Costard is the play’s truest embodiment of honesty. Where the courtiers at Navarre wrap their desires in sonnets and oaths, Costard admits plainly what he wants: “Such is the simplicity of man to hearken after the flesh.” He speaks without affectation because he lacks the education to affect anything. He is caught breaking the King’s edict by spending time with Jaquenetta, and when brought before Ferdinand, he offers no elaborate excuse. “Sir, I confess the wench,” he says simply, accepting his punishment without self-deception. This directness becomes his moral superiority over every educated person in the play.
Costard’s function is to expose the gap between the grand words of the learned and the simple truth of the body. When Armado sends him as a messenger with elaborate letters full of classical allusion and ornate language, Costard carries these messages faithfully but without understanding them—and this very ignorance protects him from the pretense they contain. He serves as a foil to Holofernes and Nathaniel, whose pedantic Latin and Greek obscure rather than clarify meaning. When Costard delivers Armado’s letter to Jaquenetta by mistake, or when he carries Biron’s sonnet, the letters’ fates in his hands suggest that all this elaborate language is fragile and prone to misdirection. What matters is not the perfection of the form but the honesty of the feeling.
By the play’s end, Costard performs as Pompey the Great in the pageant of the Nine Worthies, and he is the only performer who speaks with genuine warmth and directness. “I Pompey am,” he announces, and then explains his purpose without flourish or false dignity. The courtiers mock him, but his performance—crude and unadorned as it is—carries more human truth than all of Holofernes’ elaborate classical allusions. Costard never learns to lie, never acquires shame about his desires, and never mistakes words for truth. In a play about the folly of sworn oaths and written language, Costard’s plain speech and honest appetite represent the only reliable ground.
