The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded

Bates. Ay, or more than we should seek after; for we know enough, if we know we are the king's subjects; if his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us.

Will. But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make; when all those legs and arms and heads chopped off in a battle shall join together at the latter day, and cry all – We died at such a place; some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them; some upon the debts they owe; some upon their children rawly left. I am afeared that few die well, that die in battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument? Now if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it; whom to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.

King. So, if a son that is by his father sent about merchandise, do sinfully miscarry upon the sea, the imputation of his wickedness, by your rule, should be imposed upon his father that sent him: or if a servant, under his master's command, transporting a sum of money, be assailed by robbers, and die in many irreconciled iniquities, you may call the business of the master the author of the servant's damnation. – But this is not so… There is no king, be his cause never so spotless, if it come to the arbitrament of swords, can try it out with all unspotted soldiers.

But the king pursues this question of the royal responsibility until he arrives at the conclusion that every subject's DUTY is THE KING'S, BUT EVERY SUBJECT'S SOUL IS HIS OWN, until he shows, indeed, that there is but one ultimate sovereignty; one to which the king and his subjects are alike amenable, which pursues them everywhere, with its demands and reckonings, – from whose violated laws there is no escape.

Will. 'Tis certain, every man that dies ill, the ill is upon his own head – [no unimportant point in the theology or ethics of that time] – THE KING is not to answer for it.

Bates. I do not desire the king should answer for me, and yet I determine to fight lustily for him.

King. I, myself, heard the king say, he would not be ransomed.

Will. Ay, he said so, to make us fight cheerfully; but when our throats are cut, he may be ransomed and we ne'er the wiser.

King. If I live to see it, I will never trust his word after.

Will. Mass, you'll pay him then! That's a perilous shot out of an elder gun, that a poor and private displeasure can do against a monarch. You may as well go about to turn the sun to ice, with fanning in his face with a peacock's feather.

And, indeed, thus and not any less absurd and monstrous, appeared the idea of subjecting the king to any effect from the subject's displeasure, or the idea of calling him to account – this one, helpless, frail, private man, as he has just been conceded by the king himself to be, for any amount of fraud or dishonesty to the nation, for any breach of trust or honour. For his relation to the mass and the source of this fearful irresponsible power was not understood then. The soldier states it well. One might, indeed, as well go about to turn the sun to ice, with fanning in his face with a peacock's feather.

'You'll never trust his word after,' the soldier continues.'Come, 'tis a foolish saying.'

'Your reproof is something too round,' is the king's reply. It is indeed round. It is one of those round replies that this poet is so fond of, and the king himself becomes 'the private' of it, when once the centre of this play is found, and the sweep of its circumference is taken. For the sovereignty of law, the kingship of the universal law in whomsoever it speaks, awful with God's power, armed with his pains and penalties is the scientific sovereignty; and in the scientific diagrams the passions, 'the poor and private passions,' and the arbitrary will, in whomsoever they speak, no matter what symbols of sovereignty they have contrived to usurp, make no better figure in their struggles with that law, than that same which the poet's vivid imagination and intense perception of incompatibilities, has seized on here. The king struggles vainly against the might of the universal nature. It is but the shot out of an 'elder gun;' he might as well 'go about to turn the sun to ice with fanning in his face with a peacock's feather.' 'I should be angry with you,' continues the king, after noticing the roundness of that reply, 'I should be angry with you, if the time were convenient.'

But as to the poet who composes these dialogues, of course he does not know whether the time is convenient or not; – he has never reflected upon any of those grave questions which are here so seriously discussed. They are not questions in which he can be supposed to have taken any interest. Of course he does not know or care what it is that these men are talking about. It is only for the sake of an artistic effect, to pass away the night, and to deepen for his hero the gloom which was to serve as the foil and sullen ground of his great victory, that his interlocutors are permitted to go on in this manner.

