The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded

The tragedy is complicated, but it is only that same complication which the tragedy it stands for, is always exhibiting. The fact that this blow to his state is dealt to him by those to whom nature herself had so dearly and tenderly bound him, nay, with whom she had so hopelessly identified him, is that which overwhelms the sufferer. It is that which he seeks to understand in vain. He wishes to reason upon it, but his mind cannot master it; under that it is that his brain gives way, – the first mental confusion begins there. The blow to his state is a subordinate thing with him. It only serves to measure the wrong that deals it. The poet takes pains to clear this complication in the experiment. It is the wound in the affections which untunes the jarring senses of 'this child-changed father.' It is that which invades his identity.

'Are you our daughter? Does anyone here know me?' That is the word with which he breaks the silence of that dumb amazement, that paralysis of frozen wonder which Goneril's first rude assault brings on him. 'Why, this is not Lear; Ha! sure it is not so. Does any one here know me? Who is it that can tell me who I am?'

But with all her cruelty, he cannot shake her off. He curses her; but his curses do not sever the tie.

'But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter.  Or rather, a disease that's in my flesh  Which I must needs call mine.  Filial ingratitude!  Is it not as this mouth should tear this hand   For lifting food to it?'

For that is the poet's conception of the extent of this social life and outgoing – that is the interior of that social whole, in which the dissolution he represents here is proceeding, – and that is the kind of new phenomenon which the science of man, when it takes him as he is, not the abstract man of the schools, not the logical man that the Realists and the Nominalists went to blows for, but 'the thing itself,' exhibits. As to that other 'man,' – the man of the old philosophy, – he was not 'worth the whistle,' this one thinks. 'His bones were marrowless, his blood was cold, he had no speculation in those eyes that he did glare with.' The New Philosopher will have no such skeletons in his system. He is getting his general man out of particular cases, building him up solid, from a basis of natural history, and, as far as he goes, there will be no question, no two words about it, as to whether he is or is not. 'For I do take,' says the Advancer of Learning, 'the consideration in general, and at large, of Human Nature, to be fit to be emancipated and made a knowledge by itself.' No wonder if some new aspects of these ordinary phenomena, these 'common things,' as he calls them, should come out, when they too come to be subjected to a scientific inquiry, and when the Poet of this Advancement, this so subtle Poet of it, begins to explore them.

And as to this particular point which he puts down with so much care, this point which poor Lear is illustrating here, viz. 'that our affections carry themselves beyond us,' as the sage of the 'Mountain' expresses it, this is the view the same Poet gives of it, in accounting for Ophelia's madness.

'Nature is fine in love; and where 'tis fine,It sends some precious instance of itself,After the thing it loves.'

'Your old kind father,' continues Lear, searching to the quick the secrets of this 'broken-heartedness,' as people are content to call it, this ill to which the human species is notoriously liable, though philosophy had not thought it worth while before 'to find it out;'

'Your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all, —O that way madness lies; let me shun that,  No more of that.'

And it is while he is still undergoing the last extreme of the suffering which the human wrong is capable of inflicting on the affections, that he comes in the Poet's hands to exhibit also the unexplored depth of that wrong, – that monstrous, inhuman social error, that perpetual outrage on nature in her human law, which leaves the helpless human outcast to the rough discipline of nature, which casts him out from the family of man, from its common love and shelter, and leaves him in his vices, and helplessness, and ignorance, to contend alone with great nature and her unrelenting consequences.

'To wilful menThe injuries that they themselves procure,Must be their school-masters,' —

is the point which the philosophic Regan makes, as she bids them shut the door in her father's face; but it is the common human relationship that the Poet is intent on clearing, while he notes the special relationship also; he does not limit his humanities to the ties of blood, or household sympathies, or social gradations.

But Regan's views on this point are seconded and sustained, and there seems to be but one opinion on the subject among those who happen to have that castle in possession; at least the timid owner of it does not feel himself in a position to make any forcible resistance to the orders which his illustrious guests, who have 'taken from him the use of his own house,' have seen fit to issue in it. 'Shut up your doors, (says Cornwall),

'Shut up your doors, my lord: 'tis a wild night. My REGAN COUNSELS well; COME OUT O' THE STORM.'

And it is because this representation is artistic and dramatic, and not simply historical, and the Poet must seek to condense, and sum and exhibit in dramatic appreciable figures, the unreckonable, undefinable historical suffering of years, aad lifetimes of this vain human struggle, – because, too, the wildest threats which nature in her terrors makes to man, had to be incorporated in this great philosophic piece; and because, lastly, the Poet would have the madness of the human will and passion, presented in its true scientific relations, that this storm collects into itself such ideal sublimities, and borrows from the human passion so many images of cruelty.

In all the mad anguish of that ruined greatness, and wronged natural affection, the Poet, relentless as fortune herself in her sternest moods, intent on his experiment only, will bring out his great victim, and consign him to the wind and the rain, and the lightning, and the thunder, and bid his senses undergo their 'horrible pleasure.'

For the senses, scorned as they had been in philosophy hitherto, the senses in this philosophy, have their report also, – their full, honest report, to make to us. And the design of this piece, as already stated in the general, required in its execution, not only that these two kinds of suffering, these two grand departments of human need, should be included and distinguished in it, but that they should be brought together in this one man's experience, so that a deliberate comparison can be instituted between them; and the Poet will bid the philosophic king, the living 'subject' himself, report the experiment, and tell us plainly, once for all, whether the science of the physical Arts only, is the science which is wanting to man; or whether arts – scientific arts – that take hold of the moral nature, also, and deal with that not less effectively, can be dispensed with; whether, indeed, man is in any condition to dispense with the Science and the Art which puts him into intelligent and harmonious relations with nature in general.

It was necessary to the purpose of the play to exhibit man's dependence on art, by means of his senses and his sensibilities, and his intellectual conditions, and all his frailties and liabilities, – his dependence on art, based on the knowledge of natural laws, universal laws, – constitutions, which include the human. It was necessary to exhibit the whole misery, the last extreme of that social evil, to which a creature so naturally frail and ignorant is liable, under those coarse, fortuitous, inartistic, unscientific social conglomerations, which ignorant and barbarous ages build, and under the tyranny of those wild, barbaric social evils, which our fine social institutions, notwithstanding the universality of their terms, and the transcendant nature of the forces which they are understood to have at their disposal, for some fatal reason or other, do not yet succeed in reducing.

It is, indeed, the whole ground of the Scientific Human Art, which is revealed here by the light of this great passion, and that, in this Poet's opinion, is none other than the ground of the human want, and is as large and various as that. And the careful reader of this play, – the patient searcher of its subtle lore, – the diligent collector of its thick-crowding philosophic points and flashing condensations of discovery, will find that the need of arts, is that which is set forth in it, with all the power of its magnificent poetic embodiment, and in the abstract as well, – the need of arts infinitely more noble and effective, more nearly matched with the subtlety of nature, and better able to entangle and subdue its oppositions, than any of which mankind have yet been able to possess themselves, or ever the true intention of nature in the human form can be realized, or anything like a truly Human Constitution, or Common-Weal, is possible.

But let us return to the comparison, and collect the results of this experiment. – For a time, indeed, raised by that storm of grief and indignation into a companionship with the wind and the rain, and the lightning, and the thunder, the king 'strives in his little world of man,' – for that is the phrasing of the poetic report, to out-scorn these elements. Nay, we ourselves hear, as the curtain rises on that ideal representative form of human suffering, the wild intonation of that human defiance – mounting and singing above the thunder, and drowning all the elemental crash with its articulation; for this is an experiment which the philosopher will try in the presence of his audience, and not report it merely. With that anguish in his heart, the crushed majesty, the stricken old man, the child-wounded father, laughs at the pains of the senses; the physical distress is welcome to him, he is glad of it. He does not care for anything that the unconscious, soulless elements can do to him, he calls to them from their heights, and bids them do their worst. Or it is only as they conspire with that wilful human wrong, and serve to bring home to him anew the depth of it, by these tangible, sensuous effects, – it is only by that means that they are able to wound him.

'Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters,'

that is the argument.

'I tax you not, you elements, with unkindness.'

Surely that is logical; that is a distinction not without a difference, and appreciable to the human mind, as it is constituted, – surely that is a point worth putting in the arts and sciences.

'I never gave you kingdoms, called you children;  You owe me no subscription; why, then, let fall  Your horrible pleasure? Here I stand your slave,  A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man;  But yet, I call you servile ministers,  That have with two pernicious daughters joined  Your high, engendered battles 'gainst a head  So old and white as this. O, O, 'tis foul.'

And in his calmer mood, when the storm has done its work upon him, and all the strength of his great passion is exhausted, – when his bodily powers are fast sinking under it, and like the subtle Hamlet's 'potent poison,' it begins at last to 'o'er-crow his spirit' – when he is faint with struggling with its fury, wet to the skin with it, and comfortless and shivering, he still maintains through his chattering teeth the argument; he will still defend his first position —

'Thou thinkst 'tis much that this contentious storm  Invades us to the skin; so 'tis to thee,  But where the greater malady is fixed,  The lesser is scarce felt.''The tempest in my mindDoth from my senses take all feeling else,Save what beats there.''In such a night To shut me out! Pour on, I will endure.  In such a night as this.'

And when the shelter he is at last forced to seek is found, at the door his courage fails him; and he shrinks back into the storm again, because 'it will not give him leave to think on that which hurts him more.'

So nicely does the Poet balance these ills, and report the swaying movement. But it is a poet who does not take common-place opinions on this, or on any other such subject. He is one whose poetic work does not consist in illustrating these received opinions, or in finding some novel and fine expression for them. He is observing nature, and undertaking to report it, as it is, not as it should be according to these preconceptions, or according to the established poetic notions of the heroic requisitions.

But there is no stage that can exhibit his experiment here in its real significance, excepting that one which he himself builds for us; for it is the vast lonely heath, and the Man, the pigmy man, on it – and the KING, the pigmy king, on it; – it is all the wild roar of elemental nature, and the tempest in that 'little world of man,' that have to measure their forces, that have to be brought into continuous and persevering contest. It is not Gloster only, who sees in that storm what 'makes him think that a man is but a worm.'

Doubtless, it would have been more in accordance with the old poetic notions, if this poor king had maintained his ground without any misgiving at all; but it is a poet of a new order, and not the old heroic one, who has the conducting of this experiment; and though his verse is not without certain sublimities of its own, they have to consist with the report of the fact as it is, to its most honest and unpoetic, unheroic detail.

And notwithstanding all the poetry of that passionate defiance, it is the physical storm that triumphs in the end. The contest between that little world of man and the great outdoor world of nature was too unequal. Compelled at last to succumb, yielding to 'the tyranny of the open night, that is too rough for nature to endure– the night that frightens the very wanderers of the dark, and makes them keep their caves, while it reaches, with its poetic combination of horrors, that border line of the human conception which great Nature's pencil, in this Poet's hand, is always reaching and completing, —

'Man's nature cannot carry The affliction nor the fear.'

– Unable to contend any longer with 'the fretful element' – unable to 'outscorn' any longer 'the to and fro conflicting wind and rain' – weary of struggling with 'the impetuous blasts,' that in their 'eyeless rage' and 'fury' care no more for age and reverence than his daughters do – that seize his white hairs, and make nothing of them – 'exposed to feel what wretches feel' – he finds at last, with surprise, that art – the wretch's art – that can make vile things precious. No longer clamoring for 'the additions of a king,' but thankful for the basest means of shelter from the elements, glad to avail himself of the rudest structure with which art 'accommodates' man to nature, (for that is the word of this philosophy, where it is first proposed) – glad to divide with his meanest subject that shelter which the outcast seeks on such a night – ready to creep with him, under it, side by side – 'fain to hovel with swine and rogues forlorn, in short and musty straw' – surely we have reached a point at last where the action of the piece itself – the mere 'dumb show' of it – becomes luminous, and hardly needs the player's eloquence to tell us what it means.

