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 host's house or castle; a masque or disguising ending in a dance and in song. … The following of the events of a progress or royal entertainment accounts for the episodic structure of the play.”¹ According to Alice Griffin, Love's Labor's Lost “holds a special appeal for an audience which would recognize in it the features which made Elizabeth's own sojourns at the estates so memorable. … The short, complimentary lyrics and sonnets, in varying degrees of excellence, flourished at the progress entertainments. Love's Labor's Lost is no exception. Here, some of the laudatory verses may even have been directed at Elizabeth—the poem addressed to the ‘queen of queens’ [IV. iii. 25-40],² for example. All too numerous are the progress prototypes of Holofernes' verse which commemorates a minutia of the Princess' pastime, the killing of the ‘pretty pleasing pricket.’ The hunt, of course, was a favorite diversion of Elizabeth on progress visits.”³ Peter Erickson has noted that “the sport of killing the deer places [the Princess] in the role of the virgin huntress Diana,”⁴ one of the major simulacra of Elizabeth; and M. C. Bradbrook has shown that “the fine distinctions between pricket, sorel, and other deer hunted by the Princess” come “from Turberville's technical Book of Venerie, where Queen Elizabeth was shown hunting the deer.”⁵ Long ago, H. C. Hart argued that the details of Shakespeare's hunting scene—the erection of stands, the shooting with crossbows—may derive in part from the publication of the Queen's Entertainment at Cowdray, one of the more memorable events of her 1591 progress.⁶

Nevertheless, Sir Edmund Chambers “acidly remarks, there is no reason to suppose that Elizabeth shot a deer with a crossbow for the first or last time at Cowdray in 1591.”⁷ In its spirit, Chambers's remark represents a rebuttal to all those books and articles that attempt to link the details of Love's Labor's Lost to specific entertainments prepared for Elizabeth at a specific stop on one of her summer progresses. “Attempts to discover reflections of any one particular Progress in Love's Labor's Lost,” O. J. Campbell argued in 1925, “seem doomed to failure” (13). Defining the importance of Elizabeth for Love's Labor's Lost entails redirecting attention to other kinds of sixteenth-century royal entertainments. Recently, Glynne Wickham has claimed that Shakespeare's play owes much to Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Fulke Greville's elaborate entertainment for Elizabeth, The Four Foster Children of Desire (also titled The Castle of Perfect Beauty), presented in 1581 at the Whitehall tiltyard and published by Henry Goldwell.⁸ Starting with Shakespeare's repeated allusion in the play to the French Duc d'Alençon (II. i. 61, 194), whose proposed marriage to Elizabeth forms the political allegory of Sidney and Greville's entertainment, Wickham finds that “the whole of Shakespeare's play revolves around four … foster children”—Navarre and his three courtiers—“and their attempt to storm the defenses of the Princess of France and three of her ladies-in-waiting” (50)—figuratively the action of the earlier spectacle. In both the entertainment and the play, the romantic assault against royalty proves futile. By equating the English Queen with the Princess of France in Love's Labor's Lost, Wickham is the first critic to find, in more than a minor way, the figure of Elizabeth informing Shakespeare's characterization of female royalty.⁹

The present essay further describes the figure of Elizabeth in the Princess of France. In fact, not one but two figures of the English Queen can be detected in the female royalty of Love's Labor's Lost. Analysis of these figures, which represent complementary but opposite sixteenth-century views of Elizabeth, makes possible a new understanding of certain features of the play such as its emphasis upon unbroken oaths; the pronounced adolescence (or boyish immaturity) of Navarre, Berowne, and the other courtiers; and the strong association of several kinds of death with wooing and wedding. So charged is the double figure of Elizabeth in Love's Labor's Lost that the play, like 1 Henry VI with respect to the images of Elizabeth reflected by Joan la Pucelle, gains much of its dramatic tension from the ambiguous power radiating from the Princess of France.¹⁰

I

The figure of Elizabeth begins to materialize in the play with the mention of the King of Navarre. This figure of the Queen gradually gains a positive charge as that of Navarre develops negative overtones. Understanding this transformational process depends upon a recovery of Elizabethan meanings attached to the name King of Navarre. From 1589 to 1593, the French Huguenot King Henry of Navarre was a subject of enthusiasm in Elizabeth's court and the city of London. If the French Protestant could establish himself as King of France, England would have a powerful ally against Catholics both at home and in Spain. Elizabeth first sent money and then troops under the leadership of the Earl of Essex to aid Navarre in his war against the Guise and the Catholic League. While the French King of Navarre is called Ferdinand rather than Henry in Love's Labor's Lost, the reference appears only in the 1598 Quarto stage directions to Act I, scene i, and the heading to II. i. 129-67. In all other headings, directions, and dialogue of the play, Shakespeare consistently refers to this character as either “King” or “Navarre.”¹¹ H. B. Charlton has claimed that the initial two references to the King of Navarre as Ferdinand constitute the kind of unrevised text for which Shakespeare and his promptbook keeper are notorious—either the playwright carelessly forgot to correct two nominations after he had changed his purpose with regard to the character, presumably to invite topical association with a contemporary French aristocrat, or the book keeper erred in not noticing that Shakespeare had marked over the two references to Ferdinand in order to regularize his script (259-60). Whatever the case, Elizabethan playgoers almost certainly would have begun associating Shakespeare's character with the French King so much in the news. Pointed similarities between the conduct of Shakespeare's Navarre and that of King Henry as reported to the English strengthened playgoers' inclination to make the association.

Like Shakespeare's Navarre, Henry had established a little academy devoted to the male pursuit of learning.¹² Like him again, he was a ruler markedly adolescent at times when his adult role called for responsibility. Elizabeth had sent Essex and a large contingent of troops specifically to help Henry besiege Rouen (as he had agreed to do if Elizabeth aided him). Rather than starting the siege, Henry went “off to Noyon … and proposed to go from there to Sedan for a wedding. He had insulted [Elizabeth's] general, Essex, by summoning him to come to Noyon; and while Essex had been playing tennis with Henry at Atterly, her soldiers at Pont-de-l'Arche were being paid for doing nothing. Essex had risked being captured by the enemy on his foolhardy ride to Compiègne, and Yale had had to send the army to escort him back to Pont-de-l'Arche, again at her expense, instead of taking part in operations against Rouen.”¹³ Elizabeth's “anger had perhaps been fuelled … by a passage in code in one of the reports that she received, stating that people thought that Henry had beseiged Noyon because the town belonged to the father of the beautiful Gabrielle d'Estrées, with whom Henry was madly in love, and that he wished to recover Noyon for her family in order to please Gabrielle.”¹⁴ On another occasion, Elizabeth “was dissatisfied when she heard that Henry of Navarre, instead of following up his victory by marching on Paris or trying to link up with Casimir, had gone off to Pau to take the captured enemy flags to his latest mistress, Corisande de Gramont, and to hold discussions on politics and philosophy with the famous philosopher Montaigne.”¹⁵ Thus not only Elizabeth and her courtiers but also informed Londoners developed a picture of the French King of Navarre as a love-smitten, irresponsible adolescent, given to philosophical speculation and the formation of an academy.

That this is the image of Navarre that Shakespeare gradually creates in Love's Labor's Lost goes practically without saying. The negative aura that had gathered about Henry by 1591 and certainly by 1593 corresponds to the uncomplimentary traits in Shakespeare's Navarre that become apparent to the Princess and to playgoers. Thinking of Shakespeare's Navarre to some degree as the historical Frenchman would have entailed the inclination to think to a similar degree of his counterpart, the Princess of France, as a simulacrum of Elizabeth. The importance of oaths and oath-breaking for the stage King of Navarre and the Princess reinforces this inclination. Commentators on Love's Labor's Lost have not described the extent to which the King of Navarre's name had become synonymous by 1593 with that of an archetypal oath breaker. Henry's breaking promise with Elizabeth concerning sieges, battles, and the use of her troops seemed especially grievous because of his other violated oaths. According to J. E. Neale, Elizabeth spent approximately £300,000 in four years to aid Henry,¹⁶ money wasted by his ultimate conversion to Catholicism in July 1593. Very little of this money was ever paid back; Navarre reneged on his promissory notes just as he did in matters of warfare. Writing on September 2, 1591, to Thomas Leighton and Henry Killegrew, English officers serving Henry, Elizabeth asserted that “we will have you not to be abused by any promises of words, but by certainty of pay, whereof we may doubt how the French King shall perform that, considering in the time of Lord Willoughby promises were made of payment to our forces for their longer abiding than was at the first intended, yet the pay which they had, though it was named to be the French King's pay, was with our money lent here to his Ambassadors being parcel of greater sums due to us.”¹⁷

Nevertheless, in the minds of Protestant English men and women, the King of Navarre's religious conversion represented the ultimate oath breaking—that concerning religious vows (the wedding of the soul to Christ and God's Church)—for it rendered worthless the English war effort in France and presented the terrifying possibility (which never occurred) of a French and Spanish league against Elizabeth. Critics and editors such as Charlton, David, and Albert Tricomi have claimed that certain verses of the Princess of France—“See, See! my beauty will be saved by merit. / O heresy in fair, fit for these days!” (IV. i. 21-22)—appear to allude to Henry's conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism.¹⁸ Any salvation by merit (Protestant works) rather than Catholic faith seems in the present day heretical, the Princess jokingly implies, chiefly because the present day has shown the world a French King's rejection of his Protestant vows and his embrace of Catholicism.¹⁹

Both Charlton and David have used the date of July 1593 as the later limit for the composition of Love's Labor's Lost, assuming that Shakespeare's audience after this date would not have been interested in the stage presentation of character that provokes recollection of heretical Henry of Navarre.²⁰ But one could argue that the picture of Navarre as oath breaker that fully emerged in 1592-1593, and remained in the English consciousness for years afterward, suited Shakespeare's purpose of making the Princess's hesitation to trust Navarre acceptable to playgoers.²¹ Even after he became King of France, Henry confirmed his image in England as oath breaker. When in 1596 he broke his pledge to Elizabeth and the Netherlands that he would not make a separate peace with Spain, the Queen called him “the Anti-Christ of ingratitude.”²² And in 1601, when Elizabeth “tried to realize her wealth in French and Dutch promissory notes,” she found that “Henry … had given fair words galore, with sparing not so much as he lavished on his mistresses.”²³

The contemporary associations built into Love's Labor's Lost provide the key for interpreting the most obscure poetry of the play, the notorious dialogue between the King of Navarre and the Princess over the status of the province of Aquitaine. Editors and critics alike have labored heroically to make sense of the cloudy dialogue between Navarre and the Princess concerning the subject of her visit—money owed by the Princess's father to Navarre's father and the collateral provided in the form of Aquitaine (II. i. 109-12, 129-71). According to this dialogue, the Princess has come to Navarre as the ambassador of her father, who demands the restoration of one-hundred thousand crowns earlier paid by him on his debt. (Apparently the King of Navarre may keep that portion of Aquitaine pledged as collateral.) Abel Lefranc was one of the first Shakespearean commentators to point out that, in 1578, the embassy of Marguerite de Valois to her husband Henry of Navarre concerned disputes over her dowry, which included the province of Aquitaine.²⁴ Shakespeare, however, revamps this historical incident so as to stress a main feature of Elizabeth's 1591-1593 relationship with the King of Navarre. After reading the letter given to him by the Princess, Shakespeare's Navarre protests,

Madam, your father here doth intimate
The payment of a hundred thousand crowns;
Being but the one half of an entire sum
Disbursed by my father in his wars.
But say that he, or we, as neither have,
Receiv'd that sum, yet there remains unpaid
A hundred thousand more; in surety of the which,
One part of Aquitaine is bound to us,
Although not valued to the money's worth.
If then the king your father will restore
But that one half which is unsatisfied,
We will give up our right in Aquitaine,
And hold fair friendship with this majesty.
But that, it seems, he little purposeth,
For here he doth demand to have repaid
A hundred thousand crowns; and not demands
On payment of a hundred thousand crowns
To have his title live in Aquitaine;
Which we much rather had depart withal,
And have the money by our father lent,
Than Aquitaine, so gelded as it is.
Dear Princess, were not his requests so far
From reason's yielding, your fair self should make
A yielding 'gainst some reason in my breast,
And go well satisfied to France again.

(II. i. 129-53)

The Princess, nevertheless, claims that Navarre has received the money paid by her father (II. i. 154-57). “I do protest I never heard of it,” he replies, “And if you prove it I'll repay it back, / Or yield up Aquitaine” (II. i. 158-60). Arresting Navarre's word, the Princess commands Boyet to “produce acquittances [receipts] / For such a sum from special officers / Of Charles his father” (II. i. 161-63). But Boyet complains that the packet containing the disputed receipts cannot be delivered until tomorrow. The dispute between the Princess and King of Navarre concludes with their agreement that the Princess shall be entertained until the packet arrives.²⁵

While one could argue that this contrived dispute simply provides the dramatic rationale for the Princess's extended visit (and thus the interaction of all the lords and ladies), its content essentially evokes the nature of Elizabeth's often stormy relationship with the King of Navarre during 1589-1593. Creating through “historical” dialogue a cluster of values reminiscent of that relationship, however, helps define a dramatic pattern prominent in Love's Labor's Lost. Briefly, one can paraphrase and chart the cluster of values as follows: (1) money is borrowed and its repayment becomes a sore point; (2) the King of Navarre refuses to repay money that he apparently received; (3) the Princess confesses to being wronged but must patiently await justice. In its outline, this cluster describes Elizabeth's and Navarre's relationship as he begged for money, squandered it in foolish or irresponsible military ventures, and then shamelessly pleaded for more money when he was unable to repay earlier loans. In the play, Navarre's inability to vouch for a previous payment by the King of France precisely reflects the actual King of Navarre's general disorganization and fiscal irresponsibility that made Elizabeth hesitate to support the French Protestant champion. Recollections of the superior character of Elizabeth in her dealings with Navarre energize the figure of the Princess of France during her diplomatic dialogue with the King. While Marcade's fatal announcement supersedes the packet's arrival (and prevents the exact truth of the financial dispute from being known), most playgoers sense, especially in retrospect, that the packet would vindicate the Princess, if for no other reason than the impression conveyed as the play unfolds of her verbal integrity and Navarre's repeated oath breaking and his relatively thoughtless character. (He selfishly attempts to woo the Princess only moments after she learns of her father's death.) In summary, by the midpoint of Act II of the play, Shakespeare has so strongly evoked the negative image of the actual King of Navarre in his dealings with female royalty that informed playgoers would have been inclined to perceive a corresponding Elizabethan figure in the Princess of France. The fact that the Princess has no given name and is almost immediately referred to as “Queen” would have strengthened this inclination. “The Princess's speeches are sometimes headed ‘Queen,’” David notes of the 1598 Quarto text of the play—“on her first appearance in II., throughout IV. i, and once in V. ii” (2). This change suggests that Shakespeare himself thought of this character more as Queen than Princess.

