h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Palladis Tamia, subtitled "Wits Treasury", is a book written in 1598 by Francis Meres. It is an important document for historians of Elizabethan drama as it has a section in which it compares, favourably, English poetry and drama with Classical models. It gives a lot of information on plays and the playwrights who wrote them, and provides evidence of the latest date some of Shakespeare’s work must have been written by.

It also provides a tantalising mystery, in listing Shakespeare’s comedies ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona, Comedy of Errors, Love's Labours Lost, Love’s Labours Won, Midsummer's Night Dream, and Merchant of Venice. Where is ‘Love’s Labours Won’?

There has been a great deal of discussion over the years, was it an unsuccessful play that was lost before the 1623 Folio was printed? The Folio contained 18 plays that had never been printed before. Four plays were missing, ‘Pericles’ included in the third edition, ‘Two Noble Kinsmen’ only recently accepted into the canon, ‘Cardenio’ a lost collaboration with John Fletcher, and ‘Love’s Labours Won’.

Another theory holds that it may have been a play that we know by another name. Just as some of the plays have alternative names, ‘Twelfth Night; or What You Will’ and ‘Henry VIII; or All Is True’ are two examples. It has been suggested that either ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ or ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ are ‘Love’s Labours Won’.

The mystery was finally cleared up on the seventh of April 2007. On this day the BBC broadcast “The Shakespeare Code” a dramatisation of the events surrounding the creation and destruction of ‘Love’s Labours Won’. Evidence suggested that the play was inspired at least in part by a group of aliens called ‘Carrionites’ who planned to free their race and destroy the world by planting a coded ‘spell’ into the final speech of the play.
These aliens, it was suggested, used their powers to insert the text they required for their plan, into Will’s mind. The Carrionites had also dictated the design of the Globe Theatre and its 14 sides, to the carpenter Peter Street who was driven mad by the experience.

There is evidence that the play was performed to its end, but at that point a portal had opened in the space time continuum and released the race of Carrionites into this world. Apparently only Will could, with the power of his words, close up the breach. He extemporised a stanza but was stuck for the last rhyming word, which was luckily provided by a young black lady in the audience who cried out ‘Expelliarmus’

The portal closed, trapping the Carrionites inside but also sucking in the pages of the playscript. Some commentators believe that the young woman was subsequently immortalised by Shakespeare in the sonnets as his ‘Dark Lady’.

Many scholars regard this theory as ‘balderdash’ and accuse the BBC of doctoring the evidence.

This sounded familiar. It's only when I googled it I realised it was an episode of Doctor Who!

Deb

Fiftieth anniversary, how could I resist?

[Amy P]