SOURCE: "Love's Labour's Lost: Language and the Deferral of Desire," in Literature and Psychology, Vol. XXXV, No. 3, 1989, pp. 1-21.

In the following essay, Asp refutes the idea that the female characters spoil the play's ending by thwarting their male counterparts' desire, and instead credits the women with teaching the men how to replace defensive, repressed wittiness with open-hearted, compassionate humor.

Love's Labour Lost is unique among Shakespeare's comedies in that its conclusion falls short of the conventional comic ending: marriage. Even Berowne, the hero, comments on its oddity: "Our wooing doth not end like an old play;/Jack hath not Jill" (V.ii.864-65), locating the play's generic defect in deferral of desire.¹ Since he blames the ladies for a lack of "courtesy" which "might well have made our sport a comedy" (V.ii.874), he is the first of many critics to attribute aesthetic defect to feminine lack...