The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded

Of course, it was impossible to get out any scientific doctrine of the human society, without coming at once in collision with that doctrine of the divinity of arbitrary power which the monarchs of England were then openly sustaining. Who needs to be told, that he who would handle that argument scientifically, then, without military weapons, as this inquirer would, must indeed 'pray in aid of similes.' And yet a very searching and critical inquiry into the claims of that institution, which the new philosophy found in possession of the human welfare, and asserting a divine right to it as a thing of private property and legitimate family inheritance, – such a criticism was, in fact, inevitably involved in that inquiry into the principles of a human subjection which appeared to this philosopher to belong properly to the more chosen subjects of a scientific investigation.

And notwithstanding the delicacy of the subjects, and the extremely critical nature of the investigation, when it came to touch those particulars, with which the personal observations and experiments of the founders of this new school in philosophy had tended to enrich their collections in this department, – 'and the aim is better,' says the principal spokesman of this school, who quietly proposes to introduce this method into politics, 'the aim is better when the mark is alive;' notwithstanding the difficulties which appeared to lie then in the way of such an investigation, the means of conducting it to the entire satisfaction, and, indeed, to the large entertainment of the persons chiefly concerned, were not wanting. For this was one of those 'secrets of policy,' which have always required the aid of fable, and the idea of dramatising the fable for the sake of reaching in some sort those who are incapable of receiving any thing 'which does not directly fall under, and strike the senses,' as the philosopher has it; those who are capable of nothing but 'dumb shows and noise,' as Hamlet has it; this idea, though certainly a very happy, was not with these men an original one. Men, whose relations to the state were not so different as the difference in the forms of government would perhaps lead us to suppose, – men of the gravest learning and enriched with the choicest accomplishments of their time, had adopted that same method of influencing public opinion, some two thousand years earlier, and even as long before as that, there were 'secrets of morality and policy,' to which this form of writing appeared to offer the most fitting veil.

Whether 'the new' philosopher, – whether 'the new magician' of this time, was, in fact, in possession of any art which enabled him to handle without diffidence or scruple the great political question which was then already the question of the time; whether 'THE CROWN' – that double crown of military conquest and priestly usurpation, which was the one estate of the realm at that crisis in English history, did, among other things in some way, come under the edges of that new analysis which was severing all here then, and get divided clearly with 'the mind, that divine fire,' – whether any such thing as that occurred here then, the reader of the following pages will be able to judge. The careful reader of the extracts they contain, taken from a work of practical philosophy which made its appearance about those days, will certainly have no difficulty at all in deciding that question. For, first of all, it is necessary to find that political key to the Elizabethan art of delivery, which unlocks the great works of the Elizabethan philosophy, and that is the necessity which determines the selection of the Plays that are produced in this volume. They are brought in to illustrate the fact already stated, and already demonstrated, the fact which is the subject of this volume, the fact that the new practical philosophy of the modern ages, which has its beginning here, was not limited, in the plan of its founders, to 'natural philosophy' and 'the part operative' of that, – the fact that it comprehended, as its principal department, the department in which its 'noblest subjects' lay, and in which its most vital innovations were included, a field of enquiry which could not then be entered without the aid of fable and parable, and one which required not then only, 'but now, and at all times,' the aid of a vivid poetic illustration; they are brought in to illustrate the fact already demonstrated from other sources, the fact that the new philosophy was the work of men able to fulfil their work under such conditions, able to work, if not for the times that were nearer, for the times that were further off; men who thought it little so they could fulfil and perfect their work and make their account of it to the Work-master, to robe another with their glory; men who could relinquish the noblest works of the human genius, that they might save them from the mortal stabs of an age of darkness, that they might make them over unharmed in their boundless freedom, in their unstained perfection, to the farthest ages of the advancement of learning, – that they might 'teach them how to live and look fresh' still,

'When tyrants' crests, and tombs of brass are spent.'

That is the one fact, the indestructible fact, which this book is to demonstrate.

PART I.

LEAR'S PHILOSOPHER

'Thou'dst shun a bear;But if thy way lay towards the raging sea,Thou'dst meet the bear i' the mouth.'

CHAPTER I

PHILOSOPHY IN THE PALACE'I think the king is but a man, as I am.' —King Henry.  'They told me I was everything.' —Lear.

OF course, it was not possible that the prerogative should be openly dealt with at such a time, questioned, discussed, scientifically examined, in the very presence of royalty itself, except by persons endowed with extraordinary privileges and immunities, persons, indeed, of quite irresponsible authority, whose right to do and say what they pleased, Elizabeth herself, though they should enter upon a critical analysis of the divine rights of kings to her face, and deliberately lay bare the defects in that title which she was then attempting to maintain, must needs notwithstanding, concede and respect.

