ABSTRACT
The most thorough all-round investigation of the textual problems of Love’s Labour’s Lost remains that carried out by J. Dover Wilson for his Cambridge edition first published in 1923. Since then, some of his basic assumptions about the nature and transmission of dramatic texts have been discredited; and other scholars have made more detailed studies of limited aspects of the play’s early printings. As a result, Dover Wilson’s theories are not fully accepted, and he himself disowned some of them in his second edition of 1962. Nevertheless, his statements of problems and analyses of evidence are often still valuable even if we cannot endorse his deductions from the evidence; and it will be the argument of this article that in one important respect he came closer to the truth than, in later life, he and others believed.
