essay for （Michael Smith）

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The Imagination’s Arts: Poetry and Natural Philosophy

in Bacon and Shakespeare

by Jacqueline L. Cowan

This article argues that natural philosophy and poetry were complementary arts in the early seventeenth century. Together these arts harnessed the imagination to discover the natural order and to restore a legitimate model of sovereignty. I delineate this com- plementary relationship in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Francis Bacon’s Instauratio magna. I argue that Prospero’s ability to bring both fabled creatures and the natural elements under his sovereign rule dramatizes the complementarity between poetry and natural philosophy that Bacon codifies in his natural philosophical reforms.

POESY,” Francis Bacon argues, “[is] to be accounted rather as a pleasure or play of wit than a science” or, more precisely, than scientia.1 Remarks like this have led scholars to assume that in the seventeenth century, poetry was marginalized as an idle fancy and that natural philosophy was the medium for knowledge, technological

1 Bacon, Of the Dignity and the Advancement of Learning, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols. (London, 1857– 74), 9:62. For Bacon’s original Latin, see De Augmentis Scientiarium, in The Works of Francis Bacon, 2:360. Where possible, I use the recent Oxford Francis Bacon editions of Bacon’s works (published by Oxford University Press, 1996–, and edited severally by Graham Rees, Maria Wakely, Michael Kiernan et al.). I rely on The Works only when Bacon’s texts have not yet been published in the Oxford volumes and when they are more relevant to the aims of this article. Hereafter the Oxford Francis Bacon is abbreviated as O and the Works as W; both will be cited parenthetically by volume and page number. Since some volumes contain more than one of Bacon’s texts, those used in this article are here listed for the convenience of the reader: Oxford Francis Bacon, vol. 11: Instauratio magna prelimi- naries, 2–25; Novum organum, 48–447; and vol. 4: The Advancement of Learning. Works, vol. 8: The Great Instauration preliminaries, 15–54; The New Organon, 59–305; Of the Dignity and Advancement of Learning, books 1– 3, 385–520; and vol. 9: Of the Dignity and Advancement of Learning, books 4– 9, 13–357.

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advancement, and even modernity. In the early decades of the seven- teenth century, however, poetry was broadly understood as an art that can attain scientia, the Latin term for “knowledge.” This is also a concep- tion of poetry to which Bacon adheres elsewhere in his works. Bacon, of course, attacked the Idols of the Market, but these remarks targeted the abuse of language, not poetry itself. Bacon did not consider poetry and natural philosophy opposed to one another. Rather, the poet and natu- ral philosopher performed the same work, albeit in different ways. The respective work of the poet and natural philosopher was not reducible to one another, but they each harnessed the imagination to shared ends. Both natural philosophers and poets made recourse to the image of pre- lapsarian Adam to suggest that their labors revealed the natural order and restored a legitimate model of sovereignty. In this way, I argue that the work of the poet and the natural philosopher was understood to be complementary. Reading the natural philosophical works of Bacon, often touted as a father of modern science, alongside a dramatic work by William Shakespeare, arguably the most celebrated English writer, illuminates the complementary relationship between poetry and natu- ral philosophy in both authors, and the shared cultural understand- ing that made this complementarity possible in the early seventeenth century.

Although they ply their trades in different domains, Bacon’s natu- ral philosopher and Shakespeare’s Prospero both labor to restore a model of legitimate sovereignty, be it an Adamic dominion over nature or an ousted duke to his dukedom. Bacon’s natural philosopher and Shakespeare’s Prospero harness the imagination to achieve this aim, aligning the natural philosopher’s and the poet’s respective work. In Shakespeare’s Tempest (c. 1610), it is a matter of converting the power of stagecraft into the power of statecraft by revealing an ideal order, and in Bacon’s Instauratio magna (1620), it is a matter of how one discovers in nature the order that the poet might in turn present. The knowledge produced by the labor of the poet and the natural philosopher serves common ends in the political order. Bacon argues that the reform of “all human learning” (O, 11:3), especially poetry and natural philoso- phy, can restore, at least to some degree, the Adamic sovereignty that was lost as a consequence of the Fall. To that end, Bacon makes a place for the imagination in his natural philosophy, adapting poetry’s per- fected image of nature as the potential of natural philosophy to “trans- mute” the natural world (W, 8:410). Without the ability to “fundamen- tally alter nature” (W, 8:410) for the benefit of man’s knowledge and

134 The Scientific Imagination in Bacon and Shakespeare

art, Bacon’s natural philosophy would be rendered fruitless. Bacon’s natural philosophical reform, then, emerges not in opposition to poetry but by adapting the imaginative function that made poetry such a vital means to discover knowledge.

While today many might consider Bacon’s and Shakespeare’s works entirely distinct from each other, Shakespeare shared many of Bacon’s concerns. Shakespeare’s Tempest addresses the power and limits of poetic art alongside the role of art in natural philosophy. As a ruler whose art can be said to both fabricate spectacles and produce natural phenomena, Shakespeare’s Prospero dramatizes sovereignty over the imagination, a domain he shares with the poet, and over nature, a domain he shares with the natural philosopher. In The Tempest, the world of the imagina- tion and the natural world are largely indistinguishable, thanks to Pros- pero’s art, and this enables Prospero to restore his dukedom from his usurper. Although he is neither a poet nor a natural philosopher proper, Prospero dramatizes the political ends to which both vocations worked and, in the process, illuminates the complementarity between poetic and natural philosophical art. While I do not claim any causal influence between Bacon and Shakespeare, I do suggest that they shared a cultural understanding such that Bacon can codify or make explicit the under- lying assumption that allows Prospero to regain his dukedom.

At the outset of the seventeenth century, Bacon announced that it was imperative to “undertake a wholesale Instauration of the sciences, arts and all human learning, raised on proper foundations” (O, 11:3). In Bacon and Shakespeare’s day, poetry and natural philosophy were both consid- ered an ars, an art, that could attain scientia, making them prime candi- dates for Bacon’s reforms. While scientia generally signified teleologi- cal knowledge, what constituted scientia varied among thinkers. For Bacon, natural philosophy arrived at scientia if it produced demonstra- tive knowledge of nature’s causes. Although poetry could not produce demonstrative knowledge for Bacon, it nevertheless attained knowl- edge. Bacon reduces human learning into three categories, including “poesy” as “one of the principall Portions” (O, 4:73). And the concep- tion of poetry as an art that might discover knowledge was not held by Bacon alone. George Puttenham attests to the knowledge poetic art discovers, arguing that there “cannot be . . . any scorn or indignity [that] should justly be offered to so noble, profitable, ancient, and divine a sci- ence as poesy is.”2 Sir Philip Sidney similarly declares that “of all Sci-

2 Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 99.

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ences . . . is our Poet the Monarch.”3 As we shall see, although many thinkers vied for the primacy of either poetry or natural philosophy, both were complementary arts in the discovery of knowledge.

“[A]ll trial should be made,” Bacon proposes, “whether that com- merce between the mind of man and the nature of things . . . might by any means be restored to its perfect and original condition, or if that may not be, yet reduced to a better condition than that in which it now is” (W, 8:17; emphasis added). The Instauratio magna opens with the goal to restore mankind to the relationship that Bacon thought Adam shared with nature prior to the Fall.4 This goal would be achieved by under- standing the laws that governed nature and by yielding the fruits of new arts for “the benefit and use of life,” what Bacon considers the “true ends of knowledge” (O, 11:23). Katharine Park explains that Bacon’s Instauratio magna was a “public enterprise” in which the “personnel and resources of an entire society would be mobilized toward the ad- vancement of learning and improvement of the human condition.”5 This enterprise ought to be supported by the monarch for, as Bacon argues, “of the sciences that contemplate nature . . . the Glory of God is to conceal a thing; but the glory of a king is to find it out” (O, 11:23). Bacon thought that just as innocent Adam, the world’s first sovereign, named each “thing” in nature as he labored in Eden, natural philosophy was a means to establish the dominion over the natural world that was prom- ised in scripture.6 “[B]y his fall,” Bacon argues, “man lost both his state of innocence and his command over created things,” but, he continues, “both of these losses can to some extent be made good even in this life, the former by religion and faith, the latter by the arts and sciences” (O, 11:447). As Joanna Picciotto contends, Bacon reimagined innocent Adam as a natural philosopher:

3 Sidney, Defence of Poesie, Astrophil and Stella and Other Writings, ed. Elizabeth Porges Watson (London: Everyman Paperbacks, 1997), 101. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as D with page number. Sidney is referring here to the “humane” sciences, in which he includes philosophy, history, and astronomy, among others (101).

4 Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 4.

5 Park, “Bacon’s ‘Enchanted Glass,’” Isis 75 (1984): 300. 6 Joanna Picciotto argues that “[i]n the seventeenth century . . . the basis of the first

man’s sovereignty was theorized anew: the notion that Adam was the first king because he was the first worker brought the delver, the namer, and the sovereign into relation” (Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010], 3). Bacon and the experimental philosophers who would take him as a source of their “inspiration” later in the century, Picciotto continues, contributed greatly to this re- imagining of Adam, sovereignty, and natural philosophy (3).

