Modern Term → Bacon's Own Word

Glossary

Every modern analytical term this course uses is a translation of something Bacon named or argued himself. Some are near-exact matches; others are genuine extensions of his idea into territory he never wrote about directly. Both are labeled honestly below.

Week 1 — Judicial Restraint

"Jus dicere, and not jus dare"

"Of Judicature," Essays

A near-exact match. Bacon is making precisely this distinction — a judge interprets law, does not make it — and Richard's halted trial by combat is a direct dramatization of a ruler blurring the two.

Week 3 — Sovereignty as Asset

"Money is like muck, not good except it be spread"

"Of Seditions and Troubles," Essays

A genuine extension. Bacon's actual claim is about wealth circulating for the commonwealth's benefit, not specifically about a king converting crown revenue into personal liquidity. The course narrows a broad economic observation into a specific political failure.

Week 6 — Ambiguity of Stated Intent

"All rising to great place is by a winding stair"

"Of Great Place," Essays

A partial match. Bacon is describing the generally indirect path to power; the course's specific application — a claim deliberately worded to mean either a narrow or a total thing — is a real narrowing of his broader observation, not a direct restatement of it.

Week 8 — Sequential Defection

"There is little friendship in the world, and least of all between equals"

"Of Followers and Friends," Essays

The widest gap in this glossary. Bacon is making a general claim about the absence of loyalty among equals — he says nothing about the specific mechanic of defections requiring a prior defection as social cover. The course's application is a genuine extension into a mechanic Bacon never named directly.

Week 10 — Ceremony Masking Force

"Princes are like to heavenly bodies... which have much veneration, but no rest"

"Of Empire," Essays

A moderate match. Bacon's actual point is about the burden of rule, not specifically about staged consent covering an underlying fact of force. The course's application — reused deliberately from the Tempest unit's own Week 10 — extends the image toward a narrower claim about the theater of negotiated power.

Week 12 — Ceremony as Legitimizing Mechanism

"Custom is the principal magistrate of man's life"

"Of Custom and Education," Essays

A genuine extension. Bacon is writing about individual habit and moral formation, not political ritual. The course's application to the ceremonial performance around Richard's forced abdication borrows the structure of the claim — that repeated form governs behavior — and applies it to an institution rather than a person.

Week 15 — A Documented Letter, Not an Aphorism

"Win the Queen: if this be not the beginning, of any other course I see no end."

Bacon's letter of counsel to the Earl of Essex, 1598

Important to be explicit with students: this is not a philosophical aphorism from an essay or treatise. It is a real, documented piece of correspondence — actual advice Bacon gave a real man, years before this play's most consequential real-world use. Treat it as a historical primary source functioning as this week's closing line, not as a coined term to analyze the way the others above are.

Course-Wide Terms

The foundational course-wide entries — the Idols of the Mind (Tribe, Cave, Market-place, Theatre) and "Ipsa scientia potestas est" ("knowledge itself is power") — already live in the Tempest unit's Glossary and underlie the whole K-12 Bacon program rather than this play specifically. See that Glossary rather than duplicating them here.