It is easy to see, however, what extraordinary capabilities this particular form of writing offered to one who had any purpose, or to an author, who wished on any account, to 'infold' somewhat his meaning; – that was the term used then in reference to this style of writing. For certainly, many things dangerous in themselves could be shuffled in under cover of an artistic effect, which would not strike at the time, amid the agitations, and the skilful checks, and counteractions, of the scene, even the quick ear of despotism itself.

And thus King Lear – that impersonation of absolutism – the very embodiment of pure will and tyranny in their most frantic form, taken out all at once from that hot bath of flatteries to which he had been so long accustomed, that his whole self-consciousness had become saturated, tinctured in the grain with them, and he believed himself to be, within and without, indestructibly, essentially, – 'ay, every inch A KING;' with speeches on his supremacy copied, well nigh verbatim, from those which Elizabeth's courtiers habitually addressed to her, still ringing in his ears, hurled out into a single-handed contest with the elements, stripped of all his 'social and artificial lendings,' the poor, bare, unaccommodated, individual man, this living subject of the poet's artistic treatment, – this 'ruined Majesty' anatomized alive, taken to pieces literally before our eyes, pursued, hunted down scientifically, and robbed in detail of all 'the additions of a king' – must, of course, be expected to evince in some way his sense of it; 'for soul and body,' this poet tells us, 'rive not more in parting than greatness going off.'

Once conceive the possibility of presenting the action, the dumb show, of this piece upon the stage at that time, (there have been times since when it could not be done), and the dialogue, with its illimitable freedoms, follows without any difficulty. For the surprise of the monarch at the discoveries which this new state of things forces upon him, – the speeches he makes, with all the levelling of their philosophy, with all the unsurpassable boldness of their political criticism, are too natural and proper to the circumstances, to excite any surprise or question.

Indeed, a king, who, nurtured in the flatteries of the palace, was unlearned enough in the nature of things, to suppose that the name of a king was anything but a shadow when the power which had sustained its prerogative was withdrawn, – a king who thought that he could still be a king, and maintain 'his state' and 'his hundred knights,' and their prerogatives, and all his old arbitrary, despotic humours, with their inevitable encroachment on the will and humours, and on the welfare of others, merely on grounds of respect and affection, or on grounds of duty, when not merely the care of 'the state,' but the revenues and power of it had been devolved on others – such a one appeared, indeed, to the poet, to be engaging in an experiment very similar to the one which he found in progress in his time, in that old, decayed, riotous form of military government, which had chosen the moment of its utter dependence on the popular will and respect, as the fitting one for its final suppression of the national liberties. It was an experiment which was, of course, modified in the play by some diverting and strongly pronounced differences, or it would not have been possible to produce it then; but it was still the experiment of the unarmed prerogative, that the old popular tale of the ancient king of Britain offered to the poet's hands, and that was an experiment which he was willing to see traced to its natural conclusion on paper at least; while in the subsequent development of the plot, the presence of an insulted trampled outcast majesty on the stage, furnishes a cover of which the poet is continually availing himself, for putting the case of that other outraged sovereignty, whose cause under one form or another, under all disguises, he is always pleading. And in the poet's hands, the debased and outcast king, becomes the impersonation of a debased and violated state, that had given all to its daughters, – the victim of a tyranny not less absolute, the victim, too, of a blindness and fatuity on its own part, not less monstrous, but not, not —that is the poet's word —not yet irretrievable.

'Thou shalt findI will resume that shape, which thou dost thinkI have cast off for ever; thou shalt, I warrant thee.''Do you mark that, my lord?'

But the question of that prerogative, which has consumed, in the poet's time, all the faculties of government constitutes only a subordinate part of the action of that great play, into which it is here incorporated; a play which comprehends in its new philosophical reaches, in its new and before-unimagined subtilties of analysis, the most radical questions of a practical human science; questions which the practical reason of these modern ages at the moment of its awakening, found itself already compelled to grapple with, and master.

