Love's Labour's Lost is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to be one of his early comedies performed for the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Perhaps more than any Shakespeare play, Love’s Labour’s Lost seems to be directed toward the specific aesthetic characteristics of Elizabethan courtiers, a small and privileged group of people. As such, the play was generally unpopular during Shakespeare's own time and has remained one of Shakespeare's least studied and least performed dramas. This play also has several lengthy jokes in Latin and a monologue that exceeds a page long, which is a testament to its complex and wordy writing style. As a result, this very early effort by Shakespeare – perhaps his first attempt at a comedy – has never been particularly popular once production of Shakespeare’s plays moved outside the environs of the aristocracy and into the theaters of the common people.
Love’s Labour’s Lost is the only Shakespeare play for which no previous source material has ever been discovered. This means that its attribution to Shakespeare is largely speculative. However, some believe that this play was a precursor to one of Shakespeare's most popular comedies, Much Ado About Nothing. The fact that the narrative of Love's Labour's Lost tangentially exists within the genre of political allegory indicates that a concrete source for the story will likely never be found. One of those elements that makes this play especially entertaining for its original, if limited, audience is the intuitive understanding of how Ferdinand, the play’s King of Navarre, parallels the actual Henry IV (of Navarre) and how the King’s madcap merry lords and partners in merriment, Berowne and Longaville, are the fictional counterparts of the two closest military advisors of Henry IV.
Today, the play is rarely performed on the stage. In 2000, Kenneth Branagh adapted the play for the big screen by relocating the setting to the 1930s in an attempt to make the performance more accessible to modern audiences. The film, however, was relatively unsuccessful.
