Love’s Labour’s Lost: Navarre, Holofernes and the French Wars
A royal academy, three French noblemen, an ambassador’s quarrel, a pedantic schoolmaster and a biblical general whose story Sir Lewes Lewkenor had already told. Shakespeare’s brilliant comedy opens onto the diplomatic and literary world of Elizabeth’s court.
The King of Navarre and his academy
Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost begins with an extraordinary proposition. Ferdinand, King of Navarre, persuades three noble companions to abandon worldly pleasures and devote themselves to study.
For three years they are to live as scholars, denying themselves the company of women and submitting to a strict intellectual discipline.
Almost immediately their plans are disrupted by the arrival of the Princess of France and her attendants.
The setting is not an imaginary kingdom chosen merely for its exotic associations. Navarre was one of the most important political centres in the religious conflicts of late-sixteenth-century Europe.
Henry of Navarre, the future Henry IV of France, had spent much of his life struggling against the Catholic League and the forces that opposed his claim to the French throne.
Elizabeth I supported him with money, soldiers and diplomatic assistance. His eventual conversion to Catholicism provoked a furious response from the English Queen, who regarded his decision as a betrayal of the Protestant cause.
The historical Navarre was therefore a place of political intrigue, religious conflict, military ambition and complicated relationships between England and France.
Sir Lewes Lewkenor’s family was directly involved in that world.
John Lewkenor and Sir Henry Unton’s embassy
In 1591 Elizabeth dispatched Sir Henry Unton on a diplomatic mission to Henry IV of France.
Unton’s embassy followed the Earl of Essex’s involvement in the French campaigns and the increasingly delicate relationship between the English government and the King of Navarre.
Among the members of Unton’s entourage was John Lewkenor, a cousin of Sir Lewes.
The embassy brought him into direct contact with the French royal and military establishment.
John Lewkenor subsequently returned to England carrying letters from Unton and the French King.
The surviving account places his departure:
being in ye camp before ye city of Roan in Normandy
The phrase identifies the military setting of the embassy. This was not diplomacy conducted at a peaceful court. The French King was fighting to secure his throne, and the English ambassador was negotiating amid the movements of armies.
The connection is significant because the principal characters of Love’s Labour’s Lost bear the names of men prominent in precisely this political and military environment.
Biron, Longaville and Dumaine
The King of Navarre’s three companions in Shakespeare’s comedy are Biron, Longaville and Dumaine.
These names correspond to prominent French noblemen and military commanders of the period.
Charles de Gontaut, Duke of Biron, served as one of Henry IV’s most important commanders.
Longueville belonged to the aristocratic world of the French wars, while the Duke of Mayenne—often rendered Dumaine in English accounts—was a leading figure in the Catholic League.
Their names would have been familiar to English readers of military news and political pamphlets.
Lewkenor’s Estate of English Fugitives contains a striking reference to Biron.
Describing the defeat of English troops, Lewkenor writes:
at Rosendale, where sundry English regiments, being by the marshal Biron abandoned and betrayed, were by them defeated and overthrown
He continues with an account of the brutality inflicted upon men who had surrendered and begged for mercy.
The passage places Biron within the dangerous and morally ambiguous world of foreign military service familiar to Lewkenor.
In Shakespeare’s comedy, Biron is the most sceptical and intellectually independent member of Navarre’s academy.
He questions the King’s plan, mocks the artificial discipline of the scholars and becomes one of the play’s most accomplished speakers.
Shakespeare’s use of the names of contemporary French nobles transforms the comedy into something more immediate than a timeless story of young men falling in love.
The quarrel in Dumaine’s lodging
One of the most remarkable episodes associated with Unton’s embassy occurred in the lodging of the Duke of Mayenne.
Sir Henry Unton took offence at remarks made about Elizabeth I by the Duke of Guise.
Believing that the Queen’s honour had been insulted, Unton issued an extraordinary challenge.
His declaration began:
Forasmuch as in the lodging of Lord Dumaine, and in public elsewhere, impudently and indiscreetly and overboldly, you spoke badly of that Sovereign whose sacred person I in this country represent…
Unton continued by declaring himself ready to defend Elizabeth’s honour with both words and weapons.
