SOURCE: Skura, Meredith Anne. “Armado and Costard in The French Academy: Player as Clown.” In Love's Labour's Lost: Critical Essays, edited by Felicia Hardison Londré, pp. 313-23. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997.

[In the following excerpt, originally published in 1993, Skura contends that Shakespeare parodied the concepts of heroic honor and fame through his characterization of the pretentious figure of Don Armado and the clown Costard.]

The Taming of the Shrew, framed as theater by its Induction, is almost certainly earlier, but the pageant in Love's Labour's Lost is the first Shakespearean inner play proper. Since the players' roles call for comedians in the modern sense, their entry here marks the first confrontation in the canon between King and Clown and establishes Shakespeare's opposition between the player and the aristocratic world of heroes from whom he begs alms.¹ Ferdinand, King of Navarre, is the “great man” in Love's Labour's Lost and though he may have “sworn out house-keeping” (II.1.103), he cannot escape from his duty as host, either to the visiting princess or to the players who help him to entertain her. And when the motley players in Love's Labour's Lost perform their Pageant of Worthies, they gain access not only to Navarre's academic retreat in his country house, surrounded by its “curious-knotted garden” (II.1.242), but to the entire world of manly aristocratic heroics which it represents. This is a world shaped by the ideology of honor and driven by the heroic thrust toward “fame” as a means of establishing an eternal name, and transcending all that is base and shameful in mortality. It naturally encourages the rituals and “activities that are most integral to the whole idea of aristocracy—leading troops in a patriotic war against the King's enemies.”² This world had been the first object of Shakespeare's dramatic attention in the “heroical histories” of the first Henriad, which opens with the death of Henry V and the funeral proclaiming “death's dishonorable victory” (1H6 I.1.20), and is dominated by Talbot's effort to fight on in Henry's name and transcend death through heroic fame.³ Talbot's project in Henry VI, Part One is symbolized by his devotion to the rituals of the Order of the Garter, with its implicit opposition between heroic fame and cowardly shame: “Homi soit qui mal y pense.” His failure is signaled by the rituals of the aristocratic hunt when Talbot, who was accustomed to penetrating enemy cities, at last finds himself surrounded by the French and “bounded in a pale” like “a little herd of England's timorous deer, / Maz'd with a yelping kennel of French curs” (1H6 IV.2.45-47).

Love's Labour's Lost might not seem at first to belong in such company, but it continually alludes to the heroic tradition drawn not only from the English chronicles which furnished the plot of Henry VI, but also from the lives of the famous “Worthies”—beginning with Hercules, whose labors supply the title of Love's Labour's Lost.⁴ Similarly, both in its structure and its major concerns, Love's Labour's mirrors Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part One. Certainly Navarre's men see themselves as members of the illustrious company of departed heroes like Henry VI's St. George and Henry V. Love's Labour's Lost is an oddly death-conscious comedy; and, scholars though they are, Navarre and his fellow votaries fancy themselves above all to be chivalric warriors battling against “the huge army of the world's desires” in order to transcend “death's dishonorable victory,” as it was called in Henry VI, or “the disgrace of death,” as it is called here (LLL II.1.3, 10; 1H6 I.1.20). And just as their serious work drives them to stalk the elusive “fame that all hunt after all their lives,” in their leisure they devote themselves to the aristocratic hunt, seen as appropriate entertainment for a royal princess. The play refers insistently to the hunting party which provides the first occasion for the “bookmen” to mingle with the Princess's entourage. There Navarre spurs his horse hard upon the hill and reveals his “mounting mind.” Indeed the whole play is cast as a reversible “hunt,” and Navarre and his men meet a fate like Talbot's. The love-struck Berowne complains, “The king he is hunting the deer; I am coursing myself: they have pitched a toil [set a snare for the deer]; I am toiling in a pitch” (IV.3.1-2).⁵ Meanwhile the Princess jokes about the deer she kills and, as she prepares to shoot her bow, likens herself to a “curst wi[fe]” who “subdues a lord” (IV.1.36, 40).⁶ Navarre and his votaries had entered boldly commanding that “fame, that all hunt after in their lives, / Live register'd upon our brazen tombs” (I.1.1-2); italics added). Now the hunters are hunted and the suitor-shooters shot.

