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Black vizard masks, worn as a fashion accessory in the early modern period, were a source of mixed anxieties: while they were worn by many women, they were associated with sex workers. Vizards preserved pale beauty but also could conceal the lack thereof. This essay proposes that William Shakespeare's comedies tap into these tensions, first by proposing that fashionable vizard masks were indeed worn onstage. Using Love's Labour's Lost and Much Ado About Nothing as key case studies, I then argue that these costume masks, weighted with the baggage of both offstage prostitution and the stage history of cloth racial prosthetics, carried specific semiotic meaning, allowing playwrights a shorthand for reflecting on contemporary fears regarding women's whiteness, sexual availability, and the impossibility of ever knowing a woman's heart by looking at her face. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article present the interpretation of the final scene in William Shakespeare's play "Love's Labour's Lost", specifically analyzing the Princess's speech in lines 5.2.786-806. It suggests that the Princess initiates a rite of passage at the end of the play, highlighting three stages implied in her lines: separation, transition and incorporation; and challenges traditional readings of the play's unconventional ending and proposes a new perspective rooted in the concept of rites of passage.

In Love's Labour's Lost, the creation of an academe where study is posited as the antidote to the diseases of the mind caused by worldly desire results in an epidemic of lovesickness. Lovesickness, otherwise known as 'erotic melancholy' or 'erotomania', was treated in contemporary medical documents as a real, diagnosable illness, a contagious disease thought to infect the imagination through the eyes, which could be fatal if left untreated. Such representation of love as a communicable disease is drawn, I suggest, from a neoplatonic tradition led by the work of Marsilio Ficino, particularly his fifteenth-century treatise Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love. Ficino's construction of eros as a kind of 'vulgar love', distinctive from 'heroic love', emphatically denotes lovesickness as a kind of material contagion with the eye as its primary means of transmission, an idea that had a more significant influence in England and on the work of playwrights like William Shakespeare than has previously been acknowledged. For all its lighthearted conceits, Love's Labour's Lost takes lovesickness and its etiology very seriously, in ways that have been almost entirely ignored by scholarship on this play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the creation of an academe where study is posited as the antidote to the diseases of the mind caused by worldly desire results in an epidemic of lovesickness. Lovesickness, otherwise known as ‘erotic melancholy’ or ‘erotomania’, was treated in contemporary medical documents as a real, diagnosable illness, a contagious disease thought to infect the imagination through the eyes, which could be fatal if left untreated. Such representation of love as a communicable disease is drawn, I suggest, from a neoplatonic tradition led by the work of Marsilio Ficino, particularly his fifteenth-century treatise Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love. Ficino’s construction of eros as a kind of ‘vulgar love’, distinctive from ‘heroic love’, emphatically denotes lovesickness as a kind of material contagion with the eye as its primary means of transmission, an idea that had a more significant influence in England and on the work of playwrights like William Shakespeare than has previously been acknowledged. For all its lighthearted conceits, Love’s Labour’s Lost takes lovesickness and its etiology very seriously, in ways that have been almost entirely ignored by scholarship on this play.

