Source of the Plot. It is thought that Shakespeare created the plot. The names of some of the characters were taken from people then living. The incident in Act V, scene ii (the entrance of the King of Navarre and his men, in Russian habits), was perhaps suggested by the visit of some Russians to Queen Elizabeth in 1584.
The Fable. The King of Navarre and his three courtiers, Biron, Dumaine and Longaville, have sworn to study for three years under the usual collegiate conditions of watching, fasting, and keeping from the sight and speech of women. They are forced to break this vow. The Princess of France comes with her Court to discuss State affairs.
At the discussion, the King falls in love with the Princess, his three courtiers fall in love with the ladies of her train.
The lovers send vows of love to their ladies. They plot to visit them in disguises of masks and Russian clothes. The ladies, hearing of this plot in time, mask themselves. The men fail to recognise them. Each disguised lover makes love-vows to the wrong woman.
The ladies twit the men with a double perjury: that they have broken their vow to study, and their love vows.
The play is kept within the bounds of fantastic comedy by the members of the sub-plot, who intrude with their fun whenever the action tends to become real. They intrude here, to impersonate the Nine Worthies before the two Courts. The farce of their performance is heightened by ragging from the courtiers. When it is at its height, two of the members of the sub-plot begin to quarrel. One blow would ruin the play by making it real. At the crisis the violence is avoided; the reality is brought unexpectedly, by beauty. A messenger enters to tell the Princess that her father is dead.
The ladies bid the men test their love by waiting for twelve months. The trifling of the earlier acts is shown at its moral value against a background of tragic happening. Accomplishments are compared with life.
The members of the sub-plot enter. They end the play with the singing of a lyric.
The play gives the reader the uncanny feeling that something real inside the piece is trying to get out of the fantasy. The lip-love rattles like a skeleton's bones. The love of Biron for Rosaline is real passion. The conflict throughout is the conflict of the unreal with the real.
The play seems to have been written in a literary or sentimental mood, and revised in a real mood. There is little in the early version that is not fantastic. The situation is fantastic, the people are fantastic, the language is fantastic with all a brilliant young master's delight in the play and glitter of cunning writing. The later version was written during the passionate years of Shakespeare's growth, after something had altered the world to him. The two versions are carelessly stuck together, with the effect of a rose-bush growing out of bones.