Prologue: ‘Of Studies’ and Play

Abstract

In his essay ‘Of Studies’, Bacon is as clear about the complex balance to be struck amongst the various uses of the new learning as he is about the need to maintain it in a productive relationship with the ‘real’ world of practical experience:

To spend too much time in studies, is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgement wholly by their rules, is the humour of a scholar: they perfect nature, and are perfected by experience: for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.¹

There are moral and political dangers in scholarship which the checks and balances of Bacon’s prose work hard to contain. Not only is he aware of the potential conflicts between the various legitimate uses of learning that he lists — the enrichment of leisure, the adornment of conversation, the improvement of business. He is aware too of the conflicts that may arise between the ‘private’ world of imaginative expectation nourished by study (especially study of the ‘feigned history’ of poetry)² and the demands of the ‘public’ world of citizenship (to be studied as ‘true history’).