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[b]y transferring the primal scene of discovery from Eve’s eating of the fruit to Adam’s naming the creatures—and by linking the act of naming to the work of experiment—Bacon redeemed curiosity from its association with original sin: associated with investigative labor rather than appetite, the first sin became the first virtue.7 In Adam’s image, Bacon summarizes his Instauratio magna and the works which it comprises as a means “to let the mind exert its proper au- thority over the nature of things” (O, 11:11).8 As a way to restore Adamic dominion over nature, natural philosophy was, in an important sense, an extension of sovereign power writ large.

Bacon’s restoration was poised to move beyond what he saw as the limits of the knowledge of his predecessors. This task involved devis- ing a new natural philosophy, cultivating a new type of natural phi- losopher, and inventing new forms of art. “It is idle to expect any great advancement in science,” Bacon argues, “from the superinducing and engrafting of new things upon old. We must begin anew from the very foundations” (W, 8:74).9 More than just natural philosophical reform, Bacon sought to restore most any means to attain knowledge that had become idle. To lay this foundation for human learning, Bacon envi- sioned a body politic that continually labored to advance its under- standing and art. The ancients’ methods and many of their discoveries were stagnant; pressing on through these well- trodden tracks would spin mankind “round in circles forever, with progress little or pitiable” (O, 11:77). Too many pursuits for knowledge were idle: “Philosophy . . . and the intellectual sciences are, like statues, admired and praised but not pushed forward” or advanced (O, 11:13). Bacon reiterates the idleness of his predecessors when he likens the Greeks’ knowledge to that of a child. Knowledge derived by the Greeks, Bacon argues, “is

7 Picciotto, Labors of Innocence, 3. 8 Bacon’s goal to restore humankind to its prelapsarian relation to nature is evident

in the six- part structure of his unfinished Instauratio magna. This six- part work was mod- elled after the Bible’s six days of creation. For a brief explanation of the different compo- nent parts of Instauratio magna, see Graham Rees, ed. and intro., The Instauratio magna: Last Writings, xix.

9 Bacon writes in Novum organum: “Frustrà magnum expectatur augmentum in Scientijs ex superinductione & insitione nouorum super Vetera; sed instauratio facienda est ab imis fundamentis, nisi libeat perpetuò circumuolui in Orbem, cum exili, & quasi contemnendo progressu” (O, 11:76). This passage is alternatively translated in the Oxford Francis Bacon as: “It is useless to expect great growth in the sciences from the superinduc- tion and grafting of new things on old; instead the instauration must be built up from the deepest foundations, unless we want to go round in circles forever, with progress little or pitiable” (O, 11:77).

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what might be called the boyhood of science and, as with boys, it is all prattle and no procreation. For productive of controversies, it is barren in works” (O, 11:11). For Bacon, ancient knowledge produces idle de- bates but does not have the propensity to advance or grow. He faults those who engage in such debates: authors who have elbowed their way into a kind of dictatorship in the sciences . . . take to whining about the subtlety of nature, the inaccessibility of truth, the obscurity of things, the intricacy of causes, and the weakness of human wit. . . . [And] when any art fails to achieve something, they insist that such achieve- ment is impossible on the authority of that same art. (O, 11:15)

Having reduced their efforts to mere “whining,” these “authors” ob- struct the advancement of knowledge and art. Bacon’s program, then, is a call to labor; he “ask[s] men to think of [his program] not as a ques- tion of opinion but as a job to be done” (O, 11:23–25). Bacon and those who undertake his program will not be discouraged by the intricacies or “obscurity” of nature and will not abandon their goal to hone their arts. Indeed, Bacon rejects acatalepsy, the impossibility of knowing a thing, because “once the human soul has lost hope of discovering the truth, everything becomes more supine; and the result is that . . . [men] dodg[e] hard facts, rather than keep them in the way of rigorous in- quiry” (O, 11:109). Instead, Bacon cultivates the “hope” that what his predecessors deemed “impossible” in both knowledge and art could be attained if natural philosophy is reformed. Bacon’s vision for human learning and the state of humankind, then, is utopian: what he lays out in the Instauratio magna aims to restore the eutopia lost after the Fall.

To erect “all human learning” upon “proper foundations,” Bacon rejected the Aristotelian scholasticism that saturated sixteenth- and seventeenth- century universities and promoted a new natural philos- ophy—a grand “job to be done” indeed.10 For Aristotle, the study of poiesis, man’s art or craft, revealed only the intentions of the human mind; scientia, teleological knowledge of things in nature, alone was considered to ascertain certain knowledge of necessary truths.11 Nature

10 Peter Harrison notes that Aristotle’s Organon was still widely read in universities throughout most of the seventeenth century. “All undergraduates,” he explains, “were expected to become familiar with its contents, and until well into the seventeenth cen- tury university statutes prescribed monetary penalties for those guilty of transgressions against Aristotle’s logic” (The Fall of Man, 173).

11 On Aristotle’s understanding of what constitutes knowledge and its rejection by Bacon as well as Shakespeare in his Tempest, see Elizabeth Spiller, “Shakespeare and the Making of Early Modern Science: Resituating Prospero’s Art,” South Central Review 26 (2009): 24–41.

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and man’s art were fundamentally different. Where the things of nature could grow and reproduce themselves by some internal principle, the things of art could not;12 and where the things of nature were thought to originate in nature, the things of art originated in the mind of man. For Bacon, however, poiesis was an important means by which to dis- cover nature’s workings. In an oft-quoted passage, Bacon argues that “nature’s secrets betray themselves more through the vexations of art than they do in their usual course” (O, 11:157). While much scholarly ink has been spilled over Bacon’s “vexations of art” (their implications for nature, modern science, and gender in particular), these “vexations” were novel in Bacon’s day because, counter to Aristotle, they applied art to nature so as to discover natural knowledge.13 Bacon’s emphasis on empirical manipulations of natural phenomena was equally matched by an emphasis on the intellect in natural philosophy. As Rhodri Lewis explains, Bacon “attack[s] the shortcomings of . . . exclusively empiri- cal philosophy, and . . . [of] scholastic philosophers who excluded em- pirical data from their elegant speculations.”14 Instead, Lewis continues, Bacon’s program included elements of both, for “neither the empirici nor the dogmatici were [to be] discredited in themselves, but only in as much as they were used (and therefore abused) to the exclusion of one another.”15 Knowing the “form or certain law” of nature (O, 11:297), dis- covering her “secrets,” also meant that even nature’s most marvelous phenomena could be known and regulated by man’s art, all for the betterment of the human estate. In this way, human art was as episte- mologically valuable as nature itself, distinguishable by efficient cause only.16 Bacon’s “vexations of art” could produce neither knowledge nor

12 Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 264.

13 There has been much debate over Bacon’s “vexations of art” and their implications for gender and the conceptualization of nature. See Peter Pesic, “Wrestling with Proteus: Francis Bacon and the ‘Torture’ of Nature,” Isis 90 (1999): 81–94; Carolyn Merchant, “‘The Violence of Impediments’: Francis Bacon and the Origins of Experimentation,” Isis 99 (2008): 731–60, and “Secrets of Nature: The Bacon Debates Revisited,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69 (2008): 147–62; and Brian Vickers, “Francis Bacon, Feminist Historiography, and the Dominion of Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69 (2008): 117–41.

14 Lewis, Language, Mind and Matter: Artificial Language in England from Bacon to Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 6.

15 Lewis, Language, Mind and Matter, 7. 16 Sophie Weeks argues that the Baconian doctrine of the unity of nature suggests that

“regardless of the source of motive power, the same formal causes (forms) are at work in natural and artificial operations” (“The Role of Mechanics in Francis Bacon’s Great In- stauration,” in Philosophies of Technology: Francis Bacon and his Contemporaries, Intersections:

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the art that would help restore an Adamic dominion over nature unless Aristotle’s distinction between art and nature was rejected.

“Human knowledge and power come to the same thing,” Bacon de- clares, “for ignorance of the cause puts the effect beyond reach. For na- ture is not conquered save by obeying it” (O, 11:65). Nature could not be transformed by art unless her inner workings were first understood. At the outset of his Novum organum (1620), Bacon invites the “true sons of the sciences” to join in his quest to “penetrate” nature further than his predecessors, to discover “certain and ostensive knowledge,” and to “leave behind nature’s entrance halls (trodden by countless feet), and at last throw open the doors to her inner sanctum” (O, 11:59). Once na- ture and its laws have been mapped out, these “Wonders of Nature” would lay the “passage towardes the Wonders of Arte” (O, 4:63).17 But this “passage” could not be traversed unless art was potent enough to transform nature: [a] subtle error . . . has crept into the human mind; namely, that of considering art as merely an assistant to nature . . . but by no means to change, transmute, or funda- mentally alter nature. And this has bred a premature despair in human enterprises. Whereas man ought on the contrary to be surely persuaded of this; that the arti- ficial does not differ from the natural in form or essence, but only in the efficient; in that man . . . can put natural bodies together, and he can separate them; and therefore that wherever the case admits of the uniting or disuniting of natural bodies . . . man can do everything; where the case does not admit this, he can do nothing. (W, 8:410–11; emphasis added)

In rejecting Aristotle’s distinction between poiesis and scientia and be- tween art and nature, Bacon elevates art as a means to gain the domin- ion over nature that he thought Adam enjoyed as the first sovereign. “Gold,” Bacon explains, “is sometimes found refined in the fire and sometimes found pure in the sand, nature having done the work for herself” (W, 8:411). “[T]he rainbow is made in the sky out of a drip- ping cloud,” he adds, and “it is also made here below with a jet of water” (W, 8:411). Man’s art can produce natural phenomena in ways that nature does not, such as through the scorching fire of a kiln, and can introduce these phenomena to locations where they could other-

Yearbook for Early Modern Studies vol. 11, ed. Claus Zittel, Gisela Engel, and Romano Nanni et al. [Leiden: Brill, 2008]: 155–56).

