• 1 This translation from Thomas Mann, The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of ‘Doctor Faustus’, trans. Ri (...)
• 2 In the diary entry for 23 May 1943, Mann wrote “Begann vormittags ‘Dr. Faust’ zu schreiben. […] Nac (...)

1I begin with an entry from the diary of the German novelist Thomas Mann, writing in Pacific Palisades, California on 18 May 1943. Mann is reflecting on the latest news and relating his own activities on that day: “All Europe in invasion fever. Preparations of the French underground organization. Announcement of general strike. The garrison in Norway is instructed to fight ‘to the last man’[…]. In Africa 200,000 prisoners were taken. […] Expectation of the invasion of Italy. Undertakings against Sardinia and Sicily are in the offing. […] In the evening read Love’s Labour’s Lost.”1 The apparent discrepancy between the chaos of the European war – prisoners taken, invasion fever, underground resistance – and this Shakespeare play is at first glance stunning. If it had been King Lear, Macbeth, or Coriolanus, then the associations with apocalypse, madness and tyranny, and totalitarian rule would have been clear, yet these plays are never mentioned in this period of his diary. But Love’s Labour’s Lost of course is central to Thomas Mann’s novel Dr. Faustus, as the central character in the novel composes an opera based on Love’s Labour’s Lost early in his career. Mann’s novel was begun, and it begins, five days after the diary entry I read, on 23 May 1943.2

• 3 George Bernard Shaw, “Review of the Dramatic Students at St. James’s Theatre,” in Love’s Labour’s L (...)

2I invoke Thomas Mann here because the conjunction in his thinking of desperate world events on the one hand, and on the other the play that George Bernard Shaw called “a sunny, joyous, and delightful play” seems contradictory, even perverse.3 Yet the modern critical and production histories of Love’s Labour’s Lost do in fact reflect an increasingly dark interpretation of the play and a belief that its aesthetic can, at least in part, be understood as associated with death and violence, even explicitly with war. The current production by the Royal Shakespeare Company, directed by Christopher Luscombe, includes a pairing with a play they are dubiously calling “Love’s Labour’s Won [also known as Much Ado About Nothing]”).

• 4 http://tracking.wordfly.com/view/?sid=MTg0Xzk3MTRfNDcyNzg1XzY5OTE&l=cf607bb5-1634-e411-b26f-e41f134 (...)
• 5 John Ezell, “On Designing Love’s Labour’s Lost – Twice,” in Londré, op cit., p. 434.

3The advance publicity on the RSC website describes the setting of the two plays as “either side of the First World War [… Love’s Labour’s Lost] conjuring up the carefree elegance of a pre-war Edwardian summer; the other [Much Ado], in a post-war England when the world has changed forever.”4 “Edwardian” refers to the period c. 1900-1914 in England, roughly coinciding with the reign of King Edward VII, 1901-1910. Going even further, the designer of a 1988 American production, set in the 1930s, noted that “the audience knows that everyone is on the brink of World War II. Berowne is undoubtedly killed in the war before the year is up.”5 Berowne’s imminent death is certainly news to most of us: who knew that “a year and a day” really means “forever”?

• 6 Quotations from the play, hereafter cited in the text, are from Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. William C (...)
• 7 See Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us, Cambridge, CUP, 1935.

4What accounts for this way of setting the play in wartime? The play text, to be sure, repeatedly invokes tropes of warfare. The “civil war of wits” (2.1.222)6 has long been recognized as central to the play’s linguistic texture.7 The play’s rhetorical structure often follows the paradigm of a débat – literalized at the end of the play in the songs of spring and winter – and the “war” of wit is played out repeatedly in the encounters of the four lords and ladies as well as in the conversations of Armado, Holofernes, and Moth. “The tongues of mocking wenches,” Boyet marvels, “are as keen / As is the razor’s edge invisible […] Their conceits have wings / Fleeter than arrows, bullets, wind, thought, swifter things” (5.2.256-61). These razors, arrows, and bullets are only figurative of course, as is the internalized, psychological “war against your own affections” (1.1.9) that Navarre urges on his fellow academics. In his great speech in 4.3, Berowne brings the four lords together in the language of chivalry and war as – each man now revealed as having lost the war against his own affections – they prepare to woo the ladies: “Have at you, then, affection’s men-at-arms!” Navarre answers him, “Saint Cupid, then! And, soldiers, to the field!” and Berowne returns with the martial-sexual cry, “Advance your standards, and upon them, lords! / Pell-mell, down with them!” (4.3.281, 335-7). The Pageant of the Nine Worthies, too, represents figures of war, with Alexander the Great, “the world’s commander” with his “conquering might” (5.2.552-3), as well as Hector, trying to invoke “The armipotent Mars” (5.2.634), the god of war; Hector “far surmounted Hannibal” (5.2.652), but further claims of the deeds of war are interrupted by Costard’s news about Jaquenetta’s pregnancy, and the mock-chivalric “challenge” of Costard by Armado follows, stopped short by Armado’s sartorial short-comings: “I will not combat in my shirt” (5.2.681-2). Armado’s very name, finally, also serves as a reminder of the not-quite war with the Spanish fleet in 1588.

