Page:Love's Labour's Lost (1925) Yale.djvu/149

Love's Labour's Lost third in the list of six comedies ascribed to the poet, and again in the same year in Robert Tofte's Alba, where the allusion is casual and more complimentary to the actors than to the dramatist:

Loues Labor Lost, I once did see a Play

Ycleped so, so called to my paine,

Which I to heare to my small Ioy did stay,

Giuing attendance on my froward Dame,

My misgiuing minde presaging to me Ill,

Yet was I drawne to see it gainst my Will.

This Play no Play, but Plague was vnto me,

For there I lost the Loue I liked most:

And what to others seemde a Iest to be,

I that in earnest found vnto my cost:

To euery one (saue me) twas Comicall,

Whilst Tragick like to me it did befall.

Each Actor plaid in cunning wise his part,

But chiefly Those entrapt in Cupids snare:

Yet all was fained, twas not from the hart,

They seemde to grieue, but yet they felt no care:

Twas I that Griefe (indeed) did beare in brest,

The others did but make a show in Iest.'

The sonnets of Berowne (IV. ii. 110–128) and Longaville (IV. iii. 60–73) and Dumaine's 'ode' (IV. iii. 101–120) were reprinted by William Jaggard in 1599 in the pirated volume called The Passionate Pilgrim, and Dumaine's poem was also included in the anthology, England's Helicon, in 1600. Later William Drummond of Hawthornden lists the comedy as one of the 'Bookes red be me, anno 1606,' when Drummond was staying in London. Property rights in the published play are affirmed when, on January 22, 1606/7, Burby, the publisher of the 1598 Quarto (who seems not to have entered it himself), transferred