Navarre's aristocratic ideals thus run exactly counter to the base, effeminate pastime of playing,⁷ and the players here are mere foils showing that Navarre's heroic ambition turns out to be no better than the “Pageant of Worthies,” where everyone is “o'er-parted.” Military prowess in early modern Europe was indeed spectacle—nowhere more visibly so than in the French wars from which Shakespeare took the names of Navarre and his men (and to which he may already have alluded in Henry VI, Part One).⁸ Shakespeare was not alone in mustering his grandeur for his stage. Marlowe had made fun of soldiers who march in garish robes like players in Edward II (1592-93 [1592]), and one reason for the reluctance of the players in Histriomastix (1598-99 [1599]) to go to war is the fear that the soldiers would steal their “playing parrell” and “strout it in the field” (286)—a joke that loses its point unless soldiers were already known for strouting. The popularity of Braggadocchio suggests that they were.⁹ Even when not parodied, the soldier was represented as an actor on display for spectators, subject to the actor's extremes of fame and shame.¹⁰

Shakespeare's glorious soldier, heroic Talbot himself, is introduced on display, high in a tower where he has been “watched … even these three days” (1H6 I.4.16) by the master gunner below. For Talbot, fame and success in war entail a physical display of prowess, so that he can terrify the French, whose “whole army stood agaz'd on him” (1H6 I.1.126). Similarly, when failure threatens Talbot, it threatens in the form of public shame when the French witness his inability to live up to his role. Recounting his captivity in France, what Talbot most deplores is the shame of public exposure:

In open market-place produc'd they me
To be a public spectacle to all:
Here, said they, is the Terror of the French,
The scarecrow that affrights our children so.

And Talbot directs his heroic fury not at his captors but at his audience:

Then broke I from the officers that led me,
And with my nails digg'd stones out of the ground
To hurl at the beholders of my shame.

(1H6 I.4.38-45)¹¹

Later he is almost trapped by the Countess, who locks him within her walls and laughs at his heroic pretense; and before he finally dies the general of the encircling French forces announces that “these eyes, that see thee now well coloured, / Shall see thee wither'd, bloody, pale and dead” (1H6 IV.2.37-38; italics added).¹² Appropriately enough, Talbot sees death itself as an audience, “Thou antic Death, which laugh'st us here to scorn” (1H6 IV.7.18).

But the comparison which likens a soldier to an actor works the other way too. Navarre and his men are struggling with precisely the ambition and its discontents that lead people—including Armado and company—to the stage. We have heard the twentieth-century actor described as “a soldier going into battle,”¹³ and heard about his “warlike energy” and “gladiator instinct.” The sixteenth-century Hamlet, the most theatrical of Shakespeare's plays, pairs the soldier and actor as well, when Hamlet compares himself first to a player, then to the soldier Fortinbras, and when at the end he is carried “like a soldier to the stage” (Ham. V.2.401).¹⁴ Not long before Hamlet, Shakespeare's most heroic soldier, Henry V, had encouraged his warriors into the breach by telling them to act like tigers, while the Chorus of that play encouraged the audience to strain and work like soldiers.¹⁵

In Love's Labour's Lost, therefore, Navarre's sense of himself as a warrior, as well as his search for fame and immortality, provide a model as well as an antitype for theatrical ambition.¹⁶ Navarre's world represents everything drama aspired to in its proudest claims. More than ten years would pass before John Davies would complain that players “weene they merit immortality,” and thirty before Massinger's Roman actor could claim outright that he played for “glorie, and to leave our names / To after times.”¹⁷ But the grandiose fantasies of twentieth-century actors—that acting can make contact with the past or recreate life—were already inscribed in the praise topoi used by Thomas Nashe and Thomas Heywood in their defenses of Renaissance drama. Drama, for these men, was almost synonymous with a pageant of worthies that both recognized and created heroic immortlity. We have already had occasion to cite Nashe's famous testimony to the power of Henry VI, which we might see as Shakespeare's own “Pageant of Worthies”:

How it would have joyed brave Talbot … to think that after he had lyne two hundred years in his Tombe, hee should triumphe again on the stage and have his bones newe embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least … who, in the Tragedian who represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding.¹⁸

Nashe concludes with a less well-known but even more sweeping claim for all drama: “There is no immortalitie can be given a man on earth Like unto Playes.”¹⁹ Heywood's emphasis is on the power the play has over the audience, but he too insists on the way in which theater goes beyond creating mere “shadows” or “forms”: “To see a souldier shap'd like a souldier, walke, speake, act like a souldier: to see a Hector all besmered in blood, trampling upon the bulkes of Kinges. … To see as I have seene, Hercules, in his own shape hunting the Boare, knocking down the Bull … Oh, these were sights to make an Alexander!”²⁰ Webster's Excellent Actor (1615) makes the same claim: “A man of deepe thought might apprehend, the Ghosts of our ancient Heroes walk't again, and take [the player] (at severall times) for many of them.”²¹ Neither Nashe, Heywood, nor Webster really believes in reincarnation; just as the same complaints turn up again and again in the antitheatricalist tracts, resurrection had clearly become part of the standard defense of drama. Yet there is something in their praise that sounds like Macbeth's awe at the line of eight real kings raised up in the witches' show (Mac. IV.1.111, stage direction)—or like the scholars struck with admiration at Faustus's ability to raise Alexander and his paramour from the dead “in their own shapes” (Dr. Faustus IV.1[1233]).²² Faustus's opening complaint in Marlowe's play was that no human doctor could raise the dead; apparently in some minds the players could.²³ If nothing else, the player was the one who brought a play to “life,” and the idea of resurrection, as we have seen (chap. 2 of the book from which this essay is taken), inhabited the language of the theater.

Perhaps then, the pageant of dead white male worthies in Love's Labour's Lost serves as parodic displacement not only of Navarre's overblown aspirations but also of Shakespeare's own theatrical aspirations in Henry VI—just as Pyramus and Thisbe would soon parody his efforts at romance in Romeo and Juliet. In any case the pageant certainly serves to expose the proud beggars in Love's Labour's Lost who arrange to perform it for the king. Shakespeare devotes an unusually large proportion of lines and even whole scenes to these characters, whom Berowne dismisses as a crew of walking stereotypes from the commedia dell'arte—“the pedant, the braggart, the hedge-priest, the fool, and the boy” (V.2.536)—but who are remarkably well developed as individuals.²⁴ They include the flamboyant Spaniard Armado, his page Moth, and Costard, retainers who have been invited into the academe to provide “sport” for the bookmen. They are joined by the local villagers, the pedant Holofernes, his Parasite, Nathaniel the Curate, and Constable Dull, who help put on the pageant. The players run the gamut from narcissistic would-be stars to less-talented hired (in this case drafted) men, just as Quince's troupe does in the Athens of A Midsummer Night's Dream and as London companies did. Preparations for this performance may provide a glimpse of what went on in Elizabethan performances, though we have no way of knowing whether the power struggles among actors here, the preference for typecasting, the threat of stage fright, and the rudeness of the audience are models for, or nonsensical distortion of, professional practice.

