Since I edited the text of Love's Labour's Lost over thirty-five years ago, taking about two years over it I remember, I have scarcely given it a thought. For a serial editor of Shakespeare, being mortal, has to push on from play to play without looking back or even troubling much about his critics if he is to have any hope of getting through the canon. True, I imagined, as did the publishers, at the outset of the journey that it would not take more than ten or a dozen years, but I very soon came to realize the folly of that estimate. Nevertheless, thanks chiefly to good doctors, the long road has been traversed and the end is in sight: I shall never have to edit another play from the beginning. I can, therefore, turn back at last and reconsider some of the texts edited in salad days.

As almost all the important advances in Shakespearian research, textual and exegetic, have been made from 1930 onwards I am surprised to find how little in the first edition of Love's Labour's Lost, published in 1923, is out of date in 1960. I cannot hope for a like good fortune when I pass on to look at other plays edited in the twenties, and in this one, of course, a good deal of addition and excision has been needed. A brief account of those changes will be found in the following paragraphs.