Saturday, March 5, 2011

Parallel - corrosive, enmity, malignity

First Shake-Speare:

"Though parting be a fretful corrosive,
It is applied to a deathful wound."
  2 Henry VI, 3.2.402-3

               "[The poison] whose effect
Holding such enmity with the blood of man"
  Hamlet 1.5.65

"But with a ling'ring dram that should not work
Maliciously like poison"
  The Winter's Tale 1.2.320-1


now Bacon:

  "Medicine...of secret malignity and disagreement towards man's body...it worketh either by corrosion or by secret malignity and enmity to nature,"
   Natural History

Comment: Thus this triple collocation of medicine's or poison's malignity, enmity to nature/man, and corrosion, appears in both writers, though in Shake-Speare in three different texts.

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