Home / Topics / Robert Tofte, Boiardo in English (1598), Love's Labour's Lost, and the Billingbear Orlando Innamorato (1602)

Robert Tofte, Boiardo in English (1598), Love's Labour's Lost, and the Billingbear Orlando Innamorato (1602)

Mixed Ready evidence packet

Topic: Robert Tofte, Boiardo, and Love's Labour's Lost

Source-Control Position

The 1780 Billingbear catalogue entry Orlando Innamorato del Boiardo — Ven. 1602 can now be identified much more precisely. The likely edition is Domenico Imberti's Venice 1602 Orlando Innamorato, an illustrated composite text containing Boiardo's poem together with Nicolò degli Agostini's three-book continuation, presented through Lodovico Domenichi's rewriting and further altered by Michel Bonelli.

This matters because the English reception route is no longer abstract. Robert Tofte published an English verse selection from the Domenichi tradition in 1598. In the same year, Tofte's Alba printed the earliest surviving description of a performance of Love's Labour's Lost. The conjunction creates a concrete research avenue:

The facts do not show that Tofte supplied Italian material to the play, that the author knew Tofte, or that Henry Neville acquired the 1602 book. They identify a real English reader-translator at the intersection of Boiardo reception and early play reception, and they correct what text the 1602 Billingbear title probably contained.

1. Correcting the Identity of the 1602 Billingbear Book

The local catalogue gives only:

Orlando Innamorato del Boiardo _______ Ven. 1602

The Bodleian/Taylor Institution exhibition The World of Ariosto identifies the 1602 edition in full:

ORLANDO INNAMORATO DEL S. MATTEO MARIA BOIARDO, CONTE DI SCANDIANO. INSIEME COI TRE LIBRI DI M. NICOLO de gli Agostini, già riformati per M. Lodouico Domenichi [...], Venice, Domenico Imberti, 1602.

The Bodleian copy is shelfmark 102.E.23. The exhibition explains that it contains:

  1. Boiardo's Inamoramento de Orlando;
  2. Nicolò degli Agostini's three-book gionta or continuation;
  3. the text as rewritten by Lodovico Domenichi;
  4. “corrections” by Michel Bonelli, including passages borrowed from Francesco Berni.

The implication is important for all future comparison. Orlando Innamorato del Boiardo is a catalogue shorthand, not a guarantee that the Billingbear book preserved Boiardo's original linguistic text. If the entry is the Imberti edition—and its place and year make that the likely identification—the object was a layered Renaissance rewriting of the romance cycle.

The combined Billingbear/Audley End sheet assigns no surviving object number to this title. Exact edition identification has advanced; physical survival and provenance have not.

2. Robert Tofte's English Orlando Inamorato, 1598

EarlyPrint TCP A16304 and an EEBO image witness control Tofte's book. Its title page reads:

ORLANDO INAMORATO. The three first Bookes of that famous Noble Gentleman and learned Poet, Mathew Maria Boiardo Earle of Scandiano in Lombardie. Done into English Heroicall Verse, By R. T. Gentleman.

The imprint is:

Printed at London by Valentine Sims, dwelling on Adling hil at the signe of the white Swanne. 1598.

The book is STC 3216, ESTC S110501, seventy-two pages, signatures A-I4. Although its title says “three first Bookes,” the selection corresponds to the first three cantos of Boiardo's first book in the Domenichi tradition.

The opening argument supplies the romance action in compact form:

Charles doth a Royall Feast, and Ioust proclaime,

Where (with Argalia) comes Angelica,

Dares all to fight, and Malagigi's tane,

Perforce, sent as Prisner to Cataia.

Tofte's first stanza identifies love-madness as the subject:

I sing of Him that Wonders wroght through Loue,

That Monsters, Fiends, and Giants huge did tame,

And many a weary Iorny oft did proue,

To seeke, to finde what lost had bin his gaine,

A cruell Heart with pittie milde to moue

(Which he too faithlesse found vnto his paine:)

So neere and deere he loude her, and so well,

As (for her sake) distraught of Wit he fell.

The title page and opening are controlled against the public EEBO page image. Internet Archive incorrectly labels the derived item as 1592; the title-page image itself plainly prints 1598, agreeing with ESTC, TCP, and Folger cataloguing.

2.1 The dedication creates a patronage lead

Tofte dedicates the translation:

TO THE RIGHT VERTVOVS and worshipfull Ladie, the Ladie MARGARITE MORGAN, wife vnto Sir IOHN MORGAN of Chilworth in the Countie of SVRREY Knight, and Captaine of her Maiesties horsemen in the same Shire.

He says that both his elder brother and he had received manifolde courtesies, and exceeding great fauours at Chilworth. He presents the work as a New Year's gift and jokingly compares himself to a draper showing bad cloth at the darkest window so its faults will be less visible.

This is a researchable social setting for English Boiardo reception: the Tofte brothers, Margaret and Sir John Morgan, Chilworth, Surrey, and county horse organization. No Neville connection has yet been found. The dedication gives names and a place to search rather than a relationship to assume.

3. Tofte's 1598 Witness to Love's Labour's Lost

The Folger's Shakespeare Documented project identifies Tofte's Alba (London: Felix Kingston for Matthew Lownes, 1598), STC 24096, signature G5r, as the earliest surviving description of a performance of the play. The page image reads:

LOVES LABOR LOST, I once did see a Play,

Ycleped so, so called to my paine,

Which I to heare to my small Ioy did stay,

Giuing attendance on my froward Dame,

My misgiuing minde presaging to me Ill,

Yet was I drawne to see it gainst my Will.

