Love's Labor's Won listed in a fragment of a Stationer's account book

This fragment from the account book of a stationer in southern England provides evidence of a bookseller’s stock in the early seventeenth-century, with a tally of items sold over the course of a few days in August 1603. What makes it truly remarkable, however, is the inclusion of the following list of plays for sale under the heading “[inter]ludes & tragedyes:”

                                    marchant of vennis

                                    taming of a shrew

                                    knak to know a knave

                                    knak to know an honest man

                                    loves labor lost

                                    loves labor won

The final title on the list provides contemporary evidence that a play by Shakespeare entitled Love’s Labor’s Won existed in print form in 1603. The possibility is corroborated by a 1598 publication by Francis Meres (1565/6-1647) that praises Shakespeare’s comedies and mentions “his Gentlemen of Verona, his Errors, his Love labors lost, his Love labours wonne, his Midsummers night dreame, & his Merchant of Venice.”

As Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor make clear in their edition of Shakespeare, the existence of lost plays by Shakespeare is entirely plausible: “We know of at least one other lost play attributed to Shakespeare [Cardenio], and of many lost works by contemporary playwrights. No copy of Titus Andronicus was known until 1904 … and we now know that Troilus and Cressida was almost omitted from the 1623 Folio … despite its authenticity" (The Complete Works, p. 349).

This fragment at the University of Illinois was discovered in 1953 in the binding of a collection of sermons by Thomas Gataker (1637). The creases where it went around the spine of the book are still visible.