The world’s leading expert on Shakespeare, PROFESSOR STANLEY WELLS talks to The Literateur about the life portrait, loopy conspiracy theorists, his favourite play and his fondness for owls.

I.E.Sawmill

‘That’s a valiant flea that dares eat his breakfast on the lip of a lion’ (Henry V). And it is a foolish interviewer who puts her trust in time-tables and the materialisation of scheduled trains, only to find herself clutching research and hastily-glossed quotations on an empty platform. Not least when she should be boarding a train to meet one of the world’s leading experts on William Shakespeare.

Professor Stanley Wells, Emeritus Professor at the Shakespeare Institute, has spent a lifetime at the forefront of Shakespeare study. Most recently he has been in the press regarding the Cobbe portrait. Unveiled by Wells to the public in early 2009, this painting had been kept privately until art-restorer Alec Cobbe recognised its resemblance to a portrait of the Bard in the Folger Shakespeare Library. Following stringent scientific tests, including a tree-ring dating of the wood panel, X-ray examination and infrared reflectography, there was deemed sufficient evidence that the painting might indeed be the source picture for the Folger portrait. The painting is thought to have come into the possession of the Cobbes through their cousin’s marriage to the great granddaughter of Shakespeare’s literary patron, the 3rd Earl of Southampton.


Having rattled into Stratford-upon-Avon with just enough time to spare, The Literateur negotiated the labyrinth of rooms at the Shakespeare Centre (‘Here’s a maze trod indeed, through forth-rights and meanders!’) to discuss a number of topics with Professor Wells, in particular the Cobbe portrait and its relevance to the study of Shakespeare (‘Have you any commission from your lord to negotiate with my face? You are now out of your text’ [Twelfth Night. The aforementioned hastily-glossed quotations will not be wasted, dear readers, despite Marylebone station and Chiltern Rail’s best efforts]).

The conversation lasted about forty five minutes; a full transcript can be found below. Professor Wells’ passion for his subject was immediately evident, displaying throughout an incredible enthusiasm and enviable recall of texts and theatrical productions. With no journalistic hyperbole necessary, Wells demonstrated a verve for his subject that made him seem at least thirty years younger during the course of the discussion. Take note of the rejuvenating promises of high academia.

In an interview that covered the topics of sanity in criticism, censorship of material and the relative artistic merits of Bob Dylan, The Literateur began by asking whether there was a precise moment when Professor Wells realised he wanted to devote his academic life to the study of Shakespeare?

Stanley Wells: No. In fact I started off as a schoolmaster a long time ago. But I always kept up my interest in scholarship, and Shakespeare in particular, partly by reading issues of the Shakespeare Survey, of which I later became the editor. I came to Stratford [upon Avon] and began a PhD., which was actually on the period; it was at the Shakespeare Institute on the works of Robert Greene, Shakespeare’s early contemporary. But being in Stratford, I naturally gravitated towards Shakespeare both through teaching, because I was given the opportunity to teach courses here during my PhD., but of course also via the theatre. I went to the theatre a lot and I always have done – it is one of those things that has helped me keep up my interest in Shakespeare all my life.

I can’t say there was a defining moment, no, but gradually I was offered more work with Shakespeare, as it were; I helped to formulate the Penguin edition when it was in the making; I edited my first play for Penguin (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and it all accumulated from there.

The Literateur: Do you think there is anyone else in the English canon to whom you think you might have dedicated your career?

SW: I’m not sure there is any other writer who is as all-absorbing as Shakespeare. I have worked on other writers: I have edited Thomas Nashe, for example. I edited Greene. I wrote a book called Shakespeare and Co., which is partly about Shakespeare’s contemporaries as well as about Shakespeare himself.

One of the things that helped, in a way, to ‘justify’ my interest in Shakespeare is looking at his impact on later ages. For example, my book Shakespeare For All Time, much of it concentrates upon his legacy and the books that have derived from him; the music, the operas, the paintings.

I certainly feel I could have done more work on people like Marlowe. And later periods… Dickens? Keats? So, other writers certainly, but Shakespeare has provided me with the most opportunities.

TL: In past interviews you have mentioned how you try to avoid, what you term, ‘bardolatry’; why do you think there is ‘bardolatry’ within Shakespeare criticism?

