C

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST

INTRODUCTION

OLERIDGE'S opinion in favour of the very early production of Love's Labour's Lost has been quoted by most recent editors; but surely no intelligent and observant reader can need the aid of so eminent a critic to establish in him the belief that this play is among the first that Shakespeare wrote. No other seems to present so many claims to be considered the very first that he composed entirely. The earliest known edition is the quarto of 1598; but as the copy from which this professes to be printed was "newly corrected and augmented," in order to its presentation at Court, that date is but the limit before which it must have been originally written, successfully performed, and partly rewritten; so that the mention of it by Meres, in the same year, is of no consequence. This correction and augmentation, too, diminished the amount of internal evidence as to the early writing of the play in its original form; for it cannot be doubted that Shakespeare applied the knife to those parts which bore most unmistakable marks of youth and inexperience, and that what he added was, in style at least, worthy of him in his thirty-fifth year. These latter passages hardly any intelligent reader can fail to detect when told that they exist. The end of the fifth Act, after the announcement of the death of the King of France, is one of them; and there accident left trace of the alteration to which the play had been subjected, in the printing of a passage which was, or which should have been erased, because it was superseded by an augmentation of the identical thought in another and a more appropriate place. [Traces

of the first form may be found at IV. iii. 299 f. and 320 f. and at V. ii. 827-32 (cf. 847-64).] But had there been an edition previous to the correction, its date would hardly reach back to that of the production of the comedy, which was probably not later than 1588.

The reasons for believing it to be the earliest of its author's entirely original plays are, the unfitness of the subject for dramatic treatment, and the want of experience shown in the conduct of the plot and the arrangement of stage effect; in both which points it is much inferior to either The Two Gentlemen of Verona or The Comedy of Errors, one of which must be its rival for the honour of being Shakespeare's maiden effort as a dramatic author: the purely external and verbal character of the faults and foibles at which its satire is aimed, even in its very title; which are just such as would excite the spleen of a very young man who to genius added common sense, and who had just commenced a literary career: the fact that when Shakespeare was from twenty to twenty-five years old, the affectation in speech known as Euphuism was at its height; Euphues his England having been published in 1580 [technical Euphuism is not so much satirised as Latinism and Gorgorism, as well as other contemporaneous affectations]:—the inferiority of all the characters in strong original traits, even to those of The Two Gentlemen of Verona or The Comedy of Errors; Armado alone having a clear and well-defined individuality, and his figure, though deftly drawn, being somewhat common-place in kind for Shakespeare, while Birone, Rosaline, and Dull are rather germs of character than characters [making the whole an essay in the Comedy of Humours that Jonson was later to make peculiarly his own, and a satire, in the mood of Molière's Précieuses Ridicules, on the affectations of Elizabethan culture]: -the use of couplets, alternate rhymes, and even doggerel in the more dignified parts of the work: -the fact that Monarcho, who is alluded to in IV. i., died before 1580; as we know by Churchyard's epitaph upon him, bearing that date: and, last not least, as it appears to me, in the inno

vating omission of a professed Fool's or Jester's part from the list of dramatis personæ; for it is ever the ambitious way of youthful genius to aim at novelty of form in its first essays, while yet in treatment it falls unconsciously into a vein of reminiscence; afterward it is apt to return to established forms, and to show originality in treatment. So Shakespeare, on the rebound (for Love's Labour's Lost, it is safe to say, was never popular) put two Fools into both The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Comedy of Errors; and afterward, in nearly all his comedies, and even in some of his grandest tragedies, he introduced this character, so essential to the enjoyment of a large part of the audience for which he wrote; asserting his plastic power over his own genius by moulding his wit, his humour, his pathos, and his wisdom into forms which find fit utterance beneath the Jester's cap and chime with the tinkle of his bells.1 [To these evidences of early date may be added Robert Tofte's reference to the play in his poem, Alba, or The Month's Mind of a Melancholy Lover, printed in 1598. The play was too full of local allusions to hold the stage. It was neglected throughout the eighteenth century and regained favour largely through the German romantic movement, especially through the enthusiastic commendation of Herder, Lenz, and Tieck.]

No source of the plot of Love's Labour's Lost has been discovered; but that the play is founded upon some older work, its undramatic character, its needless fulness of detail, its air of artificial romance, and the attribution of particular personal traits - such as black eyes and a dark complexion to one, great size to another, and a face pitted with the small-pox to another of the ladies, and the merely incidental hints that one of the King's friends is an officer in the army and extremely youthful - seem unmistakable evidence; and that the story is of French origin is as clearly shown by the nationality of the titles, the Gallicism of calling a love-letter a capon, the appearance of the strong French negative,

1 See Ward, II. 76, for a summary of Sarrazin's points in favour of a later date. Lee (pp. 50-2) inclines to favour 1591. (R)

point, twice, and the use of seigneur instead of "signior." Collier supposes, with some reason, that the appearance of Armado and Holofernes in the dramatis personæ is indicative of an acquaintance with the early Italian drama, in which the Spanish braggart and the pedant were stereotyped characters; but Warburton's declaration, that the latter was a satire on John Florio, rests upon assumptions not worthy of

serious attention.

As there never was a Ferdinand, King of Navarre, and history records no mortgage of any part of France to Navarre for war expenses, the period of the action is quite indeterminable.1 [The King is doubtless meant for Henry IV., and Birone, Longaville, and Dumaine were prominent figures in the civil wars: Marshall Biron, the Duke of Longueville, and the Duke du Maine. There is a suggestion of Catharine de' Medici's journey to Henry at San Bris in 1586 in the romantic embassy of the ladies of the play (I. i. 135) and the Russian disguise in V. ii. was doubtless suggested by the Czar's mission to England in 1584. Some identify Moth with the popular French ambassador La Motte. Other identifications of personages have been attempted, but are uncertain and perhaps no longer ascertainable. But it is clear that the play abounds in contemporary allusions beyond any other comedy of Shakespeare, unless it be The Merry Wives of Windsor. Holofernes is more likely to have been suggested by Rabelais than by Florio. The fresh songs of spring and summer at the close of the comedy have been thought to show the influence of Chaucer's Parlement of Foules.] The costume may be the French dress of any period before the end of the sixteenth century, for all the characters except Armado (whose plumage should show some Spanish feathers) and Sir Nathaniel, Holofernes, and Dull, who are

1 The Rev. Joseph Hunter has, however, pointed out a passage in Monstrelet's Chronicles, which mentions a negotiation between the King of France and a Charles of Navarre, that resulted in the obligation of the former to pay the latter two hundred thousand crowns. New Illustrations, &c., Vol. I. p. 256.

plainly an English curate, an English schoolmaster, and an English third-borough of Shakespeare's time.

The text of this play is but slightly corrupted, and that in unimportant passages, in either the folio or the quarto edition. A repetition of certain errors shows that the former was printed from a copy of the latter. Collier remarks truly that the folio adds some errors of its own; but he does not remark - perhaps because he failed to observe — that it corrects a great many more than it makes. There are also variations which came from another source than the quarto; and thus it is plain that although the folio itself was not exempt from accidents, these do not invalidate its authenticity, or exempt us from the obligation to accept its deliberate changes as authoritative, and to regard the quarto only as auxiliary to the formation of the text.