Surely this is a little like 'the language' of Periander's message, when he bid the messenger observe and report what he saw him do. It is very important to note that ideas may be conveyed in this way as well as by words, the author of the Advancement of Learning remarks, in speaking of the tradition of the principal and supreme sciences. He takes pains to notice, also, that a representation, by means of these 'transient hieroglyphics,' is much more moving to the sensibilities, and leaves a more vivid and durable impression on the memory, than the most eloquent statement in mere words. 'What is sensible always strikes the memory more strongly, and sooner impresses itself, than what is intellectual. Thus the memory of brutes is excited by sensible, but not by intellectual things;' and thus, also, he proposes to impress that class which Coriolanus speaks of, 'whose eyes are more learned than their ears,' to whom 'action is eloquence.' Here we have the advantage of the combination, for there is no part of the dumb show, but has its word of scientific comment and interpretation.

'Art cold [to the Fool]?I am cold myself. Where is this STRAW, my fellow?  The art of our necessities is strange,  That can make vile things precious. Come, your hovel.  Come, bring us to this hovel.'

For this is what that wild tragic poetic resistance and defiance comes to – this is what the 'unaccommodated man' comes to, though it is the highest person in the state, stripped of his ceremonies and artificial appliances, on whom the experiment is tried.

'Where is this straw, my fellow? Art cold? I am cold myself. Come, your hovel. Come, bring us to this hovel.'

When that royal edict is obeyed, – when the wonders of the magician's art are put in requisition to fulfil it, – when the road from the palace to the hovel is laid open, – when the hovel, where Tom o' Bedlam is nestling in the straw, is produced on the stage, and THE KING – THE KING – stoops, before all men's eyes, to creep into its mouth, – surely we do not need 'a chorus to interpret for us' – we do not need to wait for the Poet's own deferred exposition to seize the more obvious meanings. Surely, one catches enough in passing, in the dialogues and tableaux here, to perceive that there is something going on in this play which is not all play, – something that will be earnest, perhaps, ere all is done, – something which 'the groundlings' were not expected to get, perhaps, in 'their sixe-penn'orth' of it at the first performance, – something which that witty and splendid company, who made up the Christmas party at Whitehall, on the occasion of its first exhibition there, who sat there 'rustling in silk,' breathing perfumes, glittering in wealth that the alchemy of the storm had not tried, were not, perhaps, all informed of; though there might have been one among them, 'a gentleman of blood and breeding,' who could have told them what it meant.

'We construct,' says the person who describes this method of philosophic instruction, speaking of the subtle prepared history which forces the inductions – 'we construct tables and combinations of instances, upon such a plan, and in such order, that the understanding may be enabled to act upon them.'

'They told me I was everything.'

They told me I was everything,' says the poor king himself, long afterwards, when the storm has had its ultimate effect upon him.

'To say ay and no to everything that I said! – [To say] ay and no too WAS NO GOOD DIVINITY. They told me, I had white hairs in my beard, ere the black ones were there. When the rain came to wet me once, and the wind to make me chatter; when the thunder would not peace at my bidding; there I found them, there I smelt them out. Go to, they are not men of their words: they told me I was everything; 'tis a lie; I am not ague-proof.'

'I think the king is but a man, as I am' [says King Hal], 'All his senses have the like conditions; and his affections, though higher mounted, when they stoop, stoop with the like wing.'

