More Promus - 10-12

10. From Bacon's Promus (entry 1430)

"It may well be the last for it hath lasted well"

Then in Love's Labour's Lost 1.1.159 we find:

"I am the last that will last keep his oath".

Comment:  Exactly the same pun on "last" in sequence and "last" in duration.

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11.  From Bacon's Promus (entry 1431)

"Those are great with you that are great by you"

Then in I Henry IV, 1.3.10-13

"Our house, my sovereign liege, little deserves

The scourge of greatness to be used on it;

And that same greatness, too, which our own hands

Have holp to make so portly".

Comment:  The Promus entry means: "Those are oppressive towards you whom you yourself have raised to eminence". And this is exactly the complaint in Shake-Speare's lines.

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12.  Bacon's Promus (entry 634)

"to play to be prophet"

and then in King Lear 5.3.72

"Jesters do oft prove prophets".

Comment:  Both lines mean the same.

Parallel - Distribution of Money

Shake-Speare:

Here, take this purse...
So distribution should undo excess
And each man have enough.
  King Lear 4.1.63 & 69-70

Bacon:
Of great riches there is no real use, except it be in the distribution.
  Essay on Riches

Comment: The basic idea that wealth should be spread was common, but "distribution" make this a close parallel.

Parallel - Miracles in Adversity

Shake-Speare:

Kent:  Nothing almost sees miracles

          But misery
  King Lear 2.2.163

Bacon:
  It was an high speech of Seneca..."That the good things which belong to prosperity are to be wished; but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired. Bona rerum secundarum, optabilia; adversarum, mirabilia. Certainly if miracles be the command over nature, they appear most in adversity.
  Essay on Adversity

  He [Christ] restored motion to the lame, light to the blind, speech to the dumb, health to the sick, cleanness to the lepers, sound mind to them that were possessed of devils, life to the dead. There was no miracle of judgment but all of mercy and all upon the human body. For with reference to riches he designed not to work any miracles except that one about giving tribute to Caesar.
  Meditationes Sacrae

Comment:  The Arden editor paraphrases the Lear quote as "for, when we are in despair, any relief seems miraculous (Kittredge)". But Bacon clearly meant, not that miracles seem greatest in adversity, but that they are wrought most often in adversity. So it is a reasonable surmise that Shake-Speare meant the same. I think Capell got it right when he wrote of the Lear text: "I suspect that 'see' is used in the sense of experience, a sense it often bears. In that case the meaning may be 'miracles are hardly ever wrought but on behalf of the wretched' ".

Father as ward to son - Lear

Shake-Speare:

Edmund:  [To Gloucester] I have heard him [Edgar] oft maintain it to be fit that
sons at perfect age and father declined, the father should be as a ward to the son,
and the son manage his revenue.

King Lear 1.2.72-75

Bacon:  Suppose a nation where the custom were that after full age the sons should expulse their fathers and mothers out of their possessions and put them to their pension. [Such cases would be] total violations and perversions of the laws of nature and nations.
  Advertisement touching a Holy War

Comment: This is part of the same scene as above. The Arden editor cites two extracts from other authors castigating fathers for keeping their sons out of the father's money. But, unlike the Bacon and Shake-Speare passages, they do not contain, or at least do not express, the idea of fathers being put in ward to their sons. Further, Bacon takes the parents' side in the controversy; and so does Shake-Speare, if his views are reflected in Gloucester's dismissal of the idea as "unnatural", "detested", "brutish", and  "abominable".

Edmund's Letter - King Lear

Shake-Speare:

Edmund, bastard son of Gloucester, is found by Gloucester with a letter in his hand. It is a letter he wants his father to see because it is adverse to his legitimate son Edgar. It purports to come from Edgar, describes Glousecter as an aged tyrant, and hints that Edgar and Edmund should murder Gloucester so that they can come into their inheritance. So with affected reluctance Edmund hands the letter over to his father.

King Lear 1.2.28-43

Bacon: Some procure themselves to be surprised at such times as it is like [likely] the party they work upon will suddenly come upon them; and to be found with a letter in their hand, to the end they may be apposed [questioned] of those things which of themselves they desire to utter.
  Essay on Cunning

Comment: So Edmund perpetrates the very ruse, a rare one, which Bacon describes.

Parallel - Pre-eminence and Power

First, Shake-Speare:

I do invest you jointly with my power,
Pre-eminence and all the large effects
That troop with majesty.
  King Lear 1.1.130-31

Next, Bacon: 

The crown was not a ceremony or garland, but consisted of
pre-eminence and power.
  Declaration of the Treasons of the Earl of Essex

Parallel - Sustaining Corn

In his Natural History Bacon wrote:

"There be certain cornflowers, which come seldom or never in other places unless they be set, but only amongst corn; as the blue-bottle, a kind of yellow marigold, wild poppy and fumitory...So as it should seem to be the corn that qualifyeth the earth and prepareth it for their growth".

Again, in his Novum Organum:

"If it be said that there is consent and friendship between corn and corncockle or the wild poppy, because these herbs hardly come up except in ploughed fields; it should be said that there is enmity between them, because the poppy and corn-cockle are emitted and generated from the juice of the earth which the corn has left and rejected; so that sowing the ground with corn prepares it for their growth".

Now compare King Lear 4.4.1-6

Cordelia (of her father):
  Alack! 'Tis he: why he was met even now
  As mad as the vex'd sea; singing aloud;
  Crowned with rank fumiter, and furrow weeds,
  With Hardock, hemlocks, nettles, cuckoo-flowers,
  Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow
  In our sustaining corn.

Comment: Editors have read "sustaining" as a platitudinous reference to the fact that  corn sustains human life. But that has no relevance in the context; nor in any of his other 35 references to corn does Shake-speare ever preface "corn" with "sustaining" or any similar adjective. There was no need even to mention that the weeds grew among corn since, if he had decked his hair with any weeds, that would equally have been evidence of madness. So why does Shake-Speare put the weeds among corn? The likely answer is that by "sustaining" he meant, as least primarily, that the corn sustains the furrow weeds, as in the Bacon passages. "Our sustaining corn" need not imply "corn which sustains us"; the corn was ours in any event because it was cultivated, not wild. It is true that this effect of corn upon weeds would seem to have no relevance in the context either. But it is just possible that Shake-Speare saw Lear as corn which sustained idle weeds - that is, his two ungrateful daughters. Even if this was not on his mind, it was his wont to make interesting comments on nature, en passant - and corn's role in sustaining the furrow weeds is far more interesting that its sustenance of human life.

Shake-Speare could not have borrowed from Bacon whose two works in question were not published till years later. And Bacon could not have found in the play (first published in 1608) his theory as to why corn sustains furrow weeds.