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Lang Andrew
Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown

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Try to imagine that Will was a born poet, like Burns, but with a very different genius, education, and environment. Burns could easily get at the Press, and be published: that was impossible for Shakespeare at Stratford, if he had written any lyrics. Suppose him to be a poet, an observer, a wit, a humorist. Tradition at Stratford says something about the humorist, and tradition, in similar circumstances, would have remembered no more of Burns, after the lapse of seventy years.

Imagine Will, then, to have the nature of a poet (that much I am obliged to assume), and for nine or ten years, after leaving school at thirteen, to hang about Stratford, observing nature and man, flowers and foibles, with thoughts incommunicable to Sturley and Quiney. Some sorts of park-palings, as he was married at eighteen, he could not break so lightly as Burns did, – some outlying deer he could not so readily shoot at, perhaps, but I am not surprised if he assailed other deer, and was in troubles many. Unlike Burns, he had a keen eye for the main chance. Everything was going to ruin with his father; school-mastering, if he tried it (I merely follow tradition), was not satisfactory. His opinion of dominies, if he wrote the plays, was identical with that frequently expressed, in fiction and privately, by Sir Walter Scott.

Something must be done! Perhaps the straitest Baconian will not deny that companies of players visited Stratford, or even that he may have seen and talked with them, and been attracted. He was a practical man, and he made for London, and, by tradition, we first find him heading straight for the theatre, holding horses at the door, and organising a small brigade of boys as his deputies. According to Ben Jonson he shone in conversation; he was good company, despite his rustic accent, that terrible bar! The actors find that out; he is admitted within the house as a “servitor” – a call-boy, if you like; an apprentice, if you please.

By 1592, when Greene wrote his Groatsworth, “Shakescene” thinks he can bombast out a blank verse with the best; he is an actor, he is also an author, or a furbisher of older plays, and, as a member of the company, is a rival to be dreaded by Greene’s three author friends: whoever they were, they were professional University playwrights; the critics think that Marlowe, so near his death, was one of them.

Will, supposing him to come upon the town in 1587, has now had, say, five years of such opportunities as were open to a man connected with the stage. Among these, in that age, we may, perhaps, reckon a good deal of very mixed society – writing men, bookish young blades, young blades who haunt the theatre, and sit on the stage, as was the custom of the gallants.

What follows? Chaff follows, a kind of intimacy, a supper, perhaps, after the play, if an actor seems to be good company. This is quite natural; the most modish young gallants are not so very dainty as to stand aloof from any amusing company. They found it among prize-fighters, when Byron was young, and extremely conscious of the fact that he was a lord. Moreover there were no women on the stage to distract the attention of the gallants. The players, says Asinius Lupus, in Jonson’s Poetaster, “corrupt young gentry very much, I know it.” I take the quotation from Mr. Greenwood. ⁷³ They could not corrupt the young gentry, if they were not pretty intimate with them. From Ben’s Poetaster, which bristles with envy of the players, Mr. Greenwood also quotes a railing address by a copper captain to Histrio, a poor actor, “There are some of you players honest, gentlemanlike scoundrels, and suspected to ha’ some wit, as well as your poets, both at drinking and breaking of jests; and are companions for gallants. A man may skelder ye, now and then, of half a dozen shillings or so.” ⁷⁴ We think of Nigel Olifaunt in The Fortunes of Nigel; but better gallants might choose to have some acquaintance with Shakespeare.

To suppose that young men of position would not form a playhouse acquaintanceship with an amusing and interesting actor seems to me to show misunderstanding of human nature. The players were, when unprotected by men of rank, “vagabonds.” The citizens of London, mainly Puritans, hated them mortally, but the young gallants were not Puritans. The Court patronised the actors who performed Masques in palaces and great houses. The wealth and splendid attire of the actors, their acquisition of land and of coats of arms infuriated the sweated playwrights. Envy of the actors appears in the Cambridge “Parnassus” plays of c. 1600–2. In the mouth of Will Kempe, who acted Dogberry in Shakespeare’s company, and was in favour, says Heywood, with Queen Elizabeth, the Cambridge authors put this brag: “For Londoners, who of more report than Dick Burbage and Will Kempe? He is not counted a gentleman that knows not Dick Burbage and Will Kempe.” It is not my opinion that Shakespeare was, as Ben Jonson came to be, as much “in Society” as is possible for a mere literary man. I do not, in fancy, see him wooing a Maid of Honour. He was a man’s man, a peer might be interested in him as easily as in a jockey, a fencer, a tennis-player, a musician, que sçais-je? Southampton, discovering his qualities, may have been more interested, interested in a better way.

In such circumstances which are certainly in accordance with human nature, I suppose the actor to have been noticed by the young, handsome, popular Earl of Southampton; who found him interesting, and interested himself in the poet. There followed the dedication to the Earl of Venus and Adonis; a poem likely to please any young amorist (1693).

Mr. Greenwood cries out at the audacity of a player dedicating to an Earl, without even saying that he has asked leave to dedicate. The mere fact that the dedication was accepted, and followed by that of Lucrece, proves that the Earl did not share the surprise of Mr. Greenwood. He, conceivably, will argue that the Earl knew the real concealed author, and the secret of the pseudonym. But of the hypothesis of such a choice of a pseudonym, enough has been said. Whatever happened, whatever the Earl knew, if it were discreditable to be dedicated to by an actor, Southampton was discredited; for we are to prove that all in the world of letters and theatre who have left any notice of Shakespeare identified the actor with the poet.

This appears to me to be the natural way of looking at the affair. But, says Mr. Greenwood, of this intimacy or “patronage” of Southampton “not a scrap of evidence exists.” ⁷⁵ Where would Mr. Greenwood expect to find a scrap of evidence? In literary anecdote? Of contemporary literary anecdote about Shakespeare, as about Beaumont, Dekker, Chapman, Heywood, and Fletcher, there is none, or next to none. There is the tradition that Southampton gave the poet £1000 towards a purchase to which he had a mind. (Rowe seems to have got this from Davenant, – through Betterton.) In what documents would the critic expect to find a scrap of evidence? Perhaps in Southampton’s book of his expenditure, and that does not exist. It is in the accounts of Prince Charlie that I find him, poor as he was, giving money to Jean Jacques Rousseau.

As to the chances of an actor’s knowing “smart people,” Heywood, who knew all that world, tells us ⁷⁶ that “Tarleton, in his time, was gracious with the Queen, his sovereign,” Queen Elizabeth. “Will Kempe was in the favour of his sovereign.”

They had advantages, they were not literary men, but low comedians. I am not pretending that, though his

 
   “flights upon the banks of Thames
So did take Eliza and our James,”
 

Will Shakspere “was gracious with the Queen.”

We may compare the dedication of the Folio of 1623; here two players address the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery. They have the audacity to say nothing about having asked and received permission to dedicate. They say that the Earls “have prosecuted both the plays and their authour living” (while in life) “with much favour.” They “have collected and published the works of ‘the dead’.. only to keep alive the memory of so worthy a Friend, and Fellow” (associate) “as was our Shakespeare, ‘your servant Shakespeare.’”

Nothing can possibly be more explicit, both as to the actor’s authorship of the plays, and as to the favour in which the two Earls held him. Mr. Greenwood ⁷⁷ supposes that Jonson wrote the Preface, which contains an allusion to a well-known ode of Horace, and to a phrase of Pliny. Be that as it may, the Preface signed by the two players speaks to Pembroke and Montgomery. To them it cannot lie; they know whether they patronised the actor or not; whether they believed, or not, that the plays were their “servant’s.” How is Mr. Greenwood to overcome this certain testimony of the Actors, to the identity of their late “Fellow” the player, with the author; and to the patronage which the Earls bestowed on him and his compositions? Mr. Greenwood says nothing except that we may reasonably suppose Ben to have written the dedication which the players signed. ⁷⁸

Whether or not the two Earls had a personal knowledge of Shakespeare, the dedication does not say in so many words. They had seen his plays and had “favoured” both him and them, with so much favour, had “used indulgence” to the author. That is not nearly explicit enough for the precise Baconians. But the Earls knew whether what was said were true or false. I am not sure whether the Baconians regard them as having been duped as to the authorship, or as fellow-conspirators with Ben in the great Baconian joke and mystery – that “William Shakespeare” the author is not the actor whose Stratford friend, Collyns, has his name written in legal documents as “William Shakespeare.”

Anyone, however, may prefer to believe that, while William Shakspere was acting in a company (1592–3), Bacon, or who you please, wrote Venus and Adonis, and, signing “W. Shakspeare,” dedicated it to his young friend, the Earl, promising to add “some graver labour,” a promise fulfilled in Lucrece. In 1593, Bacon was chiefly occupied, we shall see, with the affairs of a young and beautiful Earl – the Earl of Essex, not of Southampton: to Essex he did not dedicate his two poems (if Venus and Lucrece were his). He “did nothing but ruminate” (he tells the world) on Essex. How Mr. Greenwood’s Unknown was occupied in 1593–4, of course we cannot possibly be aware.

