Bacon’s Jokes

• In Event: Negotiating Francis Bacon

Abstract

Bacon’s Apophthegms New and Old,, a collection of jokes he published in 1625, has received little scholarly attention. Yet because of jokes’ exceptionally rigid form, and because of the large number of examples the collection provides, it can serve as an ideal site for examining how Bacon’s literary techniques reflect his intellectual preoccupations. Like all jokes, the jokes in Bacon’s collection combine a narrative context with a spoken witticism – a “kernel,” as Bacon calls it, which can be extracted from its immediate situation and reused. In their very form, then, jokes negotiate between narrative situations and verbal formulae, balancing particularity and abstraction.

Author

• Julianne Werlin, Duke University