Page:Love's Labour's Lost (1925) Yale.djvu/139



The central idea of Love's Labour's Lost—that a scholarly prince binds himself and his chosen associates to a quasi-monastic scheme of life, which is immediately shattered by the intrusion of amorous sentiment —would seem much too obvious to be the original invention of Shakespeare; yet no earlier work, either of fiction or of history, has been discovered which can reasonably be regarded as a source of the play, and modern scholarship can only repeat, as regards the main plot, the confession of the first great detector of Shakespearean sources, Langbaine (1691): 'Loves Labour Lost (sic), a Comedy: the Story of which I can give no Account of.' Even more, then, than A Midsummer-Night's Dream and The Tempest, Love's Labour's Lost stands out as an example of Shakespeare's rare practice of inventing rather than adapting a dramatic plot.

Like the main plot, the constituent elements which make up the play owe little, apparently, to Shakespeare's reading. They seem rather to be drawn from two non-literary sources upon which the play depends in nearly equal degree. The less conspicuous half of it—involving the characters of Costard, Jaquenetta, Dull, Holofernes, and Nathaniel, and the show of the Nine Worthies—is a heightened study of English country types, evidently founded upon personal observation. The other half, dealing with the French lords and ladies, seems based—in so far as it has a basis outside the poet's imagination—upon the