been reading: Love's Labour's Lost by William Shakespeare

This past weekend we went to see Love's Labour's Lost at a nearby theatre, and being the English major geek that I am, I decided to read the play before seeing it performed. I've read many of Shakespeare's plays, most of which I read during a college course I took entirely devoted to The Bard, a course taught by a professor who had the reputation of being the biggest asshole in the English department, which he totally was. This is the prof who falsely accused me of plagiarism because a paper I wrote was so good. That's actually what he told me, that my paper was so smart it couldn't possibly have been written by an undergraduate. Of course he couldn't prove his accusation because I had written it, every word. He ended up giving me a B on the paper. B for Bastard.

Remarkably, that course with that man did not quell my appreciation for Shakespeare. I didn't get much from the class itself; I never spoke a word, terrified that he would either mock me relentlessly or I would say something so brilliant he would make me go before the Honor Council. But the benefit of taking the course was simply that it gave me reason to read play after play after play. Because, of course, Shakespeare can speak for himself.

I had not read LLL. The premise is that the King of Navarre and a few of his men take a vow to devote themselves for three years to study. Part of this vow is to avoid women for the duration of the time. But the very day the men sign their contract, the Princess of France, and several of her attending ladies, arrive on very important business. The men fall madly in love with the women and, as our play program summarized the entire final act, "pageantry ensues."

LLL is full of wordplay, arguably more than any of Shakespeare's other plays; it is delightfully witty. But it is not one of his more popular plays, partly because there are many references to which today's audience cannot relate, and probably also because it's a comedy with a dark ending. (There's thought to be a sequel, Love's Labour's Won which has, ironically, been lost.) Neither the plot nor the characters are as full and complex as in many of his plays; it seems Shakespeare's primary focus was on the intellectually intricate latticework of the language.

Although I was glad to have read the play, seeing it on stage was proof that Shakespeare's works are meant to be performed. It was fantastic. I laughed a lot. I cried at the end. And throughout, I sat amazed.