Life went on, too, or in some cases, ended. On May 30, 1593, Shakespeare’s friend and fellow playwright, Christopher Marlowe was murdered. Shakespeare wanted to write some sort of tribute to him. Yet in August 1596, Shakespeare’s eleven-year-old son, Hamnet died of the plague. To know whether Shakespeare grieved for his child, please read Constance’s speech in King John (1596-7):

Shakespeare's plays: with his life
BY William Shakespeare, H. W. Hewet,
Gulian Crommelin Verplanck,
John Payne Collier, Charles Knight
ILLUSTRATED BY H. W. Hewet
PUBLISHED BY Harper & Brothers, 1847
FROM the New York Public Library

Marlowe’s memorial had to wait.

In Love’s Labor’s Lost — as we have it on our bookshelf — the King of Navarre has established in the country an academe: a study group, a kind of secular monastery, to last for three years. One of the rules for the group is that the members must swear they will have nothing to do with women. When the beautiful Princess of France and her lovely ladies-in-waiting, Rosaline, Katharine and Maria show up on their diplomatic mission, the King and his court, Berowne, Longaville and Dumaine, fall in love with the ladies at first sight. Scruples about their oaths and their own juvenile behavior prevent them from courting the willing ladies until it is too late. The French royalty and her court, forbidden from the house, are lodged, horrors, in a tent! — and they determine to take revenge on what they consider the lords’ pomposity. When the lords abandon their oaths and begin to woo the ladies, and even propose marriage, the ladies regard their efforts as an attempt to mock them, as “courtship, pleasant jest and courtesy, as bombast.” Circumstances bring the play to a close without a happy ending. The ladies send the lords away for a year’s time, on a year-long spiritual quest to test the lords’ resolve, promising that they will reconsider the marriage proposals at the end of the year.

I hope you can see from this very brief synopsis that the characters lose their love-labors because they are constantly making mistakes: the lords ruled women off the property, having forgotten that the Princess of France had already arranged a rendez-vous. Berowne finally convinces the other lords that it was a mistake to think they could gain knowledge without studying women. When the lords do woo the ladies, the slighted ladies disguise themselves so that each man mistakenly woos the wrong woman.

Besides these major mistakes, there are a myriad of minor ones: when the King sets up his girl-free academe, he forgets that the beautiful dairy-maid, Jaquenetta, is already on the premises.^[12] When Berowne and Armado send love letters to Rosaline and Jaquenetta, using Costard as messenger, Costard immediately confuses the letters, and delivers to each girl the other girl’s letter. Characters also make mistakes in English (“Consider who the king your father sends,” II.1.2), in Latin (“Laus Deo, bone intelligo,”V.1.26), and in Italian (“Vemchie, Vencha, que non le unde, que non le perreche,” IV.2.93). Asked to do math, they are hopelessly lost, especially if the number three is involved.

The dancing horse would do better at math than the characters in this play, as Moth points out.