“A little academe”: How Teaching through Performance Illuminated Love’s Labor’s Lost

Abstract

In 2002, the students in my Performing Shakespeare seminar at Davidson College encountered many interpretive challenges when they mounted a full production of Love’s Labor’s Lost. Several cruces, they learned, came down to performance choices significant enough to determine either the audience’s engagement with a play that seems even more remote than most Shakespeare works or the larger interpretation of the play. Such cruces include the dense punning in 3.1 among Don Armado, Moth, and Costard; the verbal match among Berowne, the King, and the lords over Rosaline’s attractions and Berowne’s lengthy following speech rationalizing the men’s breaking of their oath (4.3.210 ff.); the Princess’s interaction with, first, the Forester and then Costard in 4.1.1-55; and the humbling of Don Armado in 5.2.666-710 and his response to it in 717-19 and 866-76. During the students’ rehearsal period, members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, in residence on campus at the time, worked with them on some of the challenges within such passages, several of which also claim attention in Shakespearean literary criticism. Excerpts from the students’ journals, as well as performance choices from selected professional productions, elucidate each crux, providing historical context. Ultimately, both performance and understanding of Love’s Labor’s come alive in these cruces, which continue over centuries to prompt readers’ and audiences’ thinking long after an individual production is past. If some of the cruces are insoluble, they are quintessentially theatrical.