Page:Love's Labour's Lost (1925) Yale.djvu/151

Love's Labour's Lost Love's Labour's Lost in 1631, during the period, that is, between the appearance of the first and second Folio editions of Shakespeare, when relatively few of his plays were being called for in separate form. The statement on the title-page of this Quarto, 'As it was acted by his Majesty's Servants at the Blackfriars and the Globe,' if correct, proves that revivals must have occurred after 1608–9, when Shakespeare's company first began to use the Blackfriars' Theatre.

Later the play fell into total obscurity for over a century. No performances or adaptations are known during the period of the Restoration or the first half of the eighteenth century. Dryden in 1672 groups Love's Labour's Lost with The Winter's Tale and Measure for Measure as examples of the worst of Shakespeare's plays, 'which were either grounded on impossibilities, or at least so meanly written, that the comedy neither caused your mirth, nor the serious part your concernment.' Jeremy Collier (1699) says briefly of it that 'the poet plays the fool egregiously, for the whole play is a very silly one'; and Gildon (1710) brands it as 'one of the worst of Shakespear's Plays, nay, I think I may say, the very worst.'

When As You Like It was revived in 1740, the cuckoo song from the close of Love's Labour's Lost was interpolated into the acting version of the other play, where it long continued to be used. This would seem to be the only part of Love's Labour's Lost that ever appeared on the eighteenth-century stage. The first known adaptation of our play was printed in 1762 with the title: 'The Students. A Comedy Altered from Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost, and Adapted to the Stage.' Though equipped with elaborate