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FRANCIS BACON'S CRYPTIC RHYMES 161
And Polonius (ii. i)
advises simulation also for the
purpose of finding
out the truth :
Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth.
In the Essay, we are told the source from which the
thought sprang (the Spanish proverb), we have the idea
expressed in plain words in Hamlet that same
;
thought
assumes poetic form, tangible shape simulation
:
becomes bait ;
the truth we fished for and caught
becomes a carp. The nucleus of the thought
is the
same in both cases.
But that does not exhaust the number of parallels
;
we have still to deal with names, names which appear
at the very beginning of the Essay. The author, who
wished to retain the Securitatem Nominis, his nom
de guerre, towards the
people and the uneducated, as
long as he lived, was naturally careful not to speak of
Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius and Ophelia.
But he quotes an instance from Roman history,
which in three respects bears resemblance to
Hamlet.
The Essay names the Roman Emperor Augustus
and his step-son Tiberius, both masters of dissimula
tion and simulation, and goes on to say that Livia, the
wife of Augustus, the mother of Tiberius, in no way
objected to the cunning art practised both by her hus
band and by her son. The same occurs in Hamlet, the
scene of the play only having been shifted from Rome
to Denmark :
King Claudius and his step-son Hamlet
are respectively
dissimulators and simulators ;
next to
them we find the wife of the one, the mother of the
other, Queen Gertrude, who gets along very well with
both. Claudius had done away with the first husband of