SW: I think there is a tendency amongst some critics to find ways of explaining away what some people have not liked, or have disapproved of, in Shakespeare. In the 18^th century, for example, critics like Samuel Johnson were not in anyway backward in coming forward with finding fault with a lot of Shakespeare; Johnson dispraised Shakespeare’s fondness of puns, for example; Garrick found much of the language in Romeo and Juliet was too intricate and tried to simplify it. Some of the criticism was direct and some was implicit in the way some plays were rewritten, for example.

It probably goes back to the 1930s: the critics who were keen on the Colerigdean idea of an organic unity in works of art tended to try a little too hard to demonstrate that each Shakespeare play was a microcosm of every Shakespeare play, unified in all its parts. I admit that sometimes Shakespeare didn’t write very well, that some of his plays are less good than others, that sometimes his writing can be a bit clumsy.The ending of some of his plays are a bit huddled.

Of course, one has to choose one’s audience when one says this kind of thing – one wouldn’t want to seem overcritical to people whom one knows are enthused about Shakespeare, so one has to use a lot of discretion in this, I think.

TL: There has been the recent discovery of a theatre in Shoreditch where Shakespeare’s early plays were first staged. Alongside the Cobbe portrait, these are two new sites of investigation for Shakespeare study – how important are such physical sites?

SW: Well, I think one of the most exciting moments in Shakespeare activity over the last half-century or so was the discovery of remains of the Rose Theatre in ’88 and ’89, because that was the first time we had seen any physical remains of Shakespeare’s time [in London]. I was very interested in that; I became Trustee of the Rose, as I still am. We have been able to excavate two-thirds – we’d like to do more, but there is stuff in the way. Similarly with the Globe Theatre we do have a few remains; a little excavation has been done on the site of the Globe, but again we know there’s a lot more there but we can’t look at it, partly because of a lack of money and partly because it’s covered by an 18^th century protected building, Anchor Terrace.

The remains of the [Shoreditch] theatre were discovered some time ago but have just been made public. We haven’t got far with that as far as I can tell – I haven’t been intimately involved with it. But it is good we can go on learning about these things. Yes, we go on learning about Shakespeare: new things keep on emerging. There have been major discoveries and minor discoveries. The discovery over 100 years ago relating to the court case in which Shakespeare gave witness on behalf of a young apprentice whom he’d helped in his marriage negotiations… that was a fascinating little discovery.

You get different sorts: biographical ones like that…some are not so much discoveries as scholarly investigations, which may not give us documentary evidence. Certainly one of the most important developments over the past 20 years has been the investigation of Shakespeare as a co-author, with investigation done partly through increasingly sophisticated linguistic tests of authorship. There comes the increasing recognition that, both at the beginning and end of his career, Shakespeare collaborated with other writers. We always knew pretty certainly he had collaborated with Fletcher toward the end of his career; now Middleton is coming in to the picture. Middleton is, I think, the co-author of Timon Of Athens and he may have revised Macbeth. As for plays earlier on in Shakespeare’s career, it’s becoming recognised that probably Titus Andronicus is at least partly by George Peel, and also that Henry VI Part 1 is written partly by somebody else, maybe Thomas Nashe. So yes, discoveries of all sorts go on being made.

Of course some of them require a lot of argument, a lot of debate. As an example, the Cobbe portrait which I have been much involved in the last 3 years or so: we have done a great deal of research on that portrait which I think offers us at least a 90% assurance that it is a portrait of Shakespeare. We could only have a 100% assurance if we had something like an account-book mentioning it, or if it was inscribed with Shakespeare’s name perhaps; if we had an account book belonging to the Earl of Southampton saying that he had commissioned this painting by such and such a painter. There’s bound to be dispute about such aspects of Shakespeare.

One area which I refuse to get involved with is the area of authorship. I am dead certain that Shakespeare was Shakespeare, and I get cross when people start saying that Shakespeare was Marlowe or the Earl of Oxford or Queen Elizabeth, or Daniel Defoe or whatever. I think there’s absolute evidence that they were written – sometimes in collaboration – by Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon. All theories relating to the contrary rely on conspiracy theory and a lot of them are, well really, pretty crazy.

