The Rev. Joseph Hunter has spent a deal of learning and ingenuity in trying to make out that the play referred to by Meres as Lovers Labour’s Won was The Tempest.  Among Shakespeare’s dramas he could hardly have pitched upon a more unfit subject for such a title.  There is no love’s labour in The Tempest.  For, though a lover does indeed there labour awhile in piling logs, this is nowise from love, but simply because he cannot help himself.  Nor does he thereby win the lady, for she was won before,—­“at the first sight they have chang’d eyes";—­and the labour was imposed for the testing of his love, not for the gaining of its object; and was all the while refreshed with the “sweet thoughts” that in heart she was already his; while in truth the father was overjoyed at the “fair encounter of two most rare affections,” and was quite as intent on the match as the lovers were themselves.  In short, there is no external evidence whatever in favour of Mr. Hunter’s notion, while the internal evidence makes utterly against it.

There is, then, no reasonable doubt that All’s Well that Ends Well was originally written before 1598.  For myself, I have no doubt that the first writing was several years before that date; as early at least as 1592 or 1593.  Coleridge, in his Literary Remains, holds the play to have been “originally intended as the counterpart of Love’s Labour’s Lost”; and a comparison of the two naturally leads to that conclusion without any help from the title.  This inward relation of the plays strongly infers them both to have been written about the same time, or in pretty near succession.  Now Love’s Labour’s Lost was published in 1598, and in the title-page is said to have been “newly corrected and augmented,” which fairly supposes the first writing of that play also to have been several years before, since some considerable time would naturally pass before the Poet saw cause for revising his workmanship.  And the diversities of style in that play fully concur herewith in arguing a considerable interval between the original writing and the revisal.

It is abundantly certain, from internal evidence, that the play now in hand also underwent revisal, and this too after a much longer interval than in the case of Love’s Labour’s Lost.  Here the diversities of style are much more strongly marked than in that play.  Accordingly it was Coleridge’s decided opinion, first given out in his lectures in 1813, and again in 1818, though not found in his Literary Remains, that “All’s Well that Ends Well was written at two different and rather distant periods of the Poet’s life.”  This we learn from Mr. Collier, who heard those lectures, and who adds that Coleridge “pointed out very clearly two distinct styles, not only of thought, but of expression.”  The same judgment has since been enforced by Tieck and other able critics; and the grounds of it are so manifest in the play