SOURCE: “‘The Catastrophe Is a Nuptial’: Love's Labor's Lost, Tactics, Everyday Life,” in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, edited by Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, pp. 271-98.

In the following essay, Corum reviews the critical debate concerning the problematic ending of Love's Labour's Lost, reassessing the play as a whole and the ending in particular in terms of its relevance to Elizabethan cultural views on adolescence.

I always thought marriage was one step away from death. 

—Sandra Bullock, The Late Show with David Letterman, 12:10 a.m., Friday, July 25, 1995

In such conditions, the heterogeneous elements, at least as such, find themselves subjected to a de facto censorship. … They cannot be kept within the field of consideration.

—Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess,¹

“In the eighteenth century,” Michel de Certeau writes, “the ideology of the Enlightenment claimed that the book was capable of reforming society, that educational...