TL: Scotland on Sunday wrote that of one of your books was one of the most ‘sane and exciting books’ relating to Shakespeare. Often you would accuse, say, the Shakespeare Authorship Coalition of the opposite. In your rebuttal of them you implied they might be a bit [vague hand-gestures] loopy.

SW: Well, yes, I like to be thought of as sane, certainly. In fact I think a lot of people would be rather surprised by my willingness to come out on behalf of the Cobbe portrait because I have become know as someone who is very cautious of speculation of new theories and new ideas. But I’ve been involved in the argument of the Cobbe portrait; although initially when I heard about it I was very sceptical indeed, knowing how often claims are made. I’ve been gradually convinced over the last 3 years that there is a very strong case to be made that this is a representation of Shakespeare.

L: Would you describe your first response to when the Cobbe portrait was verified, an intellectual or an emotional one? Or are the two synthesised now for you?

SW: It’s the job of a scholar to doubt, to be sceptical. I mean, if you’re a scholar, you don’t take anything on trust – you should want to investigate and know where the evidence comes from. So when I was approached about this portrait – the owner believed it to be the original of a portrait which was in Folger’s Shakespeare Library – at first I though, well: I’m not an art historian, it’s not my area of expertise. But gradually I’ve worked alongside two art historians and have been persuaded of their arguments that at least there is a very strong case that in the early 17^th century it was thought to be a portrait of Shakespeare.

L: Art history obviously plays a part in the study of Shakespeare, alongside historical documents, theatre history and analysis of the text itself and its language. I wonder whether over your career you’ve sustained interest in all for that equally, or whether your own interests have grounded elsewhere.

SW: My career has taken me along diverse paths – almost by accident. I mean, a defining moment in my career, for example, came when I was asked to become editor of the Oxford Complete Works. By that that stage I had edited works by Greene and Nashe and three Shakespeare plays for the new Penguin Shakespeare, and I was at a stage in my career where I was ready to accept new challenges. The offer came from Oxford University for me to devote all my time to Shakespeare. I gave up my university job and became employed by Oxford University Press as a full-time employee to edit Shakespeare, to be in charge of their Shakespearean edition – I had to move to Oxford, I had an office in the Press complex and had a staff. I gave up my regular teaching … I became a research fellow at Balliol college and did a little teaching, but primarily I was responsible during that period to, and I was salaried by, the Press.

And out of that also came, as you probably know, two separate editions: the Complete Works which has both the modern and old spelling forms, which had very little circulation, but also we had at the same time a multivolume series rather like the Arden, or perhaps more upmarket like the Penguin, which was partly done because we felt it was the time for it. The Arden edition was at that time very much in the doldrums – it was just going along at a very slow pace and was already out of date (indeed, they still are) and we though it was worth trying to get a multivolume edition as well as the single volume edition.

The work of preparing a multivolume series is very a big task – we brought outside editors in to do this. I didn’t require the editors who were doing the multivolume series to use the same texts or to arrive at the same textual decisions as my colleagues… it was only proper to allow independent scholars to make their own textual decisions and give them their own freedom to write their own introductions and so on. The Complete Works came out in 1986 with the textual companion following on slightly afterwards…the multivolume series is still not quite complete to my knowledge – there is one play still to be done which the second. This sort of work involved a lot of diplomacy, patience. I’ve had to commission editors and then decomission them because they were not getting on with the work, for example, so it’s quite a complicated business being a General Editor in that sense. But I’m very much hoping I will complete the series before I die. I want to be the only general editor of Shakespeare’s complete works to see the whole thing right to the end, haha.

TL: We’ve almost been exclusively talking about him as a playwright – of course he was a poet as well. He has a greater reputation as a playwright – do you regard him as a better playwright than a poet?

SW: Well, I think his plays are poetic drama. He would not have been able to write his plays had he not been a great poet – the fascinating thing about the whole drama of the period was that it was the most literary period in the whole history of our drama – it is the only period during which most of the best literature was being written for the theatre. People were writing in verse for the theatre. They were writing the most profound works for the theatre, even if sometimes they were doing so in heavily commercial conditions. There was something about the development of the language the development of the physical theatre: the public taste steered the great writers into writing plays.

Shakespeare wrote early in his career two long poems – ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ which are both great poems, very popular in his own time. Far more popular as printed works than many of his plays were – ‘Venus and Adonis’ went through something like sixteen editions in Shakespeare’s lifetime whereas the most editions for his plays were four or five. People liked reading those poems. They’re less admired now because people read less poetry now; they go more to the theatre.

Also, I think, they’re more of their time. Ben Jonson says Shakespeare was not of an age but for all time, but the poems are more stuck in the poetical conventions of the 1590s and they are less susceptible to interpretation than the plays are. It is the very nature of drama that it is kept alive by the people who do it – a play is different every time that it is performed – even if you use the same text it’s different because of the different actors, the different age of the actors. We don’t know how old Shakespeare imagined parts of Benedict or Lady Macbeth to be: as soon as you cast an actor in a role you’re presenting an image of that character which is likely to be different from other images. A play is a very fluid thing. Also, of course, a play is subject to textual variation as well. People often cut them, shorten them, even adapt them so the plays go on mutating in language. [As do] the societies in which they are read and performed, so that a Hamlet of 1990 is different to one in 2009. The plays take on a life of their own in that way.

But of course Shakespeare couldn’t have written those plays unless he had been a great master of language, of prose as well as of verse. His plays are often highly poetical: I mean if you look at a play such as As You Like It, it has a great deal of prose. I often feel as if the best poetry in As You Like It is in the prose – I mean the great speeches of Rosalind with Orlando are written in prose but are more resonant and imaginative than many of the verse passages.

We can trace Shakespeare’s mastery of language back to his school days, I think. The education he received – the Stratford grammar school, the very rigorous education he received. The more I learn about Elizabethan education, the higher my respect for it is. He would learn Latin, have to speak in Latin by [the age of] eight, will have studied Ovid and Virgil and many great classical writers. It was a narrow education but very intense and it shows through the plays: it was an education mainly in rhetoric, in oratory, and you can see him in his earlier plays the mechanics of his education showing through rather. The earlier plays have more obvious use of rhetoric and classical allusion – later, it because more submerged; he gets under the surface as it were.

One can make an analogy with the works of the great composers, such as Beethoven, who in his earlier music was working much more within the established form: the sonata form, the symphony form. Whereas as he goes on, he acquires much more of his own voice. He can bend the rules, you know, in the late quartets and the piano sonatas. He becomes much more of an individual, much less a creature of convention – I think the same is true of Shakespeare.

TL: Which productions of Shakespeare’s plays have really stood out for you?

SW: Well, I’ve been going to the theatre for a very long time indeed, going back to I suppose, 1945 or 6. Fitz’s King Lear, for example, in the Provinces in the 1940s. I was lucky enough as an undergraduate to see some great performances in London while attending UCL. I saw, for example, Olivier play Richard III on the stage: that was a very shattering experience. And then I came to Stratford and I became more involved with the work of the RSC in a variety of ways, as a governor, as vice chairman of the governors; I was director of their summer school, for example, and oversaw everything that was done here. I had some great experiences. Certainly Olivier stands out. The Coriolanus he did here – I wrote a little book called Royal Shakespeare in which I give a description of four RSC productions – Twelfth Night with Judi Dench, Coriolanus directed by Peter Hall (one of his earliest productions), Richard II which John Barton directed with Richard Pascoe and Ian Richardson alternating in the roles, and Hamlet with Peter Hall and David Warner and his rather revolutionary Hamlet. Those were outstanding productions for me – I chose to write about them fifteen years after I’d seen them. But in more recent years I’ve seen some wonderful productions. I’m not the type of person who says ‘They’re not as good now as they used to be’. We can still get very fine productions in the theatre…a range of styles which differs. I mean, more recently there was Anthony Sher’s Richard III which was different from Olivier’s but which had its own sort of greatness. I have a great admiration or the work of Judi Dench. I liked Anthony Sher’s Leontes in A Winter’s Tale very much. A very fine [Anthony and] Cleopatra here with Patrick Stewart and Harriet Walter. So yes, I have had a lot of great experiences in the theatre of Shakespeare.

TL: I was wondering what you thought of the semi-Shakespeare productions, like the film ‘O’ and the ITV adaption of Othello with Christopher Eccleston.