The combination of solar and lunar imagery used to express the Princess's virtues further helps to focus in her character the beneficent figure of Elizabeth. In his April Eclogue of the The Shepheardes Calender, a poem expressly in honor of Elizabeth, Spenser intersperses a stanza portraying Elizabeth as “another Sunne,” in her brightness shaming Phoebus himself, between two portraits of the Queen as the moon, respectively “Phoebe fayre” and “Cynthia with thy silver rayes” (11. 64-85).²⁶ Likewise, Sir Walter Ralegh, in the surviving fragment of “The Ocean to Cynthia” (1592) merges images of Cynthia and Belphoebe, the sun, into an extended symbol for the Queen whose favor he was attempting to regain.²⁷ Elizabethans generally intended this conjunction of imagery to illustrate the coincidence in their Queen of life-giving power with virgin purity.²⁸ In Love's Labor's Lost, a major association of the sun with the Princess and her eyes occurs in the King of Navarre's love sonnet:

“So sweet a kiss the golden sun gives not
          To those fresh morning drops upon the rose,
As thy eye-beams when their fresh rays have smote
          The night of dew that on my cheeks down flows.”

(IV. iii. 25-28)

After complimenting the Princess's sun-like eyes, Navarre pays tribute to her as the moon:

“Nor shines the silver moon one half so bright
          Through the transparent bosom of the deep,
As doth thy face through tears of mine give light
          Thou shin'st in every tear that I do weep.”

(IV. iii. 29-32)

When the masked Princess and Rosaline exchange pinned favors so that the King and Berowne woo the wrong lady, Shakespeare suggests not only that the men's knowledge of the women is superficial but also that the Princess and Rosaline are in some sense interchangeable. Berowne tells the woman he thinks to be the Princess, “Vouchsafe to show the sunshine of your face, / That we, like savages, may worship it” (V. ii. 201-02). For literate members of an English audience of the 1590s, such verses derived much of their power from a well-known episode in the Faerie Queene. Deprived of her veil by Sansloy, Una civilizes a savage rabble of fauns and satyrs when they gaze upon her bright uncovered face (I. vi. 16, 19.5-7). “Burnt” by her heavenly countenance (I. vi. 15.7), they put a garland on her head and worship her as queen (I. vi. 13.9). The radiant image of Una as Revealed Religious Truth figures forth Elizabeth, who, in her reestablishment of the Reformation, made the word of God available again to her people.²⁹ Admittedly, the recollection of a Spenserian crux would have been only a fleeting impression in playgoers' minds. Yet the evocation is enough in Love's Labor's Lost to superimpose an Elizabethan context over potential Neoplatonic and Petrarchan frames of reference for processing Berowne's poetic imagery.³⁰ Furthermore, when Rosaline (as Princess) replies to Berowne, “My face is but a moon, and clouded too” (V. ii. 203), the lunar symbolism of Elizabethan royalty, most intense in the early 1590s, strengthens the English Queen's association with this dialogue. The apostrophe with which Navarre's sonnet concludes—“O queen of queens” (IV. iii. 39)—especially encourages auditors to apply to the Princess of France the highly positive valuation deriving from the conjunction of sun and moon imagery associated with Elizabeth.

What gain did Shakespeare achieve from capitalizing upon the iconography of Elizabeth in his characterization of the Princess of France? By extending the Elizabethan diplomatic relationship with the King of Navarre to powerful political/romantic symbolism, the playwright positively portrays female royalty in her dealings with admiring but flawed lovers. The complimentary image of Elizabeth in the play thus represents a standard of conduct and character against which the male courtiers are found lacking. The presence of the Queen's image makes not only more believable but also more acceptable the final deferral of the men's desires and the penances imposed upon them. After all, that was the daily experience of Englishmen who sought the Queen's affectionate preferment. Yet lest this deferral of desire acquire strong negative overtones, Shakespeare, in the Princess's reaction to the Pageant of the Nine Worthies, portrays the widely noted compassion of the Queen in tolerating the sometimes tedious tributes of her male subjects.

Unlike the cruelly mocking lords, the Princess kindly encourages and rewards the stumbling amateur thespians. After an initial, bewildered question concerning Armado's verbosity—“Doth this man serve God?” (V. ii. 520)—her gratitude and encouragement offset, at least partially, the sustained sarcasm of Navarre, Berowne, and the other courtiers: “Great thanks, great Pompey” (V. ii. 553); “The conqueror is dismay'd. Proceed, good Alexander” (V. ii. 562); “Alas! poor Maccabaeus, how hath he been baited” (V. ii. 623); “Speak, brave Hector; we are much delighted” (V. ii. 656). “When she addresses the players,” Bobbyann Roesen notes, the Princess “is wise and sensible enough to do so not by their own names, which she has read on the playbill, but by the names of those whom they portray, thus helping them to sustain that illusion which is the very heart of a play.”³¹

The Princess's sympathetic response to amateur entertainment staged on her behalf might well be that of Elizabeth, as reported on numerous occasions in the several published accounts of the amusements arranged for her. In a 1564 letter to those at Cambridge preparing for Elizabeth's August visit, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, wrote: “And nowe, as towchinge the matter in your letters for doubt of your well-doings to the good-likinge of Queen's Majestie, I maye very well putt you out of eny such doubte. For, presuminge with how good myndes youe will offer all things; and, knowinge howe far her Highnes doth esteme good-will above any other gifts; let this perswade youe, that nothinge can be with better will done by youe, than yt will be graciously accepted of her; whose virtues and princely dispositions, agreable with all other excellente lerning, is suche, as yt cannot be, but as youe shall have all things well taken as you woulde desier; so shall youe be otherwise as well satisfied as you can wishe.”³² Elizabeth's reception of the Latin Oration delivered to her August 5, 1564, at Cambridge verifies Dudley's assessment of his Queen: “When he [the orator] had done, she much commended him, and much marvelled that his memory did so serve him, repeating such diverse and sundry matters; saying ‘That she would answer him again in Latin; but for fear she should speak false Latin; and then they would laugh at her.’ But in fine, in token of her contentation, she called him unto her presence, and offered him her hand to kiss; requiring his name.”³³ At Warwick, “after the Recorder had made his speech of welcome, ‘Come hither, little Recorder,’ said Elizabeth, offering her hand to be kissed. ‘It was told me that you would be afraid to look upon me or to speak boldly; but you were not so afraid of me as I of you; and I now thank you for putting me in mind of my duty.’”³⁴ On August 20, 1578, during the Queen's stay at Norwich, “as she returned homewarde, within Bishops Gate, at the Hospitall Dore, Maister Stephen Limbert, Maister of the Grammer Schoole in Norwiche, stood readie to render hir an Oration: hir Majestie drewe neare unto him, and thinking him fearefull, saide graciously unto him: ‘Be not afrayde.’ He aunswerest hir in English: ‘I thanke your Majestie for your good encouragement’; and then with good courage entered into his Oration.”³⁵ Since Limbert's oration, like all those delivered to the Queen on progress, was in Latin, his answering in English represents a breach of etiquette remarkably trusting on his part. The stage-struck orator found his trust rewarded: “And the Oration ended, after she had given great thankes therefore to Maister Lymbert, she saide to him, ‘It is the best that ever I heard; you shal have my hande’; and pulled off hir glove, and gave him hir hand to kiss; which, before kneeling on his knee, he arose and kissed: and then she departed to the Court, without any other shew that night; but she sente backe to know his name.”³⁶ Pamphlet accounts of Elizabeth's empathetic mending of nervous orations may lie behind the similar phenomenon on Duke Theseus's part in A Midsummer Night's Dream (V. i. 93-105).³⁷

Elizabeth's widely remarked empathy of reception applied to amateur theatricals as well as to Latin orations. Concerning a dramatic masque performed before Elizabeth during Shrovetide 1594 by gentlemen actors and masquers of Gray's Inn, the chronicler of Gesta Grayorum notes, “for the present her Majesty graced every one; particularly, she thanked his Highness [Henry Prince of Purpoole, the festive ruler of Mardigros] for the good performance of all that was done; and wished that their sports had continued longer, for the pleasure she took therein; which may well appear from her answer to the courtiers, who danced a measure immediately after the mask was ended, saying, ‘what! shall we have bread and cheese after a banquet?’ Her majesty willed the Lord Chamberlain, that the gentlemen should be invited on the next day, and that he should present them unto her. Which was done, and her Majesty gave them her hand to kiss, with most gracious words of commendation to them particularly.”³⁸ Thus a well-known graciousness of Elizabeth as regards public entertainments provides the means for appreciating a final virtue of the Princess of France.

