ABSTRACT
For all its comic charm, Love’s Labor’s Lost presents an extraordinary exhibition of masculine insecurity and helplessness. While the veneer of male authority is brittle and precarious from the outset, female power is virtually absolute. This startling reversal of the expectation that men control women gives the play its capacity to disquiet us. By setting up such a marked inequality in their respective power, Shakespeare creates a gap between men and women which cannot be bridged. My thesis is that this fixed gap enables Shakespeare to explore dramatically the conventions of female domination and male humility which had become established in love poetry. I propose to examine the psychology of male and female stereotypes expressed in the men’s poetry in order to show how this psychology creates a barrier which keeps the men and women apart.
