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Love's Labour's Lost

by William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

  • Free to read
  • 2 hours to read
  • Reading level: 5th grade

"Love's Labour's Lost" by William Shakespeare is a comedy written in the mid-1590s. The King of Navarre and three companions vow to avoid women for three years to focus on study. Their oath crumbles when the Princess of France and her ladies arrive, sparking romantic entanglements on all sides. Through disguises, switched letters, and clever wordplay, the men pursue the women who outwit them at every turn. But an unexpected death disrupts the usual comic ending, forcing all marriages to wait a year.

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  • Comedy plays
  • Courts and courtiers
  • Princesses
  • Navarre (Kingdom)

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Executive Director's Notes:

In addition to the notes below, and so you will *NOT* think all the spelling errors introduced by the printers of the time have been corrected, here are the first few lines of Hamlet, as they are presented herein:

Barnardo. Who's there?
Fran. Nay answer me: Stand & vnfold
your selfe

Bar. Long liue the King

As I understand it, the printers often ran out of certain words or letters they had often packed into a "cliche". . .this is the original meaning of the term cliche. . .and thus, being unwilling to unpack the cliches, and thus you will see some substitutions that look very odd. . .such as the exchanges of u for v, v for u, above. . .and you may wonder why they did it this way, presuming Shakespeare did not actually write the play in this manner. . . .

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About this edition

This free edition of Love's Labour's Lost by William Shakespeare comes from Project Gutenberg eBook #2241, released 2000-07-01. It is in the public domain in the United States, so you can read it here in full at no cost, on any phone, tablet or computer. Genre: Romance, Humour, Plays/Films/Dramas, British Literature.

Other editions: eBook #1510 (most read), eBook #1109, eBook #1774.

Summary provided by Project Gutenberg (automatically generated).

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