ABSTRACT
The truism articulated by Gary Taylor—that “we find in Shakespeare only what we bring to him or what others have left behind; he gives us back our own values” 1 —suggests that a given Shakespeare production will tell us as much about the director and/or that theatre’s audience as it does about Shakespeare; and by extension, a study of productions of a Shakespeare play in a particular period or country should reveal something about that cultural context. With its interesting mix of non-English characters, Love’s Labour’s Lost virtually invites its interpretive artists to display their attitudes towards foreigners by stressing or stylizing real or imagined national traits in the French lords and ladies, in the Spanish Don Armado, and in the lords disguised as Muscovites. One might especially expect such a tendency within the context of the postwar trend of “contemporizing” Shakespeare’s plays through modern costumes and decor and through character interpretations that evoke actual contemporary figures or widely recognizable types from contemporary film or literature or society at large, particularly in the spheres of politics, business, and entertainment. A survey of postwar English and American productions, however, does not yield any clearcut pattern of prejudices or even very strong tendencies to objectify the foreign characters as recognizably different or “other” from the beholder.
