5. Bacon's Promus entry 828
"Puer glaciem" "A boy [playing with] ice"; [from Adagia]
All's Well That Ends Well 2.3.93
"These boys are boys of ice; they'll none have her".
Comment: According to Mrs. Pott, puer glaciem was "said of those who, though they cannot keep a certain thing, are unwilling to part with it"; e.g. boys who are reluctant to come in from the ice. It looks as though Shake-Speare had the Latin tag in mind, but here makes it mean that they are frigid boys with no interest in Helena. Thus he ironically inverts the usual meaning - instead of the boys wanting something, they do not want it. Editors seem to have missed this Adagia echo.
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6. Bacon's Promus entry 948 [I think these had been posted earlier but they're a good reread]
"Better unborn than untaught" [from Heywood's Proverbs L.603]
2 Henry VI, 4.2.161
"O gross and miserable ignorance!"
and 4.7.70-1
"ignorance is the curse of God;
Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven,"
Love's Labour's Lost 4.2.23
"O! thou monster Ignorance"
King John 4.2.59
"Barbarous ignorance"
Twelfth Night 4.2.43-4
"There is no darkness but ignorance"
Troilus And Cressida 2.3.28-9
"The common curse of mankind, folly and ignorance"
Othello 3.3.410-11
"....and fools as gross
As ignorance made drunk"
Comment: There are many other statements in Bacon's works on the supreme importance of knowledge. It was his passionate and life-long creed. And Shake-Speare seems to have shared it, probably more than other Elizabethan playwrights.
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