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Character
Directory
FERDINAND |
King Ferdinand of
Navarre is a ruler whose decision to make 'a little academe' (1.1.13) of
his court leads to the action of the play. Although opposed by the
sardonic humor of BEROWNE, the King bans all mirth, banqueting, and even
the company of women in order to promote disinterested study. The King's
humorless desire to make of his courtiers 'brave conquerors . . . / That
war against your own affections / And the huge army of the world's
desires' (1.1.8-10) is focused on an abstract idea, not a love of
scholarship, and is therefore vain. This self-centered seriousness is
overcome by love as the play develops. The King himself succumbs to the
charms of the Princess of France, and when, at the close of the play, she
requires that he prove his love with a year of monastic life, he willingly
assumes the task, asserting, 'My heart is in thy breast' (5.2.808). |
BIRON |
Berowne (Biron) is
one of the gentlemen in the court of the King of Navarre. Berowne is the
witty exponent of the play's two main points: that love is superior to the
pursuit of knowledge; and that pretensions, especially verbal ones, cannot
be successful. When the King demands that his courtiers follow a
three-year ascetic regimen dedicated to scholarship, Berowne argues that
this is unhealthy and doomed to failure, because young men will naturally
succumb to love. Berowne's common sense is opposed to the affectation of
scholarly devotion, and his awareness of real emotion counters the fakery
of academic rhetoric.
Unlike the other
lovers in Love's Labour's Lost, who function simply as vehicles for the
conventional proposition that the emotions should take precedence over the
intellect, Berowne is a humanly believable character, as well as a funny
one. The gentleman mocks himself in a humorous soliloquy at the end of
3.1, confessing that he has fallen under the sway of 'this signer junior,
giant-dwarf, dan Cupid' (3.1.175). He is delighted to find that the King
and the other courtiers, Dumaine and Longaville, are similarly smitten, in
the comic high point of the play, a stock eavesdropping scene repeated
three times to a height of absurdity (4.3). Berowne proclaims a manifesto
in favor of love, using his wit and warmth in a speech that contains
perhaps the best verse in the play (4.3.285-361).
The gentlemen attempt
to court the ladies with a masquerade and high-flown sentiments, and they
are mocked by the women they would woo. Berowne realises that their
pretensions have failed them, and he eloquently advances the play's
campaign against foolish rhetoric, rejecting: 'Taffeta phrases, silken
terms precise, / Three-pii'd hyperboles, spruce affection, /Figures
pedantical . . . / Henceforth my wooing mind shall be express'd / In
russet yeas and honest kersey noes. . . .' (5.2.406-413).
During the pageant in
the same scene, Berowne is merciless in his heckling, perhaps evidencing
the essential immaturity of the gentlemen. As a result of his wounding
wit, ROSALINE, at the play's denouement, requires that Berowne must spend
a year visiting the sick in hospitals before she will accept him. Berowne,
no cardboard character as are his fellows and the King, has human faults
that must be corrected, even though he is also the chief exponent of the
honest emotional life promoted by the play.
Berowne's name,
pronounced 'B'roon', is taken from that of a contemporary French
Protestant general, the Due de Biron, who was a principal adviser to the
historical King of Navarre. |
LONGAVILLE |
Longaville (Longueville)
is one of the gentlemen who fall in love and thus disrupt the ascetic
academic program of the King of Navarre. In 1.1 Longaville is enthusiastic
about the King's idea, but he falls in love with Maria, one of the
ladies-in-waiting to the Princess of France, and, along with the King and
the other courtiers, he breaks his vow and abandons scholarship for love.
Longaville's name was
taken from that of a French contemporary of Shakespeare, the Due de
Longueville, a well-known figure in the Wars of Religion. Longueville was
an aide to Henri de Bourbon, who was the historical King of Navarre and
later ruled France as Henri IV. |
DUMAIN |
Dumaine (Dumain) is
one of the gentlemen who fall in love and thus disrupt the ascetic
academic program of the King of Navarre. Although committed to the King's
idea at the outset of the play, Dumaine falls in love with Katharine, a
lady-in-waiting of the Princess of France. Along with the King and the
other courtiers, he breaks his vows and abandons scholarship for love.
