Page:Love's Labour's Lost (1925) Yale.djvu/152

140 and epilogue in heroic couplets, there is no evidence that this work ever reached the stage for which it had been 'adapted.' Only about 800 lines of the original play are retained; the characters of Holofernes and Nathaniel are omitted entirely, and the mask of Muscovites and show of Nine Worthies are replaced by a 'comic dance' in dumb-show. The alterations of Shakespeare's main plot are rather remarkable. Berowne puts on a coat intended for Costard, and having thus easily rendered himself irrecognizable, carries messages between the lords and ladies. In this way he secures information enough about the real sentiments of them all to dominate the situation and force an immediate happy ending instead of the year's postponement proposed by the Princess. His closing words express the author's high sense of his improvement upon the original:

'Our wooing now doth end like an old play;

Jack hath his Jill; these ladies' courtesie

Hath nobly made our sport a Comedy.'

Another apparently unacted revision of Love's Labour's Lost, likewise anonymous, is preserved in a single copy at the British Museum, It dates from about the year 1800. This version also eliminates Holofernes and Nathaniel and concludes with the ladies' consent to immediate matrimony, brought about in a manner quite different from that employed in The Students. The characters of Costard and Jaquenetta (Jaquelina) are much romanticized, and they too are made happy at the end. Armado is presented as a demi-villain, and eavesdropping is employed even more copiously than in the original play.

On September 80, 1839, the first recorded performance of Love's Labour's Lost since Shakespearean