• 8 See the full discussions in Carroll, op. cit. (p. 27-29), Mary Ellen Lamb, “The Nature of Topicalit (...)
• 9 Richard Wilson, “‘Worthies away’: The Scene Begins to Cloud in Shakespeare’s Navarre,” in Jean-Chri (...)
• 10 Sir Walter Raleigh, The History of the World (London, 1614): “that worthie Gentleman, Count Lodowic (...)

5In addition to these linguistic and psychological threads, the play’s disputed debt between the King of France and Navarre concerns the “hundred thousand crowns, / Being but the one half of an entire sum,” supposedly “Disbursed by [Navarre’s] father in his wars” (2.1.126-9), while the four lords’ names point toward historical actors in the French wars of religion from the 1570s into the 1590s. The historical king from Navarre was Henri, not Shakespeare’s Ferdinand, but among the prominent figures around Henri of Navarre were the duc d’Alençon, Henri’s powerful enemy the duc de Mayenne, and Henri’s followers, the duc de Longueville and the duc de Biron.8 The currency and topicality of these names in the early to mid-1590s seems significant, especially given Henri of Navarre’s famous conversion to Catholicism in 1593. “So outrageous was Henri’s abjuration to English Protestants […] that Love’s Labour’s Lost may be the only Elizabethan literary text,” Richard Wilson has argued, “that dares, even elliptically, refer to it.” 9 But what exactly is the significance of these echoes, even if we accept Wilson’s claim? Answering that question is difficult, and I cannot see the play as the topical allegory that some have argued it is. It is certainly true that many Elizabethans had first-hand knowledge of the events of St. Bartholomew’s Day 1572. Sir Walter Raleigh fought for the Protestant cause in France as a teenager from 1568-1572, and was still writing about his experiences from his cell in the Tower of London in 1614.10 If not first-hand, then Elizabethans had elaborate second-hand knowledge through the flood of pamphlets and polemical texts that reached England in the aftermath of the events of St. Bartholomew’s Day, or through such sensationalistic plays as Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris.

• 11 See Lamb, op. cit., p. 55-7.

6Some scholars have argued that Love’s Labour’s Lost alludes to even earlier events in French politics – either a meeting between Navarre and Catherine de Medici in 1586, or much earlier, the meeting between Navarre and Marguerite de Valois in 1578.11 The idea that these decades-earlier events in the French court materialize in Shakespeare’s play seems to me highly unlikely, for too many reasons to investigate here. The most I can conclude is that Shakespeare seems to have employed these contemporary names from recent and current French history to encode “the French court” and “oath-breaking” in an extremely general way.

• 12 Quoted in Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, New York, Columbia Univ (...)

7These and many other of the play’s allusions to war, combat, or assault do not lead to actual violence on the stage, and the “wars” of Navarre’s father seem to be over. Nevertheless, there has been a trend in Great Britain and the U.S since the 1970s to stage the play during or just before or after an actual war. This trend may have been inspired by the shock of the play’s ending, in its announcement of the death of the Princess’s off-stage father, the King of France. Shakespeare may have found the hint for this stunning reversal in one of the books he read, Pierre de la Primaudaye’s L’Académie Française, published in France in 1577 and translated into English in 1586, with further editions in 1589 and 1594, close to Love’s Labour’s Lost’s period of composition. Like Berowne and his fellow academics in the play, the young scholars in L’Académie Française suffered shocking news from the outside world: “the sudden and sorrowfull newes of the last frantike returne of France into civill war brake up their happie assemblie.”12 Of course, NO British or American director or producer has ever invoked L’Académie Française as an inspiration for their production.

