Love's Labour's Won

''Love's Labour's Won'' is a lost play attributed by contemporaries to William Shakespeare, written before 1598 and published by 1603, though no copies are known to have survived. Scholars dispute whether it is a true lost work, possibly a sequel to '' Love's Labour's Lost'', or an alternative title to a known Shakespeare play.

Evidence

The first mention of the play occurs in Francis Meres' '' Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury'' (1598) in which he lists a dozen Shakespeare plays. His list of Shakespearean comedies reads:
:"for Comedy, witnes his '' Gẽtlemẽ of Verona'', his '' Errors'', his '' Loue labors lost'', his ''Loue labours wonne'', his '' Midsummers night dreame'', & his ''Merchant of Venice''".
The August 1603 book list of the stationer Christopher Hunt lists the play as printed in quarto among other works by Shakespeare:
:"marchant of vennis, taming of a shrew, …loves labor lost, loves labor won."

Theories

Shakespeare scholars have several theories about the play.

Sequel to ''Love's Labour's Lost''

One theory is that ''Love's Labour's Won'' may be a lost sequel to '' Love's Labour's Lost'', depicting the further adventures of the King of Navarre, Berowne, Longaville, and Dumain, whose marriages were delayed at the end of ''Love's Labour's Lost''. In the final moments of ''Love's Labour's Lost'' the weddings that customarily close Shakespeare's comedies are unexpectedly deferred for a year without any obvious plot purpose, which would allow for a sequel.Watts, Cedric, "Shakespeare's feminist play?" in Sutherland, John & Watts, Cedric, ''Henry V, War Criminal? And Other Shakespeare Puzzles'', Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2000, p. 178. Critic Cedric Watts imagined what a sequel might look like:

Against this it must be observed that Elizabethan playwrights almost never wrote sequels to comedies. Sequels were written for historical plays or, less commonly, for tragedies.Baldwin, T. W. ''Shakespere’s Love’s Labor’s Won''. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957.

Alternative name for existing play

Another theory is that ''Love's Labour's Won'' was an alternative name for a known play. This would explain why it was not printed under that name in the First Folio of Shakespeare's complete dramatic works in 1623, for which the sequel theory has no obvious explanation.

A longtime theory held that ''Love's Labour's Won'' was an alternative name for ''The Taming of the Shrew'', which had been written several years earlier and is noticeably missing from Meres' list. But in 1953, Solomon Pottesman, a London-based antiquarian book dealer and collector, discovered the August 1603 book list of the stationer Christopher Hunt, which lists as printed in quarto:
:"marchant of vennis, taming of a shrew, knak to know a knave nknown author knak to know an honest man nknown author loves labor lost, loves labor won."
The find provided evidence that the play might be a distinct work that had been published but lost and not an early title of ''The Taming of the Shrew''. However, this evidence is not decisive. Another playwright had written a play called ''The Taming of a Shrew'' which was published in quarto in 1594, whereas Shakespeare's ''Shrew'' play was not published until the 1623 Folio. Therefore, it is possible that Shakespeare originally titled his Shrew play ''Love's Labour's Won'' in order to distinguish it from the rival play.

Yet another possibility is that the name is an alternative title for another Shakespearean comedy not listed by Meres or Hunt. ''Much Ado About Nothing'', commonly believed to be written around 1598, is often suggested. For example, Henry Woudhuysen's Arden edition (third series) of ''Love's Labour's Lost'' lists a number of striking similarities between the two plays. ''Much Ado about Nothing'' is also listed under another alternative title – ''Benedick and Beatrice –'' in several book sellers' catalogues.

Leslie Hotson speculated that ''Love's Labour's Won'' was the former title of ''Troilus and Cressida'', which did not appear in ''Palladis Tamia.'' This view that has been criticised by Kenneth Palmer for requiring a "forced interpretation of the play". In addition, ''Troilus and Cressida'' is generally considered to have been written around 1602.

David Grote argues that it was another name for '' As You Like It''. He suggests that titles for comedies were often generic – several plays could be called "As You Like It" or "All's Well that Ends Well", for example, and that names were not fixed until repeated publication. He suggests that ''As You Like It'' began as a sequel to ''Love's Labour's Lost'', but was later revised when Robert Armin replaced William Kempe as the principal comic actor in Shakespeare's theatre company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men.

Use of the title

In their 2014 season commemorating the centenary of the commencement of World War I hostilities, the Royal Shakespeare Company co-opted the title in performing ''Much Ado about Nothing'' under the name ''Love's Labour's Won (also known as Much Ado about Nothing)''. It was staged as a companion piece to ''Love's Labour's Lost''. The pair of plays bookended the period of the war. ''Love's Labour's Lost'' was set at the beginning of the war in 1914, with ''Love Labour's Won'' set at its end in 1918, with the male characters returning home after the final victory.

In other popular culture

The play was featured as a plot device in the 1948 novel ''Love Lies Bleeding'' (1948) by Edmund Crispin, in which the discovery of a copy of the play triggers a series of murders.

The writing of the play is a major plot point in the 2007 ''Doctor Who'' episode "The Shakespeare Code" where The Tenth Doctor witnesses the writing of the play firsthand.

It was also used in the book series ''The 39 Clues'' as a minor plot device in the final book of the first series.

In Harry Turtledove's alternate history novel ''Ruled Britannia'', depicting a Spanish-ruled England in which Shakespeare is involved in the clandestine resistance, depicts him writing a play called ''Love's Labour's Won''. However, this play seems to be simply "our" ''Love's Labour's Lost'', as Shakespeare is shown making a last-minute change of Don Armado's nationality from Spanish to Italian, to avoid insulting the overlords.

References

Bibliography

* Baldwin, T.W. ''Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Won: New Evidence from the Account Books of an Elizabethan Bookseller''. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957.

{{Authority control

Plays by William Shakespeare
Lost plays
1590s plays
Shakespeare apocrypha
Sequel plays