SOURCE: “The Anatomy of Masculine Desire in Love's Labor's Lost,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 4, Winter, 1992, 430-49.

In the essay below, Breitenberg challenges the notion that the play's ending emphasizes the power the women hold over the men of Love's Labour's Lost. Rather, Breitenberg maintains, the men are empowered through their Petrarchan idealization of the women.

I

I introduce my subject by way of Montaigne's lengthy meditation on gender and sexuality, translated by John Florio as “Upon some verses of Virgill.”¹ In this essay, Montaigne offers his readers a sometimes rambling collection of observations, anecdotes, classical exempla, and personal confessions on such matters as cuckoldry anxiety, male impotence, constancy and inconstancy in marriage, the nature and causes of jealousy among both men and women, and the social conditions and conventions of heterosexual desire. The essay appears motivated by Montaigne's recognition of the paradoxical fact that sexuality—“so naturall...