AFTER THREE AND A HALF HOURS of wildly tangled mistaken-identity games, comedy routines within routines, and intemperate Elizabethan wordplay, the salient emotion one takes away from the Harvard-Radcliffe Summer Theater's "Love's Labor's Lost" is surprise that the play is so good. No sooooo good--everything is relative, and it is doubtful that any theater company in the world could keep the parts of the melange of verbosity and near-interchangeable comic types from dragging--but far better than most directors who attempt the play would attest.

For obvious reason's, the challenge is not confronted all that often. The few companies that tackle it usually resort either to theater-as-carnival-spectacle (bolstering the endless wordplay with sight gags, the traditional devices with slapstick), to avant-grade-extremism, or to massive cutting. The summer loebies have tried a little of all three, but director Gregg Lachow applies the experimentation with a temperate hand. His greatest accomplishment is leaving the staging simple enough so that the occasional striking line has room to breathe, and the play's fascinating structure emerges from its weight of words. In so doing, he resists the natural impulse of most directors to rush apologetically through the play's excesses, shaving off a hall hour, perhaps, but burying the good along with the bad.

Even more interesting, Lachow's approach makes the staging reflect a recurrent theme in the play, the repeated and unsuccessful attempts of the characters to abandon artifice and bombast; they man age occasionally for a line or two but never for long.

Lachow's opening device is typical Instead of trying to coddle the audience through a long expository opening scene with clowns and cavortings, he leaves the Ex dark for at least ten minutes, forcing the audience to concentrate as four disembodied voices exhaustively lay out the play's premise. The King of Navarre (Alex Pearson) has persuaded his three friends. Dumanine, Longaville, and Berowne, to join in a vow to study for three years-fasting, rarely sleeping, and forswearing the company of women. They all swear, despite misgivings, quite forgetting that the Princess of France is arriving that day on an embassy from her father, bringing three ladies in tow.

Once you have this straight, the rest of the plot is traditional. The four lords fall for the four ladies. attempt to dissemble, then to break their vows, and are eventually taught by the ladies to sue for favor honestly, without resorting to trivial games. The transition to reality and perhaps maturity is completed by the unexpected news of the Princess' father's death, and all eight principals soberly vow faith and various types of atonement, as if ceremoniously renouncing the comic-traditional world that has held them in thrall.

The most interesting of the eight lovers in Berowne, the naysayer who winds up narrating a good deal of the young men's transitions from games to reality. Max Cantor, whose forte seems to be bringing believable emotion to stylized and ultra-verbose lines, uses physical cavorting not to distract the audience, but to jog the attention span every couple of paragraphs. And despite the length of his speeches, the ongoing struggle that structures the lines--the attempt to find true emotions among his fiends posturings--creates a clearly defined character, allowing Cantor to mold an actual stage presence.

FEW OTHER CHARACTERS have this opportunity. Not only is there little differentiation among Berowne's three cohorts (played by Nick Wyse, Alex Pearson and Ian White) or among their four lady loves (Robin Driscoll. Alison Carey, Miriam Schmir and Nina Bernstein); to make matters worse, random comic pairs appear at intervals, exchange verbal abuse and eventually band together to present the nobility a pageant of "The Nine Worthies."

Lachow expends a great deal of extremely creative effort trying to give these characters individual identities. Some of this devices are brilliant--a series of "candid" snapshots of the four ladies, for example, accompany the lords standard ravings before the female delegation first appears. Likewise, a long home-movie of one clownish master-and-page pair (Brian McCue and Jessica Marshall) offers a solid basis for the two's relationship before their first exchange, and the relationship provides one of the few emotional landmarks in a wilderness of obscure Renaissance jokes. In other cases Lachow resorts to more familiar conceits of costume and mannerism: one oaf appears with a crew cut, a white-robed sidekick follows a black-robed curate and so forth.

To one degree or another, these devices all work; there are no duds. But it's a losing battle, and no one gets much help from Shakespeare; all the characters talk as if, in the vexed exclamation of Marshall as the page Moth, "they have been at a great banquet of languages, and stole the scraps."

And yet, from the scraps there emerges a respectable degree of shape. Since Love's Labour's Lost has been known to run as long as five hours, this version must have undergone judicious cutting, changes are, it could without bleeding take a good deal more. But the pervasive freedom from fuss enlivens the script's excesses simply by showcasing them. The bare black stage, with two garden swings intelligently breaking the monotony, does not distract; neither do Martha Eddison's very effective costumes, for the most part just baggy bright smocks with cumberbunds for the nobility, or the occasional sharp-edged modern choreography.

Elizabethan language being what it is, it is unavoidable that the audience emerge from any production of this play with stiff limbs and moderately glazed eyes. But the Loeb production certainly does not inspire the question the play so frequently brings to the departing viewers' mind--why, with all the plays of Shakespeare available, the company had to pick this baggy anomaly to produce.