SOURCE: Lennam, Trevor. “‘The Ventricle of Memory’: Wit and Wisdom in Love's Labour's Lost.” Shakespeare Quarterly 24, no. 1 (winter 1973): 54-60.

In the following essay, Lennam contends that the principal figures in Love's Labour's Lost resemble characters found in traditional morality plays.

… a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions. These are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourish'd in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion. But the gift is good in those in whom it is acute and I am thankful for it.

(IV. ii. 61-67)

Some years ago T. B. Baldwin observed that Love's Labour's Lost was “constructed on an idea” and that commentators had failed to grasp “the idea as a whole” because of their ignorance of both Elizabethan psychology and the structure of morality plays; particularly he had in mind the pedagogical moralities.¹ He...