The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded

The kind, considerate Gloster, with all his loyalty to the powers which are able to show the divine right of possession, and with all his disposition to conform to the times, is greatly distressed and perplexed with the outrages which are perpetrated, as it were, under his own immediate sanction and authority. He has a hard struggle to reconcile his duty as the subject of a state which he is not prepared to overthrow, with his humane impulses and designs. He goes pattering about for a time, remonstrating, and apologizing, and trying 'to smooth down,' and 'hush up,' and mollify, and keep peace between the offending parties. He stands between the blunt, straightforward manliness of the honest Kent on the one hand, and the sycophantic servility and self-abnegation, which knows no will but the master's, as represented by the Steward, on the other.

'I am sorry for thee,' he says to Kent, after having sought in vain to prevent this outrage from being perpetrated in his own court —

'I am sorry for thee, friend: tis the duke's pleasure, Whose disposition all the world well knows, Will not be rubbed or stopped' —

as he found to his cost, poor man, when he came to have his own eyes gouged out by it. He 'saw it feelingly' then, as he remarked himself.

'I'll entreat for thee,' he continues, in his conversation with the disguised duke in the stocks. 'The duke's to blame in this. 'Twill be ill taken.'

And when the king, on his arrival, kept waiting in the court, in his agony of indignation and grief, is told that Regan and Cornwall are 'sick,' 'they are weary,' 'they have travelled hard to-night,' denounces these subterfuges, and bids Gloster fetch him a better answer, this is the worthy man's reply to him —

'My dear lord,You know the fiery quality of the duke,How unremovable and fixed he isIn his own course.'

But Lear, who has never had any but a subjective acquaintance hitherto with reasons of that kind, does not appear able to understand them from this point of view —

Lear. Vengeance! plague! death! confusion! Fiery? – what quality? Why Gloster, Gloster, I'd speak with the Duke of Cornwall and his wife.

Gloster. Well, my good lord, I have informed them so.

Lear. Informed them? Dost thou understand me?

Gloster. Ay, my good lord.

But though Gloster is not yet ready to break with tyranny, it is not difficult to see which way he secretly inclines; and though he still manages his impulses cautiously, and contrives to succour the oppressed king by stealth, his courage rises with the emergency, and grows bold with provocation. For he is himself one of the finer and finest proofs of the times which the Poet represents; one, however, which he keeps back a little, for the study of those who look at his work most carefully. This man stands here in the general, indeed, as the representative of a class of men who do not belong exclusively to this particular time – men who do not stand ready, as Kent and his class do, to fly in the face of tyranny at the first provocation; they are not the kind of men who 'make mouths,' as Hamlet says, 'at the invisible event;' – they are the kind who know beforehand that to break with the powers that are, single-handed, is to sit on the stage and have your eyes gouged out, or to undergo some process of mutilation and disfigurement, not the less painful and oppressive, by this Poet's own showing, because it does not happen, perhaps, to be a physical one, and not the less calculated, on that account, to impair one's usefulness to one's species, it may be.

But besides that more general bearing of the representation, the part and disposition of Gloster afford us from time to time, glimpses of persons and things which connect the representation more directly with the particular point here noted. Men who found themselves compelled to occupy a not less equivocal position in the state, look through it a little now and then; and here, as in other parts of the play, it only wants the right key to bring out suppressed historical passages, and a finer history generally, than the chronicles of the times were able to take up.

'Alack, alack, Edmund,' says Gloster to his natural son, making him the confidant of his nobler nature, putting what was then the perilous secret of his humanity, into the dangerous keeping of the base-born one – for this is the Poet's own interpretation of his plot; though Lear is allowed to intimate on his behalf, that the loves and relations which are recognised and good in courts of justice, are not always secured by that sanction from similar misfortune; that they are not secured by that from those penalties which great Nature herself awards in those courts in which her institutes are vindicated.

'Alack, alack, Edmund, I like not THIS UNNATURAL DEALING! When I desired their leave that I might pity him, they took from me the use of mine own house, and charged me on pain of their perpetual displeasure, neither to speak of him, entreat for him, nor in any way to sustain him.'