I have thus tried to show that Will Shakspere, if he had as much schooling as I suggest; and if he had four or five years of life in London, about the theatre, and, above all, had genius, might, by 1592, be the rising player-author alluded to as “Shakescene.” There remains a difficulty. By 1592 Will had not time to be guilty of thirteen plays, or even of six. But I have not credited him with the authorship, between, say, 1587 and 1593, of eleven plays, namely, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titus Andronicus, Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, King John, the three plays of Henry VI, and The Taming of the Shrew. Mr. Greenwood ⁷⁹ cites Judge Webb for the fact that between the end of 1587 and the end of 1592 “some half-dozen Shakespearean dramas had been written,” and for Dr. Furnivall’s opinion that eleven had been composed.

If I believed that half a dozen, or eleven Shakespearean plays, as we have them, had been written or composed, between 1587 and 1592, I should be obliged to say that, in my opinion, they were not composed, in these five years, by Will. Mr. Greenwood writes, “Some of the dates are disputable”; and, for himself, would omit “Titus Andronicus, the three plays of Henry VI, and possibly also The Taming of the Shrew, while the reference to Hamlet also is, as I have elsewhere shown, of very doubtful force.” ⁸⁰ This leaves us with six of Dr. Furnivall’s list of earliest plays put out of action. The miracle is decomposing, but plays numerous enough to stagger my credulity remain.

I cannot believe that the author even of the five plays before 1592–3 was the ex-butcher’s boy. Meanwhile these five plays, written by somebody before 1593, meet the reader on the threshold of Mr. Greenwood’s book ⁸¹ with Dr. Furnivall’s eleven; and they fairly frighten him, if he be a “Stratfordian.” “Will, even Will,” says the Stratfordian, “could not have composed the five, much less the eleven, much less Mr. Edwin Reed’s thirteen ‘before 1592.’” ⁸² But, at the close of his work ⁸³ Mr. Greenwood reviews and disbands that unlucky troop of thirteen Shakespearean plays “before 1592” as mustered by Mr. Reed, a Baconian of whom Mr. Collins wrote in terms worthy of feu Mr. Bludyer of The Tomahawk.

From the five plays left to Shakespeare’s account in p. 51, King John (as we know it) is now eliminated. “I find it impossible to believe that the same man was the author of the drama” (The Troublesome Reign of King John) “published in 1591, and that which, so far as we know, first saw the light in the Folio of 1623.. Hardly a single line of the original version reappears in the King John of Shakespeare.” ⁸⁴ “I think it is a mistake to endeavour to fortify the argument against him” (my Will, toi que j’aime), “by ascribing to Shakespeare such old plays as the King John of 1591 or the primitive Hamlet.” ⁸⁵

I thought so too, when I read p. 51, and saw King John apparently still “coloured on the card” among “Shakespeare’s lot.” We are now left with Love’s Labour’s Lost, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Comedy of Errors, and Romeo and Juliet, out of Dr. Furnivall’s list of plays up to 1593. The phantom force of miraculously early plays is “following darkness like a dream.” We do not know the date of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we do not know the date of Romeo and Juliet. Mr. Gollancz dates the former “about 1592,” and the latter “at 1591.” ⁸⁶ This is a mere personal speculation. Of Love’s Labour’s Lost, we only know that our version is one “corrected and augmented” by William Shakespeare in 1598. I dare say it is as early as 1591–2, in its older form. Of The Comedy of Errors, Mr. Collins wrote, “It is all but certain that it was written between 1589 and 1592, and it is quite certain that it was written before the end of 1594.” ⁸⁷

The legion of Shakespearean plays of date before 1593 has vanished. The miracle is very considerably abated. In place of introducing the airy hosts of plays before 1592, in p. 51, it would have been, perhaps, more instructive to write that, as far as we can calculate, Shakespeare’s earliest trials of his pinions as a dramatist may be placed about 1591–3. There would then have been no specious appearance of miracles to be credited by Stratfordians to Will. But even so, we have sufficient to “give us pause,” says Mr. Greenwood, with justice. It gives me “pause,” if I am to believe that, between 1587 and 1592, Will wrote Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Romeo and Juliet. There is a limit even to my gullibility, and if anyone wrote all these plays, as we now possess them, before 1593, I do not suppose that Will was the man. But the dates, in fact, are unknown: the miracle is apocryphal.

VI
THE COURTLY PLAYS: “LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST”

We now come to consider another “miracle” discovered in the plays, – a miracle if the actor be the author. The new portent is the courtliness and refinement (too often, alas! the noblest ladies make the coarsest jokes) and wit of the speeches of the noble gentlemen and ladies in the plays. To be sure the refinement in the jests is often conspicuously absent. How could the rude actor learn his quips and pretty phrases, and farfetched conceits? This question I have tried to answer already, – the whole of these fashions abound in the literature of the day.

Here let us get rid of the assumption that a poet could not make the ladies and gentlemen of his plays converse as they do converse, whether in quips and airs and graces, or in loftier style, unless he himself frequented their society. Marlowe did not frequent the best society; he was no courtier, but there is the high courtly style in the speeches of the great and noble in Edward II. Courtiers and kings never did speak in this manner, any more than they spoke in blank verse. The style is a poetical convention, while the quips and conceits, the airs and graces, ran riot through the literature of the age of Lyly and his Euphues and his comedies, the age of the Arcadia.

A cheap and probable source of Will’s courtliness is to be found in the courtly comedies of John Lyly, five of which were separately printed between 1584 and 1592. Lyly’s “real significance is that he was the first to bring together on the English stage the elements of high comedy, thereby preparing the way for Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing and As You Like It” (and Love’s Labour’s Lost, one may add). “Whoever knows his Shakespeare and his Lyly well can hardly miss the many evidences that Shakespeare had read Lyly’s plays almost as closely as Lyly had read Pliny’s Natural History… One could hardly imagine Love’s Labour’s Lost as existent in the period from 1590 to 1600, had not Lyly’s work just preceded it.” ⁸⁸

“It is to Lyly’s plays,” writes Dr. Landmann, “that Shakespeare owes so much in the liveliness of his dialogues, in smartness of expression, and especially in that predilection for witticisms, quibbles, and playing upon words which he shows in his comedies as well as in his tragedies.” There follows a dissertation on the affected styles of Guevara and Gongora, of the Pléiade in France, and generally of the artificial manner in Europe, till in England we reach Lyly, “in whose comedies,” says Dr. Furness, “I think we should look for motives which appeared later in Shakespeare.” ⁸⁹

The Baconians who think that a poet could not derive from books and court plays his knowledge of fashions far more prevalent in literature than at Court, decide that the poet of Love’s Labour’s Lost was not Will, but the courtly “concealed poet.” No doubt Baconians may argue with Mr. R. M. Theobald ⁹⁰ that “Bacon wrote Marlowe,” and, by parity of reasoning many urge, though Mr. Theobald does not, that Bacon wrote Lyly, pouring into Lyly’s comedies the grace and wit, the quips and conceits of his own courtly youth. “What for no?” The hypothesis is as good as the other hypotheses, “Bacon wrote Marlowe,” “Bacon wrote Shakespeare.”

The less impulsive Baconians and the Anti-Willians appear to ignore the well-known affected novels which were open to all the world, and are noted even in short educational histories of English literature. Shakespeare, in London, had only to look at the books on the stalls, to read or, if he had the chance, to see Lyly’s plays, and read the poems of the time. I am taking him not to be a dullard but a poet. It was not hard for him, if he were a poet of genius, not only to catch the manner of Lyly’s Court comedies, and “Marlowe’s mighty line” (Marlowe was not “brought up on the knees of Marchionesses”!), but to improve on them. People did not commonly talk in the poetical way, heaven knows; people did not write in the poetic convention. Certainly Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth talked and wrote, as a rule (we have abundance of their letters), like women of this world. There is a curious exception in Letter VIII of the Casket Letters from Mary to Bothwell. In this (we have a copy of the original French), Mary plunges into the affected and figured style already practised by Les Précieuses of her day; and expands into symbolisms in a fantastic jargon. If courtiers of both sexes conversed in the style of Euphues (which is improbable), they learned the trick of it from Euphues; not the author of Euphues from them. Lyly’s most popular prose was accessible to Shakespeare. The whole convention as to how the great should speak and bear themselves was accessible in poetry and the drama. A man of genius naturally made his ladies and courtiers more witty, more “conceited,” more eloquent, more gracious than any human beings ever were anywhere, in daily life.

It seems scarcely credible that one should be obliged to urge facts so obvious against the Baconian argument that only a Bacon, intimately familiar with the society of the great, could make the great speak as, in the plays, they do – and as in real life they probably did not!

We now look at Love’s Labour’s Lost, published in quarto, in 1598, as “corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere.” The date of composition is unknown, but the many varieties of versification, with some allusions, mark it as among the earliest of the dramas. Supposing that Shakespeare obtained his knowledge of fine manners and speech, and of the tedious quips and conceits which he satirises, from the contemporary poems, plays, and novels which abounded in them, and from précieux and précieuses who imitated them, as I suggest, even then Love’s Labour’s Lost is an extremely eccentric piece. I cannot imagine how a man who knew the foreign politics of his age as Bacon did, could have dreamed of writing anything so eccentric, that is, if it has any connection with foreign politics of the time.

The scene is the Court of Ferdinand, King of Navarre. In 1589–93, the eyes of England were fixed on the Court of her ally, Henri of Navarre, in his struggle with the League and the Guises; the War of Religion. But the poet calls the King “Ferdinand,” taking perhaps from some story this non-existent son of Charles III of Navarre (died 1425): to whom, according to Monstrelet, the Burgundian chronicler of that time, the French king owed 200,000 ducats of gold. This is a transaction of the early fifteenth century, and leads to the presence of the princess of France as an envoy at the Court of Navarre in the play; the whole thing is quite unhistorical, and has the air of being borrowed from some lost story or brief novel. Bacon’s brother, Anthony, was English minister at the Court of Navarre. What could tempt Bacon to pick out a non-historical King Ferdinand of Navarre, plant him in the distant days of Jeanne d’Arc, and make him, at that period, found an Academe for three years of austere study and absence of women? But, if Bacon did this, what could induce him to give to the non-existent Ferdinand, as companions, the Maréchal de Biron with de Longueville (both of them, in 1589–93, the chief adherents of Henri of Navarre), and add to them “Dumain,” that is, the Duc de Mayenne, one of the Guises, the deadly foes of Henri and of the Huguenots? Even in the unhistorically minded Shakespeare, the freak is of the most eccentric, – but in Bacon this friskiness is indeed strange. I cannot, like Mr. Greenwood, ⁹¹ find any “allusions to the Civil War of France.” France and Navarre, in the play, are in full peace.

The actual date of the fabulous King Ferdinand would have been about 1430. By introducing Biron, Longueville, and the Duc de Mayenne, and Bankes’s celebrated educated horse, the author shifts the date to 1591. But the Navarre of the play is a region “out of space, out of time,” a fairy world of projected Academes (like that of the four young men in de la Primaudaye’s L’Académie Française, Englished in 1586) and of peace, while the actual King of Navarre of 1591 was engaged in a struggle for life and faith; and in his ceaseless amours.

Many of Shakespeare’s anachronisms are easily intelligible. He takes a novel or story about any remote period, or he chooses, as for the Midsummer Night’s Dream, a period earlier than that of the Trojan war. He gives to the Athens contemporary with the “Late Minoan III” period (1600 B.C.?) a Duke, and his personages live like English nobles and rustics of his own day, among the fairies of English folk-lore. It is the manner of Chaucer and of the poets and painters of any age before the end of the eighteenth century. The resulting anachronisms are natural and intelligible. We do not expect war-chariots in Troilus and Cressida; it is when the author makes the bronze-clad Achæans familiar with Plato and Aristotle that we are surprised. In Love’s Labour’s Lost we do not expect the author to introduce the manners of the early fifteenth century, the date of the affair of the 200,000 ducats. Let the play reflect the men and manners of 1589–93, – but why place Mayenne, a fanatical Catholic foe of Navarre, among the courtiers of the Huguenot King of Navarre?

As for de Mayenne (under the English spelling of the day Dumain) appearing as a courtier of his hated adversary Henri, Bacon, of all men, could not have made that absurd error. It was Shakespeare who took but an absent-minded interest in foreign politics. If Bacon is building his play on an affair, the ducats, of 1425–35 (roughly speaking), he should not bring in a performing horse, trained by Bankes, a Staffordshire man, which was performing its tricks at Shrewsbury – in 1591. ⁹² Thus early we find that great scholar mixing up chronology in a way which, in Shakespeare even, surprises; but, in Bacon, seems quite out of keeping.

Shakespeare, as Sir Sidney Lee says, gives Mayenne as “Dumain,” – Mayenne, “whose name was so frequently mentioned in popular accounts of French affairs in connection with Navarre’s movements that Shakespeare was led to number him also among his supporters.” Bacon would not have been so led! As Mayenne and Henri fought against each other at Ivry, in 1590, this was carrying nonsense far, even for Will, but for the earnestly instructive Bacon!

“The habits of the author could not have been more scholastic,” so Judge Webb is quoted, “if he had, like Bacon, spent three years in the University of Cambridge.. ” Bacon, or whoever corrected the play in 1598, might have corrected “primater” into “pia mater,” unless Bacon intended the blunder for a malapropism of “Nathaniel, a Curate.” Either Will or Bacon, either in fun or ignorance, makes Nathaniel turn a common Italian proverb on Venice into gibberish. It was familiar in Florio’s Second Frutes (1591), and First Frutes (1578), with the English translation. The books were as accessible to Shakspere as to Bacon. Either author might also draw from James Sandford’s Garden of Pleasure, done out of the Italian in 1573–6.

Where the scholastic habits of Bacon at Cambridge are to be discovered in this play, I know not, unless it be in Biron’s witty speech against study. If the wit implies in the author a Cambridge education, Costard and Dull and Holofernes imply familiarity with rustics and country schoolmasters. Where the author proves that he “could not have been more familiar with French politics if, like Bacon, he had spent three years in the train of an Ambassador to France,” I cannot conjecture. There are no French politics in the piece, any more than there are “mysteries of fashionable life,” such as Bacon might have heard of from Essex and Southampton. There is no “familiarity with all the gossip of the Court”; there is no greater knowledge of foreign proverbs than could be got from common English books. There is abundance, indeed overabundance of ridicule of affected styles, and quips, with which the literature of the day was crammed: call it Gongorism, Euphuism, or what you please. One does not understand how or where Judge Webb (in extreme old age) made all these discoveries, sympathetically quoted by Mr. Greenwood. ⁹³ “Like Bacon, the author of the play must have had a large command of books; he must have had his “Horace,” his “Ovidius Naso,” and his “good old ‘Mantuan.’” What a prodigious “command of books”! Country schoolmasters confessedly had these books on the school desks. It was not even necessary for the author to “have access to the Chronicles of Monstrelet.” It is not known, we have said, whether or not such plot as the play possesses, with King Ferdinand and the 100,000 ducats, or 200,000 ducats (needed to bring the Princess and the mythical King Ferdinand of Navarre together), were not adapted by the poet from an undiscovered conte, partly based on a passage in Monstrelet.

Perhaps it will be conceded that Love’s Labour’s Lost is not a play which can easily be attributed to Bacon. We do not know how much of the play existed before Shakespeare “augmented” it in 1598. We do not know whether what he then corrected and augmented was an early work of his own or from another hand, though probably it was his own. Molière certainly corrected and augmented and transfigured, in his illustrious career in Paris, several of the brief early sketches which he had written when he was the chief of a strolling troupe in Southern France.

Mr. Greenwood does not attribute the wit (such as it is), the quips, the conceits, the affectations satirised in Love’s Labour’s Lost, to Will’s knowledge of the artificial style then prevalent in all the literatures of Western Europe, and in England most pleasingly used in Lyly’s comedies. No, “the author must have been not only a man of high intellectual culture, but one who was intimately acquainted with the ways of the Court, and the fashionable society of his time, as also with contemporary foreign politics.” ⁹⁴

I search the play once more for the faintest hint of knowledge of foreign politics. The embassy of the daughter of the King of France (who, by the date of the affair of the ducats, should be Charles VII) has been compared to a diplomatic sally of the mother of the childless actual King of France (Henri III), in 1586, when Catherine de Medici was no chicken. I do not see in the embassy of the Princess of the story any “intimate acquaintance with contemporary foreign politics” about 1591–3. The introduction of Mayenne as an adherent of the King of Navarre, shows either a most confused ignorance of foreign politics on the part of the author, or a freakish contempt for his public. I am not aware that the author shows any “intimate acquaintance with the ways” of Elizabeth’s Court, or of any other fashionable society, except the Courts which Fancy held in plays.

Mr. Greenwood ⁹⁵ appears to be repeating “the case as to this very remarkable play” as “well summed up by the late Judge Webb in his Mystery of William Shakespeare” (p. 44). In that paralysing judicial summary, as we have seen, “the author could not have been more familiar with French politics if, like Bacon, he had spent three years in the train of an Ambassador to France.” The French politics, in the play, are to send the daughter of a King of France (the contemporary King Henri III was childless) to conduct a negotiation about 200,000 ducats, at the Court, steeped in peace, of a King of Navarre, a scholar who would fain be a recluse from women, in an Academe of his own device. Such was not the Navarre of Henri in his war with the Guises, and Henri did not shun the sex!