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 precieux and precieuses 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 Marechal 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, {124a} 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’Academie Francaise, 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.