Love’s Labor’s Lost: The Lived-Experience, A Pan-European Play

This article addresses Abel Lefranc’s analysis of Love’s Labor’s Lost. Lefranc was a member of the Académie française, a highly respected Renaissance specialist, who published Behind the Mask of William Shakespeare in 1918. Nothing in Shakespere of Stratford’s hundreds of business records or will (the only records we have) reveal any knowledge of French. He never travelled abroad. He was a teenager in Stratford when the events in the play take place. He possibly began to learn French when he roomed with a French Huguenot family in London at the age of thirty-eight in 1602; however, Hamlet, based on an untranslated French source, was presented in 1593. Love’s Labor’s Lost (1594-98) reveals a detailed knowledge of historical events at the French court of Nérac from 1578 to 1582 and presents important, as well as minor French historical characters, and even a suppressed scandal - a wealth of knowledge not available to the general public. There is no known primary source for the play. Whoever wrote the play knew in great detail what was happening at the court of Nérac between 1578-1582. Lefranc did a phenomenal amount of research to reveal the forgotten history behind the play - the lived experience and its pan-European vision. Restoring the history reveals the play’s rich psychological depth.