CHAPTER II

UNACCOMMODATED MAN

'Consider him well. – Three of us are sophisticated.'

For this is the grand SOCIAL tragedy. It is the tragedy of an unlearned human society; it is the tragedy of a civilization in which grammar, and the relations of sounds and abstract notions to each other have suтfficed to absorb the attention of the learned, – a civilization in which the parts of speech, and their relations, have been deeply considered, but one in which the social elements, the parts of life, and their unions, and their prosody, have been left to spontaneity, and empiricism, and all kinds of rude, arbitrary, idiomatical conjunctions, and fortuitous rules; a civilization in which the learning of 'WORDS' is put down by the reporter – invented – and the learning of 'THINGS' – omitted.

And in a movement which was designed to bring the human reason to bear scientifically and artistically upon those questions in which the deepest human interests are involved, the wrong and misery of that social state to which the New Machine, with its new combination of sense and reason, must be applied, had to be fully and elaborately brought out and exhibited. And there was but one language in which the impersonated human misery and wrong, – the speaker for countless hearts, tortured and broken on the rude machinery of unlearned social customs, and lawless social forces, could speak; there was but one tongue in which it could tell its story. For this is the place where science becomes inevitably poetical. That same science which fills our cabinets and herbariums, and chambers of natural history, with mute stones and shells and plants and dead birds and insects – that same science that fills our scientific volumes with coloured pictures true as life itself, and letter-press of prose description – that same science that anatomises the physical frame with microscopic nicety, – in the hand of its master, found in the soul, that which had most need of science; and his 'illustrated book' of it, the book of his experiments in it, comes to us filled with his yet living, 'ever living' subjects, and resounding with the tragedy of their complainings.

It requires but a little reading of that book to find, that the author of it is a philosopher who is strongly disposed to ascertain the limits of that thing in nature, which men call fortune, – that is, in their week-day speech, – they have another name for it 'o' Sundays.' He is greatly of the opinion, that the combined and legitimate use of those faculties with which man is beneficently 'armed against diseases of the world,' would tend very much to limit those fortuities and accidents, those wild blows, – those vicissitudes, that men, in their ignorance and indolent despair, charge on Fate or ascribe to Providence, while at the same time it would furnish the art of accommodating the human mind to that which is inevitable. It is not fortune who is blind, but man, he says, – a creature endowed of nature for his place in nature, endowed of God with a godlike faculty, looking before and after – a creature who has eyes, eyes adapted to his special necessities, but one that will not use them.

Acquaintance with law, as it is actual in nature, and inventions of arts based on that acquaintance, appear to him to open a large field of relief to the human estate, a large field of encroachment on that human misery, which men have blindly and stupidly acquiesced in hitherto, as necessity. For this is the philosopher who borrows, on another page, an ancient fable to teach us that that is not the kind of submission which is pleasing to God – that that is not the kind of 'suffering' that will ever secure his favour. He, for one, is going to search this social misery to the root, with that same light which the ancient wise man tells us, 'is as the lamp of God, wherewith He searcheth the inwardness of all secrets.'

The weakness and ignorance and misery of the natural man, – the misery too of the artificial man as he is, – the misery of man in society, when that society is cemented with arbitrary customs, and unscientific social arts, and when the instinctive spontaneous demoniacal forces of nature, are at large in it; the dependence of the social Monad, the constitutional specific human dependence, on the specific human law, – the exquisite human liability to injury and wrong, which are but the natural indications of those higher arts and excellencies, those unborn pre-destined human arts and excellencies, which man must struggle through his misery to reach; – that is the scientific notion which lies at the bottom of this grand ideal representation. It is, in a word, the human social NEED, in all its circumference, clearly sketched, laid out, scientifically, as the basis of the human social ART. It is the negation of that which man's conditions, which the human conditions require; – it is the collection on the Table of Exclusion and Rejection, which must precede the practical affirmation.

King. Have you heard the argument? Is there no offence in it?

