The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded

The reader who has once gained this clue, the clue which the question of design and authorship involves, will find this play, as he will find, indeed, all this author's plays, overflowing every where with the scientific statement, – the finest abstract statement of that which the action, with its moving, storming, laughing, weeping, praying diagrams, sets forth in the concrete.

But he who has not yet gained this point, – the critic who looks at it from the point of observation which the traditionary theory of its origin and intent creates, is not in a position to notice the philosophic expositions of its purport, with which the action is all inwoven. No, – though the whole structure of the piece should manifestly hang on them, though the whole flow of the dialogue should make one tissue of them, though every interstice of the play should be filled with them, though the fool's jest, and the Bedlamite's gibberish, should point and flash with them at every turn; – though the wildest incoherence of madness, real or assumed, to its most dubious hummings, – its snatches of old ballads, and inarticulate mockings of the blast, should be strung and woven with them; though the storm itself, with its wild accompaniment, and demoniacal frenzies, should articulate its response to them; – keeping open tune without, to that human uproar; and howling symphonies, to the unconquered demoniacal forces of human life, – for it is the Poet who writes in 'the storm continues,' – 'the storm continues,' – 'the storm continues;' – though even Edmund's diabolical 'fa, sol, lah, mi,' should dissolve into harmony with them, while Tom's five fiends echo it from afar, and 'mop and mow' their responses, down to the one that 'since possesses chambermaids;' nobody that takes the play theory, and makes a matter of faith of it merely; nobody that is willing to shut his eyes and open his mouth, and swallow the whole upon trust, as a miracle simply, is going to see anything in all this, or take any exceptions at it.

Certainly, at the time when it was written, it was not the kind of learning and the kind of philosophy that the world was used to. Nobody had ever heard of such a thing. The memory of man could not go far enough to produce any parallel to it in letters. It was manifest that this was nature, the living nature, the thing itself. None could perceive the tint of the school on its robust creations; no eye could detect in its sturdy compositions the stuff that books were made of; and it required no effort of faith, therefore, to believe that it was not that. It was easy enough to believe, and men were glad, on the whole, to believe that it was not that – that it was not learning or philosophy – but something just as far from that, as completely its opposite, as could well be conceived of.

How could men suspect, as yet, that this was the new scholasticism, the New Philosophy? Was it strange that they should mistake it for rude nature herself, in her unschooled, spontaneous strength, when it had not yet publicly transpired that something had come at last upon the stage of human development, which was stooping to nature and learning of her, and stealing her secret, and unwinding the clue to the heart of her mystery? How could men know that this was the subtlest philosophy, the ripest scholasticism, the last proof of all human learning, when it was still a secret that the school of nature and her laws, that the school of natural history and natural philosophy, too, through all its lengths and breadths and depths, was open; and that 'the schools' – the schools of old chimeras and notions – the schools where the jangle of the monkish abstractions and the 'fifes and the trumpets of the Greeks' were sounding – were going to get shut up with it.

How should they know that the teacher of the New Philosophy was Poet also – must be, by that same anointing, a singer, mighty as the sons of song who brought their harmonies of old into the savage earth – a singer able to sing down antiquities with his new gift, able to sing in new eras?

But these have no clue as yet to track him with: they cannot collect or thread his thick-showered meanings. He does not care through how many mouths he draws the lines of his philosophic purpose. He does not care from what long distances his meanings look towards each other. But these interpreters are not aware of that. They have not been informed of that particular. On the contrary, they have been put wholly off their guard. Their heads have been turned, deliberately, in just the opposite direction. They have no faintest hint beforehand of the depths in which the philosophic unities of the piece are hidden: it is not strange, therefore, that these unities should escape their notice, and that they should take it for granted that there are none in it. It is not the mere play-reader who is ever going to see them. It will take the philosophic student, with all his clues, to master them. It will take the student of the New School and the New Ages, with the torch of Natural Science in his hand, to track them to their centre.

Here, too, as elsewhere, it is the king himself on whom the bolder political expositions are thrust. But it is not his royalty only that has need to be put in requisition here, to bring out successfully all that was working then in this Poet's mind and heart, and which had to come out in some way. It was something more than royalty that was required to protect this philosopher in those astounding freedoms of speech in which he indulges himself here, without any apparent scruple or misgiving. The combination of distresses, indeed, which the old ballad accumulates on the poor king's head, offers from the first a large poetic license, of which the man of art – or 'prudence,' as he calls it – avails himself somewhat liberally.

With those daughters in the foreground always, and the parental grief so wild and loud – with that deeper, deadlier, infinitely more cruel private social wrong interwoven with all the political representation, and overpowering it everywhere, as if that inner social evil were, after all, foremost in the Poet's thought – as if that were the thing which seemed crying to him for redress more than all the rest – if, indeed, any thought of 'giving losses their remedies' could cross a Player's dream, when, in the way of his profession, 'the enormous state' came in to fill his scene, and open its subterranean depths, and let out its secrets, and drown the stage with its elemental horror; – with his daughters in the foreground, and all that magnificent accompaniment of the elemental war without – with all nature in that terrific uproar, and the Fool and the Madman to create a diversion, and his friends all about him to hush up and make the best of everything – with that great storm of pathos that the Magician is bringing down for him – with the stage all in tears, by their own confession, and the audience sobbing their responses – what the poor king might say between his chattering teeth was not going to be very critically treated; and the Poet knew it. It was the king, in such circumstances, who could undertake the philosophical expositions of the action; and in his wildest bursts of grief he has to manage them, in his wildest bursts of grief he has to keep to them.

But it is not until long afterwards, when the storm, and all the misery of that night, has had its ultimate effect – its chronic effect – upon him, that the Poet ventures to produce, under cover of the sensation which the presence of a mad king on the stage creates, precisely that exposition of the scene which has been, here, insisted on.

'They flattered me like a dog; they told me I had white hairs in my beard, ere the black ones were there. To say Ay and No to everything I said! – Ay and No too was no good DIVINITY. When the rain came to wet me once, and the wind made 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.'

Gloster. The trick of that voice I do well remember:

Is't not THE KING?

Lear. Ay, every inch a King:

When I do stare, see, how the subject quakes.

But it is a subject he has conjured up from his brain that is quaking under his regal stare. And it is the impersonation of God's authority, it is the divine right to rule men at its pleasure, with or without laws, as it sees fit, that stands there, tricked out like Tom o'Bedlam, with A CROWN of noisome weeds on its head, arguing the question of the day, taking up for the divine right, defining its own position: —

Is't not the king?

Ay every inch a king:

When I do stare, see how the subject quakes.

See; yes, see. For that is what he stands there for, or that you may see what it is at whose stare the subject quakes. He is there to 'represent to the eye,' because impressions on the senses are more effective than abstract statements, the divine right and sovereignty, the majesty of the COMMON-weal, the rule that protects each helpless individual member of it with the strength of all, the rule awful with great nature's sanction, enforced with her dire pains and penalties. He is there that you may see whether that is it, or not; that one poor wretch, that thing of pity, which has no power to protect itself, in whom the law itself, the sovereignty of reason, is dethroned. That was, what all men thought it was, when this play was written; for the madness of arbitrary power, the impersonated will and passion, was the state then. That is the spontaneous affirmation of rude ages, on this noblest subject, – this chosen subject of the new philosophy, – which stands there now to facilitate the demonstration, 'as globes and machines do the more subtle demonstrations in mathematics.' It is the 'affirmation' which the Poet finds pre-occupying this question; but this is the table of review that he stands on, and this 'Instance' has been subjected to the philosophical tests, and that is the reason that all those dazzling externals of majesty, which make that 'IDOL CEREMONY' are wanting here; that is the reason that his crown has turned to weeds. This is the popular affirmative the Poet is dealing with; but it stands on the scientific 'Table of Review,' and the result of this inquiry is, that it goes to 'the table of NEGATIONS.' And the negative table of science in these questions is Tragedy, the World's Tragedy. 'Is't not the king?' 'Ay, every inch —a King. When I do stare, see how the subject quakes.' But the voice within overpowers him, and the axioms that are the vintage of science, the inductions which are the result of that experiment, are forced from his lips. 'To say ay and no to everything that I– that I– said! To say ay and no too, was no GOOD DIVINITY. They told me that I was everything. 'T IS A LIE. I am not ague proof.' 'T is A LIE' – that is, what is called in other places a 'negative.'

In this systematic exposure of 'the particular and private nature' in the human kind, and those SPECIAL susceptibilities and liabilities which qualify its relationships; in this scientific exhibition of its special liability to suffering from the violation of the higher law of those relationships – its special liability to injury, moral, mental, and physical – a liability from which the very one who usurps the place of that law has himself no exemption in this exhibition, – which requires that the king himself should represent that liability in chief – it was not to be expected that this particular ill, this ill in which the human wrong in its extreme capes is so wont to exhibit its consummations, should be omitted. In this exhibition, which was designed to be scientifically inclusive, it would have been a fault to omit it. But that the Poet should have dared to think of exhibiting it dramatically in this instance, and that, too, in its most hopeless form – that he should have dared to think of exhibiting the personality which was then 'the state' to the eye of 'the subject' labouring under that personal disability, in the very act, too, of boasting of its kingly terrors – this only goes to show what large prerogatives, what boundless freedoms and immunities, the resources of this particular department of art could be made to yield, when it fell into the hands of the new Masters of Arts, when it came to be selected by the Art-king himself as his instrument.

But we are prepared for this spectacle, and with the Poet's wonted skill; for it is Cordelia, her heart bursting with its stormy passion of filial love and grief, that, REBEL-LIKE, seeks to be QUEEN o'er her, though she queens it still, and 'the smiles on her ripe lips seem not to know what tears are in her eyes,' for she has had her hour with her subject grief, and 'dealt with it alone,' – it is this child of truth and duty, this true Queen, this impersonated sovereignty, whom her Poet crowns with his choicest graces, on whom he devolves the task of prefacing this so critical, and, one might think, perhaps, perilous exhibition. But her description does not disguise the matter, or palliate its extremity.

'Why, he was met even now,Mad as the vexed sea, singing aloud;'

Crowned– .

'Crowned with rank fumiter, and furrow weeds,  With hardocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckow flowers,  Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow  In our sustaining corn.'

That is the crown; and a very extraordinary symbol of sovereignty it is, one cannot help thinking, for the divine right to get on its head by any accident just then. Surely that symbol of power is getting somewhat rudely handled here, in the course of the movements which the 'necessary questions of this Play' involve, as the critical mind might begin to think. In the botanical analysis of that then so dazzling, and potent, and compelling instrument in human affairs, a very careful observer might perhaps take notice that the decidedly hurtful and noxious influences in nature appear to have a prominent place; and, for the rest, that the qualities of wildness and idleness, and encroaching good-for-nothingness, appear to be the common and predominating elements. It is when the Tragedy reaches its height that this crown comes out.

A hundred men are sent out to pursue this majesty; not now to wait on him in idle ceremony, and to give him the 'addition of a king'; but – to catch him – to search every acre in the high-grown field, and bring him in. He has evaded his pursuers: he comes on to the stage full of self-congratulation and royal glee, chuckling over his prerogative: —

'No; they cannot touch me for COINING. I am the king himself.'

'O thou side-piercing sight!' [Collateral meaning.]

'Nature's above Art in that respect.' ['So o'er that art which you say adds to nature, is an art that Nature makes.'] 'There's your press money. That fellow handles his bow like a crow-keeper: draw me a clothier's yard. – Look, look, a mouse! Peace, peace; this piece of toasted cheese will do't. – There's my gauntlet; I'll prove it on a giant_.'

But the messengers, who were sent out for him, are on his track.

Enter a Gentleman, with Attendants.

Gent. O here he is, lay hand upon him. Sir, Your most dear daughter —

Lear. No rescue? What, a prisoner? I am even The natural fool of fortune! Use me well; You shall have ransom. Let me have a surgeon, I am cut to the brains.

Gent. You shall have anything.

Lear. No seconds? All myself?

Gent. Good Sir, —

Lear. I will die bravely, like a bridegroom: What? I will be jovial. Come, come; I am a king, My masters; know you that?

Gent. You are, a royal one, and we obey you.

Lear. Then there's life in it. Nay, an you get it, you shall get it by running. Sa, sa, sa, sa. [Exit, running; Attendants FOLLOW.] ['Transient hieroglyphic.']

Gent. A sight most pitiful in the meanest wretch; Past speaking of, in A KING!

[not past exhibiting, it seems, however.]

But, of course, there was nothing that a king, whose mind was in such a state, could not be permitted to say with impunity; and it is in this very scene that the Poet puts into his mouth the boldest of those philosophical suggestions which the first attempt to find a theory for the art and practical part of life, gave birth to: he skilfully reserves for this scene some of the most startling of those social criticisms which the action this play is everywhere throwing out.

For it is in this scene, that the outcast king encounters the victim of tyranny, whose eyes have been plucked out, and who has been turned out to beggary, as the penalty of having come athwart that disposition in 'the duke,' that 'all the world well knows will not be rubbed or stopped'; – it is in this scene that Lear finds him smelling his way to Dover, for that is the name in the play – the play name – for the place towards which men's hopes appear to be turning; and that conversation as to how the world goes, to which allusion has been already made, comes off, without appearing to suggest to any mind, that it is other than accidental on the part of the Poet, or that the action of the play might possibly be connected with it! For notwithstanding this great stress, which he lays everywhere on forethought and a deliberative rational intelligent procedure, as the distinctive human mark, – the characteristic feature of a man, – the poor poet himself, does not appear to have gained much credit hitherto for the possession of this human quality. —

Lear. Thou seest how this world goes?

Gloster. I see it feelingly.

Lear. What, art mad? —

[have you not the use of your reason, then? Can you not see with that? That is the kind of sight we talk of here. It's the want of that which makes these falls. We have eyes with which to foresee effects, – eyes which outgo all the senses with their range of observation, with their range of certainty and foresight.]

'What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine —ears: see how yon justice rails upon yon simple thief. Hark, in thine ear: Change places, and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, and which is THE THIEF?' [Searching social questions, as before. 'Thou robed man of justice (to the Bedlamite), take thy place; and thou, his yoke-fellow of equity (to the Fool), bench by his side. Thou, sapient sir, sit here.']

So that it would seem, perhaps, as if wisdom, as well as honesty, might be wanting there – the searching subtle wisdom, that is matched in subtlety, with nature's forces, that sees true differences, and effects true reformations. 'Change places. Hark, in thine ear.' Truly this is a player who knows how to suit the word to the action, and the action to the word; for there has been a revolution going on in this play which has made as complete a social overturning – which has shaken kings, and dukes, and lordlings out of their 'places,' as completely as some later revolutions have done. 'Change places!' With one duke in the stocks, and another wandering blind in the streets – with a dukeling, in the form of mad Tom, to lead him, with a king in a hovel, calling for the straw, and a queen hung by the neck till she is dead – with mad Tom on the bench, and the Fool, with his cap and bells, at his side – with Tom at the council-table, and occupying the position of chief favourite and adviser to the king, and a distinct proposal now that the thief and the justice shall change places on the spot – with the inquiry as to which is the justice, and which is the thief, openly started – one would almost fancy that the subject had been exhausted here, or would be, if these indications should be followed up. What is it in the way of social alterations which the player's imagination could conceive of, which his scruples have prevented him from suggesting here?

But the mad king goes on with those new and unheard-of political and social suggestions, which his madness appears to have had the effect of inspiring in him —

Lear. Thou hast seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar?

Gloster. Ay, sir.

Lear. And the creature run from the cur? There might'st thou  behold the great image of AUTHORITY: a dog's obeyed in office.  Through tattered robes small vices do appear;  Robes, and furred gowns, hide all.    [Robes, – robes, and furred gowns!]                               Plate sin with gold,  And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;  Arm it with rags, a pigmy's straw doth pierce it.

But that was before Tom got his seat on the bench – that was before Tom got his place at the council-table.

'None does offend, —none– '

[unless you will begin your reform at the beginning, and hunt down the great rogues as well as the little ones; or, rather, unless you will go to the source of the evil, and take away the evils, of which these crimes, that you are awarding penalties to, are the result, let it all alone, I say. Let's have no more legislation, and no more of this JUSTICE, this EQUITY, that takes the vices which come through the tattered robes, and leaves the great thief in his purple untouched. Let us have no more of this mockery. Let us be impartial in our justice, at least.] 'None does offend. I say none. I'll able 'em.' [I'll show you the way. Soft. Hark, in thine ear.] 'Take that of me, my friend, who have the power TO SEAL THE ACCUSER'S LIPS.' [Soft, in thine ear.] —

'Get thee glass eyes,  And like a scurvy politician, seem  To see the things thou dost not. —Now, now, now, NOW.* * * * *  I know thee well enough. Thy name is – Gloster.  Thou must be patient; we came crying hither.  Thou know'st the first time that we smell the air  We wawl and cry. I will preach to thee; mark me.

Gloster. Alack, alack, the day!

Lear. When we are born, we cry that we are come  To this great stage of —Fools.  [Mark me, for I preach to thee – of Fools.  I am even the natural fool of fortune.]  – 'O matter and impertinency, mixed  Reason in madness.' —

– is the Poet's concluding comment on this regal boldness, a safe and saving explanation; 'for to define true madness,' as Polonius says, 'what is it but to be nothing else but mad.' If the 'all licensed fool,' as Goneril peevishly calls him, under cover of his assumed imbecility, could carry his traditional privilege to such dangerous extremes, and carp and philosophize, and fling his bitter jests about at his pleasure, surely downright madness might claim to be invested with a privilege as large. But madness, when conjoined with royalty, makes a double privilege, one which this Poet finds, however, at times, none too large for his purposes.

Thus, Hamlet, when his mind is once in a questionable state, can be permitted to make, with impunity, profane suggestions as to certain possible royal progresses, and the changes to which the dust of a Cæsar might be liable, without being reminded out of the play, that to follow out these suggestions 'would be' indeed, 'to consider too curiously,' and that most extraordinary humour of his enables him also to relieve his mind of many other suggestions, 'which reason and sanity,' in his time, could not have been 'so prosperously delivered of.'

For what is it that men can set up as a test of sanity in any age, but their own common beliefs and sentiments. And what surer proof of the king's madness, – what more pathetic indication of its midsummer height could be given, than those startling propositions which the poet here puts into his mouth, so opposed to the opinions and sentiments, not of kings only, but of the world at large; what madder thing could a poet think of than those political axioms which he introduces under cover of these suggestions, – which would lay the axe at the root of the common beliefs and sentiments on which the social structure then rested. How could he better show that this poor king's wits had, indeed, 'turned;' how could he better prove that he was, indeed, past praying for, than by putting into his mouth those bitter satires on the state, those satires on the 'one only man' power itself, – those wild revolutionary proposals, 'hark! in thine ear, —change places. Softly, in thine ear, – which is the JUSTICE, and which is THE THIEF?' 'Take that of me who have the power to seal the accuser's lips. None does offend. I say none. I'll able 'em. Look when I stare, see how the subject quakes.' These laws have failed, you see. They shelter the most frightful depths of wrong. That Bench has failed, you see; and that Chair, with all its adjunct divinity. Come here and look down with me from this pinnacle, into these abysses. Look at that wretch there, in the form of man. Fetch him up in his blanket, and set him at the Council Table with his elf locks and begrimed visage and inhuman gibberish. Perhaps, he will be able to make some suggestion there; and those five fiends that are talking in him at once, would like, perhaps, to have a hearing there. Make him 'one of your hundred.' You are of 'the commission,' let him bench with you. Nay, change places, let him try your cause, and tell us which is the justice, which is the thief, which is the sapient Sir, and which is the Bedlamite. Surely, the man who authorizes these suggestions must be, indeed, 'far gone,' whether he be 'a king or a yeoman.' And mad indeed he is. Writhing under the insufficiency and incompetency of these pretentious, but, in fact, ignorant and usurping institutions, his heart of hearts racked and crushed with their failure, the victim of this social empiricism, cries out in his anguish, under that safe disguise of the Robes that hide all: 'Take these away at least, – that will be something gained. Let us have no more of this mockery. None does offend – none – I say none.' Let us go back to the innocent instinctive brutish state, and have done with this vain disastrous struggle of nature after the human form, and its dignity, and perfection. Let us talk no more of law and justice and humanity and DIVINITY forsooth, divinity and the celestial graces, that divinity which is the end and perfection of the human form. – Is not womanhood itself, and the Angel of it fallen– degenerate? – That is the humour of it. – That is the meaning of the savage edicts, in which this human victim of the inhuman state, the subject of a social state which has failed in some way of the human end, undertakes to utter through the king's lips, his sense of the failure. For the Poet at whose command he speaks, is the true scientific historian of nature and art, and the rude and struggling advances of the human nature towards its ideal type, though they fall never so short, are none of them omitted in his note-book. He knows better than any other, what gain the imperfect civilization he searches and satirizes and lays bare here, has made, with all its imperfections, on the spontaneities and aids of the individual, unaccommodated man: he knows all the value of the accumulations of ages; he is the very philosopher who has put forth all his wisdom to guard the state from the shock of those convulsions, that to his prescient eye, were threatening then to lay all flat.