ABSTRACT
The qualities of Love’s Labour’s Lost determine its limitations. The arabesques of wit, the elaborations of courtly artifice, the coolness of tone—these sources of its charm contribute to that brittleness and thinness and faded superficiality for which some critics of several generations have reproached it. For its admirers, a heavy stress upon these limitations is likely to appear irrelevant. But even admirers must acknowledge that, placed against its author’s work, Love’s Labour’s Lost is distinguished by a certain slenderness of feeling, a delicate insubstantiality. It is most certainly not a trivial play, but its subtlety remains a little disembodied.
