Love's Labour's Lost

Love's Labour's Lost is one of William Shakespeare's early comedies, believed to have been written in the mid-1590s for a performance at the Inns of Court before Queen Elizabeth I. It follows the King of Navarre and his three companions as they attempt to swear off the company of women for three years in order to focus on study and fasting.

W. G. Clark; W. A. Wright (eds.) The Works of William Shakespeare, vol. 2 (Cambridge and London: Macmillan and Co., 1863)

Act I

Scene i

Spite of cormorant devouring Time.

Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives,
Live register’d upon our brazen tombs,
And then grace us in the disgrace of death;
When, spite of cormorant devouring Time,
The endeavour of this present breath may buy
That honour which shall bate his scythe’s keen edge,
And make us heirs of all eternity.
- King of Navarre, l. 1

Our court shall be a little Academe,
Still and contemplative in living art.
- King of Navarre, l. 13

Fat paunches have lean pates; and dainty bits
Make rich the ribs, but bankrupt quite the wits.
- 'Longaville, l. 26

Biron: What is the end of study? let me know.
King: Why, that to know, which else we should not know.
Biron: Things hid and barr’d, you mean, from common sense?
King: Ay, that is study’s god-like recompense.
- l. 55

Come on, then; I will swear to study so,
To know the thing I am forbid to know:
As thus,—to study where I well may dine,
When I to feast expressly am forbid;
Or study where to meet some mistress fine,
When mistresses from common sense are hid.
- Biron, l. 59

Or having sworn too hard a keeping oath,
Study to break it, and not break my troth.
- Biron, l. 65

Why, all delights are vain; but that most vain,
Which, with pain purchased, doth inherit pain:
As, painfully to pore upon a book
To seek the light of truth; while truth the while
Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look:
Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile:
So, ere you find where light in darkness lies,
Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.
- Biron, l. 72
  Johnson's note: "The whole sense of this gingling declamation is only this, that a man by too close study may read himself blind, which might have been told with less obscurity in fewer words."

Biron: Study is like the heaven’s glorious sun,
   That will not be deep-search’d with saucy looks:
Small have continual plodders ever won,
   Save base authority from others’ books.
These earthly godfathers of heaven’s lights,
   That give a name to every fixèd star,
Have no more profit of their shining nights
   Than those that walk and wot not what they are.
Too much to know, is to know nought but fame;
And every godfather can give a name.
King: How well he’s read, to reason against reading!
- l. 84
  Cf. Whitman, "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" (1865)

At Christmas I no more desire a rose,
Than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled shows;
But like of each thing that in season grows.
- Biron, l. 105

So study evermore is overshot:
While it doth study to have what it would,
It doth forget to do the thing it should;
And when it hath the thing it hunteth most,
’Tis won as towns with fire, so won, so lost.
- Biron, l. 140

A man in all the world’s new fashion planted,
That hath a mint of phrases in his brain.
- King of Navarre, l. 162

One whom the music of his own vain tongue
Doth ravish like enchanting harmony.
- King of Navarre, l. 164

A high hope for a low heaven: God grant us patience!
- Longaville, l. 191

About the sixth hour; when beasts most graze, birds best peck, and men sit down to that nourishment which is called supper.
- Armado, l. 227

‘That unlettered small-knowing soul.’
- King of Navarre [reads], l. 240

‘A child of our grandmother Eve, a female; or, for thy more sweet understanding, a woman.’
- King of Navarre [reads], l. 250

Affliction may one day smile again; and till then, sit thee down, sorrow!
- Costard, l. 294

Scene ii

The world was very guilty of such a ballad some three ages since: but, I think, now ’tis not to be found.
- Moth, l. 107

The rational hind Costard.
- Armado, l. 114

Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love.
- Armado, l. 163

Adieu, valour! rust, rapier! be still, drum! for your manager is in love; yea, he loveth.

Adieu, valour! rust, rapier! be still, drum! for your manager is in love; yea, he loveth.
- Armado, l. 170

Assist me some extemporal god of rhyme, for I am sure I shall turn sonnet.
- Armado, l. 171

Devise, wit; write, pen; for I am for whole volumes in folio.
- Armado, l. 173

Act II

Scene i

Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye,
Not utter’d by base sale of chapmen’s tongues.
- Princess of France, l. 15

Bold of your worthiness, we single you
As our best-moving fair solicitor.
- Princess of France, l. 28

A man of sovereign parts he is esteem’d;
Well fitted in arts, glorious in arms:
Nothing becomes him ill that he would well.
- Maria, l. 44

A merrier man,
Within the limit of becoming mirth,
I never spent an hour’s talk withal:
His eye begets occasion for his wit;
For every object that the one doth catch,
The other turns to a mirth-moving jest,
Which his fair tongue, conceit’s expositor,
Delivers in such apt and gracious words,
That aged ears play truant at his tales,
And younger hearings are quite ravished;
So sweet and voluble is his discourse.
- Rosaline, l. 66

Your wit’s too hot, it speeds too fast, ’twill tire.
- Biron, l. 119

Biron: What time o’ day?
Rosaline: The hour that fools should ask.
- l. 121

Act III

Scene i

Warble, child; make passionate my sense of hearing.
- Armado, l. 1

By my penny of observation.
- Moth, l. 24

Sweet smoke of rhetoric!
- Armado, l. 59

The boy hath sold him a bargain, a goose, that’s flat.
Sir, your pennyworth is good, an your goose be fat.
To sell a bargain well is as cunning as fast and loose.
- Costard, l. 95

Remuneration! O, that’s the Latin word for three farthings.
- Costard, l. 130

And I, forsooth, in love! I that have been love’s whip;
A very beadle to a humorous sigh.
- Biron, l. 163

This wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy;
This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid;
Regent of love-rhymes, lord of folded arms,
The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans,
Liege of all loiterers and malcontents,
Dread prince of plackets, king of codpieces,
Sole imperator and great general
Of trotting ’paritors:—O my little heart!
- Biron, l. 169

I seek a wife!
A woman, that is like a German clock,
Still a-repairing, ever out of frame,
And never going aright, being a watch,
But being watch’d that it may still go right!
- Biron, l. 179
  Cf. Jonson, The Silent Woman (1609), act 4, sc. 1: "She takes herself asunder still when she goes to bed, into some twenty boxes; and about next day, noon, is put together again like a great German clock." Middleton, A Mad World, My Masters (1608), act 4: "She consists of a hundred pieces, / Much like your German clock, and near allied: / Both are so nice they cannot go for pride." Dekker and Webster, Westward Ho (1607), act 1, sc. 1: "No German clock, nor mathematical engine whatsoever, requires so much reparation as a woman's face."

Act IV

Scene i

And, out of question, so it is sometimes,
Glory grows guilty of detested crimes,
When, for fame’s sake, for praise, an outward part,
We bend to that the working of the heart.
- Princess of France, l. 30

It is a most pathetical nit!
- Costard, l. 141

Scene ii

A buck of the first head.

A buck of the first head.
- Nathaniel, l. 9

O thou monster Ignorance, how deformed dost thou look!
- Holofernes, l. 21

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.
- Nathaniel, l. 22

His intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts.
- Nathaniel, l. 24

Many can brook the weather that love not the wind.
- Nathaniel, l. 31

You two are book-men.
- Dull, l. 32

Dictynna, goodman Dull.
- Holofernes, l. 34

This is a gift that I have, simple, simple; a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions: these are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion.
- Holofernes, l. 63

The elegancy, facility, and golden cadence of poesy.
- Holofernes, l. 117

Scene iii

By heaven, I do love: and it hath taught me to rhyme, and to be melancholy.
- Biron, l. 10

God give him grace to groan!
- Biron, l. 17

O queen of queens! how far dost thou excel,
No thought can think, nor tongue of mortal tell.
- King of Navarre [reads], l. 36

King: Sweet fellowship in shame!
Biron: One drunkard loves another of the name.
- l. 45

Did not the heavenly rhetoric of thine eye,
’Gainst whom the world cannot hold argument,
Persuade my heart to this false perjury?
- Longaville [reads], l. 56

What fool is not so wise
To lose an oath to win a paradise?
- Longaville [reads], l. 68

Like a demigod here sit I in the sky,
And wretched fools’ secrets heedfully o’er-eye.
More sacks to the mill! O heavens, I have my wish!
Dumain transform’d! four woodcocks in a dish!
- Biron, l. 75

On a day—alack the day!—
Love, whose month is ever May,
Spied a blossom passing fair
Playing in the wanton air.

On a day—alack the day!—
Love, whose month is ever May,
Spied a blossom passing fair
Playing in the wanton air:
Through the velvet leaves the wind,
All unseen, can passage find;
That the lover, sick to death,
Wish himself the heaven’s breath.
Air, quoth he, thy cheeks may blow;
Air, would I might triumph so!
But, alack, my hand is sworn
Ne’er to pluck thee from thy thorn;
Vow, alack, for youth unmeet,
Youth so apt to pluck a sweet!
Do not call it sin in me,
That I am forsworn for thee;
Thou for whom Jove would swear
Juno but an Ethiope were;
And deny himself for Jove,
Turning mortal for thy love.
- Dumaine [reads], l. 97

Ill, to example ill,
Would from my forehead wipe a perjured note;
For none offend where all alike do dote.
- Dumaine, l. 120

O me, with what strict patience have I sat,
To see a king transformed to a gnat!
To see great Hercules whipping a gig,
And profound Solomon to tune a jig,
And Nestor play at push-pin with the boys,
And critic Timon laugh at idle toys!
- Biron, l. 161

Young blood doth not obey an old decree:
We cannot cross the cause why we were born.
- Biron, l. 213

What peremptory eagle-sighted eye
Dares look upon the heaven of her brow,
That is not blinded by her majesty?
- Biron, l. 222

Where nothing wants that want itself doth seek.
- Biron, l. 233

Fie, painted rhetoric!
- Biron, l. 235

To things of sale a seller’s praise belongs.
- Biron, l. 236

Beauty doth varnish age.
- Biron, l. 240

Black is the badge of hell,
The hue of dungeons and the school of night.
- King of Navarre, l. 250

Devils soonest tempt, resembling spirits of light.
- Biron, l. 253

O, some authority how to proceed;
Some tricks, some quillets, how to cheat the devil.
- Longaville, l. 282

From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:
They are the ground, the books, the academes,
From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire.
- Biron, l. 298

Why, universal plodding prisons up
The nimble spirits in the arteries,
As motion and long-during action tires
The sinewy vigour of the traveller.
- Biron, l. 301

Where is any author in the world,
Teaches such beauty as a woman’s eye?

For where is any author in the world,
Teaches such beauty as a woman’s eye?
Learning is but an adjunct to ourself
And where we are our learning likewise is
Then when ourselves we see in ladies’ eyes.
Do we not likewise see our learning there?
- Biron, l. 308

But love, first learnèd in a lady’s eyes,
Lives not alone immurèd in the brain.
- Biron, l. 323

It adds a precious seeing to the eye.
- Biron, l. 329

A lover’s eyes will gaze an eagle blind;
A lover’s ear will hear the lowest sound.
- Biron, l. 330

Love’s feeling is more soft and sensible
Than are the tender horns of cockled snails.
- Biron, l. 333

For valour, is not Love a Hercules,
Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?
Subtle as Sphinx; as sweet and musical
As bright Apollo’s lute, strung with his hair;
And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Make heaven drowsy with the harmony.
- Biron, l. 336

Never durst poet touch a pen to write
Until his ink were temper’d with Love’s sighs.
- Biron, l. 342

Sow’d cockle reap’d no corn.

