Editing Love's Labour's Lost (section)

===Reputation===
''Love's Labour's Lost'' abounds in sophisticated wordplay, puns, and literary allusions and is filled with clever pastiches of contemporary poetic forms.<ref name="Arden" /> Critic and historian John Pendergast states that "perhaps more than any other Shakespearean play, it explores the power and limitations of language, and this blatant concern for language led many early critics to believe that it was the work of a playwright just learning his art."<ref name=Pendergast>{{cite book|last=Pendergast|first=John|title=Love's Labour's Lost: A Guide to the Play|url=https://archive.org/details/loveslabourslost0000pend|url-access=registration|year=2002| publisher=Greenwood Press|isbn=9780313313158 }}</ref> In ''[[The Western Canon]]'' (1994), [[Harold Bloom]] lauds the work as "astonishing" and refers to it as Shakespeare's "first absolute achievement".<ref>{{cite book|title=[[The Western Canon]]|page=[https://books.google.com/books?id=zIOuAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT61 46]|last=Bloom|first=Harold|author-link=Harold Bloom|publisher=Houghton Mifflin Harcourt|date=2014|isbn=978-0547546483}}</ref> It is often assumed that the play was written for performance at the [[Inns of Court]], whose students would have been most likely to appreciate its style. It has never been among Shakespeare's most popular plays, probably because its pedantic humour and linguistic density are extremely demanding of contemporary theatregoers.<ref name="Arden">{{cite book|last=Woudhuysen|first=H. R.|author-link=Henry Woudhuysen|editor=Proudfoot, Richard|title=The Arden Shakespeare complete works|edition=2|year=2001|publisher=Thomson|location=London| isbn=978-1-903436-61-5|page=743|chapter=Love's Labour's Lost|display-editors=etal}}</ref><ref name=Pendergast/> The satirical allusions of Navarre's court are likewise inaccessible, "having been principally directed to fashions of language that have long passed away, and [are] consequently little understood, rather than in any great deficiency of invention."{{sfn|Halliwell-Phillipps|1879|p={{page needed|date=February 2023}}}}