ABSTRACT
Often described as William Shakespeare’s most courtly but also most obscure play, Love’s Labour’s Lost is much preoccupied with the riddling word-games that appear to have been fashionable at the Elizabethan court in its last decade. The comedy’s explicit posing of textual ‘enigmas’ has famously prompted several critics to pillage it in search of secrets, in the form of allegorical references to contemporary aristocrats as well as writers and thinkers; since the 1970s, however, it is the secondary meanings that appear to be secreted in the text’s wordplay that have attracted most critical attention. This chapter explores how Shakespeare’s ‘pleasant conceited Comedie’ invites us to look beyond its self-conscious staging of solipsistic word-games, together with the amorous courtships undertaken by its love-struck male characters, and to reflect upon what kind of ‘end’, natural or unnatural, may follow or come after ‘the posterior’ or latter end of man’s brief play-time.
