Armado and Costard in the French Academy

The Taming of the Shrew, framed as theater by its Induction, is almost certainly earlier, but the pageant in Love’s Labour’s Lost is the first Shakespearean inner play proper. Since the players’ roles call for comedians in the modern sense, their entry here marks the first confrontation in the canon between King and Clown and establishes Shakespeare’s opposition between the player and the aristocratic world of heroes from whom he begs alms. ¹ Ferdinand, King of Navarre, is the “great man” in Love’s Labour’s Lost and though he may have “sworn out house-keeping” (II.1.103), he cannot escape from his duty as host, either to the visiting princess or to the players who help him to entertain her. And when the motley players in Love’s Labour’s Lost perform their Pageant of Worthies, they gain access not only to Navarre’s academic retreat in his country house, surrounded by its “curious-knotted garden” (II.1.242), but to the entire world of manly aristocratic heroics which it represents. This is a world shaped by the ideology of honor and driven by the heroic thrust toward “fame” as a means of establishing an eternal name, and transcending all that is base and shameful in mortality. It naturally encourages the rituals and “activities that are most integral to the whole idea of aristocracy—leading troops in a patriotic war against the King’s enemies.” ² This world had been the first object of Shakespeare’s dramatic attention in the “heroical histories” of the first Henriad, which opens with the death of Henry V and the funeral proclaiming “death’s dishonorable victory” (1H6 I.1.20), and is dominated by Talbot’s effort to fight on in Henry’s name and transcend death through heroic fame. ³ Talbot’s project in Henry VI, Part One is symbolized by his devotion to the rituals of the Order of the Garter, with its implicit opposition between heroic fame and cowardly shame: “Honi soit qui mal y pense.” His failure is signaled by the rituals of the aristocratic hunt when Talbot, who was accustomed to penetrating enemy cities, at last finds himself surrounded by the French and “bounded in a pale” like “a little herd of England’s timorous deer, / Maz’d with a yelping kennel of French curs” (1H6 IV.2.45–47).