Fancy and Achievement in Love’s Labour’s Lost

Abstract

B OVE'S Labour's Lost is organized around a central theme, but this fact is obscured by the usual approach to the play fro as a satire of overelaborate language. This interpretation ^ accounts for the witty talk and suggests that the outcome of the action is due to the lords' excessive verbal play. It is difficult, however, to see the relevance of the academy plan, the commoners' role, or the startling final act of the play in terms of wit. This focus also makes the show of the worthies, an attractive play-within-aplay, a comic interlude unrelated to the rest of Love's Labour's Lost. And the unusually articulate final songs are treated as incidental to, rather than as the culmination of, the resolution of the play. Wit is only one aspect of a larger concern. Love's Labour's Lost might be considered as a prelude to the more extensive commentary on imagination in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Love's Labour's Lost is concerned with several kinds of imagination or fancy: the lords' conceit of setting up an academy; their romantic fancy (and that of the ladies); the lords' extravagant designs in wooing; and the commoners' poetic fancy, their show of the worthies. These fancies are presented as excessively imaginative ones, and they all fall short of achievement. Love's Labour's Lost presents a conflict between fancy and achievement, a conflict which is ultimately one between artifice and nature. The King of Navarre proposes in the first speech that our court shall be a little Academe,/Still and contemplative in living art':1