Love's Labour's Lost Men and Masculinity Quotes

BEROWNE
For valor, is not Love a Hercules,
Still climbing trees in the Hesperides? (4.3.334-335)

Is this Berowne, or Armado? Noble or clown, the boys need to know that someone respectable was once in love, too.

COSTARD
A conqueror, and
afeard to speak? Run away for shame, Alisander. (5.2.646-647)

Running away for shame is what the nobles – dressed like Russians – did just a few minutes before.

ARMADO
The sweet warman is dead and rotten. Sweet
chucks, beat not the bones of the buried. When he
breathed, he was a man. (5.2.734-736)

The "war-man" part of the King and his men – the part that saw women as the enemy in Act 1 – is also on its way out.