From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain and nourish all the world:
Else none at all in ought proves excellent.
- Biron, l. 346

Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves,
Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths.
- Biron, l. 357

For charity itself fulfils the law,
And who can sever love from charity?
- Biron, l. 360

Allons! allons! Sow’d cockle reap’d no corn.
- Biron, l. 379

Act V

Scene i

Priscian! a little scratched, ’twill serve.

Your reasons at dinner have been sharp and sententious; pleasant without scurrility, witty without affection, audacious without impudency, learned without opinion, and strange without heresy.
- Nathaniel, l. 2

He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.
- Holofernes, l. 15

I abhor such fanatical phantasimes, such insociable and point-devise companions; such rackers of orthography.
- Holofernes, l. 16

Priscian! a little scratched, ’twill serve.
- Holofernes, l. 25

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.
- Moth, l. 34

O, they have lived long on the alms-basket of words. I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word; for thou art not so long by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier swallowed than a flap-dragon.
- Costard, l. 35

An I had but one penny in the world, thou shouldst have it to buy gingerbread.
- Costard, l. 60

In the posteriors of this day, which the rude multitude call the afternoon.
- Armado, l. 75

Scene ii

Had she been light, like you,
Of such a merry, nimble, stirring spirit,
She might ha’ been a grandam ere she died:
And so may you; for a light heart lives long.
- Katharine, l. 15

The letter is too long by half a mile.
- Maria, l. 54

Princess: None are so surely caught, when they are catch’d,
As wit turn’d fool: folly, in wisdom hatch’d,
Hath wisdom’s warrant and the help of school,
And wit’s own grace to grace a learned fool.
Rosaline: The blood of youth burns not with such excess
As gravity’s revolt to wantonness.
Maria: Folly in fools bears not so strong a note
As foolery in the wise, when wit doth dote;
Since all the power thereof it doth apply
To prove, by wit, worth in simplicity.
- l. 69

Muster your wits; stand in your own defence;
Or hide your heads like cowards, and fly hence.
- Boyet, l. 85

They say, that they have measured many a mile,
To tread a measure with you on this grass.
- Boyet, l. 186

The tongues of mocking wenches are as keen
As is the razor’s edge invisible,
Cutting a smaller hair than may be seen;
Above the sense of sense; so sensible
Seemeth their conference; their conceits have wings
Fleeter than arrows, bullets, wind, thought, swifter things.
- Boyet, l. 256

Fair ladies mask’d are roses in their bud;
Dismask’d, their damask sweet commixture shown,
Are angels vailing clouds, or roses blown.
- Boyet, l. 295

The ladies call him sweet;
The stairs, as he treads on them, kiss his feet.
- Biron, l. 329

Nor woo in rhyme, like a blind harper’s song!
- Biron, l. 405

Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,
Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation,
Figures pedantical; these summer-flies
Have blown me full of maggot ostentation.
- Biron, l. 406

Henceforth my wooing mind shall be express’d
In russet yeas, and honest kersey noes:
And, to begin, wench,—so God help me, la!—
My love to thee is sound, sans crack or flaw.
- Biron, l. 412

Let me take you a button-hole lower.
- Moth,, l. 688

The naked truth of it is, I have no shirt.
- Armado, l. 698

I have seen the day of wrong through the little hole of discretion.
- Armado, l. 712

A heavy heart bears not a nimble tongue.
- Princess of France, l. 725

To wail friends lost
Is not by much so wholesome-profitable
As to rejoice at friends but newly found.
- King of Navarre, l. 737

Honest plain words best pierce the ear of grief.
- Biron, l. 741

A world-without-end bargain.
- Princess of France, l. 777

That instant shut
My woeful self up in a mourning house,
Raining the tears of lamentation.
- Princess of France, l. 795

To move wild laughter in the throat of death?
It cannot be; it is impossible:
Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.
- Biron, l. 843

A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear
Of him that hears it, never in the tongue
Of him that makes it.
- Rosaline, l. 849

When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight.