But at the door of that rude hut the ruined majesty pauses. In vain his loving attendants, whom, for love's sake, this Poet will still have with him, entreat him to enter. Storm-battered, and wet, and shivering as he is, he shrinks back from the shelter he has bid them bring him to. He will not 'in.' Why? Is it because 'the tempest will not give him leave to ponder on things would hurt him more.' That is his excuse at first; but another blast strikes him, and he yields to 'the to and fro conflicting wind and rain,' and says —

'But I'll go in.'

Yet still he pauses. Why? Because he has not told us why he is there; – because he is in the hands of the Poet of the Human Kind, the poet of 'those common things that our ordinary life consisteth of,' who will have of them an argument that shall shame that 'resplendent and lustrous mass of matter' that old philosophers and poets have chosen for theirs; – because the rare accident – the wild, poetic, unheard-of accident – which has brought a man, old in luxuries, clothed in soft raiment, nurtured in king's houses, into this rude, unaided collision with nature; – the poetic impossibility, which has brought the one man from the apex of the social structure down this giddy depth, to this lowest social level; – the accident which has given the 'one man,' who has the divine disposal of the common weal, this little casual experimental taste of the weal which his wisdom has been able to provide for the many – of the weal which a government so divinely ordered, from its pinnacle of personal ease and luxury, thinks sufficient and divine enough for the many, – this accident – this grand poetic accident – with all its exquisite poetic effects, is, in this poet's hands, the means, not the end. This poor king's great tragedy, the loss of his social position, his broken-heartedness, his outcast suffering, with all the aggravations of this poetic descent, and the force of its vivid contrasts – with all the luxurious impressions on the sensibilities which the ideal wonders of the rude old fable yield so easily in this Poet's hands, – this rare accident, and moving marvel of poetic calamity, – this 'one man's' tragedy is not the tragedy that this Poet's soul is big with. It is the tragedy of the Many, and not the One, – it is the tragedy that is the rule, and not the exception, – it is the tragedy that is common, and not that which is singular, whose argument this Poet has undertaken to manage.

'Come, bring us to your hovel.'

The royal command is obeyed; and the house of that estate, which has no need to borrow its title of plurality to establish the grandeur of its claim, springs up at the New Magician's word, and stands before us on the scientific stage in its colossal, portentous, scientific grandeur; and the king – the king – is at the door of it: the Monarch is at the door of the Many. For the scientific Poet has had his eye on that structure, and he will make of it a thing of wonder, that shall rival old poets' fancy pieces, and drive our entomologists and conchologists to despair, and drive them off the stage with their curiosities and marvels. There is no need of a Poet's going to the supernatural for 'machinery,' this Poet thinks, while there's such machinery as this ready to his hands unemployed. 'There's something in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out.' There's no need of going to the antique for his models; for he is inventing the arts that will make of this an antiquity.

The Monarch has found his meanest subject's shelter, but at the door of it he is arrested – nailed with a nail fastened by the Master of Assemblies. He has come down from that dizzy height, on the Poet's errand. He is there to speak the Poet's word, – to illustrate that grave abstract learning which the Poet has put on another page, with a note that, as it stands there, notwithstanding the learned airs it has, it is not learning, but 'the husk and shell' of it. For this is the philosopher who puts it down as a primary Article of Science, that governments should be based on a scientific acquaintance with 'the natures, dispositions, necessities and discontents of the people'; and though in his book of the Advancement of Learning, he suggests that these points 'ought to be,' considering the means of ascertaining them at the disposal of the government, 'considering the variety of its intelligences, the wisdom of its observations, and the height of the station where it keeps sentinel, transparent as crystal,' – here he puts the case of a government that had not availed itself of those extraordinary means of ascertaining the truth at a distance, and was therefore in the way of discovering much that was new, in the course of an accidental personal descent into the lower and more inaccessible regions of the Common Weal it had ordered. This is the crystal which proves after all the most transparent for him. This is the help for weak eyes which becomes necessary sometimes, in the absence of the scientific crystal, which is its equivalent.