The pedant Holofernes in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost at UCB 1977.

Rabelais describes how Gargantua was taught by a theologian, Tubal Holofernes, who makes the child recite by rote, according to medieval methods. Shakespeare's pedant is not so archaic and it is frequently suggested that his detailed personality was based on the mannerisms of Shakespeare's friend, John Florio, translator of Montaigne, from whom Shakespeare might have acquired his knowledge of Montaigne's essays. Image: UCB Shakespeare Program Collection, photographer Velma Bourgeois Richmond.