The Due de Mayenne, well known in Shakespeare's London for his role in the
French Wars of Religion, is usually thought to have provided the name
Dumaine. Unlike the originals of Longaville and Berowne, he was not an
aide to the historical King of Navarre; rather, he was a principal enemy
of the insurgent monarch, but this inconsistency would probably not have
bothered either the playwright or his audience. An alternative, the less
notable General D'Aumont, who was an aide to the King of Navarre at the
time, has been proposed. |
BOYET |
Boyet Minor is in the entourage of the Princess of
France. Boyet is a smooth courtier, a familiar type in the Elizabethan
court. We first see him flattering his mistress and being put in his
place. He often serves as a messenger. He happens to overhear the plans of
the King and his gentlemen to masquerade as Russians, and he warns the
Princess and her ladies. Berowne expresses his dislike for Boyet in
5.2.315-327 |
MERCADE |
Marcade (Mercade) is
the messenger who brings the news to the Princess of France news of her
father's death in 5.2, thus changing the tenor of the play in its closing
minutes. |
DON ADRIANO DE ARMADO |
Don Adriano is a
comically pedantic and pompous Spaniard who participates in the humorous
sub-plot. Armado's language is ludicrous whether he is ingratiating
himself with royalty or wooing his rustic sweetheart, Jaquenetta. Armado
is mocked by his own page, the saucy Moth, and his preposterously
rhetorical letters are read aloud as entertainment by the other
characters. His pompously inflated language, like that of the similar
characters Holofernes and Nathaniel, is a satirical target of the play.
Armado participates in the pageant put on by the comic characters in 5.2.
In its course, it is revealed that Jaquenetta is pregnant by the Spaniard,
and at the end of the play he announces that he has taken a vow to his
beloved similar to the promises made by the aristocratic lovers, thus
providing a link between the two plots.
Armado boasts of his
acquaintance with the King of Navarre in a richly comical passage
(5.1.87-108) and clearly demonstrates his descent from the comic character
type known in ancient Roman drama as the Miles Gloriosus, a foolish,
bragging soldier. In the Italian Commedia Dell’Arte, this figure was a
Spaniard, an enemy of Italy and also of Shakespeare's England. Armado's
very name, attached to so ludicrous a character, is a derisive reference
to the Spanish Armada's grand failure to invade England in 1588. |
SIR NATHANIEL |
Nathaniel is the obsequious companion of the comical pedant Holofernes.
Nathaniel emulates his friend, seconding his opinions with less Latinity
but no less pretension. Although Nathaniel is no more than an object of
derision for the most part, Costard presents him in a more human light,
standing up for him in 5.2, when he has at the pageant, stricken with
stage fright. |
HOLOFERNES |
Holofernes is a
comical pedant. Named for Dr Tubal Holofernes, a tutor in Rabelais'
Gargantua, Shakespeare's scholar is so Latinate in his speech that he can
hardly be understood. Holofernes, never without his obsequious follower,
Nathaniel the Curate, is the subject of much mirth on the part of the
other characters. Moth says of Holofernes and his fellow grotesque,
Armado, that 'they have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the
scraps' (5.1.35-36). Although Holofernes is consistently wrong-headed,
conceited, and intolerant of those he considers his intellectual
inferiors, we nevertheless feel sorry for him when he attempts to perform
in the pageant of the Nine Worthies and is mercilessly heckled by the
gentlemen. Driven from the stage, he cries, justly, 'This is not generous,
not gentle, not humble' (5.2.623).
While Shakespeare's
audiences will have made more of Holofernes' ranting than we can, it is
nonetheless good comedy, for much of the fun lies in its
near-incomprehensibility. Some of his references are clearly to topical
jokes that are now hopelessly obscure. It has been speculated that
Holofernes was intended as a parody of some contemporary literary
figure—John Florio and Gabriel Harvey have been suggested—but this theory
cannot be proven. |
DULL |
Dull is the
slow-witted rustic constable. Dull is a character type whose name
summarizes his nature. Dull acts as a foil to the comical pedants Armado,
Holofernes, and Nathaniel, offsetting their elaborate contortions of
language by being himself. At one point, Holofemes observes, 'Via, goodman
Dull! Thou hast spoken no word all this while'. Dull replies, 'Nor
understand none neither, sir' (5.1.141). |
COSTARD |
Costard is a
quickwitted Clown who is at the centre of the rustic sub-plot. In 3.1
Costard is employed by Armado to send a love letter to Jaquenetta and by
Berowne to send another one to Rosaline. He delivers each to the wrong
woman, resulting in two comical outcomes: Armado's pompous rhetoric is
read aloud to the amusement of the Princess of France and her retinue; and
Berowne's love poem exposes to his fellow courtiers his own susceptibility
to romance, just as he is chastising them for the same failing. To a
great degree. Costard is simply a character type derived from the Italian
Commedia Dell’Arte tradition—that of the servant or rustic yokel descended
from the comic slave figures of ancient Roman Drama. He engages in several
bits of standard by play—for instance, when he comes to believe that
'remuneration' means a three-farthing coin and 'guerdon' a shilling.
