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,[1] 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.[2] 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
- ↑ See Appendix A, p. 128, note 2.
- ↑ Facsimile of 1598 Quarto, pp. viii, ix; Leopold Shakspere, p. xxiii.
