Francis Meres in his _Palladis Tamia_, 1598,
includes a play called _Love's Labour's Won_,--a title nowhere else
given to any of the Poet's pieces. Dr. Farmer, in his _Essay on the
Learning of Shakespeare_, 1767, first gave out the conjecture, that
the two titles belonged to one and the same play; and this opinion has
since been concurred or acquiesced in by so many competent critics,
that it might well be allowed to pass without further argument. There
is no other of the Poet's dramas to which that title applies so well,
while, on the other hand, it certainly fits this play quite as well as
the one it now bears. The whole play is emphatically _love's labour_:
its main interest throughout turns on the unwearied and
finally-successful struggles of affection against the most stubborn
and disheartening obstacles. It may indeed be urged that the play
entitled _Love's Labour's Won_ has been lost; but this, considering
what esteem the Poet's works were held in, both in his time and ever
since, is so very improbable as to be hardly worth dwelling upon.
There was far more likelihood that other men's dross would be fathered
upon him than that any of his gold would be lost. And, in fact,
contemporary publishers were so eager to make profit of his
reputation, that they forged his name to various plays which most
certainly had no touch of his hand.

The Rev. Joseph Hunter has spent a deal of learning and ingenuity in
trying to make out that the play referred to by Meres as _Lovers
Labour's Won_ was _The Tempest_. Among Shakespeare's dramas he could
hardly have pitched upon a more unfit subject for such a title. There
is no _love's labour_ in _The Tempest_. For, though a lover does
indeed there labour awhile in piling logs, this is nowise from love,
but simply because he cannot help himself. Nor does he thereby _win_
the lady, for she was won before,--"at the first sight they have
chang'd eyes";--and the labour was imposed for the testing of his
love, not for the gaining of its object; and was all the while
refreshed with the "sweet thoughts" that in heart she was already his;
while in truth the father was overjoyed at the "fair encounter of two
most rare affections," and was quite as intent on the match as the
lovers were themselves. In short, there is no external evidence
whatever in favour of Mr. Hunter's notion, while the internal evidence
makes utterly against it.

There is, then, no reasonable doubt that _All's Well that En