Performance of Love's Labour's Lost

[I saw a performance of Love's Labour's Lost on Friday on which I have to write a one to two page essay for class. I really hate doing academically-oriented essay (which is to say, essays written for an 'objective' or 'disinterested' audience) mostly because it always feels so artificial. So I am going to write about it as if it were a blog post and hope that I have enough words to print out tomorrow morning and turn in.]

When reading the text of Love's Labour's Lost, we expect to discover its brilliance onstage flashing most strongly in sparks of wit, lightning repartees, and bright conceits of thought that play out in a bounty of rhymes not limited to the concluding couplet we are so used to in Shakespeare. Unfortunately, this exuberance showed itself on stage not quite as intelligibly on the night of November the 6th, 2009 as it would have for the Renaissance audience of Shakespeare's day. Half of the audience's laughter at hearing Anthony Dull's reply to Holofernes' "Via, goodman Dull! Thou hast spoken no word all this while.": "Nor understood none neither, sir." likely erupted in the relief of identification with the plain-speaking man's bafflement. The players and the director were not at all insensitive to this likelihood, however, and they kept the onstage action vivid, ebullient, and quite zany (though perhaps at times zany only for the sake of slapstick zaniness). I really wished that I had had more time to read and get to know the text well, because there are many hundreds of instances where even the best actor could not have given complete lucidness to his or her lines unless she had a projector screen with footnotes showing gloss for every obscure Elizabethan joke, historical reference, and archaic and/or latinate word. Music and dancing were essential performance elements that sustained the life of the play and helped to remind us of how central that kind of pageantry was to the company that Shakespeare worked with. That interactions between the characters and the musicians could become funny is wonderful enough for the overall

I was surprised at how hard it was for me to comprehend Biron's accent, which at times seemed thicker than Don Armado's assumed Spanish accent.

(excepting Boyet's rather tedious verse, which I am at a loss to explain Shakespeare's justification for, unless we accept the idea that he is supposed to be an older character whose love-flame has long been extinguished).