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What is the oath the King and his lords swear to?
In the play’s opening scene, the King and his lords each swear an oath committing themselves to the pursuit of scholarship. The King frames this pursuit as a project aimed at making Navarre an intellectual center: “Our court shall be a little academe, / Still and contemplative in living art” (1.1.13–14). But in order to pursue the arts of contemplation—here, namely philosophy and literature—the King requires a series of restrictions on the lives of those at court. These restrictions include eating only once per day, getting minimal sleep, and avoiding all contact with women. For such a group of energetic young men, such life-denying constraints are bound to be broken.
Why do the Princess and her ladies come to Navarre?
The Princess and her ladies come to Navarre on political business. Essentially, the King of France has dispatched his daughter to discuss a financial matter related to the control of the territory of Aquitaine. But what’s most important about the reason for the Princess’s visit is, paradoxically, that it turns out to be entirely inconsequential. Although the King and the Princess do have a frank discussion about the concrete particulars of this matter of state, the political narrative never returns. It’s therefore little more than a convenient plot device that falls to the wayside as the flirtatious battle of wits between the lords and the ladies takes center stage.
How do the lords figure out they’ve each broken their vow?
The King and each of his lords break their vow to avoid women soon after they encounter the Princess and her ladies. They all fall instantly for one of the ladies and proceed to write them poems and send them gifts. However, they each do this in secret while believing they are the only one to have “forsworn” their oath. It isn’t until act 4, scene 3, that they discover they’re all in the same boat. Essentially, each lord enters one at a time, reading the poem he wrote for his beloved. When the next lord approaches, the previous one hides and eavesdrops. This process continues until all four men are onstage, at which point the concealed lords come out of hiding one by one to accuse the others of perjury.
Why do the lords stage a pageant of the Nine Worthies?
After the lords realize they’ve all broken their vows, they make a new pact actively to woo the ladies, and they decide the best way to do this is to stage an elaborate entertainment. At the suggestion of the schoolmaster Holfernes, they agree to produce a pageant. By Shakespeare’s time, it had long been customary to stage masques and pageants featuring the so-called “Nine Worthies”—that is, nine figures from history and legend who demonstrate some type of strength or virtue. In this case, the pageant of the Nine Worthies serves as something of a boast. After all, the lords’ initial idea is to impress the ladies with an entertainment that implicitly confers on them a sense of worthiness. That said, they undermine their goals by employing a comically incompetent cast.
Why do the ladies refuse to marry the lords at the end of the play?
Although the ladies are romantically interested in the lords, at the play’s end they return to France without definitively agreeing to marry. The most obvious reason they refuse the men is that the King of France has died, and the Princess must return and submit herself to a year’s worth of mourning. However, the deeper reason the ladies refuse the lords is that they aren’t fully convinced the men are truly serious about marriage. The lords have fallen in love suspiciously fast, and their ridiculous love poems amply demonstrate that they don’t really see the ladies as they are. The women therefore ask the men to spend a year in contemplation, then come find them if they are still interested.
