Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Parallels - Malignant Medicine

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.


No comments:

Post a Comment