Todo Tiene Su Como-Se-Llama

Plot Summary: Love makes people do stupid things. Duh. Hilarity ensues.

This week's bit-o-fun was Love's Labour's Lost, which is a very special play. I picked it as my second choice of six possibilities to do my Outside Reading Report on for class, having read it before. My first choice was All's Well That Ends Well . . . but they were numbered more or less at random.

Love's Labour's Lost is a lot like . . . well, okay, so it's a lot like every single other comedy that Shakespeare ever wrote. Weird love triangles, mix-ups, mistaken identity, general tomfoolery and hilarity. But specifically it reminds me of Much Ado About Nothing and The Taming of the Shrew. It has a very heavy focus on sharp wordplay between characters of opposite sexes and so forth (although LLL has by far the largest number of rhyming couplets that I've seen in a Shakespeare play thus far . . . it's outrageous).

The key difference is that in Much Ado, the conflict between the sexes is defused by a couple of benevolent outside parties and everybody wins. In Shrew, the man takes matters in his own hands and does it his way, resulting in a very clear (and disturbing) victory for malekind. In LLL there are no benevolent outside parties. The closest thing is Boyet, and he's too busy being amused by the lovers' foibles (and his wooing of all the ladies on the side) to really do anything. And there are no male characters with enough . . . gumption (some would call it backbone, some would call it crass lack of feeling) to come galloping in and sweep the ladies off their feet by whatever method works best (i.e. starving and beating them). As a result, we have a play where the women come out on top in a very big way. They make all the men look like complete idiots and have them bowing and scraping and agreeing to "enter hermitages/minister to the sick/abase themselves in general" for a full year and a day before they'll even think about coming back to consider marriage. Definitely not a traditional comedic ending . . . but quite a funny one, all the same.

Wilson- King Ferdinand, Holofernes, Mercade, Winter
Myself- Biron, Don Armado, Sir Nathaniel, Forester, Costard, Spring
Moore- Longueville
Sharptiano- Dumaine, Dull, Longueville, Sir Nathaniel
Anna- Princess
Ardith- Rosaline, Princess
Sharon- Maria, Catherine
Rachel- Catherine
Sarah- Jaquenetta, Rosaline
Scott- Mote, Dull, Dumaine
Scholl- Boyet
Gallagher- Costard, Longueville, Dumain, First Lord, Maria, Don Armado
Martinez- Costard
Lewis- Boyet

I especially feel the need to note that even I had a hard time not getting severely annoyed at Lord Biron (pronounced burr-OON . . . go figure). That guy can talk . . . it's insanity. Of particular note is his soliloquy in defense of love at the end of Act IV. Oh . . . my . . . goodness. I didn't time it, but I'm sure I was talking for at least two straight minutes. And it's hard to get a breath in between words when you're doing the whole "impassioned lover" thing, let me tell you. I was about to pass out from lack of air . . . seriously . . .

Things got very interesting at the end of Act V. See, after they've just made complete jackasses out of themselves in front of the ladies, the lords have to put up with watching another performance from some of the local commoners (and Don Armado . . . I have no idea whatsoever what practical explanation there could be for his presence in this play, he is extremely random). Anyway, the decide they can save face by totally ripping into the performance and slicing it to ribbons with their razor-sharp wit. Which they proceed to do. The thing is, you've got the king and lords played by Wilson, Scott, Sharptiano and me . . . and then you've got the performers played by Gallagher and, uhhh . . . Wilson, Scott, Sharptiano and me. So there was a bit of role-swapping, and a bit of making fun of . . . ourselves as two different characters. It was fun, and it was trippy . . . and the random security guy standing by with his hand on the light switch (it was time to lock up Longview Hall) made things just generally interesting on all sides.

In some ways it is rather a difficult play, though. Pronunciation is rough with some characters (I certainly don't envy Wilson the part of Holofernes with his horrible pseudo-Latin and whatnot), and if you don't pay attention things change really fast and you aren't quite sure what happened. It was a lot better with different people doing different parts, but when I read this one myself last summer I remember having to actually reread two or three scenes because I hadn't the faintest idea what had just happened. So . . . not an easy play to do well, and we had fun with it. Good stuff. Time to go to bed now, for sure.

Posted by Jared at March 6, 2004 01:13 AM | TrackBack