SOURCE: "Love's Labour's Lost," in Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies: The Development of Their Form and Meaning, The University of North Carolina Press, 1966, pp. 65-101.

In the following excerpt, Phialas describes Love's Labour's Lost as a satire on romance, comparing it to other Shakespearean comedies and observing that its dual theme stresses the importance of an outlook which embraces both the realism of everyday and the idealism of romance.

We may . . . consider [Love's Labour's Lost] itself as comedy, its theme and structure, and through these its contribution to the comic form which Shakespeare is developing for the accommodation of a love story. . . . [The] weight of comment on the play has been until recently overwhelmingly unfavorable. There is no need here to review what has been said of the play in detail. It will suffice to note the general tenor of that negative comment. Although Richard Burbage thought the play excellent...