It is a disconcerting fact that what nowadays appear to be the main problems attaching to Loves Labour’s Lost arise out of ill-advised attempts, over the past hundred years, to attribute to Shakespeare a rather uncharacteristic preoccupation with satirical allegory whose interpretation has produced a diversity of mutually antagonistic hypotheses. Once we accept that these major problems may be nonexistent and the minor ones, though insoluble, negligible, the residue is a straightforward, intensely vigorous yet gently sardonic comedy; a tour-de-force in which Shakespeare is able, through sheer technical dexterity, to sustain a dialogue involving no less than eight characters, of whom two or three are sufficiently heightened for the initiative to shift hither and thither and from whom there emerges a comic hero, Berowne, whose vitality surpasses that of any of his successors, Benedick alone excepted.