Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost
- Submitting institution
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Roehampton University
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 2531725
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
-
-
- Location
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- Brief description of type
- W.W. Norton
- Open access status
- -
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2014
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Love’s Labor’s Lost is one of the few Shakespeare plays with no obvious source. This portfolio of critical works is based on my discovery of two new sources for the play that reveal its serious moral and ethical foundations. In my editorial work on Love’s Labor’s Lost for the Norton Shakespeare, I brought new critical focus to Shakespeare’s revisions in the 1598 Quarto, specifically where Berowne’s speech comes to an abrupt halt and has to re-start in 4.3. I argue that this textual solecism reflects the play’s deeper scepticism about the possibility of self-knowledge, which relates in turn to the abortive process of mortification in the play. The fact that this is the first time the word ‘mortified’ appears in Shakespeare led me to Thomas Rogers’ A Method unto Mortification (1586), which I consider an important source for Love’s Labor’s Lost. Not only does it group together a number of allusions found in the play, it also warns of the difficulties of mortification in a fashion highly suggestive for Shakespeare’s plot. In the book chapter, I explore more widely the body of material with which Shakespeare was engaged when writing the play, arguing for a second new source in Aristotle’s Rhetoric – a text whose influence on Shakespeare has been ignored until now. The clash between Aristotle’s largely social definition of shame, and the Christian tradition of nosce teipsum (‘know thyself’) is crucial to the failure of mortification in Love’s Labor’s Lost. Furthermore, it suggests that Shakespeare’s scepticism about the ethical potential of shame ran deeper than has previously been allowed, and is most apparent not in the tragedies but in his comedies.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
