Shakespeare a Lawyer? - 11 - Cadit Quaestio, Confess Avoid

Was Shake-Speare a lawyer?

Part 11

Valid Pointers to Shake-Speare being a Lawyer

20.  Confess and Avoid

In Hamlet 3.4.151-2 the Prince upbraids his mother:

                   "Confess yourself to heaven,
Repent what's past, avoid what is to come;"

To "confess and avoid" was a pleading term used by lawyers, meaning: "To admit an allegation but show it to be invalid in law". Lawyers still use the term today, but it would be difficult to find a layman who knows it. In Shake-Speare's day it seems that some laymen did know it. Holinshed (1586) mentions it once; and The Art of English Poesy (1589) says: "the figure is much used by our English pleaders in the Star Chamber and Chancery, which they call to confess and avoid". In the present Hamlet text it seems to have slipped from Shake-Speare's mind almost subliminally.

19.  Cadit Quastio

In Measure For Measure 2.4.88-90 Isabella is pleading with Angelo for her brother's life. Angelo is about to propose that if she will have sex with himself (Angelo), he will spare her brother:

Angelo:    Admit no other way to save his life -
           As I subscribe not that, nor any other,
           But in the loss of question - that you, his sister
           [Have sex with me]

The parenthesis in the middle has been much debated. Interpretations have included "For the sake of argument"; "Without disowning the right of calling him to answer for his crime"; "Provided there is no dispute"; and "Provided nothing more can be said for the defense”.  But all of these are wrong. In truth, the parenthesis seems influenced by the Latin law phrase (which lawyers still use today) cadit quaestio, which means "the question falls because it is no longer relevant". For example, a Court might say: "We may have to decide whether a juvenile aged only 16 - as this Defendant claims to be - can lawfully be sent to prison. Of course if the Crown can show that he is over 16, cadit quaestio". Now Angelo's parenthesis means: "I will admit no question about the proposal i am about to make for saving your brother's life, nor will I entertain any other proposal". This is not quite a cadit quaestio situation because no premise has lapsed to render the question irrelevant. But "the loss of question" suggests that Shake-Speare had "the fall of question" in mind. Angelo is saying in effect: "The question falls because I refuse to hear argument about it".

Shakespeare a Lawyer? - 18 - Advocate Pheasant

Was Shake-Speare a lawyer?

Part 18

Valid Pointers to Shake-Speare being a Lawyer

6.  An advocate is a pheasant

In The Winter's Tale 4.4.743 this occurs:

Shepherd:   My business, Sir, is to the King.
Autolycus:  What advocate hast thou to him?
Shepherd:   I know not, and it like you.
Clown:       Advocate's the court-word for pheasant.

This is a reference to the fact that bribery of local justices (the only courts the clown would know) by gifts of poultry was common enough for the term "capon justices" to be current in 1639. The Variorum editor notes: "In the time of Elizabeth there were Justices of the Peace, called Basket Justices, who would do nothing without a present; yet, as a member of the House of Commons expressed himself, 'for half a dozen of chickens would dispense with a whole dozen of penal statutes'". This and the term "capon justices" suggests that the normal gift was chickens. So why does Shake-Speare substitute a pheasant? 

Was a pheasant in those days regarded as a greater luxury than a chicken which offers more meat? The Baconians have floated a different explanation. They have identified a family of barristers named Phesant (the name was also spelt Fesant, Ffeasant, and Pheasant; see Baconiana, Vol. 17, pp. 173-4). A Jasper Ffesant sat as a judge in 1550. A Peter Phesant, who may have been Jasper's son, was elected a Reader of Gray's Inn in 1581 and sat as a Bencher from 1582. - see the Gray's Inn Pension Book (1901) edited by R.J. Fletcher. Peter later became Attorney-General in the North. Bacon himself, as we have seen became a Bencher in 1586. So from then on he would have been closely associated with Peter till the latter's death before 8 February 1588. Peter's son of the same name was admitted to the Inn as a student in 1602, and called to the Bar in 1608. Bacon was present when his call was confirmed. Is it fanciful to suppose that Bacon substituted a pheasant for a chicken to amuse lawyers in the audience with a humourous dig at a Gray's Inn family of advocates?

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5.  My brother Angelo

In Measure For Measure  3.2.201 Escalus refer to his fellow judge Angelo as "my brother Angelo". British judges still refer to their colleagues in this fashion. A judge may say, for example, "my brother Smith" or "my brother Mr. Justice Smith". But one doubts if many laymen know this, or knew it in Shake-Speare's day.

The Bacon and Shakespeare Theory of Spirits - 8

The Bacon and Shake-Speare Theory of "spirits"

part 8 of 9 

(j)    other word parallels combined with spirits

from Shake-Speare's Measure for Measure 3.1.118-122

[In Claudio's soliloquy on death]
"To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bath in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;"

"Delighted" has always been regarded as a problem. Some editors (such as the Arden editor and the editors of William Shakespeare, A Textual Companion) favor amending to "dilated", meaning "expansive, having full scope". Other editors let "delighted" stand but offer numerous different explanations of the word's meaning in the context. They include "filled with delight", "delightful", "a spirit discharged from the body", "removed from the regions of light" and "relieved from the weight of matter". The following Bacon texts (of which editors seem unaware) are relevant to the word's interpretation:

"Joy causeth cheerfulness and vigour in the eyes, singing, leaping, dancing, and sometimes tears. All these are the effects of dilatation and coming forth of the spirits into the outward parts; which maketh them more lively and stirring".
     Natural History

"Swelling is caused, both by a dilatation of the spirits by over-heating and by a liquefaction or boiling of the humours thereupon."
     Natural History

In a letter to King James dated 20 October 1620 Bacon sought his aid in setting men to work for the collection of a natural and experimental history. He said to James that it would be:

"An excellent recreation unto you; I say, to that admirable spirit of your that delighteth in light [i.e. in intellectual light].

"The souls of the living are the delight of the world"
      The Wisdom of the Ancients

To take the third of these Bacon texts first, the King's spirit delighteth and could therefore have been described as "delighted". And I see no difficulty in supposing that Shake-Speare too regarded the human spirit/soul as an ecstatic thing. However, the first two texts, with their reference to dilatation of the spirits, may seem to support the reading "dilated". But in Bacon's terminology (which accords with normal usage) dilatation means expansion beyond the norm. Claudio is speaking of the human spirit in its normal state before it is consigned by death to harsher regions. So "delighted" is the better reading and no emendation is required. Nor would I be surprised if in his choice of word Shake-Speare, like Bacon, had in mind that the human spirit delights in intellectual light.

Another verbal parallel is as follows:

Richard III 5.3.74  "alacrity of spirit"

Bacon: "alacrity of spirit" [Spedding 9.88]

Love's Labour's Lost 4.2.64-5  "A foolish extravagant spirit"
Hamlet 1.1.159  "[of the ghost of Hamlet's father] "The extravagant and erring spirit"

Bacon: "Such extravagant and strange spirits" [Speech on Love in Conference of Pleasure, p. 11]
           "Extravagant and strange spirit" [Essay 58]

"Extravagant" in these texts is from a Latin root and means "staying beyond proper bounds". Did anyone else associate spirits with all three of the above things - "delighted", "alacrity" and "extravagant" - or even perhaps with any of them?

end of (j) and of part 8

More Promus - 7-8 - Clean tricks; hidden truth

7.  Bacon's Promus entry 1391

"He will never do his tricks clean"

Troilus And Cressida  5.2.23-4

Cressida:   what would you have me do?

Thersites:  A juggling trick: to be secretly open.

Comment:  The Arden editor paraphrases Thersites's line as a "deception [to be] privately public (or some such impossibility)". Bacon's line and Shake-Speare's are deliberate and almost identical paradoxes - a trick is by definition dirty, and a juggling trick by definition secret.

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8. Bacon's Promus entry 1401

"It is not the first untruth i have heard reported. It is not the first truth I have heard denied"

Measure for Measure  5.1.68-70

           "Let your reason serve

To make the truth appear where it seems hid,

And hide the false [which] seems true”.

Comment:  This makes the same rather fine distinction as Bacon between falsehood and suppression of truth.

Parallel - Vice Graced by Constancy

First, Shake-Speare:

                        "For even to vice
They [women] are not constant, but are changing still;
One vice, but of a minute old, for one
Not half so old as that".

 Cymbeline 2.4.180-3

"It is virtuous to be constant in any undertaking".

Measure For Measure 3.2.215

Now, Bacon: "Constancy is the foundation on which virtues rest...Even vices derive a grace from constancy."
   De Augmentis

Comment:  The elevation of constancy as the foundation of virtues is a little odd. Odder still is the view, apparently shared by Shake-Speare, that constancy mitigates
vices. Note too the collocation of "even to vice" / "even vices".

Parallel - Laws as Nets; Gangrene laws

Note: some of this is also found in a Measure for Measure post (#7):

First, Shake-Speare:

"A fish hangs in the net, like a poor man's right in the law."
  Pericles 2.1.117-8

"We must not make a scarecrow of the law,
Setting it up to fear [frighten] the birds of prey,
And let it keep one shape till custom make it
Their perch, and not their terror".
  Measure For Measure 2.1.1-4

Now Bacon:
 "There are no worse snares than legal snares...they are as nets in the path".
  De Augmentis

"...purge out the multiplicity of the laws, clear the uncertainty of them, repeal those that are snaring"

Gray's Inn Revels

"...so new judgments avoid the former. The records reverent things, but like scarecrows".
Notes for a speech 1610

"Obsolete laws that are grown into disuse".
  De Augmentis

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, that are fit to be continued in practice and execution".
  Life, vi. p. 65

"For as an express statute is not regularly abrogated by disuse, it happens that from a contempt of such as are obsolete, the others also lose part of their authority, whence follows that torture of Mezentius whereby the living laws are killed in the embraces of the dead ones".
  De Augmentis

Shake-Speare again:
   "In time the rod
Becomes more mocked than feared; so our decrees,
Dead to infliction, to themselves are dead,
And liberty plucks justice by the nose".
  Measure for Measure 1.3. 26-28

Bacon: "Above all things a gangrene of the law is to be avoided"     [body metaphor applied to law]
  De Augmentis (because the law being once gangrened is no longer respected.)

Shake-Speare:

The same is true of the body:
    "The service of the foot
Being once gangrened, is not then respected
For what before it was"
  Coriolanus 3.1.305

"This fester'd joint cut off, the rest rests sound;          [same principle as applied to the general laws]
This let alone will all the rest confound".
  Richard II, 5.3.84-5

Cockburn comments: Thus both authors see legal obstacles as "nets". On several other occasions too Bacon describes laws as "snares" which is tantamount to calling them "nets". Both authors also see obsolete laws as "scarecrows", which like "gangrene laws" are "dead to infliction" and no longer respected. Bacon waged a long campaign for the repeal of obsolete laws, and in his speech note he meant the same as Shake-Speare, namely, that obsolete laws, however revered, in time lose their power to frighten. The "scarecrow" metaphor is a far from obvious one - in the whole of my time at the English Bar I never heard anyone describe obsolete laws as scarecrows.

Note: The reform of the law was as close to Bacon's heart as the reform of learning. He greatly admired the laws of England, saying 'the equallest in the world between prince and people', and all the richer for being 'mixed and compounded', like the English language, of the customs of so many nations. But England had been rapidly developing from a simple agrarian community into an increasingly complex mercantile society, and the law had not followed suit. There had been for over a century, wrote Bacon, a 'continual heaping of laws without digesting them', and such an accumulation of 'cross and intricate' statutes on the same subject that 'the certainty of the law was lost in the heap'. How could the citizen be made 'more and more happy' - which was 'the end and scope of laws' - when left in so much uncertainty about their application?

  Francis Bacon: The History of a Character Assassination, Nieves Mathews 1996

Parallel - Power and Place

First, Shake-Speare:


Escalus:                and it concerns me
              To look into the bottom of my place.
              A power I have but of what strength and nature
              I am not yet instructed.
Measure for Measure 1.1.77-80


also,      "My absolute power and place here in Vienna,  "
Measure for Measure 1.3.13


             "My spirit and my place have in them power, "
Othello  1.1.104


now Bacon: "Good thoughts ... are little better than good dreams, except they be put in act. And that cannot be without power and place."
Essay on Great Place (Spedding 6(2).399)


Comment:  This parallel is only worthwhile if the phrase was rare (which we do not know). Ben Jonson uses "place or power" in his Sejanus Act 5.612. It may have been the standard working of a commission.

Parallel - Skinned over

Shake-Speare:

"It will but skin and film the ulcerous place,
Whiles rank corruption, mining all within,
Infects unseen."
  Hamlet 3.4.148-150

Shake-Speare:
"Because authority, though it err like others,
Hath yet a kind of medicine in itself
That skins the vice o' th' top".
  Measure For Measure 2.2.135-7

Bacon: "[Spain] having lately with much difficulty, rather smoothed and skinned over than healed and extinguished the commotion of Aragon".
  Observations on a Libel

"We are here to search the wounds of the realm and not to skin them over".
  Speech on Subsidies

Comment: No other instance has been cited of this use of the verb "skin" or "skin over" in relation to a metaphorical wound.

Measure for Measure 1 - Melsome

Some Shake-Speare / Bacon parallels in Measure for Measure (1)

This series Shakespeare-Bacon parallels derives from Dr. William Stanley Melsome’s book The Bacon-Shakespeare Anatomy, (1945). The parallels selected are just the ones most easily recognized and don’t really do the comparison justice. Melsome goes into much greater depth showing how Bacon’s philosophy permeates the Shakespeare works.

There is a letter extant from Sir Tobie Mathew to Francis Bacon, the date on which has been erased, acknowledging receipt of some work which is un-named. In this letter Mathew writes:

“I will return you weight for weight but measure for measure.”

Knowing as we do that Bacon frequently submitted his works in manuscript to Mathew before publication Baconians think it’s possible that Bacon had Mathews review this new play.

(Line numberings in the Shakespeare quotes are only approximate)

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Shake-Speare:

Duke. “Since I am put to know that your own science Exceeds, in that, the lists of all advice My strength can give you; then no more remains But that to your sufficiency - as your worth is able - And let them work”.

Measure for Measure,1.1.5

(The Duke speaking to Escalus acknowledges his great knowledge of law, and so passes over any advice on it.)

Bacon:

“Considering that I write to a king that is a master of this Science, and is so well assisted, I think it decent to pass over this part in silence.”

Advancement of Learning, 2.23.48

(Bacon, writing to King James also on the subject of law, passes over a discussion of it after acknowledging the king’s mastery of it.)

Measure for Measure 2

Some Shake-Speare / Bacon parallels in Measure for Measure (2)

Shake-Speare:

Duke. “The nature of our people, Our city's institutions, and the terms for common justice, y'are as pregnant in as art and practice hath enriched any that we remember”.

Measure for Measure, 1.1.9

(Here, Escalus is chosen as commissioner because he knows the nature of the people—as Bacon prescribed).

Bacon:

“Unto princes and states, and especially towards wise senates and councils, the natures and dispositions of the people…ought to be…in great part clear and transparent.” 

Advancement of Learning, 2.23.48

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Shake-Speare:

Duke. “Thyself and thy belongings are not thine own so proper as to waste thyself upon thy virtues, they on thee”.

Measure for Measure,1.1.29

“Heaven doth with us as we with torches do, not light them for themselves. For if our virtues did not go forth of us, ‘twere all alike as if we had them not”.

Measure for Measure, 1.1.32

(The Duke tells Angelo that his virtues should not be wasted, but should serve society.)

See also King John 5.1.45  "Be great in act, as you have been in thought"

See also Hamlet, 4.4.36-39  "Sure He that made us ... gave us not that capability and godlike reason to fust in us unused."

