Shakespeare makes us laugh in "Love's Labour's Lost" at the futility
of the attempt of ascetic and academic men to shut out love and women
from their schemes of life and study.

His early work in putting the past history of England into dramatic
form may possibly have suggested to him to put more recent history on
the stage by means of this Comedy. Light as it is, the point of it is
to satirize the monastic and exclusive element in current educational
schemes. Fictitious as the story is, it touches upon names and
incidents belonging to actual history. So familiar were these actual
happenings of the day to his audience that it could especially enjoy
these veiled allusions to them.

The main idea of the plot of the Comedy--the "Academe," was one that
had a bearing upon various similarly named educational projects of
that time in England.

One such scheme was drawn up about 1570, by Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Sir
Walter Raleigh's half-brother, for the "education of her Majeste's
Wardes and others the youths of nobility and gentlemen." This plan
was, like Shakespeare's arranged for a "three yeeres terme" (I, i, 20)
and at the end of "every three years" some book was to be published
which would represent the fruit of the Academy's study during that
period. Merely the title of this scheme--"Queen Elizabethes Achademy"
may have suggested Shakespeare's "Achademe" (I, i, 17). Of course,
however, both Gilbert's and Shakespeare's adoption of the name are
examples of the appropriation by educational groups of the classic
academes of the Philosophers of Athens and their student followers.
Another educational plan "for the bringing up in vertue and learning