Three Early Comedies: Love's Labor's Lost, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merry Wives of Windsor

by William Shakespeare

Three Early Comedies

Love's Labor's Lost
Farce and fun follow when a young king and his three friends vow to give up women for a year—just as a pretty princess and her three ladies-in-waiting arrive—in a delightful play that ends with one of Shakespeare’s loveliest songs.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona
In this lyrical comedy, two friends are infatuated with the same woman, while a jilted girl disguised as a boy and a clownish servant with a raffish mutt set the scene for laughter and a timeless story of love.

The Merry Wives of Windsor
Shakespeare’s famous rogue, Falstaff, woos two married women with identical love letters—and becomes the focus of a hilarious comedy when the women conspire to teach him a lesson.

Genres: Shakespeare, Classics, Plays, Drama

560 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1986

About the author

William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner ("sharer") of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men after the ascension of King James VI and I of Scotland to the English throne. At age 49 (around 1613), he appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious beliefs, and even certain fringe theories as to whether the works attributed to him were written by others.
Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best works produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608, among them Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in the English language. In the last phase of his life, he wrote tragicomedies (also known as romances) and collaborated with other playwrights.
Many of Shakespeare's plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. However, in 1623, John Heminge and Henry Condell, two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare's, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works that includes 36 of his plays. Its Preface was a prescient poem by Ben Jonson, a former rival of Shakespeare, that hailed Shakespeare with the now famous epithet: "not of an age, but for all time".

Reviews

[Sam Hadfield]

This is a great compilation of the three plays.
It integrates the stories with a possible source after, giving insight into how Shakespeare could have been inspired by other media at the time.

[Valerie]

If you live in Santa Cruz, check out Shakespeare Santa Cruz every summer at UCSC. You will learn to love and understand the bard as you never did in High School.

[Jenny]

Love's Labor's Lost (Shakespeare, Signet Classic) by William Shakespeare (1965)

[epiong]

Finished the three plays today.

[epiong]

Read Love's Labours Lost