Love's Labour's Lost (Vol. 54) | Thomas McFarland (essay date 1972)
Thomas McFarland (essay date 1972)
SOURCE: “Full of Dear Guiltiness: The Playfulness of Love's Labour's Lost,” in Shakespeare's Pastoral Comedy, The University of North Carolina Press, 1972, pp. 49-77.
[In the essay below, McFarland analyzes the comic spirit and form of Love's Labour's Lost, noting the artificiality and thematic significance of its paradisiacal setting.]
The setting of Love's Labour's Lost is not that of Arcadia. The action occurs in the King of Navarre's park. Such a variation of the pastoral environment is significant for the special kind of playfulness in which the plot revels.
The park, though not Arcadia, is nonetheless truly a pastoral environment. There is no hint of city life within its confines; its inhabitants, particularly those of the subplot, where we might anticipate a world of tradesmen, carpenters, blacksmiths, and other cogs in the economic machine of urban actuality, are...
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