As
mentioned in the previous post, Bacon has close connections to a primary source
for the play Measure for Measure. Recently I came across another one.
In Act 2, scene 1 (around line 40 depending on the edition) we find this passage
by Escalus:
“Well,
heaven forgive him, and forgive us all.
Some
rise by sin, and some by virtue fall:
Some
run from brakes of ice, and answer none,
And
some condemned for a fault alone.”
There
isn’t a clear interpretation on “Some run from brakes of ice”. In the 1997
Folger edition, the full note on page 215 says this:
‘Many
changes have been proposed in editorial attempts to give meaning to these
words. The most frequent alterations are from “ice” to “vice” and from “brakes”
to “breaks”. None of the changes helps significantly. The clause stands in
parallel with “some rise by sin” (line 42) and in contrast to “some condemned
for a fault alone” (line 44). It may therefore be meant to suggest “some escape
punishment for major crimes,” though no emendation thus far proposed captures
that meaning . Editors have pointed out an interesting parallel with Claudio’s
description of hell as a “thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice” (3.1.138) and
have quoted The Three Voyages of William Barents to the Arctic Regions, (1594,
1595, 1596): “the ice whereon we lay . . . brake and ran one
peece upon another . . .the ice brake under our owne feet.” Other
editors have noted that brakes could be “tortures, traps, or thorny
hedges,” as well as “engines of punishment,” “snaffles” or “sharp bits.”
An
online edition of the play has even changed “ice” to “office”:
Considering
that in the First Folio the word is spelt “Ice” with a capital letter “I” it
hardly seems reasonable that the intent was the word “office”. But some editors
may be a bit desperate to move away from the word “Ice”, especially the kind
that ‘brakes’ and that sometimes cause some to run away from. And what in the
heck would William of Stratford be doing reading an expeditionary treatise on
the arctic anyhow? Or maybe he just overheard talk of this voyage in one
of his visits to the local pub, just as where he had also became an expert in
law in a few short years!
Barents’
book is also referenced in Twelfth Night,
3.2 where Fabian mentions “..an icicle on a Dutchman’s beard…”. And then a
little later in the same scene does Shakespeare refer to “…more lines than is
in the new map with the augmentation of the Indies” which is thought to refer
to a map made by Emmeric Mollineux in 1599 for the purchasers of Hakluyt’s Voyages, “showing more of the East
Indies, including Japan, than had ever been mapped before.”
Well,
it happens that Bacon is known to have read The Three Voyages of William
Barents to the Arctic Regions, (1594, 1595, 1596). He refers to it
in his Novum Organum, in which he mentions “in Nova Zembla” and
the accompanying note says:
“This
of course refers to Barentz’s expedition in search of a North-East passage. He
passed the winter of 1596-7 at Nova Zembla.”
If
you look for the post earlier in this section (Othello: The Bosphorus)
you’ll also see that “Shakespeare” (the author) also seems to have read The Relation of a Journey begun an. Dom.
iio, in four books (1615) by George Sandys which describes his travels
to the Eastern Mediterranean. Shakespeare mentions both the “Ponticke Sea” and
the “Proponticke” within four lines of each other in Act 3, scene 3:
or
see page 326 in the First Folio Tragedies.
Here
is the Bacon reference:
So,
I vote for keeping the original as is: “Some run from brakes of Ice”.
