[12 May 1981]
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O
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ne of the projects that have been distracting me in here is
the whole question of Love’s Labor Won.
The thing is—no-one has paid attention to the Stationer’s Register evidence,
which is fatal to certain ideas. If there was a quarto in 1603 then the plays
entered in 1622 or 1623 or whenever it was cannot be Love’s Labor Won in any form—which rules out for instance an early
draft of All’s Well that Ends Well—T.
W. Baldwin’s choice. Much Ado About Nothing
could be Love’s Labor Won only if the
1603 writer in this single instance gave a play a title not found on the
title-page. The Taming of the Shrew
is possible on the assumption that a good quarto of the play was issued after
the 1594 bad quarto (if it was) and was then lost—but in that case, why did the
Folio editors prefer the title of the bad quarto over the good? My suggestion
is that the play is indeed lost. Why then wasn’t it included in the first
folio? Either (a) because it was not by Shakespeare—but the fact that all the
other plays mentioned by Meres were included makes this at least unlikely—or
(b) LLW was a bad quarto and the editors lacked a good text to replace it. In
support of this second conjecture may I point out that (1) Love’s Labor Lost was not entered in the SR; (2) It was issued as
having been augmented or enlarged or something like that; (3) LLL was printed
in the Folio exclusively from the quarto; (4) LLL seems to cry out for a
sequel. It has often been suggested that LLL was first issued in a bad quarto,
like Romeo and Juliet, which has been
lost. What if LLW was also so issued, but was not replaced by a good quarto? What
if LLL and LLW were in effect two parts of a piece? or whatever. Anyway, the
only real problem I see with this is the question of why no good text would be
available for the play. No text apparently available for LLL, but that could be
explained on the assumption that the quarto had made a ms unnecessary. And so
on and so forth. Anyway, that’s what I’ve been playing with.
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