Hamlet. None in the world. It's the image of a murder done in Vienna.

In the poetic representation of that state of things which was to be redressed, the central social figure must, of course, have its place. For it is the Poet, the Experimental Poet, unseen indeed, deep buried in his fable, his new movements all hidden under its old garb, and deeper hidden still, in the new splendours he puts on it – it is the Poet – invisible but not the less truly, he, – it is the Scientific Poet, who comes upon the monarch in his palace at noonday, and says, 'My business is with thee, O king.' It is he who comes upon the selfish arrogant old despot, drunk with Elizabethan flatteries, stuffed with 'titles blown from adulation,' unmindful of the true ends of government, reckless of the duties which that regal assumption of the common weal brings with it – it is the Poet who comes upon this Doctor of Laws in the palace and prescribes to him a course of treatment which the royal patient himself, when once it has taken effect, is ready to issure from the hovel's mouth, in the form of a general prescription and state ordinance.

'Take physic, POMP;Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,  That thou may'st shake the superflux to them,  And show the heavens more just.  Oh, I have taken too little care of This!'

It is that same Poet who has already told us, confidentially, under cover of King Hal's mantle, that 'the king himself is but a man' and that 'all his senses have but human conditions and that his affections, too, though higher mounted when they stoop, stoop with the like wing; that his ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man'; – it is that same Poet, and, in carrying out the purpose of this play, it has come in his way now to make good that statement. For it was necessary to his purpose here, to show that the State is composed throughout, down to its most loathsome unimaginable depths of neglect and misery, of individual men, social units, clothed of nature with the same faculties and essential human dignities and susceptibilities to good and evil, and crowned of nature with the common sovereignty of reason, – down-trodden, perhaps, and wrung and trampled out of them, but elected of nature to that dignity; it was necessary to show this, in order that the wisdom of the State which sacrifices to the senses of one individual man, and the judgment that is narrowed by the one man's senses, the weal of the whole, – in order that the wisdom of the State, which puts at the mercy of the arbitrary will and passions of the one, the weal of the many, might be mathematically exhibited, – might be set down in figures and diagrams. For this is that Poet who represents this method of inquiry and investigation, as it were, to the eye. This is that same Poet, too, who surprises elsewhere a queen in her swooning passion of grief, and bids her murmur to us her recovering confession.

'No more, but e'en a woman; and commanded  By such poor passion, as the maid that milks,  And does the meanest chares.'

So busy is he, indeed, in laying by this king's 'ceremonies' for him, beginning with the first doubtful perception of a most faint neglect, – a falling off in the ceremonious affection due to majesty 'as well in the general dependents as in the duke himself and his daughter,' – so faint that the king dismisses it from his thought, and charges it on his own jealousy till he is reminded of it by another, – beginning with that faint beginning, and continuing the process not less delicately, through all its swift dramatic gradations, – the direct abatement of the regal dignities, – the knightly train diminishing, – nay, 'fifty of his followers at a clap' torn from him, his messenger put in the stocks, – and 'it is worse than murder,' the poor king cries in the anguish of his slaughtered dignity and affection, 'to do upon respect such violent outrage,' – so bent is the Poet upon this analytic process; so determined that this shaking out of a 'preconception,' shall be for once a thorough one, so absorbed with the dignity of the scientific experiment, that he seems bent at one moment on giving a literal finish to this process; but the fool's scruples interfere with the philosophical humour of the king, and the presence of Mad Tom in his blanket, with the king's exposition, suffices to complete the demonstration. For not less lively than this, is the preaching and illustration, from that new rostrum which this 'Doctor' has contrived to make himself master of. 'His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man,' says King Hal. 'Couldst thou save nothing?' says King Lear to the Bedlamite. 'Why thou wert better in thy grave than to answer with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies.' 'Is man,' – it is the king who generalises, it is the king who introduces this levelling suggestion here in the abstract, while the Poet is content with the responsibility of the concrete exhibition – 'Is man no wore than this? Consider him well. Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the cat no perfume: – Ha! here's three of us are sophisticated. Thou art the thing itself. UNACCOMMODATED MAN is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal, as thou art. Off, off, you lendings.' But 'the fool' is of the opinion that this scientific process of unwrapping the artificial majesty, this philosophical undressing, has already gone far enough.

