Love's Labours Requires More Than An Unprepared Reading or Listening

In the project of reading "the bad plays" among the so-called "Shakespeare plays" I mentioned that I'd read the seldom produced or read Love's Labour's Lost.    While I didn't find it as awful as my current least favorite, "Pericles" I found the plot unbelievable and silly, based around the resolution of a group of French nobles writing up a group of rules under which they are going to study rigorously, living rigorously (the three hours a night of sleep was the thing I found most ridiculous) eating plainly and meagerly and forsaking the company of women.  Of course a group of women come to visit and, though they don't succeed in getting together the study plan is foresaken as they succumb to the charms of the ladies.

Having found that the usual method of reading the plays outside of any context doesn't necessarily let you understand them, I listened to this lecture about the play with some really good reading performances by distinguished actors, including the recent Oscar winner, Mark Rylance and Derek Jacobi.  I can't find the identity of the other actors and don't recognize them but they really are very good, I wish they'd been listed .

As you can hear in the lecture, the play that went entirely over my head was certainly much more meaningful to informed audiences of the 1580s and 90s, the histories, personalities and events in then contemporary France.  

As a hobbyist anti-Stratfordian leaning in a Baconian direction, I'll point out that whereas the Stratford man is not believed to have ever traveled out of the environs of London and Stratford, the young Francis Bacon spent more than two years in France as part of the company of the English ambassador.  He would have had plenty of time to learn about the events that the play satirizes and plays off of.

There are several videos in this series dealing with the background of several other plays, which I'll post.   They are certainly worth thinking about.  I'm going back and re-reading Love's Labour's Lost as I get a chance to look up the various figures and events mentioned in the lecture.

I won't go into the vicious, not to mention dirty attacks by supposedly distinguished academics against Rylance and Jacobi by insiders of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, the center of the Shakespeare industry which will strike back at anyone who looks at the evidence and notes that while the Stratford Shakspere left a relatively extensive personal record, it is a record of a broker, money lender, and sharp businessman, it is entirely absent of evidence that he wrote anything. There are even those who doubt that as many as four of the six alleged signatures are not in his hand but are written by clerks or others.   Hell hath no fury like an academic who fears that his lunch ticket might get devalued.