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. {127a} “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.  Moliere 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.” {129a}