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Children of Fancy

This chapter argues that the fanciful trifling featured in Love’s Labor’s Lost explores the epistemological utility of imagination, does so by deconstructing the prevalent view that imagination is a sort of intellectual idleness. Francis Bacon and others wrote that imagination is little more than childish cognitive toying, distinct from the more systematic labor of discovery. In his comedy, Shakespeare parodically recasts these prejudices by conceiving a pedagogic courtly academy devoted only to fancy, run not by scientists but fops, pedants, and children. In so doing, the play weighs the importance of courtesy, collaboration, novelty, and invention in the making of scientific knowledge.