Love’s Labour’s Lost is probably better appreciated today than at any time since its earliest performances. It is now found to play well, it has had some extremely understanding criticism over the last two decades. Nowadays critics have slackened their efforts to expound the play as a sophisticated in-joke, a spoof on Lyly and on the School of Night. No doubt it is all that, but the concentration on the topical interest of Love’s Labour’s Lost tended to obscure its permanent value. The play retains its elusiveness, but is today generally regarded as a delicate and controlled movement towards an acceptance of reality. ‘Reality’ is a term that (however unsatisfactory philosophically) critics agree upon as a convenient designation for the target of the play’s probing. The word is not susceptible to exact definition, but it designates all those phenomena of life that are symbolized by the entry of Mercade. That entry is the key fact of the play: it is hardly possible to sustain the argument that it is ‘sudden, unprovided for, external to the inner necessity of the plot, and for that reason aesthetically unsatisfactory, though theatrically effective’. For the play has opened with an assault upon Time/Death (lines 1–14), as it closes with the acknowledgement of Time’s victory. The death-message is organically present in Scene ⅰ, as certain cells die shortly after the body’s birth. And the final Act makes sense only as a reversal of the first Act: the themes of light-darkness, folly-wisdom, fantasy-reality are initiated and resolved in the exposition and conclusion.