's
Mirth_, 1599, M. Le Mot, a sprightly courtier in attendance on the King
of France, is drawn from the same original, and his name, as in
Shakespeare's play, suggests much punning on the word 'mote.' As late as
1602 Middleton, in his _Blurt_, _Master Constable_, act ii. scene ii.
line 215, wrote:

Ho God! Ho God! thus did I revel it
When Monsieur Motte lay here ambassador.

Armado, 'the fantastical Spaniard' who haunts Navarre's Court, and is
dubbed by another courtier 'a phantasm, a Monarcho,' is a caricature of a
half-crazed Spaniard known as 'fantastical Monarcho' who for many years
hung about Elizabeth's Court, and was under the delusion that he owned
the ships arriving in the port of London. On his death Thomas Churchyard
wrote a poem called _Fantasticall Monarcho's Epitaph_, and mention is
made of him in Reginald Scott's _Discoverie of Witchcraft_, 1584, p. 54.
The name Armado was doubtless suggested by the expedition of 1588.
Braggardino in Chapman's _Blind Beggar of Alexandria_, 1598, is drawn on
the same lines. The scene (_Love's Labour's Lost_, V. ii. 158 sqq.) in
which the princess's lovers press their suit in the disguise of Russians
follows a description of the reception by ladies of Elizabeth's Court in
1584 of Russian ambassadors who came to London to seek a wife among the
ladies of the English nobility for the Tsar (cf. Horsey's _Travels_, ed.
E. A. Bond, Hakluyt Soc.) For further indications of topics of the day
treated in the play, see A New Study of "Love's Labour's Lost,"' by the
present writer, in _Gent. Mag_, Oct. 1880; and _Transactions of the New
Shakspere Society_, pt. iii. p. 80*. The attempt to detect in the
schoolmaster Holofernes a caricature of the Italian teacher and
lexicographer, John Florio, seems unjustified (see p. 85 n).

{53} Cf. Fleay, _Life_, pp. 188 seq.

{55a} The story, which has been traced back to the Greek romance _Anthia
and Abrocomas_ by Xenophon Ephesius, a writer of the second century,
seems to have been first told in modern Europe about 1470 by Masuccio in
his _Novellino_ (No. xxxiii.: cf. Mr. Waters's translation, ii. 155-65).
It was adapted from Masuccio by Luigi da Porto in his novel, _La
Giulietta_, 1535, and by Bandello in his _Novelle_, 1554, pt. ii., No.
ix. Bandello's version became classical; it was translated in the
_Histoires Tragiques_ of Francoisde Belleforest (Paris, 1559) by Pierre
Boaistuau de Launay, an occasional collaborator with