Love's Labour's Lost (1925) Yale/Appendix B
APPENDIX B
Shakespeare's Original Text and His Revision
The date of composition of Shakespeare's original (lost) version of Love's Labour's Lost and its relation to the text of 1598, corrected and augmented for performance at court, have been the subject of long discussion, to which daring contributions have been made within the last half-dozen years. The conjectured dates of original composition range, according to Dr. Furness' table, from 1588 or earlier till after 1596. Metrical evidence, persisting even in the augmented text, supports the assumption of Furnivall, Dowden, and Sir Sidney Lee that Love's Labour's Lost is the earliest of all Shakespeare's plays. Hart (Arden ed., x–xvii) finds other internal evidence pointing 'to 1590 for the date of the earliest form of the play.' Such till recently has been the generally accepted opinion.
In the Modern Language Review (July, October, 1918) Mr. H. B. Charlton published a monograph on 'The Date of Love's Labour's Lost,' in which he argues for the latter part of 1592 as the time of first composition and assumes only a slight revision immediately previous to the performance of 1597–8. Subsequent writers have apparently inclined to accept Mr. Charlton's rather iconoclastic conclusions. Professor J. Q. Adams[1] agrees that '1592 is the earliest date that can possibly be assigned to the play,' and conjectures that it was composed during the inhibition of acting from June till December of that year. The recent Cambridge editors (1923) go farther and, joining Mr. Charlton's deductions to some fancied evidences in the play of hostility to Sir Walter Raleigh and his associates, arrive at 1593 for the year of writing: 'We give it as our belief, and no more, that Love's Labour's Lost was written in 1593 for a private performance in the house of some grandee who had opposed Raleigh and Raleigh's "men"—possibly the Earl of Southampton's.'
I venture to suggest briefly some reasons for thinking that the probability of an early version of Love's Labour's Lost, written not later than 1590 and standing very near the beginning of Shakespeare's dramatic work, remains unimpaired.[2] Mr. Charlton agrees that Shakespeare's use of topical names (Navarre, Berowne, Longaville, Dumaine) is a concession to English interest in contemporary events in France. This interest, he maintains, really began with the sending of an expeditionary force to the aid of Henry of Navarre in July, 1591, while 'the summer and autumn of 1592 marked the highest level of English public interest in the French wars.'[3] It seems clear, on the other hand, that if Shakespeare gave his sentimental students these topical names out of consideration for public interest in their namesakes, he could only have done so before the public, or he himself, had yet acquired any clear notion of the character and achievements of the latter. To call the King of Navarre Ferdinand rather than Henry and ignore his pretensions to the French crown, to say nothing (virtually) of the military fame of the four gentlemen and associate Dumaine in friendship with the rest, or alternatively, to confuse Dumaine with d'Aumont,[4] would have affronted common intelligence if attempted very long after the death of Henri III (August 2, 1589) had brought them all upon the centre of the political stage. I take it that the period between Henri III's assassination and the battle of Ivry (March 14, 1590) was the latest at which an English dramatist could have thought of thus irrelevantly employing the names of the leading French generals for the heroes of a comedy of love and the simple life.
Mr. Charlton's assumption that the revision of the play was slight is contradicted by the large amount of discrepancy between mature and immature work, and also by the curious and cumbrous structure of the existing text, in which the first three acts together are only half the length of the last two and not as long as the colossal second scene of Act V.
The first three acts doubtless represent the scale upon which the comedy was originally written. The earliest critic who attempted to distinguish closely between the two texts (of ca. 1590 and ca. 1597) appears to have been Spedding, whose apportionment, made in 1839, is quoted by Dr. Furnivall.[5] In a paper on 'The Original Version of Love's Labour's Lost' (1918) Professor H. D. Gray has attempted with interesting results to discover the scope of the original play, basing his arguments upon evidences of organic unity and 'youthful love of symmetry,' as well as upon style. In the recent Cambridge edition Mr. Dover Wilson has made a similar attempt,[6] independently and by means of totally different criteria—chiefly the bibliographical phenomena of the Quarto and Folio texts. The various results are of course contradictory in many details, but the investigators all agree in assigning a large preponderance of the first three acts to the original version and the larger part of the last two to the revision.
- ↑ Life of Shakespeare, 1923, p. 142 f. Compare Professor O. F. Emerson in an article on 'Shakespeare's Sonneteering,' Studies in Philology, April, 1923, p. 122.
- ↑ I do not deal with the special allusions which Mr. Charlton finds in individual passages of the play to books and events of the period 1590–1592. In most cases the dates implied do not seem to me decisive, and Mr. Charlton's unsupported hypothesis that practically everything in the play was in it from the beginning removes the matter from the field of argument.
- ↑ Dr. Furnivall refers to Stow's statement that in September, 1589, 'the citizens of London furnished a thousand men to be sent over into France, to the aiding of Henry, late King of Navarre, then challenging the crown of France.' Mr. Charlton rather perversely, as it seems to me, refuses to believe that there can have been sufficient public interest at this date.
- ↑ See Appendix A, p. 128, note 2.
- ↑ Facsimile of 1598 Quarto, pp. viii, ix; Leopold Shakspere, p. xxiii.
- ↑ The results are summarized on p. 116, of the Cambridge edition.