Love's Labor's Lost - Authorship Evidence - Part 2

Part 2 of 4 on Summary Authorship Evidence in Love's Labour's Lost 

Point 3) The play uses historical incidents within Bacon's, but not Shakspere's known experience and awareness.

    The Arden editor said that "Shakespeare's play follows historical fact remarkably closely." The parallels are:   

(a) The Academy.   An actual academy, like that in the play, was set up at the Court of Navarre by Henri. There is also a letter from 1583 by the English Ambassador to Sir Francis Walsingham, one of Queen Elizabeth's Secretaries of State, that the King of Navarre "has furnished his Court with principal gentlemen of the Religion and reformed his house", which also is found echoed in the play.  

(b) in the play, an embassy of women come from the French court to King of Navarre's academy. In actual history, there were two such embassies, though the characters are slightly different. For instance, a princess is used in the play rather than the sister of the King of France. But in each there were negotiations over money and over the region of Aquitaine.  

(c)   the historical embassy was led by Marguerite de Valois, and her journey corresponds exactly with the princess's journey in the play. For instance, both real and play embassies visited the Duc d'Alencon at his residence, and they both also visited Brabant/Flanders. In addition the Alencon family dies out before 1589, before the likely writing of the play, but after Bacon's time in France. So, again, these particular correspondences between the play and history were much more likely to be known by Francis Bacon, who had a deep interest in Academies and whose brother Anthony lived with the King of Navarre at his court in the summer of 1584, and who later resided some years with Francis after his return to England.  (Anthony Bacon had spent 12 years living on the continent and was a great resource of information and communication to him regarding European events and contacts.) 

(d)   The French surnames in the play for the three young lords (Berowne, Longaville, and Dumain) are nearly exactly those of real persons--(Duc de Biron, Duc de Longueville, and Duc de Mayenne). These characters in the play don't reflect the personalities of the actual historical persons, and the names themselves would have been known to many in England that followed events in France. However, they would be more easily known to Francis and Anthony Bacon due to their years spent in France and their associations with various personages there. In addition, Anthony Bacon personally knew the Duc de Longueville (like Longaville in the play). And one of his servants had passports in which were found the names of a de Lomagne (similar to Dumain) and a Baron de Biron (similar to Berowne). Antonio Perez, the Spanish braggart onetime friend of the Bacons, had also for a time been a companion of Henri of Navarre.     

(e)   The play refers to King of Navarre's manner of horse riding. "Was that the King, that spurred his horse so hard / Against the steep-up rising of the hill?" (4.1.1-2) The real King Henri of Navarre actually did have a habit of riding impetuously. The Bacon brothers would have known this.  

 (f)   The play also has the princess say

"Nothing but this! yes; as much love in rhyme
As would be crammed up in a sheet of paper,
Writ o' both sides the leaf, margent and all,
That he was fain to seal on Cupid's name."  (5.2.6-9)

Henri, the real King of Navarre, actually did cover the whole sheet, including margins, in his love letters, and he did seal them with romantic "special emblematic signet".   

(g)   In the play the princess has an interest in hunting. Her historical counterpart Margurite had hunting as a favorite pastime.

The above facts were mostly not published in Shakspere's lifetime. There had been a book on The French Academy published in English in 1586 but Bacon would be much more likely to have read it out of his consuming interest in academies, than would have Will Shakspere. Nor does the book mention such an academy at the court of Navarre. Casual chats with travelers would not likely be a source for all these personal and peculiar historical facts represented in the play. And I've only described maybe half of them listed by Cockburn.

Point 4)  At the end of the play the Princess has to leave due to the sudden death of her father. A more appropriate ending would have had her complete the business that she had planned and could also then have had a happy ending, as usual for a comedy. Nor was the princess' father hardly mentioned in the play, last hear about early in act 2. Plus, the historical father, Henry II, died many years before in 1559. But it so happens that Francis Bacon's own father had died on February 20, 1579 while he was in France (and while the historical Marguerite was on her embassy visit to Navarre) and this caused Francis' time on the continent to abruptly end as he then had to return to England. This would seem a perfect explanation for the similar ending in the play.

There are two other important points of evidence that I'll deal with in separate posts following this.

[end of Part 2 of 4]

Love's Labor's Lost - Authorship Evidence - Part 3

[Part 3 of 4]  Summary Authorship Evidence in Love's Labor's Lost

Parallels between Love's Labor's Lost (L.L.L) and Gray's Inn Revels of 1594-5

I summarized in earlier posts how The Comedy of Errors was integrated into these revels at Bacon's law school. Shake-Speare's 'L.L.L' also has strong connections to these same Revels.

(a)   In the Revels there were rules given for the students to read, one of which was to read a book on "The French Academy", again, one of Francis Bacon's fascinations.  

(b)   One of the themes of the play was the rival merits of Love versus Play. This was also a theme in the Revels, as would be natural for a law school. Among the speeches ascribed to Bacon is one that advocates the study of philosophy, and another that advocates the pursuit of pastimes and sport including love. And as in the play, so in the Revels is there a temporary abandonment of study for the pleasure of revelry. And in another speech in the Revels, a counsellor says "What! Nothing but tasks, nothing but working-days? No feasting, no music, no dancing, no triumphs, no comedies, no love, no ladies? Let other men's lives be as pilgrimages, but Princes' lives are as Progresses [royal visits] dedicated only to variety and solace." Compare the similarity of this speech to that in 'L L L' by Berowne  "O, these are barren tasks, too hard to keep,/ Not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep".  

(c)   In 'L L L' the characters disguise themselves as 'Muscovites' and 'blackamoors'. Likewise, in the Revels, there are characters playing 'Russians' and 'Negro Tartars'.  

(d)  In the play Rosaline mocks the King as looking "Sea-sick, I think, coming from Muscovy". In the Revels, a character supposedly returning from Russia describes himself as having seasickness.   From correspondences like these, the Stratfordian Francis Yates even observed that "It is my belief...that Love's Labor's Lost ... took immediate inspiration from the Gray's Inn Revels of 1594-5". So the question is asked - How could Shakspere be so familiar with all the minute details and speeches of the Revels, and then to be so motivated to add them to his plays, especially considering it's very unlikely he could have even attended them? 

Francis Yates also wrote "It is very curious indeed to remember that the speeches of the Counselors in Gesta Grayorum have been attributed to Francis Bacon, and if that attribution is correct, and if i am also correct in hearing echoes of those speeches in Love's Labor's Lost, then the "civil war of wits" in that play may be, in one of its aspects, a reflection of some friendly crossing of swords between the two greatest wits of the age, Shakespeare and Bacon".   If only he had been aware of all the current evidence for Bacon's authorship of both, the curiosity would be much less surprising.

Love's Labor's Lost - Authorship Evidence - Part 4

Part 4 of 4 on  Summary Authorship Evidence in Love's Labor's Lost

Finally, there's a connection between a part of the play (LLL) with another French historical fact, and with the play of Hamlet.

In LLL, 5.2.1-9 there is this passage:

Rosaline:   That was the way to make his godhead wax;
                   For he hath been five thousand year a boy.
Katharie:   Ay, and a shrewd unhappy gallows too.
Rosaline:   You'll ne'er be friends with him: a' killed your sister.
Katharine:  He made her melancholy, sad and heavy;
                    And so she died.

There is a strong historical parallel of this in French history, and Francis Bacon was perfectly positioned to hear of it. It almost certainly refers to the daughter of Marguerite's principal Lady-in-waiting. The daughter was Helene de Tournon and she died at Liege in 1577. Marguerite, again, was the sister of the French King Henry III (not to be confused with Henri, King of Navarre, who lived at the same time as the French King Henry, and who took his place as King of France when Henry III died).

Helene de Tournon had fallen in love with a young nobelman, the Marquis of Varembon, while living in Flanders. She later returned to Paris. When the King's sister Marguerite planned to visit Flanders in the summer of 1577, Helene was happy to go along in hopes of again seeing the Marquis of Varembon. When they met again in Flanders the Marquis treated her with indifference. And when he departed on a trip without acknowledging her at all it seems, she became "so stricken that she could only breathe by crying out for mortal pain." She died at Liege 8-9 days later. The cause of death attributed to spasms of the heart. Then the Marquis, having second thoughts of his treatment of her, returned to Liege to apologize. On his arrival he met Helene's funeral cortege and asking whose funeral it was, he was told, then was said to have swooned and fell from his horse.

The Arden editor of 'LLL' wrote that "It is highly probable that this incident suggested not only the decline of Katharine's sister (in the play) but the story of Ophelia in Hamlet". Remember that Hamlet only learned of Ophelia's death when he met her funeral cortege by chance. So how many noblemen first learn of the death of a girl friend by encountering her funeral cortege by chance. Both women were members of royal court, in love with a great nobleman, both facing opposition to such a relationship (the Marquis's family had other plans for him). Both had their hearts broken over overt indifference of their beloved, both of whom relented too late. And as Hamlet had jumped into Ophelia's grave, the soul of the Marquis was said to have gone down into the grave afterward.

Again, Francis Bacon was in France when this historical event occurred and which had likely been a topic of conversation. He may even heard of it directly from Marguerite. Would Shakspere, though, some 20 years later, have known about it? The odds are very low for this.

Eclipse Endured - Shakespeare Sonnet 107

The following touches very briefly on an analysis of Sonnet 107 by N.B.Cockburn in his The Bacon Shakespeare Question (1998). He analyzes eight of the sonnets in relation to the authorship question.

Sonnet 107

Not mine own fears nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,
And the sad augurs mock their own presage,
Incertainties now crown themselves assured,
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Now with the drops of this most balmy time
My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,
Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes.
    And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
    When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.

The 'mortal moon' of the sonnet is the Queen; she was often compared with Diana (alias Cynthia), the moon goddess, as an alternative name for her. "Hath her eclipse endured" means "to have suffered death".  The terms are similar to those of Edgar in King Lear when he says "Men must endure their going hence (dying)". The sonnet focuses on the fact that before the queen's death there had been widespread fears that  the succession would be tempestous. But it proved peaceful. Bacon used the same phrase for the same purpose when he wrote in his History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622), referring to another Queen Elizabeth, King James' mother-in-law, that "This lady . . . had endured a strange eclipse by the King's flight and temporary depriving from the crown".

No one has found the phrase 'endure an eclipse" anywhere else in the whole range of Elizabethan literature, which suggests that it was unique to Bacon and Shake-speare.

Cold and Unmoved - Shakespeare Sonnet 94

Parallels in Sonnet 94

This analysis is abridged to about half its full length.

                   Sonnet 94    

     They that have power to hurt, and will do none,
     That do not do the thing, they most do show,
     Who moving others, are themselves as stone,
     Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow:
     They rightly do inherit heaven's graces,
     And husband nature's riches from expense,
     They are the lords and owners of their faces,
     Others, but stewards of their excellence:
     The summer's flower is to the summer sweet,
     Though to it self, it only live and die,
     But if that flower with base infection meet,
     The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
         For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds,
         Lilies that fester, smell far worse than weeds.

Cockburn's comments: This enigmatic sonnet seems to have baffled commentators, perhaps more than any other. This sonnet makes two statements about human goodness: (1) A good person will exercise icy self-control and refrain from hurting others; (2) If a good person turns rotten, he will be worse (or at least seem worse) than someone who was bad all along.

(note: here Cockburn discusses whether the sonnet concerned the "fair youth". He shows inconsistencies with that argument and concludes that "It is far more likely that No. 94 is not about the Youth at all. The poem is neither addressed to him, nor speaks of him in the third person". Cockburn suggests that this sonnet MAY be the sonnet that Bacon wrote for the Queen. Bacon had written:

"About the middle of the Michaelmas term her Majesty had a purpose to dine at my lodge at Twickenham Park, at which time I had (though I profess myself not to be a poet) prepared a sonnet directly tending and alluding to draw on her Majesty's reconcilement to my Lord (The Earl of Essex prior to his aborted coup)". 