See also Merchant of Venice, 5.1.90  "How far that little candel throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world."

Bacon:

“The king’s most excellent majesty …hath thought fit not to leave you these talents to be employed upon yourself only, but to call you to serve himself and his people.”

(Life and Letters, Spedding et al., 6. p. 201)

“I do think every man in his particular bound to help the commonwealth the best he may.”

Life and Letters, Spedding et al., 3. P.19

“For what is your virtue if you show it not”? Life and Letters, 1. P. 333

Also, the Bibilical verse: Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light to all that are in the house.” (Matthew 5.15)

Measure for Measure 3

Some Shake-Speare / Bacon parallels in Measure for Measure (3)

Shake-Speare:

Duke: “Nor Nature never lends the smallest scruple of her excellence but, like a thrifty goddess, she determines herself the glory of a creditor, both thanks and use”.

Measure for Measure,1.1.36

Bacon:

“. . .everything in nature seems not made for itself, but for man”. . .”for all things are made subservient to man, and he receives use and benefit from them all”.

Bacon’s Prometheus

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Shake-Speare:

Duke (a judge) to Angelo (another judge): “Mortality and mercy in Vienna Live in thy tongue and heart”. 

Measure for Measure1.1.44

Bacon:

Bacon (a judge) addressing the judges in the Star Chamber in 1617:

“Do good to the people, love them and give them justice.” 

Life and Letters, 6.p. 211

Measure for Measure 4 - Place, Bottom

Some Shake-Speare / Bacon parallels in Measure for Measure (4)

Shake-Speare:

Duke: “I love the people, But do not like to stage me to their eyes; Though it do well, I do not relish well their loud applause and aves vehement; Nor do I think the man of safe discretion that does affect it”.

Measure for Measure,1.1.67

Bacon:

“I wish you to take heed of popularity. A popular judge is a deformed thing, and plaudites are fitter for players than for magistrates.”

Life and Letters, 6.p 211

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Shake-Speare:

Escalus to Angelo: “It concerns me to look into the BOTTOM of my PLACE, A power I have, but of what strength and nature I am not yet instructed”.

Measure for Measure,1.1.78

Angelo replying to Escalus: “Tis so with me. Let us withdraw together and we may soon our satisfaction have TOUCHING that point”.

Measure for Measure, 1.1.81-83

Bacon:

“. . .he complained to my Lord Chancellor of the troublesomeness of his PLACE;”

Works 7.p.170  (Spedding et al.)

“Embrace and invite helps and advices TOUCHING the execution of thy PLACE”.

Essay “Of Great Place”

Common word usage - BOTTOM.

“the BOTTOM of his danger” Bacon’s History of Henry VII.

“the BOTTOM of your business” Bacon in Works 7. p.170 (Spedding et al.)

See also Troilus and Cressida 2.2.17  "To th' bottom of the worst"

Titus Andronicus 2.3.262  "Now to the bottom ..."

All’s Well That Ends Well 3.7.29  "The bottom of your purpose:

Romeo and Juliet 3.5.198    "That sees into the bottom of my grief?"

Measure for Measure 5

Some Shake-Speare / Bacon parallels in Measure for Measure (5)

Shake-Speare:

Claudio:  “. . .all the enrolled penalties which have, like unscour'd armour, hung by th' wall so long that nineteen zodiacs have gone round and none of them been worn;”   . . . “Now puts the drowsy and neglected act freshly on me.”

Measure for Measure, 1.2.165-170

Bacon:

“Obsolete laws that are grown into disuse.” De Augmentis 7.3.57

“There are a number of ensnaring penal laws, which lie upon the subject; and if in bad times they should be awaked and put in execution, would grind them to powder.”

Life and Letters, 6. P.65

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Shake-Speare:

Claudio: Fellow, why dost thou show me thus to the world?”

Provost: “I do it not in evil disposition, But from Lord Angelo by special charge”.