When daisies pied and violets blue
   And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
   Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
   Mocks married men; for thus sings he,
             Cuckoo;
Cuckoo, cuckoo: O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!
When shepherds pipe on oaten straws,
   And merry larks are ploughmen’s clocks,
When turtles tread, and rooks, and daws,
   And maidens bleach their summer smocks,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
   Mocks married men; for thus sings he,
             Cuckoo;
Cuckoo, cuckoo: O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!
- Spring, l. 881

When blood is nipp’d and ways be foul.

Greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

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 pail,
When blood is nipp’d and ways be foul,
   Then nightly sings the staring owl,
             Tu-whit;
Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
When all aloud the wind doth blow,
   And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
   And Marian’s nose looks red and raw,
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
   Then nightly sings the staring owl,
             Tu-whit;
Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
- Winter, l. 899

The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.
- Armado, l. 917

Quotes about Love's Labour's Lost

Biron ... could not appear without his fellow courtiers and the king: and if we were to leave out the ladies, the gentlemen would have no mistresses.

Love's Labour Lost! I once did see a play
   Y-cleped so, so called to my paine,
Which I to heare to my small joy did stay,
   Giving attendance on my froward dame:
My misgiving minde presaging to me ill,
Yet was I drawne to see it 'gainst my will.
This play no play, but plague, was unto me,
   For there I lost the love I liked most;
And what to others seemde a jest to be,
   I that in earnest found unto my cost.
To every one, save me, 'twas comicall.
While tragick-like to me it did befall.
Each actor plaid in cunning wise his part,
   But chiefly those entrapt in Cupid's snare;
Yet all was fained, 'twas not from the hart,
   They seeme to grieve, but yet they felt no care;
'Twas I that griefe indeed did beare in brest:
The others did but make a shew in jest.
- Robert Tofte, Alba: The Months Minde of a Melancholy Lover, 8vo. (London, 1598)

I have sent and bene all thys morning huntyng for players Juglers & Such kinde of Creaturs, but fynde them harde to finde, wherfore Leavinge notes for them to seeke me, Burbage ys come, & sayes ther ys no new playe that the quene hath not seene, but they have revyved an olde one, Cawled Loves Labore lost, which for wytt & mirthe he sayes will please her exceedingly. And Thys ys apointed to be playd to Morowe night at my Lord of Sowthamptons, unless yow send a wrytt to Remove the Corpus Cum Causa to your howse in Strande. Burbage ys my messenger Ready attendyng your pleasure.
- Sir Walter Cope, Letter to Robert Cecil (1604); F. E. Halliday (ed.) Shakespeare and His Critics, rev. ed. (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd., 1958), pp. 152–3

In this play, which all the editors have concurred to censure, and some have rejected as unworthy of our Poet, it must be confessed that there are many passages mean, childish, and vulgar; and some which ought not to have been exhibited, as we are told they were, to a maiden queen. But there are scattered, through the whole, many sparks of genius; nor is there any play that has more evident marks of the hand of Shakespeare.
- Samuel Johnson (ed.) The Plays of William Shakespeare (London: printed for J. and R. Tonson, et al., 1765), vol. 2, p. 224 (footnote); Walter Raleigh (ed.) Johnson on Shakespeare (London: Henry Frowde, 1908), p. 89

The characters in this play are either impersonated out of Shakspeare’s own multiformity by imaginative self-position or out of such as a country town and schoolboy’s observation might supply,—the curate, the schoolmaster, the Armado (who even in my time was not extinct in the cheaper inns of North Wales) and so on.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notes on Love’s Labour’s Lost (c. 1811–1818); Henry Nelson Coleridge (ed.) The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 2 (London: William Pickering, 1836), pp. 102–3

