[In the essay that follows, Tricomi dismisses efforts to correlate figures in the subplot of Love's Labour's Lost to historical personages, but admits some correspondences can be made between characters in the main plot to the names of historical individuals involved in the French Civil War. Since these characters are depicted in broad and general terms, Tricomi surmises that Shakespeare perhaps idealized these individuals—familiar to most Elizabethans—for the purposes of entertainment through escapist fantasy.]

No other play in the Shakespeare canon has invited as much topical interpretation as Love's Labor's Lost. The speculative enterprise of trying to draw connections between illustrious persons in Elizabethan England and such characters as Armado, Moth, Sir Nathaniel, and Holofernes still goes on but without having produced lasting or even widely accepted results.¹ David Young's review of a recent book that employs a biographical-historical approach to Shakespeare's last plays sums up the achievements of this school of criticism: “It [Shakespeare's Last Plays: A New Approach] is the same fruitless attempt to read the plays in terms of contemporary politics and intellectual movements that she [Frances Yates] employed in her mercifully forgotten book on Love's Labour's Lost, and that we have seen often, though with less frequency of late, on what must be considered the fringes of Shakespearean scholarship.”² In the case of Love's Labor's Lost, the often ingenious attempts of scholars to treat the subplot figures in the play as if they were ciphers has met with the double embarrassment of producing contradictory identifications and of failing to allay the skepticism of critics who question whether there is any warrant whatsoever in the play to divine a satire on contemporary personages.³ Not only the specific results but the approach itself appears to have engendered these unrelieved problems.

It may, however, be worth our while to observe that in contrast to the subplot characters, whose names are clearly fictitious, those in the mainplot—the Princess of France, the King of Navarre, and the lords of the French court—are all given historically accurate names that correspond to living persons very much in the news during the early 1590s when Shakespeare composed his comedy.⁴ The appearance of these names in Shakespeare's play raises, in contrast again to the subplot figures, very different problems of methodology and historical interpretation. The most obvious difficulty is, in fact, precisely the opposite of that presented by the putative “cipher figures” in the subplot, for whereas the latter are drawn with much color and idiosyncratic charm, the immediately identifiable, mainplot figures are drawn so broadly and generally that it is hard to believe they are intended to represent the persons whose namesakes they are. Placed in the remote, idyllic setting of Nérac, these figures also inhabit a world so removed from the contemporary one of civil-war France in the 1590s that the basic intention of introducing their names into the play must be questioned. For these reasons, presumably, H. B. Charlton concluded that Shakespeare added these topical French names only as an afterthought; and Dover Wilson, wondering whether the names held any significance, answered his own query, saying, “in our opinion it probably implies nothing at all that need historically bother any reader.”⁵

In considering this puzzling question, it seems to me the possibility that Shakespeare introduced these names with some design is at least as reasonable as the notion that he introduced them to no real purpose at all. What I propose, therefore, is to explore the question of what Shakespeare's intention could have been in so naming his leading characters after outstanding contemporary figures from the French court when these very characters bear little resemblance to their real historical counterparts.

One notable feature emerging from a perusal of Shakespeare's sources is that whereas Shakespeare chose the idyllic French locale of Nérac in the year 1578 for the setting of his comedy, he nevertheless drew his central male characters from a period some fifteen years later, the French civil wars.⁶ The reason he did so, I suggest, is that the evident enchantment of Nérac, with its sequestered park and gay pursuit of fashion, provides an implicit but vivid contrast to the contemporary world of strife-ridden France, from which the civil war generals Navarre, Berowne, Longaville, and Dumaine are drawn. Ever since the formation of the Catholic “Ligue” and the infamous St. Bartholomew Massacre it carried out in 1572, France had become a country incurably divided into Huguenot and Catholic factions. Following the assassination of the ineffectual Henri III in 1589, France, deprived of a single recognized leader, was drawn into the vortex of civil war. Against the Duc de Mayenne (Shakespeare's Dumaine) and the House of Lorraine, which championed the Catholic cause, Henry of Navarre, a Huguenot, pressed his claim to the throne of France with an inadequately financed army that fought year after year for the decisive victory that eluded him. It was during this later period of civil war in the early 1590s that Love's Labor's Lost was written and it was from this backdrop that Shakespeare drew the names of the outstanding generals of that war.⁷

