Analysis of Shakespeare's Loves Labours Lost

Shakespeare’s story, Love Labour’s Lost, focuses the story on the endearing lust of men. Women are a powerful force, so in order to persuade them men will try to use a variety of different resources in order to attract the opposite sex. Men will often use their primal instincts like a mating call, which could equivocate today to whistling at a woman as she walks by. With the use of lies to tell a girl what she wants to hear, the musk cologne in order to make you appear more sensual, or the cliché use of the love poem, men strive to appeal to women with the intent to see his way into her heart. William Shakespeare is a man, who based on some of his other works, has a pretty good understand and is full of passion for the opposite sex. Nonetheless, whether it had been honest love or perverse lust, Shakespeare, along with most men, aimed to try to charm women. With keeping this understanding of Shakespeare in mind, his weapon of choice, to find his portal way into a woman’s heart, was his power of writing.

In Shakespeare’s writing of Love's Labour's Lost he shows us some of the struggles that men and women will always deal with, in a man’s timeless struggle for a female’s heart. His characters in this book do not always achieve their ends. A majority of the play tends to focuses on many of its character's flaws instead of their virtues. First, the men of the play try to make sacrifices in order to better their minds and their studies. King Ferdinand of Navarre and three of his lords: Dumain, Longaville, and Berowne, take a vow to abandon the pleasures of the world for three years to pursue knowledge and keep themselves company with the use of only books in order to gain respect as scholars. Ferdinand draws up a contract wh...

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... have vowed to Jaquenetta to hold the plough for her sweet love three years.” Holofernes, Sir Nathaniel, Costard, and the other actors from the pageant then present a song about spring and winter. Don Adriano speaks the last line of the play, “You that way–we this way” as both the men and women depart.

The "Lost" in the title accurately describes the fact that the men gained nothing through their oath both to their king, and to the women to whom they professed their love. It shows that no matter how hard one tries, love is powerful and often more important and more respect gaining than remaining true to ones word. As ironic as the story ends, the men all break their oath captured under the spell that women often times cast on men. Yet in order to truly get the girl, they are obligated to fulfill an oath if they truly long for their ladies hand.