Thanks a lot for coming back. Today I'm going to talk about Love's Labour's Lost. So I think I've done about 25 plays now.

All the other lectures are on iTunes, you haven't found them yet. And you can see that I'm getting out of my comfort zone week by week by week.

And Love's Lerner as a play I've never really written about until this lecture

and haven't really thought about all that much. It's not particularly easy play and I'm not

sure it's yet a play that I absolutely love. But I got more interested in it as I was thinking

about it and hope I can try and convey some of the ways in which it might be interesting for you working on it.

So even the title of love labours lost is something of a tongue twister.

And as I was working on it over the last week, I wondered whether the question I should have directly approached

is whether it has two apostrophies or one, which seems to have been one

of the big questions of the 20th century, what does the title mean, where do the apostrophies

come in the title? But we're not going to go there. There are there a lot of mysteries about

this play, and one of the things that I think talking about this play today will help us to think

about is Shakespearean mysteries quite topical given some of you may have seen the claim that a new

portrait of Shakespeare has been found and that's a claim which rests entirely on a kind of

cryptographic decoding secret kind of rebus sort of way of thinking about Shakespeare,

of which there's been a lot about love's labor's loss.

Maybe we can think about that as a kind of methodology.

The question that I've tried to cluster my thoughts around is, what is lost?

What's the idea of loss which hangs over this play?

What role does loss play in its construction?

And how might we be able to use the idea of loss to think about a play which many critics have been willing to lose.

The 19th century critic and essayist William Hazlitt was one such.

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