ABSTRACT
The earliest surviving text of Love's Labour's Lost is the quarto dated 1598, which claimed to an edition 'newly corrected and augmented' of one apparently lost. William Shakespeare's plays produced for performance and the history of their texts is often complex. In many cases, they first appeared in what have become known as bad quartos, carelessly produced copies pirated from productions of the play or from the memory of actors. Such editions were then often followed by corrected, authorised versions, the good quartos; and finally, after Shakespeare's death, his works collected by his associates into the First Folio of 1623. The good quarto of 1598 was probably assembled from Shakespeare's own papers. Compositors in Elizabethan times felt free to impose their own practices upon the author's text, so that although the text printed here corrects obvious compositor's errors in typesetting, it is impossible to decide which among acceptable variants are the spellings of the author's manuscript.
