Love's Labour's Lost (Annotated by Henry N. Hudson with an Introduction by Charles Harold Herford)

By William Shakespeare

One of Shakespeare’s early comedies and most ornately intellectual plays, “Love’s Labour’s Lost” is a mental adventure in hilarity and wit. First published in 1598, the play is filled with lexical puns, literary allusions, and shifting poetic forms, a rich example of the Bard’s linguistic mastery. The play opens with King Phillip of Naverre announcing that the men of his court will devote the coming years to ascetic studies and to reduce distractions, no women will be allowed into the court for three years. However, Naverre and his companions cannot resist the allure of the Princess of France when she comes to visit with her ladies to plead with the King for help. A series of hilarious events ensue as the men fall in love with the beautiful ladies in violation of their oaths. Confusion and humor abound as the women of the court form an alliance to gain entrance in disguise, while the men try to escape also in disguise to meet their loves. In the wit and humor of “Love’s Labour’s Lost” we find an example of Shakespeare’s legendary comedic talent. This edition includes a preface and annotations by Henry N. Hudson, an introduction by Charles Harold Herford, and a biographical afterword.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Digireads.com Publishing
• Release date: Feb 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781420960549

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare is the world's greatest ever playwright. Born in 1564, he split his time between Stratford-upon-Avon and London, where he worked as a playwright, poet and actor. In 1582 he married Anne Hathaway. Shakespeare died in 1616 at the age of fifty-two, leaving three children—Susanna, Hamnet and Judith. The rest is silence.

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LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST

By WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Preface and Annotations by

HENRY N. HUDSON

Introduction by

CHARLES HAROLD HERFORD

Love’s Labour’s Lost

By William Shakespeare

Preface and Annotations by Henry N. Hudson

Introduction by Charles Harold Herford

Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-6115-7

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-6054-9

This edition copyright © 2018. Digireads.com Publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover Image: a detail of ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost, Act II, Scene 1, the Arrival of the Princess of France’ (oil on canvas), by Thomas Stothard (1755-1834) / Royal Shakespeare Company Collection, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire / Bridgeman Images.

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

ACT I.

SCENE I.

SCENE II.

ACT II.

SCENE I.

ACT III.

SCENE I.

ACT IV.

SCENE I.

SCENE II.

SCENE III.

ACT V.

SCENE I.

SCENE II.

BIOGRAPHICAL AFTERWORD

Preface

One of the plays mentioned by Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia, 1598, as an example of Shakespeare’s reputed excellence in Comedy. The same year a quarto edition of the play was published, with the following in the title-page: As it was presented before her Highness this last Christmas. Newly corrected and augmented. No earlier or later issue of the play in quarto is known to have been made; so that we are in the dark as to what the corrections and expansions were. There was also published the same year, 1598, The Month’s Mind of a Melancholy Lover, in which the piece is clearly referred to:

Love’s Labour Lost! I once did see a play

Ycleped so, so called to my pain,

Which I to hear to my small joy did stay,

Giving attendance on my froward dame.

Each actor play’d in cunning wise his part,

But chiefly those entrapp’d in Cupid’s snare;

Yet all was feigned, ’twas not from the heart;

They seem’d to grieve, but yet they felt no care:

’Twas I that grief indeed did bear in breast;

The others did but make a show in jest.

Beyond the forecited notices, we have no external evidence as to the time either of the original writing or of the revision. But the piece itself abounds in unmistakable marks of the Poet’s earliest style. Though not, perhaps, much superior as a whole to The Two Gentlemen, yet it has several rare strains of poetry far surpassing any thing in that play. We find in both, says Staunton, though in different degrees, the same fluency and sweetness of measure, the same frequency of rhymes, the same laborious addiction to quibbling, repartees, and doggerel verse; and in both it is observable that depth of characterization is altogether subordinate to elegance and sprightliness of dialogue.

No play or tale has come to light, that could have contributed any thing towards the plot or the matter of Love’s Labours Lost. But Mr. Hunter cites a passage from Monstrelet’s Chronicles, which infers that either Shakespeare himself or the author from whom he borrowed had something of an historic basis for the story: "Charles, King of Navarre, came to Paris to wait on the King. He negotiated so successfully with the King and Privy Council, that he obtained the gift of the castle of Nemours, with some of its dependent castle-wicks, which territory was made a duchy. He instantly did homage for it, and at the same time surrendered to the King the castle of Cherburgh, the county of Evreux, and all other lordships he possessed within the kingdom of France; renouncing all claims or profits in them to the King and to his successors, on condition that with the duchy of Nemours the King of France engaged to pay him two hundred thousand gold crowns of the coin of the King our lord." The play has a passage, in ii. I, that tallies exactly with this:

Madam, your father here doth intimate

The payment of a hundred thousand crowns;

Being but the one-half of an entire sum

Disbursed by my father in his wars.

The point is not only curious in itself, but enables us to fix the time of the play, or rather of the story on which it may have been founded, to about the year 1425, in which the King of Navarre died.

This play is badly printed in all the old copies, abounding in gross textual corruptions, some of them of such a nature as almost to defy the resources of corrective art. Learned editors and commentators have laboured hard and long to get the text into a satisfactory state; but, apparently, something, perhaps much, still remains to be done. Several corrections, none of them my own however, will here be found, that are not to be met with, so far as I know, in any other edition of the Poet’s works.

