Love's Labour's Lost (Vol. 38) | Maurice Hunt (essay date 1992)
Maurice Hunt (essay date 1992)
SOURCE: "The Double Figure of Elizabeth in Love's Labor's Lost" in Essays in Literature, Vol. XIX, No. 2, Fall, 1992, pp. 173-92.
[In the following essay, Hunt contends that through the character of the Princess of France, Shakespeare portrayed Renaissance England's ambivalent view of its aging Queen Elizabeth I.]
The shadow of Queen Elizabeth has long haunted the woodland park setting of Love's Labor's Lost. In the words of F. P. Wilson, "much of the action [of the play] is based on entertainments which Elizabeth was offered while on progress: pageants; hunting the deer—the Queen observing the hunt from a stand specially built for her; dramatic shows sometimes performed seriously by country people and organized by the local schoolmaster, sometimes a burlesquing of rural life and character and presented to the Queen out of doors in the park adjoining her host's house or castle; a masque or...
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