SOURCE: Birenbaum, Harvey. “The Princess and the Pricket: Love's Labour's Lost on the Problem of Will.” Mosaic 36, no. 1 (March 2003): 103-20.

In the following essay, Birenbaum analyzes the themes of will and desire in Love's Labour's Lost and illustrates how these themes are developed through the actions of the characters.

King Ferdinand of Navarre has persuaded his three companion lords to join him in three years of study without women around, and without much food or sleep either. It does not take long for that good idea to fall apart. After the four aspiring lovers sigh aloud their stanzas of Petrarchan passion and together find out each other's treason, Berowne proclaims the new philosophy they have all been waiting for, simply to justify their male humanness:

From women's eyes this doctrine I derive: They are the ground, the books, the academes, From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire...