I search the play once more for the faintest hint of knowledge of foreign politics.  The embassy of the daughter of the King of France (who, by the date of the affair of the ducats, should be Charles VII) has been compared to a diplomatic sally of the mother of the childless actual King of France (Henri iii), in 1586, when Catherine de Medici was no chicken.  I do not see in the embassy of the Princess of the story any “intimate acquaintance with contemporary foreign politics” about 1591-3.  The introduction of Mayenne as an adherent of the King of Navarre, shows either a most confused ignorance of foreign politics on the part of the author, or a freakish contempt for his public.  I am not aware that the author shows any “intimate acquaintance with the ways” of Elizabeth’s Court, or of any other fashionable society, except the Courts which Fancy held in plays.

Mr. Greenwood {129b} appears to be repeating “the case as to this very remarkable play” as “well summed up by the late Judge Webb in his Mystery of William Shakespeare” (p. 44).  In that paralysing judicial summary, as we have seen, “the author 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.”  The French politics, in the play, are to send the daughter of a King of France (the contemporary King Henri iii was childless) to conduct a negotiation about 200,000 ducats, at the Court, steeped in peace, of a King of Navarre, a scholar who would fain be a recluse from women, in an Academe of his own device.  Such was not the Navarre of Henri in his war with the Guises, and Henri did not shun the sex!

Such are the “contemporary foreign politics,” the “French politics” which the author knows—­as intimately as Bacon might have known them.  They are not foreign politics, they are not French politics, they are politics of fairy-land:  with which Will was at least as familiar as Bacon.

These, then, are the arguments in favour of Bacon, or the Great Unknown, which are offered with perfect solemnity of assurance:  and the Baconians repeat them in their little books of popularisation and propaganda.  Quantula sapientia!

CHAPTER VII:  CONTEMPORARY RECOGNITION OF WILL AS AUTHOR

It is absolutely impossible to prove that Will, or Bacon, or the Man in the Moon, was the author of the Shakespearean plays and poems.  But it is easy to prove that Will was recognised as the author, by Ben Jonson, Heywood, and Heminge and Condell the actors, to take the best witnesses.  Meanwhile we have received no hint that any man except Will was ever suspected of being the author till 1856, when the twin stars of Miss Delia Bacon and Mr. Smith arose.  The evidence of Ben Jonson and the rest can only prove that professed playwrights and actors, who knew Will both on and off the stage, saw nothing in him not compatible with his work.  Had he been the