That these generals were known to Shakespeare and his audience there can be little doubt. The continual revivals of Marlowe's Massacre at Paris, which luridly chronicles recent French history from 1572 through 1589 and brings upon the stage both Henry of Navarre and the Duc de Mayenne, reflects the morbid fascination with which English eyes viewed the religious civil war raging across the channel.⁸ In the years 1591-93, moreover, city and court in England were buzzing with gossip of current French affairs. Elizabeth's favorite, the Earl of Essex, had helped to fire these rumors with an expedition of four thousand troops that he led to aid Henry's lame campaign in France.⁹ In a much publicized event, Essex and his men were banqueted by Navarre and those very lords who appear in Shakespeare's play—the Duc de Longueville and Field Marshal Biron.¹⁰ Most of the current flap in England created by the French civil war, as evidenced for example by Nashe's remarks about the “barricadoes of Gurney” and “the walls of Roan [Rouen],” springs from news of this expedition in which Longueville and Biron played leading roles fighting alongside the English.¹¹

At no other period could Elizabethans have been more interested in or have known more about the Bourbon king and the toughened generals on both sides of the conflict, and yet Shakespeare's rendering of these figures hardly reveals anything resembling “realistic” portraiture. His depiction of the French court moves in just the opposite direction, in fact; the characters in it are deliberately oversimplified and ritualized. Each of the lords in Navarre's entourage unfailingly falls in love with a female counterpart in the Princess' entourage, each in turn forswears his vows by revealing his love in a poem, and each woos his lady dressed in the garb of a Moscovite. These formal patterns obtain throughout the play, particularly in the romantic episodes. In Act II, scene i, for example, when the ladies-in-waiting survey their opposite numbers in the lords of Navarre's court, the Princess asks the ladies whether they know any of the men. They answer in turn. Each has once met one of the men, and each in turn recollects that splendid event, which for Maria took place “at a marriage-feast, / Between Lord Perigort and the beauteous heir / Of Jaques Falconbridge” (II.i.40-42) and for Katherine and Rosaline “at the Duke Alacon's once” (II.i.61).¹² There is a touch of nostalgia in the scene, the luster of events long past but still brightly remembered. The Princess declares in wonder, “God bless my ladies! are they all in love” (II.i.77). This too is part of the ritualized romanticism—each of the ladies has fallen in love at first sight and now with second sight each feels once more the smart of Cupid's dart. The combination of this highly patterned presentation of events with the remote idyllic setting creates an atmosphere that makes current history dissolve into a dreamlike world with elements akin to those of a fairy-tale. These elements in turn govern the representation of character. All of the great nobles of Navarre's court are depicted as uniformly admirable, graceful, young, attractive, and eligible for marriage. In Shakespeare's rendering the very real differences these generals possessed in age, body-type, and political allegiance are effaced. For example, by the early 1590s Shakespeare's dashingly handsome Berowne (Biron) was actually approaching seventy years of age, whereas Longueville, a Catholic who refused to fight for Henry until the latter converted, was in his early twenties and the youngest of Navarre's great generals.¹³ Even more strikingly, Dumaine, far from being one of Henry's generals, was actually the most outstanding general to oppose Henry's forces in the civil war, and far from being either young or graceful as in Shakespeare's play, he was a man so large from excessive indulgence in food that Navarre referred to him as “le gros duc.”¹⁴

The change by which Dumaine becomes one of Henry's merry lords in Love's Labor's Lost is not easy to pass over, even if Charlton is right in believing that Shakespeare introduces the names of these civil war generals as a mere afterthought. For Elizabethans, Dumaine was not merely the general opposing Navarre, but in 1589, after the death of his brother, the despised Duke of Guise (cf. Chapman's Bussy D'Ambois, I.ii), Dumaine became the leader of the Catholic “Ligue.” In The Massacre at Paris, for example, which was continually revived in this period, Dumaine is given a memorable role in the St. Bartholomew Massacre. When his brother, the Guise, complains that certain Huguenots are escaping the slaughter by swimming the Seine, Dumaine ingeniously resolves the dilemma, saying:

Goe place some men upon the bridge,
With bowes and dartes to shoot at them they see,
And sinke them in the river as they swim.

