SOURCE: "Love's Labour's Lost and the Renaissance Vision of Love," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. XXV, No. 3, Summer, 1974, pp. 335-50.

In the following essay, Goldstien asserts that Love's Labour's Lost is a satire on the Renaissance or Petrarchan view of love as spiritual or ideal, presenting love instead as sensual desire.

Perhaps one measure of the richness of a work of literature—though certainly not the only measure—is the variety of critical approaches which it allows. If that is the case, then Love's Labour's Lost is certainly one of the richest of Shakespeare's plays, approached, as it has been, through analyses of its language, its topical allusions, its place in the comic genre, its themes, and so on. The analyses of the play's language, the viewing of the play as a satire on various kinds of elaborate expression and rhetoric, has been at least a subsidiary consideration in...