Tofte then turns the theatrical genre into a private amorous complaint:

This Play no Play, but Plague was vnto me,

For there I lost the Loue I liked most:

And what to others seemde a Iest to be,

I, that (in earnest) found vnto my cost.

To euery one (saue me) twas Comicall,

Whilst Tragick like to me it did befall.

The next stanza explicitly comments on performance:

Each Actor plaid in cunning wise his part,

But chiefly Those entrapt in Cupids snare:

Yet All was fained, twas not from the hart,

They seemde to grieue, but yet they felt no care:

Twas I that Griefe (indeed) did beare in brest,

The others did but make a show in Iest.

This is independent evidence that Tofte attended or claimed to have attended a performance and understood the play as comic to its general audience. The same man's publication of English Boiardo in the same year makes him a high-priority reception figure.

4. The Folger Play Text: Its Own Refusal of a Conventional Comic Ending

The Folger text provides an exact point of comparison with Tofte's Comicall/Tragick response. Near the ending, Berowne says:

BEROWNE

Our wooing doth not end like an old play.

Jack hath not Jill. These ladies' courtesy

Might well have made our sport a comedy.

KING

Come, sir, it wants a twelvemonth and a day,

And then 'twill end.

BEROWNE

That's too long for a play.

—Love's Labour's Lost 5.2.947-953, Folger

The Folger passage itself calls attention to the relation between wooing, an old play, sport, and comedy, then postpones completion. Tofte's sonnet is therefore more than a bare title notice: his description of a comic performance that became personally tragic responds to a play whose own final dialogue disputes whether its interrupted wooing can yet be called a comedy.

That interpretive fit does not show that Tofte wrote, revised, or supplied the play. It shows that an identifiable Italian-romance translator left the earliest performance response and engaged precisely with the play's unstable comic conclusion.

5. A Joined Research Program

  1. Identify Tofte's Italian exemplar. Collate the 1598 English selection against Domenichi editions from 1545 onward, not only a modern Boiardo text.
  2. Separate the textual layers. For every prospective parallel, label Boiardo, Agostini, Domenichi, Berni, Bonelli, Tofte, and Imberti rather than citing “Boiardo” indiscriminately.
  3. Search the Morgan dedication network. Trace Margaret Morgan, Sir John Morgan of Chilworth, Tofte's elder brother, Surrey horse musters, household guests, and book ownership.
  4. Reconstruct Tofte's printers and booksellers. Compare Valentine Sims, Felix Kingston, and Matthew Lownes with the stationers and patrons of Italian translations and printed drama.
  5. Check all three cantos against the Folger play. Begin with courtly arrival, contests, love-madness, performance language, oath and service vocabulary, and representations of Cupid; quote every play-side comparison from Folger.
  6. Locate the Billingbear object. Search older Audley End inventories, sale catalogues, long-term-loan lists, and miscatalogued composite romances for an Imberti 1602 quarto of approximately 450 leaves.
  7. Study Tofte as an audience member. Compare the entire Alba sequence around G5r, not only the famous first line, and identify whether the froward Dame or performance occasion can be dated or socially located.
  8. Keep chronology explicit. The Tofte translation and performance notice are 1598. The likely Billingbear edition is 1602. The latter cannot be the exemplar of the former, but both belong to the Domenichi textual branch.

6. Quoted Source Passages

Direct quotations are controlled by:

No remembered Shakespeare wording is used in this packet.

7. Notes on Access

2026-07-14 Deep Research Update: A Translator at Two Courts

The EarlyPrint FTS index supplies a sharper reception fact. Through 1609, an exact surface-phrase search for loves labor lost returns one indexed document: Robert Tofte's Alba (A13797, 1598). This does not make the phrase linguistically unique outside EarlyPrint, but it confirms that the earliest performance notice is also the only indexed pre-1610 print occurrence of the full title-phrase in this corpus.

The full title of Alba adds a neglected part of Tofte's profile:

Hereunto is added a most excellent pathetical and passionate letter, sent by Duke D'Epernoun, unto the late French King, Henry the 3. of that name, when he was commanded from the court, and from his royall companie. Translated into English by the foresaid author.

This means that the same 1598 volume which names Love's Labour's Lost also presents Tofte as translator of a French court letter of banishment or exclusion, alongside his Italianate love poetry. Paired with his 1598 Boiardo translation, Tofte's documented range crosses Italian chivalric romance, French court-political writing, lyric complaint, and theatrical spectatorship.

The chronological boundary remains important. The Billingbear Orlando Innamorato — Ven. 1602 cannot have been Tofte's 1598 exemplar. What the records establish is a shared Domenichi/Boiardo reception lane: Tofte translated from that textual tradition in 1598, and a later 1602 Venetian representative of it appears in the Billingbear catalogue.

New research directions

  1. Compare Tofte's translation of d'Épernon's letter with its French exemplar and with exile/court-removal language in Love's Labour's Lost.
  2. Determine whether the Duke's letter circulated separately before Tofte and which court-news channels supplied it.
  3. Collate Tofte's Orlando Inamorato against the specific Domenichi textual states preceding the 1602 Imberti edition.
  4. Treat R.T. as a documented translator-observer, not as an assumed intermediary to Neville or the play.

Source trail

8. Citations and Local Witnesses