And such persons, as it happened, were not wanting in the retinue of that sovereignty which was working in disguise here then, and laying the foundations of that throne in the thoughts of men, which would replace old principalities and powers, and not political dominions merely. To the creative genius which waited on the philosophic mind of that age, making up in the splendour of its gifts for the poverty of its exterior conditions, such persons, – persons of any amount or variety of capacity which the necessary question of its play might require, were not wanting: – 'came with a thought.'

Of course, poor Bolingbroke, fevered with the weight of his ill-got crown, and passing a sleepless night in spite of its supposed exemptions, unable to command on his state-bed, with all his royal means and appliances, the luxury that the wet sea boy in the storm enjoys, – and the poet appears, to have had some experience of this mortal ill, which inclines him to put it down among those which ought to be excluded from a state of supreme earthly felicity, – the poor guilty disgusted usurper, discovering that this so blessed 'invention' was not included in the prerogative he had seized, under the exasperation of the circumstances, might surely be allowed to mutter to himself, in the solitude of his own bed-chamber, a few general reflections on the subject, and, indeed, disable his own position to any extent, without expecting to be called to an account for it, by any future son or daughter of his usurping lineage. That extraordinary, but when one came to look at it, quite incontestable fact, that nature in her sovereignty, imperial still, refused to recognize this artificial difference in men, but still went on her way in all things, as if 'the golden standard' were not there, classing the monarch with his 'poorest subject;' – the fact that this charmed 'round of sovereignty,' did not after all secure the least exemption from the common individual human frailty, and helplessness, – this would, of course, strike the usurper who had purchased the crown at such an expense, as a fact in natural history worth communicating, if it were only for the benefit of future princes, who might be disposed to embark in a similar undertaking. Here, of course, the moral was proper, and obvious enough; or close at hand, and ready to be produced, in case any serious inquiry should be made for it; though the poet might seem, perhaps, to a severely critical mind, disposed to pursue his philosophical inquiry a little too curiously into the awful secrets of majesty, retired within itself, and pondering its own position; – openly searching what Lord Bacon reverently tells us, the Scriptures pronounce to be inscrutable, namely, the hearts of kings, and audaciously laying bare those private passages, those confessions, and misgivings, and frailties, for which policy and reverence prescribe concealment, and which are supposed in the play, indeed, to be shrouded from the profane and vulgar eye, a circumstance which, of course, was expected to modify the impression.

So, too, that profoundly philosophical suspicion, that a rose, or a violet, did actually smell, to a person occupying this sublime position, very much as it did to another; a suspicion which, in the mouth of a common man, would have been literally sufficient to 'make a star-chamber matter of'; and all that thorough-going analysis of the trick and pageant of majesty which follows it, would, of course, come only as a graceful concession, from the mouth of that genuine piece of royalty, who contrives to hide so much of the poet's own 'sovereignty of nature,' under the mantle of his free and princely humours, the brave and gentle hero of Agincourt.

'Though I speak it to you,' he says, talking in the disguise of a 'private,' 'I think the King is but a man as I am, the violet smells to him as it doth to me; all his senses, have but human conditions. His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness, he appears but a man; and though his affections are higher mounted than ours, yet, when they stoop, they stoop with the like wing. When he sees reason of fears, as we do, his fears, out of doubt, be of the same relish as ours are'; and in the same scene, thus the royal philosopher versifies, and soliloquises on the same delicate question.

'And what have kings that "privates" have not, too, save ceremony, – save general ceremony? And what art thou, thou idol ceremony?—What is thy soul of adoration?'

A grave question, for a man of an inquiring habit of mind, in those times: let us see how a Poet can answer it.

'Art thou aught else but place, degree and form,  Creating awe and fear in other men?  Wherein, thou art less happy, being feared,  Than they in fearing?

[Again and again this man has told us, and on his oath, that he cherished no evil intentions, no thought of harm to the king; and those who know what criticisms on the state, as it was then, he had authorised, and what changes in it he was certainly meditating and preparing the way for, have charged him with falsehood and perjury on that account; but this is what he means. He thinks that wretched victim of that most irrational and monstrous state of things, on whose head the crown of an arbitrary rule is placed, with all its responsibilities, in his infinite unfitness for them, is, in fact, the one whose case most of all requires relief. He is the one, in this theory, who suffers from this unnatural state of things, not less, but more, than his meanest subject. 'Thou art less happy being feared, than they in fearing.']

What drink'st thou oft instead of homage sweet  But poison'd flattery? O! be sick, great greatness,  And bid thy ceremony give thee cure.  Thinkest thou the fiery fever will go out  With titles blown from adulation?  Will it give place to flexure and low bending?

Interesting physiological questions! And though the author, for reasons of his own, has seen fit to put them in blank verse here, it is not because he does not understand, as we shall see elsewhere, that they are questions of a truly scientific character, which require to be put in prose in his time – questions of vital consequence to all men. The effect of 'poisoned flattery,' and 'titles blown from adulation' on the minds, of those to whose single will and caprice the whole welfare of the state, and all the gravest questions for this life and the next, were then entrusted, naturally appeared to the philosophical mind, perseveringly addicted to inquiries, in which the practical interests of men were involved, a question of gravest moment.

But here it is the physical difference which accompanies this so immense human distinction, which he appears to be in quest of; it is the control over nature with which these 'farcical titles' invest their possessor, that he appears to be now pertinaciously bent upon ascertaining. For we shall find, as we pursue the subject, that this is not an accidental point here, a casual incident of the character, or of the plot, a thing which belongs to the play, and not to the author; but that this is a poet who is somehow perpetually haunted with the impression that those who assume a divine right to control, and dispose of their fellow-men, ought to exhibit some sign of their authority; some superior abilities; some magical control; some light and power that other men have not. How he came by any such notions, the critic of his works is, of course, not bound to show; but that which meets him at the first reading is the fact, the incontestable fact, that the Poet of Shakspere's stage, be he who he may, is a poet whose mind is in some way deeply occupied with this question; that it is a poet who is infected, and, indeed, perfectly possessed, with the idea, that the true human leadership ought to consist in the ability to extend the empire of man over nature, – in the ability to unite and control men, and lead them in battalions against those common evils which infest the human conditions, – not fevers only but 'worser' evils, and harder to be cured, and to the conquest of those supernal blessings which the human race have always been vainly crying for. 'I am a king that find thee,' he says.

And having this inveterate notion of a true human regality to begin with, he is naturally the more curious and prying in regard to the claims of the one which he finds in possession; and when by the mystery of his profession and art, he contrives to get the cloak of that factitious royalty about him, he asks questions under its cover which another man would not think of putting.

'Canst thou,' he continues, walking up and down the stage in King Hal's mantle, inquiring narrowly into its virtues and taking advantage of that occasion to ascertain the limits of the prerogative – that very dubious question then, —

'Canst thou when thou command'st the beggar's knee, Command the health of it?' —

No? what mockery of power is it then? But, this in connection with the preceding inquiry in regard to the effect of titles on the progress of a fever, or the amenability of its paroxysm, to flexure and low bending, might have seemed perhaps in the mouth of a subject to savour somewhat of irony; it might have sounded too much like a taunt upon the royal helplessness under cover of a serious philosophical inquiry, or it might have betrayed in such an one a disposition to pursue scientific inquiries farther than was perhaps expedient. But thus it is, that THE KING can dare to pursue the subject, answering his own questions.

'No, thou proud dream That playst so subtly with a king's repose; I am a king that find thee; and I know 'Tis not the THE BALM, THE SCEPTRE, and THE BALL, THE SWORD, THE MACE, THE CROWN IMPERIAL, The inter-tissued ROBE of gold and pearl, The FARCED TITLE —

What is that? – Mark it: – the farced TITLE! – A bold word, one would say, even with a king to authorise it.

'The farced TITLE running 'fore the king,THE THRONE he sits on, nor the tide of POMP  That beats upon the high shore of this world,  No, not all these, thrice gorgeous CEREMONY,  Not all these laid in BED MAJESTICAL,  Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave  Who, with a body filled, and vacant mind,  Gets him to rest crammed with distressful bread,  Never sees horrid night, the child of hell,  But like a lackey from the rise to set  Sweats in the eye of Phoebus; and all night  Sleeps in Elysium.

Yes, there we have him, at last. There he is exactly. That is the scientific picture of him, 'poor man,' as this poet calls him elsewhere. What malice could a philosophic poet bear him? That is the monarchy that men were 'sanctifying themselves with,' and 'turning up the white of the eye to,' then. That is the figure that it makes when it comes to be laid in its state-bed, upon the scientific table of review, not in the formal manner of 'the second part' of this philosophy, but in that other manner which the author of the Novum Organum, speaks of so frequently, as the one to be used in applying it to subjects of this nature. That is the anatomy of him, which 'our method of inquiry and investigation,' brings out without much trouble 'when we come to particulars.' 'Truly we were in good hands,' as the other one says, who finds it more convenient, for his part, to discourse on these points, from a distance.

That is the figure the usurping monarch's pretensions make at the first blush, in the collections from which 'the vintage' of the true sovereignty, and the scientific principles of governments are to be expressed, when the true monarchy, the legitimate, 'one only man power,' is the thing inquired for. This one goes to 'the negative' side apparently. A wretched fellow that cannot so much as 'sleep o' nights,' that lies there on the stage in the play of Henry the Fourth, in the sight of all the people, with THE CROWN on his very pillow, by way 'facilitating the demonstration,' pining for the 'Elysium' at his meanest subject, – that the poor slave, 'crammed with distressful bread,' commands; crying for the luxury that the wet seaboy, on his high and giddy couch enjoys; – and from whose note-book came that image, dashed with the ocean spray, – who saw that seaboy sleeping in that storm?

But, as for this KING, it is the king which the scientific history brings out; whereas, in the other sort of history that was in use then, lie is hardly distinguishable at all from those Mexican kings who undertook to keep the heavenly bodies in their places, and, at the same time, to cause all things to be borne by the earth which were requisite for the comfort and convenience of man; a peculiarity of those sovereigns, of which the Man on the Mountains, whose study is so well situated for observations of that sort, makes such a pleasant note.

But whatever other view we may take of it, this, it must be conceded, is a tolerably comprehensive exhibition, in the general, of the mere pageant of royalty, and a pretty free mode of handling it; but it is at the same time a privileged and entirely safe one. For the liberty of this great Prince to repeat to himself, in the course of a solitary stroll through his own camp at midnight, when nobody is supposed to be within hearing, certain philosophical conclusions which he was understood to have arrived at in the course of his own regal experience, could hardly be called in question. And as to that most extraordinary conversation in which, by means of his disguise on this occasion, he becomes a participator, if the Prince himself were too generous to avail himself of it to the harm of the speakers, it would ill become any one else to take exceptions at it.

And yet it is a conversation in which a party of common soldiers are permitted to 'speak their minds freely' for once, though 'the blank verse has to halt for it,' on questions which would be considered at present questions of 'gravity.' It is a dialogue in which these men are allowed to discuss one of the most important institutions of their time from an ethical point of view, in a tone as free as the president of a Peace Society could use to-day in discussing the same topic, intermingling their remarks with criticisms on the government, and personal allusions to the king himself, which would seem to be more in accordance with the manners of the nineteenth century, than with those of the Poet's time.

But then these wicked and treasonous grumblings being fortunately encountered on the spot, and corrected by the king himself in his own august person, would only serve for edification in the end; if, indeed, that appeal to the national pride which would conclude the matter, and the glory of that great day which was even then breaking in the East, should leave room for any reflections upon it. For it was none other than the field of Agincourt that was subjected to this philosophic inquiry. It was the lustre of that immortal victory which was to England then, what Waterloo and the victories of Nelson are now, that was thus chemically treated beforehand. Under the cover of that renowned triumph, it was, that these soldiers could venture to search so deeply the question of war in general; it was in the person of its imperial hero, that the statesman could venture to touch so boldly, an institution which gave to one man, by his own confession no better or wiser than his neighbours, the power to involve nations in such horrors.

But let us join the king in his stroll, and hear for ourselves, what it is that these soldiers are discussing, by the camp-fires of Agincourt; – what it is that this first voice from the ranks has to say for itself. The king has just encountered by the way a poetical sentinel, who, not satisfied with the watchword – 'a friend,' – requests the disguised prince 'to discuss to him, and answer, whether he is an officer, or base, common, and popular,' when the king lights on this little group, and the discussion which Pistol had solicited, apparently on his own behalf, actually takes place, for the benefit of the Poet's audience, and the answer to these inquiries comes out in due order.

Court. Brother John Bates, is not that the morning which breaks yonder?

Bates. I think it be, but we have no great cause to desire the approach of day.

Will. We see yonder the beginning of the day, but I think we shall never see the end of it. Who goes there?

King Henry. A friend.

Will. Under what captain serve you?

King. Under Sir Thomas Erpingham.

Will. A good old commander, and a most kind gentleman: I pray you, what thinks he of our estate?

King. Even as men wrecked upon a sand, that look to be washed off the next tide.

Bates. He hath not told his thought to the king?

King. No; nor it is not meet that he should; for though I speak it to you, I think the king is but a man as I am.

And it is here that he proceeds to make that important disclosure above quoted, that all his senses have but human conditions, and that all his affections, though higher mounted, stoop with the like wing; and therefore no man should in reason possess him with any appearance of fear, lest he, by showing it, 'should dishearten his army.'

Bates. He may show what outward courage he will; but, I believe, as cold a night as 'tis, he could wish himself in the Thames, up to the neck; and so I would he were, and I by him, at all adventures, so we were quit here.

King. By my troth, I will speak my conscience of the king. I think he would not wish himself anywhere but where he is.

Bates. Then would he were here alone; so should he be sure to be ransomed, and a many poor men's lives saved.

King. I dare say you love him not so ill as to wish him here alone; howsoever you speak this to feel other men's minds; Methinks I could not die anywhere so contented as in the king's company; his cause being just, and his quarrel honorable.

Will. That's more than we know.