(Scene vii.418-23)¹⁵

Near the end of the play Dumaine emerges as the leading figure he had become in Shakespeare's time—the principal opponent of the Bourbon claimant, Henry of Navarre. In recognition of this new eminence, Marlowe gives him one of the play's major speeches, of which we may quote a part:

Sweet Duke of Guise our prop to leane upon,
Now thou art dead, heere is no stay for us:
I am thy brother, and ile revenge thy death,
And roote Valoys his line from forth of France,
And beate proud Burbon to his native home.

(Scene xxi.1110-14)

If the main characters in Shakespeare's comedy bear little discernible resemblance to the illustrious contemporary persons after whom they are named, we are driven once more to ask what Shakespeare's purpose could have been in so naming his characters in the first place. For Shakespeare to have named them without artistic purpose or to have expected his English audience wholly to refrain from trying to make topical connections seems to me unlikely, if not remote. I suggest that the portrayal of the French lords is part of a deliberate contra-topicality,¹⁶ a deliberate inversion of the topical wherein these persons are charmingly transmuted from the French civil war into the fairy-tale world of Nérac. From that war Shakespeare drew the names of his leading male characters, which he then placed in a setting in which the trifles of love and the pleasure of witty debate become the most pressing matters of an afternoon. Far from the graceless reality of the tents and the muddy battlefields in which Henry and his lords fought into the year 1593,¹⁷ Shakespeare depicts these very men outfitted in fashion, leisured, studious, and ripe for love's conquest. For an audience deeply concerned about the outcome of these civil wars, Shakespeare's idealization of these lords was, I suggest, an appealing piece of Arcadian escapism and fantasy, which is more than a little humorous.

This same pattern of contra-topicality also obtains in a more complex way in the portrayal of Navarre himself. In the year 1593, Henry was a king whom all the world of Christendom knew had been fighting doggedly for the throne of France. In just this period this same king, properly named by his original title, “King of Navarre,” is presented in the opening scene of Shakespeare's romantic comedy expressing the sentiments dearest to his heart:

Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives,
Live regist'red upon our brazen tombs,
And then grace us in the disgrace of death;
When spite of cormorant devouring Time,
Th' endeavor of this present breath may buy
That honor which shall bate his scythe's keen edge,
And make us heirs of all eternity.
Therefore, brave conquerors—for so you are,
That war against your own affections
And the huge army of the world's desires—
Our late edict shall strongly stand in force:
Navarre shall be the wonder of the world;
Our court shall be a little academe,
Still and contemplative in living art.

(I.i.1-14)

“The wonder of the world” indeed! This same Navarre, in reality desiring no more than to win a kingdom in the active theater of the world, declares himself to be a recluse. The notion of turning a Renaissance court with all its appreciation of artful diplomacy and political compromise into a “still and contemplative” “little Academe” is as fanciful as it is appealing. Dedication to learning and a firm control over the restless “will” are unassailable virtues in Renaissance thought and in Shakespeare's plays as well, but where kingdoms were concerned, idealism bowed to practical philosophy. Like Elizabeth of England, Henry of Navarre admired learning—but for a contemporary audience to hear this very king declare himself wholly devoted to an atemporal virtue of study (as Prospero initially does in The Tempest) would have evoked at the least a bemused smile.

The ingenuousness, moreover, with which Shakespeare makes Navarre pledge himself and all his lords to sexual abstinence for three years would have been equally whimsical. By the same imaginative contra-topicality that makes study (rather than war) the sine qua non of Navarre's early reign, Shakespeare makes the king pledge himself to sexual abstinence, a pledge asserting itself against the living truth that the king was the most unperturbed royal philanderer of the epoch, with more mistresses and natural offspring than any but historians could count.¹⁸

Accompanying this contextual humor is the drollery of Navarre's rhetoric, for while the king extols the virtues of ascetic study, he speaks in metaphors of military conquest that remind us of the contemporary situation. Navarre and his lords will be “brave conquerors” of Time, “heirs of all eternity.” Warring against the “huge army of the world's desires,” they will achieve in study the “fame” that will “live regist'red” on “brazen tombs.” For Shakespeare's audience the transmogrifications of these martial values, the values by which Henry was then fighting, into a dogma of heroic asceticism would have had a ridiculous aptness.

