PODCAST · arts

Love's Labour's Lost (version 2)

by William Shakespeare

Temptations and infatuations abound in this sparklingly linguistic early comedy from Shakespeare, where cerebral pursuits and ascetic intentions prove no match for the nobles of Navarre’s royal court when the Princess of France and her attendants arrive on a political mission and find themselves enmeshed in a mission of far more amorous ambitions. An entertaining battle of sexes, wits and classes ensues as the great master of the English language concocts a roundelay of semantic gamesmanship, mixing high lyricism, bawdy wordplay and a fair degree of scholarly satire together with elastic dexterity to poke fun at masculine romantic ideations and female objectification, the ambiguities of communication, as well as the ignorance of the seemingly cultured societal sets. And then, in a stunning tonal turn mere moments before the play’s conclusion that manages to thwart all our expectations, the young Shakespeare grounds this heretofore exuberant work in a startlingly mature realism that is