The episode possesses all the ingredients of an Elizabethan comedy: aristocratic pride, diplomatic rivalry, extravagant language and a quarrel over the reputation of a woman who is not herself present.
John Lewkenor belonged to the embassy in which this confrontation occurred.
The names and personalities of the French political world were therefore not remote abstractions to the Lewkenor family.
They belonged to a recognisable network of personal relationships, letters, military encounters and diplomatic scandals.
In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Shakespeare repeatedly turns elaborate declarations of honour and devotion into opportunities for comedy.
The historical quarrel at Dumaine’s lodging offers a particularly vivid example of the culture in which such scenes could be understood.
The Princess of France and the disputed payment
The arrival of the Princess of France supplies the central interruption to Navarre’s scholarly ambitions.
She comes to negotiate a financial dispute involving Aquitaine and a substantial sum of money.
In the second act she explains:
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.
The historical court of Navarre had experienced similar disputes over money, territory and the financial obligations of the French monarchy.
In 1578 Catherine de Medici and her daughter Marguerite de Valois visited the court at Nérac amid negotiations concerning Aquitaine and outstanding payments.
The visit also brought a spectacular display of courtly entertainment and aristocratic magnificence.
Marguerite’s memoirs describe the brilliance of the court and the complications that delayed the negotiations.
Shakespeare transforms this world of royal debts and political bargaining into a comedy in which diplomacy is repeatedly frustrated by desire.
The Princess arrives to settle a financial matter, but her presence destroys the very scholarly isolation upon which Navarre and his companions have sworn.
The court becomes a theatre of broken vows, elaborate compliments and increasingly desperate attempts to conceal romantic attachment.
Holofernes in The Resolved Gentleman
The most substantial textual connection with Lewkenor’s own writings concerns Holofernes.
In Shakespeare’s comedy, Holofernes is a pedantic schoolmaster whose delight in elaborate language makes him an irresistible object of ridicule.
But Holofernes was originally the biblical general whose defeat by Judith became one of the most celebrated stories of the Apocrypha.
In The Resolved Gentleman (1594), Lewkenor recounts that episode in considerable detail.
He begins:
Holofernes, being entered into Israel with a mighty puissance, and encamped before Bethulia, had brought the same to such famine and extremity, that the Israelites, despairing of all hope, determined to yield the town unto them.
Judith, the widow of Manasses, dresses herself magnificently and enters the enemy camp.
Holofernes is captivated by her beauty and gives himself over to drinking and celebration.
Lewkenor describes the fatal consequence:
through drunkenness falling into a deadly sleep, Judith being left with him in the tent alone, strengthened therein by the hand of God, cut off his head with his own falchion
The story is presented as an example of the sudden destruction of worldly power.
The great commander, surrounded by soldiers and apparently secure in his military strength, is defeated through his own appetites.
Shakespeare’s Holofernes is a very different figure, but the name carries an unmistakable association with learning, biblical history and the vulnerability of excessive pride.
The comedy’s schoolmaster is likewise undone by his vanity.
Holofernes and the Nine Worthies
In the final act of Love’s Labour’s Lost, Holofernes participates in the entertainment of the Nine Worthies.
He undertakes the role of Judas Maccabaeus, the Jewish military hero.
The performance becomes an occasion for relentless mockery.
HOLOFERNES: Judas I am,—
DUMAIN: A Judas!
HOLOFERNES: Not Iscariot, Sir.
Judas I am, ycliped Maccabaeus.
DUMAIN: Judas Maccabaeus clipt is plain Judas.
The courtiers deliberately confuse Judas Maccabaeus with Judas Iscariot, transforming the heroic name into an accusation of treachery.
The historical associations are rich.
Judas Maccabaeus fought against the religious oppression of Antiochus IV, while the biblical Holofernes had attempted to subjugate the people of Israel.
Lewkenor’s account of Holofernes belongs to the same collection of classical and biblical examples through which early modern writers examined tyranny, religious persecution and the reversals of Fortune.
Shakespeare turns these solemn histories into comic material, placing a pedantic scholar before an audience determined to humiliate him.
The resulting scene is a brilliant demonstration of how learned references could be transformed into theatrical entertainment.
