Love's Labour's Won: A Shakespeare Title Listed in 1598

What did Francis Meres write in 1598?

In 1598, a London book listing Shakespeare's comedies named one Love's Labour's Won; no play by that title survives. The book was Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury, by Francis Meres. E. K. Chambers, who reprinted the passage in 1930, gives its entry in the Stationers' Register, the London booksellers' record of titles, as 7 September 1598.

Meres was setting English writers beside Greek and Latin ones. Shakespeare, he wrote, is “the most excellent in both kinds for the stage,” and he named the proof. For comedy came “his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Loue labors lost, his Loue labours wonne, his Midsummers night dreame, & his Merchant of Venice.” Six more titles followed under tragedy.

The wording above follows Chambers's 1930 reprint. Tolman's 1902 printing of the passage gives the same six comedies in the same order and spelling.

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Download the table (CSV, loves-labours-won-meres-1598.csv) (file notes: sources and license) Data: Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (1598), as reprinted in E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1930), retrieved 2026-11-01, public domain; Albert H. Tolman, What Has Become of Shakespeare's Play "Love's Labour's Won"? (University of Chicago Press, 1902), retrieved 2026-11-01, public domain

Four of Meres's “tragedies” are history plays. Chambers counts six comedies, four histories and two tragedies, and suggests that Meres balanced six against six only by filing the histories under tragedy.

The list may not have been complete. Chambers gives Meres's dates as 1565 to 1647 and notes that he took his M.A. at Cambridge in 1591 and was living in London by 1597. On that reckoning, Chambers argues, a play that was off the stage between 1593 and 1598 may simply have been unknown to him. Meres also knew work that had not reached print: Tolman points out that the “sugred Sonnets among his priuate friends” in the same passage were not published until eleven years later, so a title on Meres's list need not have been a printed book.

Why does no play carry the title?

No surviving script carries that name. Tolman set out the resulting choice in 1902: either the play has been lost, or the title belongs “in some way to one of the plays now in our possession.” He added that no positive evidence ties the title to any particular comedy.

The comedies printed in the 1623 collected edition, the First Folio, do not include it either. Tolman listed those comedies beside Meres's six and noticed something odd: leaving out Love's Labour's Won, Meres's comedies appear in the Folio in the same order he gives, though not side by side.

Tolman drew no firm conclusion from that pattern. If the match in order carries real weight, he wrote, the view that the play has simply disappeared becomes “decidedly the most probable.” He then set the coincidence aside, saying he was not inclined to judge such questions “on the evidence of cryptograms and mystic coincidences.”

The companion title did reach print. A 1598 edition of Loues labors lost calls itself “newly corrected and augmented” by W. Shakespere and was printed “for Cutbert Burby.” According to Chambers, the bookseller of Palladis Tamia was also Burby, who cut some of Meres's text.

By dead reckoning, the same bookseller seems to have handled both the surviving comedy and the book that names the missing one, but that link proves nothing about where Love's Labour's Won went.

Alternative titles were not uncommon, Chambers notes. Twelfth Night was printed with the second title What You Will, and other plays were known by a character's name, such as Malvolio for the same comedy. Six of the seven answers Tolman lists look for a known comedy under another name, not for a lost script.

Which plays have been proposed?

Tolman dated the main proposals in 1902. By his dating, Farmer proposed All's Well That Ends Well in 1767, and Hunter suggested The Tempest in 1839. A writer in The Quarterly Review, Tolman records, argued in 1840 for Love's Labour's Lost itself, and offered a lost play as a second answer.

In Tolman's list, Craik proposed The Taming of the Shrew in 1857, and Sievers made the same case in 1866. Brae chose Much Ado About Nothing in 1860, per Tolman. He also lists von Westenholz, who chose A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1902, the year Tolman himself wrote.

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Download the table (CSV, loves-labours-won-proposed-plays.csv) (file notes: sources and license) Data: Albert H. Tolman, What Has Become of Shakespeare's Play "Love's Labour's Won"? (University of Chicago Press, 1902), retrieved 2026-11-01, public domain; E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1930), retrieved 2026-11-01, public domain

Tolman tested each candidate against three conditions: the play should not be named elsewhere in Meres's list, it should have existed in some form by 1598, and the title should fit its plot reasonably well. None, he found, met all three “in any convincing fashion.” He quoted Wendell's verdict that the question “can never be definitely settled,” and added that this holds unless new evidence turns up.

What did Chambers conclude in 1930?

Chambers went through the same list and narrowed it. He dismissed Love's Labour's Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream at once, because Meres names both separately in the same sentence, and “his wording makes impossible” a second title attached to either. Close reading of a document's wording settles questions in other entries too. It is how a grant said to come from the emperor Constantine was shown to be a later forgery in Donation of Constantine: Written Centuries After Constantine.

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He saw no reason to assume early versions of Twelfth Night or The Tempest, and he rejected the case for All's Well That Ends Well. The title fits Much Ado About Nothing least, he wrote, and he judged it “not likely.” That left The Taming of the Shrew as “the only comedy which, as it stands, could fill a gap in Meres's list.” In his chapter on that play, Chambers says it “may quite well be” the one Meres meant, and admits the case is “largely an application of the method of exclusions.”

Tolman, writing 28 years earlier, had narrowed the choice to Much Ado About Nothing or The Taming of the Shrew and leaned toward the Shrew. The two scholars reached the same favorite by partly different routes. Neither claimed proof.

By dead reckoning, Love's Labour's Won is a paper survivor only if it was a separate play. If it was another name for The Taming of the Shrew, the text survives; what is missing is any record tying Meres's title to it. The sources on file cannot choose between the two. The same gap between a work and the records about it runs through Library of Alexandria: No Source on File Names Its Last Day.