• 15 This denigration of roughly 98% of the play’s text stems in part from the conventional denigration (...)
• 16 Peter Brook, The Quality of Mercy: Reflections on Shakespeare, London, Nick Hern Books, 2013, p. 29 (...)

10Subsequent critics would demonstrate that death enters the play, not for the “first time” in this final moment, but much earlier, through a string of references, including the “disgrace of death” (1.1.3) in the opening speech, the “epitaph on the death of the deer” (4.2.45-6), the “death’s face in a ring” (5.2.598), and the “plague…tokens” (5.2.421-3) inscribed on the lovers’ faces. “Cormorant devouring time” (1.1.4) haunts the play. Still, Brook and Rosen established a paradigm of staging and interpretation, in which “the entire world of the play” (Rosen) as a whole is now seen as “an artificial world” (Brook) which is “swept away and destroyed” (Rosen) by the “real” (Brook), by “Death […] in the person of Marcade” (Rosen). This reading is powerful and plausible, and many of us have profited from it, but it is perhaps worth noting that it nonetheless devalues almost everything that is energetic, positive, and attractive in the play as “artificial” and unreal, and that price may not be worth paying.15 Moreover, six decades later Brook himself saw his production not as implicated in war, but influenced “by the post-war reaction against four years of drabness and austerity. We longed for elegance and charm,” which he found not in traditional Elizabethan clothing but in the paintings of Watteau. Brook in fact now describes the play as “an extraordinary, amazing and intoxicating experience,” which “suddenly introduced an enigmatic coexistence of light and dark.”16

• 17 James Hisao Kodama, “Armado’s ‘You That Way; We This Way,” in Londré, op. cit., p. 364.

11Directors and critics usually justify the leap from the insights of Brook and Barton about the compelling entrance of Death into the play, to a production placing this play in a clearly defined war-time setting, by referring to the play as a whole as a “golden” or “unreal” world whose values cannot survive any encounter with the “real” – that is war; surveying a number of productions set in the pre-World War II 1930s, one critic has claimed, with the dubious authority of hindsight, that these productions were the result of “the gathering storm which foreboded the approach of disaster for the world, [in which] people became more susceptible to the fear of the ominous intruder who might at any moment come and snatch away their life and mirth.”17 This interpretive hind-sight comes too easily for me.

• 18 Although a 1992 production at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre set the play pretty specifically (...)

12Love’s Labour’s Lost has been set in many different time periods, and surely most often in a non-specific vaguely “Renaissance” period, with doublets and hose and the usual signifiers of “Shakespeare” (fig. 2).18

• 19 Melia Bensussen, “Envoi,” in Londré, op. cit., p. 471-472. The production was at the University of (...)

13The play has also frequently been set, as we would expect, in the eighteenth century, as in one American production that used “images from the mid-1750s” in order to “point up the artificiality of the world of the self-indulgent and immature lords and ladies” (fig. 3).19

• 20 A 1977 production of the play by the Alabama Shakespeare Festival had set the play precisely on Apr (...)
• 21 Production Program, 1984-85 Season, American Repertory Theatre, p. 1, 12.

But I am interested here specifically in those productions that invoke war as the play’s context. If the play must be set during, before, or between times of war, which wars, and why?20 The threat of World War II, as I have already suggested, has frequently been used as a setting. Jerome Kilty, directing a 1985 production at the American Repertory Theatre (fig. 4), had “newly set” the play “in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of World War II, the last era when the world still seemed fresh and humankind felt relatively free of threatening external exigencies,” according to the ART Artistic Director Robert Brustein. But the director Kilty asked, rather contradicting Brustein, for the period of the play, “why not the end of the Age of Anxiety, prelude to the Atomic Age?”21 Why not indeed, but were the 1930s to be thought of as a “fresh” period of history “relatively free of threatening external” forces, which seems historically naïve (to say the least), or as the Age of pre-Atomic Anxiety? Blurring its supposed historical period, this production offered the setting of an Edwardian soirée – seemingly at one of the colleges at Oxford.