Edmund. Most savage and unnatural.

Gloster. Go to, say you nothing.

[And say you nothing, my contemporary reader, if you perceive that this is one of those passages I have spoken of elsewhere, which carries with it another application besides that which I put it to].

'There is division between the dukes – and a worse matter than that: I have received a letter this night, – 'tis dangerous to be spoken; – I have locked the letter in my closet: these injuries the king now bears, will be revenged at home' [softly – say you nothing]. 'There is part of a power already footed: we must incline to the king. I will seek him and privily relieve him. Go you and maintain talk with the duke, that my charity be not of him perceived. If he ask for me, I am ill, and gone to bed. If I die for it, —as no less is threatened me, —the king, my old master– MUST BE RELIEVED. There is some strange thing toward, Edmund. Pray you be careful.'

Even Edmund himself professes to be not altogether without some experience of the perplexity which the claims of apparently clashing duties, and relations in such a time creates, though he seems to have found an easy method of disposing of these questions. Nature is his goddess and his law (that is, as he uses the term, the baser nature, the degenerate, which is not nature for man, which is unnatural for the human kind), and in his own 'rat'-like fashion, 'he bites the holy cords atwain.'

'How, my lord,' he says, in the act of betraying his father's secret to the Duke of Cornwall, in the hope of 'drawing to himself what his father loses' – 'how I may be censured that NATURE, thus gives way to LOYALTY, something fears me to think of.' And again, 'I will persevere in my course of loyalty, though the conflict be sore between that and my blood.'

'Know thou this,' he says afterwards, to the officer whom he employs to hang Cordelia, 'THAT MEN ARE AS THE TIME IS. Thy great employment will not bear question. About it, I say, instantly, and carry it so as I have set it down.' 'I cannot draw a cart, nor eat dried oats,' is the officer's reply, who appears to be also in the poet's secret, and ready to aid his intention of carrying out the distinction between the human kind and the brute, 'I cannot draw a cart, nor eat dried oats; – if it be MAN'S WORK I will do it.'

But it is the steward's part, as deliberately explained by Kent himself, which furnishes in detail the ideal antagonism of that which Kent sustains in the piece; for beside those active demonstrations of his disgust, which the poetic order tolerates in him, though some of the powers within appear to take such violent offence at it, besides these tangible demonstrations, and that elaborate criticism, which the poet puts into his mouth, in which the steward is openly treated as the representative of a class, who seem to the poet apparently, to require some treatment in his time, Kent himself is made to notice distinctly this literally striking opposition.

'No contraries hold more antipathy than I, and such a knave,' he says to Cornwall, by way of explaining his apparently gratuitous attack upon the steward.

No one, indeed, who reads the play with any care, can doubt the poet's intention to incorporate into it, for some reason or other, and to bring out by the strongest conceivable contrasts, his study of loyalty and service, and especially of regal counsel, and his criticism of it, as it stood in his time in its most approved patterns. 'Such smiling rouges as these' ('that bite the holy cords atwain').

'Smooth every passion  That in the nature of their lord rebels;  Bring oil to fire, snow to their colder moods;  Revenge, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaks  With every gale and vary of their masters,  As knowing nought like dogs but —following.'

Such ruses as this would not, of course, be wanting in such a time as that in which this piece was planned, if Edmund's word was, indeed, the true one. 'Know thou this, men are as the time is.'

And even amidst the excitement and rough outrage of that scene – in which Gloster's trial is so summarily conducted, even in that so rude scene – the relation between the guest and his host, and the relation of the slave to his owner, is delicately and studiously touched, and the human claim in both is boldly advanced, in the face of an absolute authority, and age and personal dignity put in their claims also, and demand, even at such a moment, their full rights of reverence.

[Re-enter servants with GLOSTER.]

Regan. Ingrateful fox! 'tis he.

Cornwall. Bind fast his corky arms.

Gloster. What mean your graces? – Good my friends, consider. You are my guests: do me no foul play, friends.

Cornwall. Bind him, I say.

