SOURCE: Gilbert, Miriam. “‘As it was presented before her Highness’: Love's Labour's Lost on the Elizabethan Stage.” In Shakespeare in Performance: Love's Labour's Lost, edited by J. R. Mulryne, J. C. Bulman, and Margaret Shewring, pp. 1-20. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Gilbert attempts to show how Shakespeare's Elizabethan audiences would have experienced Love's Labour's Lost.

In this play, which all the editors have concurred to censure, and some have rejected as unworthy of our poet, it must be confessed that there are many passages mean, childish, and vulgar; and some which ought not to have been exhibited, as we are told they were, to a maiden queen. But there are scattered through the whole many sparks of genius; nor is there any play that has more evident marks of the hand of Shakespeare.

(Johnson, p. 112)

Samuel Johnson's closing comment on Love's Labour's Lost for...