The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded

Those 'amusements,' with which governments that are founded and sustained, 'by cutting off and keeping low the grandees and nobility' of a nation, naturally seek to propitiate and divert the popular mind, – those amusements which the peoples who sustain tyrannies are apt to be fond of – 'he loves no plays as thou dost, Antony,' – that 'pulpit,' from which the orator of Caesar stole and swayed the hearts of the people with his sugared words; and his dumb show of the stabs in Caesar's mantle became, in the hands of these new conspirators, an engine which those old experimenters lacked, – an engine which the lean and wrinkled Cassius, with his much reading and 'observation strange' and dangerous, looking through of the thoughts of men; and the grave, high-toned Brutus, with his logic and his stilted oratory, could not, on second thoughts, afford to lack. It was this which supplied the means of that 'volubility of application' which those 'Sir Oracles,' those 'grave sirs of note,' 'in observing their well-graced forms of speech,' it is intimated, 'might easily want.'

By means of that 'first use of the parable,' whereby (while for the present we drop 'the argument') it serves to illustrate, and bring first under the notice of the senses, the abstruser truths of a new learning, – truths which are as yet too far out of the road of common opinion to be conveyed in other forms, – these amusements became, in the hands of the new Teachers and Wise Men, with whom the Wisdom of the Moderns had its beginning, the means of an insidious, but most 'grave and exceedingly useful,' popular instruction.

But the immediate influence on the common mind was not the influence to which this association trusted for the fulfilment of its great plan of social renovation and advancement. That so aspiring social position, and that not less commanding position in the world of letters, built up with so much labour, with such persistent purpose, with a pertinacity which accepted of no defeat, – built up expressly to this end, – that position from which a new method of learning could be openly propounded, in the face of the schools, in the face of the Universities, in the face and eyes of all the Doctors of Learning then, was, in itself, no unimportant part of the machinery which this political association was compelled to include in the plot of its far-reaching enterprise.

That trumpet-call which rang through Europe, which summoned the scholasticism and genius of the modern ages, from the endless battles of the human dogmas and conceits, into the field of true knowledge, – that summons which recalled, and disciplined, and gave the word of command to the genius of the modern ages, that was already tumultuously rushing thither, – that call which was able to command the modern learning, and impose on it, for immediate use, the New Machine of Learning, – that Machine which, even in its employment in the humblest departments of observation, has already formed, ere we know it, the new mind, which has disciplined and trained the modern intelligence, and created insidiously new habits of judgment and belief, – created, too, a new stock of truths, which are accepted as a part of the world's creed, and from which the whole must needs be evolved in time, – this, in itself, was no small step towards securing the great ends of this enterprise. It was a step which we are hardly in a position, as yet, to estimate. We cannot see what it was till the nobler applications of this Method begin to be made. It has cost us something while we have waited for these. The letter to Sir Henry Savile, on 'the Helps to the Intellectual Powers,' which is referred to with so much more iteration and emphasis than anything which the surface of the letter exhibits would seem to bear, in its brief hints, points also this way, though the effect of mental exercises, by means of other instrumentalities, on the habits of a larger class, is also comprehended in it. But the formation of new intellectual habits in men liberally educated, appeared to promise, ultimately, those larger fruits in the advancement and culture of learning which, in 'the hour-glass' of that first movement, could be, as yet, only prophecy and anticipation. The perfection of the Human Science, then first propounded, the filling up of 'the Anticipations' of Learning, which the Philosophy of Science also included in its system, – not rash and premature, however, and not claiming the place of knowledge, but kept apart in a place by themselves, – put down as anticipations, not interpretations, – the filling up of this outline was what was expected as the ultimate result of this proceeding, in the department of speculative philosophy.

But in that great practical enterprise of a social and political renovation – that enterprise of 'constructions' according to true definitions, which this science fastens its eye on, and never ceases to contemplate – it was not the immediate effect on the popular mind, neither was it the gradual effect on the speculative habits of men of learning and men of intelligence in general, that was chiefly relied on. It was the secret tradition, the living tradition of that intention; it was the tradition whereby that association undertook to continue itself across whatever gulfs and chasms in social history 'the fortunes of our state' might make. It was that second use of the fable, which is 'to wrap up and conceal'; it was that 'enigmatic' method, which reserves the secrets of learning for those 'who by the aid of an instructor, or by their own research, are able to pierce the veil,' which was relied on for this result. It was the power of that tradition, its generative power, its power to reproduce 'in a better hour' the mind and will of that 'company' – it was its power to develop and frame that identity which was the secret of this association, and its new principle of UNION – that identity of the 'one mind, and one mind good,' which is the human principle of union – that identity which made a common name, a common personality, for those who worked together for that end, and whose WILL in it was 'one.' A name, a personality, a philosophic unity, in whose great radiance we have basked so long – a name, a personality whose secret lies heavy on all our learning – whose secret of power, whose secret of inclusiveness and inexhaustible wealth of knowledge, has paralysed all our criticism, 'made marble' – as Milton himself confesses – 'made marble with too much conceiving.' 'Write me a prologue, and let the prologue seem to say [in dumb action], we will do no harm with our swords.' 'They all flourish their swords.' 'There is but one mind in all these men, and that is bent against Caesar' – Julius Caesar.

'Even so the raceOf SHAKE-SPEAR's mind and manners brightly shines,  In his well turned and true filed– lines;  In each of which he seems to SHAKE a LANCE,  As brandished at the eyes of – Ignorance,'

[We will do no harm, with our – WORDS [it seems to say.] —Prologue.]

It was the power of the Elizabethan Art of Tradition that was relied on here, that 'living Art'; it was its power to reproduce this Institution, through whatever fatal eventualities the movement which these men were seeking then to anticipate, and organize, and control, might involve; and though the Parent Union should be overborne in those disastrous, not unforeseen, results – overborne and forgotten – and though other means employed for securing that end should fail.

It is to that posthumous effect that all the hope points here. It is the Leonatus Posthumus who must fulfil this oracle.

'Now with the drops of this most balmy timeMy love looks fresh, and death to me subscribes;Since, spite of him, I'LL live in this poor rhyme,While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes;And thou in this shall find thy monument,When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.''Not marble, nor the gilded monuments [Elizabethan AGE.]Of Princes shall outlive this power-ful rhyme.'

[This is our unconscious Poet, who does not know that his poems are worth printing, or that they are going to get printed – who does not know or care whether they are or not.]

'But you shall shine more bright in these contents,Than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time.When wasteful war shall statues overturn [iconoclasm], And broils [civil war] root out the work of masonry, Nor Mars his sword, nor war's quick fire shall burn The living record of your memory.'

[What is it, then, that this prophet is relying on? Is it a manuscript? Is it the recent invention of goose-quills which he is celebrating here with so much lyrical pomp, in so many, many lyrics? Here, for instance: – ]

'His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,And they shall live, and he in them still green.'

And here —

'O where, alack!Shall time's best jewel from time's chest lie hid?  Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?  Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?  O none, unless this miracle [this miracle] have might,  that in black ink– '

Is this printer's ink? Or is it the ink of the prompter's book? or the fading ink of those loose papers, so soon to be 'yellowed with age,' scattered about no one knew where, that some busy-body, who had nothing else to do, might perhaps take it into his head to save?

'O none, unless this miracle' – THIS MIRACLE, the rejoicing scholar and man of letters, who was not for an age, but for all time, cries – defying tyranny, laughing at princes' edicts, reaching into his own great assured futurity across the gulfs of civil war, planting his feet upon that sure ground, and singing songs of triumph over the spent tombs of brass and tyrants' crests; like that orator who was to make an oration in public, and found himself a little straitened in time to fit his words to his mouth as he had a mind to do, when Eros, one of his slaves, brought him word that the audience was deferred till the next day; at which he was so ravished with joy, that he enfranchised him. 'This miracle.' He knows what miracles are, for he has told us; but none other knew what miracle this was that he is celebrating here with all this wealth of symphonies.

'O none, unless this miracle have might,That in black ink my love may still shine bright.'

['My love,' – wait till you know what it is, and do not think to know with the first or second reading of poems, that are on the surface of them scholastic, academic, mystical, obtrusively enigmatical. Perhaps, after all, it is that Eros who was enfranchised, emancipated.]

'But thy eternal summer shall not fade,Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest [thou owes!],  Nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade,  When in eternal lines to time thou growest.  So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,  So long lives this, and this gives life to – thee!

But here is our prophecy, which we have undertaken to read with the aid of this collation: —

'When wasteful war shall statues overturn,And broils root out the work of masonry;Nor Mars his sword, nor war's quick fire shall burnThe living record of your memory.  'Gainst death, and all oblivious enmity,  Shall YOU pace forth. Your praise shall still find room,  Even in the eyes [collateral sounds] of all posterity,  That wear this world out to the ending doom.  So, till the JUDGMENT that YOURSELF arise [till then],  You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.'

See the passages at the commencement of this chapter, if there be any doubt as to this reading.

'In lover's eyes.'

Leonatus Posthumus. Shall's have a Play of this? Thou scornful Page, There lie thy part. [To Imogen disguised as Fidele.]

The consideration which qualified, in the mind of the Author of the Advancement of Learning, the great difficulty which the question of civil government presented at that time, is the key to this 'plot.' For men, and not 'Romans' only, 'are like sheep;' and if you can but get some few to go right, the rest will follow. That was the plan. To create a better leadership of men, – to form a new order and union of men, – a new nobility of men, acquainted with the doctrine of their own nature, and in league for its advancement, to seize the 'thoughts' of those whose law is the law of the larger activity, and 'inform them with nobleness,' – was the plan.

For these the inner school was opened; for these its ascending platforms were erected. For these that 'closet' and 'cabinet,' where the 'simples' of the Shake-spear philosophy are all locked and labelled, was built. For these that secret 'cabinet of the Muses,' where the Delphic motto is cut anew, throws out its secret lures, – its gay, many-coloured, deceiving lures, – its secret labyrinthine clues, – for all lines in this building meet in that centre. All clues here unwind to that. For these – for the minds on whom the continuation of this enterprise was by will devolved, the key to that cabinet – the historical key to its inmost compartment of philosophic mysteries, was carefully laboured and left, – pointed to – pointed to with immortal gesticulations, and left ('What I cannot speak, I point out with my finger'); the key to that 'Verulamian cabinet,' which we shall hear of when the fictitious correspondence in which the more secret history of this time was written, comes to be opened. That cabinet where the subtle argument that was inserted in the Poem or the Play, but buried there in its gorgeous drapery, is laid bare in prose as subtle ('I here scatter it up and down indifferently for verse'); where the new truth that was spoken in jest, as well as in parables, to those who were without, is unfolded, – that truth which moved unseen amid the gambols of the masque, – preferring to raise questions rather than objections, – which stalked in, without suspicion, in 'the hobby-horse' of the clown, – which the laugh of the groundlings was so often in requisition to cover, – that 'to beguile the time looked like the time,' – that 'looked like the flower, and was the serpent under it.'

For these that secret place of confidential communication was provided, where 'the argument' of all these Plays is opened without respect to the 'offence in it,' – to its utmost reach of abstruseness and subtlety – in its utmost reach of departure from 'the road of common opinion,' – where the Elizabethan secrets of Morality, and Policy and Religion, which made the Parables of the New Doctrine, are unrolled, at last, in all the new, artistic glories of that 'wrapped up' intention. This is the second use of the Fable in which we resume that dropped argument, – dropped for that time, while Caesar still commanded his thirty legions; and when the question, 'How long to philosophise?' being started in the schools again, the answer returned still was, 'Until our armies cease to be commanded by fools.' This is that second use of the Fable where we find the moral of it at last, – that moral which our moralists have missed in it, – that moral which is not 'vulgar and common-place,' but abstruse, and out of the road of common opinion, – that moral in which the Moral Science, which is the Wisdom of the Moderns, lurks.

It is to these that the Wise Man of our ages speaks (for we have him, – we do not wait for him), in the act of displaying a little, and folding up for the future, his plan of a Scientific Human Culture; it is to these that he speaks when he says, with a little of that obscurity which 'he mortally hates, and would avoid if he could': 'As Philocrates sported with Demosthenes,' you may not marvel, Athenians, that Demosthenes and I do differ, for he drinketh water, and I drink wine; and like as we read of an ancient parable of the two gates of sleep '… so if we put on sobriety and attention, we shall find it a sure maxim in knowledge, that the pleasant liquor of wine is the more vaporous, and the braver gate of ivory sendeth forth the falser dreams.' ['I,' says 'Michael,' who is also in favour of 'sobriety,' and critical upon excesses of all kinds, 'I have ever observed, that super-celestial theories and sub-terranean manners are in singular accordance.']

And in his general proposal to lay open 'those parts of learning which lie fresh and waste, and not improved and converted by the industry of man, to the end that such a plot, made and committed to memory, may both minister light to any public designation, and also serve to excite voluntary endeavours,' he says, 'I do foresee that of those things which I shall enter and register as deficiencies and omissions, many will conceive and censure that some of them are already done, and extant, others to be but curiosities and things of no great use' [such as the question of style, for instance, and those 'particular' arts of tradition to which this remark is afterwards applied] – and others to be of too great difficulty – and almost impossibility – to be compassed and effected; but for the two first, I refer myself to particulars; for the last, – touching impossibility, – I take it those things are to be held possible, which may be done by some person, though not by every one; and which may be done by many, though not by any one; and which may be done in succession of ages, though not within the hour-glass of one man's life; and which may be done by public designation, though not by private endeavour.

That was 'the plot' – that was the plan of the Elizabethan Innovation.

THE ENIGMA OF LEONATUS POSTHUMUS

'When as a lion's whelp shall, to himself unknown, without seeking find, and be embraced by a piece of tender air; and when from a stately cedar shall be lopped branches, which, being dead many years, shall after revive, be jointed to the old stock, and freshly grow; then shall Posthumus end his miseries, Britain be fortunate, and flourish in peace and plenty.'

THE VERULAMIAN CABINET, AND ITS WORKMANSHIP

Here, for instance, is a specimen of the manner in which scholars who write about these times, allude to the reserved parts of this philosophy, and to those 'richer and bolder meanings,' which could not then be inserted in the acknowledged writings of so great a person. This is a specimen of the manner in which a posthumous collection and reintegration of this philosophy, and a posthumous emancipation of it, is referred to, by scholars who write from the Continent somewhere about these days. Whether the date of the writing be a little earlier or a little later, – some fifty years or so, – it does not seem to make much difference as to the general intent and purport of it.

Here is a scholar, for instance, whose main idea of life on this planet it appears to be, to collect the philosophy, and protect the posthumous fame of the Lord Bacon. For this purpose, he has established a literary intimacy, quite the most remarkable one on record – at least, between scholars of different and remote nationalities – between himself and two English gentlemen, a Mr. Smith, and the Rev. Dr. Rawley. He writes from the Hague but he appears to have acquired in some way a most extraordinary insight into this business.

'Though I thought that I had already sufficiently showed what veneration I had for the illustrious Lord Verulam, yet I shall take such care for the future, that it may not possibly be denied, that I endeavoured most zealously to make this thing known to the learned world. But neither shall this design of setting forth in one volume all the Lord Bacon's works, proceed without consulting you' – [This letter is addressed to the Rev. Dr. Rawley, and is dated a number of years after Lord Bacon's death] – 'without consulting you, and without inviting you to cast in your symbol, worthy such an excellent edition: that so the appetite of the reader' – [It was a time when symbols of various kinds – large and small – were much in use in the learned world] – 'that so the appetite of the reader, provoked already by his published works, may be further gratified by the pure novelty of so considerable an appendage.

'For the French interpreter, who patched together his things I know not whence, and tacked that motley piece to him; they shall not have place in this great collection. But yet I hope to obtain your leave to publish a-part, as an appendix to the Natural History, —that exotic work, —gathered together from this and the other place (of his lordship's writings), [that is the true account of it] and by me translated into —Latin.

'For seeing the genuine pieces of the Lord Bacon are already extant, and in many hands, it is necessary that the foreign reader be given to understand of what threads the texture of that book consists, and how much of truth there is in that which that shameless person does, in his preface to the reader, so stupidly write of you.

'My brother, of blessed memory, turned his words into Latin, in the First Edition of the Natural History, having some suspicion of the fidelity of an unknown author. I will, in the Second Edition, repeat them, and with just severity animadvert upon them: that they, into whose hands that work comes, may know it to be rather patched up of many distinct pieces; how much soever the author bears himself upon the specious title of Verulam. Unless, perhaps, I should particularly suggest in your name, that these words were there inserted, by way of caution; and lest malignity and rashness should any way blemish the fame of so eminent a person.

'If my fate would permit me to live according to my wishes, I would fly over into England, that I might behold whatsoever remaineth in your Cabinet of the Verulamian workmanship, and at least make my eyes witnesses of it, if the possession of the merchandise be yet denied to the public. At present I will support the wishes of my impatient desire, with hope of seeing, one day, those (issues) which being committed to faithful privacy, wait the time till they may safely see the light, and not be stifled in their birth.

'I wish, in the mean time, I could have a sight of the copy of the Epistle to Sir Henry Savil, concerning the Helps of the Intellectual Powers: for I am persuaded, as to the other Latin remains, that I shall not obtain,for present use, the removal of them from the place in which they now are.'

Extract of a letter from Mr. Isaac Gruter. Here is the beginning of it: —

'TO THE REV. WM. RAWLEY, D.D

'Isaac Gruter wisheth much health.

'Reverend Sir, – It is not just to complain of the slowness of your answer, seeing that the difficulty of the passage, in the season in which you wrote, which was towards winter, might easily cause it to come no faster; seeing likewise there is so much to be found in it which may gratify desire, and perhaps so much the more, the longer it was ere it came to my hands. And although I had little to send back, besides my thanks for the little Index, yet that seemed to me of such moment that I would no longer suppress them: especially because I accounted it a crime to have suffered Mr. Smith to have been without an answer: Mr. Smith, my most kind friend, and to whose care, in my matters, I owe all regard and affection, yet without diminution of that (part and that no small one neither) in which Dr. Rawley hath place. So that the souls of us three, so throughly agreeing, may be aptly said to have united in a triga.'

It is not necessary, of course, to deny the historical claims of the Rev. Dr. Rawley, who is sufficiently authenticated; or even of Mr. Smith himself, who would no doubt be able to substantiate himself, in case a particular inquiry were made for him; and it would involve a serious departure from the method of invention usually employed in this association, which did not deal with shadows when contemporary instrumentalities were in requisition, if the solidarity of Mr. Isaac Gruter himself should admit of a moment's question. The precautions of this secret, but so powerful league, – the skill with which its instrumentalities were selected and adapted to its ends, is characterised by that same matchless dramatic power, which betrays 'the source from which it springs' even when it 'only plays at working.'