In any case the performance gives a glimpse of would-be actors as Shakespeare saw them. Most revealing among these actors is the group's leader, Armado, another version of Shakespeare's proud beggar. Though he is a braggart soldier by stereotype, Armado has a good deal of the braggart player about him. He resembles Robert Greene's equally spruce and arrogant player in Groatsworth of Wit. Greene's player boasts to Roberto that he can make “a prettie speech,” and reports that he had “terribly thundred” the twelve labors of Hercules on stage, in a role not very different from those in the pageant.²⁵ Even Holofernes, a vain man himself, sees through Armado's similar bombast:

his humour is lofty, his discourse peremptory, his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, his gait majestical, and his general behaviour vain, ridiculous, and thrasonical. He is too picked, too spruce, too affected. … I abhor such fanatical phantasimes, such insociable and point-devise companions.

(V.1.9-13, 17-19)

Armado's sensitivity however distinguishes him from Greene's unworthy charlatan and makes him an important indicator of Shakespeare's attitude toward actors. Armado's pride is not only a matter of social pretense, but an involvement with self and self-image that suggests something like what we now mean by narcissism. He is as concerned with emotional as with sartorial style, and he cannot even fall in love without playing a role. When Jaquenetta steals his heart Armado desperately seeks “some mighty precedent” to shore up his battered sense of self: “Comfort me, boy,” he asks his clever page, “What great men have been in love?” (I.2.60-61). And, like Richard III, if Armado is proud and thrasonical, he nonetheless finds himself in humiliating pursuit of a most unlikely woman. Like Richard with Lady Anne, Armado veers between brazen self-assertion and abject submission, claiming to be the Nemean lion to Jaquenetta's lamb, the King to her Beggar—then vowing at the end to hold the plow three years for her.

Armado is awed both by his female audience—as Navarre and his men are by theirs—and by the king for whom he organizes the Pageant of Worthies. He is a fawning courtier thoroughly concerned with pleasing his audience and, like all Shakespeare's later players, he feels an exaggerated, even childlike, deference for his lord and patron. For him, self-esteem is inseparable from Navarre's approval. When he learns that “the king would have me present the princess, sweet chuck, with some delightful ostentation” (V.1.102-104), he takes it as sign that his theatrical duties have “singled [him out] from the barbarous” (V.1.73). He never suspects that he has been included in the festivities as mere sport, and is assumed to be no better than a “Monarcho” or court fool.²⁶ If we take his unwitting innuendoes seriously, Armado finds an almost obscene pleasure in serving Navarre and being his “familiar”:

Sir, the king is a noble gentleman, and my familiar, I do assure ye, very good friend. For what is inward between us, let it pass … for I must tell thee, it will please his grace, by the world, sometime to lean upon my poor shoulder, and with his royal finger, thus, dally with my excrement, with my mustachio; but, sweet heart, let that pass … some certain special honours it pleaseth his greatness to impart to Armado, a soldier, a man of travel, that hath seen the world: but let that pass. The very all of all is, but, sweet heart, I do implore secrecy, that the king would have me present the princess, sweet chuck, with some delightful ostentation, or show, or pageant, or antic, or firework.

(V.1.87-104)

As he prepares a pageant for “The posteriors of this day” (V.1.80-81), Armado, with unconscious camp, elaborates the king's patronage into an indecent fantasy of something “inward” between them as the king's “royal finger” dallies with Armado's excrement.

