engaged in a struggle for life and faith; and in his ceaseless
amours.

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.