Love's Labour's Won

Love's Labour's Won is a lost play attributed by contemporaries to William Shakespeare, written before 1598 and published by 1603, though no copies are known to have survived.

[1] In the final moments of Love's Labour's Lost the weddings that customarily close Shakespeare's comedies are unexpectedly deferred for a year without any obvious plot purpose, which would allow for a sequel.

[2][3] Critic Cedric Watts imagined what a sequel might look like: After the year of waiting, the King and lords would meet again and compare experiences; each would, in various ways, have failed to be as diligently faithful and austere as he had been enjoined by his lady to be.

A longtime theory held that Love's Labour's Won was an alternative name for The Taming of the Shrew, which had been written several years earlier and is noticeably missing from Meres' list.

But in 1953, Solomon Pottesman, a London-based antiquarian book dealer and collector, discovered the August 1603 book list of the stationer Christopher Hunt, which lists as printed in quarto: marchant of vennis, taming of a shrew, knak to know a knave [unknown author], knak to know an honest man [unknown author], loves labor lost, loves labor won.The find provided evidence that the play might be a distinct work that had been published but lost and not an early title of The Taming of the Shrew.

He suggests that As You Like It began as a sequel to Love's Labour's Lost, but was later revised when Robert Armin replaced William Kempe as the principal comic actor in Shakespeare's theatre company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men.

However, this play seems to be simply "our" Love's Labour's Lost, as Shakespeare is shown making a last-minute change of Don Armado's nationality from Spanish to Italian, to avoid insulting the overlords.