After spotting her in the field outside Navarre, Longaville develops feelings for Maria without knowing her name. He asks Boyet who she is, and the two men enter a needling battle of wits. Finally, seeing Longaville’s anger, Boyet reveals her identity (“She is an heir of Falconbridge”). Longaville replies with an allusion to the Four Humors, saying:
Nay, my choler is ended. She is a most sweet lady.
Longaville replies that he is no longer angry (“my choler is ended”). “Choler” here refers to the choleric humor, one of the four bodily “humors.” The four humors were fluids in the body that Renaissance physicians believed affected a person’s temperament. This thinking originated with the ancient Greek physicians Hippocrates and Galen, and doctors in Shakespeare's era adopted and expanded the theory.
Doctors and academics believed that "choler" (or yellow bile), blood, phlegm, and black bile needed to be present in the body in a certain proportion to one another. Maintaining this proportion ensured an individual's physical health and emotional balance. Renaissance men and women often adjusted their diet to maintain this balance of humors through a complicated system of “humoral” eating.
In addition, many in this era believed that one humor “dominated” each person (i.e. one fluid was more naturally present in the body and determined each person’s personality). A person with too much blood had a “sanguine” temperament, naturally cheerful and curious. Too much phlegm made one “phlegmatic” by nature, or quiet, composed, and even apathetic. Too much bile made you “melancholic” (depressive) and too much choler made you “choleric”—that is, extroverted and angry. Longaville’s reference is certainly modern for the period and thematically appropriate in a play centered on ideas of balance and harmony as they apply to love and life.
Boyet reads Armado’s pretentious love letter out loud before the Princess and her ladies after Costard accidentally delivers it to Rosaline. The letter makes reference to the famous Nemean lion:
Thou dost thou hear the Nemean lion roar
'Gainst thee, thou lamb, that standest as his prey.
Submissive fall his princely feet before,
And he from forage will incline to play.
In this letter, meant for Jacquenetta, Armado compares himself to a lion and Jacquenetta to a lamb. He suggests that she acquiesces to his advances (“Submissive fall”). With its object within reach, his metaphorical “hunt” can then become playful rather than aggressive. The ladies make fun of Armado’s grandiose self-conception.
To make things even more ridiculous, Armado doesn’t just compare himself to any lion, but to the legendary Nemean lion. The Greco-Roman hero Hercules, as punishment for murdering his own family, was assigned Twelves Labors by a king named Eurystheus. The first great labor was to slay the Nemean lion, a monstrous, unkillable lion that stalked the village of Nemea in northeastern Greece. The lion was of supernatural origin (the offspring of Typhon and Echidna) and could not be killed with any normal weapon. After failing to kill the lion with either a club or arrows, Hercules strangled the animal to death. He is often depicted wearing its pelt.
This classical allusion, rather than making Armado look sophisticated, makes him look totally ridiculous. Once again, Shakespeare lampoons the mindless worship of book learning. Armado’s formal education is richer than his experience with women, as the dramatic comparison in his letter attests. As a result, his book learning is dangerously misapplied; his reference to myth makes him look stuffy, weird, and self-involved.
When Jacquenetta enters with her letter in Act 4, she asks Holofernes to read it to her. However, Holofernes ignores her and instead quotes an Italian poet (Baptista Spagnuli of Mantua). In reference to Spagnuli, Holofernes quotes an Italian idiom:
HOLOFERNES
[...] I may speak of
thee as the traveler doth of Venice:
Venetia, Venetia,
Chi non ti vede, non ti pretia.
This idiom translates to “Venice, Venice, / he who does not see you will not admire you.” Holofernes means to imply that those who have not read Spagnuli cannot appreciate him, a sentiment in line with his characterization as a pedant.
There is good reason to believe that this idiom was, in fact, a real Italian saying (not something made up by Shakespeare for effect). The expression actually comes from the writings of John Florio, a translator and contemporary of Shakespeare’s. In his works on Italian grammar, Florio reports the idiom in full as, “Venice, he who does not see you will not admire you, but he that sees you pays dearly for it.”
Florio translated a number of popular expressions and sayings from Italian into English. He also accomplished a landmark translation of Montaigne’s essays into English, and authored an extensive Italian-English dictionary. Shakespeare was known to have read Florio’s work closely, and many phrases attributed to Shakespeare were borrowed from Florio’s translations. In fact, the title of this play, Love’s Labor’s Lost, comes from a line in his work, Second Frutes (“It is labor lost to speak of love”).
Shakespeare's choice to incorporate this phrase into the dialogue could be seen as a veiled allusion to Florio, to whom he owes a significant creative debt. But it also lends a sense of authenticity to Holofernes's character. Holofernes’s choice to use this relatively obscure phrase, particularly in a context which does not require any reference to it at all, underscores his snobbishness and ego. Shakespeare read Florio because he had a deep interest in Italy, as his many plays set in the country attest. But Florio’s work was pretty far outside the mainstream for most readers in England at the time, and Holofernes’ insistence on quoting it reflects his obsession with signaling his level of education at all times.