II

At the beginning of Act IV, playgoers become clearly aware of a second figure of Elizabeth in Love's Labor's Lost, one that slowly but perceivably began materializing in Act I. Strictly speaking, one might say that the primary image of Elizabeth begins transforming itself in the Princess into a darker, a more threatening figure. The spectator cannot identify the point in the play at which the playgoer suddenly sees the shape of an ominous Queen in the positively powerful, nurturing image of female majesty;³⁹ by the beginning of Act IV, however, dialogue like that quoted below makes the presence of another, subversive figure of Elizabeth no longer doubtful.

Recently, a growing number of social historians and literary critics have focused on a paradox central to Elizabeth's reign—that while men were masters of women at home and in society at large, a royal virgin peremptorily ruled every man in England.⁴⁰ Shakespeare imports this paradox into Love's Labor's Lost in the dialogue between the Princess and Boyet at the beginning of Act IV. When the Princess tells Boyet that she joins the deer hunt only to gain praise for her skill in archery, he unexpectedly remarks,

Do not curst wives hold that self-sovereignty
Only for praise' sake, when they strive to be
Lords o'er their lords?

(IV. i. 36-38)

Identifying the Princess with curst wives who rebel against “proper” subordination in sixteenth-century society, Boyet boldly attempts to contain the Princess's pride and aggressive wit-play. As Boyet's ruler, however, she reminds him of his place by sanctioning curst wives' rebellion, reasserting that she will shoot deer “Only for praise; and praise we may afford / To any lady that subdues a lord” (IV. i. 39-40).

Immediately after the Princess's blasphemous tribute to any wife who subdues her lord, Costard enters, and sacrilegiously asks, “Pray you, which is the head lady?” (IV. i. 41-42). Commenting on Love's Labor's Lost in his edition of 1765, Samuel Johnson wrote, “In this play … it must be confessed that there are many passages mean, childish, and vulgar; and some which ought not to have been exhibited, as we are told they were, to a maiden queen.”⁴¹ If Sidney and Greville's pun, made in The Four Foster Children of Desire, about the Castle of Beauty—Elizabeth herself—being “impregnable” is any indication, however, the maiden queen was accustomed to hearing sexual innuendoes about her unique status as a female prince—a mannish woman.⁴² To Elizabethan ears, especially male Elizabethan ears, Costard has made a joke about female majesty who possesses a “head”—a penis. Elizabeth appears to have been sensitive to the anxiety-producing power of this particular quibble, “for she did not take the title of ‘supreme head’ of the English church which her father Henry VIII had created, but assumed instead the title of ‘supreme governor.’”⁴³ Shakespeare's female royalty, however, shuns such niceties. Attempting to regain control, the Princess, in reply, plays upon another sense of “head”—“Thou shalt know her, fellow, by the rest that have no heads [maidenheads]” (IV. i. 44-45). The Princess defines (and defends) her royal virginity by characterizing her ladies as impure; her aggressive wit for the moment checks the male resentment and hostility masked by Costard's quibble.

Leah Marcus has recently demonstrated, in her analysis of Joan la Pucelle's role in 1 Henry VI, that a French identity permitted Shakespeare (and his playgoers) to more easily (and safely) represent repressed, ambivalent male attachment to a “mankind” Queen Elizabeth (52-53, 66-96). The Princess of France, to a lesser degree, enacts a similar paradigm in Love's Labor's Lost, providing the mechanism for the release of masculinist anxieties at the same time that she represents an object against which they may safely be discharged.

At the beginning of the play, Navarre and his courtiers anticipate the threatening figure of the Queen by proposing a project that can result in male perpetuation of the self without the agency of women. By gaining fame for their speculative learning, the men believe that they can acquire the immortality naturally promised by marriage and children. Chaste Navarre and his courtiers isolate themselves in a green park. Traditionally, the hortus conclusis, the enclosed garden or park, was a pictorial and literary symbol of female virginity. In a witty reversal of the motif, Shakespeare transfers the symbol to men, casting the Princess into the role of the “male” aggressor. Bound on her diplomatic mission concerning Aquitaine, the Princess threatens to penetrate a chaste enclosure. Her language makes implicit her role as “masculine” sexual aggressor:

Therefore to's seemeth it a needful course,
Before we enter his forbidden gates
To know his pleasure.

(II. i. 25-27)

Meeting the Princess on the edge of his park, Navarre, however, warns “You may not come fair princess, within my gates” (II. i. 172). The threat posed to men desirous of a certain self-sufficiency by royal female majesty appears momentarily contained.

And yet that threat erupts later in Act IV in the Princess's rebellious attitude toward wives' sovereignty and in her bawdy witplay. The obscene joking connected with the Princess's hunting of deer (itself a primarily male pursuit both literally and romantically, in the metaphor of hunter/deer/dear) consolidates the Princess's role as a masculine Queen. Before the hunt, Boyet jokes about the ladies' denied affection for the lords. Making the archery/hunting term “mark” allude to the female pudendum, he crows, “A mark! O! mark but that mark; a mark, says my lady. / Let the mark have a prick in't, to mete at, if it may be” (IV. i. 130-31).⁴⁴ The obscene conflation of arrow and male member recurs after the hunt in Holofernes and Nathaniel's argument about the kind of deer the Princess has killed. According to Nathaniel, it was a “buck of the first head” (IV. ii. 10). Dull, however, insists that it was a “pricket” (IV. ii. 12). While in Elizabethan parlance a pricket was a two-year-old deer, the word obviously extends the previous bawdy pun on “prick.”⁴⁵ At length, Holofernes agrees to call the deer a pricket but only so that he can alliterate a verse commemorating the occasion. In his self-styled “extemporal epitaph on the death of the deer” (IV. ii. 49-50), Holofernes chants, “The preyful princess pierc'd and prick'd a pretty pleasing pricket” (IV. ii. 57). Bad as it is, the poetry nevertheless condenses and summarizes the threat posed by the aggressive royal virgin, especially to the King and his courtiers. The psychological transference of male sexuality to the Princess is complete in Holofernes's verse. And yet even as the simulacrum of Elizabeth as Bellona is defused in 1 Henry VI by being depicted in the French warrior Joan la Pucelle, finally mastered by English soldiers, so the image (terrifying to some men) of the royal virgin with the male member is undercut in Love's Labor's Lost by the stereotypically feminine disclaimers voiced by the Princess concerning the hunt. Regarding her role as hunter as that of a “murderer” (IV. i. 8), the Princess portrays herself as a sensitive woman required to participate in a crude male sport:

But come, the bow: now mercy goes to kill,
And shooting well is then accounted ill.
Thus will I save my credit in the shoot:
Not wounding, pity would not let me do't;
If wounding, then it was to show my skill,
That more for praise than purpose meant to kill.

(IV. i. 24-29)

Preceding her claim that praise is due any lady who subdues a lord, these words safeguard the Princess's female character by stereotyping it as feminine. Shakespeare thus presents male playgoers with a way of defusing the threat of a masculine queen soon to be presented in the scene.

