So writes Gabriel Harvey in one of hundreds of ecstatic invocations of Eutrapelus, chief among the dramatis personae or alter egos that strut and fret on the margins of hisbooks –in this case, his double-bound copy of Lodovico Domenichi's Facetie, motti, et burle di diversi signori et persone private and Lodovico Guicciardini's Detti, et fatti piacevoli et gravi, two Italian collections of jests and apophthegms (see figureopposite). In Harvey's rhapsodicaccount –which traverses Latin, English and occasionally Italian and Greek, and which is so voluminous that it can only be lightly sampledhere –Eutrapelus is ‘a peerles Artist: a matchles Professour: & a most excellent man, at euerie proofe of the Worthiest men’, possessing ‘a unique zeal for words, things, and actions, and a singular abundance of the highest faculties’; he ‘surpasses all in the elegant art … [adding] grace and dignity to his profession and to every pragmatic ability’. A ‘living mirror of every excellence’, Eutrapelus is ‘the onlie surprising Witt, toung, hand, foote, & sowle of the World… . A man for all seasons: a philosopher therefore for all things; a most capable actor for singular matters: most timely in all things. Ahead in the beginning, last at the end; one worth all the rest.’

This essay explores the relationship between Harvey's virtuous marginalia and Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, two unrelated creations that are nevertheless strangely entangled through their mutual engagement with eutrapelia, the Aristotelian virtue of conversational wit that forms a central element of Renaissance discourses of civility and courtesy. In making this juxtaposition I am not suggesting that Harvey's marginalia, or Harvey himself, operates as a ‘source’ for the play (although there is a long, albeit somewhat outdated, critical tradition of reading aspects of Love's Labour's Lost as direct references to the Harvey–Nashe quarrel). Rather, I want to highlight some fundamental homologies between how Harvey formulates the relationship between eutrapelia, practice and virtue and how Love's Labour's Lost orchestrates its witty engagements.