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

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Shakespeare
• Earl of Oxford
• Love’s Labor’s Lost
• French court
• pan-European

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Elisabeth Pearson Waugaman

Elisabeth Pearson Waugaman, Ph.D., has taught at Duke and Johns Hopkins Universities. She is the author of two books—Follow Your Dreams; The Story of Alberto Santos-Dumont, a children’s book she illustrated, for which she was awarded the Alberto Santos-Dumont medal at the Brazilian Embassy in Washington, D.C.; and Women, Their Names, and the Stories They Tell. She has written articles published in The American Analyst, The 34th Annual Medieval Renaissance Forum, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, and The Oxfordian. She has blogged for Psychology Today, Medieval and Renaissance Studies on LinkedIn, Nameberry, and Atlas Obscura. She is a faculty member of New Directions, the Writing Program of the Washington-Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. She has spoken at the Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C., the Kiwanis, The Go to Work Day for Government Employees, Le Club d’Amitié Francophone International, The Women’s Club of Washington D.C., The Bethesda Women’s Club, and The Cosmos Club.