Such a mechanism, however, could not have been completely effective. The playwright intensifies the threat posed by a masculine queen to male sexual identity by recasting the Princess's political power so that it no longer seems benign. Shakespeare transforms a benevolent feature of the image of Elizabeth into an ominous dramatic trait. The Princess's inspiring, sun-like eyes refigure into a desire-denying, omniscient power frequently associated with visual portraits of Elizabeth. The ladies can play their trick of disguising themselves so that the men woo the wrong masked women only because Boyet has secretly overheard Navarre and the courtiers plotting to woo their beloveds under guise of Muscovites (V. ii. 89-125). Later, the men have the impression, when the Princess bewilders them with her knowledge of their device, that she possesses virtually supernatural powers of sight and hearing. How else, they reason, could she penetrate their disguises? The all-seeing, all-knowing Queen was one of the most popular images of Elizabeth, depicted most memorably perhaps in the Rainbow portrait (c. 1600-03) attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger. In this painting, the Queen, whose face wears the governmentally decreed mask of youth and who is surrounded by symbols of the sun and moon, sits garbed in an orange cloak covered with woven eyes and ears. Roy Strong has argued that these woven eyes and ears symbolize all those ministers and subjects “who watched and listened to purvey their intelligence” to the Queen.⁴⁶ The cloak does envelop the Queen in the painting, and Walsingham, who organized rings of spies and informers that on several occasions saved Elizabeth's life, did use a sketched eye as a shorthand signature for himself in correspondence with Elizabeth. Strong suggests that the woven eyes in Elizabeth's cloak in the Rainbow portrait may have been inspired by part of John Davies's Hymn to Astraea (publ. 1599):

E ye of that most quick and clear
L ike Heaven's eye, which from his sphere
I nto all things prieth;
S ees through all things everywhere,
A nd all their nature trieth.(47)

If this stanza of Davies's poem in praise of Elizabeth was part of Gheeraert's programme, it alerts us to a possibility that Strong ignores in his interpretation of the painting's details; the eyes and ears woven into Elizabeth's cloak could be images of Elizabeth's own faculties as well as those of her servants. Davies praises Elizabeth's eye, which he compares appropriately to the ascendant sun; “My darkest ways her eyes make clear as day,” Ralegh wrote of Elizabeth in a stanza of his fragmentary “The Ocean to Cynthia.”⁴⁸ The motto inscribed on the Rainbow painting, “Non sine Sole Iris” (“No rainbow without the sun”), encourages the beholder to think of the portrayed Elizabeth as the royal sun animating and giving color (and hence life) to England. Granted this solar symbolism, the beholder is likely to think of the eyes in Elizabeth's cloak as multiplied images of “Heaven's eye”—her own sun-like mystical power of apprehension. This interpretation receives support from a detail of another well-known likeness of Elizabeth. In George Gower's “Sieve” portrait of the Queen (1574), Elizabeth's eyes appear especially penetrating, obviously to reinforce the picture's inscribed motto—“Tutto Vedo e Molto Mancha” (“I see everything, and much is missing”).⁴⁹

Certain details of the “Sieve” and Rainbow portraits of Elizabeth represent cultural models analogous to Shakespeare's suggestion, at least as regards Navarre and his courtiers, that the Princess possesses all-knowing ears and mystically penetrating eyes—faculties that reduce men to bewilderment and easy manipulation. For them, the omniscience of the queen does not feel like a benevolent trait. Like Elizabeth in the “Sieve” painting, the Princess sees far into Navarre's, Berowne's, and the other male lovers' characters and finds much that is missing (e.g., constancy to sworn oaths). Like Elizabeth's eyes in the Rainbow portrait as illuminated by the stanza from Davies's Hymn to Astraea, those of the Princess in Shakespeare's play appear to the male characters to pry into all things and try (test) all natures.

It is this exasperating subjection to the superior royal virgin's powers of knowledge that reinforces the King's and courtiers' anxiety in the play. The majesty and self-possession of the Princess freezes Navarre in his adolescent manhood. Berowne's portrayal of Rosaline, who shares several of the Princess's magisterial traits, could easily be Navarre's depiction of the Princess:

What peremptory eagle-sighted eye
Dares look upon the heaven of her brow,
That is not blinded by her majesty?

(IV. iii. 223-25)

Elizabethan male writers echoed this sentiment in many purported compliments to Elizabeth. As part of his entertainment for Elizabeth at Wanstead (1578), Sir Philip Sidney has his Lady of May address a supplication to the “Most gracious monarch” that includes the following ambivalent language:

How dare I wretch seeke there my woes to rest,
Where eares be burnt, eyes dazled, harts opprest?
.....Your face hurts oft, but still it doth delight.(50)

Sidney's partly negative representation of Elizabeth's sun-like eyes was duplicated by another frustrated servant of Elizabeth's. Describing Belphoebe, one of Elizabeth's simulacra in Book II of the Faerie Queene, Spenser wrote:

In her faire eyes two living lamps did flame,
Kindled above at th' heavenly makers light,
And darted fyrie beames out of the same,
So passing persant, and so wondrous bright,
That quite bereav'd the rash beholders sight.

(II. iii. 23.1-5)

Like Sidney and Spenser, Shakespeare in Love's Labor's Lost participates in an Elizabethan literary strategy of characterizing the eyes of female majesty as hurtful to male subjects. Blinded by the gaze of majesty (IV. iii. 225), Berowne and Navarre testify to the transformation of one aspect of the figure of Elizabeth, royalty's nurturing, sun-like eyes, into its opposite—a Basilisk-gaze.

Given the Princess's threatening omniscience and self-sufficiency, Navarre and his courtiers might find in the Pageant of the Nine Worthies a defense against her power. The Nine Worthies were all men, perfect in their chosen tasks and pursuits. That compensatory male perfection becomes the issue of the performance is confirmed by a remark of Costard's: “for mine own part, I am, as they say, but to parfect one man in one poor man, Pompion the Great, sir” (V. ii. 498-500). After discharging his part, Costard repeats, “I hope I was perfect” (V. ii. 554). The clowns and lesser gentry of Love's Labor's Lost, however, misrepresent the ideal of the Nine Worthies in such a way that the flaws of Navarre and his bookmen receive greater emphasis.⁵¹ In fact, the repressive effect of royal virginity in the play accounts for particular forms of misrepresented impersonation. In keeping with the lords' implied opinion of the Princess's and her ladies' emasculating effect upon wooers, the Pageant stresses the minority status of classical male heroes and the perpetual boyhood of male gods. Cupid, to use Rosaline's words, “hath been five thousand year a boy” (V. ii. 11). Moreover, physical limitations of the acting cast require that Hercules must be played in his minority (V. i. 129-30)—as a child, by the tiny Moth, in his infancy strangling the snake in his cradle. Sixteenth-century humanists' interpretation of this Herculean myth as the hero's early control of passion, most obviously those connected with the libido, reinforces our impression in Love's Labor's Lost that Moth's rendition reflects the frustration and denial of male sexual desire resulting from the Princess's and her ladies' cold rejection of lovers' suits. Even in the entertainment mutually agreed upon to draw attention away from their humiliation as Muscovites, the King and his courtiers find tokens of masculine adolescence. Ironically, they never hear the Princess's nurturing, empathetic encouragement of the actors they mock because they are convinced that the ladies are bent on nipping their desires—and by extension their sexuality.⁵²

Granted the emerging repressive figure of Elizabeth in the play, Shakespeare's audience was disposed to associate a pattern of wooing and death with the Princess and her ladies.⁵³ In the play, Marcade's announcement of the death of the Princess's father blasts Navarre's courtship, partly causing her to conceive of Navarre's trial of penitent love in terms of life-denial. “Your oath I will not trust,” she tells him:

          … but go with speed
To some forlorn and naked hermitage,
Remote from all the pleasures of the world;
There stay, until the twelve celestial signs
Have brought about the annual reckoning.
If this austere insociable life
Change not your offer made in heat of blood;
If frosts and fasts, hard lodgings and thin weeds,
Nip not the gaudy blossoms of your love,
But that it bear this trial and last love;
Then at the expiration of the year,
Come challenge me, challenge me by these deserts,
And, by this virgin palm now kissing thine,
I will be thine.