17 Bacon’s inclusion of marvels into natural philosophical study also rejects Aristotle’s argument that scientia could not be gained from accidents since they could not be general- ized to nature’s workings at large. See Spiller, “Resituating Prospero’s Art,” 25; and Das- ton and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 160 and 290–96.

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wise not occur, such as inside a laboratory with a jet of water. Bacon “fundamentally” alters nature not by changing its order but by dis- playing this order under human- made circumstances; he cannot usurp nature’s laws but exerts dominion over where these laws are discov- ered. Man can “fundamentally alter nature” and still be governed by its laws.18 Natural philosophers, however, could not eradicate the “error” of Bacon’s predecessors nor “transmute” nature if they were distracted by the idle disputes that arise when language is ill- defined.

For Bacon and his contemporaries, God’s creation and God Himself were inextricable from the Word or Logos, intimately tying language with the discovery of the divine. Knowledge of God’s creations was also revealed through language. As S. K. Heninger, Jr., argues, “the system of language was perfectly analogous to the system of creation: each word was predetermined by something God had created, and Adam’s task was merely to render explicit for mortal comprehension what God had intended.”19 In naming Eden’s creatures, innocent Adam distinguished one from another according to their essences, revealing the divine order of nature through language. Because of his labors to name all the crea- tures in Eden, Adam was taken up by seventeenth- century natural and experimental philosophers as their model.20 As Bacon reminds his readers, Adam was a natural philosopher whose knowledge of nature was inextricably linked to language: “Againe the first Acts which man perfourmed in Paradise, consisted of the two summarie parts of knowl- edge, the view of Creatures, and the imposition of names” (O, 4:34). The art of poetry also resembled Adam’s work in Eden. This art required the poet or rhetorician to find subject matter germane to the topic and to the desired effect of the poem or rhetorical tract: in a process called inven- tio, the poet and rhetorician “invented” what would be discussed. And what the poet, and the rhetorician in particular, invented was intended to compel an audience to act in a particular way—a poet’s and rhetori- cian’s invention was persuasive.21 Unlike the modern usage of the term

18 Bacon also writes that “it seemeth to me, there can hardly bee discouered any ra- dicall or fundamentall alterations, and innouations in Nature, either by the fortune & essayes of experiments, or by the light and direction of Phisical causes” (O, 4:89). But here he is discussing nature proper, not the art that can “transmute” nature by producing it through means or in locations not possible by nature alone.

19 Heninger, Sidney and Spenser: The Poet as Maker (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 118.

20 See Picciotto, Labors of Innocence, esp. chapter 1. 21 Markku Peltonen emphasizes the persuasive function of rhetoric, arguing that “the

aim [of rhetoric] was not to find out the truth or to reach consensus but to persuade the

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“invention,” the poet’s invention also revealed or dis- covered things al- ready present in the world, though otherwise hidden from view. From the Latin verb invenio, “come upon,” a poet’s and rhetorician’s invention importantly discovered the divine signatures that marked nature and brought them to light. Akin to Adam, the poet made God’s imprints visible to an earthly audience. As Jonathan Sawday puts it, invention “expressed a sense of rediscovering what had been hidden by God from humankind after the Fall.”22 In discovering the divine signatures that marked the natural world, poetry was understood as a means by which to gain knowledge of God’s handiwork and His ideal order; poetry was an art that could attain teleological knowledge. The natural philosopher and the poet were one in this understanding of Adam.

One reason why scholars have perceived an opposition between poetry and natural philosophy in the seventeenth century is because of the contentions over poetic and rhetorical language, a debate greatly furthered by Bacon. In relating his efforts to lay the foundation for his program, Bacon identifies four different types of obstacles, which he famously calls “Idols,” to the pursuit and growth of knowledge. He singles out those idols that “have slipped into the intellect through the alliance of words and names” as “the greatest nuisances of the lot” (O, 11:93). These Idols of the Market include the “shoddy and inept ap- plication of words” (O, 11:81), and to be more precise, words that are “names of things which do not exist” or are “ill- defined” (O, 11:93). These types of words, Bacon explains, “overrule the understanding, and throw all into confusion, and lead men away into numberless empty controversies and idle fancies” (W, 8:78).23 Natural philosophy could

audience and to clinch the victory in the war of words” (Rhetoric, Politics and Popularity in Pre- Revolutionary England [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013], 9).

22 Sawday, Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (London: Routledge, 2007), 174.

23 Bacon writes in his Latin Novum organum: “Svnt etiam Idola tanquàm ex contractu & societate humani generis ad inuicem, quæ Idola Fori propter hominum commercium, & consortium, appellamus. Homines enim per sermones sociantur; At verba ex captu vulgi imponuntur. Itaque mala & inepta verborum impositio, miris modis intellectum obsidet. Neque definitiones aut explicationes, quibus homines docti se munire & vindi- care in nonnullis consueuerunt, rem vllo modo restituunt. Sed verba planè vim faciunt intellectui, & omnia turbant; & homines ad inanes, & innumeras Controuersias, & com- menta, deducunt” (O, 11:80). This passage has been alternatively translated into English in the Oxford Francis Bacon as: “There are also Idols, derived as if from the mutual agree- ment and association of the human race, which I call Idols of the Market on account of men’s commerce and partnerships. For men associate through conversation, but words are applied according to the capacity of ordinary people. Therefore shoddy and inept ap- plication of words lays siege to the intellect in wondrous ways. Nor do the definitions and

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not progress or better the state of humankind if men were distracted by debates incited by the Idols of the Market.

Bacon, of course, was not the first to express such a concern over lan- guage, nor would he be the last. Critics of poetry, most notably Stephen Gosson, and its advocates, particularly Puttenham and Sidney, also ad- dressed the “abuses” of language. Among other concerns, Gosson wor- ries that many poets are dissemblers who fashion language so sweetly that their malevolent intentions might go undetected: “[m]anie good sentences . . . [are] written by poets as ornamentes to beautifie their woorkes, and sette their trumperie too sale without suspect.”24 Worse still, he claims, poetry inflames the passions to such a degree that they overrule reason and move the audience to vice: “by the privy entries of the eare sappe downe into the heart, and with gunshotte of affection gaule the minde, where reason and vertue shoulde rule the roste.”25 Puttenham likens the poetic imagination to a “glass” that at its worst “breed[s] chimeras and monsters in man’s imaginations” and “also in all his ordinary actions and life which ensues.”26 Sidney com- plains that the “hony- flowing matron Eloquence” can be “disguised . . . in a Curtisan- like painted affectation” through which poets indiscrimi- nately “cast sugar and spice upon every dish that is served to the table” (D, 125). Whether detractor or defender, to these commentators poetry was a powerful means of persuasion, and such power could be used to render idle, confuse, or inflame the mind to nefarious ends.

But these ends, Sidney argues, are the fault not of poetry but of the particular mind of the poet. Just as a sword can be equally used to kill as to protect, arguments against the destructive ends to which poetry can be aimed are more appropriately arguments against the poet who wields the instrument for those purposes. It is not accurate to say “that Poetrie abuseth mans wit,” Sidney contends “but that mans wit abus- eth Poetrie” (D, 112). Even Gosson claims that those who “thinke that I banishe Poetrie . . . [do but] dreame” and clarifies that his attack on poetry “touche[s] but the abuses.”27 Although Bacon rails against the

explanations with which learned men have in some cases grown used to sheltering and defending themselves put things right in any way. Instead words clearly force themselves on the intellect, throw everything into turmoil, and side- track men into empty disputes, countless controversies and complete fictions” (O, 11:81).

24 Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse, Containing a Pleasant Invective Against Poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters &c. 1579 (London, 1841), 10.

25 Ibid., 22. 26 Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 110. 27 Gosson, The ephemerides of Phialo deuided into three books. . . . And a short apologie of the

Schoole of abuse, against poets, pipers, players, [et] their excusers (London, 1579), 83.

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abuses of language, he does not equate the imaginative use of language with the Idols of the Market wholesale. For Bacon, poetry and rheto- ric were useful not only to disseminate information to a varied audi- ence28 but to restore the natural philosophy he sought to cultivate as well. When used appropriately, the poetic imagination could aid dis- covery and harness nature’s wonders into the wonderful art of man. To return to Bacon’s description of the Idols of the Market, his suspicion of poetry and rhetoric instead stemmed from language that produced “idle fancies” (emphasis added).

“Idle” and such related terms as “vain” or “superfluous” were prime among the charges laid against poetry in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. These charges held significant weight given their theological implications and their associations with social discord.29 If reparations for the Fall were to be made, mankind could not risk falling idle. In his The Schoole of Abuse (1579), Gosson bolsters his criticism of poetry, among other arts, by arguing that the harmonious body politic is a laboring one: For as to the body ther are many members serving to severall uses, the eye to see, the eare to heare . . . the feet to beare the whole burden of the rest, and every one dischargeth his duety without grudging, so shoulde the whole body of the common wealth consist of fellow laborers, all generally serving one head, and particularly following their trade without repining. From the head to the foote, from top to the toe, there shoulde nothing be vaine, no body idle.30 For Gosson, the healthy body politic consists of laborers who, if turned exclusively to the “vaine” or “idle” pursuits of poetry, would threaten the commonwealth. Sidney repeats this line of argument in his Defence of Poesie (published posthumously in 1595), enumerating it as one of the abuses he aims to debunk. He ventriloquizes the criticism that poetry is the “nurse of abuse” that entices “the mind to the Serpent’s tayle of sin- full fancy. . . . as Chaucer sayth. . . . [How] before Poets did soften us, we were full of courage, given to martiall exercises, the pillers of manlyke liberty, and not lulled asleepe in shady idlenes with Poets’ pastimes” (D, 110). While Sidney admits that the abuse of poetry “can doe more hurt then any other Armie of words,” he contends that these abuses should not dissuade the production of poetry, for “beeing rightly used” poetry “doth most good” (D, 113). The criticism that poetry can move

28 Park, “Bacon’s ‘Enchanted Glass,’” 299. 29 These charges would be renewed with added vigor as poetry, rhetoric, and elo-

quence were blamed in part for the English Civil War. 30 Gosson, Schoole of Abuse, 40.

144 The Scientific Imagination in Bacon and Shakespeare

a mind to sleep “in shady idlenes” turns in on itself, because poetry’s ability to move the mind highlights one of the powers that makes it po- litically valuable: poetry calls the mind to action. To attribute idleness to either the poet or poetic works, then, is to misunderstand what the poet does.

In the Renaissance, the poet was a “maker” who discovered the divine signatures that marked nature and crafted a perfected vision of the world; as an art that “made” a perfected world, poetry worked against the idleness that was thought to threaten the body politic. English poets often identified themselves as “makers” who labored with words and whose words moved an audience to labor.31 Attributed to Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy (1589) opens by adopting the “Greek” under- standing that a “poet is as much to say as a maker.”32 Sidney reiter- ates this idea, for “wee Englishmen have mette with the Greekes in call- ing [the poet] a Maker” (D, 87). Puttenham’s and Sidney’s advocacy of poetry, of course, was not specific to language that fit a certain meter or rhyme scheme. Instead, “poetry” can be more broadly understood as a fabrication of fiction in language. Bacon defines “poesy” as “nothing else than feigned history or fables; for verse is but a character of style, and belongs to the arts of speech” (W, 8:407).33 Sidney similarly explains that “it is not riming and versing that maketh a Poet. . . . But it is that fayning notable images of vertues, vices, or what else, with that delight- full teaching, which must be the right describing note to know a Poet by” (91). Even after mid- century, a poet’s art was not strictly defined by

31 Sawday points out that “one of the most frequently cited classical legends in defence of poetry was that of the construction of Thebes by the power of poetic harmony,” linking the poet’s linguistic material with the building materials of artisans and architects (En- gines of the Imagination, 175). Poetry’s constructive power was thought to build not only architectural structures but also the societies they housed. Puttenham proclaims poets to be the source of “civil society”: “[f]or it is written that poesy was the original cause and occasion of their first assemblies, when, before, the people remained in the woods and mountains, vagrant and dispersed like the wild beasts, lawless and naked, or very ill clad” (Art of English Poesy, 96). Even John Locke intimated that societies were made pos- sible by language: “[t]he Comfort, and Advantage of Society, not being to be had without Communication of Thoughts, it was necessary, that Man should find out some external sensible Signs, whereby those invisible Ideas, which his thoughts are made up of, might be made known to others” (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975], 405).

32 Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 93. Although The Art of English Poesy was published anonymously, Whigham and Rebhorn argue that George Puttenham was most likely its author (18–23).

33 Heninger, Jr., explains that “poesy” is a derivative of the Latin poesis and that “poetry” derives from the Latin form, poetria. He further notes that after the sixteenth century, “poetry” subsumes the terms “poem” and “poesy” (Sidney and Spenser, 514–15n5).

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its versification or its form. John Dryden considers a dramatist a poet, a synonym he references in the title of his Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668). And it is in this broader sense of one who fabricates imagined worlds in language that the term “poet” is here used.

Renaissance poetry was a form of techne or poiesis: a skilled and cre- ative craft.34 Sixteenth- and early seventeenth- century poets were crafters—they were “makers”—whose labors persuaded their audi- ence to some form of action. Sidney explains that the poet’s craft is the most laborious because it moves its audience to act in the world: “to be moved to doe that which we know, or to be moved with desire to knowe, Hoc opus, hic labor est” (D, 101). The poet, however, importantly does not create his world in the way God created;35 Puttenham empha- sizes that God created the world without labor. To return to the open- ing of The Art, Puttenham argues that “[a] poet is as much to say as a maker. . . . Such as (by way of resemblance and reverently) we may say of God, who without any travail to his divine imagination, made all the world of nought.”36 Where God’s creation was made “without any tra- vail” or work, the poet’s craft was labor- intensive. In this way, the labor that Sidney ascribes to the poet is also what distinguishes the poet from “the heavenly Maker of that maker” (D, 89). This difference between God’s and the poet’s respective creations framed poetry as reverent, not aggrandizing, and rebutted claims that it was vain or idle:37 the poet labored to “make” language that celebrated God’s creations. The charge against poetry as idle ignored the defining feature of the poet and the labor that distinguished him from an irreverent imitator of the divine. As a “maker,” the poet crafted a perfected world that discovered the hand of the divine and in moving mankind to action helped to stabilize the body politic.

34 Rayna Kalas argues that because the term “art” was not “inflected by modern aes- thetics” in the Renaissance as it is today, the current opposition between art and tech- nology was not drawn in the sixteenth century (Frame, Glass, Verse: The Technology of Poetic Invention in the English Renaissance [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007], 1). Rather than consider Renaissance poetry as a “concept that reflects reality by observing the mimetic conventions of pictorial representation,” Kalas motions for a reassessment of Renaissance language and poetry that “tak[es] into account the techne of poesy” so as to “recognize poetic language as an instrument of figuration that partakes of worldly reality” (ibid.).

35 The male pronoun is here used not to overlook the many important female poets in Bacon and Shakespeare’s age, but to correspond with the way the poet was most com- monly described in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

36 Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 93. 37 Kalas, Frame, Glass, Verse, 140.

146 The Scientific Imagination in Bacon and Shakespeare

The poet’s fabulous images displayed a vision of nature that no other profession could. Bacon suggests that poetry “exceeds the measure of nature, joining at pleasure things which in nature would never have come together . . . [or] never have come to pass” (W, 8:407–8). Because “History” must recount the past as it was experienced (or at least be- lieved to have been experienced by others), Bacon explains that history is “not so agreable to the merits of Vertue and Vice, therefore Poesie faines them more iust in Retribution, and more according to Reuealed Prouidence” (O, 4:73). Poetry best instructs mankind about virtues and vices, as it “serueth and conferreth to Magnanimitie, Moralitie, and to Delectation” (O, 4:73)—a sentiment that Sidney shares when he exalts the poet above all other professions. “Onely the Poet,” Sidney contends, is “lifted up with the vigor of his owne in[v]ention, dooth growe . . . into another nature, in making things either better then Nature bringeth forth . . . [or] formes such as never were in nature” (D, 88).38 Unlike the historian or natural philosopher, the poet is free to engage the imagina- tion in its multiple combinations and permutations of sense experience. Sidney argues that poet’s use of the imagination allows poetry to sur- pass nature in its richness, for “Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapistry as divers Poets have done, neither with so plesant rivers, fruit- ful trees, sweet smelling flowers, nor whatsoever els may make the too much loved earth more lovely” (D, 88). For Sidney, the poet importantly transmutes the “brasen” material world into a perfected, “golden” one (D, 88). Bacon similarly explains that poetry “show[s] that there is agree- able to the spirit of man a more ample greatness, a more perfect order, and a more beautiful variety than it can anywhere (since the Fall) find in nature” (W, 8:440). Poetry perfected nature’s order, allowing man to see a utopian vision of the world where moral values are clearer and easier to approximate.

Poetry could not produce a perfected image of the world nor call the mind to virtuous action without the imagination. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the mind was largely thought to be composed of three faculties: the imagination, reason, and memory. If a person was in good health, all three faculties worked together harmoniously, and the imagination drew upon the contents of memory and relayed sense experience to be judged by reason. Furnished by the senses, the imagi-

38 The Porges Watson edition uses the word “intention” where other editions of the De- fence use “invention.” “Invention” is here used because it emphasizes the inventio involved in crafting a poem. See Sir Philip Sidney, Defense of Poesy, ed. Lewis Soens (Lincoln: Uni- versity of Nebraska Press, 1970), 9.

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nation fabricated a vast multitude of images. Much like Puttenham and Sidney, Bacon argues that because the imagination is “not tyed to the Lawes of Matter,” it “may at pleasure ioyne that which Nature hath seuered: & seuer that which Nature hath ioyned, and so make vnlawfull Matches & diuorses of things” by manipulating sense experience or the content of the memory (O, 4:73).39 For Bacon, the imagination is also the messenger that connected the “VNDERSTANDING and REASON” to “WILL, APPETITE, & AFFECTION” (O, 4:105–6). As a “common instru- ment” to reason and will (W, 9:61), the imagination is foundational to all mankind’s thought and action and could not be avoided. The poet’s art in particular influences the imagination, for his words invited his audi- ence to imagine the fabulous world he crafts. In an often- quoted pas- sage, Bacon explains that the “Ianus of Imagination hath differing faces; for the face towards Reason, hath the print of Truth. But the face towards Action, hath the print of Good; which neuerthelesse are faces, Quales decet esse sororum.” (O, 4:106). The imagination looks toward reason to furnish it with images and to the will to elicit action, aligning “Truth” with the “Good.” The imagination’s “vnlawfull Matches & diuorses of things” furnished poetry with images of a beautiful world that could not be otherwise found in nature, and these perfected images could instruct the mind in moral actions.

