SOURCE: Roberts, Jeanne Addison. “Convents, Conventions, and Contraventions: Love's Labour's Lost and The Convent of Pleasure.” In Shakespeare's Sweet Thunder: Essays on the Early Comedies, edited by Michael J. Collins, pp. 75-89. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1997.

In the following essay, Roberts compares Love's Labour's Lost with Margaret Cavendish's The Convent of Pleasure (1668), and highlights the innovative thematic approach taken by both comedies with respect to relations between women and men.

The temptation is strong to argue for Love's Labor's Lost as Shakespeare's most feminist play. Such an argument would be supported most obviously by the fact that the Princess of France and her three noble ladies control the action from their first appearance to their last. In spite of their exclusion from the inner sanctum of the court of Navarre because the King and his three noble followers have resolved on a cloistered life and have...