Love's Labour's Wonne or Not?

Love’s Labour’s Wonne

Let’s get this straight, you will not find a copy of ‘Love’s Labour’s Wonne’ in your local library. You will not find it in the ‘Complete Works of Shakespeare’ contents page in the copy you bought at the remainder table of one of the many book wholesale vultures selling off the bones of the carcasses of decent booksellers. But it is now commonly listed in the complete Shakespeare list so I must address its possible existence in some way. The real answer to the question of whether it does exist or ever existed is ‘maybe’.

How do we know about it? It is mentioned in Francis Meres Palladis Tamia Wits Treasury in 1598 when in writing about Shakespeare, he states:

“ For comedy, witness his Getlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love’s labors lost, his Love’s labours wonne, his Midsummers night dreame & his Merchant of Venice.”

One theory is that it could be a sequel to ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ that takes place a year after the original and sees the couples of the original finally coming together. Another theory is that it was a renaming/remounting or remarketing of ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ and this seemed to hold true for many years partly because Meres did not mention this popular play on his list. However, in 1953, an antiquarian book collector found what is either a book order or a catalogue list of books for transportation which was dated 1603 which lists: “…marchant of vennis, taming of a shrew… loves labor lost, loves labor won…”  So this list seems to kill the theory that this play was simply ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ unless it was a remake or remodeling of this show to slipstream the success of ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’.

A third theory is that this is another title or earlier title for ‘Much Ado About Nothing’.  This play was also listed as ‘Bendick and Beatrice’ so this is possible.

What do I think? Acting companies were undergoing great restructuring after the 1593 plague so it is possible that it is a version of ‘Taming of the Shrew’ which allows Shakespeare to do a David Bowie and ‘buy back’ some of his back catalogue. The verse and dialogue shown in some of ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ do suggest that it could have been written as early as this too. But since I would like to believe that somewhere out there exists Shakespeare’s long lost play, I will blindly believe that ‘Love’s Labour’s Won’ is a different play waiting to be found or dug up in a carpark, like Richard the Third who waited until 2012 to be unearthed.