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.
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