:07:34,000 And that process, as we've talked before, is really the process of romantic comedy for Shakespeare. 68 00:07:34,000 --> 00:07:39,040 Not so much how women behave, although our tendency is to is to think about that. 69 00:07:39,040 --> 00:07:50,260 But how do men behave? How do men break relationships? Their primary relationships with other men and instead make these relationships with women. 70 00:07:50,260 --> 00:07:57,640 So perhaps then this must apparently unsighted logical of place may hide a deeper truth about comic motivation. 71 00:07:57,640 --> 00:08:01,810 It takes inside the characters, those elements of prohibition. 72 00:08:01,810 --> 00:08:10,180 That comedy tends to project onto other figures. And in that perhaps it pre-empts the play where that's often said to be the case. 73 00:08:10,180 --> 00:08:14,350 The only case or the first case in Shakespeare. Much ado about nothing. 74 00:08:14,350 --> 00:08:18,110 Claire Makarkin editing that play for the Odyn series, 75 00:08:18,110 --> 00:08:22,810 says Much Ado about Nothing is the first play where the blocking figure of the elements 76 00:08:22,810 --> 00:08:28,520 that block the relationships continuing is psychological rather than external. 77 00:08:28,520 --> 00:08:36,340 It's because Beatrice and Benedick can't bring themselves to admit that they love each other rather than that they are being blocked from outside. 78 00:08:36,340 --> 00:08:40,820 That brings about the comedy. But Love's Labour's Lost predates much ado about nothing. 79 00:08:40,820 --> 00:08:48,580 May actually pre-date it in that in that way too. But without an obvious blocking agent, however, 80 00:08:48,580 --> 00:08:57,060 the play loses those self-imposed imposed difficulties by which comedy meshes out its dramatic lengths. 81 00:08:57,060 --> 00:09:03,970 In romantic comedy, romantic partnerships must be extended and tested before they are finally resolved. 82 00:09:03,970 --> 00:09:09,400 People cannot just meet and fall into bed or not in Shakespeare's comedies, at least, 83 00:09:09,400 --> 00:09:16,540 we need to see the romantic relationship develop so that we can invest in it as our own narrative desire in the play. 84 00:09:16,540 --> 00:09:21,520 So comedies are all about desire, but only in part the desires of the characters. 85 00:09:21,520 --> 00:09:31,270 Perhaps the major desires, the desire of the audience to see things work out in a way which has been set up and established and signposted. 86 00:09:31,270 --> 00:09:38,050 So we need to invest our narrative desire in the play, but we also need the confirmation of that desire to be deferred. 87 00:09:38,050 --> 00:09:43,360 Just like the characters in the play do so that there is a play for us to watch. 88 00:09:43,360 --> 00:09:49,390 Love's Labour's Lost. I think challenges many of these comic expectations. 89 00:09:49,390 --> 00:09:57,340 We've talked in the lecture on Romeo and Juliet about the notion of inevitability as a feature of tragedy. 90 00:09:57,340 --> 00:10:08,380 So inevitability as a feature of tragedy. There we identified via the critic Susan Snyder the opposite concept of evitable, ability, 91 00:10:08,380 --> 00:10:15,700 Evatt's ability, the comic possibility to change, to take evasive action around obstacles. 92 00:10:15,700 --> 00:10:26,560 That becomes the leitmotif of comedy. So comedy and equitability, the doom laden trajectory of tragedy as inevitability. 93 00:10:26,560 --> 00:10:33,340 But here in Love's Labour's Lost, as we can see, it's comedy that's absolutely inevitable for women. 94 00:10:33,340 --> 00:10:42,340 For men. Go figure. Perhaps all Shakespeare's plays are actually a little bit light in terms of plot. 95 00:10:42,340 --> 00:10:50,230 Or maybe, in fact, he keeps all the plot for histories which have too much plot and doesn't have enough left for comedies and tragedies. 96 00:10:50,230 --> 00:10:55,210 Certainly at fours are not usually a high point of Shakespeare's art. 97 00:10:55,210 --> 00:11:01,420 If you ever wondered why you're always flagging by nine 30 in the theatre. It's more likely to be his fault than yours. 98 00:11:01,420 --> 00:11:09,580 But even in this wider context of how plot works for Shakespeare, think love letters lost is really definitely on the plot deficient side. 99 00:11:09,580 --> 00:11:16,690 Nothing really happens. The first loss then is plot. 100 00:11:16,690 --> 00:11:22,990 Perhaps this helps us make sense of one early reference and puzzling reference to the play. 101 00:11:22,990 --> 00:11:33,190 In a pairing with a now unknown companion piece writing in 15 Ninety-eight in his printed commonplace book, 102 00:11:33,190 --> 00:11:42,450 Paladin's Tanya Francis Memories gives an early appreciation of Shakespeare's talents. 103 00:11:42,450 --> 00:11:46,420 And he also helps us to sort of stake out a chronology of Shakespeare's writing. 104 00:11:46,420 --> 00:11:57,370 By this point, by the end of the 16th century for comedy, says Mary's witness, his gentleman of Verona, his errors, his love labours lost his love. 105 00:11:57,370 --> 00:12:02,710 Labours won his Midsummer Night's Dream and his Merchant of Venice. 106 00:12:02,710 --> 00:12:07,120 In parentheses, mirrors also gives us for tragedy. Richard the second. 107 00:12:07,120 --> 00:12:14,290 Richard the third, Henry the fourth King John Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet. 108 00:12:14,290 --> 00:12:23,890 So what's interesting here is the two parallel comedy titles. Love's Labour's Lost and Love's Labour's Won. 109 00:12:23,890 --> 00:12:33,110 We don't know now what this second play refers to, whether it's a lost play or an alternative title for one we already have. 110 00:12:33,110 --> 00:12:39,910 And the identity of Love's Labour's won has been one of the brilliant mysteries or gaps into 111 00:12:39,910 --> 00:12:46,390 which Shakespeare studies and Shakespeare preference various studies have happily world. 