Measure for Measure 7 - Neglected Laws

Some Shake-Speare / Bacon parallels in Measure for Measure (7)

Bacon and Shake-Speare comments on neglected laws.

Shake-Speare:

Duke: “As fond fathers having bound up the threat'ning twigs of birch, only to stick it in their children's sight for terror, not to use, in time the rod becomes more mock'd than fear'd; so our decrees, dead to infliction, to themselves are dead;”

Measure for Measure, 1.3.23

Bacon:

“…judges …especially in cases of laws penal, ought to have a care that that which was meant for terror be not turned into rigour”. (They should not be kept “like scarecrows” merely to intimidate.)

Essay  Of Judicature

“Obsolete laws that are grown into disuse”. De Augmentis, 8.3.57

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -  -

Shake-Speare:

“In time the rod becomes more mock’d than feared”. Measure, 1.3.27

“Liberty plucks justice by the nose.” Measure, 1.3.29

”The birds of prey make the scarecrow law their perch, and not their terror”. Measure, 2.1.2

“The strong statutes stand, like the forfeits in a barber’s shop, as much in mock as mark”. Measure, 5.1.322

“The baby beats the nurse and quite athwart goes all decorum”. Measure, 1.3.30

Menenius: “The service of the foot being once gangrened, is not then respected for what before it was”. Coriolanus, 3.1.305

Bacon:

Obsolete laws, if not cut away from the general body of the law “ . . .bring a gangrene, neglect and habit of disobedience upon other wholesome laws”, and cause them to “lose part of their authority”, and “the lessening of authority in what degree soever must needs increase disobedience”. Life and Letters, 3. P. 380

“ . . . above all things a gangrene of the law is to be avoided,” De Augmentis, 8, 3, 57

“Their principal working was upon penal laws, wherein they spared none great or small; nor considered whether the law were possible or impossible, in use or obsolete; but raked over all old and new statutes; though many of them were made with intention rather of terror than of rigour”

Works, 6. P. 219 (Spedding et al.)