The First Quarto is a garbled copy taken down in the theater. It was printed in 1597. Its title claims that "it hath been often (with great applause) plaid publiquely, by the right Honourable the L. of Hunsdon his servants." The company in which Shakespeare acted was so called from July, 1596, to April, 1597. The Second Quarto, "newly corrected, augmented, and amended," appeared in 1599, and is the basis of all later texts. Three others followed--1609, one undated, and 1637.
It is generally held that Shakespeare wrote much, perhaps all, of the play in the early nineties, and that he revised it for production about 1597. The play is therefore a stepping-stone between the first and second periods of his work.
+Source+.--The development of the story has been traced from Luigi da Porto's history of _Romeo and Giulietta_ (pr. 1530 at Venice) through Bandello, Boisteau, and Painter's _Palace of { 145} Pleasure_, to Arthur Brooke's poem _Romeus and Juliet_ (1562), and to a lost English play which Brooke says in his address "To the Reader" he had seen on the stage, but is now known only through a Dutch play of 1630 based upon it.
The part in which Shakespeare altered the action most notably is the first scene, one of the most masterly expositions of a dramatic situation ever written. The nurse is borrowed from Brooke, the death of Mercutio from the old play. The whole is, however, completely transfused by the welding fire of genius.
+Love's Labour's Lost+.--Obviously imitative of the comedies of John Lyly, _Love's Labour's Lost_ is a light, pleasant court comedy, with but a slight thread of plot. The king of Navarre and three of his nobles forswear for three years the society of ladies in order to pursue study. This plan is interrupted by the Princess of France, who with three ladies comes on an embassy to Navarre. The inevitable happens; the gentlemen fall in love with the ladies, and, after ineffectual struggles to keep their oaths, give up the pursuit of learning for that of love. This runs on merrily enough in courtly fashion till the announcement of the death of the king of France ends the embassy, and the lovers are put on a year's probation of constancy. In the subplot, or minor story, the play is notable for the burlesquing of two types of character--a pompous pedantic schoolmaster, and a braggart who always speaks in high-flown metaphor. These two, happily contrasted with a country curate, a court page, and a country clown with his lass, make much good sport.