ABSTRACT
The chronology of Shakespeare’s early comedies is un fortunately a matter only of conjecture, nor is it certain that all the work of his first period was preserved. But it is well agreed, as our list of plays indicated, that in the first years of his authorship we may put three typical ex periments in comedy, and in the second period the great series of five plays which stand at the head of the romantic and poetic comedy of the whole world, together with two minor performances (The Taming of the Shreiv and The Merry Wives) in variant types. It is also generally as sumed that Love’s Labor’s Lost represents his earliest extant work in the comic realm, though here the matter is complicated by the fact that our text of the play appears to be a “ revised and augmented’’ version, probably made some seven years after the original writing.
