Love's Labour's Lost is
one of Shakespeare's romance
comedies, believed to have been written in the mid-1590s, making it
contemporaneous with Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer
Night's Dream. It was first published in 1598. The
title page states that the play was "Newly corrected and augmented by W.
Shakespere," which has suggested to some scholars a revision of an earlier
version. The play next appeared in print in the First
Folio in 1623. The earliest recorded performance of the play occurred at
Christmas time in 1597 at Court before Queen Elizabeth.
Love's Labour's Lost
is one of those plays which seem difficult on the page (all dense wordplay,
leaping from one literary level to another), but work marvellously on stage. It
was one of Shakespeare's first attempts to blend romantic comedy with farce
and to import the style of each into the other. The play concerns the subject of love, includes lots of
rhetoric and witty exchanges by the characters, and has a happy ending,
although it does not end with a marriage.
