[51] The hero is the King of Navarre, in whose dominions the scene is laid. The two chief lords in attendance on him in the play, Biron and Longaville, bear the actual names of the two most strenuous supporters of the real King of Navarre (Biron’s later career subsequently formed the subject of two plays by Chapman, The Conspiracie of Duke Biron and The Tragedy of Biron, which were both produced in 1605). The name of the Lord Dumain in Love’s Labour’s Lost is a common anglicised version of that Duc de Maine or Mayenne whose name was so frequently mentioned in popular accounts of French affairs in connection with Navarre’s movements that Shakespeare was led to number him also among his supporters. Mothe or La Mothe, the name of the pretty, ingenious page, was that of a French ambassador who was long popular in London; and, though he left England in 1583, he lived in the memory of playgoers and playwrights long after Love’s Labour’s Lost was written. In Chapman’s An Humourous Day’s Mirth, 1599, M. Le Mot, a sprightly courtier in attendance on the King of France, is drawn from the same original, and his name, as in Shakespeare’s play, suggests much punning on the word ‘mote.’ As late as 1602 Middleton, in his Blurt, Master Constable, act ii. scene ii. line 215, wrote:
Ho God! Ho God! thus did I revel it
When Monsieur Motte lay here ambassador.
Armado, ‘the fantastical Spaniard’ who haunts Navarre’s Court, and is dubbed by another courtier ‘a phantasm, a Monarcho,’ is a caricature of a half-crazed Spaniard known as ‘fantastical Monarcho’ who for many years hung about Elizabeth’s Court, and was under the delusion that he owned the ships arriving in the port of London. On his death Thomas Churchyard wrote a poem called Fantasticall Monarcho’s Epitaph, and mention is made of him in Reginald Scott’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, 1584, p. 54. The name Armado was doubtless suggested by the expedition of 1588. Braggardino in Chapman’s Blind Beggar of Alexandria, 1598, is drawn on the same lines. The scene (Love’s Labour’s Lost, V. ii. 158 sqq.) in which the princess’s lovers press their suit in the disguise of Russians follows a description of the reception by ladies of Elizabeth’s Court in 1584 of Russian ambassadors who came to London to seek a wife among the ladies of the English nobility for the Tsar (cf. Horsey’s Travels, ed. E. A. Bond, Hakluyt Soc.) For further indications of topics of the day treated in the play, see A New Study of “Love’s Labour’s Lost,”’ by the present writer, in Gent. Mag, Oct. 1880; and Transactions of the New Shakspere Society, pt. iii. p. 80*. The attempt to detect in the schoolmaster Holofernes a caricature of the Italian teacher and lexicographer, John Florio, seems unjustified (see p. 85 n).
[53] Cf. Fleay, Life, pp. 188 seq.
[55a] The story, which has been traced back to the Greek romance Anthia and Abrocomas by Xenophon Ephesius, a writer of the second century, seems to have been first told in modern Europe about 1470 by Masuccio in his Novellino (No. xxxiii.: cf. Mr. Waters’s translation, ii. 155-65). It was adapted from Masuccio by Luigi da Porto in his novel, La Giulietta, 1535, and by Bandello in his Novelle, 1554, pt. ii., No. ix. Bandello’s version became classical; it was translated in the Histoires Tragiques of Françoisde Belleforest (Paris, 1559) by Pierre Boaistuau de Launay, an occasional collaborator with Belleforest. At the same time as Shakespeare was writing Romeo and Juliet, Lope de Vega was dramatising the tale in his Spanish play called Castelvines y Monteses (i.e. Capulets and Montagus). For an analysis of Lope’s play, which ends happily, see Variorum Shakespeare, 1821, xxi. 451-60.
[55b] Cf. Originals and Analogues, pt. i. ed. P. A. Daniel, New Shakspere Society.
[56] Cf. Parallel Texts, ed. P. A. Daniel, New Shakspere Society; Fleay, Life, pp. 191 seq.
[60] Cf. Fleay, Life, pp. 235 seq.; Trans. New Shakspere Soc., 1876, pt. ii. by Miss Jane Lee; Swinburne, Study, pp. 51 seq.
[62] In later life Shakespeare, in Hamlet, borrows from Lyly’s Euphues Polonius’s advice to Laertes; but, however he may have regarded the moral sentiment of that didactic romance, he had no respect for the affectations of its prose style, which he ridiculed in a familiar passage in I Henry IV, II. iv. 445: ‘For though the camomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows, yet youth the more it is wasted, the sooner it wears.’
[65] Henslowe, p. 24.