Love's Labour's Lost by William Shakespeare
Published 1598 · 21,500 words · about 1 hour at an average pace · Drama, Comedy
How hard is Love's Labour's Lost to read?
Love's Labour's Lost scores 49 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 70 out of 100
- The most linguistically dense of Shakespeare's comedies, packed with puns, Latinate vocabulary, and satirical jargon.
- Sentence structure: 70 out of 100
- Elaborate rhetorical set pieces, embedded sonnets, and competitive wit combats make for demanding syntax.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- The play is explicitly about the relationship between language and reality, words and feeling.
- Information density: 35 out of 100
- The plot is thin but the language is extremely dense with wordplay requiring careful attention.
- Narrative indirection: 35 out of 100
- The oath-breaking is staged as a chain of overheard confessions; the ending swerves away from comic convention.
- Symbolic density: 40 out of 100
- The academe, the pageant, and the sudden intrusion of death all function symbolically.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- The play satirizes its own characters' rhetorical excesses while reveling in them; the ending ironizes the entire genre.
- Resolution withholding: 60 out of 100
- The expected marriages are deferred for a year; the comedy refuses its own conventional ending.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Parallel oath-breaking sequences with an embedded pageant and a structurally unprecedented deferred ending.
How Love's Labour's Lost is regarded
Love's Labour's Lost holds a literary regard score of 75 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.