HENRY N. HUDSON.

1880.

Introduction

‘Love’s Labour’s Lost I once did see,’ wrote Robert Tofte, in 1598, in his The Month’s Mind of a Melancholy Lover. The play was therefore then no longer new. In its original form it no longer exists. A few months before Tofte wrote, it had been revised and expanded by Shakespeare for performance before the Queen as a part of the Christmas festivities at Whitehall. The text thus ‘newly corrected and augmented’ was published in the following year, and is known as the first quarto. Soon after the accession of James I. the play, which had pleased Elizabeth, was resorted to by Shakespeare’s company in one of the embarrassments created by the vigorous dramatic appetite of the new Queen. ‘I have sent and bene all thys morning huntyng for players Juglers and such kinde of Creaturs,’ wrote Sir Walter Cope in 1604 to Lord Cranborne, ‘but fynde them hard to finde, wherefore leavinge notes for them to seeke me, Burbage ys come and Sayes ther ys no new playe that the quene hath not seene, but they have Revyved an olde one, cawled Loves Labore lost, which for wytt and mirthe he sayes will please her excedingly. And thys ys apointed to be playd to Morowe night at my Lord of Sowthamptons. . . . Burbage ys my messenger.’ Certainly Anne’s pronounced taste for the artificial style and elaborate allusiveness of the Masque, which she did so much to encourage, made the choice of this play not inapt Two years later, in 1606, another visitor from Scotland, Drummond of Hawthornden, inserted ‘Loues Labors Lost, comedie,’ with only two other plays of Shakespeare—Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream—in a list of books that he had ‘red.’ So late as 1631 it was thought worth while to publish another quarto edition, reprinted from the folio of 1623. But the play owed much of its popularity to a passing phase of taste; it was too intensely of the Elizabethan age to be quite congenial to the next; allusions to it became rare, it entirely disappeared from the stage, and a disparaging mention of it by Dryden in company with The Winter’s Tale and Measure for Measure, as an example of Shakespeare’s incoherent comic plots, must be reckoned to it for an honour. Throughout the eighteenth century it continued to be, in England, among the least regarded of his works. At length the discovery of Shakespeare in Germany suddenly provided an audience of delighted readers for the neglected play. The band of young Shakespeareans who gathered round Herder and Goethe at Strassburg revelled in its young vivacity, its ‘whimsicality’ and ‘quibbles’;{1} and a generation later the very profusion of caprice and fancy which disturbed the commonsense criticism of Johnsonian England, secured for it the peculiar favour of the Romantic Tieck.

The original version of Love’s Labour’s Lost was among the earliest of Shakespeare’s original plays, if not, as is generally supposed, the first of all. The ‘corrections’ of 1597 have, doubtless, removed many marks of early style; happily, however, they have also, indirectly, given us a unique clue to them; fragments of the original version having, in at least three cases, remained embedded in the ‘corrected’ text. Two of these occur in Biron’s great speech (iv. 3. 296 f. and 320 f.). Here the ‘correction’ has merely served to heighten the vigour of the phrasing. The third, however, throws the divergences of the Shakespeare of 1597 from the Shakespeare of eight years earlier into glaring relief. The earlier version of Rosaline’s compact with Biron (v. 2. 827-832) is singularly jejune. The past mistress of quips and cranks seems to take up the role of moral censor as a new phase in the game of outwitting the lords, and to impose her penalty by way of flinging a last decisive shot at her adversary. In the later version (v. 851 f.) she has passed, like the princess, into a serious and feeling mood (announced to the reader by Biron’s question: ‘Studies my lady?’), and the demand, before petulantly tossed at him in somewhat jerky iambics, is now gravely formulated in lines of subtly varied movement and eloquently rounded phrase, and with a moral dignity for which certainly nothing in her previous bearing prepares us. But then Shakespeare, when he thus ‘corrected,’ was already the creator of Portia.

Many youthful traits, however, remain: the characters symmetrically grouped and on the whole slightly drawn; the comic parts loosely attached and inclining to burlesque and caricature; the language bristling with verbal antitheses; the verse, running with a facility and a frequency unapproached in any other play, into lyric strophes and into doggerel. The last is the most decisive ground for giving this play a very early date. Lyric strophes, which here occupy 236 lines, Shakespeare continued to use occasionally, in exalted passages, as late as Much Ado and As You Like It (1600); but doggerel was a relic of the pre-Marlowesque drama, which, after making the most of it in the present comedy (194 verses) and The Comedy of Errors (108 verses), and allowing a few lines to Speed in the Two Gentlemen, he practically abandoned. And nowhere but in this comedy does it serve for the dialogue of high-bred persons. For reasons given in the next section it cannot be dated earlier than 1589-90. The grounds just stated forbid us to date it later.

Love’s Labour’s Lost is full of topical and allusive matter, but seems to owe very little to any previous literature.{2} The most important of these topical allusions, so far as they affect the structure of the play, are the following:—

(1) The scene is laid at the court of Navarre; the King therefore stands unquestionably for Henry IV., whose fortunes excited the keenest sympathy in England. This was especially the case between