• 22 Russell Jackson, “Filming Shakespeare’s Comedies: Reflections on Love’s Labour’s Lost,” in Shakespe (...)
• 23 Quoted in Ramona Wray and Mark Thornton Burnett, “From the Horse’s Mouth: Branagh on the Bard,” in (...)

17The happy ending, however, did not include Boyet, who had joined the Resistance and was shot and had to die in gloomy black and white. “The ‘war’ element of the film,” Russell Jackson discretely notes, “in itself was problematic.” He reports that the script “originally called for a shot where the men’s aircraft would be seen flying over the massed crosses of a First World War graveyard,” but while that scene, we can be grateful, didn’t make it into the film, the “underlying sense” of the film was always that “retreat to a ‘little academe’ was an escape from the realities of the late 1930s.”22 The aesthetic and historiographical justifications for these choices, however, remain obscure. In an interview, Branagh said he saw the 1930s as a “last idyll in the twentieth century … a stolen, magical, idyllic time which nevertheless had a clock ticking.”23 Thus, as in Kilty’s production, we have contradictory ideas about the 1930s period: can it be both “a stolen, magical, idyllic time” and the one of brutal “realities” from which the lords “retreat” and “escape”?

• 24 Ramona Wray, “Nostalgia for Navarre: The Melancholic Metacinema of Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’ (...)
• 25 Gerald Freedman, “On Directing Love’s Labour’s Lost – Five Times,” in Londré, op. cit., p. 428-429; (...)

18Branagh’s attempt to fuse the 1930s musical genre, the Shakespearean text, and this ominous historical moment into an ultimately sunny and optimistic vision of plucky British endurance has been harshly critiqued in penetrating terms by Ramona Wray, Katherine Eggert, and others, as escapist nostalgia and “self-serving political myopia,” as Wray put it.24 Leaving aside this analysis of Branagh’s aesthetics in general, I return to the problem of the choice of war in itself. Other directors have also set the play in the 1930s: one American production, as I have already noted, takes place, according to its director, in “the early 1930s, before the clouds of World War II darkened the national spirit. It was suggestive of the wit and wisdom of Brideshead Revisited,” and as the set designer confidently predicted, “Berowne is undoubtedly killed in the war before the year is up.”25

• 26 Wray, op. cit., p. 197, notes the discrepancy in the headline, and comments that this “temporal bre (...)

20But November 11 was of course when World War I ended, not World War 2; VE Day in World War II was 8 May 1945, while the Pacific war ended in August 1945. Branagh’s conflation of the two wars – surely not a simple historical mistake – not only introduces an historical indeterminacy, but suggests that the pre-World War I era is also part of his conception.26 Like a magnet pulling one back, the Edwardian age (roughly from 1900 to the beginning of the Great War in 1914) has become the default period and style for staging many of Shakespeare’s plays but especially Love’s Labour’s Lost.

• 28 Brideshead Revisited, a novel by Evelyn Waugh published in 1945, follows the young aristocrat, Lord (...)

22In 1993, Ian Judge directed the RSC production that is often “referred to as the ‘Brideshead Revisited’28 production,” as Sylvia Norris has noted: “The programme cover of Judge’s production showing the four young men lounging in a punt was shot on the Avon, but was intended to suggest Oxford,” and, she observes, the imagery clearly alluded to the “Brideshead Revisited” television series (1981), which became extremely popular in the UK and the US, and then became a movie in 2008 (fig. 9 and 10).

• 29 Sylvia Morris, “The Shakespeare Blog,” http://theshakespeareblog.com/2014/02/loves-labours-won/ (ac (...)
• 30 Peter Holland, English Shakespeares: Shakespeare on the English Stage in the 1990s (Cambridge: CUP, (...)

23The production evoked, through its costume and set designs, the now-past glories of the pre-war period. At the end of the production, as with Phillips’, Norris reports, “the sky darkened and the sound of distant explosions was heard in the theatre, a premonition that the elegant, witty world of the play was about to come to an unbearably violent end.”29 As Peter Holland acerbically noted, “it was the long summer of 1914 and the young men would never live out their year and a day in the trenches, a more absolute solution than the text’s open-endedness.”30

• 33 NT Education Workpack: Love’s Labour’s Lost, p. 2.
• 34 Lizzie Loveridge, “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” Curtain Up, 25 February 2003; http://www.curtainup.com/lo (...)
• 35 NT Education Workpack: Love’s Labour’s Lost, op. cit., p. 4. The production promptbook, in the Nati (...)
• 36 Peter, “Growing Pains,” op. cit. (http://0-search-proquest-com.catalogue.libraries.london.ac.uk/docview/316720005?accountid=9676, acce (...)
• 37 Mark Shenton, “Trevor Nunn bids farewell,” BBC News, 23 February 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/e (...)