112 00:12:46,390 --> 00:12:55,540 There's a rather great version of it in one of the doctor who episodes called the Shakespeare Code, Where Love's Labour's One is made up by witches. 113 00:12:55,540 --> 00:13:04,420 And it's going to kind of bring back, as things always are, in inductor. 114 00:13:04,420 --> 00:13:09,460 In the 2014 15 season, the Royal Shakespeare Company played these two plays, 115 00:13:09,460 --> 00:13:17,140 Love's Labour's Lost and Love's Labour's Won, with the second heading up a production of Much Ado about Nothing. 116 00:13:17,140 --> 00:13:22,720 Another common scholarly opinion is that the missing play now goes under the title. 117 00:13:22,720 --> 00:13:29,350 All's well pretends well the same so of the pairing of Love's Labour's Lost and the 118 00:13:29,350 --> 00:13:34,570 Mysterious Love's Labour's one is that perhaps Love's Labour's lost the play we have. 119 00:13:34,570 --> 00:13:41,530 It's part of a double bill in which a second play provides a plot supplement or a balancing narrative. 120 00:13:41,530 --> 00:13:50,650 This is a common place of kind of mediaeval story collections or story structures where we tend to get paired stories, 121 00:13:50,650 --> 00:13:55,730 which shows two sides of the same question. So, for example, we might get. 122 00:13:55,730 --> 00:14:07,450 A play about a nagging woman or a story about knocking woman on the one hand and then the next one is about a tyrannical husband or a violent husband. 123 00:14:07,450 --> 00:14:16,220 So this sometimes have to kind of extremes or to plots which together give us some sense perhaps of a harmony or a complete whole. 124 00:14:16,220 --> 00:14:23,150 So these stories such as we can see this in The Canterbury Tales, for instance, or in years to Kameron, 125 00:14:23,150 --> 00:14:29,610 stories that tend to be written in pairs, not by presenting the same characters in a Part two. 126 00:14:29,610 --> 00:14:36,620 So it's not so much like Henry the fourth, part one and two. We've got continuing story and continuing characters across the two parts. 127 00:14:36,620 --> 00:14:44,960 But by deepening largely social themes, by private, by presenting an alternative take on the same question, 128 00:14:44,960 --> 00:14:51,920 we might perhaps think here about Johnson's every man in his humour and every man out of his humour as titles, 129 00:14:51,920 --> 00:14:57,800 which clearly are in that same kind of parallel relationship as Love's Labour's Lost and Love's Labour's One. 130 00:14:57,800 --> 00:15:03,560 But in the Johnson case, we do not. But we're not getting is the same characters. 131 00:15:03,560 --> 00:15:08,990 Continuing the story where we left off, we got a different group of characters approaching these. 132 00:15:08,990 --> 00:15:18,170 The theme of the Huma's in different ways. So maybe what's lost is half of the play, the missing Love's Labour's won. 133 00:15:18,170 --> 00:15:27,200 And maybe what Francis Marius evidence suggests is that the loss in the first title is only temporary, is only provisional. 134 00:15:27,200 --> 00:15:35,210 It awaits a winning in the second part. Lost and won are in a kind of balance across the two parts. 135 00:15:35,210 --> 00:15:45,120 So maybe it was lost in Love's Labour's Lost is its companion play something that comes after it and something which in some sense completes it. 136 00:15:45,120 --> 00:15:52,990 Now, what everybody says about Love's Labour's Lost is that it makes up for these two potential losses of plot and of its original play, 137 00:15:52,990 --> 00:15:59,450 supplement or companion. It makes up for these losses with language. 138 00:15:59,450 --> 00:16:04,460 Now, of course, plot, like everything else in the theatre, is actually language, too. 139 00:16:04,460 --> 00:16:13,130 But if we were to ask about Love's Labour's Lost, what is it about? The answer would have to be it is about language. 140 00:16:13,130 --> 00:16:20,750 If the plot is simple, then the language is endlessly elaborated and characters are absolutely self-conscious about this. 141 00:16:20,750 --> 00:16:26,810 They all know this is what they're doing and they pointed out to us to make sure that we do too. 142 00:16:26,810 --> 00:16:32,480 So we have quite different kinds of speech, but all of it exaggerated in different ways. 143 00:16:32,480 --> 00:16:41,470 The flowery rhetoric of the male courtiers, the preposterously Latinate pomposity of the schoolmaster Holofernes, 144 00:16:41,470 --> 00:16:49,820 the zany linguistic exuberance of the Spanish knight, Armato malapropisms by the country bumpkin co-starred on. 145 00:16:49,820 --> 00:16:54,800 One of the ways Love's Labour's Lost makes its drama is by bringing these kinds of language 146 00:16:54,800 --> 00:17:00,980 together into juxtaposition many scenes in which different kinds of language clash together. 147 00:17:00,980 --> 00:17:10,910 And they make the play the difference between Armada's hyperbolic language and the reductive haughtiness of his rustic sweetheart, Jack Conetta. 148 00:17:10,910 --> 00:17:19,070 For the French ladies who get a letter mistakenly which was intended for someone else, 149 00:17:19,070 --> 00:17:29,140 language in this play obfuscates, decorates, elaborates much more than it illuminates. 150 00:17:29,140 --> 00:17:36,590 The miscarried letters in the play are pretty obvious symbols for that failure of communication 151 00:17:36,590 --> 00:17:42,110 co-starred the messenger muddles his commissions and delivers them to the wrong recipients, 152 00:17:42,110 --> 00:17:49,930 just as communication between characters or between characters and audience is intercepted and interrupted. 