SOURCE: Smidt, Kristian. “Shakespeare in Two Minds: Unconformities in Love's Labour's Lost.” English Studies 3, no. 65 (June 1984): 205-19.

In the following essay, Smidt offers an analysis of the apparent inconsistencies in Shakespeare's characters in order to suggest that Love's Labour's Lost begins as a romance and ends as a satire.

Love's Labour's Lost, says Muriel Bradbrook in a well-balanced judgment, ‘is as near as Shakespeare ever came to writing satire; and yet there is more than a spice of panegyric behind the ridicule of fine manners’.¹ If I were to qualify this judicious statement, I would simply suggest that Shakespeare came rather more than near to writing satire and that the elements of satire and panegyric, or alternatively of satire and romance, are very unevenly distributed in the play. Shakespeare began Love's Labour's Lost in a mood of romance and finished it in predominantly satirical mood. Romance promises well...