‘Then we cannot be bought’

Abstract

This article argues the courtships as performed in Love’s Labour’s Lost challenge early modern marital ideologies. By using performance theory to examine the women’s roles in particular, I argue that as the courtships unfold, the play highlights the particular ways that women emphasize their self-sufficient value by refusing to engage in banter or accept gifts that place them as an object of exchange. Thus the play ends, not as most Shakespearean comedies do by reminding us with overt performative self-consciousness that we have just watched a comedy, but rather that we have not.