There has been a tendency for some people to find satirical representations in all the characters of this play. If it were written for a small "in group" rather than for the general public, it might well contain "in jokes" against the personal enemies of the group in the audience.

Thus, the Earl of Essex had become Queen Elizabeth's favorite in the very years of the Armada (and this play) after her previous favorite, the Earl of Leicester, died. Essex's great rival was Sir Walter Raleigh, who had been Leicester's protege and whose nose had been put out of joint by the handsome Essex's greater success with the Queen. Some people therefore think that Armado was intended as a satire on Raleigh for the amusement of the Essex coterie. However, there seems little one can point to in what Armado says or does that has "Raleigh" written on it. (There are other candidates for the role of real-life Armado too, but none are really convincing.)

Armado at once enters the plot, indirectly, to lend humor to it. He has spied a country bumpkin, Costard, making love to a young country girl, Jaquenetta, in defiance of the published edict against association with womankind, and has reported the matter to the authorities. Costard is arrested by Constable Dull and is turned over to the custody of Armado.

It turns out, of course, that Armado is himself in love with Jaquenetta, and he displays this in the approved manner of the puling stage lover. He uses his page as a sounding board for his melancholy and says:

—Act I, scene ii, lines 1-2

The page is of the smallest possible size and is named Moth (pronounced "mote" in Shakespeare's day with the obvious pun). It is his function to be witty in Shakespearean fashion, so he answers:

—Act I, scene ii, line 3

Some people have attempted to equate Moth with Thomas Nashe, a pamphleteer who was contemporary with Shakespeare and who engaged in battles of wits in polemical style with other controversialists. He was coarse, pretentious, and arrogant.

By those who think this, Armado is equated with Gabriel Harvey, another controversialist of the time who was an opponent of Nashe's. The Armado-Moth quibbling might therefore be taken to represent, with satiric inadequacy, the Homeric polemics of Harvey and Nashe.

Armado pictures himself as a warlike hero unmanned for love and demands of Moth that he give him examples of great men in love:

—Act I, scene ii, lines 68-69

Moth had already named Hercules as an example, and rightly, for he was described in the numerous myths that clustered about his name to have lain with innumerable women. Once, according to legend, he lay with fifty women in one night, impregnated them all, and ended by having fifty sons-a feat far greater, really, than all his twelve usual labors put together.

At the mention of "good repute and carriage," Moth adds, however:

—Act I, scene ii, lines 70-72

The twist on the word "carriage," from carrying oneself to carrying external objects, refers to a time when Samson was visiting a harlot in Gaza. The Philistines, knowing the town gates were locked, waited for morning to deal with him, but Samson rose at midnight "and took the doors of the gate of the city, and the two posts, and went away with them, bar and all, and put them upon his shoulders, and carried them up to the top of an hill" (Judges 16:3) so that he got away when his enemies confidently thought he was trapped. At the time of this feat he was in love (if you can dignify the relation between himself and the woman by that word).

Later on, Armado meets Jaquenetta, confesses his love to the unimpressed girl, and soliloquizes afterward on the great men of the past who had been in love. To Hercules and Samson, he adds one more, saying:

—Act I, scene ii, lines 172-73

The biblical writers felt that Solomon's numerous wives seduced him away from perfect love of God. "And he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred concubines: and his wives turned away his heart. For it came to pass, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned away his heart after other gods" (1 Kings 11:3-4).

The Princess arrives and she has with her, symmetrically enough, three ladies: Maria, Catherine, and Rosaline.

The symmetry proves even neater when each of the ladies evinces an interest in one of the King's followers, each different lady with a different man. What's more, each has met her man before. With Maria it's Longaville, with Katherine it's Dumaine, and with Rosaline it's Berowne. Thus, Katherine says of Dumaine:

—Act II, scene i, lines 61-62

If we stick to the time of Henry of Navarre, there was a Duc d'Alencon who was well known to the English of the time. He was the fourth and youngest of the four sons of Henry II, and he had watched his three older brothers become kings of France, one after the other: Francis II, Charles IX, and Henry III. He died in 1584, while his brother Henry was reigning.

Alencon was known to the English as a persistent wooer of Queen Elizabeth I, which was rather pathetic, for Alencon was quite worthless and Elizabeth (one of the most remarkable women in history) could not have endured him an hour. However, Elizabeth was incapable of a clear no at any tune, but had a genius for temporization, so that the poor simpleton pursued the golden prize uselessly from 1579 to 1582.

When the King and his followers arrive to receive the ladies, the men are as intrigued by the women as vice versa, and, as luck would have it, each man is interested in the particular woman who is interested in him.

It works out beautifully, for Berowne (the wittiest of the men) is at once involved with Rosaline (the wittiest of the women), and, eager to break the ice, he uses a device not unknown today, when he says to her: