Love's Labour's Lost (Arkangel Complete Shakespeare) [UNABRIDGED]

Rating:
Summary: Funny, but too lovey-dovey
Review: Like most of Shakespeare's comidies, LLL involved a couple of very independent women falling in love with a couple of guys who were in love with them too. It also brought mistaken identities into play and, like A Midsummer Night's Dream, it had a play within the play. The humor was mostly in the form of puns, most of which were hard to understand the first time through. The ending was really bad, though, because the girls didn't get together with the guys like they should have if Shakespeare had planned a happy ending. All-in-all, I would only recommend this play for really serious Shakespearean scholars, as it is almost too dense for us laypeople

Rating:
Summary: witty
Review: this is witty play about four guys who vow to sequester themselves for three years in serious study, but who are forced to forswear their vows when four attractive women show up and upset their plans. the humor is mainly in the form of wordplay, as only shakespeare can do, and the verbal jousting between berowne and his lady is especially entertaining, and anticipates the tete-a-tetes between petruchio and katherina in "taming of a shrew" and benedick and beatrice in "much ado about nothing". definitely worth a read, and if you can get it, the bbc television production of LLL is also worth seeing. last of all, i disagree with the other poster who complained of the ending. i thought it was pretty clear that the couples would get together in a year's time. so the ending was implicitly happy. only someone who is accustomed to instant gratification could find fault with it.

Rating:
Summary: A most helpful edition of a riot of words
Review: This merry play is a delight for its language. It has more a situation than a plot. The King has sworn himself and three attendants to three years of fasting, abstinence from women, study, and little sleep. Immediately a princess arrives with her attendants that cause the men to regret their oaths. Letters are written, delivered incorrectly, and a huge final scene with disguises, masks, and a wonderfully strange presentation of some of the nine worthies. All of this provides a structure for a rich play of language that is full of wit and bawdy.

This edition has a lengthy introductory essay that helps understand the issues of the text, the historical context, and performance practice issues. The notes are wonderfully helpful in understanding the text and what choices the editors had to make in presenting it. After the play is an essay just on the text of the play, appendix 2 has additional lines that this edition leaves out of the play, appendix 3 discusses Moth's name.

The issue around Moth is that in Elizabethan times Moth would likely have been pronounced more like Mott than our soft th. And the word mote and moth were roughly interchangeable. The name of the insect and the word for a small particle meant roughly the same thing. It is a nice issue to be aware of and the essay is helpful.

Appendix 4 lists words that are rhymed in this play - often a revelation to the way words were pronounced 400 years ago. Appendix 5 lists the compound words, many of them minted in this play.

All in all, this edition is a happy experience of a very fun play.