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This chapter examines Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost. It argues that the most striking thing about the play is how little Shakespeare used exciting action, story, or conflict; how far he went in the direction of making the piece a set exhibition of pastimes and games. The play is a strikingly fresh start, a more complete break with what he had been doing earlier in his career. The change goes with the fact that there are no theatrical or literary sources, so far as anyone has been able to discover, for what story there is in the play—Shakespeare, here and in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and nowhere else, makes up everything himself, because he is making up action on the model of games and pastimes.

Chapter 2 considers how Catholic content functions in an apparently apolitical comedy. Focusing on Love's Labour's Lost, it questions why the male romantic leads should be oddly encumbered with real names, famous from the bloody sectarianism of the French wars of religion. The pun-saturated drama explores the social implications of linguistic mutability, whereby the meaning of words seems endlessly adaptable. Converting the name of the famous apostate Henri of Navarre to a comic role that lacks historical specificity, Shakespeare puts this problem on a representational level, and connects it to the real-life problem of mutable meaning. The generic breakdown at the play's close, when the happy ending is postponed, implies that these tensions cannot be resolved and that in the final estimation they cannot be comedic.

This chapter moves from speech to writing and argues that while Shakespeare did not study ‘English’ as part of his own schooling, he nevertheless had a literary education. Elizabethan Latin learning is best regarded as covering a range of active, expressive skills that can be grouped under the term ‘rhetoric’, and the study of literature and drama was seen as an important way of acquiring those skills. If the Elizabethan regime is understood in terms of process rather than content, then Shakespeare did indeed study creative writing. Examples are given from Ovid, Quintilian, Erasmus, the Parnassus Plays, John Brinsley, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The second part of the chapter focuses on Nashe and on Love’s Labour’s Lost, the play where Shakespeare specifically tackles the question of educational aims and objectives. It is argued that Shakespeare’s work was the product of a creative abuse of the Tudor education system.

The world of Baldassare Castiglione's Book of the Courtier (1528) displays a striking affinity with William Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, not only with regard to the courtly arena that both texts present but also because of their shared concern with ideals of courtly behaviour. In Book 2 of The Courtier, the courtiers discuss the prescriptions that govern the proper art of jesting. This chapter looks at the courtly precepts on laughter. At court, hostile jesting was now derided as vulgar. Taste and decorum were the key values. Wit was a technique of self-promotion, a means of displaying one's skill at entertaining one's peers. Laughter was above all a form of pleasant diversion or a lubricant deployed to defuse social tension. Shakespeare adapted these norms for the public theatre and stages them in Love's Labour's Lost. What he also imports into the theatre is the aristocratic notion of play as gratuitous pleasure, serving no other purpose than to entertain.

Written within about two or three years of each other, The Taming of the Shrew and Love’s Labour’s Lost are William Shakespeare’s only comedies to explore the pursuit of love through the semiotic of the book, its institution (the school), and its ideology (humanism). In both plays, the book is introduced through its particular relationship to the institute of learning. However, almost immediately, the imperatives of the play-world begin to destabilise the idea of the book and its pedagogic context. In examining both plays together, this chapter looks at the ways in which representations of love are scrutinised through the book and, more particularly, how a language of the book emerges in the dynamic between the lover and the beloved, which seeks to both fetishise and contain the body of the woman. Even within the few years that separate these plays, the book has shifted from an erotic object to a deficient form.

Love’s Labour’s Lost is William Shakespeare’s first attempt to represent melancholy in drama, but one that has irritated playgoers for hundreds of years. The play offers both a fashionable courtly identity and an explanatory frame for morbid anxiety, with melancholy figuring prominently not only in its distracting entertainments but also in its final disclosure of the fact of death. This chapter examines the unresolvable tension between the comic and the terrifying which also drives Shakespeare’s priming encounter with melancholy assemblage as a dramatic situation in Love’s Labour’s Lost. It shows how melancholy in the play functions as a kind of switch point along the deep fringes between affect and affectation, considers personal display associated with melancholy self-fashioning, and analyzes how Walter Benjamin views the interpenetration of past and future within fashion. It also comments on the performativity of masculine love melancholy before concluding with a discussion of the transmission of melancholy from male minds to female bodies.

