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    Love’s Labours Lost
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    Love’s Labours Lost
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    Love’s Labours Lost
    Audiobook2 hours

    Love’s Labours Lost

    Written by William Shakespeare

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Sir Derek Jacobi and cast perform another Shakespeare classic which has been released for the first time as a digital download.

    The play opens with the King of Navarre and three noble companions, Berowne, Dumaine, and Longaville, taking an oath to devote themselves to three years of study, promising not to give in to the company of women — Berowne somewhat more hesitantly than the others. Berowne reminds the king that the princess and her three ladies are coming to the kingdom and it would be suicidal for the King to agree to this law. The King denies what Berowne says, insisting that the ladies make their camp in the field outside of his court. The King and his men comically fall in love with the princess and her ladies.

    The main story is assisted by many other humorous sub-plots. A rather heavy-accented Spanish swordsman, Don Adriano de Armado, tries and fails to woo a country wench, Jaquenetta, helped by Moth, his page, and rivaled by Costard, a country idiot. We are also introduced to two scholars, Holofernes and Sir Nathaniel, and we see them converse with each other in schoolboy Latin. In the final act, the comic characters perform a play to entertain the nobles, an idea conceived by Holofernes, where they represent the Nine Worthies. The four Lords — as well as the Ladies' manservant Boyet — mock the play, and Armado and Costard almost come to blows.

    At the end of this 'play' within the play, there is a bitter twist in the story. News arrives that the Princess's father has died and she must leave to take the throne. The king and his nobles swear to remain faithful to their ladies, but the ladies, unconvinced that their love is that strong, claim that the men must wait a whole year and a day to prove what they say is true. This is an unusual ending for Shakespeare and Elizabethan comedy. A play mentioned by Francis Meres, Love's Labour's Won, is sometimes believed to be a sequel to this play

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateDec 9, 2010
    ISBN9780007423880
    Unavailable
    Love’s Labours Lost
    Author

    William Shakespeare

    William Shakespeare was born in April 1564 in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, on England’s Avon River. When he was eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway. The couple had three children—an older daughter Susanna and twins, Judith and Hamnet. Hamnet, Shakespeare’s only son, died in childhood. The bulk of Shakespeare’s working life was spent in the theater world of London, where he established himself professionally by the early 1590s. He enjoyed success not only as a playwright and poet, but also as an actor and shareholder in an acting company. Although some think that sometime between 1610 and 1613 Shakespeare retired from the theater and returned home to Stratford, where he died in 1616, others believe that he may have continued to work in London until close to his death.

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    Reviews for Love’s Labours Lost

