Love’s Labour’s Lost

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before – four bookish scholars give up women for a year in order to stroke their throbbing intellects. Then – surprise, surprise – they fall in love with four women who think they’re nice, but also pretty weird. The punch line is that after all declaring their reciprocal feelings for one another, everybody decides to wait for a year before taking further action. This is one of Shakespeare’s least performed plays, but it’s not hard to see why. Although it’s a comedy, the humour relies on fast-exchanges of witty lines for which a modern audience has no frame of reference. Think of hearing Who’s On First but with no idea that something called ‘baseball’ exists. I quite enjoyed watching this one (from the BBC Shakespeare collection which lasted from 1978-1985), but it was because of funny performances rather than any understanding of what the jokes actually meant. I was at a loss as to how to represent it until the two songs at the end, collectively referred to as The Cuckoo and the Owl. They give two ambiguous, and not particularly positive views of marriage – a fitting end to this unusual play. PS – the tiny bird on the obverse is not a cuckoo. I don’t know what it is, but it was the nicest tiny bird figure I could find.