SOURCE: McLay, Catherine M. “The Dialogues of Spring and Winter: A Key to the Unity of Love's Labour's Lost.” Shakespeare Quarterly 18, no. 2 (spring 1967): 119-27.

In the following essay, McLay maintains that the songs sung by Spring and Winter at the close of Love's Labour's Lost reflect and expand the play's major themes: the movement “from the artificial to the natural, from illusion to reality, from folly to wisdom.”

Despite the heretical ending of Love's Labour's Lost,¹ an ending where “Jack hath not Jill” (V. ii. 865)² and the ritual marriage celebrations are denied or postponed “too long for a play” (V.ii.868), the drama does have its connections to the ritual origins of comedy in the concluding Songs or Dialogues of Spring and Winter.³ Although there is considerable controversy over the dating of the play, it is generally agreed to be the product of at least two different periods...