However, he displays realistic touches of humanity that rank among the
play's literary gems. A participant in the comical pageant of the Nine
Worthies, Costard plays Pompey the Great, but he muffs his lines and
shamefacedly apologizes, in 5.2.554-555. Some twenty lines later, Costard
demonstrates an appreciation for his fellows that exceeds the restricted
humanity of a stock figure, when he speaks up for Nathaniel the Curate,
who has been driven away by stage fright. Costard's name is an old word
meaning 'apple' or 'head', which stimulates a cluster of jokes in 3.1. |
MOTH |
Moth is a page
employed by the Spanish braggart Armado. Moth's quick wit is employed to
ridicule his master, subtly to his face and blatantly behind his back.
Moth appears only in scenes that function as set pieces, humorous sketches
intended simply as entertainment. Moth is apparently an energetic
teenager or child, small and slight of build. He is described as 'not so
long by the head as hononficabilitudinitatibus' (5.1.39- 40) (the longest
word in Latin, and in Shakespeare). His name, pronounced 'mote' in
Elizabethan English, suggests both the erratic flight of an insect and the
elusiveness of a particle of dust. In the pageant of the Nine Worthies
(5.2), he plays the infant Hercules. He is the vehicle for a number of the
obscure topical jokes that make Love's Labour's Lost the most cryptic of
Shakespeare's plays. He is believed to have been in tended as a parody of
the peppery Elizabethan pamphleteer and satirist Thomas Nashe. |
A Forester |
Forester is the guide
for a royal hunt. The Forester's naive honesty : provides a foil for the
wit of the Princess of France in 4.1. |
PRINCESS |
The Princess is the
head of an embassy from France to the court of the King of Navarre, who
falls in love with her. When we first encounter the Princess, in 2.1, she
reprimands her courtier, Boyet, for his flattery in sharp but sensible
terms that immediately establish her as a straightforward woman. But,
although we do have a sense of the Princess as a real person, her chief
role in the play is as a participant in the courtly tableau of lovers that
draws the King and his gentlemen to an awareness that their narrow world
of asceticism is insufficient compared to the power of love. In 5.2, when
she learns of her father's death, the Princess prepares to leave Navarre
immediately. She responds to the King's suit by requiring him to live as a
hermit for a year to test the strength of his love. She recognizes that
the process of maturation that the gentlemen have undergone in the course
of the play is not complete—a recognition that makes her the character who
perhaps most clearly represents the play's point of view. |
ROSALINE |
Rosaline is the
beloved of Berowne and one of the ladies-in-waiting to the Princess of
France. Rosaline is largely a stock figure—a witty, charming lady who
takes part in the courtly pageant of love that is the main business of the
play. However, at times we are made to sense her humanity. For instance,
we hear a real person, a mischievous young woman, as she contemplates
tormenting the lovestruck Berowne: 'How I would make him fawn, and beg,
and seek, / And wait the season, and observe the times, / And spend his
prodigal wits in bootless rimes, / And shape his service wholly to my
hests / And make him proud to make me proud that jests! / So Pair-Taunt
like would I o'ersway his state / That he should be my fool, and I his
fate. . . .' (5.2.62-68).
Described as having a
strikingly dark complexion, and demonstrating a provoking wit, Rosaline is
presumed to have been linked, in Shakespeare's mind, to the Dark Lady of
the Sonnets, although this cannot be proved. She does seem to anticipate
later Shakespearean heroines who are plainly among his favorite
types—attractive and assertive young women such as Beatrice, Portia, and
her near Rosalind. |
MARIA |
Maria is the beloved
of Longaville and one of the ladies-in-waiting to the Princess of France.
Maria, like her lover, functions simply as a figure in the courtly pageant
of love that constitutes the play's main plot. She has no distinctive
personality traits, although she may be said to anticipate more fully
developed secondary female characters, such as Nerissa, in The Merchant of
Venice. |
KATHARINE |
Katharine (Katherine;
Catherine) is the beloved of Dumaine and a lady-in-waiting to the
Princess of France. Although primarily a stock figure in the play's
courtly tableau of lovers, she is given a flash of true human feeling. In
5.2, Rosaline teases her about a sister who was said to have died of love,
and Katharine is overtaken by her memory of the occasion. 'He made her
melancholy, sad, and heavy; / And so she died: had she been light, like
you, / Of such a merry, nimble, stirring spirit, /She might ha' been a
grandam ere she died.'(5.2.14-17). This brief remark gives us not only a
glimpse of a young woman's recollected grief, but we receive an impression
of Rosaline's character as well. It is thought that Shakespeare derived
the story of Katharine's sister's death from a current account of a
similar demise among the attendants of the historical Princess of France
of the day. Marguerite of Valois, who was in fact married to the King of
Navarre. The same tale may also have influenced the Ophelia episode in
Hamlet. |
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