If my surmise is correct, Bacon in the sonnet is urging the Queen to refrain from using her power to hurt Essex, despite her apparent intention to hurt him. "Influencing others, but herself uninfluenced, rock-like, of independent judgment, her own mistress" is presumably how the Queen liked to see herself. It was certainly how Bacon saw her.

One of the things which has been thought most puzzling about Sonnet 94 is the words "unmoved, cold" in line 4. Many commentators have refused to believe that Shake-Speare intended to extol being "unmoved, cold" as a virtue. Not so the Penguin editor of the Sonnets (1986), who paraphrases L1. 3-4 as "Such people, moving others emotionally while remaining detached, are as cold as the proverbial stone - a frequent image in Shakespeare of unrelenting indifference". But the editor, like almost everyone else, has misunderstood what Shake-Speare meant by "unmoved, cold". How could Shake-Speare have extolled "unrelenting indifference" as a virtue which would help one to inherit Heaven's graces? In truth, he was using the words "unmoved, cold" as Bacon used them, to mean "free from passion". Regarding the use of "cold", Bacon had written of Lord Burleigh "...out of the greatness of his experience and wisdom and out of the coldness of his nature hath qualified generally all hard and extreme courses". On the hypothesis that Sonnet 94 was Bacon's sonnet to the Queen, that is exactly what Shake-Speare was urging the Queen to do -- to show "coldness of nature" and qualify all hard and extreme courses against Essex.

For Bacon's use of the word "unmoved" one goes first to a letter of advice, drafted by Bacon, which Essex sent in his own name to the young Earl of Rutland who was about to travel. The letter says "Health consisteth in an unmovable constancy and a freedom from passions which are indeed the sickness of the mind". Bacon's use of the word 'Constancy' as the foundation of virtue had this same meaning of 'free from passions'. One finds echoes of this in other Shake-Speare texts. In Henry V, 2.2.132-4 "Free from gross passions or of mirth or anger / Constant in spirit, not swerving with the blood". In Hamlet 3.2.71-2 "Give me that man that is not passion's slave". In Measure For Measure 3.2.219-20 "It is virtuous to be constant in any undertaking". Though 'constant' isn't in Sonnet 94, the other two words "unmoved" and "cold" do.

And when one finds them both used in an unusual sense which has nonplussed commentators, but is the sense in which Bacon used them, that must surely tell in favor of his authorship of this sonnet.

In addition, there are a half dozen other little language echoes in this sonnet to a letter Bacon wrote to the Queen at about the same time that Bacon had said he wrote the sonnet to the Queen reconciling her with Essex. But it would take about another page to post them here so I'll leave them out, except for the following:

After Essex's abortive rebellion on 8 February 1601, Bacon tells us that he "did both commend her Majesty's mercy terming it to her an excellent balm that did continually distil from her sovereign hands". This echoes the lines from The Merchant of Venice 4.1.180-1 "the quality of mercy is not strained; it droppeth as the gentle rain from Heaven".

Cockburn concludes with "Whether or not Sonnet 94 is Bacon's sonnet to the Queen, the unusual use of "cold" and "unmoved" and the other parallels I have mentioned afford strong evidence that Bacon was the sonnet's author.

Parallel - Weep to have through fear of losing - Sonnet 64

First, Shake-Speare:

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminante –

That time will come and take my love away.

This thought is as a death, which cannot choose

But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

Sonnet 64, 11-14

Also:

Portia:                   then confess

What treason there is mingled with your love.

Bassanio:  None but that ugly treason of mistrust,

Which make me fear th’enjoying of my love,

The Merchant of Venice, 3.2.26-31

Now, Bacon:

[A classical dictum]  Non uti ut non appetas, non appetere ui non metuas,

Sunt animi pusilli et diffidentis [To abstain from the use of a thing that you may not feel a want of it; to shun the want that you may not feel the loss of it, are the precautions of pusillanimity and cowardice].

The Advancement of Learning (Spedding 3.427)

I will not use because I will not desire. I will not desire because I will not fear to want.

A Conference of Pleasure p. 5

Comment: Fearing to lose love was of course a commonplace. But to weep to have it in case you lose it suggests that Shake-Speare had in mind the philosophical conundrum of the Bacon texts. (The conundrum is said to have its source in Plutarch’s Life of Solon).