    3.5/5

    323 ratings16 reviews

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    • 4/5
      British mathematician Alan Turing reports the burglary of his house to the police. Under questioning he tries to give the detective information about whom he suspects of the crime, but the detective can tell Turing is lying and the investigation leads to further questioning. Turing becomes flustered and admits to having an affair with one of the suspects. It's 1951, homosexuality is illegal, and Turing's admission leads to a conviction and chemical castration for the man who had been awarded an O.B.E. for conceiving a code-breaking computer that helped the Allies win during WWII.This play, based on facts, follows the years of Turing's life from about 1948 to 1951, with a flashback to his childhood. The scene changes are done fluidly with the actor simply changing a jacket and lighting changes. It was first performed in London in 1986, then went to Broadway, with Derek Jacobi as Turing, and Jacobi also appeared in the filming of the play. I put this in my "Something Led Me to the Book" category as I first learned about it because my favorite actor, John Castle, took over the role in 1987.
    • 4/5
      It's always a bit of a challenge to read a play without having seen it. This one is particularly difficult because it skips in time from childhood to war efforts and post war events and back again; visual cues from the stage would make the transition easier than on the page.This said, this 'time warping' is an effective ploy to recount not only Alan Turing's professional contributions (computing and cryptography) but also his personal difficulties. It gives a very tight account of the man in his research, his personality and the main events of his life. Despite the very technical nature of his work, it is explained in an easily accessible fashion, with a sense of wonder. Generally a precise look at a man's extraordinary contribution.
    • 3/5
      A play about Alan Turing and his code-breaking activities. It focuses on both the mathematics and on his homosexuality, but does not render the latter in a prurient or leering way as many do. The author chose to ground each scene in time and space, but not tell you what those times and spaces are, which makes it difficult to figure out since it does not proceed in a linear fashion. Only by knowing something about both Alan Turing and history can you begin to make much sense of it, except in one scene where he references 1948 as being four years before; that's nice, but the next scene dips back into Turing's youth, the middle aged man becomes a teenager, and you're back to being lost. The explanations of Turing's ideas was good, the play was interesting, but reading it is difficult because of the refusal to consider the most basic rules of storytelling; not a problem if you're writing a play where time doesn't matter, but in a play of this nature, the author is, in my opinion, being a jerk for the sake of art.
    • 4/5
      [Love's Labour's Lost - The Arden Shakespeare]Love's Labour's Lost - BBC Shakespeare Collection 1985Shakespeare does it again, he writes a play that builds and deepens on much of what has gone before (1594/5) on the British stage, producing a play that seems totally original. Between August 1592 and the spring of 1594 the London theatres were closed due to the plague and Shakespeare's career as a playwright seems to have come to a halt as he probably spent his time preparing his narrative poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). Certainly he must have been busy writing sonnets, because a few of them appear in Love's Labour's Lost. There is a lot of poetry in the play and a good percentage of it is rhymed iambic pentameters. It is a delight to read and the only comparison I can make is with the later plays of John Lyly for example Loves Metamorphoses where the themes are virginity, chastity and constancy in love, all wrapped up in a froth of light entertainment. Love's Labour's Lost is certainly a comedy and would fall under the genre of light entertainment, but there is more depth, more word play and the jokes are more funny. There is not much of a plot in Love's labour's Lost. Ferdinand the King of Navarre has persuaded three of his courtiers Berowne, Longaville and Dumaine to give up all pleasures for a three year period to study with him in his academy. They have forsworn oaths that they will not even speak to any women during this time. Berowne points out that the king must break his oath the next week because he has agreed to welcome the Princess of France and her attendants who are arriving on a diplomatic mission. The inevitable happens the four men fall in love with the Princess and her ladies Rosaline, Maria and Katherine and must devise ways of courting their intended. A Spanish gentleman, a clown are both looking to get their way with Jaquenetta a dairymaid and a pedantic schoolmaster Holofernes are all thrown into the mix. There are the usual elements of disguises, mistaken identity, a play within a play and many opportunities for double entendres, however Shakespeare introduces two major items of originality in that the women always seem to have the upper hand and are wise and worldly compared to their male counterparts and the ending of the play is open ended.The four men appear foolish from the very start with their oath making and only proceed to become more foolish when they fall in love. The play does not rely on mistaken identities or slapstick comedy to entertain, but does rely on wordplay, wit and characterisation. This can make it more difficult to catch all the jokes and puns, because of the differences in language and culture between modern times and the Elizabethan era, but I think there is still enough which comes through to entertain us today, which was shown by the BBC production: the penultimate scene of the play put on by the nine worthies (commoners) was hilarious. As in much of Shakespeare more familiarity with Elizabethan culture and drama will result in a more in depth all round entertainment. A feature of this play is the craze for sonnet writing. Shakespeares contemporaries were rushing into print with sonnet collections based on ideas from a previous era of courtly love where the poet would write reams of words complaining about his unrequited love, for the unattainable woman or man of his affections. Ferdinand, Berowne, Longaville and Dumaine all write sonnets to their loved ones and those proudly read out by Ferdinand, Longaville and Dumaine are certainly no better than much of the dross that was served up by the Elizabethan sonneteers. The sonnet written by Berowne is a cut above the others, but unfortunately this one gets misplaced and read out by Nathaniel the curate to Jaquenetta the dairymaid, when it finally gets back to Berowne he immediately tears it up; this is surely Shakespeare's joke. There are many jokes concerning book worms and ink horns, which stretch across the social divide from the nobles to the professionals. Unrequited love is a feature of most sonnet collections and at the end of this play love is unrequited for all of the sonnet writers.A play then about the battle of the sexes, with the women as the morally superior beings, but of course it is the foolish men who are the stars of the show. Much can be read into the play; for example Shakespeare's comments on the life of the courtiers, the tomfoolery and ignorance of the working classes, but although this may be interesting from a historical point of view this is an entertainment first and foremost. The reader can appreciate the word play with the puns and the innuendos, but the BBC production of the play showed how it works on stage. It is a delight for the eye as well as the brain and can be adapted to enhance Shakespeare's original stage craft. I was pleased to see that not too much was made of the sexual innuendos by the actors and if the viewer reads anything in the dialogue then this was not the result of leery comments or facial expressions from the players. This play does not need that, it has Shakespeare's genius to lift a mundane plot full of clichés into superb entertainment. A four star read and a five star view.
    • 2/5
      Eh, not a big fan of The Bard's comedies. The bulk of them come across as a Three's Company episode with better dialogue.

