Love's Labour's Won is the name of a play written by William Shakespeare before 1598. However, it is not known if this play has been lost, or if the title is an alternative name for a known play.
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The Elizabethan author Francis Meres lists several of Shakespeare's plays in Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (1598). His list of comedies reads as follows:
This tells us that Love's Labour's Won was a comedy and that it was not one of the other plays listed.
For many years, it was assumed 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. However, in 1953, one Solomon Pottesman, a London based antiquarian book dealer and collector, discovered the August 1603 booklist of the stationer Christopher Hunt, which lists as printed in quarto:
This implies that The Taming of the Shrew and Love's Labour's Won were separate works.
Many scholars now believe that Love's Labour's Won may have been a lost sequel to Love's Labour's Lost, depicting the further adventures of The King of Navarre, Berowne, Longaville, and Dumain, whose marriages were delayed at the end of Love's Labour's Lost.
The other possibility is that it is an alternative title for another Shakespearean comedy not listed by Meres or Hunt.[1] Much Ado About Nothing, commonly believed to be written around 1598,[2] is often suggested, as is All's Well That Ends Well. For example, Henry Woudhuysen's Arden edition (Third Series) of Love's Labour's Lost points out a number of striking similarities between the two plays. Leslie Hotson speculated that Love's Labour's Won was the former title of Troilus and Cressida, pointing out that Troilus and Cressida did not appear in Palladis Damia. However, this play is generally considered to have been written c. 1602, and Kenneth Palmer has criticized it for requiring a "forced interpretation of the play." Love's Labour's Won might have been published originally in 1599[3]
Others have proposed that Love's Labour's Won was not actually a play at all, but rather perhaps something like an extended comedic poem to be read on stage.
In Brahms and Simon's No Bed for Bacon, Shakespeare is always trying to find time during the rehearsals of his plays to write "Love's Labour's Wonne", but never gets beyond the title.
The play is featured in "The Shakespeare Code", an episode of the science fiction drama Doctor Who first broadcast on 7 April 2007. In the episode, the play is lost because it was written under the influence of "magic" as a "spell" to bring forth the end of the world by the Carrionites, a witchlike race. When the Carrionites' plan is ruined, all the copies of the cataclysmic play are expelled with them.
It also is featured in the novels Love Lies Bleeding (1948) by Edmund Crispin, Ruled Britannia (2002) by Harry Turtledove, Harvard Yard (2003) by William Martin, What Time Devours (2009) by A.J. Hartley, and mentioned in I, Elizabeth (1994) by Rosalind Miles.
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