SW: The derivative works. Well, they tend to draw upon different conventions, upon different sorts of artistry. Hmm. I feel when one is looking at adaptations of Shakespeare’s work I want to feel like the adaptation has its own intensity, that it’s not just somehow a dilution of the original play – not just some director, or a creative artist imposing his or her ideas on something. I want it [the work] to be thoroughly re-digested, absorbed into the imaginative system and re-projected as something new. Now, I enjoyed Kiss Me Kate very much. It doesn’t mean as much to me as Shakespeare, of course, but it has great, fun, wonderful music by Cole Porter and it’s a very clever musical in it’s own right. The operas…I mean, if you look at Verdi’s Otello it is one of the greatest of all operas. It only uses about half of Shakespeare’s play, it starts with the second Act and misses the first Act entirely. Similarly, with Benjamin Britten’s opera based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream which again uses only about half of Shakespeare. I think it’s just wonderful to see Shakespeare liberating new creative impulses in great minds, in great composers, in great artists. In both visual artists and in film-makers too – I have enjoyed and admired Ken Branagh’s films that are far from filmed stage productions but have their own kind of integrity.

I sometimes feel a distinct aversion that it [the making of ‘derivative works’] vulgarises, it lowers the original – that’s the kind of thing I don’t like, when you feel you’re bring cheated. You find it sometimes with more or less straight productions of let’s say, The Comedy of Errors which I am very fond of. I edited it for the Penguin [edition]. It’s a little masterpiece. But it’s too often played for farce as if the only point of it was to rouse farcical reactions, to rouse laughter by a rather vulgar means and that to me is a debasement. It’s a beautiful play: I’ve seen at least two really good productions (one long ago here [Stratford-upon-Avon] with Clifford Williams and the other also here much more recently) both of which were fine because they played the play as a comedy, not as a farce. It is the only play of Shakespeare’s which has ‘comedy’ in the title , but it has a… underlying basis in reliability, I think. I feel let down if I see a production which trivialises, whether using Shakespeare’s texts or not.


TL: It’s a rather facile question, but do you have a favourite play?

SW: Yes. It varies according to my mood. One of my favourites is A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. A great play – although I get a bit bored with the lovers’ scenes sometimes – but it is a marvellously pure work of imagination, a work in which Shakespeare is, in a way, talking about his own art as he also is in Love’s Labour Lost and The Tempest – plays which are fundamentally about the work of the playwright or the work of the artist. In A Midsummer’s Nights’ Dream, the speech by Theseus about imagination, which mirrors the play within a play… Shakespeare thinking about the relationship between the audience and the creative artist and the performer on the work of art. And The Tempest is very similar.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a favourite, partly of course because it is the first play I edited. When I retired my students put on a production of it specially for me because they knew it was rather a favourite. But then I think the greatest of the plays is King Lear. I edited that for my own multivolume series and I think if I had to preserve one Shakespeare play, it would be King Lear because it is there that he digs deepest on the human condition, the relationship between life and death, what it is to be human, what it is to be a human being, and I think it is a very profound play indeed.

I love Hamlet; you know I get on pretty well with all of them. Twelfth Night is a great favourite too.

TL: You are based in Stratford-upon-Avon – given much of Shakespeare’s professional life was in London, how important do you think Stratford-upon-Avon was in the compilation of his work?

SW: Stratford has become a Shakespearean centre since David Garrick had the Shakespearean Jubilee here in 1769 – during which it must be said not a word of Shakespeare was spoken. But Stratford has become the place where you have the RSC, where the theatre has been operating for well-over 100 years now, where we have the main remains of Shakespeare’s domestic life. We have no similar thing in London.

But I don’t really think the study of Shakespeare needs to be based in a particular place at all – you need a library and you need a theatre, which of course you have here and in London too . I think one is led to where, in a sense, the materials are. And where the jobs are, for that matter: in Stratford we have big resources for the study of Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Centre – major collections and editions of books of works criticism. So too, however, in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington – you could just as well study Shakespeare there, but you would have much less opportunity to go to the theatre.

TL: You mention that you started off as a school-teacher. Often in school the more bawdy bits of Shakespeare are skirted over – i.e. In Hamlet, the word ‘country’ in ‘country matters’ [Hamlet, Act 3 Sc. 2] was glossed as meaning ‘common’. Do you deplore this as censorship?