'Pry'thee, Nuncle, be contented,' he says, 'it is a naughty night to swim in.'

For it is the great heath wrapped in one of those storms of wind and rain and thunder and lightning, which this wizard only of all the children of men knows how to raise, that he chooses for his physiological exhibition of majesty, when the palace-door has been shut upon it, and the last 'additions of a king' have been subtracted. It is a night —

'Wherein the cub-drawn bear would couch,The lion, and the belly-pinched wolfKeep their fur dry' —

into which he turns his royal patient 'unbonneted.'

For the tyranny of wild nature in her elemental uproar must be added to the tyranny of the human wildness, the cruelty of the elements must conspire, like pernicious ministers, with the cruelty of arbitrary HUMAN will and passions, the irrational, INHUMAN social forces must be joined by those other forces that make war upon us, before the real purpose of this exhibition and the full depth and scientific comprehension of it can begin to appear. It is in the tempest that Lear finds occasion to give out the Poet's text. Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Unaccommodated man in his struggle with nature. Man without social combinations, man without arts to aid him in his battle with the elements, or with arts that fence in his body, and robe it, it may be, in delicate and gorgeous apparelling, arts that roof his head with a princely dome it may be, and add to his native dignity and forces, the means and appliances of a material civilization, but leave his nobler nature with its more living susceptibility to injury, unsheathed, at the mercy of the brute forces that unscientific civilizations, with their coarse laws, with their cobwebs of WORDY learning, with their science of abstractions, unmatched with the subtilty of THINGS, are compelled to leave at large, uncaught, unentangled.

Yes, it is man in his relation to nature, man in his dependence on artificial aid, man in his two-fold dependence on art, that this tempest, this double tempest wakes and brings out, for us to 'consider,' – to 'consider well'; – 'the naked creature,' that were better in his grave than to answer with his uncovered body that extremity of the skies, and by his side, with his soul uncovered to a fiercer blast, his royal brother with 'the tempest in his mind, that doth from his senses take all feeling else, save what beats there.'

It is the personal weakness, the moral and intellectual as well as the bodily frailty and limitation of faculty, and liability to suffering and outrage, the liability to wrong from treachery, as well as violence, which are 'the common' specific human conditions, common to the King in his palace, and Tom o'Bedlam in his hovel; it is this exquisite human frailty and susceptibility, still unprovided for, that fills the play throughout, and stands forth in these two, impersonated; it is that which fills all the play with the outcry of its anguish.

And thus it is, that this poor king must needs be brought out into this wild uproar of nature, and stripped of his last adventitious aid, reduced to the authority and forces that nature gave him, invaded to the skin, and ready in his frenzy to second the poet's intent, by yielding up the last thread of his adventitious and artistic defences. All his artificial, social personality already dissolved, or yet in the agony of its dissolution, all his natural social ties torn and bleeding within him, there is yet another kind of trial for him, as the elected and royal representative of the human conditions. For the perpetual, the universal interest of this experiment arises from the fact, that it is not as the king merely, dissolving like 'a mockery king of snow' that this illustrious form stands here, to undergo this fierce analysis, but as the representative, 'the conspicuous instance,' of that social name and figure, which all men carry about with them, and take to be a part of themselves, that outward life, in which men go beyond themselves, by means of their affections, and extend their identity, incorporating into their very personality, that floating, contingent material which the wills and humours and opinions, the prejudices and passions of others, and the variable tide of this world's fortunes make – that social Name and Figure in which men may die many times, ere the physical life is required of them, in which all men must needs live if they will live in it at all, at the mercy of these uncontrolled social eventualities.