Before the pageant is over—or rather interrupted, as nearly all Shakespeare's inner plays are—Armado and his fellows experience the extremes of egotism and shame inherent in a player's life. Some of them are truly “shame-proof” (Berowne's wishful claim; V.2.508): Holofernes begins the project ridiculously overconfident about his worthiness to play three Worthies, and nothing that happens during the performance can faze Costard, who walks off barely containing his delighted “I hope I was perfect” (V.2.554), despite the audience's rudeness to him. But when the audience is unrelenting in its seemingly motiveless malignity toward the poor players, others fall apart. Holofernes, like Tomkis's “fresh player” or T.G.'s “bashful” player, is literally put “out of countenance.”²⁷ Nathaniel is so afflicted by the audience's scorn—“A conqueror, and afeared to speak!” (V.2.573-574)—that he forgets his lines and must “run away for shame” (V.2.574). He responds to their rejection just as Boyet predicts the would-be lovers will respond to the ladies' rejections: “Why, that contempt will kill the speaker's heart, / And quite divorce his memory from his part” (V.2.149-150). The men attack not only the acting but the very shape and odor of the actors' bodies, taking advantage of their physical vulnerability: Nathaniel smells; Holofernes' face is too thin like a “death's face”; and (spoken sarcastically) Armado's “leg is too big” in the “calf” and the “small” (V.2.562, 607, 631-634). If Armado's devotion to the King evokes the familial fantasies modern actors describe, his experience during the performance itself suggests the modern actor's sense of being held at bay by Canetti's baiting crowd. The players become scapegoats. “Only the savage shame one feels toward an unworthy part of oneself,” Thomas Greene notes, “could motivate the gentlemen's … (quite uncharacteristic) cruelty.”²⁸ It is a telling analysis of audience psychology.

In the end, Armado, insulted in his effort to present Hector, suffers the worst reversal. Like Navarre claiming to be heir to all eternity, Armado has staged a heroic drama and attempts (à la Nashe and Heywood) to bring dead heroes to life. But instead the pageant turns into an unheeded memento mori, a “death's face in a ring,” as Berowne calls Holofernes (V.2.607). When “Alexander” comes on stage to announce that, “when in the world I lived, I was the world's commander” (V.1.557), his words only remind the audience that in the world he does not live any longer. Then too, Armado's play, as much as Navarre's own efforts, is interrupted by the messenger from France announcing the death of the Princess's father. More painful for Armado than the metaphysical failure of his fictional pageant, is the real-life defeat that it accompanies. Costard interrupts “Hector” in midspeech and accuses Armado of getting Jaquenetta pregnant. “Dost thou infamonize me among potentates?” Armado cries (V.2.670), ready to fight for his honor; and the bookmen crowd around to laugh not at Hector but at Armado. The poor Spaniard endures an almost literal realization of the actor's fear of being naked in front of an audience, when Costard challenges him to strip to his shirt and Armado is forced to admit, shamefully, that he has none (“I go woolward for penance”; V.2.701-702). The man who played Hector, and who identified with the King when he quoted the ballad of “The King and the Beggar” to Jaquenetta, is humiliated in front of his King. He is a portrait of the actor as vulnerable narcissist.

But Shakespeare's satiric thrust in Love's Labour's Lost is aimed more at the aristocrats than the actors; even their attack on the players reflects back on themselves. The joke is not so much on the clownish players as on Navarre and his men, whose plans are interrupted when Marcade breaks up the play. Besides, Love's Labour's Lost exudes a confidence and delight in itself as theater which contradicts its mockery of the pageant. Its self-assurance emerges not least in the way it teases its offstage aristocratic audience, both by inviting their complicity in the play's dense allusiveness and private jokes, then refusing them the expected happy ending, and by suggesting that they are as unsatisfying an audience as Navarre and his fellows.

Notes

1. Jack Cade in Henry VI, Part Two comes earlier, but he does not meet with the king himself.

2. G. K. Hunter, “Bourgeois Comedy: Shakespeare and Dekker” in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, ed. E. A. J. Honigman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), p. 3.

3. David Riggs, Shakespeare's Heroical Histories (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), describes the heroical ideal the plays embody and rework.

4. Both the chronicles and the Worthies also contributed to the “prentice literature” aimed at and consumed by seventeenth-century adolescents. The apprentices “conceived of themselves as possessing the manly virtues displayed on the battlefields of France and of the Holy Land … and with the romantic virtues of Johnson's Nine Worthies.” The latter was a prentice version of the famous heroes, celebrating nine London prentices all of whom made good. Steven R. Smith, “The London Apprentices as Seventeenth-Century Adolescents,” Past and Present 61 (1973), 149-61.

