More Promus - 1 - Poisonous minerals

Here is another short series of parallel ideas and phrases between Shake-Speare and Bacon. These Bacon writings are from his Promus notebook, the same from which the posts on Romeo and Juliet came from. The distinction that these Bacon entries have is that they all seem to have been devised by himself, rather than jotted down from another source.

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1.  from Bacon's Promus (entry 81) (and repeated in entry 1403).

"Mineral wits strong poison if they be not corrected".

Now Shake-Speare:

Othello 2.1.290-2 & 3.3.330-4

Iago:  For that I do suspect the lustful Moor

         Hath leap'd into my seat, the thought whereof

         Doth like a poisonous mineral gnaw my inwards

..............................

         The Moor already changes with my poison;

         Dangerous conceits are in their nature poisons

         Which at the first are scarce found to distaste

         But with a little act upon the blood,

         Burn like the mines of sulphur

Comment:  I think Bacon meant the same as Iago; namely, that if you plant a disturbing thought in someone's mind, it will undermine him like a mineral poison. Bacon's "wits" must mean "thoughts".

More Promus - 2-4 - Repartee

2. Bacon's Promus entry 198

"Hear me out. [As repartee] You were never in [i.e. "you were never saying anything pertinent"]

now from Shake-Speare:

Love's Labour's Lost 4.1.136:

"And if my hand be out [at archery], then belike your hand is in [with Rosaline].

Comment:  The young courtiers are engaging in banter and double meanings about Rosaline. The Promus entry is one of a number of pieces of repartee devised by Bacon. In this one A says "Hear me out", and B snaps back "You were never in". The Shake-Speare line is likewise repartee based on "in" and "out", though in a different context. This is quoted along with two more in the next two examples of additional repartee by Bacon to show how similar they are in style to Shake-Speare's repartee. Bacon could not have used such repartee in his prose works - only in private conversation and / or in plays.

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3. Bacon's Promus entry 200

"You go from the matter [As repartee] but it was to follow you [i.e. in effect "It was you who go from the matter"]

Then in Shake-Speare's All's Well That Ends Well 2.1.98

"Now, fair one, does your business follow us?  [i.e. what is your business?"]

Comment:  These references to "the matter" or "business" "following" a person seem odd terminology in their contexts.

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2. Bacon's Promus entry 204

"You take more than is granted [As repartee] You grant less than is proved".

now from Shake-Speare: Richard II, 3.3.15-7

Bolingbroke:   Mistake not uncle, further than you should.

York:                 Take not good cousin, further than you should,

                           Lest you mistake

and from The Tempest, 2.1.20-1

Gonzalo:    You have spoken truer than you purpos'd.

Sebastian:  You have taken it wiselier than I meant you should.

Comment: Very similar types of repartee.

More Promus - 5-6 - Ice boys; Ignorance

5. Bacon's Promus entry 828

"Puer glaciem"   "A boy [playing with] ice"; [from Adagia]

All's Well That Ends Well  2.3.93

"These boys are boys of ice; they'll none have her".

Comment:  According to Mrs. Pott, puer glaciem was "said of those who, though they cannot keep a certain thing, are unwilling to part with it";  e.g. boys who are reluctant to come in from the ice.  It looks as though Shake-Speare had the Latin tag in mind, but here makes it mean that they are frigid boys with no interest in Helena.  Thus he ironically inverts the usual meaning - instead of the boys wanting something, they do not want it.  Editors seem to have missed this Adagia echo.

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6.  Bacon's Promus entry 948    [I think these had been posted earlier but they're a good reread]

"Better unborn than untaught"  [from Heywood's Proverbs L.603]

2 Henry VI, 4.2.161

          "O gross and miserable ignorance!"

and 4.7.70-1

          "ignorance is the curse of God;

Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven,"

Love's Labour's Lost  4.2.23

         "O! thou monster Ignorance"

King John 4.2.59

          "Barbarous ignorance"

Twelfth Night  4.2.43-4

          "There is no darkness but ignorance"

Troilus And Cressida  2.3.28-9

          "The common curse of mankind, folly and ignorance"

Othello  3.3.410-11

           "....and fools as gross

As ignorance made drunk"

Comment: There are many other statements in Bacon's works on the supreme importance of knowledge. It was his passionate and life-long creed. And Shake-Speare seems to have shared it, probably more than other Elizabethan playwrights.

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.

More Promus - 9 - Remover to remove - Sonnet 116

9. From Bacon's Promus (entry 1422)

(as it was found - not counting the quote marks)

"Removing  (Remuant"

Then we find in Shake-Speare's Sonnet 116:

            "....love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove".

Comment:  In Bacon's Promus entry "Removing" means "changing"; and "Remuant" was a French word meaning "restless", and Bacon evidently Englished it as "removing" which thus means the same. This explains the Sonnet's line "Or bends with the remover to remove", which thus means "Or changes when it finds some change in the loved one". The O.E.D. defines this meaning of "remover" as "One who changes his place, a restless or stirring person; rare". It cites only two instances. One is the Sonnet line. The other is Bacon's Essay on Fortune which says: "An hasty fortune maketh an Enterpriser and Remover (the French hath it better: Entreprenant or Remuant): but the exercised fortune maketh the able man". In short, it looks as though Bacon in his notebook may have coined the word "remover" in the sense in question, and then Shake-Speare used it in his Sonnet which was probably written about the same period, the mid 1590's. Even if "remover" in this sense was not unique to our two authors, it was certainly rare.

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.

Promus - 1 - Introduction

Parallels between Shake-Speare and Bacon's Promus

With this post I'm starting a series of what are called Promus parallels. The Promus was a kind of notebook for Francis Bacon in which he jotted down thoughts and phrases that could be of use to him later in his writings. There are about 1655 entries and they are all or nearly all in his handwriting, and include metaphors, similes, aphorisms, apothegms, turns of speech, proverbs, repartee, forms of compliment and single words. Their principal sources were Latin and Greek classics (Seneca, Horace, Virgil and Ovid), the Vulgate (the Latin Bible), a collection of English proverbs by John Heywood, and by Erasmus' Adagia. It includes many French, Spanish, and Italian proverbs plus some of Bacon's own invention. They are dated from about early December 1594 to late January 1596.

Cockburn estimates that about 600 of the 1655 entries have enough points of contact to a passage in the Shake-Speare plays and poems to count as parallels. That itself is significant especially since the Promus was all or nearly all compiled prior to the performance or publication of any of the Shake-Speare works, half of which were not published until the First Folio in 1623. Most of these parallels were Elizabethan commonplaces in that they were derived from sources which would have been available to many scholars or other playwrights. But one question is why Bacon and Shake-Speare use so many of the same commonplaces when there were many others available? Often only parts of a Promus entry are paralleled. And many parallel passages do not have the same meaning, or they mean the opposite. The relevant question though is whether the Shake-Speare passages look like offshoots from the Promus entries.

The Stratfordians do not question that this bulk of parallels exist. H.N. Gibson in his The Shakespeare Claimants, accepted that the proposition that the Promus entries occur profusely in the Shake-Speare plays "is substantially correct and would not be disputed by anyone". Similarly, E.A. Abbot conceded that the Promus contains "a very considerable similarity of phrase and thought between these two great authors". So the question, as with the non-Promus parallels, is how unique are these Promus Bacon/Shake-Speare parallels likely to be, and could they be the result of mutual borrowing?

As to mutual borrowing this is rejected for the following reasons:

1)  Shakspere would not have had access to Bacon's private notebook. 2) Only about a third of the Promus entries are in English. 3) None of the plays had been published until 1597 and probably only about 10 had been written and acted by early 1596. 4) If somehow Bacon had jotted notes either from a published or live play that he viewed one would expect these jottings to be bunched together in the Promus. But they are not grouped play by play. The parallel entries are instead widely scattered in the Promus for each Shake-Speare play they are found in. 5) If Bacon had borrowed something from Shake-Speare, one would have expected him to jot it down it its original form, not in a foreign language, and almost none of the parallel entries found in Shake-Speare are in the same Promus form. Many are in seed form only.

Bacon took nearly all of his English proverbs for his Promus from John Heywood, just as most of Shake-Speare's English proverbs are from Heywood. Other playwrights seem not to have relied so heavily on Heywood's proverbs. Only one Stratfordian seems to have attempted to study Bacon's Promus in detail (Charles Crawford in an article Collectanea Stratford on Avon 2nd Series (1907) and his attempt can best be described as sloppy (my summation of Cockburn's analysis).

The following Promus Bacon/Shake-Speare parallels will delve into more foreign language and grammatical analysis and so will not be as straightforward as many of the non-Promus parallels previously posted. But readers will see how challenging and interesting the authorship question can be.

end of Promus - Part 1

Promus - 2 - unbonneted

Parallels between Shake-Speare and Bacon's Promus

Part 2

This is a parallel which may explain a Shake-Speare text.

From Othello 1.2.21-4

Othello:               I fetch my life and being
          From men of royal siege, and my demerits [merits]
          May speak unbonneted to as proud a fortune
          As this that I have reached;

and from Bacon's Promus (entry 1538):

"Language de hauts bonnets ["Language of high bonnets"]

Comments: The Arden Othello editor notes on "unbonneted": "This must mean, in the context, 'without taking the bonnet off', i.e. 'on equal terms'". But it is difficult to make the adjective "unbonneted" mean "bonneted". The editor says "unbonneted" does not appear elsewhere in Shake-Speare, but in fact one finds it in Lear 3.1.13 where it is said of Lear "unbonneted he runs", which of course means "without his hat on". The Promus entry may explain Othello's reference to "unbonneted". Randle Cotgrave in his Dictionary of the French and English tongues (1611) translates the Promus phrase as: "An old wives tale; or a stale, obsolete or overworn language; a fashion of speaking that's old and quite out of fashion". So probably Othello meant: "My merits speak for themselves, without the need for formal or high-flown language". "Unbonneted" then relates to the type of language, not to whether he doffed his hat. The French phrase may have prompted Shake-Speare to use "unbonneted," a word he may have coined since till 1818 the O.E.D. (Old English Dictionary) gives no instance of it apart from the Lear text. In Coriolanus 2.2.25-8 he used "bonneted" to mean "doffed his hat to". There "bonneted" is the verb "bonnet", from the French verb "bonneter", with the meaning just stated. The O.E.D. gives no other instance of the verb "bonnet" till 1824. So Shake-Speare may have coined that verb too, from the French verb.

Promus - 3 - melancholy - crochets

Parallels between Shake-Speare and Bacon's Promus

(b) a second explanatory parallel

from Shake-Speare's The Merry Wives of Windsor 2.1.146-8

Ford:           I melancholy? I am not melancholy. Get you home, go.
Mrs. Ford:  Faith, thou hast some crochets in thy head now.

now from Bacon's Promus, (entry 1644):

"Il a beaucoup de grillons in la teste"   (a French proverb)

Comments: The Arden editor translates "crochets" as simply: "absurb ideas. The phrase is proverbial (Tilley C.843)".  But M.P. Tilley's A Dictionary of Proverbs gives examples of the English proverb from 1577-1670, none of which mention the element of melancholy.  However, the French proverb from Bacon's Promus, as translated by Cotgrave's Dictionary means: "He is in his dumps; his head is much troubled, full of crochets or of Proclamations".  So it looks as though Shake-Speare may have had in mind the French proverb and its accepted interpretation.

Promus - 4 - Brown Wench

Parallels between Shake-Speare and Bacon's Promus

(c) a third explanatory parallel

from Shake-Speare's King Henry VIII, 3.2.295-6

                 "When the brown wench
Lay kissing in your arms, Lord Cardinal [Wolsey],"

and from Bacon's Promus (entry 1522):

"Fille brunette gay et nette"

Comment: The Arden editor notes on "brown wench": "probably a slut or an ill-favoured girl". But Cotgrave's Dictionary of the French and English Tongues (1611) gives the full French proverb as "Fille brunette est de nature gaye & nette" and translates it as "A nut-brown girl is neat and blithe by nature". Such a girl might perhaps be a slut, but not ill-favoured. Nor would Cardinal Wolsey's wench have been ill-favoured - he could take his pick. So Shake-Speare's "brown wench" is probably the "fille brunette" of the French jingle Bacon paraphrases in his Promus.

Promus - 5 All places yield to him ere he sits down

Parallels between Shake-Speare and Bacon's Promus

(d) a fourth explanatory parallel

from Shake-Speare's Coriolanus 4.7.27-8
[Coriolanus is leading Volscians against the Romans]

Lieutenant:   [to Aufidius] Sir, I beseech you, think you he'll carry Rome?
Aufidius:      All places yield to him ere he sits down.                                 [Line 28]

from Bacon's Promus (entry 562):

"Romanus sedendo vincit"
["The Roman conquers by sitting down"; from Erasmus's Adagia 329].

Comment: The Arden editor comments on line 28: "i.e. they yield before he lays siege to them". But the Promus dictum (of which the editor seems unaware) is not specifically related to laying siege; it has a wider meaning, namely that a Roman conquers, not by rash exploits, but by patience and perseverance. Shake-Speare's source, North's translation of Plutarch's Lives, says that Coriolanus did lay siege to Roman cities (see the Arden edition p. 352 - "Then Martius [Coriolanus] did besiege their cities"). The true meaning of Line 28 is not that all places yielded to him without being besieged, but rather that he swept all before him without the need even to show patience and perseverance.