SW: Yes, I deplore censorship. I can understand that people would want to protect the very young from being exposed to what you might regard as grown-up sexuality before they are ready for it. The whole of Adonis is about that, how he is not ready for the sex Venus wants to get out of him. But: yes, on the whole.

When I first started teaching Shakespeare I had to teach from editions that were expurgated. I am sometimes surprised that Romeo and Juliet which is in some ways the bawdiest of the plays is sent to School children. I’ve just finished my last book that has just gone off to print – it’s called Shakespeare: Sex and Love – and in this book I talk a lot about the censorship of the plays, the bawdiness that lies behind them and Shakespeare’s interest in sexuality, the way it changes and develops as his career goes on. And of course we are learning more and more about Shakespeare’s language in this way – there have been some important studies in this field over recent years. Gordon Williams’ three volume works on sexual language in the drama and his single volume glossary of Shakespeare’s sexual language has helped us to understand much more.

Although of course it is easy to vulgarise things. I mean, one of the worst books published recently is called Filthy Shakespeare, which is a pornographic book, wherein the Author paraphrases certain passages of Shakespeare in away that imposes on them sexual meaning that are not there, quite simply. It’s just a piece of exploitation.

TL: Given you think one can’t justify censoring Shakespeare at all, but obviously everyone can understand you wouldn’t want to talk about ‘country matters’ with 8 year olds…do you think there’s any point in introducing Shakespeare to very young children?

SW: That’s a very interesting question. When I was a schoolmaster it worried me a great deal. I mean, school teachers work within a certain framework, the framework of the educational system and the examination system. I was teaching in a not very good school and teaching pupils who were not very bright. I knew, nevertheless, I had to get them through … the Ordinary Level, GCSE. I knew they would have to study some Shakespeare then and I worried a great deal about at what level to introduce them to Shakespeare, at what point to start them off on Shakespeare’s language. And I would sometimes think, ‘No, this third form is just not ready’. Ready emotionally, linguistically; ready sexually, perhaps, but not so much that. Also it was a question of what to start with. In fact, I gave them simplified versions. There was a very useful little book called Little Plays From Shakespeare, which didn’t re-write the plays but it did fillet them – it formed a very useful introduction both to the language and to the drama to let them understand, for example, the excitement of the trial scene in the merchant of Venice without having the rest of the rest of the play. Some parts of Shakespeare are more or less self-contained.

I think there is no moral duty upon anybody’s part to like Shakespeare -sometimes, one always get the feeling with some educators and some people that you’re not a ‘complete person’ until you like Shakespeare. I think that’s nonsense. I know lots of people perfectly respectable and intelligent people that have no interest in Shakespeare. On the other hand, I think for many people Shakespeare can be an immensely enriching experience and therefore I wouldn’t want to deny young people the opportunity of starting to get to know him. If at the end they decide that Shakespeare is not for him – OK! Mozart is not for everybody. Schubert is not for everybody. Bob Dylan is not for everybody, not for me for example.

These are matters of taste, and their taste should be respected. But on the other hand, it has become almost a social duty to know something about Shakespeare – it’s not easy to move in educated circles unless you have at least a general knowledge that Hamlet is a tragedy for example. Some of it has entered the language: quotations are made often without us even realising we’re quoting Shakespeare. So from that points of view it is desirable that young people should be given an introduction to Shakespeare at the very least.

TL: You mentioned how often Shakespeare has entered the general vocabulary. I was wondering if there are any lines or themes of Shakespeare that you keep coming back to?

SW: Yes, there are. They vary according to my experience but, yes, there are some speeches which seem to encompass a world of experience. In King Lear: ‘’ Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life, / And thou no breath at all?’. It seems to me an ultimate human reaction to death and that’s very important.

Sometimes it is a matter of simple phrasing. ‘It is required you do awake your faith’, says Paulina in the last scene of A Winter’s Tale to Leontes. It’s quite often true that we need to awake our faith. So yes, I suppose all sorts of phrases go in and out of my mind in different circumstances.

TL: Professor Stanley Wells, thank you.

Postscript: Following this interview, and having caught sight of some of The Literateur’s marketing material, Professor Wells mentioned he was a great fan of owls. To which we quote, ‘Tu-whit! tu-whoo! A merry note!’ (Love’s Labours Lost)