The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded

This was the combination of conditions of which the Elizabethan Literature was the result. The Elizabethan Men of Letters, the organisers and chiefs of the modern civilization were the result of it.

These were men in whom the genius of the North in its happiest union of developments, under its choicest and most favourable conditions of culture, in its yet fresh, untamed, unbroken, northern vigour, was at last subjected to the stimulus and provocation which the ancient learning brings with it to the northern mind – to the now unimaginable stimulus which, the revival of the ancient art and learning brought with it to the mind of Europe in that age, – already secure, in its own indigenous development, already advancing to its own great maturity under the scholastic culture – the meagre Scholastic, and the rich Romantic culture – of the Mediaeval Era. The Elizabethan Men of Letters are men who found in those new and dazzling stores of art and literature which the movements of their age brought in all their freshly restored perfection to them, only the summons to their own slumbering intellectual activities, – fed with fires that old Eastern and Southern civilizations never knew, nurtured in the depths of a nature whose depths the northern antiquity had made; they were men who found in the learning of the South and the East – in the art and speculation that had satisfied the classic antiquity – only the definition of their own nobler want.

The first result of the revival of the ancient learning in this island was, a report of its 'defects.' The first result of that revival here was a map – a universal map of the learning and the arts which the conditions of man's life require – a new map or globe of learning on which lands and worlds, undreamed of by the ancients, are traced. 'A map or globe' on which 'the principal and supreme sciences,' the sciences that are essential to the human kind, are put down among 'the parts that lie fresh and waste, and not converted by the industry of man.' The first result of the revival of learning here was 'a plot' for the supply of these deficiencies.

The Elizabethan Men of Letters were men, in whom the revival of 'the Wisdom of the Ancients,' which in its last results, in its most select and boasted conservations had combined in vain to save antiquity, found the genius of a happier race, able to point out at a glance the defect in it; men who saw with a glance at those old books what was the matter with them; men prepared already to overlook from the new height of criticism which this sturdy insular development of the practical genius of the North created, the remains of that lost civilization – the splendours rescued from the wreck of empires, – the wisdom which had failed so fatally in practice that it must needs cross from a lost world of learning to the barbarian's new one, to find pupils – that it must needs cross the gulf of a thousand years in learning – such work had it made of it – ere it could revive, – the wisdom rescued from the wreck it had piloted to ruin, not to enslave, and ensnare, and doom new ages, and better races, with its futilities, but to be hung up with its immortal beacon-light, to shew the track of a new learning, to shew to the contrivers of the chart of new ages, the breakers of that old ignorance, that old arrogant wordy barren speculation. For these men were men who would not fish up the chart of a drowned world for the purpose of seeing how nearly they could conduct another under different conditions of time and races to the same conclusion. And they were men of a different turn of mind entirely from those who lay themselves out on enterprises having that tendency. The result of this English survey of learning was the sanctioned and organised determination of the modern speculation to those new fields which it has already occupied, and its organised, but secret determination, to that end of a true learning which the need of man, in its whole comprehension in this theory of it, constitutes.

But the men with whom this proceeding originates, the Elizabethan Men of Letters, were, in their own time, 'the Few.' They were the chosen men, not of an age only, but of a race, 'the noblest that ever lived in the tide of times;' men enriched with the choicest culture of their age, when that culture involved not the acquisition of the learning of the ancients only, but the most intimate acquaintance with all those recent and contemporaneous developments with which its restoration on the Continent had been attended. Was it strange that these men should find themselves without sympathy in an age like that? – an age in which the masses were still unlettered, callous with wrongs, manacled with blind traditions, or swaying hither and thither, with the breath of a common prejudice or passion, or swayed hither and thither by the changeful humours and passions, or the conflicting dogmas and conceits of their rulers. That is the reason why the development of that age comes to us as a Literature. That is why it is on the surface of it Elizabethan. That is the reason why the leadership of the modern ages, when it was already here in the persons of its chief interpreters and prophets, could get as yet no recognition of its right to teach and rule – could get as yet nothing but paper to print itself on, nothing but a pen to hew its way with, nor that, without death and danger dogging it at the heels, and threatening it, at every turn, so that it could only wave, in mute gesticulation, its signals to the future. It had to affect, in that time, bookishness and wiry scholasticism. It had to put on sedulously the harmless old monkish gown, or the jester's cap and bells, or any kind of a tatterdemalion robe that would hide, from head to heel, the waving of its purple. 'Motley's the only wear,' whispers the philosopher, peering through his privileged garb for a moment. King Charles II. had not more to do in reserving himself in an evil time, and getting safely over to the year of his dominion.

