Envoi *

My first thoughts on staging a production of Love’s Labour’s Lost had to do with earning the ending of the play. In reading and rereading the play, I was struck by Marcade’s entrance, by the sudden mention of death, by the apparently instant maturation of the leading characters. How intriguing for Shakespearean comedy: instead of ending in the traditional marriage scene (as in Much Ado About Nothing, or Twelfth Night, or As You Like It, or A Midsummer Night’s Dream…), in Love’s Labour’s Lost we hear vows to wait a year, to suffer for a year, and only then to wed.