153 00:17:49,930 --> 00:17:59,600 There are long punning routines in which every possible meaning of saw or light or juvenile is explored, 154 00:17:59,600 --> 00:18:06,440 and characters talk about their language explicitly as Holofernes and Armada trade polysyllables. 155 00:18:06,440 --> 00:18:13,640 The boy notes wryly, They have been at a great feast of languages and stolen and stolen. 156 00:18:13,640 --> 00:18:18,920 The scraps had been at a great, great feast of languages and stolen the scraps. 157 00:18:18,920 --> 00:18:24,110 Barrone, the wisecracking leader of the King's friends, describes the Spaniard. 158 00:18:24,110 --> 00:18:28,850 Armando is a most illustrious white, a man on fire. 159 00:18:28,850 --> 00:18:34,730 New words, fashions own night does find new words is one of things. 160 00:18:34,730 --> 00:18:41,960 The place very interested in this is a play where two thirds of the lines are rhyming. 161 00:18:41,960 --> 00:18:49,330 So it's it's not blank verse, blank meaning unwrapping, but rhyming couplets. 162 00:18:49,330 --> 00:18:53,660 And these emphasise both the kind of inevitability of the plot. 163 00:18:53,660 --> 00:18:58,090 So rhyming couplet is like. A really quick piece of plot. 164 00:18:58,090 --> 00:19:06,430 We know that once the runway is set up, there's a limited number of things that it can ride with and it's usually pretty obvious and rugged. 165 00:19:06,430 --> 00:19:11,710 But they also draw attention to the artificiality of language in the play. 166 00:19:11,710 --> 00:19:18,250 But Barones couplet emphasises the importance of language in characterising Armando, 167 00:19:18,250 --> 00:19:22,920 but also draws attention to his own rather precisely archaic word for man. 168 00:19:22,920 --> 00:19:28,030 Quite so, even as Barrone mocks Armando on linguistic grounds, 169 00:19:28,030 --> 00:19:37,600 that's to say his own language is placed under particular and sceptical scrutiny at the end of the of the play. 170 00:19:37,600 --> 00:19:44,680 Barrone realises honest play plain words best pierce the air of grief. 171 00:19:44,680 --> 00:19:48,250 Honest plain words. Best pierce the air of grief. 172 00:19:48,250 --> 00:19:57,790 A series of monosyllables which enact its own premise that to speak plainly is to be most clearly understood. 173 00:19:57,790 --> 00:20:03,040 But then he goes on to elaborate that in terms which show how difficult it is 174 00:20:03,040 --> 00:20:08,350 for characters in this play to step back from their own linguistic affectation. 175 00:20:08,350 --> 00:20:14,470 Oh, never will I trust to speeches penned nor to the motion of a schoolboy's tongue, 176 00:20:14,470 --> 00:20:21,310 nor never come Envisat to my friend nor wew in rhyme like a blind harp song. 177 00:20:21,310 --> 00:20:30,670 Taffeta phrases sing silken terms precise three piled hyperboles spruce affectation figures pedantically. 178 00:20:30,670 --> 00:20:41,110 These summer flies have blown me full of maggot ostentation. I do foreswear them and I hear protest by this white glove white glove of Rosalind. 179 00:20:41,110 --> 00:20:49,450 How white the hand God knows. Henceforth my wooing mind shall be expressed in Rusick yays and honest kersley nose. 180 00:20:49,450 --> 00:21:00,520 And to begin Wenche so God help me law my love to these sound sounds crap or floor rosalind's dry retort sounds sounds. 181 00:21:00,520 --> 00:21:06,280 I pray you shows how difficult it is for Barrone to break out of pretentious rhetorical forms. 182 00:21:06,280 --> 00:21:13,960 It's a speech all about how his language is going to be clear and straightforward, which is anything other than straightforward, 183 00:21:13,960 --> 00:21:24,100 which piles up images which enjoys rhetorical construction and which which takes a dozen lines to say to elaborate. 184 00:21:24,100 --> 00:21:32,500 The thing he said was simply in a single one. Not to mention it's one of the many glitches in the first quarter tax. 185 00:21:32,500 --> 00:21:40,600 Quite problematic. Text of the play published in Fifty 98 is the Barrone delivers a version of this speech twice. 186 00:21:40,600 --> 00:21:42,100 So I mean, that's kind of an error, 187 00:21:42,100 --> 00:21:53,200 but it's an error which is very much in keeping with the play that Barrone can't stop talking and can't stop using these elaborate phrases. 188 00:21:53,200 --> 00:21:59,560 It speaks them to the plays and the character's preference for language over substance. 189 00:21:59,560 --> 00:22:06,100 Now, we shouldn't take you to miss. I think if we acknowledge that the most successful play for this, the most successful setting, 190 00:22:06,100 --> 00:22:11,920 sorry for this play in modern performance, has tended to set it in Oxford. 191 00:22:11,920 --> 00:22:22,090 This has worked to emphasise the youth of the protagonists and some kind of sense of their life as sheltered and inward looking. 192 00:22:22,090 --> 00:22:30,660 Navarros idea of a little academe, a little Akeda and that's what is going to set up with his friends is almost always envisioned as the enclosed, 193 00:22:30,660 --> 00:22:35,350 preferably close to the stage shared set of an Oxford quadrangle. 194 00:22:35,350 --> 00:22:39,940 Of course, we all talk here in an incomprehensible and affected argot. 195 00:22:39,940 --> 00:22:46,900 That is part Latin, part private slang and part unnecessary pretension. 196 00:22:46,900 --> 00:22:55,690 Barry Kiles 1984 production described the young man as pompous highbrows in graduate gowns 197 00:22:55,690 --> 00:23:02,320 and 10 years later in Judge established established late Edwardian Oxford for his setting, 198 00:23:02,320 --> 00:23:08,470 complete with a college bar decorated with painted blades and team photographs and with dreaming spires, 199 00:23:08,470 --> 00:23:13,150 the backdrop to what one revue called a Rupert Brooke reading party. 