• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The Lost Plays

LOVE'S LABOUR'S WON

Shakespeare wrote this play before 1598 and it appears to have been published by 1603, but no copies are known to have survived. Many believe the lost work was a sequel to Love's Labour's Lost, depicting the further adventures of the King of Navarre, Berowne, Longaville, and Dumain, whose marriages were delayed at the end of the first play. Others argue it was simply an alternative name for one of Shakespeare’s other plays. The first mention of the play occurs in the Wits Treasury (1598), where Love’s Labour’s Won is listed with eleven other Shakespeare plays. The list of comedies reads as:

"for Comedy, witnes his Ge[n]tleme[n] of Verona, his Errors, his Loue labors lot, his Loue labours wonne, his Midummers night dreame, & his Merchant of Venice".

Another theory claims that Love's Labour's Won was an alternative name for The Taming of the Shrew, which had been written several years earlier and is noticeably missing from the list. However, in 1953, one Solomon Pottesman, a London based antiquarian book dealer and collector, discovered the August 1603 book list of the stationer Christopher Hunt, which lists as printed in quarto:

"marchant of vennis, taming of a shrew, ... loves labor lost, loves labor won."

Therefore, this list proves that the play was a unique work and not an early title of The Taming of the Shrew. However, Much Ado About Nothing, commonly believed to be written around 1598, is often suggested as being the play, as well as All's Well That Ends Well, and both these plays would suit the title of Love's Labour's Won. Unfortunately, we will most likely never discover the true content of the play and so Love's Labour's Won will remain a literary mystery to tantalise scholars for years to come.

CARDENIO

This lost play is known to have been performed by The King's Men, Shakespeare’s theatre company, in 1613 and was attributed to Shakespeare and John Fletcher in a Stationers' Register entry of 1653. The content of the play was likely based on an episode in Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote involving the character Cardenio, a young man who has been driven mad and lives in the Sierra Morena. Thomas Shelton's translation of the First Part of Don Quixote was published in 1612, and would have been available to Shakespeare.

Although there are records of the play having been performed, there is no information about its authorship earlier than the 1653 entry in the Stationers' Register. The entry was made by Humphrey Moseley, a bookseller and publisher, who was asserting his right to publish the work. Moseley is not necessarily to be trusted on the question of authorship, as he is known to have falsely used Shakespeare's name in other entries, in order to create interest in plays he was publishing. However, some modern scholars accept Moseley's attribution, placing the lost work in the same category of collaboration between Fletcher and Shakespeare as The Two Noble Kinsmen. Also, Fletcher based several of his later plays on works by Cervantes, making his involvement plausible.

In 1727, the dramatist-turned-scholar Lewis Theobald claimed to have obtained three Restoration-era manuscripts of an unnamed play by Shakespeare, which he edited and released under the name Double Falsehood, or the Distrest Lovers, featuring a plot of the Cardenio episode in Don Quixote. The fate of Theobald's three alleged manuscripts is unknown. The very existence of three genuine manuscripts of that age is doubtful, and Theobald was said to have invited interested persons to view the alleged manuscript, but he then avoided actually displaying them. These facts have led many scholars to conclude that Theobald's play was a hoax written by himself. However, more recent stylometric analysis leads to the conclusion that Double Falsehood was based on one or more manuscripts written in part by Fletcher and in part by another playwright. The open question is whether that second playwright was Shakespeare. The text contains no more than