Love's Labour's Lost The Elizabethans considered it simply "a witty and pleasant comedy"; Samuel Johnson observed that "all the editors agreed in censuring him"; and William Hazlitt stated, "If we were to part with any of the author's plays, it should be this." It was only well into the twentieth century that Love's Labour's Lost achieved its greatest value, and that fact alone may be enough to make a case for it as Shakespeare's most prescient work. It is above all its ending, an unexpectedly bleak conclusion in which nothing is actually concluded, that appealed to modern sensibilities and made Love's Labour's Lost Shakespeare's work of the twentieth century. Trevor Nunn makes this point emphatically in a recent National Theater production which presents Love's Labour's Lost as the tale of society's transition from the nineteenth century to the devastation of the First World War. While neither this idea nor any other aspect of his output is entirely new, it emerges as perhaps the darkest interpretation of the work yet presented, taking the disturbing qualities that have so delighted modern audiences and pushing them to their limits and beyond. Reading the work now, it seems difficult to believe that the unusualness of the ending could have apparently gone unnoticed for so long. With the stage set for the usual comic finale of multiple marriages, the news of the princess's father's death comes as a complete shock: Marcadé enters into a moment of such carefree gaiety that the princess jokingly scolds him, "you interrupt our merriment." (5.2 .712). A moment later, the news is announced and the atmosphere of the show has changed considerably, as Berowne himself acknowledges when he says: "The scene begins... in the middle of the paper... ns. In the end, Nunn manages to make convincing his dark vision of Love's Labour's Lost, and to use the work to make the usual points (the fleeting nature of happiness and happy endings, the need to face difficult realities, the inevitability of death) with exceptional force the triumphs come to the price of two invaluable aspects of Shakespeare's ending: its unexpected reversal of audience expectations and its surprisingly modern opening. Bibliography Gilbert, Miriam Love's Labour's Lost Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993 .Holland, English Shakespeares Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.Peter, John., Sunday Times, February 2003, Woudhuysen, H.R., ed: The Arden Shakespeare, 1998.