SOURCE: “The Witty Idealization of the French Court in Love's Labor's Lost,” in Shakespeare Studies, Vol. 12, 1979, pp. 25-33.

In the essay that follows, Tricomi dismisses efforts to correlate figures in the subplot of Love's Labour's Lost to historical personages, but admits some correspondences can be made between characters in the main plot to the names of historical individuals involved in the French Civil War. Since these characters are depicted in broad and general terms, Tricomi surmises that Shakespeare perhaps idealized these individuals—familiar to most Elizabethans—for the purposes of entertainment through escapist fantasy.

No other play in the Shakespeare canon has invited as much topical interpretation as Love's Labor's Lost. The speculative enterprise of trying to draw connections between illustrious persons in Elizabethan England and such characters as Armado, Moth, Sir Nathaniel, and Holofernes still goes on but without having produced lasting or even widely accepted results...