What happens in Love's Labour's Lost

Ferdinand, the young King of Navarre, has a grand plan. He and three of his lords, Biron, Longaville, and Dumain, will swear off women, feasting, and sleep for three years and devote themselves to study, hoping to win lasting fame. Biron signs the oath but warns from the start that it cannot hold. He has a point: the King has already forgotten that the Princess of France is due to arrive on state business, and the court’s own law forbids her to come near. A subplot bubbles up alongside this: a country fellow named Costard is arrested for flirting with the dairymaid Jaquenetta, and the boastful Spaniard Don Armado, who fancies Jaquenetta himself, is put in charge of him.

The Princess arrives with three ladies of her own: Rosaline, Maria, and Katharine. Forced to camp outside the gates, she meets the King to settle the matter of Aquitaine. The men cannot help themselves. Sparks fly immediately, especially between Biron and Rosaline, who trade barbs that sound a lot like courtship. Within a few scenes, every one of the four scholars has fallen for one of the four women, each secretly breaking the oath he swore.

The unraveling is a comedy of letters. Armado writes to Jaquenetta; Biron writes a love poem to Rosaline. Costard, carrying both, muddles them. Biron’s poem ends up in the ladies’ hands, and the schoolmaster Holofernes intercepts another copy and sends it on to expose Biron’s perjury. The men’s secret is out, though they don’t yet know it.

The heart of the play comes when each lord, thinking himself alone, reads aloud the verses he has written, only for the next one to overhear and the next after that. Biron, hidden, watches all three confess before he is caught out himself. Once the foursome stands exposed to one another, Biron stops mocking and mounts a soaring defense of love, arguing that a woman’s eyes teach more than any book and that loving is the truest study of all. The men abandon the academy and resolve to court the ladies openly.

But the women already know everything. When the men come disguised as Russians to woo them, the ladies have swapped the love tokens they were given, so each man courts the wrong lady and makes a fool of himself. The mockery continues through a clumsy pageant of the Nine Worthies, staged by Holofernes, Armado, Costard, and the others, which the lords heckle without mercy. The country characters get their own jab in when Costard reveals that Jaquenetta is pregnant by Armado.

Then the mood breaks. A messenger named Mercade arrives with news that the Princess’s father, the King of France, has died. The laughter stops at once. The men press their suits in earnest, but the women refuse to be won so quickly. The Princess tells the King to spend a year living plainly in a hermitage; Rosaline sends Biron to spend a year making the sick and suffering laugh, to learn that wit must serve more than itself. Armado vows to work the land three years for Jaquenetta. No weddings happen. Every match is deferred for a year and a day, and the play closes not with celebration but with two songs of spring and winter, a reminder that love keeps its own slow time.