For when would you, my lord, or you, or you,

Have found the ground of study’s excellence

Without the beauty of a woman’s face?

From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive.

They are the ground, the books, the academes,

From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire.

Why, universal plodding poisons up

The nimble spirits in the arteries,

As motion and long-during action tires

The sinewy vigour of the traveller.

Now, for not looking on a woman’s face

You have in that forsworn the use of eyes,

And study, too, the causer of your vow.

For where is any author in the world

Teaches such beauty as a woman’s eye?

Learning is but an adjunct to ourself,

And where we are, our learning likewise is.

Then when ourselves we see in ladies’ eyes

With ourselves.

Do we not likewise see our learning there?

B. The following two lines, spoken by the Princess and found after 5.2.130 in the First Quarto, seem to represent a first draft of 5.2.131-2.

Hold, Rosaline. This favour thou shalt wear,

And then the King will court thee for his dear.

C. The following lines found after 5.2.809 in the First Quarto represent a draft version of 5.2.824-41.

BIRON

And what to me, my love? And what to me?

ROSALINE

You must be purged, too. Your sins are rank.

You are attaint with faults and perjury.

Therefore if you my favour mean to get

A twelvemonth shall you spend, and never rest

But seek the weary beds of people sick.

LOVE’S LABOUR’S WON

A BRIEF ACCOUNT

IN 1598, Francis Meres called as witnesses to Shakespeare’s excellence in comedy ‘his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love Labour’s Lost, his Love Labour’s Wone, his Midsummer’s Night Dream, and his Merchant of Venice’. This was the only evidence that Shakespeare wrote a play called Love’s Labour’s Won until the discovery in 1953 of a fragment of a bookseller’s list that had been used in the binding of a volume published in 1637/8. The fragment itself appears to record titles sold from 9 to 17 August 1603 by a book dealer in the south of England. Among items headed ‘[inte]rludes & tragedyes’ are

marchant of vennis

taming of a shrew

knak to know a knave

knak to know an honest man

loves labor lost

loves labor won

No author is named for any of the items. All the plays named in the list except Love’s Labour’s Won are known to have been printed by 1600; all were written by 1596-7. Taken together, Meres’s reference in 1598 and the 1603 fragment appear to demonstrate that a play by Shakespeare called Love’s Labour’s Won had been performed by the time Meres wrote and was in print by August 1603. Conceivably the phrase served as an alternative title for one of Shakespeare’s other comedies, though the only one believed to have been written by 1598 but not listed by Meres is The Taming of the Shrew, which is named (as The Taming of A Shrew) in the bookseller’s fragment. Otherwise we must suppose that Love’s Labour’s Won is the title of a lost play by Shakespeare, that no copy of the edition mentioned in the bookseller’s list is extant, and that Heminges and Condell failed to include it in the 1623 Folio.

None of these suppositions is implausible. We know of at least one other lost play attributed to Shakespeare (see Cardenio, below), and of many lost works by contemporary playwrights. No copy of the first edition of Titus Andronicus was known until 1904; for I Henry IV and The Passionate Pilgrim only a fragment of the first edition survives. And we now know that Troilus and Cressida was almost omitted from the 1623 Folio (probably for copyright reasons) despite its evident authenticity. It is also possible that, like most of the early editions of Shakespeare’s plays, the lost edition of Love’s Labour’s Won did not name him on the title-page, and this omission might go some way to explaining the failure of the edition to survive, or (if it does) to be noticed. Love’s Labour’s Won stands a much better chance of having survived, somewhere, than Cardenio: because it was printed, between 500 and 1,500 copies were once in circulation, whereas for Cardenio we know of only a single manuscript.

The evidence for the existence of the lost play (unlike that for Cardenio) gives us little indication of its content. Meres explicitly states, and the title implies, that it was a comedy. Its titular pairing with Love’s Labour’s Lost suggests that they may have been written at about the same time. Both Meres and the bookseller’s catalogue place it after Love’s Labour’s Lost; although neither list is necessarily chronological, Meres’s does otherwise agree with our own view of the order of composition of Shakespeare’s comedies.

RICHARD II

THE subject matter of Richard II seemed inflammatorily topical to Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Richard, who had notoriously indulged his favourites, had been compelled to yield his throne to Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Hereford: like Richard, the ageing Queen Elizabeth had no obvious successor, and she too encouraged favourites—such as the Earl of Essex—who might aspire to the throne. When Shakespeare’s play first appeared in print (in 1597), and in the two succeeding editions printed during Elizabeth’s life, the episode (4.1.145-308) showing Richard yielding the crown was omitted, and in 1601, on the day before Essex led his ill-fated rebellion against Elizabeth, his fellow conspirators commissioned a special performance in the hope of arousing popular support, even though the play was said to be ‘long out of use’—surprisingly, since it was probably written no earlier than 1595.

But Shakespeare introduced no obvious topicality into his dramatization of Richard’s reign, for which he read widely while using Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577, revised and enlarged in 1587) as his main source of information. In choosing to write about Richard II (1367―1400) he was returning to the beginning of the story whose ending he had staged in Richard III; for Bolingbroke’s usurpation of the throne to which Richard’s hereditary right was indisputable had set in train the series of events finally expiated only in the union of the houses of York and Lancaster celebrated in the last speech of Richard III. Like Richard III, this is a tragical history, focusing on a single character; but Richard II is a far more introverted and morally ambiguous figure than Richard III. In this play, written entirely in verse, Shakespeare forgoes stylistic variety in favour of an intense, plangent lyricism.