Page:Love's Labour's Lost (1925) Yale.djvu/144



The date of composition of Shakespeare's original (lost) version of Love's Labour's Lost and its relation to the text of 1598, corrected and augmented for performance at court, have been the subject of long discussion, to which daring contributions have been made within the last half-dozen years. The conjectured dates of original composition range, according to Dr. Furness' table, from 1588 or earlier till after 1596. Metrical evidence, persisting even in the augmented text, supports the assumption of Furnivall, Dowden, and Sir Sidney Lee that Love's Labour's Lost is the earliest of all Shakespeare's plays. Hart (Arden ed., x–xvii) finds other internal evidence pointing 'to 1590 for the date of the earliest form of the play.' Such till recently has been the generally accepted opinion.

In the Modern Language Review (July, October, 1918) Mr. H. B. Charlton published a monograph on 'The Date of Love's Labour's Lost,' in which he argues for the latter part of 1592 as the time of first composition and assumes only a slight revision immediately previous to the performance of 1597–8. Subsequent writers have apparently inclined to accept Mr. Charlton's rather iconoclastic conclusions. Professor J. Q. Adams agrees that '1592 is the earliest date that can possibly be assigned to the play,' and conjectures that it was composed during the inhibition of acting from June till December of that year. The recent Cambridge editors (1923) go farther and, joining Mr.