200 00:23:13,150 --> 00:23:18,310 When the men make their adolescent pack to study and to avoid women, 201 00:23:18,310 --> 00:23:30,400 Kenneth Brunner's musical film of 2000 created Quad's and punting scenes and a lovely musical number in a kind of inversion of the Rateliff camera. 202 00:23:30,400 --> 00:23:35,890 It's interesting that these kinds of readings tend to coincide with an idea that Love's Labour's Lost is a very early play. 203 00:23:35,890 --> 00:23:38,800 But as a play, we can't really date very easily at all. 204 00:23:38,800 --> 00:23:46,480 It could be anywhere from 15, 92, three to fifteen ninety five, six, as if it is itself youthful, 205 00:23:46,480 --> 00:23:53,590 exuberant, undisciplined, unsophisticated, rather than perhaps being about those things. 206 00:23:53,590 --> 00:23:59,810 And as such, it might be. To look alongside other plays designated early on, 207 00:23:59,810 --> 00:24:05,470 we've talked before about the way early has quite different associations of 208 00:24:05,470 --> 00:24:13,270 value from a very established critical term late for Shakespeare's final plays, 209 00:24:13,270 --> 00:24:19,300 the romances. So if you want to play that self-conscious about language and about the linguistic 210 00:24:19,300 --> 00:24:23,830 debates of the early modern period and about the uses and abuses of rhetoric, 211 00:24:23,830 --> 00:24:27,700 Love's Labour's Lost is exactly the play for you. 212 00:24:27,700 --> 00:24:35,470 It seems to me a play in which plot gives way almost entirely to style, and that language is its main topic. 213 00:24:35,470 --> 00:24:39,960 Rather than merely its formal vehicle. 214 00:24:39,960 --> 00:24:48,860 And one consequence of that linguistic texture is a tendency in the play and it's and in its performance towards stylisation. 215 00:24:48,860 --> 00:24:57,140 This is a play that actually works really well and interestingly in performance. And it's one way I'd encourage you to look at it. 216 00:24:57,140 --> 00:25:05,740 There's one critic who says that the developments in Shakespeare in performance have really given only two things to substantial things, 217 00:25:05,740 --> 00:25:10,510 to Shakespeare criticism. One is that the history plays do well in a sequence. 218 00:25:10,510 --> 00:25:15,190 I'm not so sure about that. But the second is that Love's Labour's Lost is a play which works on the stage. 219 00:25:15,190 --> 00:25:20,500 So these are the only two games for scholarship from the long history of Shakespearean performance. 220 00:25:20,500 --> 00:25:27,400 But it's quite interesting in Love's Labour's Lost I, it is a play very much worth trying to see or to see bits of. 221 00:25:27,400 --> 00:25:33,610 So one consequence is a tendency towards stylisation as kind of Brunner's film ably expresses. 222 00:25:33,610 --> 00:25:40,720 The four couples at the play centre already give Love's Labour's lost the feeling more of a dance than of a drama, 223 00:25:40,720 --> 00:25:44,620 as if stage symmetries are more important than the distinctiveness of comic 224 00:25:44,620 --> 00:25:50,980 individuals where Shakespeare gives us multiple common comic couples in other plays. 225 00:25:50,980 --> 00:25:54,400 The effect is usually one of differentiation or contrast. 226 00:25:54,400 --> 00:26:01,570 So we compared the robust relationship of Rosalind and Orlando against the more timid encounter of Celia and Oliver, 227 00:26:01,570 --> 00:26:06,700 or the more pragmatic coupling up Touchtone and Audrey in as we like it, for instance. 228 00:26:06,700 --> 00:26:16,270 Or we set a hero and Claudio, the kind of inexperienced, innocent, 229 00:26:16,270 --> 00:26:23,920 kind of high romantic lovers of much ado about nothing against the sort of screwball comedy of Beatrice and Benedict. 230 00:26:23,920 --> 00:26:32,320 So the point of the couples seems in those plays to give us a contrast, contrasting views of marriage, contrasting views of courtship. 231 00:26:32,320 --> 00:26:40,630 Here, though, in Love's Labour's Lost, the effect of having multiple couples is the effect of duplication rather than contrast. 232 00:26:40,630 --> 00:26:51,430 Writing in the 1920s, the theatre director, Harley Gramble Barker described Love's Labour's Lost as akin to the artifice of a ballet akin 233 00:26:51,430 --> 00:26:58,120 to a ballet and suggested that the actor should think of the dialogue in terms of music. 234 00:26:58,120 --> 00:27:05,560 Lots of subsequent critics have likened the play to a comic opera such as Mozart, Mozart's Marriage of Figaro. 235 00:27:05,560 --> 00:27:15,160 In the early 1970s, W.H. Auden and his partner, Chester Coleman, worked on an opera with Nicholas Nabokov, cousin of Vladimir. 236 00:27:15,160 --> 00:27:18,200 Based on the play they described the play. 237 00:27:18,200 --> 00:27:23,620 Auden is very interesting on the play, saying it's absolutely light and light and frothy until the very last scene, 238 00:27:23,620 --> 00:27:34,270 which he calls a morality play ending in Thomas Mann's novel, Dr Fasters, the imaginary composer has written one opera based on Love's Labour's Lost. 239 00:27:34,270 --> 00:27:40,950 There are lots of settings of Love's Labour's Lost songs by Stravinsky and by Finzi, amongst others. 240 00:27:40,950 --> 00:27:44,530 Brunner's film of 2000 develops this musical impulse, 241 00:27:44,530 --> 00:27:53,200 drawing out from extant songs in classic Hollywood musicals, a kind of counterpoint to Shakespeare's play. 242 00:27:53,200 --> 00:28:03,610 He recognises that the these set piece linguistic moments are quite easily translatable in in the genre of the musical. 