Isaac Asimov - Asimov’s Guide To Shakespear. Volume 1

Berowne, despite his brave words, finds that love drives him to write a letter to Rosaline (strictly against the King's rules) and to have it delivered to her secretly by Costard the clown. Armado, however, is also using Costard as delivery boy, sending a letter by way of the clown to Jaquenetta.

When Costard tries to deliver the letter to Rosaline, the Princess seizes it and behold, it turns out to be Armado's letter. She opens it and finds that the Spaniard is writing most grandiloquently to the peasant girl. He makes comparisons that are flattering to himself, if little likely to delight the girl, for he says:

—Act IV, scene i, lines 65-68

King Cophetua, the hero of a ballad, was a completely fictional personage. He was an immensely rich king of Africa who disdained all womankind till he accidentally saw a beggar maid from his window. He had to have her, married her, and lived with her long and happily. The name given the beggar maid may have been Penelope to begin with. It varies from version to version of the story, however, and Zenelophon is a name as good as another.

As evidence for the very popular thesis that "love conquers all," the ballad grew famous and was particularly close to the hearts of any girl that dreamed of marrying above her station someday.

It is impossible to help but notice now and then that Armado is extraordinarily like Don Quixote in his consistent overestimate of himself and in Ms insistence on imagining himself a superhuman storybook hero. He ends the letter with some doggerel which begins:

—Act IV, scene i, lines 90-91

Armado represents himself as the Nemean lion (see page I-58) while Jaquenetta is the lamb. (And remember that Don Quixote tried to fight a lion in the cage and called himself, in consequence, "Knight of the Lions.")

There is something rather pleasant in the thought that Shakespeare might be borrowing from Miguel de Cervantes, the Spanish author of the Don Quixote saga, since Cervantes was almost an exact contemporary of Shakespeare's (the former was three years younger and both died in the same year) and by all odds one of the few writers, on the basis of Don Quixote alone, worthy of being mentioned in the same breath with Shakespeare.

There is only one catch, but that is a fatal one. The first part of Don Quixote was published in 1605, a dozen years at least after Love's Labor's Lost was written.

When the Princess wonders about the identity of the man who wrote the unintentionally amusing letter, Boyet tells her he is:

—Act IV, scene i, lines 101-2

A "phantasime" is a man with a wild imagination (fantasy), and Monarcho was a harmless Italian madman who was tolerated at Elizabeth's court because he was found to be amusing, and who had died perhaps ten years before the play was written.

One can't help remembering that in the second part of Don Quixote, published in 1615, there is a long section in which the mad knight is humored by a kindly Duke and Duchess who keep him at their estate for the fun he affords them.

Could it be in reverse? Could Cervantes have come across Love's Labor's Lost and turned a small suggestion into a towering work of genius? I have never seen this stated even as a conjecture but I can't help wondering.

Boyet playfully rallies Rosaline on the letter Berowne has sent her, a letter she hasn't seen yet because of Costard's mix-up. She counters with:

—Act IV, scene i, lines 121-23

King Pepin (see page I-455) reigned in France in the eighth century, over eight hundred years before Shakespeare's time, and he was apparently considered the epitome of the dead-and-gone in French idiom.

The next scene introduces Holofernes, a most unbearable pedant, whose speech consists half of Latin and who spends all his time nit-picking the English language. He is a satire on what learning can come to if it is carried to extremes without even a modicum of good sense to go along with all the education.

Those who look for personal satire in Love's Labor's Lost suspect Holofernes to represent a gibe against John Florio, the London-born son of a Protestant refugee from Italy. Florio was a linguist who spent his life translating foreign works into English, notably Montaigne's Essays, and who compiled Italian-English dictionaries, collections of proverbs, grammars, etc. He was intensely learned and was probably pedantic enough to make it seem that Holofernes was a satiric reference to him.

Another possibility is Thomas Harriot, an English mathematician who was Raleigh's scientific adviser on an expedition to the New World (a position which would be alone sufficient to make him instant anathema to the Essex coterie, including Shakespeare). Harriot wrote a book on the voyage which was published in 1588 and which was pedantic enough, perhaps, to inspire the satire.

Holofernes is a pedant from his very name onward, for the name, though biblical, is not one that many would think of using. It occurs only in the apocryphal (but very popular) Book of Judith, accepted as canonical by the Catholics but by neither Jews nor Protestants. It deals with an invasion of Judea by an army of Assyrians under a general named Holofernes. The general was hoodwinked and assassinated by the Jewish heroine Judith, and as a villainous name it would scarcely be used except to signify someone who would find pleasure in obscure and unusual allusions.

Thus, Constable Dull tries to trap Holofernes with a riddle which he thinks is impossible to puzzle out-to wit, what was a month old when Cain was born, is still alive, but is not yet five weeks old. The answer is, of course, "the moon," since when it is four weeks old it starts all over again with another "new moon."

Holofernes knows the answer and gives it at once, but naturally would not dream of saying "the moon" or even using the more common classical terms such as "Diana," "Selene," "Artemis," or "Cynthia." Instead, he picks the most obscure allusion possible and says:

—Act IV, scene ii, line 37

Dictynna was undoubtedly one of the many local names for the moon goddess which then had to be woven into the general body of myths worked out by the old Greek poets. It was said that one of the companions of Diana, the goddess of the hunt, who was often considered a personification of the moon, was Britomartis, who hid from the unwanted love of King Minos of Crete. Britomartis finally threw herself into the sea in desperation and was rescued in a fisherman's net. Thereafter, she was given the name "Dictynna" from a Greek word for "net." Her association with Diana was used to explain the fact that Dictynna could be used as a personification of the moon.

Of course, Dull can make nothing of the answer and Holofernes has to explain it.

Again, he quotes a Latin line and falls into ecstasies over it, saying:

—Act IV, scene ii, lines 95-96

Now, the greatest of all the Latin poets, Vergil, who wrote the Aeneid, was born near Mantua and was frequently referred to as "the Mantuan." A reader might be forgiven if he supposed at first that Holofernes was quoting from the Aeneid and rhapsodizing over Vergil.