ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE

No, sir, not I. I came from Syracuse.

DUKE

Stay, stand apart. I know not which is which.

ANTIPHOLUS OF EPHESUS

I came from Corinth, my most gracious lord.

DROMIO OF EPHESUS And I with him.

ANTIPHOLUS OF EPHESUS

Brought to this town by that most famous warrior,

Duke Menaphon, your most renowned uncle.

ADRIANA

Which of you two did dine with me today?

ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE I, gentle mistress.

ADRIANA And are not you my husband?

ANTIPHOLUS OF EPHESUS No, I say nay to that.

ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE

And so do I. Yet did she call me so;

And this fair gentlewoman, her sister here,

Did call me brother. (To Luciana) What I told you then

I hope I shall have leisure to make good,

If this be not a dream I see and hear.

ANGELO

That is the chain, sir, which you had of me.

ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE

I think it be, sir. I deny it not.

ANTIPHOLUS OF EPHESUS (to Angelo)

And you, sir, for this chain arrested me.

ANGELO

I think I did, sir. I deny it not.

ADRIANA (to Antipholus of Ephesus)

I sent you money, sir, to be your bail,

By Dromio, but I think he brought it not.

DROMIO OF EPHESUS No, none by me.

ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE (to Adriana)

This purse of ducats I received from you,

And Dromio my man did bring them me.

I see we still did meet each other’s man,

And I was ta’en for him, and he for me,

And thereupon these errors are arose.

ANTIPHOLUS OF EPHESUS

These ducats pawn I for my father here.

DUKE

It shall not need. Thy father hath his life.

COURTESAN

Sir, I must have that diamond from you.

ANTIPHOLUS OF EPHESUS

There, take it, and much thanks for my good cheer.

ABBESS

Renowned Duke, vouchsafe to take the pains

To go with us into the abbey here,

And hear at large discoursed all our fortunes,

And all that are assembled in this place,

That by this sympathized one day’s error

Have suffered wrong. Go, keep us company,

And we shall make full satisfaction.

Thirty-three years have I but gone in travail

Of you, my sons, and till this present hour

My heavy burden ne’er delivered.

The Duke, my husband, and my children both,

And you the calendars of their nativity,

Go to a gossips’ feast, and joy with me.

After so long grief, such festivity!

DUKE

With all my heart I’ll gossip at this feast.

Exeunt ⌈into the priory⌉ all but the two Dromios and two brothers Antipholus

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE (to Antipholus of Ephesus)

Master, shall I fetch your stuff from shipboard?

ANTIPHOLUS OF EPHESUS

Dromio, what stuff of mine hast thou embarked?

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE

Your goods that lay at host, sir, in the Centaur.

ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE

He speaks to me.—I am your master, Dromio.

Come, go with us. We’ll look to that anon.

Embrace thy brother there; rejoice with him.

Exeunt the brothers Antipholus

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE

There is a fat friend at your master’s house,

That kitchened me for you today at dinner.

She now shall be my sister, not my wife.

DROMIO OF EPHESUS

Methinks you are my glass and not my brother.

I see by you I am a sweet-faced youth.

Will you walk in to see their gossiping?

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE Not I, sir, you are my elder.

DROMIO or EPHESUS That’s a question. How shall we try it?

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE We’ll draw cuts for the senior. Till then, lead thou first.

DROMIO OF EPHESUS Nay, then thus:

We came into the world like brother and brother,

And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before another.

Exeunt ⌈to the priory⌉

LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST

THE first, 1598 edition of Love’s Labour’s Lost is the earliest play text to carry Shakespeare’s name on the title-page, which also refers to performance before the Queen ‘this last Christmas’. The play is said to be ‘Newly corrected and augmented’, so perhaps an earlier edition has failed to survive. Even so, the text shows every sign of having been printed from Shakespeare’s working papers, since it includes some passages in draft as well as in revised form. We print the drafts as Additional Passages. The play was probably written some years before publication, in 1594 or 1595.

The setting is Navarre—a kingdom straddling the border between Spain and France—where the young King and three of his friends vow to devote the following three years to austere self-improvement, forgoing the company of women. But they have forgotten the imminent arrival on a diplomatic mission of the Princess of France with, as it happens, three of her ladies; much comedy derives from, first, the men’s embarrassed attempts to conceal from one another that they are falling in love, and second, the girls’ practical joke in exchanging identities when the men, disguised as Russians, come to entertain and to woo them. Shakespeare seems to have picked up the King’s friends’ names—Biron, Dumaine, and Longueville—from leading figures in contemporary France, but to have invented the plot himself. He counterpoints the main action with events involving characters based in part on the type-figures of Italian commedia dell‘arte who reflect facets of the lords’ personalities. Costard, an unsophisticated, open-hearted yokel, and his girl-friend Jaquenetta are sexually uninhibited; Don Adriano de Armado, ‘a refinèd traveller of Spain’ who also, though covertly, loves Jaquenetta, is full of pompous affectation; and Holofernes, a schoolmaster (seen always with his doting companion, the curate Sir Nathaniel), demonstrates the avid pedantry into which the young men’s verbal brilliance could degenerate. Much of the play’s language is highly sophisticated (this is, as the title-page claims, a ‘conceited comedy’), in keeping with its subject matter. But the action reaches its climax when a messenger brings news which is communicated entirely without verbal statement. This is a theatrical masterstroke which also signals Shakespeare’s most daring experiment with comic form. ‘The scene begins to cloud’; in the play’s closing minutes the lords and ladies seek to readjust themselves to the new situation, and the play ends in subdued fashion with a third entertainment, the songs of the owl and the cuckoo.

Love’s Labour’s Lost was for long regarded as a play of excessive verbal sophistication, of interest mainly because of a series of supposed topical allusions; but a number of distinguished twentieth-century productions revealed its theatrical mastery.

THE PERSONS OF THE PLAY

Ferdinand, KING of Navarre