This chapter explores the mystery of the lost Love’s Labour’s Won. It reviews the evidence that it ever existed, and the history of scholarship speculating about its content, drawing on recent work on the phenomenon of lost plays. Imaginary, scholarly, and popular fictional reconstructions of the play, from the Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works to Dr Who, share certain––and the author argues, unwarranted––narrative and plot assumptions about the shape of this lost play. The absent Love’s Labour’s Won is seen as a challenge to the idea of Shakespeare’s complete canon, and of editorial projects including the Arden 3 series.
