Don Adriano de Armado

Play

Love's Labour's Lost

Summary

Don Adriano de Armado is the fantastical Spaniard who haunts Navarre's court as a figure of elaborate verbal excess. His speech is a parody of Euphuistic and Petrarchan rhetoric — overblown, circumlocutory, and in love with its own ornament. He is simultaneously ridiculous and strangely touching: genuinely in love with the country wench Jaquenetta, he challenges Costard to a duel and is revealed at the play's close to be awaiting the birth of his child with her. His page Moth delights in deflating him.

Notable Quotations

"I do affect the very ground, which is base, where her shoe, which is baser, guided by her foot, which is basest, doth tread." *(1.2)*

"The sweet war-man is dead and rotten; sweet chucks, beat not the bones of the buried." *(5.2)*

Cross-references

• Love's Labour's Lost — the play
• Comedies
• character_moth_lll — his diminutive, quicksilver page
• character_holofernes — fellow figure of verbal excess
• character_costard — his rival for Jaquenetta