Aquitaine is the subject of the Princess’s diplomatic embassy, and he happens to be one of the places where courtly love had its origins at the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Courtly love is a huge subject; some of its features are: the knight fell in love with a lady (somebody else’s wife, never his own). The lady was supposed to be unobtainable, but if she admired or pitied some small part of the knight’s adoration, she might give him a favor, something of hers to take on his quests and combats. Look at this:

And later:

Shakespeare has Longaville send Katharine gloves, and has Rosaline (as well as all the ladies) wearing gloves in the last scene: he wanted each lady to be able to give a glove to her knight when she sent him on his year-long quest to win her love.^[13]

Here are some other elements of the play, starting with apples: “costard” means a kind of apple; the song tells of “roasted crabs” meaning roasted crabapples; and Holofernes mentions the “pomewater” apple. Berowne has to climb up somewhere high to spy on the other lords as they recite their sonnets, so why should he not climb a tree, and an apple tree at that? In his justification of the lords’ perjury, he compares love to “a Hercules, / Still climbing trees in the Hesperides” (IV.3.315), and though Berowne has blundered again (Hercules didn’t climb the tree, he sent Atlas), the golden apples were the object of Hercules’ quest.

The play has some distinct Old Testament references.^[14] Holofernes (from the Book of Judith) is the name of a character. Holofernes acts the part of Judas Maccabeus (in the pageant of the Nine Worthies). Armado refers to Jaquenetta as “a child of our grandmother Eve.” As for the number three, which gives characters such trouble, it is the number of the Holy Trinity, which of course does not figure at all in the Old Testament.

There is something in the play that seems like a mistake by Shakespeare, and is not. The action of the play takes place in only two days. Yet, during those two days, Armado falls in love with Jaquenetta, and by the end of the play, she is two months pregnant.

There is only one place in human history where Jaquenetta’s speeded-up pregnancy is not impossible, and where all the other elements of the play, like the apples, fit in neatly — you may have guessed that it is the Garden of Eden. When Shakespeare wanted a play to have an Eden-like environment of beauty and graciousness, he set the play in France: Love’s Labor’s Lost in French Navarre, As You Like It in the Ardennes, and All’s Well That Ends Well in Roussillon. In Henry V, France is blasphemously referred to as “the world’s best garden.”