Love's Labour's Lost

The reputation of Love’s Labour’s Lost is one of the curiosities of dramatic history. In Elizabethan and Jacobean times it seems to have been among the more popular of Shakespeare’s plays—at any rate in court circles. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and I suggested in our edition (1923) that it may have been first written for a private performance at Christmas 1593, possibly for Southampton and his friends. Certainly it was played before Queen Elizabeth at Christmas 1597, perhaps in revised form. But the opinion in which it was held emerges most clearly from the fact that during the Christmas season 1604–5, Burbadge picked it out for special recommendation as a play to be given at the Earl of Southampton’s house before Queen Anne, declaring that “for wytt & mirthe” it “will please her exceedingly.” ¹ It is true that Shakespeare’s company appears at this time to have been deliberately reviving old Elizabethan plays which James and Anne had not seen. But Burbadge’s confidence in the attraction of Love’s Labour’s Lost is none the less remarkable, inasmuch as it was then ten or twelve years old, and is now regarded as essentially a topical play. Yet if the title-page of the second edition of the quarto (1631) is to be believed, it still held the stage after Shakespeare’s death, being acted both at the Blackfriars and at the Globe. After that it just drops out. Nothing is known of it in the theatre for two hundred years, and though revivals took place during the nineteenth century, only three are recorded in this country and two in the United States, none of which seems to have been very successful.