Letters were the only ships that could pass those seas. But it makes a new style in literature, when such men as these, excluded from their natural sphere of activity, get driven into books, cornered into paragraphs, and compelled to unpack their hearts in letters. There is a new tone to the words spoken under such compression. It is a tone that the school and the cloister never rang with, – it is one that the fancy dealers in letters are not able to deal in. They are such words as Caesar speaks, when he puts his legions in battle array, – they are such words as were heard at Salamis one morning, when the breeze began to stiffen in the bay; and though they be many, never so many, and though they be musical, as is Apollo's lute, that Lacedemonian ring is in each one of them. There is great business to be done in them, and their haste looks through their eyes. In the sighing of the lover, in the jest of the fool, in the raving of the madman, and not in Horatio's philosophy only, you hear it.

The founders of the new science of nature and practice were men unspeakably too far above and beyond their time, to take its bone and muscle with them. There was no language in which their doctrines could have been openly conveyed to an English public at that time without fatal misconception. The truth, which was to them arrayed with the force of a universal obligation, – the truth, which was to them religion, would have been, of course, in an age in which a single, narrow-minded, prejudiced Englishwoman's opinions were accepted as the ultimate rule of faith and practice, 'flat atheism.' What was with them loyalty to the supremacy of reason and conscience, would have been in their time madness and rebellion, and the majority would have started at it in amazement; and all men would have joined hands, in the name of truth and justice, to suppress it. The only thing that could be done in such circumstances was, to translate their doctrine into the language of their time. They must take the current terms – the vague popular terms – as they found them, and restrict and enlarge them, and inform them with their new meanings, with a hint to 'men of understanding' as to the sense in which they use them. That is the key to the language in which their books for the future were written.

But who supposes that these men were so wholly super-human, so devoid of mortal affections and passions, so made up of 'dry light,' that they could retreat, with all those regal faculties, from the natural sphere of their activity to the scholar's cell, to make themselves over in books to a future in which their mortal natures could have no share, – a future which could not begin till all the breathers of their world were dead? Who supposes that the 'staff' of Prospero was the first choice of these chiefs? – these 'heads of the State,' appointed of nature to the Cure of the Common-Weal.

The leading minds of that age are not minds which owed their intellectual superiority to a disproportionate development of certain intellectual tendencies, or to a dwarfed or inferior endowment of those natural affections and personal qualifications which tend to limit men to the sphere of their particular sensuous existence. The mind of this school is the representative mind, and all men recognise it as that, because, in its products, that nature which is in all men, which philosophy had, till then, scorned to recognise, which the abstractionists had missed in their abstractions, – that nature of will, and sense, and passion, and inanity, is brought out in its true historical proportions, not as it exists in books, not as it exists in speech, but as it exists in the actual human life. It is the mind in which this historical principle, this motivity which is not reason, is brought in contact with the opposing and controlling element as it had not been before. In all its earth-born Titanic strength and fulness, it is dragged up from its secret lurking-places, and confronted with its celestial antagonist. In all its self-contradiction and cowering unreason, it is set face to face with its celestial umpire, and subjected to her unrelenting criticism. There are depths in this microcosm which this torch only has entered, silences which this speaker only has broken, cries which he only knows how to articulate.

'The soundest disclosing and expounding of men is by their natures and ends,' so the one who is best qualified to give us information on this question tells us, – by their natures and ends; 'the weaker sort by their natures, and the wisest by their ends'; and 'the distance' of this wisest sort 'from the ends to which they aspire,' is that 'from which one may take measure and scale of the rest of their actions and desires.'

The first end which these Elizabethan Men of Letters grasped at, the thing which they pursued with all the intensity and concentration of a master passion, was —power, political power. They wanted to rule their own time, and not the future only. 'You are hurt, because you do not reign,' is the inuendo which they permit us to apply to them as the key to their proceedings. 'Such men as this are never at heart's ease,' Caesar remarks in confidence to a friend, 'whiles they behold a greater than themselves.' 'Come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf,' he adds, 'and tell me truly what thou think'st of him.' These are the kind of men that seek instinctively 'predominance,' not in a clique or neighbourhood only, – they are not content with a domestic reflection of their image, they seek to stamp it on the state and on the world. These Elizabethan Men of Letters were men who sought from the first, with inveterate determination, to rule their own time, and they never gave up that point entirely. In one way or another, directly or indirectly, they were determined to make their influence felt in that age, in spite of the want of encouragement which the conditions of that time offered to such an enterprise. But they sought that end not instinctively only, but with the stedfastness of a rational, scientifically enlightened purpose. It was an enterprise in which the intense motivity of that new and so 'conspicuous' development of the particular and private nature, which lies at the root of such a genius, was sustained by the determination of that not less superior development of the nobler nature in man, by the motivity of the intellect, by the sentiment which waits on that, by the motive of 'the larger whole,' which is, in this science of it, 'the worthier.'