      Love's Labour's Lost is a particularly confused mess. The men declare themselves uninterested in women, then lose their minds over the first women they see, many of whom they admit are not that attractive. The women are keen to meet the men, then rebuff and humiliate them at every turn, then agree to accept their attentions after a suitable period of mourning/penance has passed. The whole situation is patently a platform on which to stage battles of wits, and those neither scintillating nor scathing.

      This is compounded by the puerile interpretations of the Norton editor, one Walter Cohen, who insists that the play is a homoerotic and scatological triumph. Every occurrence of the word "loose" or "end" has a chuckling gloss denoting "ass" or "anus" or "scatological". When "enigma" is misconstrued by a character to be "an egma", it is insisted that "egma" is "enema", and that "salve" is "an anal salvo discharged from the male". Within three lines, the word "goose" is assumed to refer to "prostitute", "a victim of veneral disease", and "buttocks". And all that is just one page from scene 3.1. It gets a bit tiresome.
    • 2/5
      I enjoyed the absurd interactions between Holofernes and Nathaniel, and the whole play was a good bit of light-hearted fun. But I couldn't help but feel that even Shakespeare went a bit too far with the ostentatious verbiage on this occasion.
    • 4/5
      Not so profound a play as Twelfth Night, but an entertainment which has stuck with me over the decades. To the modern eye this is obviously a satire upon manners of the time, and it is more accessible to the modern reader than many of the other plays from the same hand. A king decides to absent himself from duties and cultivate his mind. His male courtiers perforce fall in with the scheme. but the ladies are annoyed to be deprived of male company, and break into the plan, with predictable by-play. Biron and Rosaline find each other, and even the king finds himself compromised. He shortens the period he will be cloistered and everyone promises to meet again in a year, to see how their affections have held. And, we all go home, wondering which couples will stand the strain.
    • 4/5
      A king and his gentlemen vow to remain celibate, studious and moderate in their habits for three years to improve their minds. They have signed their names to this vow. Oops! They forgot that an embassy from France was due soon, consisting of a princess and her ladies! Shenanigans ensue. And wordplay, such wordplay!What seemed at first a fairly shallow and cynical plot, developed by the end to be a story of depth. No fools these women, they understood these men better than the men understood themselves, and called them on their foolishness. Shakespeare leaves the ending undecided, as the twelve month penance the men are given by the women is "too long for a play."
    • 5/5
      The 2000 film of this play got me in trouble because I was laughing so loudly at Shakespeare; I was told after the film, "Everybody in this room HATES you." (Guess Americans are not s'posed to laugh at Great Drama--or poetry, either.) Arguably Shakespeare's most Shakespearean play, or interplay: the exchanges of wit, what he would have overheard at Middle Temple and among his fellow actors. Rather than the text, I'll comment on Branagh's musical version, with himself as Berowne and Director, Scorsese as producer. It's hilarious, especially for a Shakespearean; I laughed throughout so much (my laugh scares babies) one lady in the audience 25 came up to me after the film to kindly inform, "Everybody in this room HATES you." I thanked her for the admonition. Very slow, stagey opening lines by the Prince. Dunno why. They cut the poetry criticism, and substitute the American songbook--Gershwin, Berlin--for poems. The Don Armado stuff (with Moth his sidekick) is broad, not literary: mustachioed, funny body, melancholy humor. Armado's the most overwritten love-letter, parodying catechism; but he is standard Plautine Braggart Soldier ("Miles Gloriosus") by way of commedia dell'arte. Then the Plautine Pedant (commedia Dottore) Holofernia crosses gender, a female professor type. Costard wears a suit, maybe a Catskills standup.Branagh cuts the Russian (or fake-Russian) lingo, "muoosa-Cargo" of the masked entrance. Wonderful 30's film cliches: female swimmers, the dance scenes, the prop plane's night takeoff. Ends with WWII, grainy newsreel footage of the year, after news of the French Princess's father's death. Berowne (pronounced .."oon") is sentenced privately "to move wild laughter in the throat of death…" His judge, Rosaline, points out the Bard' instruction on jokes: "A jest's prosperity lies in the ear / Of him that hears it, never in the tongue / Of him that makes it" (V.end). LLL ends with death and winter (the Russian an intimation?): "When icicles hang by the wall,/ And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,/ And Tom bears logs into the hall,/ And milk comes frozen home in pails.." and the owl talks, "Tu-whit..Tu whoo, a merry note/ While greasy Joan doth keel the pot." That's the European Tawny Owl (male and female must combine for it) so an American director might replace with the same prosody, "Who cooks for youuu?"