ABSTRACT
In a sense the play has ended; an epilogue has been spoken by Berowne and that haunting and beautiful kingdom created by the marriage of reality with illusion destroyed, seemingly beyond recall. In the person of Marcade, the world outside the circuit of the park has at last broken through the gates, involving the people of the play in its sorrows and grim actualities, the plague-houses and desolate retreats, the mourning cities and courts of that vaster country overshadowing the tents and the fantastic towers of Navarre. Yet before the final dissolution of that minute and once isolated kingdom of the play, when some of the characters seem already to have disappeared and the others are preparing sadly to journey into the realms beyond the walls of the royal close, there is granted suddenly a little moment of grace. In the waning afternoon, all the people of the play return to the stage and stand quietly together to hear the song which “the two learned men have compiled in praise of the Owl and the Cuckoo,” a song into which the whole of that now-vanished world of Love’s Labour’s Lost seems to have passed, its brilliance, its strange mingling of the artificial and the real, its loveliness and laughter gathered together for the last time to speak to us in the form of a single strain of music.
