SOURCE: "The Double Figure of Elizabeth in Love's Labor's Lost" in Essays in Literature, Vol. XIX, No. 2, Fall, 1992, pp. 173-92.

In the following essay, Hunt contends that through the character of the Princess of France, Shakespeare portrayed Renaissance England's ambivalent view of its aging Queen Elizabeth I.

The shadow of Queen Elizabeth has long haunted the woodland park setting of Love's Labor's Lost. In the words of F. P. Wilson, "much of the action [of the play] is based on entertainments which Elizabeth was offered while on progress: pageants; hunting the deer—the Queen observing the hunt from a stand specially built for her; dramatic shows sometimes performed seriously by country people and organized by the local schoolmaster, sometimes a burlesquing of rural life and character and presented to the Queen out of doors in the park adjoining her host's house or castle; a masque or disguising ending...