(the Barred Owl). In the penultimate scene, Dull is onstage the whole scene nere speaking a word until Holofernes says, "Thou hast spoken no word the while," to which Dull, "Nor understood none neither, sir."Well, no wonder, if he has no Latin, for Costard offers, "Go to, thou has it AD dunghill…as they say." Hol, "Oh, I smell false Latin--dunghill for UNGUEM." The Bard kindly explains the Latin joke, essential for modern American readers. Incidentally, Berowne uses Moliere-like rhymed couplets in his social satire on Boyet, V.ii.315ff. His most daring rhymes, "sing/ushering" and maybe "debt/Boyet."
    • 4/5
      Love's Labour's Lost is one of Shakespeare's comedies, despite its unique ending in which none of the lovers are conveniently married off, and the men are instead ordered to a year's worth of abstinence to prove their devotion to the women. The ending echoes the opening of the play in a bitterly amusing way: at the start of the play, the men have sworn off women and dissolute living for three years, to improve their minds, and at the end of the play they swear to be faithful for a year and a day (in other words, no women) to prove the constancy of their loves. Will they abide by the second promise, when they were unable to keep the first? The doubt surrounding this proposition closes the play on a jarring note.I started with the ending, so let me retrace my steps and explain the premise of the story. The King of Navarre and this three companions have taken an oath to perform three years of study and fasting, abstaining from women to keep their minds clear. One of the men, Berowne, skeptically observes that none of them has the endurance, but he reluctantly agrees. Enter the women: the Princess from France arrives for some political parley, along with her three women companions. The men immediately fall in love; fortunately, each man falls in love with a separate lady in the group. Without any hesitation, they throw aside their oath. In a scene that is replete with wonderful dramatic irony, each man comes out, one at a time, to confess in a soliloquy that he will pursue his new love, while at least one other man is hiding in the wings, eavesdropping. The King overhears the confessions of the others, and rebukes them for breaking their oath, before Berowne points out that he heard the King himself betray their earlier promise, and so they all have a good laugh at each other. They decide to court the ladies in disguise. Boyet, one of the men attending the Princess, overhears their plans and tells the female visitors. Not only are they a little indignant at this turn of events - the King had earlier refused them admittance into the Court, due to his oath, forcing them to camp outside - they are also contemptuous of how easily the men break their promises and of the foolish way they hope to woo them. To repay them for these issues, the women devise their own plot. They will also wear disguises, professing to be someone else, and force the men to court the wrong woman.As Shakespeare's women are so often the more clever gender, the plan goes exactly the way the women wish it to. The King and his entourage humbly apologize, and after some playful bickering, all turns out well, for it seems that the women have also fallen in love, each with the man that is most partial to her. This type of miraculous coincidence is to be expected in a comedy, where even fate and destiny work for the eventual good of the characters. Indeed, the story seems headed to the conventional marriage and celebration, when the festive events are interrupted with somber news. The Princess's father has died, and she must return home to mourn for the required year.
    • 5/5
      After seeing the fantastic Shakespeare in the Park original musical adaptation, I decided to read the play itself. The Shakespeare in the Park version interspersed modern lyrics with the original lines in a way that complemented both--and told a psychologically modern story that was set among recent college graduates getting back together again--and falling in love, interspersed with some of the more over-the-top satiric characters. It was hard to believe that the play itself could read anything like that adaptation. But, of course, it did.

