Teaching objectives
To understand Bacon’s attitude toward life
To study Bacon’s writing techniques
Key teaching points Theme, Structure, Writing techniques of the essay
Teaching procedures
I. A brief summary
As we all know, Francis Bacon, the chief figure of the English Renaissance, is a very famous as an English statesman, essayist, and philosopher of science. Of Marriage and Single Life is one of his most well-known essays, which analyzes and compares marriage with single life in different aspects, such as characters, public service and personal qualities. While, there seems to be not so comprehensive from people’s perspective today.
Bacon’s basic opinion is that marriage is good to both individual and society. His analysis is taken step by step. At first, a single man believes that a man with wife and children, who are obstacles to both great courses and little trivial, is the slave of fortune. Especially some miser men think children are the bills of charges and will reduce their riches. And foremost reason is that to be single is to be free, while wife and children are the bonds to his freedom. However, a single life has some good aspects. “Unmarried men are best friends, best masters, and best servants.” But single life could also make a man indifferent, facile and corrupt for judges and magistrates, coward for soldiers without combat power and perseverance. Marriage makes a man be responsible, tender, enthusiastic and warm-hearted. Finally, Bacon pointed that “wives are young men’s mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men’s nurses”. Even though a wife marries a bad husband, marriage offers a good chance for husband to correct themselves.
II Theme discussions
Fortune
Selfishness
Liberty
Professional Preference
Humane Discipline
Chastity
To Marry or Not?
Ⅲ Analysis
This essay considers "wives" and children (assuming his readers are male) and balances their advantages against their disadvantages in such a way that it's difficult to decide whether marriage is a good or a bad idea. Bad marriages, however, he suggests can be analyzed more easily by their effects upon the women in them.
Bacon first states with apparent confidence that ‘He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises’, a statement that on the face of it is closed and certain.
However, Bacon’s essays are also motivated by a sense of exploration, and any resolution of idea is soon left behind. Following the above sentence he departs from the question of whether women and children are impediments and continues:
Certainly the best works […] have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men; which

both in affection and means have married and endowed the public. Yet it were great reason that those that have children should have greatest care of future times, unto which they know they must transmit their dearest treasures. Some there are, who though they lead a single life, their thoughts do end with themselves, and count future times impertinences.
The word ‘certainly’, with which this passage begins is progressively demolished till only uncertainty is left. The argument winds back to contradict itself: men without children are more likely to endow the future, yet men with them want the future to be good for their offspring, while some single men think anything beyond their own lives irrelevant. All that remains is a suggestion of various truths, none of which is absolute.
Bacon views marriage as bondage. First, "they are impediments to great enterprises". Second,
"the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men ..." Notice what else Bacon says about single men: They are "best friends, best masters, best servants ..." However, everything Bacon says about single men and women is not complimentary.
He goes on to say how a wife and children as "a kind of discipline of humanity". One of
Bacon's well known quotes is toward the end of his essay: "Wives are young men's mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men's nurses".
Notice how straightforward is Bacon's writings.
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