French words in Shakespeare?

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Bawdy song from Love's Labour's Lost

William Shakespeare never visited France. Nor did he study the French language in a formal sense. French was sometimes used at court, but speaking French was generally seen as an exotic skill, even amongst those wth a formal education.

When French is used directly in Shakespeare, it is generally for comic effect. Sometimes this is via double entendres, etc. The bawdy song in Love's Labour's Lost, for example, puns on conccolinel as a euphemism for impotency.  

In other cases, the joke is simply the very idea of those funny foreigners with their strange language. Perhaps the most famous example of this is in the English lesson scene in  Henry V: 

There are many other examples of French vocabulary across the plays and sonnets. These are  typically - but not exclusively - loanwords that have been given a new anglicized form

Use of French Words that are not Anglicized:

• foison (harvest), sans (without), carcanet  (necklace), antres (“antres vast and deserts idle” in Othello I.3), “gouts of blood” (Hamlet II.i.625) 

b) French words Anglicized:

• mal content—used for the first time in Love’s Labour’s Lost, III.i.185

New Words based on French:

omittance, abidance, deracinate, rejoindure, legitimation  prophetic, control, confin’d, mortal (as adjectives), eclipse, augur,

French words that are rarely used in English:

• Othello tells Desdemona of “antres vast, ” (vast, mysterious places). 

• “scrimeurs”—a unique Anglicization of “escrimeurs” (fencers).