      Love's Labor's Lost is about a King and his followers that take a vow to retreat from women to study for three years, a princess and her followers who come upon them and disrupt the vow, and what happens after. The romantic comedy between Berowne and Rosaline drives much of the plot and is up there with the best of Shakespeare's witty, romantic repartee.
    • 4/5
      I was surprised to say I quite liked William Shakespeare's "Love's Labors Lost." Knowing that it isn't often performed today (and that my local library didn't even have a copy of this one,) I really didn't have high expectations. I found it an entertaining, though sometimes challenging read."Love's Labors Lost" is essentially a romantic comedy. The King of Navarre and his courtiers pledge to dedicate themselves to study for the next three years and forsake all women... of course a bevy of beauties immediately emerge to challenge that notion. The play is typical Shakespeare -- word play, messages misdelivered, disguises and people switching places. I'm sure a lot of the puns were lost on me, but I still enjoyed the ones I got.While this definitely isn't one of Shakespeare's best, I did find it fun overall.
    • 2/5
      You know what I'm not crazy about? Shakespeare's comedies
    • 4/5
      I’m normally a big fan of Shakespeare’s plays, and while I enjoyed parts of this one, it still fell a bit flat for me. The King of Navarre and three of his friends decide they will swear off women and other temptations for three years while they focus on their studies. Of course they decide to do this shortly before the Princess of France and her friends are about to visit. No sooner is the vow made than all four men are swooning over the lovely ladies. There are some really funny parts, like when the men try to hold each other to their vow while at the same time writing love letters to their new crushes. As with all of Shakespeare’s comedies, hidden identities and witty dialogue confound the characters as they find themselves unexpectedly falling in love. **SPOILERS**The play ends with a bit of an unusual cliff hanger. The lovers are all separated when the Princess must return to rule France after hearing of her father’s unexpected death. There is a theory that a sequel to the play existed but there are no surviving copies. The play “Love’s Labour’s Won” is mentioned in other texts from around the same time and it could have been the sequel that resolved the lovers’ future. **SPOILERS OVER**BOTTOM LINE: This isn’t one of the Bard’s strongest plays, but if you’re already a fan then it’s worth reading. If not, start with one of his better comedies, like Twelfth Night, As You Like It or Much Ado About Nothing. “He hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book; he hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink.”“As sweet and musicalAs bright Apollo's lute, strung with his hair;And when Love speaks, the voice of all the godsMakes heaven drowsy with the harmony.” 
    • 5/5
      Love's Labour's Lost is easily one of my favorites in the whole body of Shakespeare's works (excluding his sonnets, of course, which are a whole different animal entirely). As I haven't yet gotten around to reading a different version, I can't comment on how the Folger measures up, but the annotations in this edition seem just about perfect, in that it explains the things that need to be the most and leaves the rest up to personal interpretation.The plot of this play is simple in that it could easily be a Renaissance rom-com if not for the superb execution. Per the usual, Shakespeare weaves layer upon layer of literary devices until your mind spins (in a good way), but the humor of this particular play overshadows even the ever-entertaining double entendres. I could read this over and over again for the cutting wit of Berowne alone; throw in Costard, too, and I'm hooked for life. Their exchange at the beginning of Act III makes me smile like an idiot no matter how many times I read it (see also: Berowne's soliloquy about love at the end of Act III, Scene I. Shakespeare was a freaking genius).***Spoilers***The only downside to this work is the ending, and even that really depends on how you look at it. Though part of me wants the fan-girly happily ever after, the more somber, uncertain ending lends the play some much needed weight.
    • 4/5
      Bizarre, yet entertaining story of men who renounce the company of women, then are quickly forsworn.