What follows are quotations from
Hamlet (1623, First Folio edition), from Pope's An Essay on Man (1733--actually outside the bounds of our period, but still useful), from a speech by Ulysses in Shakespeare's play Troilus and Cressida (1602), another quote from Hamlet, and some pages from Bacon's The Advancement of Human Learning (1605). First, visit another site about Sir Francis Bacon.
Read both of these quotations. What conception of humankind's qualities do they express? What do they depict as humankind's strengths and weaknesses? Where does humanity "fit" in relation to the rest of Creation?
Click on the lines above to see them embedded in their full page,
from Hamlet in the the First Folio of Shakespeare's works from 1623.
Now read these lines from Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man (1734):
Alexander Pope,
An Essay on Man, Epistle II, opening lines:1 Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
2 The proper study of mankind is man.
3 Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state,
4 A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
5 With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,
6 With too much weakness for the stoic's pride,
7 He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
8 In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;
9 In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
10 Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
11 Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
12 Whether he thinks too little, or too much:
13 Chaos of thought and passion, all confus'd;
14 Still by himself abus'd, or disabus'd;
15 Created half to rise, and half to fall;
16 Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
17 Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd:
18 The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
Sir Philip Sidney, who was a contemporary of Shakespeare, wrote that humankind possessed "an erected wit, but an infected will." That description surely fits both Hamlet's words and Pope's. In what has been called the "Great Chain of Being," humankind occupied the highest link of all living creatures...a "middle state," to use Pope's words, because it possessed both the intelligence of angels (in kind, if not degree) and the physical, gross body of animals that acts not according to the light of God's intelligence but according to its own "will" (drives, desires). Much Renaissance literature in English chews on this "double nature" of humankind, trying to extract a sense of who and what kind of creatures we actually are. When we read John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, you will be enthralled by the character Daniel de Bosola's struggle with his double nature and will also question whether or not the Duchess herself evidences both sides of human nature in her behavior, whether we (and she) want to admit it.
Click here for the next page, Ulysses's speech on the importance of "degree" (hierarchy and order) in the society of Renaissance England. (Yes, he's a "Greek" character, but Shakespeare's plays are ultimately about his own society!)