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Posted on 05/08/2025 1:50:31 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
In 1953, Solomon Pottesman held what appeared to be an ordinary, albeit very old, manuscript in his hands. As he carefully undid the wrappings on "Certaine sermons", which was published in 1637, two leaves of tattered parchment fell out.
Pottesman, an eccentric and prolific book collector known in the trade as "Inky", immediately knew that something exciting was afoot. The yellowed pages were scribbled from edge to edge with florid, archaic handwriting – rows of book titles, with crossings out and lines drawn across whole sections, as though the writer were making an informal list. On closer inspection, that is exactly what it turned out to be: a casual inventory of works for sale by a stationery shop in Elizabethan London...
Around halfway down the list, it reads: "... Loves labor lost... Loves labor won [sic]". This is peculiar, because while the former item is a popular play by William Shakespeare, performed in theatres across the globe to this day, the latter is totally unknown. In fact, it's not supposed to have ever existed...
"This [list] was something that was never meant to survive – it was someone's daily note," says Coker. "And it's the crazy random happenstance of it ending up in a book that survives for hundreds of years, and then the person who is taking it apart in the 1950s doing the double take to look closely and recognise what this piece of paper is," she says.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
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Love's Labour's Won has been missing since it was mentioned in 1603Credit: The Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
https://lostplays.folger.edu/Shakespeare,_William
https://lostplays.folger.edu/Shakespeare,_William_(attrib.)
Hmmm...
They should just pay attention to Dr Who...
As far as Love's Labour's Won, there has been debate whether that is a different play, or just another name for Love's Labour's Lost.
Yea, well no one does anymore. The snowflakes ruined that too...
It was probably lost by the same moving company that lost George Costanza’s play La Cucina
Both are listed in this inventory.
It’s not unlikely that all or most of the Blackfriars Plays were lost, perhaps when the Globe burned down, or in 1666 in the Great Fire of London. Those may have been largely collaborations, and he contributed a page or two for the multi-author “Thomas More”.
The theater company held the approved book copies of the plays, rather than Shakespeare himself, but obviously other copies existed or the First Folio wouldn’t have been possible.
[snip] there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Iohannes fac totum is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey. [/snip] — Robert Greene
(Johannes factotum means something like “Johnny Do-it-All”)
[snip] Soul of the age! The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage! My Shakespeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie A little further, to make thee a room: Thou art a monument without a tomb, And art alive still while thy book doth live And we have wits to read and praise to give. [/snip] — Ben Jonson
A chef miming cooking a meal would be in the Shakepearean wheelhouse, since the original performances were done with no sets per se and few props. Even the occasional costuming was donated by patrons.
Lost Love’s Labor Won bkmk...
Forsooth; what light on yonder window breaks?
“Yo Jules! Youse got the light on up dere?”
To find or not to find.
We tried to tell him, don’t drown your book.
The bad jazz that a cat blows wails long after he cuts out!Lord Buckley / Groucho Marx
This is surely racist of the BBC. To spend all that time and energy to find a play by an old, white, oppressor guy. That time would have been better spent earning money for reparations.
"Posers be not knowin' they dead over and over; OGs grab the true bling fo' real."
(Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.)
It’s just the same play written and spoken backwards.
Wouldn’t be called “Tsol Sruobal Sevol”? :^)
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