Promus - 7 - Folio 112

Parallels between Shake-Speare and Bacon's Promus

Parallels between Bacon's Promus and Romeo and Juliet - continued
(with special emphasis on Promus Folio 112) (A folio is a page in the Promus)

Part 2b

(Readers may want to print this out to more easily refer to it in later posts)
(To the right I'm citing the play the entry is paralleled with and leaving unparalleled entries intact here just for the sake of context)

Bacon's Promus of Formularies.
Folio 112

1189 good morow                                               (Romeo And Juliet)
1190 Good swear
1191 Good trauaile                                             (All's Well That Ends Well)
1192 good hast                                                   (Measure For Measure)
1193 good matens
1194 good betymes; bonum mane                       (1 Henry IV)
1195 bon iouyr. Bon iour; (bridgrome.)                  (Romeo And Juliet)
1196 good day to me & good morow to yow.         (Troilus And Cressida)
1197 i haue not sayd all my prayers till haue bid yow
        good morow.
1198 Late rysing fynding a bedde,                        (Romeo And Juliet)
1199 early risinge, summons to ryse                     (Romeo And Juliet)
1200 Diluculo surgere saluberrimum est                (Twelfth Night) 

1201 Surge puer mane sed noli surgere vane.
1202 Yow will not rise afore yor. betters                (Romeo And Juliet)
        (ye. sonne.
1203 Por mucho madrugar no amanece mas ayna.
1204 Qui a bon voisin a bon matin                         (Romeo And Juliet)
        (lodged next;
1205 Stulte quid est somnus gelidae nisi moris imago  (Romeo And Juliet)
1206 Longa quiescendi tempora fata dabunt.           (Romeo And Juliet)
1207 Albada; golden sleepe.                                  (Romeo And Juliet)
1208 early vp & neuer ye neere.
1209 The wings of ye. mornying.                             (Romeo And Juliet)
1210 The yowth & spring of ye. day                        (2 Henry IV)
1211 The Cock; The Larke                                      (Romeo And Juliet)
1212 Cowrt howres.                                                 (Romeo And Juliet)
1213 Constant; abedd when yow are bedd; & vp when
         yow are vp.
1214 Trew mens howres.
1215 Is this your first fligh x I doe not as byrds doe for
        I fly owt of my feathers Is it not a fayre one
1216 Sweet, fresh of ye. mornying.                       (Romeo And Juliet)
1217 I pray god your early rysing doe yow no hurt;  (Romeo And Juliet)
         Amen when I vse it.                        
1218 I cannot be ydle vp as yow canne.
1219 Yow could not sleep for your yll lodging; I cannot gett
1220 Yow have an alarum in your head               (Romeo And Juliet)
1221 Block heads & clock heads.                        (Romeo And Juliet)
1222 There is Law against lyers a bedde.           (Romeo And Juliet)
1223 Yow haue no warrant to ly a bedde.            (Romeo And Juliet)
1224 Synce yow are not gott vp turn vp.              (2 Henry IV)
1225 Hott cocckles withowt sands
1226     god night                                                  (Romeo And Juliet)
1227 Well to forgett;                                              (Romeo And Juliet)
1228 I wish yow may so well sleepe as yow may not fynd
        yor yll lodging.                                                (Romeo And Juliet)

Remember, these are 'seed' ideas and language parts and aren't expected to be found in the plays exactly as they are found in the Promus. None of the above entries were used in Bacon's prose works, and a few of them by their nature could only be used in plays or in Bacon's personal life. One doubts whether the bawdy puns (which will be explained later - unless they're too bawdy for this website) would have been used even in his personal life. They were better suited to the amusement of a theatre audience.

Some other Promus parallels with Roman And Juliet (besides those in Folio 112) will be included even though they may be slight or commonplace. But they are still relevant and interesting as little shreds of mental fibre which help to show that Bacon and Shake-Speare had the same brain texture.

Promus - 15 Romeo and Juliet

Part 2 - Parallels between Bacon's Promus and Romeo and Juliet
(with special emphasis on Promus Folio 112)

Part 2i

R&J  Act 2.3.11-18

(In the early morning Friar Lawrence makes his first entry. More may be said later on Friar Lawrence).

Friar L:  O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies
          In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities.
          For naught so vile that on the earth doth live
          But to the earth some special good doth give;
          Nor aught so good but, strain'd from that fair use,
          Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.
          Virtue itself turns vice being misapplied,               [Line 17}
          And vice sometime's by action dignified.

now Promus entry 1337 (Folio 123):

"Quae continent, ut animalia ut plantae et amplius sed non amplius potest esse mali" ['Both animals and plants contain many ample properties, but they cannot be as amply endowed with bad properties"]

Promus entries 168 & 169 (Folio 86B), repeated in Promus 1459, (Folio 128):

"Aliquisque malo fuit usus in illo. Usque adeo latet utilitas”: ["And there was some use in that evil. To such a degree does usefulness lie hidden"; from Ovid]

Comment: Shake-Speare's main source for the play, Harold Brooke's long poem on the same story, makes the first of the two points in Lines 17-18. But the second, converse, point is added by Shake-Speare as an extra piece of philosophizing on the lines of Promus 168 & 169. It means that evil sometimes has beneficial consequences. This point is also made in Henry V, 4.1.4-5:

"There is some soul of goodness in things evil
 Would men observingly distil it out;"