What was Big Willy Shakes going for?
Love's Labour's Lost is known for its explosion of wordplay. And we're not just talking a few flares here and there. We're talking full on pyrotechnics. In some ways, the words that characters use in this play are more important than what they are actually trying to say. So it's no surprise then, that Shakespeare coined a phrase or two in this course of penning Love's Labour's Lost.
Make no mistake, Shakespeare was having fun when he wrote this play—the kind of fun that kindergarteners have when their inner-artist is liberated, and when they discover finger painting involves dipping their hands into buckets of paint and then smearing it all over a blank piece of paper. Only, instead of kindergarteners, we have a brilliant writer in his prime; and instead of paint, he used words. Puns, rhymes, and allusions are around every corner.
Even though this kind of word play is sometimes challenging for us modern peeps, the meaning of this phrase is not lost on us. "Foul play" here simply means that the women have been dishonest or unfair in how they treated the guys.
Once Shakespeare created "foul play," he couldn't stop using it. He used it again in Henry IV Part I, Hamlet, Pericles, and The Tempest. We're pretty sure we can say that Shakespeare dug this phrase and its applications.