Shakespeare’s Comic Topicality in Love’s Labour’s Lost

In the mid-1590s, William Shakespeare fashioned his insistently topical Love’s Labour’s Lost out of unlikely material, the turbulence in contemporary France. The violence and schism had become so severe that King Henri IV had converted to Catholicism in attempt to pacify his nation. Nothing about France’s situation would seem to lend itself to a romantic comedy for a Protestant England. If, however, we examine Love’s Labour’s Lost alongside the representations of Henri, the Catholic League, and France’s situation that were coming out of the English presses between 1593 and 1595, a different picture emerges. The gap between history and Shakespeare’s play dramatically narrows, and the play becomes funnier. The comedy remains critical and wary of Henri, but allows English spectators to laugh with, rather than at, a weak but unified France. Shakespeare’s clever reworkings of topical connections create a political spoof humorous to the large numbers of Londoners reading the news. Through the redemptive impulses of comedy, Shakespeare creates a space for tolerating Henri as a Catholic working to stabilize his nation—as long as this French King stays under England’s and Elizabeth’s auspices. [L.S.]