This chapter explores in some depth the understanding expressed in Shakespearean comedy of what it is to live humbly, with a sense of one's own folly. It specifically takes up the theme of levelling and directs it towards the matter of living humbly, with a healthy sense of one's own folly, and also reports the connections between humility, folly and the conditions for being taken seriously as a lover. ‘Comedy’ in Love's Labour's Lost is social comedy, its target being Renaissance rhetoric and the exhilarating possibilities and dangers inherent in the encouragement of rhetorical fluency. The characters illustrate the direction in which the rhetorical culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could go. The ending of this play is where women lay down conditions for being taking seriously a lover.

‘Control over Casting’ begins with the rehearsal scenes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the amateur dramatics of Love’s Labour’s Lost. It presents the argument that these scenes depend on an entirely new element in English Renaissance dramaturgy, which emerges in Shakespeare’s plays after 1594. This is the phenomenon of physical specificity across a range of parts. One central example of that development comes in the roles that Shakespeare wrote for William Kemp, the lead clown of the Chamberlain’s Men. Physical specificity, however, is also widely in evidence in other roles that Shakespeare wrote for new company, tailored to the capacities of individual sharers, hired men, and boys. In this first chapter dealing with Shakespeare as a ‘company man’ from 1594 onwards, the book argues that a new level of control over casting was a catalyst for the emergence of a newly distinctive Shakespearean style.

The final chapter covers the last ten years of Nabokov’s life: his fifth and last marriage, to photographer Dominique Cibiel; his friendship with Robert Oppenheimer; his association with the Aspen Institute; his renewed interest in teaching; his close ties with Stravinsky until the composer’s death in 1971; his involvement as adviser to festivals in Iran and Israel, especially; and the resumption of his career as composer, with such works as the Cello variations he wrote for Rostropovitch; his Third Symphony, premiered by Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic; and the opera Love’s Labour’s Lost, on a libretto by Auden and Chester Kallman, premiered in Brussels in 1973; and various abortive projects with Balanchine. While anxious to make sure that the Congress’s legacy would not be misinterpreted, he mostly left out of his autobiography, Bagázh, which came out in 1975, reserving the material for another volume, which he had only begun to draft at the time of his death in April 1978.

This chapter concentrates on Shakespeare's use of cosmetic signifiers as ingredients on the stage and tropes on the page, in constructing his own dramatic art in two comedies: A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Love's Labour's Lost. To do this, it is important first to provide some background about the use of cosmetics in early modern theatre and their utility in staging particularly Elizabethan dramatic devices. Second, the chapter explores how Shakespeare, in these two plays, legitimates cosmetics in artistic terms by evoking their materiality within a poetic and theatrical context. Shakespeare used cosmetic metaphors in A Midsummer Night's Dream and dramatised the relationship between love and cosmetic mutability. He used cosmetic signifiers in Love's Labour's Lost to explore contemporary formulations of poetic models and the correct uses of rhetorical language. Shakespeare also employed cosmetic analogies to represent the opposing definitions within a dramatic context.

Chapter 3 considers the psychology of cuts and cutting. The early modern idea of perception as happening in a fluid state would seem to contrast with modern scientific demonstrations that perception happens in a series of oscillations or cuts between “perceptual moments.” Despite this difference in explanations, we continue to experience perception as a continuous fluid state. We fill in the gaps to create a “running effect” that can be witnessed in the still frames that produce the effect of continuous motion in cinema. Vision, hearing, and memory present themselves as sites for witnessing the interplay between cuts and fluidity. Chapter 3 surveys cuts of varying duration, particularly the creative work that happens in the seemingly blank spaces between cuts. “Blinks” come in for particular attention. Examples of perceptual cutwork are provided by the verbal play in Love’s Labour’s Lost and by early modern rememberings of plays in performance.