_LOVE'S LABOUR'S WON: THE FIRST SKETCH OF ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL--THE COMEDY OF ERRORS--THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA_ As a counterpart to the comedy of _Love's Labour's Lost_, Shakespeare soon after composed another, entitled _Love's Labour's Won_. This we learn from the celebrated passage in Francis Meres' _Palladis Tamia_, where he enumerates the plays which Shakespeare had written up to that date, 1598. We know, however, that no play of that name is now included among the poet's works. Since it is scarcely conceivable that a play of Shakespeare's, once acted, should have been entirely lost, the only question is, which of the extant comedies originally bore that title. But in reality there is no question at all: the play is _All's Well that Ends Well_--not, of course, as we now possess it, in a form and style belonging to a quite mature period of the poet's life, but as it stood before the searching revision, of which it shows evident traces. We cannot, indeed, restore the play as it originally issued from Shakespeare's youthful imagination. But there are passages in it which evidently belong to the older version, rhymed conversations, or at any rate fragments of dialogue, rhymed letters in sonnet form, and numerous details which entirely correspond with the style of _Love's Labour's Lost_. The piece is a dramatisation of Boccaccio's story of Gillette of Narbonne. Only the comic parts are of Shakespeare's invention; he has added the characters of Parolles, Lafeu, the Clown, and the Countess. Even in the original sketch he no doubt gave new depth and vitality to the leading characters, who are mere outlines in the story. The comedy, as we know, has for its heroine a young woman who loves the haughty Bertram with an unrequited and despised passion, cures the King of France of a dangerous sickness, claims as her reward the right to choose a husband from among the courtiers, chooses Bertram, is repudiated by him, and, after a nocturnal meeting at which she takes the place of another woman whom he believes himself to have seduced, at last overcomes his resistance and is acknowledged as his wife. Shakespeare has here not only shown the unquestioning acceptance of his original, which was usual even in his riper years, but has transferred to his play all its peculiarities and improbabilities. Even the psychological crudities he has swallowed as they stand--such, for instance, as the fact of a delicate woman forcing herself under cover of night upon the man who has left his home and country for the express purpose of escaping from her. Shakespeare has drawn in Helena a patient Griselda, that type of loving and cruelly maltreated womanhood which reappears in German poetry in Kleist's _Käthchen von Heilbronn_--the woman who suffers everything in inexhaustible tenderness and humility, and never falters in her love until in the end she wins the rebellious heart.