(5) Love’s Labor’s Lost

I’m going to be right up front and honest: I had a really hard time connecting with this one, on any level, finding it way too esoteric and obscure. I think I know why I found this one so difficult but I’d rather let Anne Barton, a far better writer than I, explain via her Riverside introduction:

“Love’s Labor’s Lost is perhaps the most relentlessly Elizabethan of all Shakespeare’s plays. Filled with word games, elaborate conceits, parodies of spoken and written styles and obscure topical allusions, it continually requires – and baffles – scholarly explanation.”

Well put…and baffles this reader muchly indeed. For example, this passage has the character Holofernes arguing the fact that a deer the Queen has just shot is five years old, as opposed to just two. The notes, which were indispensible in this one (and quite extensive throughout), told me this. I would have never figured it out on my own. See for yourself:

“Most barbarous intimation! Yet a kind of insinuation, as it were in via, in way, of explication; facere, as it were, replication, or rather ostentare, to show, as it were, his inclination, after his undressed, unpolished, uneducated, unpruned, untrained, or rather unlettered, or ratherest unconfirmed fashion, to insert again my haud credo for a deer.”

See what I mean? I like me some word wranglin’ and all, but this was just way too much. So, sorry to write this one off (so to speak), but sometimes you just have to move on.