5. Berowne's playful conceit, at least when applied to lovers rather than actors, was hardly unique to Shakespeare. At about the same time that Berowne was onstage, Arden in the anonymous Arden of Faversham (1585-92 [1589]) has a premonitory dream before his wife murders him:

   This night I dreamed that being in a park,
   A toil was pitched to overthrow the deer,
   And I upon a little rising hill
   Stood whistly watching for the herd's approach.
   Even there, methoughts, a gentle slumber took me. …
   But in the pleasure of this golden rest
   An ill-thewed foster had removed the toil,
   And rounded me with that beguiling home
   Which late, methought, was pitched to cast the deer.
   With that he blew an evil-sounding horn,
   And at the noise another herdsman came
   With falchion drawn, and bent it at my breast,
   Crying aloud, “Thou art the game we seek.”

   Arden of Faversham, ed. Martin White (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982), 6.6-19 (italics added).

6. Two scenes later Holofernes evokes the hunt again for us, when he reads his “extemporal epitaph on the death of the deer,” which begins, “The preyful princess pierc'd and prick'd a pretty pleasing pricket,” and notes how “the dogs did yell” bringing the pricket down (IV.2.47-48, 55, 58). Hers is only a playful preyfulness, but the bantering which accompanies it suggests a parallel between the Princess's attack on the deer and the French attack on Talbot. The phrase “in blood,” found both in Holofernes' poem and in the description of Talbot's predicament, is another link between the two. See also Holofernes' unusual reference to Diana as “Dictynna” (IV.2.35)—a name Ovid uses only when calling her “hunter of deer.”

7. The incompatibility was being explored on the stage at the time. In Histriomastix, for example, the traditional opposition between soldier and scholar becomes a conflict between soldier and player when the Captain comes to press the players into service: “What?” the Captain cries, “Playes in time of Warres? hold, sirra / Ther's a new plott,” and remains unconvinced when one of the players explains, “'Tis our Audience must fight on the field for us, / And we upon the stage for them.” Histriomastix, in Plays of John Marston, 3:285-286.

8. For several years, across the channel, Navarre's namesake, Henri the “white plume of Navarre,” (compare Armado, that “plume of feathers”: IV.1.95) had become a folk hero to the English by challenging the Catholics on the French throne. Essex, a man with an eye for self-preservation, used Henri's wars to act out his expensive dreams of chivalric glory, with his old-fashioned knights errant “armed like the antique figures shown on old tapestries, with coats of mail and iron helmets … going into battle to the sound of bagpipes and trumpets”; Anthony Esler, The Aspiring Mind of the Elizabethan Younger Generation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1966), p. 93.

9. Less derogatory was the new military genre in painting which deemed soldiers worthy subjects for artists. See J. R. Hale, Artists and Warfare in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).

10. When King John besieges Angiers in Shakespeare's King John, for example, the citizens standing on the city walls are like an audience “in a theater, whence they gape and point / At [King John's] industrious scenes and acts of death” (KJ II.1.375-376).

11. The rest of his scenes are dogged by shame: “let Talbot perish with this shame” (1H6 III.2.57), he cries when defeat seems likely; he and his son speak of “shame” three times (and infamy once) in seventeen lines when they meet; his fellow soldiers speak of his “shame” after he is gone. This obsessive sense of shame has a biblical flavor about it, and does actually echo the prophetic wrath in Jeremiah, where an angry God shames his people for their “abominations”: “For the greatness of thine iniquity (are thy skirts discovered and thy heels made bare) … therefore will I discover thy skirts about thy face, that thy shame may appear. …” (Jer. 13:22) Talbot not only suffers from a sense of shame as physical exposure; he tries to inflict it on his enemies as well. He punishes the coward Fastolfe by publicly stripping off his garter in a technically accurate but nonetheless unhistorical defrocking ceremony. And his showiest victory in France is the attack on Orleans in which the French, as Alençon says, were “shamefully surprised” (1H6 II.1.65). There Talbot roused “the Dauphin and his trull” from “drowsy beds” (1H6 II.2.28, 23) so that they come running on stage “in their night clothes” (1H6 stage directions after II.1.38), and then, as another stage direction says, “fly, leaving their clothes behind them” (1H6 stage directions after II.1.7). He revenges his earlier shame by exposing his enemies.

