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. It
was familiar in Florio's Second Frutes (1591), and First Frutes
(1578), with the English translation. The books were as accessible
to Shakspere as to Bacon. Either author might also draw from James
Sandford's Garden of Pleasure, done out of the Italian in 1573-6.

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