According to the play, the King of Navarre and his nobles pledge themselves under oath to retire from the world for three years and give their whole attention during that time to study. They are to lay aside all the cares, obligations, and pleasures of life for this purpose. The comedy turns upon the utter futility of such a scheme. It is a travesty on the kind of learning, and particularly on the methods of acquiring learning, then in vogue. For ages men had sought knowledge by turning their backs upon nature and upon human life. All that they had wanted was Aristotle and the Fathers; all that they acquired was, in the language of Hamlet, "words, words, words." In the Advancement of Learning' Bacon attributes to this method of study what he calls the "first distemper of learning." He says: "Men have withdrawn themselves too much from the contemplation of nature and the observations of experience, and have tumbled up and down in their own reasons and conceits. "As many substances in nature which are solid do putrefy and corrupt into worms, so it is the property of good and sound knowledge to putrefy into a number of subtle, idle, unwholesome and (as I may term them) vermiculate questions, which have indeed a kind of quickness and life of spirit, but no soundness of matter or goodness of quality. This kind of degenerate learning did chiefly reign amongst the schoolmen; who had sharp and strong wits, abundance of leisure, and small variety of reading; but their wits being shut up in the cells of a few authors (chiefly Aristotle, their dictator), as their persons were shut up in the cells of monasteries and colleges; and knowing little history, either of nature or time, did, out of no great quantity of matter and infinite agitation of wit, spin out unto us those laborious webs of learning which are extant in their books. For the wit and mind of man, if it work upon matter, which is the contemplation of the creatures of God, worketh according to the stuff, and is limited thereby; but if it work upon itself, as the spider worketh his web, then it is endless, and brings forth cobwebs of learning, admirable for the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit."- Book I. Here, then, is the key to the drama of 'Love's Labor's Lost.' It was Bacon's first indictment against the Aristotelian philosophy as it had been studied by the schoolmen, and as it was still studied and taught in his own time. The lesson it teaches is this: that the closer the scholar keeps himself in touch with his fellow-men, the more successful will he be in the pursuit of truth. The rays of the sun give out no heat till they strike the earth; so those of truth cannot warm or fructify till they come into actual contact with human life. Bacon left the University of Cambridge in his sixteenth year, before the completion of his course and without a degree. He did this, as he afterwards explained to Dr. Rawley, because he was disgusted with the methods of study which prevailed there, and which, it appears, are ridiculed in 'Love's Labor's Lost.' Coincidence number fifteen. XVI One of the most amusing characters in Shake-speare is Dr. Caius in the Merry Wives of Windsor.' He is an irascible, hot-headed French physician, who is ready to draw his rapier on the slightest provocation against anybody who comes in his way, but with a special antipathy toward the honest Welsh parson, Sir Hugh Evans. Seeing in Evans a possible rival for the hand of Mistress Anne Page, he sends a challenge to him, charging the messenger who carries it,— "You jack'nape, give-a this letter to Sir Hugh; by gar, it is a challenge; I vill cut his troat in de Park; and I vill teach a scurvy jack-a-nape priest to meddle-by gar, I vill kill de jack priest." — i. 4. At the appointed time and place for the duel the parson fails to appear, whereupon the following colloquy occurs between Caius and his servant: "Caius. Vat is de clock, Jack? “Rugby. 'Tis past the hour, sir, that Sir Hugh promised to meet. "Caius. By gar, he has save his soul, dat he is no come; he has pray his Pible well, dat he is no come; by gar, Jack Rugby, he is dead already, if he be come. "Rugby. He is wise, sir; he knew your worship would kill him, if he came. "Caius. By gar, de herring is no dead so as I vill kill him. Take your rapier, Jack; I vill tell you how I vill kill him. "Rugby. Alas, sir, I cannot fence. "Caius. Villany, take your rapier." — ii. 3. On another occasion he threatens Simple, whom Mistress Quickly for his safety had hidden in a closet, with instant death. It may astonish some of our readers to learn that this ridiculous character in the play was drawn from life. The prototype was Dr. John Caius of Cambridge University, a physician, the re-founder of Gonville Hall (which still in part bears his name), and in his relations with the students an exceedingly choleric and revengeful instructor. His true name was Kaye, but as he had been educated abroad, and was inclined to ape foreign manners, he changed his English cognomen into its Latin form, Caius, by which he was then and is now generally known. The Dictionary of National Biography says of him: "Caius's relations with the society over which he ruled at Cambridge were less happy. Lying, as he did, under the suspicion of aiming at a restoration of Catholic doctrine, he was an object of dislike to the majority of the fellows, and could with difficulty maintain his authority. He retaliated vigorously on the malcontents. He not only involved them in law-suits which emptied their slender purses, but visited them with personal castigations, and even incarcerated them in the stocks. Expulsions were frequent, not less than twenty of the fellows, according to the statement of one of their number, having suffered this extreme penalty." To complete the likeness between the two characters, dramatic and historical, we find that Caius had an especial antipathy to Welshmen, for in the ordinances of the college founded by him, Welshmen are expressly excluded from the privileges of fellowship. It appears then — 1. That both were physicians. 2. That both came from abroad. 3. That both were phenomenally quarrelsome, even to the extent of inflicting chastisement upon others with their own hands. 4. That both hated Welshmen. Now, how did William Shakspere of Stratford become acquainted with these idiosyncrasies of a Cambridge professor, and how did he acquire sufficient interest in the subject to induce him, twenty-nine years after the professor's death, to hold the man up to public ridicule in a play? Dr. Caius died in July, 1573, at which time the reputed poet was living at Stratford, nine years old. The controversy, as it raged in Cambridge and as it is reflected in the play, was a personal one, and in the absence of newspapers or equivalent means of disseminating general information, could hardly have been known beyond university circles. Francis Bacon was the nephew of Lord Treasurer Burghley, to whom the students appealed for protection against their oppressor. He entered the university in April, 1573, three months before Dr. Caius' death and in the height of the prevailing excitement. Coincidence number sixteen. XVII The tragedy of 'Othello' was first printed in quarto in 1622 (six years after the reputed author's death), though it had been in existence as an acting play for ten or twelve years preceding. In the folio of 1623, it appears in a revised Whose icy current and compulsive course It seems to be probable, then, that sometime between the date of the first appearance of the play on the stage (1610) and that in the Folio (1623) the author's attention had been called to a tidal peculiarity of the Mediterranean Sea; namely, that the current through the Bosphorus flows continuously in one direction, from east to west. William Shakspere died in Stratford six years before the first publication of the play in its original draft, which was, as we have said, in 1622. Francis Bacon investigated the tides of the Mediterranean in or about 1616, and in his treatise on the subject, entitled De Fluxu et Refluxu Maris, made especial reference to the fact that through the Bosphorus the tide never ebbs.1 It is curious, also, that the two seas, east and west of the Bosphorus, are mentioned under the same names by both authors: Pontus and Propontis - BACON. Pontic and Propontic - SHAKE-SPEARE. Coincidence number seventeen. XVIII Timon of Athens' was neither printed in quarto nor, so far as we know, produced on the stage, previously to its appearance in the folio of 1623. No hint of its existence 1 Bacon had no knowledge, of course, of the undercurrent flowing the other way, nor of the extent of evaporation from the surface of the Mediterranean, amounting to eight or ten feet per annum. |