Poetry could attain teleological knowledge when the imagination perfected an image of nature so as to invent, discover, or make explicit the divine signatures that marked nature. And it is the poet’s imagi- native ability to perfect an image of nature that becomes so important to the trajectory of natural philosophy as it turned away from its Aris- totelian roots. Bacon’s natural philosophical reforms appropriated the poet’s imagination as a means to reveal knowledge in nature. Lewis argues that Bacon’s art of discovery consisted of two distinct and hier- archical modes of investigating nature that were also, and impor- tantly, complementary: experientia literata or “literate experience” and novum organum or “new organon,” also called the interpretatio naturae or “interpretation of nature.”40 The novum organum produced demon- strative knowledge of the laws that ordered nature—it attained scien-

39 For more on Bacon and the imagination, see Karl R. Wallace, Francis Bacon on the Nature of Man (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967); Lisa Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); and Park, “Bacon’s ‘Enchanted Glass,’” 293–97.

40 Rhodri Lewis, “Francis Bacon and Ingenuity,” Renaissance Quarterly 67 (2014): 137.

148 The Scientific Imagination in Bacon and Shakespeare

tia—and called exclusively upon the intellect to do so.41 The experientia literata produced knowledge in two ways. Firstly, it produced experi- menta lucifera or “experiments of light,” which are “experiments of no use in themselves but which only contribute to the discovery of causes” (O, 11:157–59). Secondly, and more importantly, it organized the other- wise scattershot materials of natural history such that a natural philoso- pher could extend or translate these older discoveries into new fields or apply them onto new natural phenomena.42 Although experientia literata does not attain scientia, it is vital preparatory work for the novum orga- num that can.43 Unlike the novum organum, however, experientia literata cultivated the ingenium in order to attain knowledge of nature. The inge- nium, a notoriously slippery term, involved the imagination and was essential to poetic art. As Lewis puts it, “ingenium was the imaginative talent through which the poet, painter, or sculptor was able to imitate, and even to surpass, the created world in his works.”44 In order to ad- vance knowledge, the imagination needed to be cultivated such that it could extend older discoveries into the recesses of nature that were otherwise thought impossible to “penetrate.” Bacon’s natural philoso- phy, then, cannot be divorced from the imagination.45

Like Sidney who argues that the poet’s art transmutes the “brasen” natural world into a perfected, “golden” one (D, 88), Bacon also uses an alchemical metaphor to describe the relationship between art and nature in his natural philosophy. For Bacon, the material world was a fallen world that, through man’s art, could be “transmute[d]” (W, 8:410)

41 Lewis, “Francis Bacon and Ingenuity,” 139 and 143–44. 42 Jardine explains that “experientia literata is the material of the natural history organ-

ised in such a way as to suggest to a perceptive mind the possibilities for enlarging [ex- perimental] knowledge by applying techniques successful in one field in similar fields, or by applying experiments successful on one type of material to similar materials” (Dis- covery and the Art of Discourse, 144).

43 Lewis, “Francis Bacon and Ingenuity,” 143–44. 44 Ibid., 121. 45 While many scholars have argued that Bacon’s suspicion of the imagination left

it little room within his natural philosophical reforms, others have attempted to reha- bilitate the imagination within Bacon’s works. Park argues that because Bacon thought that similitudes were necessary for philosophical invention, the imagination could not be excluded from his program. For Bacon, “man cannot thrust his understanding into the unknown but must proceed in steps, by analogy with that which is already under- stood. From this point of view, imagination is a powerful, even a necessary, instrument in the hand of the scientist” (“Bacon’s ‘Enchanted Glass,’” 294). For a discussion of the work of poiesis, the imagination, and language in Bacon’s natural philosophical project, see also Michael C. Clody, “Deciphering the Language of Nature: Cryptography, Secrecy, and Alterity in Francis Bacon,” Configurations 19 (2011): 117–42; and Todd Wayne Butler, Imagination and Politics in Seventeenth- Century England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).

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into one where an Adamic sovereignty over nature is, at least partially, restored. The poet, of course, did not have the power to alter nature itself—he was a “maker” and not a “creator”—but could transform na- ture through artifice such that, like Adam, it revealed the divine order. While Bacon cautioned against extrapolating knowledge of nature to knowledge of God’s intentional causes, natural philosophy could dis- cover the laws by which God ordered the natural world. Man’s art, he argued, could “fundamentally alter” nature insofar as it produced natu- ral phenomena in ways that nature alone did not or in artificial environ- ments. More than just sharing an alchemical metaphor to describe the work of their respective art, Bacon’s application of art in the pursuit of natural knowledge works analogously to the means by which Sidney’s poet discovered knowledge: both use art, be it language or mechanical aids, such that it reveals in nature otherwise hidden knowledge.

More than any of the Idols, Bacon intimates that the lack of hope is the greatest hindrance to the pursuit of knowledge. “[B]y far the great- est obstacle to the advancement of the sciences and the adoption of new tasks and provinces therein,” Bacon argues, “lies in men’s despairing belief that the job is impossible” (O, 11:149). The boundaries ascribed to art and the pursuit of knowledge needed to be eliminated, a task that could be accomplished by the imagination. Although the imagi- nation could extend itself only as far as it was furnished by sense ex- perience, it was nevertheless required to exceed the limits of what was deemed possible in art and knowledge if the chains of despair were to be broken. Recall Bacon’s description of the imagination as a fac- ulty that “make[s] vnlawfull Matches & diuorses of things,” his expla- nation of poetry as that which “exceeds the measure of nature, joining at pleasure things which in nature would never have come together . . . [or] never have come to pass,” and his discussion of man’s ability to in- fluence nature with art by “uniting and disuniting of natural bodies . . . [whereby] man can do everything.” The poetic imagination per- forms the tasks that Bacon ascribes to man’s ability to alter nature: man “can do everything” by making “vnlawfull Matches & diuorses of things” that in nature would “never have come to pass” without his art.46 While nature’s laws cannot be broken through natural philosophy,

46 Bacon also argues that “where the case does not admit” the “uniting and disunit- ing of natural bodies,” man “can do nothing.” It is possible to read such cases as “vnlaw- full Matches & diuorses of things,” straining the similarities between the work of Bacon’s imagination and of his natural philosopher. Clearly, the imagination can operate out- side of nature’s laws where a natural philosopher must work within them. Nevertheless,

150 The Scientific Imagination in Bacon and Shakespeare

these imaginative permutations can produce in art what nature alone could not. For if, as Bacon believes, humans can “fundamentally alter” nature, what was once deemed “impossible” in nature is held possible through natural philosophical art. Just as a poet’s golden world “ex- ceeds the measure of nature” to display knowledge of an ideal order, Bacon’s natural philosophy displays nature in artificial environments to discover the knowledge that advances man toward the utopian ends of his program at large. Bacon’s natural philosophical art harnessed the poetic imagination to regulate nature such that it was subject to man’s control, restoring the dominion over nature that was lost in the Fall. Ex- perientia literata and novum organum, then, were complementary modes of investigating nature, because without such an interpenetrative com- patibility, natural philosophy could not reach the ends at which Bacon aimed. In this way, Bacon’s natural philosophy is set to craft in art what poetry crafts in language, producing a world of “a more perfect order” (W, 8:440) once reserved for fables.

Even if overlooked by many modern scholars, the imagination’s role in Bacon’s natural philosophy was not missed by the experimen- tal philosophers who largely adopted his natural philosophical reforms around mid- century.47 In his History of the Royal Society (1667), Thomas Sprat, the Royal Society’s most notable apologist, argues that the ex- periment will benefit, not hinder, the work of “Wits, and Writers, of this,

Bacon’s penchant to achieve what was once deemed “impossible” and to “fundamentally alter nature” aligns the scope of the imagination with that of his vision of natural philoso- phy. Provided nature’s laws do not intercede, man can achieve “everything,” including things thought possible only in fables. Consider the scientific wonders of the Bensalemites in Bacon’s New Atlantis. While these wonders of art are described within a utopian narra- tive, some were extensions of the wonders Bacon sought to produce in his other works. Bacon discusses the prolongation of life in book 4 of his Of the Dignity and Advancement of Learning (W, 9), a topic he also addresses in The New Atlantis when the Bensalemites’ abilities to preserve and prolong life are described (New Atlantis, in Francis Bacon: A Criti- cal Edition of the Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996], 480–82). And the “ships and boats for going under water” related in the New Atlantis (489) are most likely informed by the actual incipient submarines brought to the English court by Cornelis Drebbel in the early seventeenth century mentioned in Novum orga- num (O, 11:421). Man could not subvert his body’s need to breathe, but he could devise a machine that would allow him to breathe in environments where he otherwise could not. Although man’s art must obey nature’s laws, Bacon thought they could be imagina- tively manipulated to the benefit of mankind and to achieve what would otherwise be impossible.

47 Lewis argues that many of the natural and experimental philosophers who pro- claimed Bacon as their forefather, including members of the Hartlib circle and the Royal Society, opted to ignore half of Bacon’s art of discovery, “devot[ing] so much energy to the ingenious business of experientia literata, while neglecting the intellectual rigors of the novum organum” (“Francis Bacon and Ingenuity,” 148).

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and all future Ages” because, he suggests, the experiment will discover in “the Works of Nature an inexhaustible Treasure of Fancy.”48 Just as the poet excites the imagination of his audience with his craft, the natu- ral philosopher whets the imagination of the poet with the experiment. And Sprat attributes this relationship between the imagination and the experiment to Bacon: The use of Experiments to this purpose is evident, by the wonderful advantage that my Lord Bacon receiv’d from them. This excellent Writer was abundantly recompenc’d for his Noble Labors in that Philosophy, by a vast Treasure of admi- rable Imaginations which it afforded him, wherewith to express and adorn his thoughts about other matters.49 In this passage, Sprat does not applaud Bacon for the characteristics we would today associate with a scientist. Instead, Sprat frames Bacon as a poet, one whose “Noble Labors” in natural philosophy were “af- forded” by a “vast Treasure of admirable Imaginations.” And Bacon’s imaginations allowed him to “adorn” other aspects of his reforms, no less.50 Bacon, Sprat declares, “was a Man of strong, cleer, and power- ful Imaginations: his Genius was searching, and inimitable: and of this I need give no other proof, then his Style it self; which as, for the most part, it describes mens minds, as well as Pictures do their Bodies.”51 In using Bacon’s writing style as evidence of his “[i]maginations,” Sprat again crafts Bacon as a poet. Indeed, Bacon’s natural philosophical writ- ings were ripe with tropes and figures, not the least his call to “pene- trate” nature’s “inner sanctum” (O, 11:59) through the “vexations” of art (O, 11:157). Bacon’s eloquence and rhetorical prowess have not gone unnoticed. Brian Vickers remarks how frequently “studies of Bacon pay incidental tribute to his literary art.”52 The application of natural philo- sophical art to nature not only provided fodder for the poets but, if we take Sprat’s description of Bacon seriously, was indebted to one.

As a program set to achieve the “impossible,” Bacon’s natural philo- sophical art used the imagination to discover and perfect nature for

48 Sprat, The History of the Royal- Society for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (London, 1667), 413.

49 Ibid., 416. 50 Sprat elsewhere uses the term “adorn” to describe Bacon’s work, casting Bacon yet

again as a poet: “In whose Books there are every where scattered the best arguments, that can be produc’d for the defence of Experimental Philosophy; and the best directions, that are needful to promote it. All which he has already adorn’d with so much Art” (ibid., 35).

51 Ibid., 36. 52 Vickers, Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose (New York: Cambridge University Press,

1968), 4.

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man’s use. This utopian goal required the labor of the natural philoso- pher to be undaunted by the ancients and by despair—the pursuit of knowledge could no longer be idle. The utopian qualities that Bacon ascribes to his enterprise are also those he ascribes to poetry. For his program to achieve the goals he envisions, Bacon’s natural philosopher must perform the work of the poet: he must invent nature through art in ways deemed “impossible.” The fabulous images of poetry, then, are aligned with the wonders made possible through Bacon’s natural philosophy, blending the respective domains of each art. In this way, Bacon’s natural philosophical art can be considered an expression of the poetic imagination. When Bacon argues that he “finde not any Science, that doth properly or fitly pertaine to the IMAGINATION” (O, 4:106) or that poetry should “be accounted rather as a pleasure or play of wit than a science” (W, 9:62), it is because his natural philosophers have taken up the task of the poet and ushered the imagination from the province of eloquent language into the world of material nature. Through Bacon’s scientific reforms, the language with which the poet crafted his utopia became more closely aligned with the natural phenomena studied by the natural philosopher, more closely approximating the Adamic unity between word and thing in turn. In the image of man’s first sovereign, poetic language and natural philosophy made manifest the political order in word and world.

The complementarity between poetry and natural philosophy and the work they perform is especially evident in Shakespeare’s Tempest. Bacon and Shakespeare were contemporaries whose respective works, I argue, participate in a shared cultural understanding that saw poetry and natural philosophy as essential to the political order. Where Bacon makes explicit the role of these arts in the political order most point- edly in his natural philosophical writings, Shakespeare exemplifies it through dramatic artifice. The Tempest simultaneously addresses the power and limits of poetic art and natural philosophical art by staging their role in the restoration of legitimate sovereignty. Prospero’s art can be said to work on the imagination, a province he shares with the poet, and on nature, a domain he shares with the natural philosopher, exem- plifying the work that poetic and natural philosophical art perform in the political order in the early seventeenth century. Prospero’s art has been considered a metaphor for the imagination53 or a “farewell to a

53 Barbara Mowat, “Prospero, Agrippa, and Hocus Pocus,” English Literary Renaissance 11 (1981): 281–303.

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whole region of the human imagination,”54 and many have considered Prospero as Shakespeare’s ventriloquization of the process of produc- ing dramatic art.

Described as a “spectacle” (1.2.26) that elicits “amazement” (1.2.14) even to the extent that it can “infect” one’s “reason” (1.2.208), the imagi- nation cannot be bracketed from Prospero’s art.55 All of these readings presuppose Prospero as one who fabricates fiction with his command of language—that is, as a poet of sorts. Indeed, Prospero need only utter a few words, and Ariel manifests Prospero’s magical command to “th’syl- lable” (1.2. 498). Many scholars, however, have also identified Prospero as a Renaissance magus, some intimating the character as an incipient scientist,56 and recently the play as a whole has been considered an ex- ample of art’s role in natural philosophy’s rejection of some of its Aris- totelian roots.57 Sawday even claims that “Prospero is a truly Baconian figure, overmastering nature by means of his superior technology.”58 While some scholars have resisted the reading of Prospero as an in- cipient scientist,59 I do not claim Prospero as a natural philosopher but rather argue that Prospero’s art addressed the concerns that natural phi- losophy faced at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Prospero’s art demonstrates that counter to Aristotle, man’s art is indistinguish- able from nature save for its efficient cause—a central concern for Bacon when he advocates “vexations of art” to discover the workings of na- ture. When investigating the domains over which Prospero’s art func- tions, it is less important that his art works to compel (or, as the case

54 David Gwilym James, The Dream of Prospero (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 68.

55 For discussions of amazement or wonder in The Tempest, see Peter G. Platt, Reason Diminished: Shakespeare and the Marvelous (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), chapter 9; and Mary B. Moore, “Wonder, Imagination, and the Matter of Theatre in The Tempest,” Philosophy and Literature 30 (2006): 486–511.

56 See Hugh Kearney, Science and Change, 1500–1700 (New York: McGraw- Hill, 1971); Frances Yates, Shakespeare’s Last Plays: A New Approach (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975); and Denise Albanese, New Science, New World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 6 and 66–70.

57 Spiller, “Resituating Prospero’s Art.” 58 Sawday, Engines of the Imagination, 305. 59 Barbara Mowat, “Prospero and the Renaissance Scientist,” New Directions for Teach-

ing and Learning 8 (1981): 77–84; and Stephen Orgel, “Prospero’s Wife,” Representations 8 (1984): 1–13. Where Mowat considers reading Prospero as a scientist “an aberration of intellectual history” (“Renaissance Scientist,” 78), Orgel acknowledges some value in “talk[ing] about Prospero as a Renaissance scientist” but concludes that “what the play’s action presents is not experiments and empiric studies but a fantasy about controlling other people’s minds” (“Prospero’s Wife,” 9).

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may be, fails to compel) his audience to a particular end as would a poet proper or that his art produces natural phenomena as would a natu- ral philosopher’s Baconian vexations. Rather, it is especially noteworthy that Prospero’s art exerts influence over both the imagination and na- ture, because, in sharing these domains, his art dramatizes a comple- mentarity between the poet’s and the natural philosopher’s labors that Bacon codifies throughout his Instauratio magna.

Shakespeare’s Tempest exemplifies the political ends to which both poetry and natural philosophy worked—a shared sphere of influence that is introduced at the play’s outset. Within the first twenty- four lines, the relationship among the natural order, political order, and man’s role within them is ushered onto center stage. The Boatswain and Gonzalo’s debate over the dangers of the tempest contrast sovereign authority with the force of nature, bringing into relief the supposed disparity be- tween political and natural orders. “What cares these roarers,” the Boat- swain chides, “for the name of king?”60 But as the means by which Pros- pero initiates his plan to restore his dukedom under a legitimate crown, these “roarers” do indeed “care for the name of king.” Prospero’s art calls the political order and the natural order into disorder, restoring each under legitimate sovereignty at the play’s close when he ensures that the ship carrying his once- enemies is met with “calm seas, [and] auspicious gales” (5.1.314) on their journey back to Naples. This state of disorder, however, is as much a “spectacle” (1.2.26) as the tempest that produced it. The tempest, like the fabled creatures Prospero later crafts, casts the usurpers into a state of chaos where they can no longer assert power over their happenstance, environment, or even over their own minds. While the tempest poses no real threat to the men aboard the ship, the effects of this artifice are wrought in the political order. Pros- pero’s art produces an illusion of disorder so as to reproduce the politi- cal order under legitimate sovereignty. Put differently, the artifice of his stagecraft is a form of statecraft.

Prospero crafts a tempest, not a vicious leviathan or a plague of sea monsters—though such feats are conceivably within the purview of his art—to bring his enemies ashore, producing a natural phenomenon that mirrors his and Miranda’s marooning on the island. This signal event suggests that man can indeed produce natural phenomena as an expres-

60 Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (New York: Norton and Company, 2004), 1.1.16–17. Hereafter cited parenthetically by act, scene, and line number(s).

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sion of power. In this way, Prospero’s production of nature through art is akin to the vexations of art that Bacon tasks to his natural philosopher in the works that comprise his Instauratio magna. The ship members’ response to the storm furthermore suggests that Prospero’s tempest demonstrates that man’s art is indistinguishable from nature, at least in appearance: the ship members believe they are about to be wracked by a violent sea storm. In rejecting Aristotle’s distinction between art and nature, Bacon too argues that man’s art differs from nature only in its efficient cause. In The Tempest as well as for Bacon, man’s art, be it the poetic imagination or natural philosophical vexations, is difficult to differentiate from nature on any other grounds than its creator, impor- tantly aligning the poet and the natural philosopher.

The forms of writing respectively associated with the imagination and with the description of nature as it exists are also conflated in Prospero’s art. Prospero asks Ariel if the tempest was “performed to the point” of his commands (1.2.194), bidding Ariel to relate an exact account that is true to the tempest’s occurrence. Although Ariel is to report the tempest as though it were a natural historical account, Ariel’s “flamed amaze- ment” (1.2.198) situates his narrative as though it belongs in ancient fables: his “fire and cracks / Of sulfurous roaring” (1.2.203–4) are so powerful they “besiege” (1.2.205) the “most mighty Neptune” (1.2.204). In this way, Ariel’s retrospective account of the tempest conflates fable and natural history, blending a world fabricated entirely by language with one that consists of natural phenomena. Just as Ariel’s reference to Neptune blends what could have been a natural historical account of the tempest with fables, so Prospero’s enemies’ recourse to travel nar- ratives blends imagined and natural worlds. Stranded on an uncharted island, Prospero’s enemies turn to travel narratives to reference their amazement and explain the marvels they witness on the island. “Now I will believe,” Sebastian proclaims, “that in Arabia / There is . . . one phoenix / At this hour reigning there” (3.3.21–24). “I’ll be sworn ‘tis true. Travelers ne’er did lie,” Antonio agrees, “Though fools at home condemn ‘em” (3.3.26–27). The strange banquet and the harpy that would otherwise be reserved for poetry may indeed belong to the natu- ral world as well. What was once suspected as fable is given grounds for empirical existence, aligning once more the fables of the poet and the natural marvels that travel literature marks out for (Baconian) natu- ral philosophical investigation. While natural history (inquiries into what existed in nature) was distinct from natural philosophy (inquiries

156 The Scientific Imagination in Bacon and Shakespeare

into nature’s causal order), both worked together in Bacon’s program.61 Similarly in The Tempest, Prospero’s enemies inquire about the island’s strange phenomena—phenomena that they grant empirical existence based on the precedence of travel narratives—in an attempt to under- stand their cause. In the very language used to describe the effects of Prospero’s art, the province of the poet—the imagination—and the do- main of the natural philosopher—the natural world—are largely indis- tinguishable.

But art and nature are indistinguishable only under Prospero’s hand. Prospero crafts a plan to restore his lineage and regain the glory Milan lost in its subjection to Naples under Antonio’s rule. Prospero alone is privy to the knowledge of his art and the unfolding of his plan. Ariel’s complaints over his labor suggest that he does not possess full knowl- edge of Prospero’s plan, even though he is the means by which it is enacted. Prospero elides Alonso’s query over the strange happenings on the island, emphasizing his power over knowledge: “Do not infest your mind with beating on / The strangeness of this business. At picked leisure, / Which shall be shortly, single I’ll resolve you” (5.1.246–48). Prospero is the “single” holder of knowledge who will relate it at a “picked leisure,” a power he exerts by identifying to whom this knowl- edge can be shared and when it will be disseminated. None but Pros- pero knows whether his art affects the imagination or produces natu- ral phenomena, and such knowledge is inconsequential to the play. To be enchanted by Prospero’s fabulous images and to seek the cause of the natural phenomena his art produces is to know his power as the legitimate duke of Milan. The “business” of restoring the body poli- tic through art, The Tempest demonstrates, also restores a hierarchy of knowledge.

Throughout the play, the ship’s members wonder whether their imaginations have infected their reason or whether they witness natu- ral phenomena. Their query is not resolved even when Prospero iden- tifies himself as the source of their amazement. Is the tempest a feature of the imagination or is it a simulation of a natural phenomenon? Does Prospero’s art vex the mind or, as Bacon’s natural philosophers sought

61 Peter Anstey, “Francis Bacon and the Classification of Natural History,” Early Sci- ence and Medicine 17 (2012): 13 and 24–25. Lorraine Daston argues that “[p]art of Bacon’s innovation was to invert the relationship between natural history and natural philosophy, elevating the former to the status of foundation and corrective to the latter” (“Baconian Facts, Academic Civility, and the Prehistory of Objectivity,” in Rethinking Objectivity, ed. Allan Megill [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994, 1997], 45).

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to do, nature itself? Is Prospero a poet of sorts or does he also address natural philosophical concerns? It is difficult to disarticulate imagined from natural worlds in The Tempest, I submit, because they were not disarticulated in the early seventeenth century. Prospero’s art can be said to affect both the imagination and nature because there had been no division between the sphere that poetry and natural philosophy in- fluenced in the early seventeenth century: the knowledge ascertained through both affected the political order. Had the poets and their imag- ined world been entirely opposed to the natural philosophers’ study (and Baconian “vexation”) of nature, Prospero’s art would affect either the imagination or nature but could not be said to affect both. The world of the imagination, commonly thought to be the province of the poet, and the world of nature, the domain of the natural philosopher, are im- portantly conflated in Prospero’s art to serve political ends. Both poetry and natural philosophy labor to invent knowledge of an ideal order such that it can be reproduced in the political sphere. Where Bacon produces natural phenomena through vexations of art to reproduce the model of Adamic sovereignty, Prospero’s art produces natural and political dis- order so as to reproduce the conditions of his usurpation62 and restore his legitimate ducal line.

But Prospero’s art cannot change a thing’s essential nature, whether it is that of one “not honored with / A human shape” (1.2.283–84) or the heart of a usurper. The power of the poet’s and natural philosopher’s art is limited to a display. While Sidney’s poet can craft a perfected image of nature, he cannot perfect the material world itself. Similarly, when Bacon’s natural philosopher applies art to nature to produce natural phenomena, this production is an artful display crafted in a created en- vironment; he does not alter nature’s laws, but he does control where these laws can be best discovered. Prospero’s attempts to cultivate a human nature in the “freckled whelp” (1.2.283) Caliban, then, fails be- cause Caliban is “a born devil; on whose nature/ Nurture will never stick” (4.1.188–89). In Bacon and Shakespeare’s day, Caliban’s inherent disposition excluded him from any permanent position or rank in the natural order, despite the shipwrecked pair’s best efforts at education. In the early seventeenth century, Caliban can only be read as a ruler once he is left to the island at the play’s close and is no longer inserted

62 More than just conjuring a tempest that reproduces his strife at sea, Prospero sends Alonso and Gonzalo into a sudden slumber, prompting Antonio and Sebastian’s plot to usurp Naples. Ariel awakens Gonzalo, not Alonso, in time to save the duke, mirroring Gonzalo’s role in keeping Prospero and Miranda alive.

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into the natural order. Caliban’s nature similarly prevents his mutiny from succeeding. Trinculo, a jester, and Stephano, a butler, can no more be inserted into that order as rulers than their would- be island subject. As the trio attempt to overthrow Prospero, they are thwarted in the very moment Trinculo and Stephano stop to assume the outward display of rank they seek. Adorning themselves with a “gown” (4.1.226) and a “jerkin” (4.1.235), they afford Prospero time to sic on them dreadful spirits and to further exemplify their exclusion from places of higher rank: the mere possibility that they could raise their standing higher in the natural order is comically cut short when they opt to don the ward- robe of a woman, not a man. The threat to the political order is doubly contained as it is staged as dramatic folly.63 The power of art’s display, however, should not be understated. For it is by the artful display of nature that the poet and natural philosopher discover the order that the political hierarchy is to emulate. And it is through his art that Prospero restores his dukedom to legitimate rule.

The Tempest suggests that the power of the sovereign is to allot the members of the body politic into their natural place within the po- litical order, and this is the end to which Prospero’s art works while he is on the island. While in Milan, Prospero’s neglect of his political duties for the “bettering of [his] mind” (1.2.90) betrays the political ends to which his art should work. Forgoing his responsibilities, Pros- pero “[a]waked an evil nature” (1.2.93) in his brother, who orchestrates Prospero’s usurpation. But as an illegitimate ruler, Antonio could but “execut[e] th’outward face of royalty” (1.2.104); as younger brother to a ruler with a female heir, he is, by virtue of his birth, naturally precluded from legitimate rule while Prospero and Miranda still live. Antonio, then, cannot wield the sovereign’s power. When Antonio strategically “grant[s] suits” (1.2.79) to secure his usurpation, he can raise his men only superficially. Prospero specifies that these suits were not “new- created” (1.2.81) but that Antonio’s attempt to raise certain men more accurately “changed’em / Or else new- formed’em” (1.2.82–83). Only Prospero, and eventually Miranda and Ferdinand, can instate members of the body politic into the political hierarchy without also toppling the natural order.

Although Prospero restores his dukedom under legitimate rule, Antonio’s persistent refusal to repent for his treachery renders him

63 Shakespeare also dramatizes the relationship between one’s nature and one’s rank in the political order in A Winter’s Tale, where Perdita, the king of Sicily’s daughter, can once again assume her royal rank after being brought up by a shepherd.

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“[u]nnatural” (5.1.79). Prospero scorns Antonio by claiming that in reaching too far above his natural station, he has rejected and over- turned the natural order: Antonio’s “ambition / Expelled remorse and nature” (5.1.75–76). Just as Prospero cannot cultivate in Caliban a “human” (1.2.284) nature, Prospero’s art cannot transmute his brother’s treacherous heart. Prospero’s art compels his enemies’ imaginations to usurp their reason but not so as to gain complete and permanent control over their minds. Instead, Prospero chooses the “rarer action” (5.1.27) of mercy so as to prevent his “so potent art” from degrading entirely into a “rough magic” (5.1.50). Because Prospero releases his enemies’ imaginations from under his control, his art commands the imagination and nature primarily to reveal the order by which Milan and Naples should be restored. When Prospero reveals himself to his enemies, he must “present / As [he] was sometime Milan” (5.1.85–86) and trade his magic cloak for his “hat” and “rapier,” lest he go unrecognized as the legitimate ruler (5.1.82–84). Lacking the power to soften one’s heart, let alone alter one’s essence, Prospero exerts control over the imagination and nature to exemplify his art’s role in revealing the order to which the political hierarchy ought to be restored.

But if Prospero’s art ultimately restores his dukedom, how could it also be the catalyst of his usurpation? A healthy body politic, to re- call Gosson, is one that labors. Prospero’s “secret studies” (1.2.77) dis- tracted him from his duties as duke, and “by being so retired” (1.2.91) he is unable to protect himself, his daughter, and his dukedom from his brother’s plot. If Prospero is to restore his dukedom, his art can no longer be idle. Prospero’s plan, then, is described as a series of labors: Prospero encourages Ariel, “there’s more work” (1.2.238); Prospero as- sures his “industrious servant” (4.1.33), “[s]hortly shall all my labors end” (4.1.264); and Ariel reminds Prospero that their “work should cease” (5.1.5). Labor—that which Prospero shirked in Milan—is ac- knowledged as necessary to restore his dukedom. Indeed, Gonzalo’s utopia is “laughed at” (2.1.172) precisely because it is idle. In Gonzalo’s commonwealth “[a]ll things in common nature should produce / With- out sweat or endeavor” (2.1.155–56), and its inhabitants would have “[n]o occupation, all men idle, all” (2.1.150). Without a laboring body politic, Gonzalo’s “golden age” (2.1.164) would collapse. Whether in Milan, on the island, or in an imagined commonwealth, The Tempest sug- gests that labor is a corrective to political instability.

And more than just a corrective, it is through labor that Prospero deems Ferdinand and Miranda a couple worthy of inheriting Naples

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and Milan. Prospero presents Ferdinand with the same work with which he charges Caliban: carrying logs. But where Caliban complains and attempts to shirk this work, Ferdinand extols the virtue of “labor” (3.1.1). However “mean” the task (3.1.4), Ferdinand’s labor not only demonstrates his love for Miranda and gains her hand, but also shows Prospero that the suitor is worthy of such a match; love’s labors are not here lost. Prospero explains that Ferdinand’s laborious “vexations” (4.1.5) have “strangely stood the test” (4.1.7), making Miranda an “ac- quisition / Worthily purchased” or earned through his work (4.1.13–14). Ferdinand’s work also purchases Prospero his dukedom from Antonio. Once Miranda and Ferdinand wed, Antonio’s line can no longer inherit the crown, and the two dukedoms will be unified through Prospero’s lineage. Gonzalo hints as much when he asks “[w]as Milan thrust from Milan that his issue / Should become kings of Naples?” (5.1.205–6). Here again labor is a foil to Gonzalo’s failed utopia. Idleness pre- cludes marriage in Gonzalo’s commonwealth, for when Sebastian asks “[n]o marrying ‘mong [Gonzalo’s] subjects?” (2.1.161), Antonio re- sponds “None, man, all idle: whores and knaves” (2.1.162). The court- ship that will both restore Prospero’s dukedom and ensure peace with its neighbor is one consolidated through labor.

The restoration of Milan would not be complete unless Prospero ab- jured his art. In setting aside his art, Prospero’s privileged position is passed down to Miranda and Ferdinand, consolidating a legitimate lin- eage across two now peaceful dukedoms. Indeed, Milan would not be assured legitimate perpetuity unless Prospero relinquished the power that situates him as the head of the body politic, both as its ruler and, by extension, as the site of knowledge. In a similar manner, Prospero asks the play’s audience to take up his art and release him from the “bare island” (epilogue, 8)64 on which he was marooned “[w]ith the help of [our] good hands” (epilogue, 10) and “[g]entle breath” (epilogue, 11). The Tempest asks two things of the audience in the epilogue: to take up the labors of the poet by imagining Prospero off the island and to ac- knowledge their enchantment with the play by clapping and cheering. Because Prospero’s project “was to please” (epilogue, 13), the epilogue makes explicit the audience’s role in the political work performed by the products of the imagination. Prospero’s art must move its audience to action, otherwise Prospero would be stuck on the island and the po-

64 The island, of course, is not left bare of inhabitants: Caliban is left to the island or, read differently, the island is left to Caliban.

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litical order would be stuck in disorder. If the audience fails to take up Prospero’s art, then Prospero’s “project fails” (epilogue, 12) too.

But what does it mean to “please” an audience? Few critics would claim Prospero as one of their more beloved Shakespeare characters; it is Prospero’s art, not him, that pleases his audience.65 Because Pros- pero’s art exemplifies the alignment between the world of the imagina- tion and the world of natural phenomena, the audience can acknowl- edge that the poet’s golden world also reveals the divine order that structures their material world. For the body politic to be restored, it must be aligned with the order of nature—the roarers must care for the name of king. In other words, if the golden world imagined by the poet is to become manifest, then man’s art must be able to align the order of nature with the order among men. In pleasing his audience, Prospero’s epilogue does just that: in praising the play as artifice with claps and cheers, the audience acknowledges that man’s art can help restore the natural order. The domain of the poet and the natural philosopher meet in the political sphere. The Tempest, then, dramatizes the relationship among poetry, natural philosophy, and sovereign power: poetry and natural philosophy both reveal the order that the sovereign is to main- tain in his political hierarchy.

Even though they plied their labors in different domains, the poet and natural philosopher were complementary in the political work they performed during the early seventeenth century. As Prospero dem- onstrates, the realm of the imagination and the world of natural phe- nomena are indistinguishable under the hand of the legitimate ruler. When the play’s characters and its audience question whether Pros- pero’s art works on the imagination or on natural phenomena, either answer reflects the ruler’s power, and together they enable political correspondence across both imaginary and natural worlds. In The Tem- pest, Prospero’s art addresses the power and limits of poetic and natu- ral philosophical art for the restoration of the political order, drama- tizing the complementary relationship between poetry and natural philosophy in the early seventeenth century. In his endeavor to restore an Adamic sovereignty over nature, Bacon rejects all distinctions be- tween man’s art and nature, save its efficient cause. The imagination, commonly wielded by the poets, becomes essential to achieving what

65 Harold Bloom, one can assume, is exaggerating when he writes that “[n]o audience has ever liked Prospero” (Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human [New York: Riverhead Books, 1998], 669).

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was otherwise thought “impossible” in natural philosophical knowl- edge and art. Bacon infused the imagination’s ability to perfect nature into his conceptualization of his natural philosophy, making manifest the utopianism of poetry as the eutopianism of his program. Bacon can then emphasize the primacy of the natural philosopher because his natural philosophical reforms have appropriated the poet’s func- tion, overlapping golden and natural worlds. Because experientia lite- rata and novum orgnum must work together if an Adamic sovereignty over nature is to be restored, Bacon codifies the complementarity be- tween poetry and natural philosophy that allows Prospero to exert do- minion over the imagination and nature. In the early seventeenth cen- tury, poetry and natural philosophy each express versions of sovereign power that reproduce the political order. Although Bacon himself never used this exact formulation, the popularized and pithy statement often attributed to him is nevertheless befitting: “knowledge is power.”66

Stephen F. Austin State University

66 In Meditationes Sacrae, Bacon writes “ipsa scientia potestas est” or “knowledge itself is power” (W, 14:79). This article is indebted to the many sharp minds whose insights have helped me refine my own thinking. I am appreciative of the seminar participants at the 2014 Shakespeare Society of America Annual Meeting and the reader at Studies in Phi- lology, all of whom offered me invaluable questions and helpful suggestions. I would also like to extend a special note of gratitude to Leonard Tennenhouse and Rhodri Lewis for their incredibly useful and sagacious feedback.

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