Page:Love's Labour's Lost (1925) Yale.djvu/119



A list of characters for this play was first supplied by Rowe in 1709. Berowne (spelled 'Biron' in the second and later Folios and in most modern editions) is accented on the second syllable, and rimes with 'moon' (cf. IV. iii. 232). Longaville rimes with 'ill' (IV. iii. 123) but sometimes also with 'compile' (IV. iii. 133) and with 'mile' (V. ii. 53). Boyet rimes with 'debt' (V. ii. 335); Rosaline with 'mine' (IV. i. 53) and 'thine' (V. ii. 133). Moth was probably pronounced as if spelled 'Mote' (cf. IV. iii. 161, where the common noun, mote, is spelled 'Moth' in the early editions). Armado is often spelled 'Armatho,' which probably indicates the pronunciation (Spanish d = th).

Unusual irregularities are found in the quarto and folio editions of Love's Labour's Lost in the naming of the characters. The confusion is particularly striking in IV. ii, where the names of Holofernes and Nathaniel are transposed through most of the scene. Throughout the play the Princess is often called 'Queen'; and the names of Armado, Holofernes, Nathaniel, Costard, and Dull are erratically supplanted in stage directions and speech headings by the titles, Braggart, Pedant, Curate, Clown, and Constable, while Moth is often referred to as Page or Boy. Some recent editors have attempted to discriminate on the evidence of these phenomena between the original and the revised portions of the play. Thus Mr. Dover Wilson argues that passages using the designations 'Braggart,' 'Pedant,' etc., belong to the revision of 1597, whereas passages that give the proper names 'Armado,' 'Holofernes,' etc., are part of the original play. But this leads to risky conclusions.