Regan. Hard, hard: – O filthy traitor!

Gloster. Unmerciful lady as you are, I am none.

Cornwall. To this chair bind him: – Villain, thou shalt find – [REGAN plucks his beard].

Gloster. By the KIND gods [for these are the gods, whose 'Commission' is sitting here]'tis most ignobly done, To pluck me by the beard.

Regan. So white, and such a traitor!

Gloster. Naughty lady, These hairs, which thou dost ravish from my chin, Will quicken and accuse thee. I am your host: With robber hands, my hospitable favours You should not ruffle thus.

Tied to the stake, questioned and cross-questioned, and insulted, finally, beyond even his faculty of endurance, he breaks forth, at last, in strains of indignation that overleap all arbitrary and conventional bounds, that are only the more terrible for having been so long suppressed. Kent himself, when he 'came between the dragon and his wrath,' was not so fierce.

Cornwall. Where hast thou sent the king?

Gloster. To Dover.

Regan. Wherefore To Dover, was't thou not charged at peril? —

Cornwall. Wherefore to Dover? Let him first answer that.

Regan. Wherefore to Dover?

Gloster. Because I would not see thy cruel nails Pluck out his poor old eyes, nor thy fierce sister In his anointed flesh stick boarish fangs.

…

Regan. One side will mock another; the other too.

Cornwall. If you 'see vengeance.'

Servant. Hold your hand, my lord: I have served you ever since I was a child; But better service have I never done you, Than now to bid you hold.

Regan. How now, you dog?

Servant. If you did wear a beard upon your chin,

  I'd shake it on this quarrel: What do you mean?

[Arbitrary power called to an account, requested to explain itself.]

Cornwall. My villain!

Regan. A PEASANT stand up thus?

Thus too, indeed, in that rude scene above referred to, in which the king finds his messenger in the stocks, and Regan's door, too, shut against him, the same ground of criticism had already been revealed, the same delicacy and rigour in the exactions had already betrayed the depth of the poetic design, and the real comprehension of that law, whose violations are depicted here, the scientific law, the scientific sovereignty, the law of universal nature; commanding, in the human, that specific human excellence, for the degenerate movement is in violation of nature, that is not nature but her profanation and undoing.

This is one of those passages, however, which admit, as the modern reader will more easily observe than the contemporary of the Poet was likely to of a second reading.

Goneril. Why might not you, my lord, receive attendance From those that she calls servants, or from mine?

* * * * *

What need you five-and-twenty, ten, or five, To follow in a house, where twice so many Have a command to tend you?

Regan. What need one?

Lear. O reason not the need: our basest beggars Are in the poorest things superfluous.

[Poor Tom must have his 'rubans.']

Allow not NATURE more than NATURE needs,MAN'S LIFE were cheap as BEASTS [and that's not nature]  Thou art a lady;  If only to go warm were gorgeous,  Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st,  Which scarcely keeps thee warm. – But, for TRUE NEED,  You heavens, give me THAT patience. —Patience I need.

It is, indeed, the doctrine of the 'true need' that is lurking here, and all that puts man into his true place and relations in the creative order, whether of submission or control is included in it. It is the doctrine of the natural human need, and the natural ground and limits of the arts, for which nature has endowed man beforehand, with a faculty and a sentiment corresponding in grandeur to his need, – large as he is little, noble as he is mean, powerful as he is helpless, felicitous as he is wretched; the faculty and the sentiment whereby the want of man becomes the measure of his wealth and grandeur, – whereby his conscious lowness becomes the means of his ascent to his ideal type in nature, and to the scientific perfection of his form.

