Note 51 — V.—EARLY DRAMATIC EFFORTS

The hero is the King of Navarre, in whose dominions the scene is laid. The two chief lords in attendance on him in the play, Biron and Longaville, bear the actual names of the two most strenuous supporters of the real King of Navarre (Biron’s later career subsequently formed the subject of two plays by Chapman, The Conspiracie of Duke Biron and The Tragedy of Biron, which were both produced in 1605). The name of the Lord Dumain in Love’s Labour’s Lost is a common anglicised version of that Duc de Maine or Mayenne whose name was so frequently mentioned in popular accounts of French affairs in connection with Navarre’s movements that Shakespeare was led to number him also among his supporters. Mothe or La Mothe, the name of the pretty, ingenious page, was that of a French ambassador who was long popular in London; and, though he left England in 1583, he lived in the memory of playgoers and playwrights long after Love’s Labour’s Lost was written. In Chapman’s An Humourous Day’s Mirth, 1599, M. Le Mot, a sprightly courtier in attendance on the King of France, is drawn from the same original, and his name, as in Shakespeare’s play, suggests much punning on the word ‘mote.’ As late as 1602 Middleton, in his Blurt, Master Constable, act ii. scene ii. line 215, wrote: