The Bacon and Shakespeare Theory of Spirits - 2

The Bacon and Shake-Speare Theory of "spirits"

Part 2 of 9

(a) the emphasis on the motions of the spirits; and that joy is caused by the spirits coming into the outward parts.

First, Shake-Speare:

"Forth at your eyes your spirits wildly peep,"
    Hamlet 3.4.119

   "Fie, fie upon her!
There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip -
Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out
At every joint and motive of her body."
    Troilus and Cressida 4.5.56-7

The idea of the spirits peeping out from the eyes or other parts of the body seems a quaint one. But Bacon's theory explains it. In his Natural History he writes:

"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. We know it hath been seen that excessive sudden joy hath caused present death, while the spirits did spread so much as they could not retire again".

See also his History of Life and Death:

"The vital spirit has a special abhorrence of leaving the body...it may perhaps rush to the extremities of the body to meet something that it loves".

And his De Augmentis:

"For every passion of the more vehement kind produces motions in the eyes and indeed in the whole countenance and gesture, which are uncomely, unsettled, skipping and deformed".

So in the first of these Bacon passages we have express reference to the spirits coming forth into the outward parts. He is speaking of this as the cause of the outward manifestations of joy, but presumably he would have given the same explanation of outward passions generally - the De Augmentis passage implies this. And note that both authors speak of spirits coming "forth". Bacon also couples spirits and "forth" in other passages, as in his Natural History "It has been noted also that it is most dangerous when an envious eye is cast upon persons in glory and triumph and joy, the reason whereof is for that at such times the spirits come forth most into the outward parts ..."; and in Spedding 5.224 "if moreover it [the spirit] be not much excited by the external air to come forth"; and "do not excite them [the spirits] too much to go forth".

Did other writers make this verbal collocation? Compare too "motive" with "motions", though this time Bacon uses the latter word of the body's motions, not of the spirits responsible for them.

Death due to sudden joy was a commonplace, but features in Shake-Speare in Pericles 5.1.191-4:

"Give me a gash, put me to present pain
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me
O'erbear the shores of my mortality
And drown me with their sweetness".

end of (a) - part 2 of 9

Parallel - Motes and Shadows

First, Shake-Speare:

In the Prologue to Act 4.4, Gower, urging the audience to follow the movements of the play's characters, says:

"Like motes and shadows see them move awhile;"
Pericles 4.4.21

Comment: Editors show no sign of understanding why Shake-Speare couples motes (specks of dust in a sunbeam) with shadows. But a Bacon passage explains it. In his Natural History he wrote:

Bacon: "The utmost parts of the shadows seem ever to tremble. The cause is for that the little motes do ever stir, though there be no wind, and therefore those moving in the meeting of light and shadow, from the light to the shadow and from the shadow to the light, do show the shadow to move because the medium moveth."

Comment: A most telling parallel. Shake-speare could not have borrowed from Bacon whose Natural History was not published till years later. And Bacon could not have found in the play his theory as to why shadows tremble.

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