ABSTRACT
Love’s Labours Lost is one of the earliest of Shakspere’s dramas, and has many of the peculiarities of his poems, which are also the work of his earlier life. The opening speech of the king on the immortality of fame—on the triumph of fame over death—and the nobler parts of Biron, display something of the monumental style of Shakspere’s Sonnets, and are not without their conceits of thought and expression. This connection of Love’s Labours Lost with Shakspere’s poems is further enforced by the actual insertion in it of three sonnets and a faultless song; which, in accordance with his practice in other plays, are inwoven into the action of the piece and, like the golden ornaments of a fair woman, give it a peculiar air of distinction.There is merriment in it also, with choice illustrations of both wit and humour; a laughter often exquisite, ringing, if faintly, yet as genuine laughter still, though sometimes sinking into mere burlesque, which has not lasted quite so well. And Shakspere brings a serious effect out of the trifling of his characters. A dainty love-making is interchanged with the more cumbrous play; below the many artifices of Biron’s amorous speeches we may trace sometimes the “unutterable longing;” and the lines in which Katharine describes the blighting through love of her younger sister are one of the most touching things in older literature. 1 Again, how many echoes seem awakened by those strange words, actually said in jest!—“The sweet war man [Hector of Troy] is dead and rotten; sweet chucks, beat not the bones of the buried: when he breathed, he was a man”—words which may remind us of Shakspere’s own epitaph. In the last scene, an ingenious turn is given to the action, so that the piece does not conclude after the manner of other comedies—
Our wooing doth not end like an old play;
Jack hath not Jill:
