Love's Labour's Won is something of a mystery in the Shakespearean canon. It is not the only one,... more Love's Labour's Won is something of a mystery in the Shakespearean canon. It is not the only one, though, since the lost play Cardenio, by Shakespeare and Fletcher, is also problematic. Yet, we do know that "Cardenno" was played at court in 1612-1613 and that it was duly registered for publication by Humphrey Moseley at the Stationers' Hall in September 1653, whereas the information related to the performance of Love's Labour's Won is entirely missing. Part of the difficulty with Love's Labour's Won is that the play, if it was ever performed, was never registered. Its title is obviously that of an early comedy which "must have either been missed when Heminge and Condell compiled the Folio (after all like Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen, while Timon of Athens was only squeezed in as a filler when copyright problems almost excluded Troilus and Cressida), or […] must have got into the volume under a different name." 1 Two solutions can thus be offered: either the text of the play, like many others at the time, was entirely lost, or it was performed and then published under a different name. The logic underpinning the current scholarship on Love's Labour's Lost/Won is not entirely satisfactory for treasure seekers as the general response has been to subsume the unknown title under the identity of a familiar play rather than celebrate the possibility of a new Shakespeare play. What could this "familiar" play be? Many different suggestions have been made by editors and critics as speculations started early. In a letter dated February 28 1767, which he sent to a Cambridge scholar named Richard Farmer, Bishop Percy said that he had identified Love's Labour's Won as All's Well that Ends Well . Impressed by Bishop Percy's "discovery," Farmer included the suggestion in his Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare (1767), unlikely though it may have been. 2 All the same, he was followed in this by Edmund Malone who, after dating All's Well to 1598 on stylistic grounds, also identified that comedy with Love's Labour 's Won. 3 This hypothesis has been discarded because, on the basis of topical allusions and intertextual echoes, it is now suggested that All's Well was not completed before
Love's Labour's Won is something of a mystery in the Shakespearean canon. It is not the only one,... more Love's Labour's Won is something of a mystery in the Shakespearean canon. It is not the only one, though, since the lost play Cardenio, by Shakespeare and Fletcher, is also problematic. Yet, we do know that "Cardenno" was played at court in 1612-1613 and that it was duly registered for publication by Humphrey Moseley at the Stationers' Hall in September 1653, whereas the information related to the performance of Love's Labour's Won is entirely missing. Part of the difficulty with Love's Labour's Won is that the play, if it was ever performed, was never registered. Its title is obviously that of an early comedy which "must have either been missed when Heminge and Condell compiled the Folio (after all like Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen, while Timon of Athens was only squeezed in as a filler when copyright problems almost excluded Troilus and Cressida), or […] must have got into the volume under a different name." 1 Two solutions can thus be offered: either the text of the play, like many others at the time, was entirely lost, or it was performed and then published under a different name. The logic underpinning the current scholarship on Love's Labour's Lost/Won is not entirely satisfactory for treasure seekers as the general response has been to subsume the unknown title under the identity of a familiar play rather than celebrate the possibility of a new Shakespeare play. What could this "familiar" play be? Many different suggestions have been made by editors and critics as speculations started early. In a letter dated February 28 1767, which he sent to a Cambridge scholar named Richard Farmer, Bishop Percy said that he had identified Love's Labour's Won as All's Well that Ends Well . Impressed by Bishop Percy's "discovery," Farmer included the suggestion in his Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare (1767), unlikely though it may have been. 2 All the same, he was followed in this by Edmund Malone who, after dating All's Well to 1598 on stylistic grounds, also identified that comedy with Love's Labour 's Won. 3 This hypothesis has been discarded because, on the basis of topical allusions and intertextual echoes, it is now suggested that All's Well was not completed before
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