This article is an offshoot of work towards an edition of Bel-vedére or The Garden of the Muses, a printed commonplace book published in 1600. The editors' comprehensive analysis of the origins of the 4,482 one- or two-line passages has resulted in the discovery of thirteen hitherto untraced passages that are based on Shakespeare (and of a fourteenth passage whose Shakespearean origins were discovered by the scholar Charles Crawford in the early twentieth century but not published). These passages and their Shakespearean source texts in Romeo and Juliet, Love's Labour's Lost, Richard II, Richard III, Venus and Adonis, and The Rape of Lucrece are discussed here and serve to illustrate the range of adaptive strategies used in the compilation of the commonplace book. Three additional passages which have perhaps been adapted from Shakespeare source texts, including one of his sonnets, are also discussed. Discussion of the Shakespearean presence in Bel-vedére is contextualised by a brief account of prior work on the commonplace book and the attempted identification of its origins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Combining a sensual celebration of love with a well-established tradition of allegorical exegesis, the Song of Songs, one of the most poetic and debated among the biblical books, is a text that has played a crucial role in the shaping of love language since the very beginning of Western vernacular literature. Among the many Song-derived topoi, the controversial one of the “black but comely” beloved (Song 1:4-5) proved particularly appealing to Shakespeare. As this study will reveal, not only is the biblical passage echoed in many of his works (1 Henry VI, The Merchant of Venice, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Antony and Cleopatra, The Sonnets), but it is endowed with a particularly significant role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the representation of readerly affect in scenes from five Shakespeare plays (Love’s Labour’s Lost, Titus Andronicus, Cymbeline, Julius Caesar and The Tempest) in order to challenge the use of Shakespearean examples in various histories of reading as well as accounts of the historical emergence of a “love” for literature. While recent histories of reading situate the origins of that love in an eighteenth-century culture of sensibility, we show that the responses to books developed by some Shakespearean characters already adumbrate specific varieties of “modern” book love. Shakespeare did not just become an object of modern readerly affections, he also created figures of loving readers with whom later generations could identify in less anachronistic ways than recent theories about “modern” reading practices allow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article argues the courtships as performed in Love’s Labour’s Lost challenge early modern marital ideologies. By using performance theory to examine the women’s roles in particular, I argue that as the courtships unfold, the play highlights the particular ways that women emphasize their self-sufficient value by refusing to engage in banter or accept gifts that place them as an object of exchange. Thus the play ends, not as most Shakespearean comedies do by reminding us with overt performative self-consciousness that we have just watched a comedy, but rather that we have not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shakespeare wrote his early plays mostly in collaboration, and in about 1592 switched decisively to sole authorship. This paper argues that in the epigram toVenus and Adonisand, later, in the paratextual line “The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo” at the end ofLove's Labour's LostShakespeare identified his art as Apollonian: pure, inspired, removed from commerce.Venus and Adonisresponds to the attack on Shakespeare inGreene's Groatsworth of Wit(1592), which contradictorily represents Shakespeare as both appropriative upstart and recognisable master of a distinct style. The figure of Richard III reflects Shakespeare's subsequent and aggressive rejection of the consanguinuity of shared labour in favour of a strongly willed authorial self-definition. However, this lonely ideal is ultimately untenable for a dramatist of the professional theatre, as is recognised in the figure of Autolycus inThe Winter's Tale. Thus the paper as a whole addresses the emergence of genius as a contingent process dependent on training and commerce. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Nine scholars conclude that Emilia Bassano-Lanier was the "Dark Lady" of the sonnets, but the intellectual implications have not been previously considered. Shakespeare incorporated the plots of about forty Italian novelle and classical histories and plays--some of the most important never translated--into his plays. Shakespeare's achievements become more comprehensible when one reads the Italian and classical sources, translated into English in the nineteenth century and recently available online. His most successful plays rely on the plots and characters of such sources. Shakespeare, as "chaste autodidact," may have located, translated, comprehended, and assimilated such diverse sources. It is more plausible that he received help. Using historical and literary analysis this article concludes that the plays include debts to a highly educated Italian-speaking person(s) who understood the court and power and changed and developed his views about women. The bilingual poet Bassano-Lanier, mistress of his aged patron, was highly educated in classical literature and Italian and was familiar with the ways of the court. She is the person most likely to have provided such assistance. She is not the secret author of Shakespeare's plays, but she or a person with her attributes is probably his secret inspiration, educator, and expositor. Such assistance provides the most plausible explanation for his knowledge of courts, classical and Italian literature, and love. Shakespeare was obsessed with sexual jealousy. Spirited, active, articulate, and sexual women are integral to his plays, women who were like Bassano-Lanier, as described by her physician Doctor Simon Forman, with whom she performed "sexual villainy" between 1597 and 1600. She performed