Measure for Measure, 1.2.115

(Claudio is shamed and scandalized above and beyond the penalty of death.)

Bacon:

“And let there be, besides penalty, a note of infamy or punishment by way of admonishing others, and chastising delinquents, as it were, by putting them to the blush with shame and scandal”.

Aphorism 40

Measure for Measure 6 - Power and Place, Laws that Sleep/slip

Some Shake-Speare / Bacon parallels in Measure for Measure (6)

Shake-Speare:

Duke: I have deliver'd to Lord Angelo,. . . My absolute power and place here in Vienna.

Measure for Measure,1.3.13

Bacon:

“. . .good thoughts are little better than good dreams except they be put in act, and that cannot be without power and place”.

Essay “Of Great Place”

Note: See the Parallel on "Power and Place" for further elaboration on this connection.

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Shake-Speare:

Duke to Friar:  “We have strict statutes and most biting laws, The needful bits and curbs to headstrong steeds, which for this fourteen years we have let slip (sleep)”;

Measure for Measure, 1.3.19

(Note: modern editions keep ‘slip’ which we think is wrong and should be ‘sleep’, not just because Bacon also mentioned sleeping laws, but because of previous references to laws in the play as “drowsy and neglected” and as having “hung by th’ wall so long that nineteen zodiacs have gone round and none of them been worn”).

Bacon:

“Nevertheless I would not have you headstrong, but heartstrong.”

Life and Letters, 7. P. 104

The Duke will be testing to see whether Mercy seasons Justice. He’s also curious to see if power will change Angelo’s natural disposition.

“Therefore let penal laws, if they have been sleepers of long, or if they be grown unfit for the present time, be by wise judges confined . . .”

Essay “Of Judicature”

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

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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.)

Measure for Measure 8

Some Shake-Speare / Bacon parallels in Measure for Measure (8)

Shake-Speare:

Duke:  “ . . ;for we bid this be done, when evil deeds have their permissive pass and not the punishment”.

Measure for Measure, 1.3.37

“Tis necessary he should die;” for “Nothing emboldens sin so much as mercy.”

Timon of Athens, 3.5.3

Bacon:

“He who shows mercy to his enemy  denies it to himself”.

De Augmentis, 6.3. Antitheta

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Shake-Speare:

Lucio: “He (Angelo) ... hath pick’d out an act under whose heavy sense your brother’s life fall into forfeit”.

Measure for Measure, 1.4.62-64

Angelo: “Your brother is a forfeit of the law”. Measure, 2.2.71

Angelo: “It is the law not I condemns your brother”. Measure, 2.2.80

Isabel: “My brother had but justice In that he did the thing for which he died”. Measure, 5.1.445

(Why does Angelo make the above statements to Isabel? Surely to show her that his judgment was contained within the compass of the law.)

Bacon:

“Nor should a man lose his life without first knowing that he had forfeited it”.

Aphorism 39

Aphorism 46: “As that law is the best which leaves least to the discretion of the judge, so is that judge the best who leaves least to himself”. (De Augmentis, 8.3. and Aristotle, Rhet. I. I.)

Bacon: “The judge as long as his judgment was contained within the compass of the law was excused; the subject knew by what law he was to govern himself, and his actions; nothing was left to the judge’s discretion (Life and Letters, 3. Pp. 331-2)

Measure for Measure 9 - Scarecrow, Condemn the Fault

Some Shake-Speare / Bacon parallels in Measure for Measure (9)

Shake-Speare:

Angelo: “We must not make a scarecrow of the law,. .. .” 

Measure for Measure, 2.1.1

Bacon:

“As posteriores leges priores abrogant, so new judgements avoid the former. The records reverent things, but like scarecrows.” 

(Life and Letters, 4. P. 200)

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Shake-Speare:

Isabella: “I have a brother is condemned to die: I do beseech you, let it be his fault and not my brother.

Angelo: “Condemn the fault and not the actor of it”!

Measure for Measure 2.2.34-37

Bacon:

“…and to cast a severe eye upon the example, but a merciful eye upon the person”.

