Love's Labour's Lost (Vol. 64) | Maruice Hunt (essay date 1992)

Maruice Hunt (essay date 1992)

SOURCE: “The Double Figure of Elizabeth in Love's Labor's Lost,” in Essays in Literature, Vol. 19, No. 2, Fall, 1992, pp. 173-92.

[In the following essay, Hunt studies the ways in which the figure of Queen Elizabeth, as both a nurturing and threatening female, informs the characterization of the Princess of France in Love's Labour's Lost.]

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...

[The entire page is 11769 words long]

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