We do not need to apply the key of times to those indirectly historical remains in which the real history, the life and soul of a time, is always best found, and in which the history of such a time, if written at all, must necessarily be inclosed; we do not need to unlock these works to perceive the indications of suppressed movements in that age, in which the most illustrious men of the age were primarily concerned, the history of which has not yet fully transpired. We do not need to find the key to the cipher in which the history of that time is written, to perceive that there was to have been a change in the government here at one time, very different from the one which afterwards occurred, if the original plans of these men had succeeded. It is not the Plays only that are full of that frustrated enterprise.

These were the kind of men who are not easily baffled. They changed their tactics, but not their ends; and the enterprises which were conducted with so much secresy under the surveillance of the Tudor, began already to crown themselves as certainties, and compare their 'olives of endless age' with the spent tombs of brass' and 'tyrant's crests,' at that sure prospect which, a change of dynasties at that moment seemed to open, – at least, to men who were in a position then to estimate its consequences.

That this, at all events, was a state of things that was not going to endure, became palpable about that time to the philosophic mind. The transition from the rule of a sovereign who was mistress of 'the situation,' who understood that it was a popular power which she was wielding – the transition from the rule of a Queen instructed in the policy of a tyranny, inducted by nature into its arts, to the policy of that monarch who had succeeded to her throne, and whose 'CREST' began to be reared here then in the face of the insulted reviving English nationality, – this transition appeared upon the whole, upon calmer reflection, at least to the more patient minds of that age, all that could reasonably at that time be asked for. No better instrument for stimulating and strengthening the growing popular sentiment, and rousing the latent spirit of the nation, could have been desired by the Elizabethan politicians at that crisis, 'for the great labour was with the people' – that uninstructed power, which makes the sure basis of tyrannies – that power which Mark Antony takes with him so easily – the ignorant, tyrannical, humour-led masses – the masses that still roar their Elizabethan stupidities from the immortal groups of Coriolanus and Julius Caesar. We ourselves have not yet overtaken the chief minds of this age; and the gulf that separated them from those overpowering numbers in their own time, to whose edicts they were compelled to pay an external submission, was broad indeed. The difficulty of establishing an understanding with this power was the difficulty. They wanted that 'pulpit' from which Brutus and Mark Antony swayed it by turns so easily – that pulpit from which Mark Antony showed it Caesar's mantle. They wanted some organ of communication with these so potent and resistless rulers – some 'chair' from which they could repeat to them in their own tongue the story of their lost institutions, and revive in them the memory of 'the kings their ancestors' – some school in which they could collect them and instruct them in the scientific doctrine of the commons, the doctrine of the common-weal and its divine supremacy. They wanted a school in which they could tell them stories – stories of various kinds – such stories as they loved best to hear – Midsummer stories, or Winter's tales, and stories of their own battle-fields – they wanted a school in which they could teach the common people History (and not English history only), with illustrations, large as life, and a magic lantern to aid them, – 'visible history.'

But to wait till these slow methods had taken effect, would be, perhaps, to wait, not merely till their estate in the earth was done, but till the mischief they wished to avert was accomplished. And thus it was, that the proposal 'to go the beaten track of getting arms into their hands under colour of Caesar's designs, and because the people understood them not,' came to be considered. To permit the new dynasty to come in without making any terms with it, without insisting upon a definition of that indefinite power which the Tudors had wielded with impunity, and without challenge, would be to make needless work for the future, and to ignore criminally the responsibilities of their own position, so at least some English statesmen of that time, fatally for their favour with the new monarch, were known to have thought. 'To proceed by process,' to check by gradual constitutional measures that overgrown and monstrous power in the state, was the project which these statesmen had most at heart. But that was a movement which required a firm and enlightened popular support. Charters and statutes were dead letters till that could be had. It was fatal to attempt it till that was secured. Failing in that popular support, if the statesman who had attempted that movement, if the illustrious chief, and chief man of his time, who headed it, did secretly meditate other means for accomplishing the same end – which was to limit the prerogative – such means as the time offered, and if the evidence which was wanting on his trial had been produced in proof of it, who that knows what that crisis was would undertake to convict him on it now? He was arrested on suspicion. He was a man who had undertaken to set bounds to the absolute will of the monarch, and therefore he was a dangerous man. [He (Sir Walter Raleigh), together with the Lord Chobham, Sir J. Fortescue, and others, would have obliged the king to articles before he was admitted to the throne, and thought the number of his countrymen should be limited. —Osborne's Memorials of King James.] The charges that were made against him on that shameless trial were indignantly repelled. 'Do you mix, me up with these spiders?' (alluding, perhaps, more particularly to the Jesuit associated with him in this charge). 'Do you think I am a Jack Cade or a Robin Hood?' he said. But though the evidence on this trial is not only in itself illegal, and by confession perjured, but the report of it comes to us with a falsehood on the face of it, and is therefore not to be taken without criticism; that there was a movement of some kind meditated about that time, by persons occupying chief places of trust and responsibility in the nation – a movement not favourable to the continuance of 'the standing departments' in the precise form in which they then stood – that the project of an administrative reform had not, at least, been wholly laid aside – that there was something which did not fully come out on that trial, any one who looks at this report of it will be apt to infer.

