Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing: An Early Diptych?

In his Palladis Tamia published in 1598, Francis Meres gave a list of popular plays, already a fairly long one, written by a young playwright aged 34, William Shakespeare. In Meres’s inventory, an intriguing, unknown play called Love’s Labour’s Won is paired with Love’s Labour’s Lost, a mention which has so far remained a complete mystery. This paper aims at reconsidering the hypothesis according to which Much Ado About Nothing might be the comedy designated under the title of Love’s Labour’s Won and at examining the two-part work then formed by these two pieces which, in many respects, seem to match perfectly. Can Much Ado About Nothing be seriously regarded as a sequel to Love’s Labour’s Lost, and, if so, what about the notion of dramatic seriality in Shakespeare’s time? In other words, what may have been the playwright’s intentions in writing a comic rather than a historical sequel or sequence?