(V. ii. 784-97)

Similarly, Rosaline's service laid on Berowne bears a deathly charge—to prune his sharp wit if, jesting with the “speechless” sick in hospitals, he cannot “move wild laughter in the throat of death” (V. ii. 845). This imagistic pattern of wooing/delayed marriage/potential barrenness and death, emanating from the Princess, had been enacted by 1594 by Elizabeth and those close to her many times. Artistic praxis grounds itself in a cultural symbolic pattern, gaining validity there.

Elizabeth's delay in making (an always negative) decision concerning marriage proposals is so well known that it scarcely needs remarking. Philip II of Spain; the Earl of Arundel, Sir William Pickering; King Eric XIV of Sweden; Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester; Archduke Charles of Austria; Charles IX of France; Thomas Heneage; the Duc d'Alençon (twice)—these and other suitors for the hand of the Virgin Queen experienced the frost of Elizabeth's rejection upon the blossoms of their courtship. What is not usually noted in accounts of the Queen's life is the strong taint of death surrounding the wooing and rejections of Elizabeth. When Amy Robsart, Robert Dudley's wife, died violently under mysterious circumstances, the common rumor in England and abroad ran that he ordered his servants to push her down stairs—she may have died a suicide, depressed by reports of Elizabeth's flirtation with her husband—so that he could marry the Queen.⁵⁴ Furthermore, Elizabeth's potential marriage to aristocratic Englishmen such as Dudley inevitably evoked the specter of death in the murderous factions that were likely to result from one lord, as the Queen's consort, gaining political advantage over his court rivals.

J. E. Neale reports that Elizabeth wept for some part of twenty-one consecutive days after learning of the death in June 1584 of the Duc d'Alençon. By all accounts, she had grown to love the small, homely, pock-marked French Catholic, the face of death itself to many English Protestants.⁵⁵ When she wept for Alençon, Elizabeth undoubtedly was also weeping for herself, barren all her life and now condemned, at age 51, to final barrenness. Fixated by her father's beheading of her mother and favorite step-mother, Elizabeth, as several writers have suggested, may have learned early in life to identify royal wooing and wedding with death, a lesson perhaps underlying her life-long hesitation to marry.⁵⁶ John Stubbs, in The Discovery of a Gaping Gulf (1579), had memorably linked the Duc d'Alençon and the King of Navarre in the minds of Elizabethans. Concerning the threatening marriage of Elizabeth to Alençon, Stubbs, in a judgment that would later cost him his right hand, denounced Alençon “as the serpent who had come in the form of a man ‘to seduce our Eve that she and we may lose this English paradise’; he would bring the Mass with him to England, and his wedding to the Queen would be a ‘Parisian marriage,’ like the wedding of Henry of Navarre and Margaret of Valois in Paris, to be followed by another Massacre of St. Bartholomew.”⁵⁷ Alençon, the King of Navarre, Queen Elizabeth—all three figures join in a pattern of courtship/marriage/death when Marcade blasts the King's and courtiers' wooing with the announcement of France's death and when the Princess and Rosaline impose “deathly” penances upon Navarre and Berowne.

While it might be objected that, by the 1590s, the association of wooing and marrying Elizabeth with death had lost strength because she had long ago passed child-bearing age, her flirtations with Ralegh and Essex sufficed to keep old fears and psychological associations alive. Moreover, the youthful mask of Elizabeth's face decreed for painters of her portrait, to say nothing of Spenser's and other poets' depiction of the Queen as a never-dying Flora, would have reinforced the tendency of Shakespeare's audiences during the 1590s not only to see the figure of a youthful Queen in the character of the Princess of France, but also to think of barrenness and death as the reward for wooing her image as potential realities.

Other Elizabethan literary works such as Sidney's Arcadia confirm the strong contemporary association of death with the wooing of the Queen. Roy Strong points out that Sidney in his revised Arcadia evokes the image of Elizabeth in his initial description of the virgin queen, Helen of Corinth—“a strongminded ruler of a people ‘mutinously proud’ but to whom she had brought peace when ‘many courtiers were full of wars.’”⁵⁸ In Book One, Musidorus and Clitophon encounter Helen's coach and outriders, magnificently equipped in black and white—Queen Elizabeth's personal colors symbolic of her constancy and virginity.⁵⁹ Sidney's knights discover, however, that this simulacrum of Elizabeth represents the touch of death. Helen of Corinth's lover, Philoxenus, dies when he jealously attacks Amphialus, the friend with whom Helen has fallen madly in love. Dressed in the armor of Amphialus, which he found when its owner in despair cast it away after his reluctant killing in self-defense of enraged Philoxenus, Musidorus, on his approach to Helen's coach, must kill in self-defense several outriders who attack him. Their deaths result from their mistaking Musidorus for the knight who had killed Philoxenus.⁶⁰ Thus Sidney portrays an image of Elizabeth callously unaware of the many male deaths directly and indirectly caused by the temptation to win her virginity. Sidney clinches the association of death with attempts to win the virgin queen later in Book One in Clitophon's picture and device of Helen of Corinth—“His device he had put in the picture of Helen which he defended: it was the Ermion [the ermine] with a speech that signified, ‘Rather dead than spotted!’”⁶¹ This motto amounts to a translation of the iconology of the crowned ermine depicted on the left sleeve of Elizabeth in the 1585 “Ermine” portrait of the Queen. Symbolic of absolute purity in Petrarch's Triumph of Chastity and Book III of the Faerie Queene (III. ii. 25.7-10), the ermine typified a creature that would rather die than spot its purity. In the words of Strong, “the most famous ermine device was that adopted by King Ferrante of Naples, which depicted the animal surrounded by a bank of mud, for an ermine would rather die than soil the whiteness of its fur.”⁶² It is this sentiment that Sidney captures in his motto, yet with the new connotations suggested by Helen of Corinth's deadly effect on suitors and those around her. They are likely to be dead before they, or anyone else, can spot (that is to say, break) the Queen's virginity.

