Love’s Labour’s Music: the song-contest of the cuckoo and the owl

Love’s Labour’s Lost has often been praised for its musical language, but it actually contains relatively few references to music compared to other plays by Shakespeare. Upon analysis, the elusive songs seem less relevant than the concept of dance as a potentially structuring metaphor, while much weight is given to the associations with Orpheus and Apollo, who simultaneously embody the power of poetry and of music, and are challenged in both respects by the closing songs.