243 00:28:03,610 --> 00:28:13,110 So one way to think about the play's detailed linguistic texture has been compared to other art forms, to music particularly, 244 00:28:13,110 --> 00:28:18,340 and to to alter dance or the combination in opera, 245 00:28:18,340 --> 00:28:25,270 or sometimes the detailed linguistic texture of the play has been compared to the texture of painting, 246 00:28:25,270 --> 00:28:40,150 particularly perhaps to baroque artists like Watto and and Quite Chino, who particularly painting these kind of Arcadian settings, 247 00:28:40,150 --> 00:28:47,470 these aristocrats at leisure in these sort of rustic or rural Arcadian settings. 248 00:28:47,470 --> 00:28:55,150 What's important to think about these art forms and as parallels to or translations of love labours lost is that they're all. 249 00:28:55,150 --> 00:28:59,560 Quite radically antenarrative, they're not narrative forms. 250 00:28:59,560 --> 00:29:05,470 They recognised that the value of the play is in texture rather than plot. 251 00:29:05,470 --> 00:29:11,740 As the theatre director Carol Brahms' wrote, Love's Labour's Lost is less a play with a beginning, 252 00:29:11,740 --> 00:29:18,940 a middle and an end than a pervasive atmosphere, a pervasive atmosphere. 253 00:29:18,940 --> 00:29:27,250 OK, so so far that we've been talking about an absence of plot substituted by self-conscious experimentation in the linguistic sphere. 254 00:29:27,250 --> 00:29:33,100 One major lost then in the play. A play about loss is plot. 255 00:29:33,100 --> 00:29:40,170 But let's just challenge that description of the play for a moment. If fact something quite important does happen in Love's Labour's Lost. 256 00:29:40,170 --> 00:29:46,700 The play does have one rather significant twist up its sleeve almost at the last minute in Act five, 257 00:29:46,700 --> 00:29:53,590 a character we've never met before called Misty in my car day enters with a sombre message for the princess. 258 00:29:53,590 --> 00:29:57,790 She presents this message perhaps because of what he looks like. This is my card. 259 00:29:57,790 --> 00:30:04,870 I'm sorry, madam, for the news I bring is heavy on my tongue. The king, your father, dead for my life. 260 00:30:04,870 --> 00:30:10,860 Even so, replies my party. My tale is told. We don't hear anything else from him. 261 00:30:10,860 --> 00:30:15,130 A it is an interesting figure. He's like a kind of reverse deus ex machina. 262 00:30:15,130 --> 00:30:24,040 The figure from classical drama who steps in unannounced at the very end to bring an apparently irresolvable situation to final judgement. 263 00:30:24,040 --> 00:30:28,600 What my country does is to step in at the same point, but to do exactly the opposite. 264 00:30:28,600 --> 00:30:35,380 He brings an apparently entirely resolved situation that that's been resolved since the very beginning of the play. 265 00:30:35,380 --> 00:30:38,950 The four couples have recognised their affection for each other. 266 00:30:38,950 --> 00:30:47,320 So he begins. He brings that resolve situation into turmoil. So he undoes the resolution rather than bringing it only at the end of the play. 267 00:30:47,320 --> 00:30:53,800 That's to say, do we get that grit. The blocking figure, we might have expected to be its main business. 268 00:30:53,800 --> 00:30:58,060 It's a real an unexpected challenge to generic expectations. 269 00:30:58,060 --> 00:31:05,200 Bringing death into comedies is not really on the point about comedy is that the data usually pretending death is threatened, 270 00:31:05,200 --> 00:31:10,960 but not in acting enacted because the genre is all about ongoing life. 271 00:31:10,960 --> 00:31:15,820 The early modern playwright Thomas Haywood characterised in a nicely formalistic way 272 00:31:15,820 --> 00:31:21,070 the difference between tragedy and comedy by means of a kind of inversion in comedies, 273 00:31:21,070 --> 00:31:27,400 he writes. Turbulent Premer Tranquila Ultima in Tragedies Tranquila Premer Turbulent. 274 00:31:27,400 --> 00:31:31,510 Ultima comedies begin in trouble and end in Peace. 275 00:31:31,510 --> 00:31:37,630 Tragedies Beginning CALM's and End in Tempest. By this measure, Love's labours lost. 276 00:31:37,630 --> 00:31:42,100 Having spent four and a half acts looking like the most obvious comedy ever. 277 00:31:42,100 --> 00:31:45,380 Suddenly turns tragic at the end. 278 00:31:45,380 --> 00:31:52,710 It's a more problematic M.V. in structural terms than those comedies, often given serious stage treatment because of their unresolved conclusions. 279 00:31:52,710 --> 00:31:57,760 Plays like all's well that ends well or measure for measure. 280 00:31:57,760 --> 00:32:04,150 Responding to the death of her father, the Princess of France, now its queen wants to leave Novar immediately. 281 00:32:04,150 --> 00:32:08,410 All is revealed. The men confess their loves, and the king asks. 282 00:32:08,410 --> 00:32:15,670 Now at the latest minutes of the hour, granters. Your Love's response, though, is unexpected. 283 00:32:15,670 --> 00:32:25,210 The princess's reply is distinctly uncommon. A time methinks too short to make a world without end bargain. 284 00:32:25,210 --> 00:32:31,410 In nice phrase, a time methinks. Too short to make a world without end bargain. 285 00:32:31,410 --> 00:32:35,380 And again, this is a shock to expectations. 286 00:32:35,380 --> 00:32:40,240 Comic romantic couples never seem to feel that they've done things in a in a 287 00:32:40,240 --> 00:32:44,140 terrible hurry or that there isn't time to make such a momentous decision. 288 00:32:44,140 --> 00:32:50,020 It's part of the rush about comedies that they're immediately in love and immediately married. 289 00:32:50,020 --> 00:32:55,390 They cheerfully get together within minutes of meeting and by the by the end of the play two hours later, 290 00:32:55,390 --> 00:32:59,740 they're absolutely firm, unbreakable couples. 291 00:32:59,740 --> 00:33:06,310 But what the princess does here is to introduce a quite other timescale scale right at the end of the play. 292 00:33:06,310 --> 00:33:10,750 If my love. Is addressing the king of Navarre, it for my love as there is no such cause. 