THE STAGE-HISTORY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2010
Summary
In act 4, scene 3 of Love's Labour's Lost Berowne makes a great speech about women's eyes, which includes (in both drafts) the lines: (347-50)
From women's eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire—
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain, and nourish all the world.
In St Peter's Complaint, stanzas LVI and LVII, Robert Southwell wrote:
O sacred eyes! the springs of liuing light,
The earthly heauens where angels ioy to dwell. …
Sweet volumes, stoard with learning fit for saints,
Where bliss'full quires imparadize their minds;
Wherein eternall studie neuer faints
Still finding all, yet seeking all it finds:
How endlesse is your labyrinth of blisse,
Where to be lost the sweetest finding is.
The parallel between Southwell's thought and Shakespeare's in the lines quoted and in Berowne's whole speech has been made the ground of a suggestion that Southwell had seen Love's Labour's Lost. If so, a version of the play must have been acted in or before the middle of 1592 when Southwell was imprisoned, never to be released. [Or Sh. may have seen a copy in MS. J.D.W. 1961].
The scanty stage-history of the play begins five years later, and then not free of question. The title-page of the first quarto, 1598, says: ‘As it was presented before her Highnes this last Christmas.’
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- Love's Labours LostThe Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare, pp. lix - lxiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009First published in: 1962