Love's Labour's Lost

Adaptations

Literature

Start of a performance of Love's Labour's Lost at Shakespeare's Globe, London

Alfred Tennyson's poem The Princess (and, by extension, Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera Princess Ida) is speculated by Gerhard Joseph to have been inspired by Love's Labour's Lost.[38]

Thomas Mann in his novel Doctor Faustus (1943) has the fictional German composer Adrian Leverkühn attempt to write an opera on the story of the play.[39]

Musical theatre, opera, and plays

An opera of the same title as the play was composed by Nicolas Nabokov, with a libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, and first performed in 1973.

In the summer of 2013, The Public Theater in New York City presented a musical adaptation of the play as part of their Shakespeare in the Park programming. This production marked the first new Shakespeare-based musical to be produced at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park since the 1971 mounting of The Two Gentlemen of Verona with music by Galt MacDermot. The adaptation of Love's Labour's Lost featured a score by Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson collaborators Michael Friedman and Alex Timbers. Timbers also directed the production, which starred Daniel Breaker, Colin Donnell, Rachel Dratch, and Patti Murin, among others.[40]

The 2004 ska musical The Big Life is based on Loves Labour's Lost, reworked to be about the Windrush generation arriving in London.[41]

Marc Palmieri's 2015 play The Groundling,[42] a farce the New York Times referred to as "half comedy and half tragedy", was billed as a "meditation on the meaning of the final moments of Love's Labour's Lost".[43]

Film, television and radio

Kenneth Branagh's 2000 film adaptation relocated the setting to the 1930s and attempted to make the play more accessible by turning it into a musical. The film was a box office disappointment.[44]

The play was one of the last works to be recorded for the BBC Television Shakespeare project, broadcast in 1985. The production set events in the eighteenth century, the costumes and sets being modeled on the paintings of Jean-Antoine Watteau. This was the only instance in the project of a work set in a period after Shakespeare's death.[45] The play is featured in an episode of the British TV show, Doctor Who. The episode, entitled The Shakespeare Code, focuses on Shakespeare himself and a hypothetical follow-up play, Love's Labour's Won, whose final scene is used as a portal for alien witches to invade Earth. All copies of this play disappear along with the witches.[46]

BBC Radio 3 aired a radio adaptation on 16 December 1946, directed by Noel Illif, with music by Gerald Finzi scored for a small chamber orchestra. The cast included Paul Scofield. The music was subsequently converted into an orchestral suite.[47] BBC Radio 3 aired another radio adaptation on 22 February 1979, directed by David Spenser, with music by Derek Oldfield. The cast included Michael Kitchen as Ferdinand; John McEnery as Berowne; Anna Massey as the Princess of France; Eileen Atkins as Rosaline; and Paul Scofield as Don Adriano.[48]

A modern-language adaptation of the play, titled Groups of Ten or More People, was released online by Chicago-based company Littlebrain Theatre in July 2020.[49][50] This adaptation, set during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, was filmed entirely over the digital conferencing program Zoom.[51]


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