Love's Labor's Lost and Folklore in the Digital Age

We live in a remix culture. This is extraordinarily problematic when considering current copyright laws, but that is a discussion for another day. In our culture, we take things we've heard, seen, read, or experienced and incorporate them and remix them for our own purposes. In academia, this is as simple as quoting someone and expanding upon that quote to support your argument (and then citing them so as to protect their intellectual property). On Facebook, this could be taking a movie still and commenting on it with your own words to make a witty point. On YouTube, this is taking clips from several different romantic period movies and putting music over it to make a romantic music video.

There are a billion and a half ways we remix, but this concept of remixing wasn't born of the digital age. Authors have always borrowed from others authors, reference popular culture works to make a joke, and taken age-old fairy tales and made them their own (a nod to Mr. Disney).


The principle of remixing is inseperable from folklore, which defines itself as ever-changing as it is passed from person to person. Some people pass folklore on as is, without messing with it, but most will alter it in some way. It cannot be helped. Many just borrow themes from folklore and remix it to be entirely their own. This principle is one that folklorist, Elenor Long describes as different personality types/ attitudes towards folklore

"Eleanor Long, in her research on performers of folklore, found that there were patterns in narrators' attitudes towards their material. She labeled these attitudes 'personality types' and determined that there were four major classifications: perseverators, who seek to hang on to an inviolable tradition; confabulators, who idiosyncratically alter texts to fit their own personal tastes; integrators, who find a middle ground between the first two; and recreators, who form new texts from traditional materials." (Information found at essorment.com). 

Shakespeare was no exception to the rule of remixing folklore. Love's Labor's Lost is a great example of how Shakespeare reuses and remixes folklore (in this case, the genre of proverbs) for his own purposes.

I thoroughly enjoyed BYU's production of Love's Labor's Lost set during WWII (unfortunately I did have to take off about halfway through Act 5 and so missed the last 15 minutes or so). The things that I thought most interesting was how they divided the lines of one character between so many - a definite remix of the play. But I really appreciated Shakespeare's punning off old proverbs like "an eel is quick" in order to make a joke (Act 1 Scene 2). The performance of this argument between Moth (played by a lady instead of a servant boy in this production) and Armando serves as a way to show Moth's jealousy of Armando's affection for Jaquenetta. It was quite a fun remixing of the play.