It was a project which had not yet proceeded to any overt act; there was no legal evidence of its existence produced on the trial; but suppose there were here, then, already, men 'who loved the fundamental part of state,' more than in such a crisis 'they doubted the change of it' – men 'who preferred a noble life before a long' – men, too, 'who were more discreet' than they were 'fearful,' who thought it good practice to 'jump a body with a dangerous medicine that was sure of death without it;' suppose there was a movement of that kind arrested here then, and the evidence of it were produced, what Englishman, or who that boasts the English lineage to-day, can have a word to say about it? Who had a better right than those men themselves, those statesmen, those heroes, who had waked and watched for their country's weal so long, who had fought her battles on land and sea, and planned them too, not in the tented field and on the rocking deck only, but in the more 'deadly breach' of civil office, whose scaling-ladders had entered even the tyrant's council chamber, – who had a better right than those men themselves to say whether they would be governed by a government of laws, or by the will of the most despicable 'one-only-man power,' armed with sword and lash, that ever a nation of Oriental slaves in their political imbecility cowered under? Who were better qualified than those men themselves, instructed in detail in all the peril of that crisis, – men who had comprehended and weighed with a judgment which has left no successor to its seat, all the conflicting considerations and claims which that crisis brought with it, – who better qualified than these to decide on the measures by which the hideous nuisances of that time should be abated; by which that axe, that sword, that rack, that stake, and all those burglar's tools, and highwayman's weapons, should be taken out of the hands of the mad licentious crew with which an evil time had armed them against the common-weal – those weapons of lawless power, which the people had vainly, for want of leaders, refused before-hand to put into their hands. Who better qualified than these natural chiefs and elected leaders of the nation, to decide on the dangerous measures for suppressing the innovation, which the Tudor and his descendants had accomplished in that ancient sovereignty of laws, which was the sovereignty of this people, which even the Norman and the Plantagenet had been taught to acknowledge? Who better qualified than they to call to an account – 'the thief,' the 'cut-purse of the empire and the rule,' who 'found the precious diadem on a shelf, and stole and put it in his pocket'?

['Shall the blessed Sun of Heaven prove a micher, and eat blackberries'? A question not to be asked! Shall the blessed 'Son of England' prove a thief, and take purses? A question to be asked. 'The poor abuses of the time want countenance.'

Lear. Take that from me, my friend, who have the power to seal the accuser's lips.]

Who better qualified could be found to head the dangerous enterprise for the deliverance of England from that shame, than the chief in whom her Alfred arose again to break from her neck a baser than the Danish yoke, to restore her kingdom and found her new empire, to give her domains, that the sun never sets on, – her Poet, her Philosopher, her Soldier, her Legislator, the builder of her Empire of the Sea, her founder of new 'States.'

But then, of course, it is only by the rarest conjunction of circumstances, that the movements and plans which such a state of things gives rise to, can get any other than the most opprobrious name and place in history. Success is their only certificate of legitimacy. To attempt to overthrow a government still so strongly planted in the endurance and passivity of the people, might seem, perhaps, to some minds in these circumstances, a hopeless, and, therefore, a criminal undertaking.

'That opportunity which then they had to take from us, to resume, we have again,' might well have seemed a sufficient plea, so it could have been made good. But it is not strange that some few, even then, should find it difficult to believe that the national ruin was yet so entire, that the ashes of the ancient nobility and commons of England were yet so cold, as that a system of despotism like that which was exercised here then, could be permanently and securely fastened over them. It is not strange that it should seem to these impossible that there should not be enough of that old English spirit which, only a hundred years before, had ranged the people in armed thousands, in defence of LAW, against absolutism, enough of it, at least, to welcome and sustain the overthrow of tyranny, when once it should present itself as a fact accomplished, instead of appealing beforehand to a courage, which so many instances of vain and disastrous resistance had at last subdued, and to a spirit which seemed reduced at last, to the mere quality of the master's will.