Blackwell Reference Online

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Our wooing doth not end like an old play:Jack hath not Gill. These ladies' courtesyMight well have made our sport a comedy.(Love's Labour's Lost, 5.2.874–6)Here Shakespeare signals his awareness, in a relatively early play, written in 1594–5, of a conscious departure from existing stage tradition. Indeed Love's Labour's Lost, as I have argued elsewhere, is a highly fashion-conscious play, deliberately playing with modishness and parodying very contemporary trends in both theatre and London life (Dillon 2000). Yet the force of this rejection, with its bid to create new fashion, can only be visible to an audience familiar with older tradition, an audience that recognizes the difference between old and new in what it sees. It is the aim of this essay not only to show how far Shakespeare is indebted to the old in his comic writing, but also to illustrate the degree to which the stance of Love's Labour's Lost is characteristic of his work. While his plays so evidently grow out of English stage traditions (which are very varied in themselves, and include several different strands of classical and European influence), their characteristic attitude towards tradition is dialogic, playful, and exploratory. That conscious dialogism works by constructing an audience alert to allusions, quotations, and in-jokes. Thus, if we wish to recover the full comic experience of Shakespeare's comedies ... log in or subscribe to read full text