THE MEDICINE IN SHAKESPEARE

Perhaps serious consideration should be given as to whether or not William Shakspere of Stratford should be credited with the discovery of the circulation of the blood, rather than William Harvey. One medical practitioner ponders this question.

THE MEDICINE IN SHAKESPEARE

BY ORVILLE W. OWEN, M. D.,

_________

Extracts from a lecture at a stated meeting of the Detroit Medical and Library Association.

I wish to open up a comparatively new question--the circulation of the blood as found in the plays. With it I shall give you a little anatomical knowledge from the plays, for the author must have either dissected the human body or at least seen it done, and that he was perfectly familiar with the experiments and proofs of the circulation I think I can show to your satisfaction. For we find it scattered through all the thirty-six plays contained in this volume, and in so plain and elaborate a manner that I cannot believe but that I can show you he was either the original discoverer of the great anatomical and physiological truth or knew intimately the experiments and dissections upon which it is based.

Here I make an extraordinary statement which is, if William Shakespeare wrote the plays bearing his name, he discovered the circulation of the blood instead of Dr. William Harvey. And further, if Shakespeare wrote the plays, Harvey stole the discovery from Shakespeare. One of these statements must be correct if it is allowed for an instant that William Shakespeare wrote the plays, and I will now proceed to prove my statement. I must preface it with a short epitome of both Harvey and Shakespeare.

Dr. Harvey took his literary degree at Caius College, Cambridge, and his medical degree at the great school of medicine at Padua. He returned to London and was, in the year 1615, appointed Lumlian professor at Bartholomew Hospital. In the year 1616, about the latter part, he made his first discovery of the circulation, but did not make it public until the year 1619, when he published his first little monograph upon the subject, but it was not until the year 1628 that he became fully sure the world was ready for the announcement. In that year he published the work which makes him famous at the present day.

Master William Shakespeare finished writing, so his biographers tell us, in the year 1612, and although the works bearing his name were not published until 1623, and although they were double in amount, all of them having been rewritten, still, the gentlemen referred to say he did nothing after 1612. Master William, having finished his work, thought it best to depart from this vale of tears, and did so in April, 1616. Notice the last of his writing, done in 1612, and his death occurring in the April before Harvey makes his discovery.

If there is one word in the plays of the circulation, then there is a great discrepancy between Shakespeare and Harvey. For if Harvey did make it Shakespeare must have risen from his grave to write it in the 1623 edition. If, on the other hand, Shakespeare wrote it before his death, then Harvey must have stolen it. The first thought that arises is, get the early editions of the plays and see if it was in them. But here steps in a difficulty which we cannot overcome, namely, six of the plays never appeared except in the 1623 edition, and all the others are completely rewritten and enlarged to about double their original size. For instance, Richard Third’s whole opening speech, commencing "Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York" is not found in any of the early editions of the plays. So of them all, they are so changed from the first printed copies that there is no use in citing them in any way, so that we are forced to abide by the 1623 edition and no other. This being the case, and as the 1623 is the only edition having all the so-called Shakespeare plays, we will use that as the basis of comparison.

Examine these quotations:

Coriolanus 1.1.126-139
"Your most grave belly was deliberate,
Not rash like his accusers and thus answered:
True is it, my incorporate friend, quoth he,
That I receive the general food at first
Which do you live upon; and fit it is;
Because I am the store-house and the shop
Of the whole body: but if you do remember,
I send it through the rivers of your blood,
Even to the court the heart--to th’ seat o’ th’ braine;
And, through the cranks and offices of man,
The strongest nerves, and small inferior veines,
From me receive that natural competencie
Whereby they live; and though that all at once,
You, my good friends (this says the belly) mark me."

Now please turn to Romeo and Juliette, 1.1.85 and read:

"With purple fountains issuing from your veins."

Then in this same play at 4.1.93-99:

"Take thou this viole, being then in bed,
And this distilling liquor drink thou of,
When presently through all thy veins shall run
A cold and drowsy humor, for no pulse
Shall keep his native progress but surcease;
No warmth nor breath shall testify thou livest;
The roses in thy lips and cheeks shall fade."

