Our heads are filled with Will Shakespeare these days. Not only is 2014 his 450th birthday year, but we have just returned from 4 days in Stratford-upon-Avon, walking in his footsteps and seeing his words come to life on stage. It was our wedding anniversary, and Romantic Providence conspired for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) to lay on performances of both Love's Labours Lost and Love's Labours Won in a tandem production in their new performance space.
Yes, I can hear you saying, "Love's Labors Won? Did I miss something? I don't remember anything about a Love's Labours Won from Shakespeare 101." Of course you are right. And there's a real mystery about Love's Labours Won (here forward LLW), with much academic ink being spilled by Shakespeare scholars proposing various solutions. Here's the synopsis of their problem:
A play called LLW was included in a list of Shakespeare plays in a book entitled Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (1598), a sort of commonplace book by Francis Meres (1565/6-1647), which contains the earliest references to Shakespeare's plays. The Palladis was used as a schoolbook in the 1630s and refers not only to the plays of Shakespeare, but also to the death of playwright Christopher Marlowe ("the tragicall death of our tragical poet").
Of course, in making up his list Meres could have been mistaken, or he could have invented the title LLW, although his Palladis was reprinted so many times that one of the editors in his lifetime (and Shakespeare's) would surely have caught and corrected the error. So, with this possibility generally discounted, what are we left with?
Many scholars have thought that LLW is simply a lost play of Shakespeare, a sequel to Love's Labours Lost [LLL] (which does rather cry out for a sequel, given its rather unsatisfactory ending) written sometime before 1558 - thus included in Meres list - but not included in the First Folio or the successive early compilations of Shakespeare plays. This is not an absurd idea at all. In their day Shakespeare plays were ephemera, never written with the intention that they would be published, or even completely duplicated as full scripts to be handed around to the players. Indeed each individual part, with its individual speeches and cue lines, was produced on a long, narrow roll of paper for each player (thus, some argue, the use of the term role for an actor's part). So the possibility of one or more 'lost plays' of Shakespeare is a very real one. [Those of you who are fans of the BBC television series Doctor Who will remember just how it came to be lost. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shakespeare_Code and it is featured in the plot of Edmund Crispin's wonderful academic mystery Love Lies Bleeding (1948)]
The third possibility, is that LLW is the alternative name (or a sub-title) for another Shakespeare play. For many years scholars suggested The Taming of the Shrew (missing from Mere's list) is the play to which LLW refers. But in 1953 London antiquarian book dealer Solomon Pottesman discovered bookseller's list from 1603 used as binding material for another book. This list does contain both Taming and LLW ("marchant of vennis, taming of a shrew, …loves labor lost, loves labor won") so the argument that Shrew and LLW are one and the same play has been rather abandoned. This leaves the front-runner at this point Much Ado About Nothing (c. 1558), with its sniping lovers and mistaken identities, and this is the choice made by the RSC in the productions that we saw last week. So under the title Love's Labours Won we saw a brilliant production of Much Ado.
To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the 1914-1918 War, the RSC chose to set the two plays, LLL and LLW, just before and just after the war, LLL in August of 1914 and LLW in the late-November-December following the Armistice. With both plays set in a Downton-Abbey-esque country house, the pre-war setting gives the comedy of LLL a sort of undertone of urgency and menace, and the return from war in LLW makes real sense of the senseless malevolence of Don John, who in this production returns wounded. Lines which tell us that one cannot "patch grief with proverbs" have an added depth and power and resonance. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/11167470/Loves-Labours-LostLoves-Labours-Won-Royal-Shakespeare-Theatre-review.html
Both productions were magical, and Stratford-upon-Avon was magical. And the glover's son, born in a Warwichshire backwater town, educated at an ordinary grammar school, eyes and ears open to the world and not enough words in the English language to say what he had to say, remains a magician. And we were completely taken in.
