THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Salmacis, supposed to reduce ‘the barbarians ... of fierce and cruel natures’ to the ‘sweetness of the Grecian customs’,
was loosely interpreted as an allusion to the King who ‘out of his mercy and clemency ... seekes to reduce tempestuous
and turbulent natures into a sweet calm of civil concord’. Charles appeared attired as Philogenes (the ‘lover of his
people’) whose ‘secret wisdom’ exorcised the forces of Discord. This ‘wisdom’ also enabled Philogenes to prove that
he could govern ‘a sullen age, | When it is harder far to cure | The People’s folly than resist their rage’. The King - the
Earl of Northumberland reported some two weeks before the entertainment was performed - was ‘dayly so imployed
about the Maske, as till that be over, we shall think of little ellse’. Charles was not necessarily fiddling as London
smouldered around him. His fellow-actors included at least five members of the aristocracy who would soon actively
support the opposition to his rule. Salmacida Spolia was both an expensive attempt to plaster over cracks and a final
theatrical assertion of a divinely justified ideal of royal government.
The Advancement of Learning: Francis Bacon and the Authorized Version
Masques and Triumphs, Francis Bacon grudgingly noted in one of his Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall of
1625, ‘are but Toyes, to come amongst such Serious Observations. But yet, since Princes will have such Things, it is
better, they should be Graced with Elegancy, then Daubed with Cost.’ The essay suggests that the rational Bacon
(1561-1626) did not set much store by allegorical theatre, though he offers a list of practical recommendations
designed to save both cost and human energy in its performance. By the 1620s Bacon was both an experienced and an
unfortunately disgraced statesman. He no longer had a pressing obligation to flatter his sovereign or to nod
honourably to the ceremonies of the court. In dedicating the first book of his
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The Advancement of Learning to King James I in 1605, however, he had laid the flattery on with a trowel in
comparing the King to ‘ancient Hermes’, the possessor of a ‘triplicity’ of command. James, he avowed, had ‘the
power and fortune of a King, the knowledge and illumination of a Priest, and the learning and universality of a
Philosopher’. Bacon’s aim in 1605 seems to have been to encourage James to support ‘some solid work, fixed
memorial and immortal monument’ worthy of so gifted a man and so glorious a reign. That ‘solid work’ would have
been the promotion of a methodical enquiry into natural phenomena and a national investment in what we now call
scientific research. In the dedication of his Novum Organum of 1620 he returned to his plea. ‘You who resemble
Solomon in so many things’, James was told, ‘would further follow his example in taking order for the collecting and
perfecting of a natural and experimental history, true and severe.’ James, a genuine if scarcely generous patron of the
varieties of learning that suited his eclectic tastes, remained unmoved. Indeed, he is said to have remarked on
receiving his copy of Novum Organum that it was like the peace of God, past all understanding.
The Advancement of Learning attempted to draw a distinction between two kinds of Truth, a theological Truth
‘drawn from the word and oracles of God’ and determined by faith, and a ‘scientific’ Truth based on the light of
nature and the dictates of reason. Both, he freely conceded, possessed an equal intellectual validity. But if Bacon
continued to exhibit an abiding concern with natural knowledge and with inductive reasoning, his work was not
inconsistent with the pursuit of the occult. Nevertheless, in the first book he offered a defence of proper learning
against misleading distortions, ‘vanities’, ‘distempers’, and ‘peccant humours’, before moving on to a critique of what
he deemed to be the ‘vain affectations’ of those Renaissance humanists who had concentrated on rhetoric rather than
matter, of the hidebound Aristotelianism of the universities, and of the delusions of alchemy and astrology.
Throughout his work, Bacon is a great classifier, a forthright proponent of the innovative power of human reason, and
a firm believer in a ‘perpetual renovation’ of knowledge. The theories of The Advancement of Learning were later
reworked and expanded in its Latin version, De Augmentis Scientiarum of 1623, but both works should properly be
seen as preliminaries to the larger overarching argument of the ‘true directions concerning the interpretation of
nature’ contained in Novum Organum (the ‘New Instrument’ by which human understanding would be advanced).
Here, in a weighty introductory preface, Bacon presents his ‘Great Instauration’, the laying of the intellectual
foundations ‘not of a sect or doctrine, but of human utility and power’, and he insists on his own ‘utmost endeavours
towards restoring or cultivating a just and legitimate familiarity between the mind and things’. The Novum Organum
argues in Latin for a new method of scientific thinking, free of the prejudices of the past and the received affectations
of the present (characterized as the ‘Idols’ of the Tribe the Cave, the Market Place, and the Theatre). The engraved
title-page to its first part bore the image of two ships confidently sailing through the Pillars of
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