Saturday, April 9, 2011

Parallel - Hatch and Disclose

Shakespeare:
      "There's something in his soul
O'er which his melancholy sits on brood,
And i do doubt [fear] the hatch and the disclose
Will be some danger;"
   Hamlet  3.1.165-8

Bacon:
"The distance [time] between...the egg laid and the disclosing or hatching"
  Natural History

Comment: "Disclose" is synonymous with "hatch", the revealing of the young by the breaking open of the shell. Did anyone else use this tautology "hatch and disclose"? Note that it follows almost immediately after "out of tune and harsh" in Hamlet 3.1.159 which is part of a parallel posted in March 2011. Thus a few lines in Hamlet give rise to two idiosyncratic phrases which may be unique to Bacon and Shake-Speare.

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