Unless you be possess'd with devilish spirits, This tongue hath parley'd unto foreign kings In this addition to the speech four passages may be noted: 1. The judge denies that he has been guilty of bribery, though not accused of it in the play, nor, historically, in the administration of justice in his court. Bacon fell from power in the spring of 1621, under charges of bribery, which he also declared to be false and of which we now know he was innocent. 2. The judge had sent a book of which he was author to the king and been "preferred" on account of it. Bacon sent a copy of his Novum Organum in 1620 to King James, who immediately created him Viscount St. Alban. 3. The judge had bestowed large gifts on persons of subordinate rank. Bacon's generosity to the same class of people was a distinguishing trait in his character. He frequently gave gratuities to messengers, who came to him with presents, of £5 10s., or (in money of the present time) £66 ($330). On one occasion the gratuity (present value) was £300, or $1,500. In three months (June 24 to Sept. 29, 1618) he disbursed in this way the sum of £302 7s., equal now to £3,600, or $18,000. This was at the rate of $72,000 per annum. 4. The judge had conversed on public affairs with foreign potentates. Bacon had been attaché of a British embassy abroad, and on intimate terms with kings and queens. The above addition to Judge Say's speech was thus made not only after 1619, at which time the reputed poet had been three years in his grave at Stratford, but even after May 3, 1621, the date of Bacon's degradation from the bench on charges of bribery. Coincidence number fourteen. XV 'Love's Labor's Lost' is one of the earliest of the Shakespeare dramas. Mr. Staunton assigns its production to a period somewhere between 1587 and 1591. The best evidence indicates that it was written in or about 1588.1 The scene is laid at the court of Navarre, a small rude kingdom situated between France and Spain among the Pyrenees Mountains. The writer of the play seems to have been strangely familiar not only with this distant and at that time little-known territory, but also with its internal politics, for he has introduced, as dramatis persona, the king himself and the leading councillors of state, mostly under their proper names. The king was at a later day the famous Henry IV. of France, but, as he was living when the play was published in 1598, Shake-speare has given him the name of Ferdinand. Of the king's councillors, we have also in the play Biron and Longaville (Longueville), both of whom were active in the cause of Henry, and Boyet (Bois), who was the king's marshal at Paris and who came to Navarre in the train of the princess. The question arises, how did the dramatist acquire this intimate knowledge of the court of Navarre in 1588, at so early a period in the career of its king? William Shakspere came to London from an illiterate town, himself wholly illiterate, in or about 1586, one year or so only before the composition of the play. On the other hand, Anthony Bacon went to the Continent in 1579, and for five years - to wit, from 1585 to 1590 — was an honored guest at Henry's court in Navarre, "on terms of close intimacy," 1 See infra, page 65. says the Dictionary of National Biography (ii. 325), “with the king's councillors," and in confidential correspondence Iwith his brother Francis in London. The author of the play had knowledge, also, of a very obscure event in the history of Navarre, which, it is safe to say, was unknown in England in the time of Shake-speare, especially to persons who had never crossed the channel. We find it in the chronicles of Enguerrand de Monstrelet, where it is thus narrated: "Charles, King of Navarre, came to Paris to wait on the King. He negotiated so successfully with the King and his Privy Council that he obtained a gift of the castle of Nemours, with some of its dependant castlewicks, which territory was made a duchy. He instantly did homage for it, and at the same time surrendered to the King the Castle of Cherbourg, the county of Evreux, and all other lordships he possessed within the kingdom of France, renouncing all claim or profit in them to the King and to his successors, on consideration that with this duchy of Nemours the King of France engaged to pay him two hundred thousand gold crowns of the coin of the King our Lord." - i. 54. This is given in the play as follows:· "Madam, your father here doth intimate The payment of a hundred thousand crowns, The Chronicles of Monstrelet were not translated into English until 1809, or more than two hundred years after the play was written. That Shake-speare, the dramatist, was perfectly competent to read Monstrelet in the original French, however, there is sufficient evidence in the play itself. He puns twice in that language; once when he uses the word capon" in the double sense of a fowl and a love-letter, and again the word "point" as the tip of a sword and a strong French negative. The play is also full of sentences in Latin, Spanish, and Italian, so much so that Professor Stapfer thinks it" over-cumbered with learning, not to say pedantic." Another commentator finds in it a "manifest ostentation of booklearning." Francis Bacon, it must be remembered, spent nearly three years in France and at other places on the continent in his youth, after a course of study at Cambridge University. Singularly enough, also, the embassy of the princess itself had an historical basis. Catherine de Medici made a journey from Paris to Navarre, "with many beautiful ladies," it is expressly stated, "in her train," in 1586, of which, it is quite safe to say, there could not have been any public account, known in England, in 1588. This took place, however, during Anthony Bacon's residence in Navarre. In All's Well that Ends Well,' we read, "I am St. Jacques' pilgrim, thither gone."-iii. 4. St. Jacques had a church dedicated to him at Orleans, to which in the time of Francis Bacon's visit to that city pilgrims were used to resort. This fact could scarcely have then been known in England, certainly not with such prominence as to suggest the statement in the text; for, as Richard Grant White says, " it has no relation whatever to the dramatic progress, the interest, or even the vraisemblance of the For Shake-speare's purpose one saint was as good as another, St. George, St. Andrew, and St. Patrick excepted." scene. Mr. George James of Birmingham, Eng., calls attention to the use of the word l'envoy in this play. The word is in the highest degree technical. Etymologically considered, it means simply what is sent, but, as defined by the dramatist himself, it is the last couplet of a song, "An epilogue or discourse, to make plain Some obscure precedence that hath tofore been sain." iii. 1. Such songs, according to a custom peculiar to France, were written in competition for prizes, and, it is needless to add, would have been unknown at that time to a foreigner who had not studied French lyric poetry on the spot. Mr. James has also been able to connect one of the principal characters of the play historically with Francis Bacon. He identifies Antonio Perez, the well-known Spanish refugee, with Don Armado. Perez visited England in 1593, and at once, joining the followers of Essex, was presented to the Bacon brothers, with whom for a time he seems to have been on terms of intimacy. The intimacy, however, was of short duration, for the Spaniard speedily developed so much affectation and bombast in the courtly circles to which he had been admitted that he soon fell into contempt. Essex left London to avoid him. In the following year Perez published a book under the assumed name of Raphael Peregrino, an undoubted allusion to which Mr. James discovers in 'Love's Labor's Lost.' Holophernes is ridiculing Don Armado, who, like Perez, is a "traveller from Spain" and noted for his bombastic style of writing, and says of him,— "He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it."- v. 1. As if to make the reference more pointed and unmistakable, Sir Nathaniel replies, "A most singular and choice epithet," and at once enters it in his note-book. Don Armado is, of course, a caricature of Perez. 'Love's Labor's Lost' was first printed in 1598, with the statement on its titlepage that it had been "newly corrected and augmented." This parody on Perez' sobriquet was evidently one of the augmentations. But it is in the motif or raison d'être of the comedy that we find the strongest proof of its Baconian authorship. 'Love's Labor's Lost' stands, indeed, as one of Bacon's earliest protests against the barren philosophy of his time. |