(Bacon Essay OF JUDICATURE)

“Such is our inclination to clemency and moderation as we are willing rather to correct the fault than to deal with the persons whom it may concern”.

(Life and Letters 3. P. 387)

“…because the example is more than the man.” (Life and Letters, 5.p.160)

Measure for Measure 10

Some Shake-Speare / Bacon parallels in Measure for Measure (10)

Shake-Speare:

“Some (are) condemned for a fault alone”.

Measure for Measure, 2.1.40

Bacon:

“. . . in men of eminent virtue, their smallest faults (or defects) are readily seen, talked of, and severely censured, which in ordinary men would be either entirely unnoticed or readily excused”.

Bacon on Ecclesiastes X.I.

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Shake-Speare:

Isabella: “O just but severe law”!

Measure for Measure, 2.2.41

Bacon:

“There are some laws fit to be retained but their penalty too great.”

(Life and Letters, 6. p.65)

“And it is ever a rule that any over-great penalty (besides the acerbity of it) deads the execution of the law”.

(Life and Letters, 6, p. 65)

Measure for Measure 11

Some Shake-Speare / Bacon parallels in Measure for Measure (11)

Shake-Speare:

Angelo: “It is the law, not I condemns your brother”.

Measure for Measure, 2.2.80

(He is only enforcing the law, not interpreting it.)

Bacon:

“And it is a true maxim, that the best law leaves least to the breast of the judge; which is effected by certainty”.

De Augmentis, 8.3.8

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Shake-Speare:

Isabella: “Go to your bosom, knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know that's like my brother's fault”. 

Measure for Measure 2.2.136

Escalus: “Whether you had not sometimes in your life”.

Measure, 2.1.14

Isabel: “If he had been as you, and you as he, you would have slipped like him; but he, like you, would not have been so stern”.

Measure, 2.2.64

Isabel: “How would you be, if he, which is the top of judgment, should but judge you as you are? Oh! Think on that, and mercy then will breathe within your lips, like a man new made”.

Measure, 2.2.75

Also Hamlet:

“Come, come, and sit you down. You shall not budge. You go not till I set you up a glass where you may see the inmost part of you”.

Hamlet  3.4.19

Bacon:

“That oracle ‘Know thyself’ is not only a rule of universal wisdom, but has also a principle place in politics”

De Augmentis, 8.2

“And St. James excellently observes of mankind, that ‘he who views his face in a glass, instantly forgets what manner of man he was.’ Whence we had need be often looking”.

De Augmentis, 8. 2

Measure for Measure 12

Some Shake-Speare / Bacon parallels in Measure for Measure (12)

Shake-Speare:

Isabel: “Yet show some pity”.

Angelo: “I show it most of all when I show justice; for then I pity those I do not know, which a dismissed offence would after gall, and do him right that, answering one foul wrong, lives not to act another.”

Measure for Measure, 2.2.100

York: ”If thou do pardon whosoever pray,

    More sins for this forgiveness prosper may.

    This fest'red joint cut off, the rest rest sound;

    This let alone will all the rest confound.”

Richard II, 5.3,82

Bacon:

“But lest this principle might seem to include all kinds of compassion, Solomon wisely adds that ‘the mercies of the wicked are cruel.’ Such is the sparing to use the sword of justice upon wicked and guilty men; for this kind of mercy is the greatest of all cruelties, as cruelty affects but particular persons whilst impunity lets loose the whole army of evil doers and drives them upon the innocent.”

De Augmentis, 8.2, Parabola 14

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Shake-Speare:

Angelo:“Those many had not dar’d to do that evil if the first that did the edict infringe had answered for his deed”.

Measure for Measure, 2.2.91

Bacon:

“It is the part of discipline to punish the first buddings of all grave offences”.

De Augmentis, 8.3.44

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Shake-Speare:

Escalus: “Mercy is not itself, that oft looks so; Pardon is still the nurse of second woe”.

Measure for Measure, 2.1.270

Bacon:

“No virtue is so often delinquent as clemency”.

Exempla Antihetorum