26Marcadé entered, and spoke his line, “The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo,” and we discover that “one of the soldiers is Berowne. He attempts to console a wounded companion and in this moment recalls the previous summer which started with a vow.”33 According to one reviewer, though it is not so specified in the National Theatre’s program synopsis, Berowne himself is “mortally wounded.”34 After this opening frame, the battlefield then disappeared, the smoke clears, the lights come up, the soldier Berowne rises and cautiously joins his friends, and the play itself begins. What followed was the now familiar procession of Edwardian costumes and iconic signifiers (see fig. 16 below). The final scene of the play found Marcadé entering again – the shock surprise he usually generates undermined – and repeating his line. The final action returned to the battlefield, where “Berowne turns around and amidst the horror of war sees a nurse. She turns to him. It is Rosaline.”35 “Did Berowne die in battle?” the reviewer Peter wondered: “It remains an open-ended question.”36 However Berowne’s fate was read, Nunn’s version framed the play strictly in the “horror of war,” not just suggesting it with a rumble of guns, but showing it in some detail. Or, as the BBC reviewer said, noting that it was Nunn’s last production as artistic director of the National Theatre, “If Nunn meant to go out with a bang, he need not have taken it quite so literally.”37

• 38 Loveridge, “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” op. cit.
• 39 Production Program, Huntington Theatre Company, p. 19.
• 40 Benjamin Evett, “Director’s Notes,” Production Program, The Actors’ Shakespeare Project, p. 11 (my (...)
• 41 Dozens of similar images can easily be found of UK and US productions.

27Nunn’s and many, many other productions of Love’s Labour’s Lost now place the play in the Edwardian period, partly to take advantage of the impending Great War, partly to indulge in costume orgies of English finery, but partly also to promulgate a particular reading of the play. One reviewer who approved of Nunn’s version justified the setting thus: “The 1914-18 war is a great watershed dividing the antiquity of the nineteenth century from the modernity of the twentieth with all the technology. Trevor Nunn captures the nostalgia for this lost and elegant world where the women wear picture hats and long white lace dresses like the early film footage of the Tsarina Alexandra and her daughters, the Romanov grand duchesses.”38 Similar comments dominate the recent performance history of the play. For Nicholas Martin (in his 2006 Huntington Theatre production in Boston), the Edwardian period was “a time of insouciance and frivolity,” and it “had a lightheartedness to it – there was a real rejection of Victorian era constraints […]. The period from 1900-1912 seems to hold a sense of hope and innocence that resonates deeply with this play.”39 The play itself, another director asserted, “is inherently nostalgic.”40 The result of such assertions has been a sameness to many recent productions, as the following images suggest (fig. 11-19).41

• 42 http://www.rsc.org.uk/whats-on/loves-labours-lost/article-a-labour-of-love.aspx, accessed 23 Octobe (...)

28And once again, the new 2014-15 Royal Shakespeare production in Stratford, England places the play in the “carefree elegance of a pre-war Edwardian summer” (evidently not “sweltering,” as in Trevor Nunn’s production). As the Director Christopher Luscombe says: “The idyllic, pastoral world of Love's Labour's Lost, with tragedy waiting in the wings, seems particularly well suited to the fragile beauty of the last Edwardian summer.”42 Dumaine holds the obligatory Brideshead Revisited teddy bear in one scene, intimations of Noel Coward float through the production, and Marcadé enters dressed as a World War I French field marshall. After what one thinks are the final songs, the music turns into a military tune, and the lords reenter, wearing WW1 brown British army uniforms, to stand at attention downstage. Military drums are heard while Armado pronounces the Mercury/Apollo line, and the lords click their heels and march out. A harmonica is sadly playing a military march. The lights fade away slowly on their military fate, which evidently is not to be reunited with the ladies as in Branagh’s film.

