PURITAN BARD: Expense of Spirit In A Waste of Shame.
Elizabeth Weir
It's obvious that Strats and Oxfordians can't match
Bacon evidence for evidence.
For example, what did the Stratford tradesman or the
Earl of Oxford write that qualifies either for authorship
of Sonnet 129?
Bacon left at two passages in his acknowledged
writings that are expressed in or evocative of lines
in Sonnet 129:
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action . . .
In Natural History (Spedding Vol 2, p. 555), Bacon
writes:
It has been observed in the ancients that too much
use of Venus doth dim the sight. The cause. . . is
the expense of spirits.
Some part of 'spirit' is expended in the sex act, a 'waste
of shame.'
In the sonnet. lust is a savage beast:
. . . and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust . . .
From Bacon's Wisdom of the Ancients (Spedding,
Vol 6, p. 740):
(Desire) never rests with what it has but goes on
and on, with infinite insatiable appetite, panting
after new triumphs. Tigers are also kept in its
stalls and yoked to its chariots, for as soon as it
ceases to go on foot and and comes to ride in
its chariot, as in celebration of its victory and
triumph over reason, then it is cruel, savage and
pitiless.
The except was translated from Bacon's Latin by a Victorian
so we don't have Bacon's poetic prose style but Lust driving
a chariot yoked to a tiger is still a Shakespearean image.
The sonnet concludes:
Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
Bacon had a notoriously bawdy wit, drank, smoked and
caroused in the theatres and taverns but Bacon was also
raised by Calvinist Puritans including the starchy Lord Burghley
so it's inevitable that Bacon would have fits of Puritan shame.
We'll need to see some evidence of puritanism in the writings of
the Stratford hustler and Oxford.
Cordially,
Elizabeth