12. His opponent throughout the play, Joan of Arc, threatens—though she fails to effect—a similarly fatal gaze: “O were mine eyeballs into bullets turned / That I might shoot them at your faces!” (1H6 IV.7.79-80).

13. Stuart W. Little and Arthur Cantor, The Playmakers (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1970), p. 90.

14. Fortinbras, it turns out, is marching for no more than a “fantasy” or a “trick of fame” (Ham. IV.4.61)—hardly better than the First Player caught up in his “fiction” or “dream of passion” (Ham. II.2.246); while by contrast the player can make himself into Pyrrhus, a potent soldier.

15. See Chapter 5 and Afterword of the book from which this essay is taken.

16. Heroic drama was also the medium used by dramatists to compete with one another. George Peele, Robert Greene, and Thomas Kyd all tried to out-Tamburlaine Christopher Marlowe—and thus were exploring not only a national ideology but a much more pragmatic trade war.

17. John Davies, Microcosmos (1603) in The Complete Works of John Davies of Hereford, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (Edinburgh University Press, 1878), Vol. 1, p. 82; Philip Massinger, The Roman Actor (1626), ed. William Lee Sandidge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1929), 4.1.31-32.

18. Pierce Pennilesse His Supplication to the Divell, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966) Vol. 1, p. 212.

19. Ibid.

20. Thomas Heywood, Apology for Actors, B3v-B4r.

21. John Webster, An Excellent Actor, cited in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967) Vol. 4, p. 258.

22. Like Faustus, the magician John a Kent (who is even more than Faustus a figure for the dramatist) can “from foorth the vaultes beneathe, / call up the ghosts of those long since deceast”; Anthony Munday, John a Kent and John a Cumber (1587-90 [1589]), ed. Muriel St. Clare Byrne, Malone Society Reprints (Oxford University Press, 1923) 5, lines 108-109. Shakespeare's magician-dramatist Prospero claims that “graves at my command / Have wak'd their sleepers, op'd, and let 'em forth” (Tem. V.1.48-49), although we never see any such thing.

23. D. J. Palmer claims that Shakespeare also “resurrected” Henry V in that king's eponymous play; D. J. Palmer, “Casting Off the Old Man: History and St. Paul in Henry IV,” Critical Quarterly 12 (1970), 267-83. This seems even truer in the context of the full cycle of history plays, which began with Henry V's death in Henry VI, Part One (1592) and ended with the live Henry's greatest triumph in Henry V (1599).

24. The proportion may have been even larger in an earlier draft. Editors have suggested that a scene with Armado and Moth is missing, and that the original play lacked the lengthy Muscovy fiasco which fills out the aristocratic plot. For a summary of the discussions see Richard David, ed., Love's Labour's Lost, Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1968), pp. xxii, xxi. The degree of character development is such that scholars continue to search for the historical originals of the mechanicals as well as for those of the aristocrats.

25. Robert Greene, Greenes Groatsworth of Wit, in The Life and Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Robert Greene, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, The Huth Library (London: Hazell, Watson, and Viney, 1881-83), Vol. 12, pp. 131-132.

26. A Spaniard in post-Armada England, Armado is already branded as an inferior “other.”

27. Thomas Tomkis, Lingua (1607). “Bashful player” is in T. G[ainsford]., Rich Cabinet, in W. C. Hazlitt, ed., The English Drama and Stage under the Tudor and Stuart Princes 1543-1664 (London: Wittingham and Wilkins, 1869), p. 230.

28. Thomas Greene, “Love's Labour's Lost: The Grace of Society,” Shakespeare Quarterly 22 (1971), 323.