ABSTRACT
William Shakespeare's exuberant drama contains the antic and ordered masque dichotomies, reversals and paradoxes of sixteenth-century French and British disguisings; and it is climaxed by the jolting 'unmasking' of youth to actual life. So linguistically daunting is Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost that this early drama – with its scintillating verbal play, driving energy, intellectualized eroticism and frequently neglected moral seriousness – regularly eludes in its wide suggestiveness the helpful though narrow concerns of much recent criticism. As T. W. Baldwin noted in 1947, this 'first surviving play, Love's Labour's Lost' by Shakespeare 'is the most original in structure of all his plays, unless it be his last, The Tempest'. Love's Labour's Lost, divorced from revels traditions, can become a trap for pedantry. The work itself is so expansive and nuanced that it often functions, in its parodies of Renaissance academic rhetoric and learning, to critique restrictive interpretations.
