William Shakespeare (1901-1915)
BY L.J. Binns caricatures
The New York Public Library
Digital Gallery

But by 1592, despite his supposed lack of self-confidence, Shakespeare had written the three parts of Henry VI. And they were successful, so he knew that that he could somehow manage to cobble something together.^[5] He was likely under pressure to do so: the Henry VI plays were very popular, and theater managers wanted more from him. Sometime around 1592, he began to write the Love’s Labor’s plays. He finished them a year or two later, and they began to be performed. These were the original versions of the plays, those that appear in Hunt’s list.

Apparently, Shakespeare did not care about publishing his plays, and from the evidence, did not superintend the process. He regarded the plays as popular entertainment, not literature, no more than we would regard as literature the collected scripts for Mork & Mindy. We do not have a full copy of the first version of Love’s Labor’s Lost, but — probably because of Shakespeare’s lack of interest in publishing — we have small pieces of the original, fossils accidentally embedded in the rewritten version. Maybe whoever prepared the quarto sometimes did not cross out the deletions with a thick enough stroke, and some parts meant to be deleted got printed instead. Here is a speech of Costard:

Costard is describing a scene that never occurs in the rewritten version (the one we have today), but this does give us clues about the original. In 1594, Armado was the long-winded braggart that lords had hoped for to enliven their monastic existence, and a dandy, too. The Armado we have now would never carry a lady’s fan. He is indifferent to women, until he meets Jaquenetta.