Love's Labour's Lost

The drama follows a group of young noblemen who vow to renounce women and devote themselves to study, but their resolve collapses when a visiting princess and her female retinue arrive. The men compete to woo the visitors with elaborate rhetoric, poetry, and contrived courtly entertainments while a pair of comic servants and a self-important courtier supply farcical misunderstandings and buffoonery. Seductions, disguises, and mock trials escalate into witty verbal contests, until tidings of a sudden bereavement interrupt the festivities; marriages are postponed and the suitors are set to prove their constancy by returning after a year's trial, leaving resolutions suspended.