If we were to part with any of the author’s comedies, it should be this. Yet we should be loth to part with Don Adriano de Armado, that mighty potentate of nonsense, or his page, that handful of wit; with Nathaniel the curate, or Holofernes the schoolmaster, and their dispute after dinner on “the golden cadences of poesy”; with Costard the clown, or Dull the constable.
Biron is too accomplished a character to be lost to the world, and yet he could not appear without his fellow courtiers and the king: and if we were to leave out the ladies, the gentlemen would have no mistresses.
Still we have some objections to the style, which we think savours more of the pedantic spirit of Shakespeare’s time than of his own genius; more of controversial divinity, and the logic of Peter Lombard, than of the inspiration of the Muse. It transports us quite as much to the manners of the court, and the quirks of courts of law, as to the scenes of nature or the fairyland of his own imagination. Shakespeare has set himself to imitate the tone of polite conversation then prevailing among the fair, the witty, and the learned, and he has imitated it but too faithfully. It is as if the hand of Titian had been employed to give grace to the curls of a full-bottomed periwig, or Raphael had attempted to give expression to the tapestry figures in the House of Lords.
- William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear's Plays (London, 1817), pp. 293–4

It is this foppery of delicate language, this fashionable plaything of his time, with which Shakspere is occupied in Love's Labours Lost. He shows us the manner in all its stages; passing from the grotesque and vulgar pedantry of Holofernes, through the extravagant but polished caricature of Armado, to become the peculiar characteristic of a real though still quaint poetry in Biron himself, who is still chargeable even at his best with just a little affectation. As Shakspere laughs broadly at it in Holofernes or Armado, so he is the analyst of its curious charm in Biron; and this analysis involves a delicate raillery by Shakspere himself at his own chosen manner.
As happens with every true dramatist, Shakspere is for the most part hidden behind the persons of his creation. Yet there are certain of his characters in which we feel that there is something of self-portraiture. And it is not so much in his grander, more subtle and ingenious creations that we feel this — in Hamlet and King Lear — as in those slighter and more spontaneously developed figures, who, while far from playing principal parts, are yet distinguished by a peculiar happiness and delicate ease in the drawing of them; figures which possess, above all, that winning attractiveness which there is no man but would willingly exercise, and which resemble those works of art which, though not meant to be very great or imposing, are yet wrought of the choicest material. Mercutio, in Romeo and Juliet, belongs to this group of Shakspere’s characters — versatile, mercurial people, such as make good actors, and in whom the
“Nimble spirits of the arteries,”
the finer but still merely animal elements of great wit, predominate. A careful delineation of minor, yet expressive traits seems to mark them out as the characters of his predilection; and it is hard not to identify him with these more than with others. Biron, in Love’s Labours Lost, is perhaps the most striking member of this group. In this character, which is never quite in touch, never quite on a perfect level of understanding, with the other persons of the play, we see, perhaps, a reflex of Shakspere himself, when he has just become able to stand aside from and estimate the first period of his poetry.
- Walter Pater (1878); Appreciations, with an Essay on Style (London: Macmillan and Co., 1889), pp. 171–2, 174–5

Here is a fashionable play; now, by three hundred years, out of fashion. Nor did it ever, one supposes, make a very wide appeal. It abounds in jokes for the elect. Were you not numbered among them you laughed, for safety, in the likeliest places. A year or two later the elect themselves might be hard put to it to remember what the joke was.
- Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare, 1st ser. (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., 1927), p. 2

And why anybody should ever say that Love’s Labour’s Lost is a bad play, the Lord He knoweth; for to my mind it is one of the most réussi things of its kind ever made.
- Dorothy L. Sayers, Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne (8 September 1935), after an open-air performance of the play in Regent's Park; Barbara Reynolds (ed.) The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, 1899–1936 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), p. 352

I take more unmixed pleasure from Love’s Labour’s Lost than from any other Shakespearean play. ... [It] is a festival of language, an exuberant fireworks display in which Shakespeare seems to seek the limits of his verbal resources, and discovers that there are none.
- Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), ch. 10

External links

Encyclopedic article on Love's Labour's Lost on Wikipedia
Works related to Love's Labour's Lost on Wikisource