By Kimberly Johnson

Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptations of Shakespeare plays represent a formidable corpus. In Rolling Stone, Peter Travers called his 1989 film adaptation of Henry V “thrilling” and gushed that Branagh’s performance “captures the poetry and potency of Shakespeare” with an “unquenchable fire.” Of Branagh’s Hamlet, Geoffrey O’Brien raved that in this particular, “brilliant,” version, the play “is allowed all its complexity.” As of February 2026, the two films are rated 98% and 95%, respectively, on Rotten Tomatoes.

In stark contrast to these rhapsodic responses is the general reception of Branagh’s 2000 Love’s Labours Lost, whose Rotten Tomatoes aggregation currently hovers just over exact middling, at 51%. Even the more or less positive reviewers think it “wildly uneven,” and less generous viewers dismiss it as “silly, redundant, odd.” The chief irritation seems largely to arise from Branagh’s decision to adapt the play into a musical spectacular lifted straight out of the golden age of cinema. In Branagh’s Love’s Labours Lost, characters burst out into song at random junctures and pause discussion to hoof it like downmarket Fred-and-Ginger wannabes. Bewilderment at Branagh’s impetuous decision to transpose Shakespearean seriousness into madcap fluff animates a goodly portion of the hate this film has received.

I’m here to stand against the haters. Not because Branagh proves to bedazzlingly light on his feet—indeed, none of the ensemble company seems remotely expert at sashaying across the screen in heels or warbling their tentative notes along to the soundtrack’s catalogue of standards by Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, and other titans of the American songbook. Alicia Silverstone is, as it turns out, no Judy Garland. Nevertheless, I will defend Branagh’s decision to make a musical out of Shakespeare’s play until my last breath because of his perceptive understanding that the Hollywood musical offers an honorable modern analogue for Love’s Labours Lost, a romantic comedy that is not really about either romance or comedy but is very much
about sonnets.

The play’s romantic plot seems well-suited to sonneteering: the King of Navarre and his three fellows have sworn off women in order to devote themselves to learning, but when the Princess of France and her three companions arrive on an embassy, the men’s oaths begin to wither. The studious dudes do what studious dudes do: they secretly, perfidiously, each write sonnets to woo their opposite number, until all the sonnets—and the forsworn love to which they give voice—are exposed, to the men’s delighted sheepishness (see 4.3). Even the local curate gets in on the action, reading a sonnet as part of preparations for a festive performance (4.2.97–111 in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al.; all my citations of Shakespeare’s play reference this volume). In Love’s Labours Lost, sonnets mark the development of the comic action from amorous refusal to giddy courtship; and sonnets—the writing and concealing and revealing and exchanging and reading of them—serve as external indicators of evolving internal states, and drive the plot of the play.

But sonnets don’t just show up as props for the play’s plot in Love’s Labours Lost. Shakespeare also, slyly and without comment, incorporates sonnets into passages of regular dialogue. From its very first scene (and indeed from its first fourteen lines) this play’s characters just casually talk in sonnets. Let me be clear: these sonnets aren’t presented as such in the play; they’re quietly embedded in the conversation of the characters, as when Berowne voices his reluctance to take the vow of loveless studiousness. In the middle of a longer speech, Berowne muses:

Study me how to please the eye indeed
By fixing it upon a fairer eye,
Who dazzling so, that eye shall be his heed
And give him light that it was blinded by.
Study is like the heaven’s glorious sun,
That will not be deep-searched with saucy looks.
Small have continual plodders ever won,
Save base authority from others’ books.
These earthly godfathers of heaven’s lights,
That give a name to every fixèd star,
Have no more profit of their shining nights
Than those that walk and wot not what they are.
Too much to know is to know naught but fame,
And every godfather can give a name. (1.1.82-95)

By my count, there are about a dozen of these subtle sonnets across the play, offhandedly slipped into long speeches by men and women alike. And the presence of naturalized sonnets isn’t limited to monologic moments; for in their climactic scene of courtship, a sonnet develops across the King’s and Princess’s alternating lines of dialogue (5.2.342–356), a verbal pas de deux that serves to manifest just how well-matched is this royal pair.

It is this strange and often overlooked feature of Shakespeare’s play that persuades me that Branagh’s splashy song-and-dance revue offers a worthy equivalent to the aesthetic logic of Love’s Labours Lost. The text of the play revels in the pleasures of art for its own sake. As the sonnets accumulate—noticed or unnoticed by the audience—the contrivance of their repeated utterance stands out against the quotidian cadences of speech (even of the noble’s iambs, which dominate the non-sonnet dialogue). These sonnets serve no purpose in the story, strictly speaking: structurally, their presence cannot be said to advance the plot. Instead, the sonnets performatively amplify the nonsemantic features of the text’s language, as when the film exchanges the curate’s sonnet for the Kern/Fields composition “The Way You Look Tonight.” As in the Hollywood musical, the play is willing to counterprogram the headlong progress of plot with artifice, elbowing it into conversation, character, and the unfolding drama of romance, in order to foreground the pleasures of the aesthetic. Indeed, Branagh nearly forces our awareness of the continuities between the aesthetic operation of sonnets in the text of the play and the aesthetic operation of dance in the film when he, as Biron, tap-dances the iambs of a speech in which he argues that the men should give up their austere vow and pursue love. In the film, that ostentatious gesture to Shakespeare’s poetics transitions directly into—what else?—a song: Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek.”

Ultimately, Branagh’s version instructs us not to get so caught up in the workaday pursuit of resolution but rather to allow business to be interrupted, gleefully and pointlessly, with pleasure. Branagh’s film sings, along with Irving Berlin and Shakespeare himself, “Let’s face the music and dance.”

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Kimberly Johnson is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Fatal (Persea, 2022), two books of ancient poetry in translation, and a number of critical works on early modern English literature. She is the recipient of grants and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Amy Lowell Trust, the NEA, and others. She lives in Utah.