Later in the play, when Navarre's lords are about to give up their academe along with their sexual abstinence, they celebrate their conversion from one faith to the other with the ardor of military heroes who prepare to conquer, not their enemies, but their loved ones:

BER.
It is religion to be thus forsworn:
For charity itself fulfills the law,
And who can sever love from charity?
KING.
Saint Cupid, then! and, soldiers, to the field!
BER.
Advance your standards, and upon them, lords;
Pell-mell, down with them! but be first advis'd,
In conflict that you get the sun of them.
LONG.
Now to plain-dealing, lay these glozes by:
Shall we resolve to woo these girls of France?

(IV.iii.360-68)

This metaphoric treatment of love in terms of military conquest is conventional, but because the characters are named after the generals of the current civil war in France, the military metaphors provide an unacknowledged, additional frame of reference. Berowne's speech not only prepares for the king's militant speech of “conversion” but hints also at the contemporary truth that Navarre, constantly threatening to abjure his original Huguenot faith to help secure the French crown, actually did so, to Elizabeth's dismay, on 25 July 1593. The Princess' quip “See, see my beauty will be sav'd by merit. / O heresy in fair, fit for these days!” (IV.i.21-22) provides further indication of the play's glancing cognizance of the topical issues of religious orthodoxy and reformation which it charmingly refuses to acknowledge in any but a metaphoric way. So, too, the Princess of France's declaration “This civil war of wits were much better used / On Navarre and his book-men, for here 'tis abused” (II.i.226-27) illustrates with like obliquity the play's awareness of the contemporary situation. These quips, part of the play's witty battle of the sexes, reveal a characteristic comic pattern in the romance: a studious contra-topicality whose disingenuous charm is its elliptical or wholly fanciful relation to the current civil war in France.

For a comedy that was popular in the English court for a decade after its composition, being at least twice revived and then forgotten until the Restoration,¹⁹ it is helpful for us to realize that the play's humorous idealization could remain durable as long as the French names of its principal characters remained familiar to Shakespeare's audiences. This means that the witty portrayal of Navarre's court could remain reasonably effective until the assassination of Henry IV in 1610 when, under Louis XII, France was ushered into a new period of national unity and court fashion. Such considerations suggest that the portrayals of Navarre and the civil-war generals presented Elizabethan audiences, not with a mere collection of French names in the news, but with an added dramatic dimension which, once lost, helps to account for the eclipse Love's Labor's Lost soon underwent.

It may be, as Charlton surmised, that Shakespeare added the names of these famous French lords only as afterthought. But even if he did, we are still obliged to inquire, it seems to me, what the significance of such changes could have had been. If the inclusion of these contemporary French names was a purposive one, as I think we must assume it was, then the whimsical contra-topicality for which I have argued must have obtained in Shakespeare's comedy. Such an added dramatic dimension is reason enough for its presence in the comedy, but it is not the only reason; it is also part of the serious thematic concerns of the play. In Navarre's scheme to immortalize his reign by creating an academy and renouncing the company of women, he and his lords flout Nature's ways, until Nature, in sweet revenge, proves what mortals these fools be. Shakespeare's strategy of placing the highly topical figures of the French civil war in the Arcadian context of Nérac, 1578, parallels precisely this master theme. In fact, the source of this aspect of the comedy—its pastoral setting and characterizations—lies in the implicit comparison of Shakespeare's idealized portrayals of these topical figures and the known reality. The relationship between the present world and that of Nérac is the relationship between an immediately recognizable world of process and a world seemingly out of time, for in the dream of this wittily romantic comedy, enemies are portrayed as friends, the great conflict of an afternoon is the bandinage of love, and time holds no power to decay. From the Arcadian representation of the contemporary French court much of the escapist charm of Love's Labor's Lost, largely lost to twentieth-century audiences, derives.

Notes

1. See, e.g., Frances Yates, A Study of “Love's Labour's Lost” (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1936); Abel Lefranc, Sous Le Masque de “William Shakespeare” (Paris: Payot, 1919); Arthur Acheson, Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 (New York: B. Quaritch, 1920), pp. 166-71; and Muriel C. Bradbrook, The School of Night (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1936).

2. “Recent Studies in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama,” Studies in English Literature, 16 (1976), 344.

3. See, e.g., Ernest A. Strathmann, “The Textual Evidence for ‘The School of Night,” Modern Language Notes, 56 (1941), 176-86; David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics: An Approach to Topical Meaning (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 15-16; and especially Alfred Harbage, “Love's Labour's Lost and the Early Shakespeare,” Philological Quarterly, 41 (1962), 18-36, who reviews critically the entire subject.

4. “Ferdinand,” the a-historical Christian name given to Navarre in the list of dramatis personae and in the speech headings of the first scene, “never appears in the dialogue,” and thus “lacks all dramatic point in the text”—John Dover Wilson, ed., Love's Labour's Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1962), p. 138n. The status of Shakespeare's text, which shows much evidence of revision and incompletely executed excisions, is reviewed thoroughly by Richard David, ed., Love's Labour's Lost, 4th ed. rev. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1951), xvii-xxv.

5. Charlton, “The Date of Love's Labour's Lost,” Modern Language Review, 13 (1918), 259, and Wilson, p. xxxii.

6. Shakespeare's use of the Nérac setting of 1578 was explored and established by Abel Lefranc in his otherwise highly controversial work, Sous Le Masque. On the provenance of the names of the French lords in Shakespeare's play, see Charlton, pp. 258-63.

7. For a detailed account of the battle conditions and strategy of the French civil war, see Howell A. Lloyd, The Rouen Campaign, 1590-1592 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973); and Henry M. Baird, The Huguenots and Henry of Navarre (1903; rpt. New York: AMS, 1970), II, passim, but especially 383-93 on the Rouen campaign. The accepted dating range for Love's Labor's Lost, which I follow, is 1592-95, with 1593-94 considered as most likely. See David, pp. xxvi-xxxii. Harbage's dissent—he opts for a date before Essex's expedition to France in 1591 and before 1590—should, however, be registered.

8. On the date of original performance and the play's success in revival, see H. J. Oliver, ed., “Dido Queen of Carthage” and “The Massacre at Paris” (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968), p. lxix.

9. On Essex's relations with Elizabeth during this period, see Lloyd, pp. 121, 124-25, and Robert Lacy, Robert, Earl of Essex (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 82-91. For the constant correspondence between the courts of England and France during this period, see M. Berger De Xivrey, ed., Receuil des Lettres Missives de Henri IV (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1848), III, 506, 568, 623-24, 715-16; IV, 28-29.

10. Sir Thomas Coningsby, Journal of the Siege of Rouen, 1591, John Gough Nichols, ed. (London: Camden Society, 1847), p. 17.

11. Charlton, p. 263.

12. Citations from Love's Labor's Lost refer to G. Blakemore Evans, ed., The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

13. Arthur John Butler, ed., Public Record Office: Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series of the Reign of Elizabeth, 1578-79 (London: Machie, 1903), pp. 28, 90, 247, 301; and Hesketh Pearson, Henry of Navarre: The King Who Dared (New York: Harper, 1963), p. 76. By July, 1592, Biron was dead, and by the time Love's Labor's Lost was performed (ca. 1593), Biron's son, Charles—beside whom the English had also fought—had taken his father's place as Field Marshal of France.

14. Henri Jonquieres, ed., Lettres D'Amour et De Guerre Du Roi Henri IV (Paris: Jonquières, 1928), p. 112. Also, Irene Mahoney, Royal Cousin (New York: Doubleday, 1970), p. 181.

15. Citations from The Massacre at Paris refer to Fredson Bowers' old-spelling edition, The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1973), Vol. I.

16. Support for this approach may be found in Bevington, p. 15, and, in passing, in Harbage, 25-26.

17. Coningsby's Journal, pp. 17-18, depicts the depression with which the English forces under Essex viewed the wasted countryside in France.

18. Pearson, p. 98, counts sixty love affairs and eleven natural children begotten by the King of Navarre.

19. On the dates of performance for Love's Labor's Lost, see Richard David's ed., pp. l-li.