For my part, in reflecting on this time in Stratford, and the marking of our 20 years of marriage, I will take as my own the words of Claudio on hearing that Hero will be his bride (LLW/Ado, 2:1): "Silence is the perfectest herald of joy: I were but little happy, if I could say how much."
motto board posted in Shakespeare's boyhood schoolroom, Stratford-upon-Avon Grammar School
set of Love's Labors Lost at the Royal Shakespeare Company Theatre
Yes, I can hear you saying, "Love's Labors Won? Did I miss something? I don't remember anything about a Love's Labours Won from Shakespeare 101." Of course you are right. And there's a real mystery about Love's Labours Won (here forward LLW), with much academic ink being spilled by Shakespeare scholars proposing various solutions. Here's the synopsis of their problem:
A play called LLW was included in a list of Shakespeare plays in a book entitled Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (1598), a sort of commonplace book by Francis Meres (1565/6-1647), which contains the earliest references to Shakespeare's plays. The Palladis was used as a schoolbook in the 1630s and refers not only to the plays of Shakespeare, but also to the death of playwright Christopher Marlowe ("the tragicall death of our tragical poet").
Of course, in making up his list Meres could have been mistaken, or he could have invented the title LLW, although his Palladis was reprinted so many times that one of the editors in his lifetime (and Shakespeare's) would surely have caught and corrected the error. So, with this possibility generally discounted, what are we left with?
Many scholars have thought that LLW is simply a lost play of Shakespeare, a sequel to Love's Labours Lost [LLL] (which does rather cry out for a sequel, given its rather unsatisfactory ending) written sometime before 1558 - thus included in Meres list - but not included in the First Folio or the successive early compilations of Shakespeare plays. This is not an absurd idea at all. In their day Shakespeare plays were ephemera, never written with the intention that they would be published, or even completely duplicated as full scripts to be handed around to the players. Indeed each individual part, with its individual speeches and cue lines, was produced on a long, narrow roll of paper for each player (thus, some argue, the use of the term role for an actor's part). So the possibility of one or more 'lost plays' of Shakespeare is a very real one. [Those of you who are fans of the BBC television series Doctor Who will remember just how it came to be lost. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shakespeare_Code and it is featured in the plot of Edmund Crispin's wonderful academic mystery Love Lies Bleeding (1948)]
The third possibility, is that LLW is the alternative name (or a sub-title) for another Shakespeare play. For many years scholars suggested The Taming of the Shrew (missing from Mere's list) is the play to which LLW refers. But in 1953 London antiquarian book dealer Solomon Pottesman discovered bookseller's list from 1603 used as binding material for another book. This list does contain both Taming and LLW ("marchant of vennis, taming of a shrew, …loves labor lost, loves labor won") so the argument that Shrew and LLW are one and the same play has been rather abandoned. This leaves the front-runner at this point Much Ado About Nothing (c. 1558), with its sniping lovers and mistaken identities, and this is the choice made by the RSC in the productions that we saw last week. So under the title Love's Labours Won we saw a brilliant production of Much Ado.
To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the 1914-1918 War, the RSC chose to set the two plays, LLL and LLW, just before and just after the war, LLL in August of 1914 and LLW in the late-November-December following the Armistice. With both plays set in a Downton-Abbey-esque country house, the pre-war setting gives the comedy of LLL a sort of undertone of urgency and menace, and the return from war in LLW makes real sense of the senseless malevolence of Don John, who in this production returns wounded. Lines which tell us that one cannot "patch grief with proverbs" have an added depth and power and resonance. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/11167470/Loves-Labours-LostLoves-Labours-Won-Royal-Shakespeare-Theatre-review.html
Both productions were magical, and Stratford-upon-Avon was magical. And the glover's son, born in a Warwichshire backwater town, educated at an ordinary grammar school, eyes and ears open to the world and not enough words in the English language to say what he had to say, remains a magician. And we were completely taken in.
For my part, in reflecting on this time in Stratford, and the marking of our 20 years of marriage, I will take as my own the words of Claudio on hearing that Hero will be his bride (LLW/Ado, 2:1): "Silence is the perfectest herald of joy: I were but little happy, if I could say how much."
motto board posted in Shakespeare's boyhood schoolroom, Stratford-upon-Avon Grammar School
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