• 43 Ibid.
• 44 At the intermission of the RSC “Live From Stratford-upon-Avon” projection of their recent Two Gentl (...)

29Still, this RSC production concept seems to have preceded the director’s involvement in the play, since, as Luscombe says, “RSC Artistic Director Gregory Doran wanted to commemorate the Great War, and suggested that I locate the plays [Much Ado About Nothing as well] either side of [the war].”43 In a recent interview, Doran commented on the settings of the forthcoming productions of the two plays, and the reviewer perceptively asked, “a bit of a Downton [Abbey]?”44 Indeed, Luscombe reports that:

• 46 Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio, “Brushing Up Shakespeare: Relevance and Televisual Form,” (...)

31The “imagined community” of Downton Abbey or Brideshead Revisited or Charlecote Park represents a sentimental appeal to American and English audiences in particular. The Edwardian period is the embodiment of what is now called “heritage Shakespeare […] a static and narrow conception of British history, national identity, and the national poet,” as recent critics have put it, a conception that marks the “stability of English national identity […] as enshrined in the tourist industry and embodied in the national curriculum.”46 Heritage Shakespeare imagines the past in terms of space and time as a pre-industrial, neo-pastoral Englishness – certainly not Welsh or, god forbid, Scottish. The typical setting is a grand country estate, far from the tedious coal mines, workers’ strikes, and immigrant suppression in the rest of the country (fig. 23-26).

• 47 See W.C. Carroll, “Love’s Labour’s Lost in Afghanistan”, Shakespeare Bulletin 28.4 (2010), 443-458.

35I do not mean to suggest that the productions I have mentioned are not good ones – indeed, I’ve seen many of them, and found many of them enchanting and provocative, the acting outstanding, and learned much about the play from them. Yet productions of Love’s Labour’s Lost in other countries, including some actually at war or during the Cold War, as I have briefly described elsewhere,47 do not rely on this default historical moment. Certainly Corinne Jaber’s production in Kabul, Afghanistan in 2005 and 2006, under extraordinarily dangerous war conditions, contrasts dramatically with the safely nostalgic Edwardian settings (fig. 27-28).

• 48 . All quotations from and references to Jaber’s production come from my “Love’s Labour’s Lost in Af (...)

She then commented that it is “an extraordinary thing to say in a society where most of the time that’s all you see of a woman … her eyes. All this made so much sense and people could relate to it. This courtship [… is] like a hymn to women, which I felt was important.”48 Other productions of the play produced 1950-1989, in countries behind the Iron Curtain, have been equally different from the Edwardian-nostalgic productions in Britain and the US.

• 49 Andrew Tracy reports that “The play’s prologue ropes in the Chorus’ opening oration from Henry V, w (...)
• 50 Ibid.

38Following the death of his father, Victor returns to Buenos Aires from Mexico and attempts to revive his artistic pursuits, and to confront his prior romantic foibles. Snippets of Shakespearean text, often printed on screen, come not only from Love’s Labour’s Lost but other Shakespearean plays as well.49 The former theatre company includes five women, and Victor’s love life and the plot of the play begin to overlap. This film is not yet in general release, and it is an appropriation rather than a straightforward production of the play, but it is encouraging to see a truly new approach to the play. Piñero says in an interview that he attempts to respond to an “idea of acting or imagination that the Elizabethan theatre is asking for, or that Shakespeare is asking for. […] I think that many of the representations of Shakespeare nowadays don’t follow very well that statement: they try to present the plays as if they were realistic tales, which they are not.”50

• 51 Mann, The Story of a Novel, op. cit., p. 29, 28.

39Thomas Mann, to return to my beginning, commented some years later on the diary passage that I began this article with, noting that “The Shakespeare play […] falls within the magic circle – while around it sounds the uproar of the world” – that is, “the world that did not pertain to the novel.”51 For him at least, it was possible to hold war and imaginative art simultaneously in mind, neither one cancelling or erasing the other. After all, Love’s Labour’s Lost ends not with a song of Winter, but with a song of Spring and a song of Winter, both songs mingling sadness and life’s ongoing energy, in what Holofernes terms a “dialogue.” A dialogue, of course, requires two sides to speak. We should remember Peter Brook’s comment, that the play offers “an enigmatic coexistence of light and dark.” If we forget that, and offer war as the only thing that is “real,” then great things laboring will perish in their birth.