The association of wooing/denial/death that attached itself to Elizabeth extended to the courtiers about her and the ladies they (often secretly) wooed and wedded. The Princess of France's strong determination of Rosaline, Maria, and Katherine to enacting the pattern primarily associated with the Queen bases itself in Elizabeth's absolute rule of the marriages and divorces of her immediate court. Learning of the concealed marriage of Lady Bridget Manners, one of her favorite ladies in waiting, to one Tyrwhitt, an angry Elizabeth committed the husband to prison and his wife to the custody of a trusted lady.⁶³ When Lady Mary Howard, who was an object of Essex's affection, refused to bear Elizabeth's mantle during one of the Queen's daily walks in her garden, Elizabeth flew into a rage, verbally abusing Lady Mary in excess of her fault in etiquette. This irascibility of Elizabeth's, which became extreme at about the time Shakespeare wrote Love's Labor's Lost, grew worse in the last ten years of Elizabeth's life.⁶⁴ Many witnesses attest to her progressively rough treatment of the ladies at court, reporting that she maliciously tested them to see if they had any desire to marry and then rebuking them if they showed any sign of defying her stated resolve that her ladies in waiting should, like herself, remain virgins all their lives.⁶⁵ Learning that the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare's patron, had secretly returned to England from France in 1598 to wed his mistress Vernon, Elizabeth “commanded that there shall be provided for her the sweetest and best appointed lodging in the Fleet; and the Earl is commanded, on his allegiance, to return with all speed to London, to advertise his arrival, but not to come to Court in person.”⁶⁶ When Katherine Grey, the sister of Lady Jane Grey and thus an early potential heir of Elizabeth's throne, asked permission in 1559 to marry Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, Elizabeth refused the request. When Katherine secretly married Seymour and became pregnant, an angry Elizabeth sent both of them to the Tower. She then convened a special commission to declare the marriage null and void and the child, born in the Tower, illegitimate. When the Tower officer allowed Katherine and Seymour to live in prison as man and wife and a second child was born, Elizabeth confined Katherine under house arrest at her uncle's estate in Middlesex. Seymour was confined until 1568, released only because Katherine had died. When Katherine's sister, Lady Mary Grey, secretly married the Queen's Sergeant-Porter, Thomas Keys, Elizabeth placed Keys in Fleet prison and Mary under house arrest. In 1571, Keys died in the Fleet.

Rosaline's, Maria's, and Katherine's willingness to imitate the Princess's precedent of inflicting upon suitors painful suffering, the denial of nuptial hopes, and death (in the possibility that Navarre and his courtiers may never marry to perpetuate themselves) reprises in Love's Labor's Lost Elizabeth's imposition of suffering, imprisonment, barrenness, and even death indirectly upon the marriage designs of her ladies. Shakespeare transforms a morbid Elizabethan wooing pattern, making it acceptable, or at least bearable, by presenting male suitors deserving of the suffering inflicted upon them. Still, the potentially deathly pattern of art most likely raised old anxieties within Shakespeare's Elizabethan audiences, mainly because of the strife anticipated upon the death of a childless Queen. This pattern represents perhaps the most gloomy shadow cast by the figure of Elizabeth in Love's Labor's Lost. If she saw her own dark shape in the play, which was performed for her in 1598 (and perhaps earlier), Shakespeare could easily point out to her the all-knowing, radiant face of her figure and claim that it triumphs. Nevertheless, for his astute playgoers, the face is Janus-like, looking two ways, as many English men and women were beginning to do as they nostalgically looked backward to the splendid decade of the Armada victory and fearfully ahead, toward the last years of a vain, irritable, aging Queen and a land wracked by financial inflation and debt. When he introduced a double figure of Elizabeth in the Princess of France's character, Shakespeare in Love's Labor's Lost capitalized upon a culture's bifurcated view of royalty.

Notes

1. F. P. Wilson, Shakespearian and Other Studies, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970) 70.

2. All citations and quotations of Love's Labor's Lost are taken from the New Arden edition, ed. Richard David (London: Methuen, 1956). Quotations of other Shakespeare plays derive from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton, 1974).

3. Alice S. Griffin (Venezsky), Pageantry on the Shakespearean Stage (1951; rpt. New York: Twayne, 1972) 139. The relevance for Love's Labor's Lost of entertainments that occurred during Elizabeth's summer progresses into the countryside was first strongly argued by 0. J. Campbell, “Love's Labour's Lost Re-studied,” Studies in Shakespeare, Milton, and Donne, University of Michigan Publications in Language and Literature 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1925) 1-45, esp. 13-20.

4. Peter B. Erickson, “The Failure of Relationship Between Men and Women in Love's Labor's Lost,” Women's Studies 9 (1981): 71. Erickson claims that Holofernes's and Nathaniel's scholarship, which applies the names “Dictynna” and “Phoebe” to the moon (IV. ii. 36-38), “indirectly gives us the key to the Princess' identity as the slayer of the deer” (Diana/Elizabeth) (80). Richard Cody confirms the identification of the hunting Princess of France with Diana in The Landscape of the Mind: Pastoralism and Platonic Theory in Tasso's “Aminta” and Shakespeare's Early Comedies (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969) 109.

5. M. C. Bradbrook, Shakespeare: The Poet In His World (New York: Columbia UP, 1978) 30.

6. Love's Labour's Lost, ed. H. C. Hart, Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1906) xlviii-1. H. B. Charlton, in “The Date of Love's Labour's Lost,” Modern Language Review 13 (1918): 257-66, 387-400, esp. 391-92, extended Hart's identification to include Shakespeare's supposed criticism, in IV. i. 1-40, of the Queen's callous slaughter of many penned deer at Cowdray.

7. Qtd. in David xxix.

8. Glynne Wickham, “Love's Labor's Lost and The Four Foster Children of Desire, 1581,” Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985): 49-55.

9. Donald M. Goodfellow, in “Lovers Meeting”: Discussions of Five Plays by Shakespeare, Carnegie Series in English 8 (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Institute of Technology, 1964), devotes a paragraph to speculation that traits of Queen Elizabeth partly inform the character of the Princess of France: “Of each it can be said that her head controlled her heart; that she enjoyed witty badinage, but that she knew how to be straight-forward and businesslike; that she liked to follow the stag-hounds. … In the Muscovite scene, when Ferdinand, addressing Rosaline in the guise of the Princess, pleads: ‘Vouchsafe, bright moon, and these thy stars, to shine’ … he seems to be echoing the remark of an ambassador who had been asked by Queen Elizabeth how he liked her ladies: ‘It is hard to judge of stars in the presence of the sun’” (8). Also see Gary Schmidgall, Shakespeare and the Poet's Life (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1990) 39, 102-03, 110, 114, 116.

10. For substantiation of this claim with regard to 1 Henry VI, see Leah Marcus, “Elizabeth,” Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988) 51-105.

11. See David 2.

12. Campbell 8-9; David xxxiii-xxxiv.

13. Jasper Ridley, Elizabeth I: The Shrewdness of Virtue (New York: Viking, 1988) 308.

14. Ridley 310.

15. Ridley 268.

16. J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth I (1934; rpt. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957) 337. The figure is confirmed by Christopher Haigh, Elizabeth I (London: Longman, 1988) 138-39.

17. The Letters of Queen Elizabeth I, ed. G. B. Harrison (1935; rpt. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1968) 213.

18. Charlton 266; David 63-64; Albert H. Tricomi, “The Witty Idealization of the French Court in Love's Labor's Lost,” Shakespeare Studies 12 (1979): 31.

19. David (64) asserts that subsequent lines of the Princess's—“And out of question so it is sometimes, / Glory grows guilty of detested crimes, / When, for fame's sake, for praise, an outward part, / We bend to that the working of the heart” (IV. i. 30-33)—refer, when heard within the context of the prior allusion, to Henry's crime (in Protestant minds) of spiritual vow breaking.

20. Charlton 265; David xxv.

21. In the course of establishing the presence of Henry of Navarre in the play, R. Chris Hassel, Jr., in “Love Versus Charity in Love's Labor's Lost,” Shakespeare Studies 10 (1977): 17-41, esp. 25-26, quotes the opinion of Geoffrey Bullough to this effect: “He [Henry of Navarre] had forsworn himself for power when he turned Catholic, so it would not surprise an English audience to find a fictitious King of Navarre forswearing himself more innocently for love” (26).

22. Neale 361.

23. Neale 399.

24. David 37. Alfred Harbage, however, in “Love's Labor's Lost and the Early Shakespeare,” Philological Quarterly 41 (1962): 18-36, esp. 27-28, points out that John Phelps, in an article published in 1899, originally made the connection with Marguerite's 1578 visit.

