Welcome to another year of Page to Stage!

Our season opens with Laura Dickinson-Turner’s production of William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost.

The play was first published in 1598, with a note on the title page indicating it was performed at court the past Christmas. Scholars suggest it was likely done as early as 1594 for the Inns at Court. It was revived by Southampton for Queen Anne in 1605.

Unlike many Shakespeare plays, this one does not find its plot from another play. The male characters (Navarre and his court) are loosely based on figures from the ongoing French civil war. Berowne, for example, is derived from Charles de Gontaut, Duc du Biron; the Earl of Essex, Robert Devereaux, knew him and had fought with him. The last King Henri of Navarre recently had become King Henri IV of France in 1589. Don Armado resembles a caricature of the Spanish ambassadors to the court of Queen Elizabeth, the last of whom was sent packing after being caught in an assassination plot, shortly before the failed invasion of 1585. But the characters appear based on their celebrity, not their persons. 

It was influenced by the work of John Lyly (the source of As You Like It) and the University Wits, playwrights and poets based in Oxbridge and the academic world. Shakespeare also seems to be having a go at them with the King’s aspiration to establish a little academe, the extraordinary word play, and the figures of the curate and the pedant.

Linda has some suggestions for Page-to-Stage participants to consider as they read:

• What do you find most striking about Shakespeare’s emphasis on wordplay and the various forms of language employed in this play? (Puns, couplets, sonnets, song lyrics, Latin, stacked synonyms, redundancy, witticisms, insults, ribaldry, verbal sparring, malapropisms, absurdity, etc.) 

• How does “linguistic exuberance” (Carroll, “A Modern Perspective: Love’s Labor’s Lost,” linked below) stand in relation to plot, character development, and other dramatic elements?

• When songs were incorporated in the play, how did that affect the scene?

• If tasked with paring down this play, what would you cut? What would you keep?

• How did reading and seeing a play with many characters differ from experiencing plays with only two, three, or four characters?

• What lines, phrases, and scenes did you find most funny?

• Who was your favorite character, and why?

• How do the characters’ speech patterns reveal their personalities?

• What themes best retain universality, nearly 450 years after the play was first performed?

• Did you experience any moments of particular poignancy? If so, how was that achieved?

• What do you think was the purpose of Shakespeare ending the play with the announcement of the Princess’s father’s death?

This is not a widely adapted play, even among the comedies, which tend to get a lot of attention. There is of course Kenneth Branagh’s film (2000), still likable, though critics didn’t. There is an opera composed by Nicolas Nabokov with libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman which debuted in 1973. There’s a 2004 ska musical,The Big Life; and a 2013 musical adaptation presented by The Public Theater at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, reviewed here by Hilton Als: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/a-worthy-loves-labours-lost 

The above-mentioned article by William C. Carroll:

https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/loves-labors-lost/loves-labors-lost-a-modern-perspective/ 

Meanwhile, let us know if you have any questions, and we’ll look forward to seeing you at the theater!