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 Achaeans 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. {126a} 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.