Parallel - Sleeping and Dead as Lifeless Pictures

Shake-Speare:
               ...poor Ophelia
Divided from herself and her fair judgment
Without the which we are pictures or mere beasts;"
  Hamlet 4.5.85-7

"He is a proper man's picture, but alas! who can converse with a dumb-show"?
  The Merchant of Venice  1.2.67-69

" .... the sleeping and the dead are but as pictures;"
  Macbeth 2.2.53-4

"[of unresponsive Adonis] "Fie, lifeless picture, cold and senseless stone,"
   Venus and Adonis  211

Bacon:  "Words are but images of matter and except they have life and reason,  to fall in love with them is all one to fall in love with a picture".
   The Advancement of Learning

Comment:  Thus Bacon and Shake-Speare both describe someone or something devoid of animation or reason as a "picture".

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)

Parallel - Visage as a Standing Pool or Pond

Shakespeare:

"There are a sort of men whose visages
Do cream and mantle like a standing pond,"
The Merchant of Venice 1.1.88-89

Bacon: "Will you be a standing pool that spendeth and choketh his spring within itself?"
   Gesta Grayorum  (Spedding 8.339)

Cockburn comment: In these excerpts a man or his face is likened to a "standing pool" or a "standing pond" - a far from obvious metaphor.

Greater Light drowns lesser light ; Sounds are sweeter at night

From The Merchant of Venice  5.1.89-101

Portia:  That light we see is burning in my hall:
            How far that little candle throws his beams!
             So shines a good deed in a naught world.
Nerissa: When the moon shone we did not see the candle.
Portia:    So doth the greater glory dim the less,-
             A substitute shines brightly as a king
             Until a king be by, and then his state
             Empties itself, as doth an inland brook
             Into the main waters: - music - hark!
Nerissa: It is your music (madam) of the house.
Portia:   Nothing is good (I see) without respect, -
             Methinks it sounds much sweeter than by day.
Nerissa: Silence bestows that virtue on it madam.

As J.M. Robertson commented in his The Baconian Heresy p. 435: "Shakespeare frequently introduces the idea of reactions and relations between the greater and the less, the greater 'hiding' or overshadowing or obscuring or absorbing the other, as in the case of lights, griefs, maladies, or sea or river". One illustration of this is afforded by L1.92-97 above. Bacon makes the same two points in his A Brief Discourse touching the Happy Union of the Kingdom of England and Scotland (1603):

"The second condition [of perfect mixture] is that the greater draws the less. So we see when two lights meet, the greater doth darken and drown the less. And when a smaller river runs into a greater, it loseth both the name and stream."

The second of these two observations was commonplace; the first somewhat less so. What is striking about this parallel is that Shake-Speare and Bacon use the same two "the less in the greater" phenomena in conjunction and in the same order. J.M Robertson was a little troubled by this, and to explain it he suggested (p. 435) that both authors may have copied an earlier source, or that Bacon may have watched or read the play. But there is no evidence of an earlier source. And would Bacon, years later when he made his comment of general application, have remembered and borrowed from a particular application of it in the play? Besides, Bacon is likely to have formed his views on such matters long before the play was published in 1600.

Now look at L1.100-1 and compare Bacon's Natural History
"Sounds are meliorated by the intension [intensification] of the sense, where the common sense is collected most to the particular sense of hearing, and the sight suspended; and therefore sounds are sweeter as well as greater in the night than in the day."

That sounds seem greater at night was of course a commonplace, and is expressed by Shake-Speare, together with the reason Bacon gives for it, in A Midsummer Night's Dream 3.2.177-8:

Dark night, that from the eye his function takes
The ear more quick of apprehension makes,
Wherein it doth impair the seeing sense,
It pays the hearing double recompense.

Compare to Bacon's "The apprehension of the eye is quicker than that of the ear"
--Natural History

However, the notion that sounds seem sweeter at night was surely not a commonplace; yet is is voiced by both authors. And they probably agree as to the reason for it. Just as Bacon in his Natural History says: "As for the night, it is true also that the general silence helpeth". He is speaking of sounds seeming greater at night, but he probably regarded the general silence as one reason for their seeming sweeter as well. It was chronologically impossible for Shake-Speare to have borrowed from Bacon, though Bacon could have borrowed from the play.