In this lecture we move from the individual voice of love as expressed in the sonnets to the social words and actions of love in two comedies. The male suitors of Love's Labor's Lost try to break through the artificiality of verbal courtship to something more natural but are outstripped by the larger realities of time, death, and seasonal change. In Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare's characteristic use of multiple plot lines works out the conflict between artifice and nature in two contrasted actions.