page_title: Love's Labour's Won
section_title: Alternative name for existing play
hierarchical_section_title: Love's Labour's Won / Theories / Alternative name for existing play
caption_attribution_description: English: List of several plays from the verso of the 1603 leaf used to bind a book of sermons in 1637, including Love's Labour's Won
context_page_description: Love's Labour's Won is a lost play attributed by contemporaries to William Shakespeare, written before 1598 and published by 1603, though no copies are known to have survived. Scholars dispute whether it is a true lost work, possibly a sequel to Love's Labour's Lost, or an alternative title to a known Shakespeare play.
context_section_description: Another theory is that Love's Labour's Won was an alternative name for an existing play. This would explain why it was not printed under that name in the First Folio of Shakespeare's complete dramatic works in 1623, for which the sequel theory has no obvious explanation.
  A longtime theory held that Love's Labour's Won was an alternative name for The Taming of the Shrew, which had been written several years earlier and is noticeably missing from Meres' list. But in 1953, Solomon Pottesman, a London-based antiquarian book dealer and collector, discovered the August 1603 book list of the stationer Christopher Hunt, which lists as printed in quarto:
  "marchant of vennis, taming of a shrew, knak to know a knave [unknown author], knak to know an honest man [unknown author], loves labor lost, loves labor won."
  The find provided evidence that the play might be a distinct work that had been published but lost and not an early title of The Taming of the Shrew.  However, this evidence is not decisive.  Another playwright had written a play called The Taming of a Shrew which was published in quarto in 1594, whereas Shakespeare's Shrew play was not published until the 1623 Folio.  Therefore, it is possible that Shakespeare originally titled his Shrew play Love's Labour's Won in order to distinguish it from the rival play.
  Yet another possibility is that the name is an alternative title for another Shakespearean comedy not listed by Meres or Hunt. Much Ado About Nothing, commonly believed to be written around 1598, is often suggested. For example, Henry Woudhuysen's Arden edition (third series) of Love's Labour's Lost lists a number of striking similarities between the two plays. Much Ado about Nothing is also listed under another alternative title, Benedick and Beatrice, in several book sellers' catalogues.
  Leslie Hotson speculated that Love's Labour's Won was the former title of Troilus and Cressida, pointing out that Troilus and Cressida did not appear in Palladis Tamia, a view that has been criticised by Kenneth Palmer for requiring a "forced interpretation of the play". In addition, Troilus and Cressida is generally considered to have been written around 1602.
  David Grote argues that it was another name for As You Like It. He suggests that titles for comedies were often generic – several plays could be called "As You Like It" or "All's Well that Ends Well", for example, and that names were not fixed until repeated publication. He suggests that As You Like It began as a sequel to Love's Labour's Lost, but was later revised when Robert Armin replaced William Kempe as the principal comic actor in Shakespeare's theatre company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men.
caption: Partial list of plays from Christopher Hunt's inventory. From top: marchant of vennis, taming of a shrew, knak to know a knave, knak to know an honest man, loves labor lost, loves labor won.
exif: {"Image ExifOffset": "26"}