And this whole social picture, – rude, savage as it is, – savage as it shews when its sharp outline falls on that fair ideal ground of criticism which the doctrine of a scientific civilization creates, – is but the Poet's report of the progress of human development as it stood in his time, and of the gain that it had made on savage instinct then. It is his report of the social institutions of his time, as he found them on his map of human advancement. It is his report of the wild social misery that was crying underneath them, with its burthen of new advancements. It is the Poet's Apology for his new doctrine of human living, which he is going to publish, and leave on the earth, for 'the times that are far off.' It is the negative, which is the first step towards that affirmation, which he is going to establish on the earth for ever, or so long as the species, whose law he has found, endures on it. Down to its most revolting, most atrocious detail, it is still the Elizabethan civility that is painted here. Even Goneril's unscrupulous mode of disposing of her rival sister, though that was the kind of murder which was then regarded with the profoundest disgust and horror – (the queen in Cymbeline expresses that vivid sentiment, when she says: 'If Pisanio have given his mistress that confection which I gave him for a cordial, she is served as I would serve a rat') – even as to that we all know what a king's favourite felt himself competent to undertake then; and, if the clearest intimations of such men as Bacon, and Coke, and Raleigh, on such a question, are of any worth, the household of James the First was not without a parallel even for that performance, if not when this play was written, when it was published.

It is all one picture of social ignorance, and misery, and frantic misrule. It is a faithful exhibition of the degree of personal security which a man of honourable sentiments, and humane and noble intentions, could promise himself in such a time. It shows what chance there was of any man being permitted to sustain an honourable and intelligent part in the world, in an age in which all the radical social arts were yet wanting, in which the rude institutions of an ignorant past spontaneously built up, without any science of the natural laws, were vainly seeking to curb and quench the Incarnate soul of new ages, – the spirit of a scientific human advancement; and, when all the common welfare was still openly intrusted to the unchecked caprice and passion of one selfish, pitiful, narrow, low-minded man.

To appreciate fully the incidental and immediate political application of the piece, however, it is necessary to observe that notwithstanding that studious exhibition of lawless and outrageous power, which it involves, it is, after all, we are given to understand, by a quiet intimation here and there, a limited monarchy which is put upon the stage here. It is a constitutional government, very much in the Elizabethan stage of development, as it would seem, which these arbitrary rulers affect to be administering. It is a government which professes to be one of law, under which the atrocities of this piece are sheltered.

And one may even note, in passing, that that high Judicial Court, in which poor Lear undertakes to get his cause tried, appears to have, somehow, an extremely modern air, considering what age of the British history it was, in which it was supposed to be constituted, and considering that one of the wigs appointed to that Bench had to leave his speech behind him for Merlin to make, in consequence of living before his time: at all events it is already tinctured with some of the more notorious Elizabethan vices – vices which our Poet, not content with this exposition, contrived to get exposed in another manner, and to some purpose, ere all was done.

Lear. It shall be done, I will arraign them straight! Come, sit thou here, most learned Justice.

[To the BEDLAMITE_.]

Thou, sapient Sir, sit here. [To the FOOL.]

And again, —

I'll see their trial first. Bring in the evidence.Thou robed MAN of JUSTICE take thy place.

[To TOM O'BEDLAM.]

And thou, his yoke fellow of EQUITY bench by his side.

[To the FOOL.]

You are of 'the Commission' – sit you too.

[To KENT.]

Truly it was a bold wit that could undertake to constitute that bench on the stage, and fill it with those speaking forms, – speaking to the eye the unmistakeable significance, for these judges, two of them, happened to be on the spot in full costume, – and as to the third, he was of 'the commission.' 'Sit you, too.' Truly it was a bold instructor that could undertake 'to facilitate' the demonstration of 'the more chosen subjects,' with the aid of diagrams of this kind.

Arms! Arms! Sword, fire! CORRUPTION IN THE PLACE! False justicer, why hast thou let her scape?

The tongues of these ancient sovereigns of Britain, 'tang' throughout with Elizabethan 'arguments of state,' and even Goneril, in her somewhat severe proceedings against her father, justifies her course in a very grave and excellent speech, enriched with the choicest phrases of that particular order of state eloquence, in which majesty stoops graciously to a recognition of the subject nation; – a speech from which we gather that the 'tender of a wholesome weal' is, on the whole, the thing which she has at heart most deeply, and though the proceeding in question is a painful one to her feelings, a state necessity appears to prescribe it, or at least, render it 'discreet.'

