The Bacon and Shakespeare Theory of Spirits - 8

The Bacon and Shake-Speare Theory of "spirits"

part 8 of 9 

(j)    other word parallels combined with spirits

from Shake-Speare's Measure for Measure 3.1.118-122

[In Claudio's soliloquy on death]
"To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bath in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;"

"Delighted" has always been regarded as a problem. Some editors (such as the Arden editor and the editors of William Shakespeare, A Textual Companion) favor amending to "dilated", meaning "expansive, having full scope". Other editors let "delighted" stand but offer numerous different explanations of the word's meaning in the context. They include "filled with delight", "delightful", "a spirit discharged from the body", "removed from the regions of light" and "relieved from the weight of matter". The following Bacon texts (of which editors seem unaware) are relevant to the word's interpretation:

"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".
     Natural History

"Swelling is caused, both by a dilatation of the spirits by over-heating and by a liquefaction or boiling of the humours thereupon."
     Natural History

In a letter to King James dated 20 October 1620 Bacon sought his aid in setting men to work for the collection of a natural and experimental history. He said to James that it would be:

"An excellent recreation unto you; I say, to that admirable spirit of your that delighteth in light [i.e. in intellectual light].

"The souls of the living are the delight of the world"
      The Wisdom of the Ancients

To take the third of these Bacon texts first, the King's spirit delighteth and could therefore have been described as "delighted". And I see no difficulty in supposing that Shake-Speare too regarded the human spirit/soul as an ecstatic thing. However, the first two texts, with their reference to dilatation of the spirits, may seem to support the reading "dilated". But in Bacon's terminology (which accords with normal usage) dilatation means expansion beyond the norm. Claudio is speaking of the human spirit in its normal state before it is consigned by death to harsher regions. So "delighted" is the better reading and no emendation is required. Nor would I be surprised if in his choice of word Shake-Speare, like Bacon, had in mind that the human spirit delights in intellectual light.

Another verbal parallel is as follows:

Richard III 5.3.74  "alacrity of spirit"

Bacon: "alacrity of spirit" [Spedding 9.88]

Love's Labour's Lost 4.2.64-5  "A foolish extravagant spirit"
Hamlet 1.1.159  "[of the ghost of Hamlet's father] "The extravagant and erring spirit"

Bacon: "Such extravagant and strange spirits" [Speech on Love in Conference of Pleasure, p. 11]
           "Extravagant and strange spirit" [Essay 58]

"Extravagant" in these texts is from a Latin root and means "staying beyond proper bounds". Did anyone else associate spirits with all three of the above things - "delighted", "alacrity" and "extravagant" - or even perhaps with any of them?

end of (j) and of part 8

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.

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

Parallels on Hope

First Shake-Speare:

Bushy:   Despair not Madam,
Queen:   Who shall hinder me?
         I will despair and be at enmity
         With cozening Hope - he is a flatterer,
         A parasite, a keeper-back of death
         Who gently would dissolve the bands of life,
         Which false hope lingers in extremity.
 Richard II, 2.2.68-72

"For in a theme so bloody-faced as this
Conjectures, expectation and surmise
Of aids incertain, should not be admitted."
  2 Henry IV 1.3.22-4

"Thoughts speculative their unsure hopes relate".
  Macbeth 5.4.19

"Even here I will put off my hope and keep it
No longer for my flatterer:"
  The Tempest 3.3.7-8

now Bacon:
  "You will ask perhaps if it be not better when a man knows not what to expect, that he should divine well of the future, and rather hope than distrust, seeing that hopes makes the mind more tranquil...but such tranquility as depends on hope I reject as light and unsure".
  Meditationes Sacrae

Comment: The view expressed in all these passages is surely an idiosyncratic one - most people think it does no harm to hope. And note "unsure" in Macbeth and Bacon, and the similarity between "should not be admitted" in 2 Henry IV and "I reject" in Bacon. At the end of his life, years after the plays had been written, Bacon seems to have relented over his rejection of hope. For in his Essay on Regiment of Health, in a passage added in 1625, he advised "Entertain hopes". And in his History of Life and Death (1623) he wrote: "Hope is of all affections the most useful, and contributes most to prolong life, if it be not too often disappointed, but feed the imagination with the prospect of good". Its capacity for prolonging life had already been recognized by Shake-Speare in the passage from Richard II above, and also in 3 Henry VI, 4.4.16-7.

Bacon and Queen Elizabeth regarding Richard II

Bacon and the Queen regarding Richard II

In Bacon's Apotheghems it is said that, "The book of deposing Richard the Second, and the coming in of Henry the Fourth, supposed to be written by Dr. Hayward, who was committed to the Tower for it, had much incensed Elizabeth, and she asked Mr. Bacon, being then of her learned counsel: Whether there were no treason contained in it? Mr. Bacon, intending to do him a pleasure, and to take off the Queen's bitterness with a jest, answered:


"No, madam, for treason I cannot deliver opinion that there is any, but very much felony." The Queen apprehending it gladly, asked: "How and wherein?" Mr. Bacon answered: "Because he had stolen many of his sentences and conceits out of Cornelius Tacitus."


In an early number of the journal Baconiana, a writer showed that whole pages of The Annals of Tacitus were used in Richard II. The play was staged in 1597, again during the Essex Rebellion and before, and Bacon, at the trial of Essex makes the cryptic remark: "It is said I gave in evidence mine own tales." All these indications point to Bacon's connection with the Shake-Speare play Richard II.


Mr. Henry Seymour, in Baconiana, (December 1926) pointed out the extraordinary fact that this play was published annonymously in the first instance, and that only when the Queen was hunting for it's author to "rack" him, that the new edition of 1598 was then issued with the name of "William Shakespeare" as author! Was this the moment to print a real author's name upon it? It plainly shows that this name was but a pseudonym, that Bacon was the concealed author, and that his knowledge of its "cribbing" from Tacitus was an unconscious admission of the fact.

Parallel - Words of Dying Men

First, Shake-Speare:

        The tongues of dying men
Enforce attention like deep harmony.
Richard II, 2.1.5-6

"The words which men speak at their deaths, like the song of the dying swan, have a wonderful effect upon men's minds."
Bacon in The Wisdom of the Ancients

Comment: In both passages the words of dying men are effective and like music.

Parallel - Deal of World

First, Shake-Speare:

[Bolingbroke of his exile abroad] "What a deal of world I wander from the jewels that I love."
Richard II, 1.3.269-70

Bacon: "There was much ado and a great deal of world."
Letter to Buckingham describing Bacon's ceremonial installation as Lord Keeper

Comment: "Deal of world" is used in different senses in the two passages, but it sounds like an idiosyncratic expression.

Parallel - Dutch and English feasts

Shake-Speare:

Lo, as at English feast, so I regreet
The daintiest last to make the end most sweet.
Richard II 1.3.67-8   [note: 'regreet' meaning 'to greet again']

Now, Bacon: "Let not this Parliament end like a Dutch feast, in salt meats, but like an English feast in sweet meats".
A 1604 speech

Comment: It was the practice for English feasts, unlike Dutch feasts, to end with confectionary and fruit. Shake-Speare evidently had this distinction in mind, or he would not have specified "English feast".

Parallel - Troubler of the World

Shake-Speare:

"Oh thee, the troubler of the world's peace." Richard III, 1.3.1221

Now Bacon:

"Great conquerors and troublers of the world." Bacon in his Natural history

"That gigantic state of mind which possesseth the troublers of the world...
who would have all men happy or unhappy as they were friends or enemies, and 
would give form to the world according to their own humours." Bacon in The Advancement of Learning

"The French King troubles the Christian world." Bacon in History of Henry VII

Comment: J.M. Robertson gives 13 examples of "troublers" of Israel or of this or that, but none of "troublers" of the "world". Such small differences in working may seem insignificant but they can be a fingerprint.

Parallel - Packhorse

First Shake-Speare:

"I was a packhorse in his great affairs" Richard III, 1.3.122

Now Bacon:

"I have laboured like a packhorse in your business" Bacon's Letter to Murray, c. 1614

Comment: The O.E.D. gives the Shake-Speare text as its earliest example of packhorse used to mean "drudge".