fight a lion in the cage and called himself, in consequence, "Knight of the Lions.")
There is something rather pleasant in the thought that Shakespeare might be borrowing from Miguel de Cervantes, the Spanish author of the Don Quixote saga, since Cervantes was almost an exact contemporary of Shakespeare's (the former was three years younger and both died in the same year) and by all odds one of the few writers, on the basis of Don Quixote alone, worthy of being mentioned in the same breath with Shakespeare.
There is only one catch, but that is a fatal one. The first part of Don Quixote was published in 1605, a dozen years at least after Love's Labor's Lost was written.
When the Princess wonders about the identity of the man who wrote the unintentionally amusing letter, Boyet tells her he is:
A phantasime, a Monarcho, and one that makes sport
To the prince and his book-mates.
- Act IV, scene i, lines 101-2
A "phantasime" is a man with a wild imagination (fantasy), and Monarcho was a harmless Italian madman who was tolerated at Elizabeth's court because he was found to be amusing, and who had died perhaps ten years before the play was written.
One can't help remembering that in the second part of Don Quixote, published in 1615, there is a long section in which the mad knight is humored by a kindly Duke and Duchess who keep him at their estate for the fun he affords them.
Could it be in reverse? Could Cervantes have come across Love's Labor's Lost and turned a small suggestion into a towering work of genius? I have never seen this stated even as a conjecture but I can't help wondering.
... King Pepin of France ...
Boyet playfully rallies Rosaline on the letter Berowne has sent her, a letter she hasn't seen yet because of Costard's mix-up. She counters with:
Shall I come upon thee
with an old saying that was a man when
King Pepin of France was a little boy...
- Act IV, scene i, lines 121-23
King Pepin (see page I-455) reigned in France in the eighth century, over eight hundred years before Shakespeare's time, and he was apparently considered the epitome of the dead-and-gone in French idiom.
Dictynna ...
The next scene introduces Holofernes, a most unbearable pedant, whose speech consists half of Latin and who spends all his time nit-picking the English language. He is a satire on what learning can come to if it is carried to extremes without even a modicum of good sense to go along with all the education.
Those who look for personal satire in Love's Labor's Lost suspect Holofernes to represent a gibe against John Florio, the London-born son of a Protestant refugee from Italy. Florio was a linguist who spent his life translating foreign works into English, notably Montaigne's Essays, and who compiled Italian-English dictionaries, collections of proverbs, grammars, etc. He was intensely learned and was probably pedantic enough to make it seem that Holofernes was a satiric reference to him.
Another possibility is Thomas Harriot, an English mathematician who was Raleigh's scientific adviser on an expedition to the New World (a position which would be alone sufficient to make him instant anathema to the Essex coterie, including Shakespeare). Harriot wrote a book on the voyage which was published in 1588 and which was pedantic enough, perhaps, to inspire the satire.
Holofernes is a pedant from his very name onward, for the name, though biblical, is not one that many would think of using. It occurs only in the apocryphal (but very popular) Book of Judith, accepted as canonical by the Catholics but by neither Jews nor Protestants. It deals with an invasion of Judea by an army of Assyrians under a general named Holofernes. The general was hoodwinked and assassinated by the Jewish heroine Judith, and as a villainous name it would scarcely be used except to signify someone who would find pleasure in obscure and unusual allusions.
Thus, Constable Dull tries to trap Holofernes with a riddle which he thinks is impossible to puzzle out-to wit, what was a month old when Cain was born, is still alive, but is not yet five weeks old. The answer is, of course, "the moon," since when it is four weeks old it starts all over again with another "new moon."
Holofernes knows the answer and gives it at once, but naturally would not dream of saying "the moon" or even using the more common classical terms such as "Diana," "Selene," "Artemis," or "Cynthia." Instead, he picks the most obscure allusion possible and