293 00:33:10,750 --> 00:33:21,190 You will do all this. Shall you do for me. Your oath I will not trust but go with speed to some forlorn and naked hermitage remote from all the 294 00:33:21,190 --> 00:33:29,770 pleasures of the world that stay until the 12 celestial signs have brought about the annual reckoning. 295 00:33:29,770 --> 00:33:34,780 If this austere in sociable life change not your offer made in heats of blood. 296 00:33:34,780 --> 00:33:44,590 If frosts and fasts, hard lodging and thin weeds nip not the gaudy blossoms of your love, but that it bade this trial and last life. 297 00:33:44,590 --> 00:33:53,470 Then at the expiration of the year, come challenge me challenged me by these desserts and by this virgin palm now kissing vine. 298 00:33:53,470 --> 00:34:01,210 I will be thine. So sending the king off for 12 months of monastic living returns him pretty much 299 00:34:01,210 --> 00:34:05,980 to the state of sombre solitude with which he attempted to to begin the play. 300 00:34:05,980 --> 00:34:11,050 The other women instruct their suitors similarly. And Rosalind. 301 00:34:11,050 --> 00:34:16,660 Rosalind adds to barrooms obligations. And they're all to win me, if you please. 302 00:34:16,660 --> 00:34:22,000 Without the witch. I am not to be one. You shall have this 12 month term from day to day. 303 00:34:22,000 --> 00:34:26,740 Visit the speechless sick and still converse with groaning wretches. 304 00:34:26,740 --> 00:34:34,010 And your task shall be with all the fierce endeavour of your wit to force, to enforce the pain and impotent to smile. 305 00:34:34,010 --> 00:34:37,870 Barones answer to move while laughter in the throat of death. 306 00:34:37,870 --> 00:34:47,170 It cannot be. It is impossible. Mirth cannot move. So in agony, having turned romantic comedy into something else, 307 00:34:47,170 --> 00:34:53,620 Rosalind instructs the sardonic and humorous Barrone to try to turn real life tragedies into laughter. 308 00:34:53,620 --> 00:35:03,520 The consciousness of generic conversion. It's everywhere. Our wooing does not end like an old play, Verrone says ruefully. 309 00:35:03,520 --> 00:35:11,260 Jack half not Jill. These ladies courtesy might well have made our sport a comedy. 310 00:35:11,260 --> 00:35:15,680 The King's answer comes, sir, at once 12 month and a day. And then we'll end. 311 00:35:15,680 --> 00:35:21,640 It gets Piros wry reply. That's too long for a play. 312 00:35:21,640 --> 00:35:27,700 The ending of the play is a song by winter, spring and by winter, capturing an unexpectedly bittersweet conclusion. 313 00:35:27,700 --> 00:35:38,960 What is lost in the end is the promised pairings of romantic comedy, The Labours of Love that the play had seemed so complacently to endorse. 314 00:35:38,960 --> 00:35:43,610 So far, then, we've talked about the absence of plot and the play's extravagant displacement of 315 00:35:43,610 --> 00:35:50,030 action with language and about the pleasures of stylising the play acting for us. 316 00:35:50,030 --> 00:35:58,160 As, for example, in music or dance. And then we've talked about the generic instability that comes unexpectedly with the figure of death. 317 00:35:58,160 --> 00:36:00,260 Marc-Andre, at the end. 318 00:36:00,260 --> 00:36:10,060 Those idealised Arcadian pictures of what home Pusan often carried a memento mori such as a skull or a tomb or the motto etched in Arcadio. 319 00:36:10,060 --> 00:36:22,400 I go I. Death also. I mean Arcadia Marc-Andre is that memento mori the grim reaper watching the beautiful young things, playing croquet in the quad. 320 00:36:22,400 --> 00:36:29,630 So what's lost here registers a more existential sense of life's transience, a loss of innocence or something like that. 321 00:36:29,630 --> 00:36:30,830 The end of Branagh's film. 322 00:36:30,830 --> 00:36:39,410 Fast forward through this time of abstinence, figuring the couples separated by war time by the Second World War and ultimately reunited. 323 00:36:39,410 --> 00:36:42,770 This is all in a kind of wordless tableau at the end. 324 00:36:42,770 --> 00:36:48,860 Ultimately reunited older, sadder, wiser and thankful to be together. 325 00:36:48,860 --> 00:36:57,080 All those Edwardian settings for the play performance are redolent with that sense that in Philip Larkin's phrase about the First World War, 326 00:36:57,080 --> 00:37:02,930 never such innocence again. It's not just us to say the men who have to grow up. 327 00:37:02,930 --> 00:37:09,770 There's something about age. Something about the time that has to mature. 328 00:37:09,770 --> 00:37:14,690 Of course, this is an argument that only can justify an aesthetic of lightness or emptiness 329 00:37:14,690 --> 00:37:19,460 or frippery by making it serve and ultimately serious philosophical points. 330 00:37:19,460 --> 00:37:27,890 That is one of the problems about the study of comedy. The play's fripperies become all the more poignant in the shadow of the trenches. 331 00:37:27,890 --> 00:37:31,940 The silliness of the plot is pointed up by the suddenness of the conclusion. 332 00:37:31,940 --> 00:37:39,440 Perhaps we can only really justify comedy to ourselves by uncovering its occluded darkness. 333 00:37:39,440 --> 00:37:47,330 Certainly, the dominant trend in early 20th century scholarship on the play was to uncover a seriousness that was allegorical. 334 00:37:47,330 --> 00:37:52,610 This is the play those critics felt that cannot possibly be taken at face value. 335 00:37:52,610 --> 00:38:00,050 There must be something hidden deeper underneath the idea that Love's Labour's lost is a mystery to be solved. 336 00:38:00,050 --> 00:38:07,670 It's very evident in its critical history introducing the play in the 1940s for the Ardern series. 