Here is the only encounter Shakespeare shows us between Armado and Jaquenetta:

Jaquenetta starts out as smart-alecky as Rosaline, but softens immediately when Armado says “I love you.” (Berowne never says “I love you” to Rosaline. He mentions love in his sonnet to her but of course that sonnet is never delivered. He tears it up at IV.3.197.)

I assume that Jaquenetta has just picked an apple from the tree, which I imagine is onstage, and at the end of their scene, I assume she hands it to Armado as a love-gift.^[15] Shakespeare intended us to see this as a re-enactment of what happened between Adam (whose name is mixed up in Armado’s) and Eve (Jaquenetta’s grandmother, according to Armado).

The play is a compendium of human errors and failings, founded on the first and greatest error humans ever made, when our great-grandmother Eve offered to share that apple with Adam. But Shakespeare has made that sin a virtue. Jaquenetta gives the apple to Armado, as the token of their love. Their embracing of love (and each other, to be sure) saves them. At the end of the play, the four other couples, who have not pursued love, unsuccessful and unhappy, are turned out of the garden by Armado. He brandishes the sword he wore as Hector, which stands for the flaming sword that has barred us from the Garden ever since, as he points the royals and their courts towards the gate, “You that way; we this way.” And by “we,” he means himself and Jaquenetta, the only couple who get to stay inside.^[16]

Allow me to give the final word to Shakespeare, via Costard. In delivering his letter to Jaquenetta, Armado gives Costard three farthings (i.e. a penny and a half), and Berowne, when delivering his letter to Rosaline, gives Costard a shilling (i.e. twelve pence), telling him, “There’s thy guerdon; go.”^[17]

Indeed, it was much sweeter for us when we were in the Garden than when we received remuneration for our sins.