Gabriel Harvey, John Florio and the pedant
The literary satire becomes still more interesting when the schoolmaster is considered alongside the scholars and translators of Elizabethan England.
Gabriel Harvey, the Cambridge scholar and correspondent of Edmund Spenser, was notorious for his quarrels with Thomas Nashe and other writers.
His elaborate learning, linguistic pretensions and fierce literary controversies made him a natural subject for satire.
John Florio, the Italian teacher and translator, likewise belonged to a world of fashionable language, continental learning and aristocratic patronage.
Shakespeare’s Holofernes repeatedly displays his knowledge of Latin, Italian and learned terminology.
His language is crowded with unnecessary explanations and elaborate distinctions.
At one point he declares:
This is a gift that I have, simple, simple; a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions.
The speech satirises the scholar who values the display of learning above the clear communication of meaning.
Such characters were familiar in the literary controversies of the 1590s.
Lewkenor’s own circle included Spenser and other writers whose works intersected with the disputes involving Harvey, Nashe and Florio.
The comedy’s schoolmaster therefore belongs to a recognisable intellectual environment rather than an entirely imaginary world of pedantry.
The Venetian proverb
One of Holofernes’s most revealing displays of foreign learning concerns Venice.
He announces:
I may speak of thee as the traveller doth of Venice;
Venetia, Venetia, chi non ti vede, non ti pretia.
The proverb celebrates the beauty of Venice and the inability of those who have never seen it to appreciate its splendour.
It appears in John Florio’s Second Fruits (1591), although an earlier form had appeared in James Sandford’s Garden of Pleasure.
Lewkenor would subsequently devote an entire volume to the government and institutions of the Venetian republic.
His Commonwealth and Government of Venice was published in 1599, but the manuscript had been in preparation earlier.
The Venetian proverb therefore belongs to the same literary and linguistic culture in which Lewkenor’s translation developed.
It is particularly amusing that Shakespeare places the celebrated Italian saying in the mouth of a schoolmaster whose knowledge is continually exposed to ridicule.
The comedy plays with the difference between genuine experience of foreign countries and the fashionable repetition of phrases learned from books.
Don Armado and the Spanish traveller
The fantastical Spaniard Don Adriano de Armado supplies another portrait of extravagant language.
Ferdinand describes him as:
A man in all the world’s new fashion planted,
That hath a mint of phrases in his brain.
Armado’s elaborate style turns ordinary events into grand declarations of honour and romance.
His speech is a performance of continental sophistication.
The character belongs to the same fashionable culture of foreign travel, language instruction and aristocratic imitation that Shakespeare satirises through Holofernes.
The master manuscript examines possible connections with Antonio Pérez, the Spanish political exile who arrived in England in 1593 and became associated with the Earl of Essex and Anthony Bacon.
Pérez was celebrated for his wit, diplomatic experience and elaborate literary manner.
His presence in England brought Spanish court politics into the same aristocratic circles that patronised writers and theatrical entertainments.
The character of Armado can therefore be read against a recognisable contemporary fashion for the extravagant Spanish traveller.
The literary world of Southampton
The Earl of Southampton was one of the most important patrons in Shakespeare’s early literary career.
Shakespeare dedicated Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece to him, while Southampton’s connections with the Earl of Essex brought him into a circle of aristocrats, diplomats and writers deeply involved in the French wars.
Anthony Bacon, Antonio Pérez and other members of that circle had direct experience of Henry of Navarre’s court.
The French setting of Love’s Labour’s Lost would therefore have possessed particular interest for audiences familiar with Southampton and Essex.
Lewkenor’s connections with the same aristocratic and literary environment make the comedy an important part of the cumulative Shakespeare investigation.
The play combines French political names, diplomatic disputes, fashionable foreign travellers and learned literary satire in a manner that repeatedly intersects with the world Lewkenor inhabited.
The court performance of 1597
Love’s Labour’s Lost was performed before Elizabeth I during the Christmas season of 1597.
The first quarto, published in 1598, announced that the play had been:
Newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere.
The wording suggests that Shakespeare had revised the comedy before its performance before Elizabeth I during the Christmas festivities of 1597.
