(3) In 1582–1583 an official deputation of Muscovites was at Queen Elizabeth's court to treat concerning the marriage of the Czar Ivan to a kinswoman of the English Queen. They made themselves ridiculous and became the butt of a practical joke. (See V. ii. 121 and note.)
The pertinence of these parallels is hardly questionable, but the flippancy and vagueness with which Shakespeare utilizes the historical incidents certainly suggest that his knowledge comes from current talk rather than from definite printed accounts. The dramatist, of course, was not purporting to write contemporary history, as Marlowe was when he produced his Massacre at Paris. Doubtless Shakespeare first devised his fiction of Navarre and France at a period when it was possible to weave into it recent names and incidents still too vague in their connotation for English auditors to jar against the playful spirit of the comedy.[1] He seems to have conceived of his Navarre, Berowne, Longaville, and Dumaine as living in some pleasant remote time, and it is entirely possible that the real nucleus of the Navarre-France portion of the story is to be found in some such passage as that of Monstrelet's history,[2] cited by Hunter in 1845, the relevancy of which Lee and nearly all subsequent critics have denied. Monstrelet writes as follows: 'At this same season [ca. 1403], Charles king of Navarre came to Paris to wait on the king. He negotiated so successfully with the king and his privy council, that he obtained a gift of the castle of Nemours, with some of its dependent castlewicks, which territory was made
- ↑ See Appendix B.
- ↑ Monstrelet, who died in 1453, continued the Chronicles of Froissart from the year 1400. The passage quoted comes near the commencement of his work (bk. i, ch. 17). A number of French editions were available in Shakespeare's time, but there appears to have been no translation into English before that of Thomas Johnes in 1809.
