LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST

THE problem of dating exactly Shakespeare's earliest plays is beset with peculiar difficulties. During the first few years of his dramatic activity, he made experiments in all the three main divisions of the drama of his time, comedy, tragedy, and history; and within these divisions his versatility showed itself still farther. Thus, in the field of comedy, he seems to have laid especial stress on diction in Love's Labour's Lost, on character in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, on situation and plot in The Comedy of Errors. This variety of aim makes it hard to arrange these plays in order of production on mere internal evidence, as might have been possible had they been successive attempts along precisely the same lines; and external evidence is very scanty and inconclusive. The order adopted here is as probable as any; but the three comedies placed first should be regarded as essentially contemporaneous.

The first extant edition of Love's Labour's Lost was published as a quarto in 1598. The titlepage of this edition states that it is printed" as it was presented before her Highness this last Christmas. Newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere." If this volume was issued before March 25, 1598 (O. S.), “last Christmas" would mean Christmas of 1598; if after March 25, it would mean Christmas of 1597. References to the play in Meres's Palladis Tamia (1598), and in Tofte's Alba or Month's Mind of a Melancholy Lover (1598), do not help to determine this point. The indication of an earlier form of the play given in the words "corrected and augmented" is corroborated by certain peculiarities in the text. The speech of Biron in iv. iii. 289–365, and the conversation between him and Rosaline in v. ii. 827-832, 847-881, show undoubted traces of revision, the earlier form of some of the lines having been retained in the later text by the mistake of the printer. We have no means of defining closely the augmentations, but from the disproportion in the length of the acts, and from the style of the speeches, it is fairly clear that they must have been chiefly in the fourth and fifth acts, and in the speeches of Biron and Rosaline. The date of this earlier version is to be conjectured from internal evidence only. The very great frequency of riming lines, the occurrence of speeches rimed alternately and in sonnet form, the slightness of the characterization, the obvious symmetry in the arrangement of the persons, the nature of the topical allusions, — all these, combined with the impression of immaturity produced by the play, have led to a fairly general agreement that it is one of Shakespeare's first independent attempts, and is to be placed not later than 1591.

The Quarto of 1598 is the direct source of the next printed text, that of the First Folio. This edition of the play, though somewhat more carefully printed than the Quarto, has no independent authority, and adds nothing save the last line and the division into acts. The present text is, accordingly, based on that of the Quarto.

No source of the plot as a whole has yet been discovered, and it is quite possible that the story was invented by Shakespeare himself. Hints may have been derived from French history. Monstrelet relates that, in the first quarter of the fifteenth century, a king of Navarre renounced his claims to certain French lordships on condition of receiving the Duchy of Nemours and 200,000 crowns. Again, in 1586, Catherine de' Medici, accompanied by a bevy of ladies, visited the court of Henry of Navarre, and attempted to settle the disputes between that prince and her son, Henry III. The charms of the ladies in her retinue were expected to aid in the accomplishment of her diplomatic purposes. The names of Biron and Longaville are those of two well-known adherents of Henry of Navarre in the civil wars which were raging when the play was written; and the name of Dumain is an anglicized form of that of the Duc de Mayenne who figured on the other side in the same conflict. Further, in 1582, a Russian ambassador arrived in England to arrange a treaty, and to take home with him a wife for the Czar from among the kinswomen of Eliza

beth. A lady was selected, and was presented to the ambassador in a pavilion in the gardens of York House with a ceremony which may have given a hint for the masque of the Muscovites in v. ii. 158 ff., especially as the episode was long remembered as a joke.

In the characters of Armado and Holofernes traces have been found of the stock types of the braggart soldier and the pedant of Latin and Italian comedy. In the stage directions of the early copies, Armado is often called "Braggart," and Holofernes "Pedant." Some of the former's characteristics may have been suggested by an eccentric Italian who haunted the court of Elizabeth, and was known as the "fantastical monarcho." Boyet calls Armado “a phantasime, a Monarcho" (IV. i. 101), and Holofernes refers to him as a "fanatical phantasime " (v. i. 19). The name of Holofernes may be due to its occurrence in Rabelais as that of the tutor of Garagantua. The rustic pedant had been recently exploited by Sir Philip Sidney in the character of Rombus in The Lady of the May. The scraps of Latin put into the mouth of Holofernes and of Nathaniel are taken from sixteenth-century school-books, a fact which may partly account for the attempts to find in the Pedant a portrait of Shakespeare's own schoolmaster. Endeavors to identify him with John Florio, and to point out in other characters in the play allusions to men concerned in current controversies, are not convincing.

The main point of Love's Labour's Lost for Shakespeare's contemporaries must have been in its pervading burlesque of current fads and affectations. The wit-combats of the lords and ladies, the affected diction of the sonneteering courtiers, the preposterous bombast of Armado, the latinized English and pedantic alliteration of Holofernes, and the quips of Moth, are all parodies of the absurdities into which the prevailing interest in linguistic feats had led almost all classes of Elizabethan society. Euphuism is to-day the most familiar of these fashions, but Euphuism itself, in the strict sense, is not specifically attacked. There are, however, other indications of the influence of Lyly, at this date by far the greatest master of English comedy. The farcical scenes with Moth, Armado, and the clowns, the repartee between the ladies and the courtiers, the scene in which the lovers betray their broken vows, and the general method of representing courtly intercourse, are all foreshadowed in the work of Lyly. Nor need it be supposed that all the verbal affectation and quaintnesses in the play are due to a burlesque intention. Shakespeare himself, as all his early work goes to show, was fascinated by the word-play in which his contemporaries indulged, and the eloquence of the finer speeches of Biron is probably the outcome of a genuine delight in the discovery of his own power to manipulate words as skilfully as his fellows.

The general drift of the play is evident alike in the plot and in the verbal parodies, namely, the exposure of the absurdity of departing from common sense, and the ability of Nature to assert herself to the discomfiture of those who foolishly attempt to organize society on artificial lines that run counter to the fundamental laws of our constitution. appears in the early copies, is accented on the second syllable, Boyet" rimes with "debt; Moth 19 was pronounced "mote: and "Rosaline " rimes with "thine."

"Biron," or Berowne

and rimes with "moon;'

as it