at great houses in plays and masques and "was maintained in great pride" by the Lord Chamberlain, patron of Shakespeare's company. She had the means and the motive to help Shakespeare write "immortal lines to time." She argued at length in verse and probably inspired sonnets and his creation of women characters in plays such as Love's Labour's Lost, Much Ado about Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Othello, and Anthony and Cleopatra. Shakespeare's sonnets, published in 1609, included sexually explicit references to a musical Dark Lady with black wiry hair which would have harmed Bassano-Lanier's ambitions for social advancement. Bassano-Lanier responded by publishing a book of poetry in 1611, which champions, theologically, a new status for women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Kenneth Branagh's film adaptation of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost (2000), although not a commercial or a critical success when released, continues to raise issues pertinent to contemporary adaptation studies. By investigating how Shakespeare's 'academe' is represented through the idiom of a different kind of 'Academy', that of the Hollywood musical of the 1930s/1940s, we can uncover tensions created by the opposition of high and low culture, and the intermingling of the cinematic and the theatrical. In this film adaptation of a play, the relationship between the cinematic and theatrical is further complicated through the model of the early Hollywood musical, which itself seeks, through its inbuilt conventions, to maintain a connection with live theatre and its community. Although Branagh's adaptation may be deemed a failed experiment, it is representative, in its exploitation of the interaction between the cinematic and theatrical, of a continuing, complex conversation between the genres, exemplified by the use of cinematic techniques in the theatre, and the broadcasting of live theatre into cinemas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay offers a close examination of the contest of wit between Romeo and Mercutio in Act 2, Scene 3 ofRomeo and Juliet. This contest is often understood to involve mutual banter and to be neutral in both tone and outcome. In contrast, this article aims to show that Mercutio's tone is satirical and that he thoroughly out-wits his friend. This contest is also commonly understood to dramatize Romeo's social and intellectual transformation as a result of meeting Juliet. However, this article attempts to show that Romeo performs poorly in the contest and appears basically unchanged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines Shakespeare's portrayal of devotional practice in Romeo and Juliet, Richard III and Hamlet. The scenes I selected are concerned with the associations between adulterous sexuality, idolatrous religion and perfidious theatricality found in such wide-ranging religious works as official homilies, devotional handbooks, controversialist and anti-theatrical tracts. In engaging with these discourses, Shakespeare seeks to distinguish between the inner truth of the mind and the performance of religious affect, idolatrous and adulterous in its reliance on the outward show of holiness, on visually seductive ornaments and gestures. Shakespeare's portrayal of false piety reveals a commitment to the epistemology of the moderate reformed church. Yet its ultimate commitment, I believe, lies elsewhere. There is a peculiar anti-theatrical sentiment in his suspicion towards the theatrically-inflected religious spectacle, and I argue that this anti-theatricalism serves the interests of the theatrical profession. In representing 'the harlotte a false Church' as fundamentally theatrical, Shakespeare's plays ultimately do not seek to locate that false church within the spectrum of confessional practices negotiated in the public sphere of his day. They seek to dissociate theatre from religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shakespeare's work has been described as proverbial in two main ways: his works both used existing proverbs and created new ones. This analysis combines these two approaches by focusing on a classical proverb that Shakespeare re-phrased and that continued to circulate in Shakespeare's phrasing. This particular proverb from Love's Labour's Lost, 'Fat paunches have lean pates, and dainty bits / Make rich the ribs, but bankrupt quite the wits' (1.1.26-27), is found in multiple seventeenth-century print and manuscript sources. This paper traces the inter-related oral, print and manuscript transmission of the 'fat paunches' proverb in order to demonstrate that Shakespeare's phrase was popularized by early print dramatic extracts. Manuscript compilers were not reading Shakespeare's play, but were instead reading treatises on physiognomy and guides to improve their speaking and writing skills. The 'fat paunches' couplet from Love's Labour's Lost did not circulate in manuscript because of the popularity of the play, but rather because of the dramatic excerpting that led this couplet to become proverbial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Avoiding stereotypes, the female characters of both Shakespeare and Austen have recognizable voices, a linguistic competence that is confident and wonderfully varied as these young women make their way in their various worlds. Both writers' creativity in the comic and romance genres centres on allowing their female characters to speak with eloquence, and making their speech or silence a vital element of the plot. Austen, who knew her Shakespeare well, may have been influenced in her use of Shakespearean models for her eloquent heroines by the rise of the Shakespearean comedy actress in the second half of the eighteenth century. She 'rewrites' Shakespeare's women and their plots to suit her own culture - to make them contemporary, particularly in relation to gender issues. Further, the effective speeches of her heroines utilize rhetorical tropes and structures similar to those found in the speeches of Shakespeare's eloquent women, as my analyses show. The eloquence of the heroines of both writers is a rich and complex appropriation of the masculine tradition of rhetoric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]