Next turn to Love’s Labour Lost, 4.3.309-12:

"Why, universal plodding poisions up
The nimble spirits in the arteries:
As motion, and long during action, tires
The sinewy vigor of the traveler."

 http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/LLL_4_3.html

Now drop down the same column at 4.3.332-337 read:

"Lives not alone emured in the brain;
But with the motion of all elements,
Courses as swift as thought in every power;
And gives to every power a double power,
Above their functions and their offices.
It adds a precious seeing to the eye;"

Now see what's in Twelfth Night at 1.1.38-39:

"Liver, brain, and heart,
These sovereign thrones are all supplied and filled."

The same play at 3.2.58-60:

"If he were opened and you find so much blood in his liver
As will clog the foot of a flea, I will eat th’ rest of th’ anatomy."

Now turn to Henry the Sixth, part II, 3.2.160-168:

"See how the blood is settled in his face.
Oft have I seene a timely-parted ghost
Of ashy semblance, meagre, pale, and bloodless
Being all descended to the labouring heart
Who in the conflict that it holds with death
Attracts the same for aidance ’gainst the enemy
Which with the heart there cools and ne’re returneth
To blush and beautifie the cheek againe.
But see his face is blacke and full of blood."

Now read Henry the Fourth, part II, 4.3.108-110:

"The vitall commoners and inland pettie spirits
Muster me all to their capitaine, the heart, who great
And puft up with his retinue, doth any deed of courage."

The Winter’s Tale, 5.3.62-68:

Leontes. "Let be, let be would.
I were dead but that methinks alreadie
(What was he that did make it? See (my Lord)
would you not deeme it breathed and that those veines
Did verily beare blood?"
Polixenes. "Masterly done!
The very life seems warm upon her lip"
Leontes. "The fixture of her eye has motion in it,
As we are mock’d with art."

Finally, in The Merchant of Venice, 4.1.108, we find:

"A messenger with letters from the doctor, new come from Padua."

And just below it 4.1.112, read:

"My flesh, blood, bones and all
Ere thou shalt lose for me one drop of blood."
--------------------------------------------

Was Shakespeare an anatomist? Every portion of the human body known to his day is mentioned. Was he a student of physiology? Physiological functions are given in detail. Had he knowledge of materia medica? He speaks of many medicines. Was he a neurologist? It might be called his specialty, and I must confess I feel hardly competent to analyze his wonderful descriptions and delineations in this great field of our science. All the types of insanity are fully described. The sleep-walking dementia of Lady Macbeth is paralleled by the suicidal insanity of Ophelia. King Lear’s delirium is a good foil to Hamlet’s feigned madness. The tragical jealousy of Othello is a counterfoil to the comical jealousy of Master Ford. Richard the Third, Macbeth, Edmund, Malvolio, the different fools, Gonerill, Timon of Athens, and Titus Andronicus, will show types of either real or feigned madness, or mental instability. How did he give these medical observations to the world three hundred years ago. How did he know it? Where did he find it if not from the study of the insane?

* * *

If we consider that Francis Bacon could be the author of the plays, then our questions are easily answered:

"I have oft seene Dr. William Harvey, the new doctor from Padua, at Bartholomew Hospital, in the presence of the learned doctors, force a purple, distilling liquor through the veines of a dead body, and, after it had descended to the heart, liver, and lungs, the blood-coloured liquor returneth againe to the face which blacke and full of blood, or pale, meagre, and bloodless before, doth blush and beautifie, as if with life; you would think the body breathed; the very lippe is warme to look upon; but we are mock’d with art as there is no pulse gainst the finger and though the arteries seem full, yet no life is present. The legs, waist, arms, hands, brow, and limbs seem alive, but we can never ransome nature. The doctor was enrolled at Caius College."-Francis Bacon
William Harvey was a close friend of Bacon, as well as his private physician.

In addition, Francis Bacon in 1600 wrote to Queen Elizabeth that his mother was "much worn." Shortly afterwards she became violently insane and continued to do so, under the sole care of Francis Bacon, until her death in 1610.