Eros and Etiology in Love’s Labour’s Lost

In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the creation of an academe where study is posited as antidote to diseases mind caused by worldly desire results in epidemic lovesickness. Lovesickness, otherwise known ‘erotic melancholy’ or ‘erotomania’, was treated contemporary medical documents a real, diagnosable illness, contagious disease thought infect imagination through eyes, which could be fatal if left untreated. Such representation love communicable drawn, I suggest, from neoplatonic tradition led work Marsilio Ficino, particularly his fifteenth-century treatise Commentary on Plato’s Symposium Love. Ficino’s construction eros kind ‘vulgar love’, distinctive ‘heroic emphatically denotes lovesickness material contagion with eye its primary means transmission, idea that had more significant influence England and playwrights like William Shakespeare than has previously been acknowledged. For all lighthearted conceits, Lost takes etiology very seriously, ways have almost entirely ignored scholarship this play.