25. For a different paraphrase of the details of the Aquitaine matter, see Kristian Smidt, “Shakespeare in Two Minds: Unconformities in Love's Labour's Lost,” English Studies 65 (1984): 215-16.

26. Qtd. in Edmund Spenser's Poetry, ed. Hugh Maclean (New York: Norton, 1968) 440. All subsequent quotations of Spenser's poetry are taken from this text.

27. For the relevant passages in Ralegh's “Cynthia,” see E. C. Wilson, England's Eliza, Harvard Studies in English 20 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1939) 309-10.

28. For Elizabethan poetic descriptions of the Queen in terms of these values, see E. C. Wilson 321-69.

29. Noting that “Una was also used as a cult epithet of Queen Elizabeth,” Michael O'Connell, in Mirror and Veil: The Historical Dimension of Spenser's “Faerie Queene” (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1977), 44-51, explicates the several senses in which Una is Elizabeth. For more on the identification, see Lawrence Rosinger, “Spenser's Una and Queen Elizabeth,” English Language Notes 6 (1968-69): 12-17; and Robin H. Wells, Spenser's “Faerie Queene” and the Cult of Elizabeth (London: Croom Helm, 1983) 31-32, 52-53. Shakespeare clinches the positive identification of the Princess near the end of the play when, in one of her rare oaths, the Princess swears by her “maiden honour, yet as pure / As the unsullied lily” (V. ii. 351-52). Many years later, at the end of his career, Shakespeare's highest praise for his dead Queen took the form of this supreme floral image. “Would I had known no more,” Cranmer laments in Henry VIII during his vision of England's future Queen: “but she must die, / She must, the saints must have her; yet a virgin, / A most unspotted lily shall she pass / To th' ground, and all the world shall mourn her” (V. iv. 59-62).

30. In “Love's Labour's Lost and the Renaissance Vision of Love,” Shakespeare Quarterly 25 (1974): 335-50, Neal Goldstien, after summarizing the argument that the Princess and her ladies in Love's Labor's Lost represent Petrarchan or Neoplatonic mistresses, persuasively concludes that Shakespeare's mockery of the identification makes it unlikely that he seriously intended the typified association.

31. Bobbyann Roesen, “Love's Labour's Lost,” Shakespeare Quarterly 4 (1953): 422. In addition to Roesen, John Russell Brown, in Shakespeare and His Comedies (1957; rpt. London: Methuen, 1968) 77, notes that the reaction of the Princess to the playlet is empathetic, especially when compared to that of the courtiers and King.

32. John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth (1788-1805; rpt. London: Printed by N., 1823) 1:155.

33. Nichols 1:162.

34. Neale 212.

35. Nichols 2:155.

36. Nichols 2:159. Neale (212-13) also notes the Queen's courteous treatment of Limbert as evidence of her charity for well-meaning but imperfect entertainers.

37. The possibility that Theseus's charitable reception of public welcomes was modeled on those of Elizabeth has been remarked by Jean Wilson, Entertainments for Elizabeth I (Totowa, NJ: Rowman, 1980) 39.

38. Nichols 3:319.

39. Obviously this subtle transformation makes the shape like that of the notorious gestalt of rabbit/duck, which forms the basis of Norman Rabkin's analysis of the double figure of Henry V in Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981) 33-62.

40. For the paradox (at least for masculinists) of a sixteenth-century female prince, at once superior politically and inferior culturally to her male subjects, see Constance Jordan, “Woman's Rule in Sixteenth-Century Political Thought,” Renaissance Quarterly 40 (1987): 421-51; Haigh 8-10; and Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London: Routledge, 1989) esp. 61-165. For the Shakespearean treatment of the paradox with respect to Elizabeth, see Louis A. Montrose, “‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” Representations 1 (1983): 61-94.

41. Qtd. by Irene Dash, Wooing, Wedding, and Power: Women in Shakespeare's Plays (New York: Columbia UP, 1981) 15.

42. For the pun in the The Four Foster Children, see Jean Wilson 75-76.

43. Berry 65-66.

44. The bawdy allusion is confirmed by Herbert A. Ellis, Shakespeare's Lusty Punning In “Love's Labour's Lost” with Contemporary Analogues (The Hague: Mouton, 1973) 62-64.

45. See Ellis 78-79. Also noting the bawdy joke on “pricket,” Peter B. Erickson concludes that Shakespeare “makes the Princess' killing of the deer verbally equivalent to castration and provides another context for the men's uneasiness with women” (80).

46. Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Thames, 1977) 52.

47. Qtd. by Strong, Cult of Elizabeth 52.

48. Sir Walter Ralegh: Selected Writings, ed. Gerald Hammond (Manchester: Fyfield, 1984) 39.

49. See Roy Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (London: Thames, 1987) 94, 98.

50. Qtd. by Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1965) 45. In just a few short years, Sidney himself would experience the truth of this poetic representation; his own ears must have burned and his eyes smarted when he heard and read that Elizabeth had in essence rusticated him as punishment for his blunt letter warning her against marriage to Alençon.

51. The fullest demonstration of this claim is that of Judith C. Perryman, “A Tradition Transformed in Love's Labour's Lost,” Etudes Anglaises 37 (1984): 156-62.

52. The courtiers' prospect of barrenness and emasculation finds support in the play's repeated allusions to Omphale's and Delilah's figurative castration of Hercules and Samson, heroic men who, to their grief, lost their heads (in both the passionate and sexual senses) to a woman.

53. Bobbyann Roesen identifies several senses in which the Princess and her ladies are linked with death: “Significantly, it is they, the intruders from the outside world of reality, who first, in Act Three, bring death into the park itself. In this act, the Princess kills a deer” (419-20). It is Katherine's sister who died of melancholy (420), and it is the ladies whose effect upon the lords Berowne half-seriously equates with that of the black death: “Write ‘Lord have mercy on us’ on those three; / They are infected; in their hearts it lies; / They have the plague, and caught it your eyes. / These lords are visited; you are not free, / For the Lord's tokens on you I see” (420).

54. Neale remarks that “even if Dudley had been less envied and hated by his fellows, the tragedy of Amy Robsart was too black a cloud over his reputation with Englishmen to permit [Elizabeth's] marrying him” (84), an opinion echoed by Haigh (12, 155-56). The death of Amy Robsart transformed the latent fertility of Dudley and Elizabeth's liaison into barrenness.

55. Associations of death further grew around Alençon from the English fear that the Queen, advanced in years, would die of childbirth if she married him (Neale 246).

56. See, for example, Charles R. Forker, “Sexuality and Eroticism on the Renaissance Stage,” South Central Review 7.4 (1990): 13-14.

57. Ridley 208.

58. Cult of Elizabeth 75.

59. Cult of Elizabeth 71.

60. Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (New York: Penguin, 1977) 119-29.

61. The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia 164-65.

62. Gloriana 114-15.

63. G. B. Harrison, The Elizabethan Journals, Being a Record of Those Things Most Talked of During the Years 1591-1603 (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1955) 1:314.

64. In “Court and Polity under Elizabeth I,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library of Manchester 65.2 (1982-83): 259-86, Penry Williams quotes the opinion of Bishop Goodman—“that Elizabeth was ‘ever hard of access and grew to be very covetous in her old days’; towards the end of her life he alleges ‘the Court was very much neglected, and in effect the people were very generally weary of an old woman's government’” (270).

65. Ridley describes Elizabeth's prohibiting the daughter of Sir Robert Arundell from marrying the man of her choice after she cruelly led the girl and her father to believe that she would assent to the match (324).

66. Harrison, Elizabethan Journals 2:305. Ridley remarks that, during the 1590s, Elizabeth's “worst outbursts were often on the subject of marriage and sex” (323).