The occasion is significant. Shakespeare’s comedy, filled with French noblemen, diplomatic negotiations, elaborate courtship and satire of fashionable learning, was presented before a Queen whose government had been deeply involved in the military and political affairs of France.
Henry IV of France, the historical King of Navarre, had been one of Elizabeth’s most important continental allies. His conversion to Catholicism in 1593 had complicated that alliance, while the financial and military obligations arising from English intervention remained subjects of diplomatic dispute.
Members of Elizabeth’s court would have recognised the names of Biron, Longueville and Dumaine. They would also have been familiar with the extravagant manners of foreign ambassadors, the pretensions of fashionable travellers and the intellectual rivalries of the Inns of Court.
Shakespeare’s comedy drew its humour from precisely this world.
The ending: death interrupts the comedy
One of the most unusual features of Love’s Labour’s Lost is its refusal to conclude with the marriages expected of romantic comedy.
Just as the young noblemen appear to have secured the affections of their chosen ladies, Marcade arrives with news of the death of the Princess’s father.
The Princess must return to France, and the promised marriages are postponed.
The announcement transforms the atmosphere of the play.
The elaborate courtship games, disguises and verbal competitions suddenly give way to the reality of mortality and political responsibility.
Biron acknowledges the abrupt change:
Our wooing doth not end like an old play;
Jack hath not Jill: these ladies’ courtesy
Might well have made our sport a comedy.
The Princess responds:
I understand you not: my griefs are double.
Instead of marriage, the women impose a year of probation upon their suitors.
Biron must visit the sick and dying, using his wit to bring comfort rather than merely to display his cleverness.
Rosaline instructs him:
To enforce the pained impotent to smile.
The ending makes a serious distinction between fashionable wit and moral accomplishment.
Language that has been used throughout the comedy for vanity, seduction and intellectual display must now prove its worth through service to others.
The transformation belongs to the moral world explored in Lewkenor’s Resolved Gentleman, where learning, worldly ambition and the pursuit of honour are repeatedly tested against the realities of Fortune, suffering and death.
From the French wars to Shakespeare’s stage
The historical connections assembled in this investigation are unusually varied.
Lewkenor’s cousin John accompanied Sir Henry Unton’s embassy to Henry IV of France, bringing the family into direct contact with the military and diplomatic world of Navarre.
The names Biron, Longueville and Dumaine belonged to contemporary French political history, while the financial dispute between Navarre and the Princess of France reflects the language of actual royal negotiations.
Lewkenor’s Estate of English Fugitives describes the conduct of Marshal Biron and the dangerous military world of the French wars.
His Resolved Gentleman recounts the biblical history of Holofernes, whose name Shakespeare gives to his pedantic schoolmaster.
The literary connections extend into the circles of Edmund Spenser, Gabriel Harvey, John Florio, Antonio Pérez and the Earl of Southampton.
Finally, the recorded performance before Elizabeth I places the comedy within the very court whose diplomatic and political interests it so frequently evokes.
The importance of these connections lies in their cumulative effect.
Shakespeare’s Navarre is not simply a fanciful country in which four young men abandon their studies for love.
It is a theatrical transformation of a recognisable European political world, populated by names, arguments, fashions and literary personalities familiar to the Elizabethan court.
Sir Lewes Lewkenor’s writings and family connections provide a particularly revealing route into that world.
Continue:
Twelfth Night — Orsino and the Royal Entertainment →
Sources and Further Reading
Sir Lewes Lewkenor, The Resolved Gentleman (1594), including the account of Holofernes and Judith.
Sir Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), including the account of Marshal Biron and the French military campaigns.
The correspondence of Sir Henry Unton, including John Lewkenor’s participation in the embassy to Henry IV and the challenge concerning the Duke of Guise.
Marguerite de Valois, Memoirs, concerning the court of Navarre and the negotiations at Nérac.
Thomas Lodge, Rosalynde (1590); John Florio, Second Fruits (1591); James Sandford, The Garden of Pleasure; the literary controversies involving Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe.
William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, first quarto (1598), including its notice of performance before Elizabeth I.
The Master of the Ceremonies, October 2026 manuscript, chapters concerning the French wars, the Unton embassy, Holofernes, the Inns of Court and Shakespeare’s literary contemporaries.