337 00:38:07,670 --> 00:38:13,340 Richard David believed hopefully that the that tricky play had found its moment in 338 00:38:13,340 --> 00:38:19,820 the golden age of detective fiction as if it were a kind of poetic Agatha Christie. 339 00:38:19,820 --> 00:38:24,950 Many of the related interpretive attempts have focussed on the idea that the 340 00:38:24,950 --> 00:38:31,070 characters in the play are disguised or satirical portraits of real Elizabethans. 341 00:38:31,070 --> 00:38:38,620 The title page of the 15 Ninety-eight Quarto indicates that the play was performed before Queen Elizabeth, 342 00:38:38,620 --> 00:38:45,110 the attempt to identify a courtly or coterie audience rather than the general audience of the public 343 00:38:45,110 --> 00:38:52,580 stage has been one way that critics have tried to understand or to construct its deeper meaning. 344 00:38:52,580 --> 00:38:59,350 Francis Yates, for instance, wrote extensively about the play's links to the so-called School of Night, 345 00:38:59,350 --> 00:39:02,360 a phrase which exists which appears in Love's Labour's Lost, 346 00:39:02,360 --> 00:39:11,980 who were a group of atheistic free thinkers, gathered around Walter to rally, including George Chapman and the Italian thinker Giordano Bruno. 347 00:39:11,980 --> 00:39:17,060 Secich Yates suggests that Barrone is a portrait of Brunete. 348 00:39:17,060 --> 00:39:24,770 She makes the unlikely name of the schoolmaster. Holofernes plays into an anagram for John Florio, the Italian translator, 349 00:39:24,770 --> 00:39:30,450 dictionary maker and transmitter of Montaigne's essay's, who clearly Shakespeare did know. 350 00:39:30,450 --> 00:39:36,640 She's one of many scholars to puzzle over the nonsense word in the play, honorific Carpin. 351 00:39:36,640 --> 00:39:40,820 The two did not tip us custards. 352 00:39:40,820 --> 00:39:50,480 Word has been variously translated to reveal secret messages in the play, including that it was really written by Francis Bacon. 353 00:39:50,480 --> 00:39:55,310 In fact, this is an am I gonna read it again? It's an enjoyably long word. 354 00:39:55,310 --> 00:40:01,730 A bit like Mary Poppins. Supercalifragilistic all the places that impossibly long named Village in Wales 355 00:40:01,730 --> 00:40:06,800 that has a certain comic currency and works at the 15 nineties and beyond. 356 00:40:06,800 --> 00:40:14,540 But the argument here is that something important and topical has been lost in the play's transmission into the modern period. 357 00:40:14,540 --> 00:40:18,980 That Love's Labour's Lost is a play peculiarly dependent on a knowing coterie 358 00:40:18,980 --> 00:40:25,040 audience and that these important resonances have been lost over historical time. 359 00:40:25,040 --> 00:40:30,620 In some ways, the specifics of these arguments are less important than their overall thrust that the play must be 360 00:40:30,620 --> 00:40:36,080 pointing to something beneath its elaborately decorative linguistic surface that this plotless. 361 00:40:36,080 --> 00:40:44,440 Yeah, that sprey is not sufficient. Not complete without a detailed political or interpersonal subtext. 362 00:40:44,440 --> 00:40:48,280 So this is a play then apparently thought incomplete had at its time of publication 363 00:40:48,280 --> 00:40:52,600 and performance and supplemented by that companion play Love's Labour's One, 364 00:40:52,600 --> 00:40:59,980 which has been given an alternative method of completion or supplement through these busy scholarly allegorical readings. 365 00:40:59,980 --> 00:41:07,210 Somehow, the primary meaning of Love's Labour's Lost often looks to be somewhere other than the play itself. 366 00:41:07,210 --> 00:41:16,840 This turns it into a helpful Shakespearean case study. Should we take our lead from the play's own self-conscious sense of formal structures 367 00:41:16,840 --> 00:41:21,790 and linguistic linguistic variation and thus give it a kind of formalised analysis? 368 00:41:21,790 --> 00:41:29,860 Is that what it wants? Does it want close reading and understanding of rhetoric, a kind of aesthetics of the detail? 369 00:41:29,860 --> 00:41:34,930 Or should we hear, after its apparent allusions outward to construct a contextual, 370 00:41:34,930 --> 00:41:40,940 allegorical or more topical one coded interpretations of Shakespeare? 371 00:41:40,940 --> 00:41:46,630 Seemed to me generally pretty unconvincing, although some fun. 372 00:41:46,630 --> 00:41:56,950 But one last interpretation of the play is a kind of off key Romagna Clef does seem to me suggestive writing in 2014. 373 00:41:56,950 --> 00:42:05,260 Gillian Woods argues that there is something inescapably topical about the names in Love's Labour's Lost. 374 00:42:05,260 --> 00:42:13,990 The King of Navarre was the prominent Protestant figure in the French wars of religion during the fifteen eighties and the fifteen nineties. 375 00:42:13,990 --> 00:42:21,370 The success of his French Protestant cause was regularly prayed for in Elizabethan liturgy. 376 00:42:21,370 --> 00:42:31,030 In July 15 93, Novar took the politically expedient decision to convert to Catholicism in order to secure Paris. 377 00:42:31,030 --> 00:42:38,680 Marlow's massacre at Paris, with which Love's Labour's lost might be said to be in a kind of extended into textual dialogue, 378 00:42:38,680 --> 00:42:44,980 had already depicted this topsy turvy religious violence and conversion on the stage. 379 00:42:44,980 --> 00:42:53,480 The name Novar then was associated with oath breaking in a brutally sectarian context. 380 00:42:53,480 --> 00:42:57,220 And this revelant name is flanked in Shakespeare's play by numerous other 381 00:42:57,220 --> 00:43:01,310 names from the religious politics of the period Barrone longer veiled domain, 382 00:43:01,310 --> 00:43:10,450 Moth McHardy and boy are all names that have topical allusions and real life people to attach them to. 383 00:43:10,450 --> 00:43:20,590 It can't be a coincidence. And of course, the oath breaking that is so associated with the historical Novar is one of the play's own major themes. 384 00:43:20,590 --> 00:43:26,720 Novar promises to abjure women circumstances immediately conspire to make this valley impossible to keep, 385 00:43:26,720 --> 00:43:32,500 and the play echoes with the repeated word words. Swear, foreswear, oath. 386 00:43:32,500 --> 00:43:42,380 Vow, promise, break. Searching for these words in the play reveals a network of illusions that keep the breaking of a promise. 387 00:43:42,380 --> 00:43:48,950 At the centre of Love's Labour's Lost. You remember the queen. The princess tells Novar she can't marry him. 388 00:43:48,950 --> 00:43:57,920 Your oath. I will not trust. He is already established as somebody who is not who does not keep his word. 389 00:43:57,920 --> 00:44:03,050 I don't think that is to say that in some way, Love's Labour's Lost is an allegory of the French wars of religion. 390 00:44:03,050 --> 00:44:08,210 But there is something going on in this juxtaposition of this stylised and stylish plot 391 00:44:08,210 --> 00:44:13,820 and the violently political on a Mastech associations of Shakespeare's characters names. 392 00:44:13,820 --> 00:44:18,530 It's as if a slapstick plot in a modern film gave its goofy characters the names. 393 00:44:18,530 --> 00:44:20,290 Bush and Blair. 394 00:44:20,290 --> 00:44:29,270 It would have a meaning, even if that meaning was something about the jarring of the illusion of the names in an apparently light-hearted context. 395 00:44:29,270 --> 00:44:38,570 Something similar is happening here. Either the allusion to the sectarian wars of religion deepens the play and adds a topical dimension. 396 00:44:38,570 --> 00:44:44,860 Or it points up the absolute absence of such dimensions in Love's Labour's Lost. 397 00:44:44,860 --> 00:44:50,090 That debate between substance and style that is intrinsic to the play. 398 00:44:50,090 --> 00:44:56,230 That's to say, is also intrinsic to its criticism. 399 00:44:56,230 --> 00:45:06,160 So then we've been thinking about a play about which critics have struggled to know what to say, and perhaps that's the point of Love's Labour's lost. 400 00:45:06,160 --> 00:45:14,020 But given that this play is itself in danger of dropping out of the working repertoire of most readers and students of Shakespeare, 401 00:45:14,020 --> 00:45:18,610 including me, it's in danger of being itself lost. 402 00:45:18,610 --> 00:45:20,500 And not much looked for. 403 00:45:20,500 --> 00:45:29,260 Let's finish by trying to knit it back into the canon and suggest some of the ways it could connect with other Shakespearean plays. 404 00:45:29,260 --> 00:45:35,140 Taking up the play's musicality and stylisation alongside, say, Romeo and Juliet Richard. 405 00:45:35,140 --> 00:45:42,520 The Second Midsummer Night's Dream could work. I think so that rather than seeing it as a disappointing romantic comedy, 406 00:45:42,520 --> 00:45:53,590 we view it as a formal structure which explores non naturalistic forms of speech and interaction in a ballistic or operatic way. 407 00:45:53,590 --> 00:45:56,770 Branagh's film was a terrible flop, but its premise? 408 00:45:56,770 --> 00:46:06,070 Seeing the play's linguistic set pieces as musical numbers is a good one, I think, and one that could be extended elsewhere in the canon. 409 00:46:06,070 --> 00:46:12,970 There's a generic playfulness or uncertainty about the ending of this play that we tend to associate more with the so-called problem plays, 410 00:46:12,970 --> 00:46:21,160 or at least with later comedies. It's interesting to see it done here. And the idea that verbal events are more important in Love's Labour's lost than 411 00:46:21,160 --> 00:46:26,530 active or gestural ones points this play towards the great dilemma of Hamlet. 412 00:46:26,530 --> 00:46:34,960 Similarly punctuated by linguistic happenings when we might expect that something real ought to be done. 413 00:46:34,960 --> 00:46:38,260 It's discussion of art, nature and life. 414 00:46:38,260 --> 00:46:47,950 And where these big Toppo overlap or are juxtaposed also anticipates the painterly qualities of the Winter's Tale. 415 00:46:47,950 --> 00:46:49,360 A couple of last suggestions. 416 00:46:49,360 --> 00:46:57,880 There is a play within a play here, the pageant of the nine Worthy's that is very rarely put alongside the mouse trap and Pyramus and this big. 417 00:46:57,880 --> 00:47:06,670 But it's something that might enliven what sometimes a slightly tired debate about better theatricality in those two plays. 418 00:47:06,670 --> 00:47:11,740 And part of that, a play that play introduces in stage directions. 419 00:47:11,740 --> 00:47:22,520 UNspeak in characters called Blackmore's silent but presumably highly visible outsiders that are their counterparts to Aaron and Othello, 420 00:47:22,520 --> 00:47:27,400 but almost never discussed in accounts of Shakespeare's treatment of race. 421 00:47:27,400 --> 00:47:29,920 So these elements are all themselves, I think, 422 00:47:29,920 --> 00:47:39,370 in danger of being lost when the play is routinely dismissed as lacking interest, maturity or psychological insight. 423 00:47:39,370 --> 00:47:44,920 Next week is the last of my lectures for this term, and I'll be talking about Timon of Athens. 424 00:47:44,920 --> 00:47:51,080 And the central point I'm going to try and explore is what can we do about collaboration in this play? 425 00:47:51,080 --> 00:47:54,670 A play written with Thomas Middleton. How should that. 426 00:47:54,670 --> 00:48:01,180 How does that affect the way we read this play? And what are the ways you could extend that outwards in the canon? 427 00:48:01,180 --> 00:48:06,974 That's enough.