SOURCE: “Sitting in the Sky (Love's Labor's Lost, 4.3),” in Shakespeare's “Rough Magic”: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, edited by Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn, University of Delaware Press, 1985, pp. 113-130.

In the essay below, Levin presents an overview of Love's Labour's Lost, studying the play's language, plot, and theme of scholarship versus courtship, while noting its playfulness and wit.

All's Well That Ends Well, Much Ado about Nothing, The Comedy of Errors—such phrases are generic as well as proverbial, and might be applied to almost any of Shakespeare's comedies. He was even more off-hand about specifying his subject matter when he entitled one play As You Like It and subtitled another What You Will. Hence Love's Labor's Lost is an exceptional title for its genre, alerting us to expect the unexpected. Love's Labor's Won sounds much more conformable, and has also been given...