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All the Bloody Shakespeare: Love's Labour 's Lost

Imagine this four times over but with letters instead of conversations and Elizabethan hygiene standards.


I was quite excited to read Love's Labour's Lost, it starts really well.  The king and his three mates all swear off women for three years to pursue academic interests and higher purposes.  Oh, and the king makes it law that everyone else has to do the same for ease of plot development.  It's all going well until a princess / potential queen shows up with her exactly three friends.

There's a lot of potential here, and we see an immediate step up in terms of the quality of writing.  You know those nut jobs who think all Shakespeare's plays were written by different people? Well, I almost thought they had a point for a minute.  Almost every phrase the king utters is profound and well-composed.  This can't be written by the same bloke that wrote Two Gentlemen of Verona, I erroneously posited.

Then we get Costard (a clown).  Costard has already broken the 'no birds allowed' rule which allows him to work as an intermediary between the celibate cast and their intended loves.  

But also, he is there to carry on Shakespeare's weirdly sexual obsession with sheep.  To deliver some (actually quite funny) Benny Hill style poetic asides*, and to take another needless pop at the Jews.  He's basically Launce again, but with tighter material.  

There are four things you can take away from Costard.  
 1.     Shakespeare couldn't spell custard.  
 2.  Shakespeare was WAY into sheep.
 3.  Shakespeare did get better at writing as he went along.
 4.  Shakespeare was a determined anti-semite.

Aside from Costard, there is lots of letter sending (again).   The blokes all try way too hard and make themselves look like idiots, and the women get to laugh at them, which is a definite step forward.  Another step forward is that the servants are allowed to intelligent and insightful human beings as opposed to one joke whipping posts.

Love's Labour 's Lost is the ultimate 'will they won't they' romantic comedy.  It first asks, won't they? Then asks, will they? Then concludes by saying they will unless it turns out that they won't.

The ending has everyone falling in love but unable to marry for another year due to the still ongoing 'no birds allowed' rule.  Which is a pretty crummy and unsatisfying conclusion.  Some people think that there may have been a sequel called Love's Labour's Won.  But a lot of other people think there wasn't, or if there was it had to be destroyed because of witches or aliens or something.

3/5 It's the best one so far.

*Aside: Costard's poetry lacks both the metric sophistication and linguistic range of Hill's efforts.  But, he is writing hundreds of years after Shakespeare so we'll give Shakey a pass on that.

Interestingly, many of the same people who condemn Hill for his 60s/70s misogyny / racial stereotyping are more than happy to defend both Shakespeare and Monty Python.  Both of whom are steeped in the same elements.  Ben Elton (who led the media charge against Hill) and Curtis' Upstart Crow is basically a series of apologetic sequences of idolisation and justification.  Shakespeare gets a pass because the middle class hold him as sacred. Likewise the Pythons.  Hill is a common oik, so nobody influential is about to leap to his defence.

In the interest of transparency, I like both Hill and Python.  Though they're both as bad as Shakespeare.

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