Even in Gloster's case, though the process to which he is subjected, is, confessedly, an extemporaneous one, it appears from the Duke of Cornwall's statement, that it was only the form which was wanting to make it legal. Thus he apologizes for it. —

Though well we may not pass upon his lifeWithout the form of justice, yet our power  Shall do a courtesy to our wrath, which men  May blame, but not control.

Goneril, however, grows bolder at the last, and says outright, 'Say if I do, the laws are mine NOT THINE.' But it is the law which is thine and mine, it is the law which is for Tom o' Bedlam and for thee, that great nature speaking at last through her interpreter, and explaining all this wild scene, will have vindicated.

Most MONSTROUS, exclaims her illustrious consort; but at the close of the play, where so much of the meaning sometimes comes out in a word, he himself concedes that the government which has just devolved upon him is an absolute monarchy.

'For us,' he says, 'WE WILL RESIGN, during the life of this old

Majesty, OUR ABSOLUTE POWER.'

So that there seems to have been, in fact, – in the minds, too, of persons who ought, one would say, to have been best informed on this subject, – just that vague, uncertain, contradictory view of this important question, which appears to have obtained in the English state, during the period in which the material of this poetic criticism was getting slowly accumulated. But of course this play, so full of the consequences of arbitrary power, so full of Elizabethan politics, with its 'ear-kissing arguments,' could not well end, till that word, too, had been spoken outright; and, in the Duke of Albany's resignation, it slips in at last so quietly, so properly, that no one perceives that it is not there by accident.

This, then, is what the play contains; but those that follow the story and the superficial plot only, must, of course, lose track of the interior identities. It does not occur to these that the Poet is occupied with principles, and that the change of persons does not, in the least, confound his pursuit of them.

The fact that tyranny is in one act, or in one scene, represented by Lear, and in the next by his daughters; – the fact that the king and the father is in one act the tyrant, and in another, the victim of tyranny, is quite enough to confound the criticism to which a work of mere amusement is subjected; for it serves to disguise the philosophic purport, by dividing it on the surface: and the dangerous passages are all opposed and neutralised, for those who look at it only as a piece of dramatized, poetic history.

For this is a philosopher who prefers to handle his principles in their natural, historical combinations, in those modified unions of opposites, those complex wholes, which nature so stedfastly inclines to, instead of exhibiting them scientifically bottled up and labelled, in a state of fierce chemical abstraction.

His characters are not like the characters in the old 'Moralities,' which he found on the stage when he first began to turn his attention to it, mere impersonations of certain vague, loose, popular notions. Those sickly, meagre forms would not answer his purpose. It was necessary that the actors in the New Moralities he was getting up so quietly, should have some speculation in their eyes, some blood in their veins, a kind of blood that had never got manufactured in the Poet's laboratory till then. His characters, no matter how strong the predominating trait, though 'the conspicuous instance' of it be selected, have all the rich quality, the tempered and subtle power of nature's own compositions. The expectation, the interest, the surprise of life and history, waits, with its charm on all their speech and doing.

The whole play tells, indeed, its own story, and scarcely needs interpreting, when once the spectator has gained the true dramatic stand-point; when once he understands that there is a teacher here, – a new one, – one who will not undertake to work with the instrumentalities that his time offered to him, who begins by rejecting the abstractions which lie at the foundation of all the learning of his time, which are not scientific, but vague, loose, popular notions, that have been collected without art, or scientific rule of rejection, and are, therefore, inefficacious in nature, and unavailable for 'the art and practic part of life;' a teacher who will build up his philosophy anew, from the beginning, a teacher who will begin with history and particulars, who will abstract his definitions from nature, and have powers of them, and not words only, and make them the basis of his science and the material and instrument of his reform. 'I will teach you differences,' says Kent to the steward, alluding on the part of his author, for he does not profess to be metaphysical himself to another kind of distinction, than that which obtained in the schools; and accompanying the remark, on his own part, with some practical demonstrations, which did not appear to be taken in good part at all by the person he was at such pains to instruct in his doctrine of distinctions.