SOURCE: “A Sense of the Ending: ‘Our wooing doth not end like an old play,’” in “Curious-Knotted Garden”: The Form, Themes, and Contexts of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, edited by Dr. James Hogg, Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1977, pp. 154-76.

In the essay below, Montrose considers the indeterminacy of the ending of Love's Labour's Lost and the thematic reconciliation of actuality and imagination in the play's closing songs.

The spell of the playworld's magic circle is weakened from within before it succumbs to the pressures of an inexorable outer reality. It is threatened from the play's beginning, and is only maintained by an anxious and at times frantic group effort. The play's texture is filled with ominous prolepses and disturbing images, knit together by an undercurrent of lust and obscenity and the symbolism of the hunt. Berowne and his comrades playfully draw their imagery of love...