Love's Labour's Lost

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Why This Play?: 

I wanted to try something new for this reading.  First, some backstory: about 10 years ago, I was living in Los Angeles and my parents were out in Scottsdale, AZ.  It’s a roughly 6-hour drive between the two cities, so I would road trip out on occasion to visit them.  During that period, I amassed a number of audio books on CD to help pass the solo drive.  One I picked up on the cheap happened to be the Arkangel dramatic reading of Love’s Labour’s Lost.  I listened to it once on a desert drive, tucked it away in my car, and promptly forgot about it for a decade. [I solemnly swear I’ve cleaned out my car multiple times in that decade, I just always kept hold of it in case I had another long solo drive.]  I stumbled upon it again in recent months, and I’ve been saving it for this blog post.

For this reading, I unearthed my old 2007 Macbook, popped in the CD, and followed along with my written copy.  What a fantastic way for the language in this one to come alive!  LLL is infamous for being heavy on the Elizabethan wordplay, and this really helped with my understanding far more than footnotes could.  I may have to dig up more of these at my local library!  This play is about what happens when four men desist their contact with women, but women happen into their lives anyway.  There’s a stupid, cliché adage that love only comes when you cease to look for it.  The thing is... that's actually what happened that led me to my husband.

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Henry IV, Part I

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Why This Play?:

Mostly, it was just time for another history play.  I know I’ve been going at these plays in no real order thus far…and that’s probably going to continue.  There are sure to be 0.43 readers out there who are rolling their eyes that I didn’t do Richard II prior to this play.  I don’t really have any defense – my week’s selection is either based around available performances (ahem, my Netflix queue) or mere whim.  While I know the basics of the War of Roses that make up 8 of the history plays, I’m also trying to write posts that would help make sense of it for someone new to the plays who had zero background knowledge (hi, Hubs!!).  I promise in the case of true sequels (i.e. the Henry plays), I will not read them out of order.  Probably, maybe.

Certainly the first part of Henry IV is a play about growing up.  There’s Hal, messing around and acting the fool, mentored by the ultimate drunken Peter Pan.  Even at the beginning of the play, Hal admits to himself that this time has to be short lived.  He knows that he will eventually take up his royal obligation, and he even states of his time in the tavern: “If all the year were playing holidays,/To sport would be as tedious as to work” (I.ii.201-202).  And good Lord, doesn’t every one of us know that from experience?  

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