# Love’s Labour’s Lost — Character guide

> Key figures in Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare.

- [King of Navarre](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/love_s_labour_s_lost_se/characters/king_of_navarre.md): He opens the play as a scholar-sovereign determined to make his court 'a little Academe,' binding three lords to a strict oath of fasting, sleepless study, and no women for three years. His flaw is the very pride that dr
- [Biron](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/love_s_labour_s_lost_se/characters/biron.md): Biron is the lord who punctures the King's grand scheme from the start, pointing out that fasting, sleeplessness, and womanlessness are 'barren tasks, too hard to keep,' and he signs the oath only as a joke. His wit is h
- [Longaville](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/love_s_labour_s_lost_se/characters/longaville.md): Longaville is one of the three lords who swear to the King's three-year fast, declaring that 'the mind shall banquet, though the body pine' and that fat paunches make lean pates. He is described by Maria as a man of 'sov
- [Dumain](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/love_s_labour_s_lost_se/characters/dumain.md): Dumain enters declaring himself 'mortified,' throwing love, wealth, and pomp to the 'gross world's baser slaves' and vowing to live in philosophy. Katharine later describes him as a youth of such grace that he has 'most 
- [Princess of France](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/love_s_labour_s_lost_se/characters/princess_of_france.md): The Princess arrives at Navarre's gates on serious business concerning Aquitaine, only to find the King has sworn no woman may approach his court for three years. She refuses Boyet's flattery with the tart reminder that 
- [Rosaline](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/love_s_labour_s_lost_se/characters/rosaline.md): Rosaline is one of the three ladies attending the Princess, introduced through Biron's awestruck description of her black beauty as a 'wood divine' that turns the fashion of the day. She gives as good as she gets: when B
- [Maria](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/love_s_labour_s_lost_se/characters/maria.md): Maria moves through Navarre's forbidden court as one of the Princess's attending ladies, quick to name the men behind the King's famous vow. Asked about Longaville, she recalls him from a Normandy wedding as a man of sov
- [Katharine](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/love_s_labour_s_lost_se/characters/katharine.md): Katharine attends the Princess on the embassy to Navarre and is the first to describe Dumain, calling him a well-accomplished youth loved for virtue itself, with wit enough to make an ill shape good. Her warm report reve
- [Boyet](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/love_s_labour_s_lost_se/characters/boyet.md): Boyet serves as the Princess's chief messenger and go-between, the man she trusts to negotiate entry into Navarre's studious seclusion. He opens the play's embassy with a lavish inventory of her perfections, only to be w
- [Costard](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/love_s_labour_s_lost_se/characters/costard.md): Costard is the play's clown, a laborer whose confessed affair with the wench Jaquenetta lands him in the King's custody just as the court swears to three years of austere study. His plain speech and cheerful guilt expose
- [Don Adriano de Armado](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/love_s_labour_s_lost_se/characters/armado.md): Armado styles himself a soldier and scholar at Navarre's court, but his grandiloquent letters to the country wench Jaquenetta betray a man undone by desire he considers beneath him. He confesses to his page Moth that he 
- [Moth](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/love_s_labour_s_lost_se/characters/moth.md): Moth attends the bombastic Armado as a boy whose small stature and quick tongue make him the perfect foil to his master's swollen rhetoric. He mocks Armado's melancholy, proves him a cipher, and offers a deadpan recipe f
- [Jaquenetta](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/love_s_labour_s_lost_se/characters/jaquenetta.md): Jaquenetta moves between the court's scholarly seclusion and the working countryside, courted at once by the bombastic Spaniard Armado and the clown Costard. When a letter meant for a lady of the French court falls into 
- [Holofernes](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/love_s_labour_s_lost_se/characters/holofernes.md): Holofernes presides over the play's subplot of pedants, parsing every word of a misdelivered letter and turning a dead deer into an alliterative epitaph. He mistakes his own bombast for learning, and his vanity makes him
- [Sir Nathaniel](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/love_s_labour_s_lost_se/characters/sir_nathaniel.md): Sir Nathaniel is the parish curate and Holofernes's constant companion, forever seconding his friend's Latin and calling his verses rare. Where Holofernes thunders, Nathaniel murmurs approval, and together they embody th
- [Anthony Dull](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/love_s_labour_s_lost_se/characters/dull.md): A constable who delivers messages and appears in the pageant.
- [Hector](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/love_s_labour_s_lost_se/characters/hector.md): A character played by Armado in the pageant of the Nine Worthies.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/love_s_labour_s_lost_se/characters