Meaning & Analysis
Just as one nail can be driven out by another, so too can one influence, experience, or force replace or expel another.
Insights
Replacement of Emotions
Suggests that a new emotional experience—especially love, pain, or grief—can replace a prior one, easing or displacing it by sheer force or novelty.
Conflict and Supplantation
Indicates that one cunning act, deception, or strategy can be used to undo or supplant another—particularly in political, personal, or rhetorical contests.
Cure by Counterforce
Embodies the idea that the best remedy for a persistent influence is a stronger opposing force, often used in contexts of addiction, obsession, or mental preoccupation.
Classical Origins
Erasmus’s Latin adage *Clavum clavo pellere* traces the proverb to antiquity, where it signified the substitution of one pain or pleasure for another—suggesting that human psychology responds to displacement more than resolution.
Emotional Substitution in Literature
Shakespeare's usage—'One nail drives out another'—highlights the proverb's resonance in narratives of love and emotional shift. It reflects early modern understandings of emotional cure through distraction or substitution rather than introspection.
Cynicism Toward Human Nature
The proverb often carries a cynical undercurrent: that we don’t overcome problems or attachments by transformation but by replacing them—deceit for deceit, love for love, grief for grief.
Rhetorical Devices
Mechanical Metaphor
Applies a manual, physical process—driving out a nail—to abstract processes of emotion, conflict, or strategy, reinforcing the proverb's visceral, hands-on resonance.
Parallelism
The repetition of 'one...another' structures the proverb as a balanced formula, enhancing its memorability and rhetorical force.
Synecdoche
The 'nail' stands in for entire experiences, emotions, or agents—compressing broad dynamics into a compact, tangible image.
Transcription
Quotations
Clauum clauo pellere.
[As we se one nayle dryuen out with an other nayle, so doth many tymes one crafte and gyle expell an other. [As in Eras.]]
Clauum clauo pellere to dryue out one nayle with an other. A prouerbe signifying one yll to put out an other, one labour an other, one grefe an other, one deceyte an other, extreme pleasure with extreme peyne.
Seel-dome cumth the better, come or go who will, One nayle driueth out an other, wee se still.
But afterwarde, one nayle driuing forth another, they fell in great ad-miration at the sudden and shorte anger of louers.
One nayle is driuen out with an other.
One nayle is driven out by an other.
Thus with one nail another I’ll expel, And make the world judge, that I us’d him well.
One nayle you see another will expel, When nothing els can force the same to mooue.
(Have you neuer heard, that one naile).
One nayle serues to driue out another; one friend im-ployed to supplant the other.
One Nail (as the Prouerb is) being to be driven out by another.
Languages and Words . . may be said to stick in the memory like nails or pegs in a Wainscatdoor, which useth to thrust out one another often-times.
One nail thrusts out the other.
To drive one nail with another.
It was thought fit, by some eminent persons . . to drive out one nail with another.
Shakespeare Citations
Even as one heat another heat expels Or as one nail by strength drives out another, So the remembrance of my former love Is by a newer object quite for-gotten.
One fire drives out one fire; one nail, one nail.
Cross References
- See DÜr., I, no. 358
- JENTE 242, p. 428
- Pf., no. 113
- T. 410, p. 216.
- D174 One deceit (falsehood) drives out another
- F277 One fire (heat) drives out another
- G446 The greater grief (sorrow) drives out the less
- L538 One love drives out (expels) another
- W234 One wedge drives out another.
Annotations
- As we se one nayle dryuen out with an other nayle, so doth many tymes one crafte and gyle expell an other. [As in Eras.]
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
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