SOURCE: Pendergast, John S. “Themes.” In “Love's Labour's Lost”: A Guide to the Play, pp. 81-104. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002.

In the following essay, Pendergast explores a number of prominent themes in Love's Labour's Lost related to language, love, marriage, nature, and artifice.

The title Love's Labour's Lost suggests two of the major themes of the play, transformation and love. The title's personification of love suggests the extent to which it serves not only as a static theme but as a dynamic player in the action of the play. Love is transformative, even if the change it effects is ultimately a negative one, a loss. Further, the word “labour” suggests the labors of Hercules, and thereby the emphasis on learned myths and images as well as the role that “work” plays in the interaction between the characters: in the play, labor is characterized as the actual work of...