ABSTRACT
Shakespeare's Love's Labor's Lost opens with the king of Navarre and three of his lords firmly forswearing women, but when the princess of France and her three ladies come to town, the courtiers' resolve promptly crumbles. The production of Love's Labor's Lost that Shaw attended flouted this convention, to disastrous effect, when Berowne attached himself to the trunk of the property tree in an attitude so precarious and extraordinarily prominent that Dumain. In Love's Labor's Lost the perils of visual worship are vividly depicted in the lords' attitudes towards their ladies. Longaville adopts the traditional language of courtship when he recites a poem referring to his lady as a 'Goddesses'. This chapter focuses on the presentational aspects of theater suggests the pervasiveness of visual paradigms that were part of everyday popular worship. Scholars interested in religion and early modern drama has generally turned to tragedies; Huston Diehl has even argued that revenge tragedies in particular crystallized early modern anxieties about visual images.
