SOURCE: Westlund, Joseph. “Fancy and Achievement in Love's Labour's Lost.” Shakespeare Quarterly 18, no. 1 (winter 1967): 37-46.

In the following essay, Westlund sees the conflict between imaginative fancy and achievement (paralleling a conflict between artifice and nature) as the central theme of Love's Labour's Lost.

Love's Labour's Lost is organized around a central theme, but this fact is obscured by the usual approach to the play as a satire of overelaborate language. This interpretation accounts for the witty talk and suggests that the outcome of the action is due to the lords' excessive verbal play. It is difficult, however, to see the relevance of the academy plan, the commoners' role, or the startling final act of the play in terms of “wit”. This focus also makes the show of the worthies, an attractive play-within-a-play, a comic interlude unrelated to the rest of Love's Labour's Lost. And the unusually articulate final...