The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded

by Delia Salter Bacon

CHAPTER III.

THE KING AND THE BEGGAR.

Armado. Is there not a ballad, boy, of the King and the Beggar?

Moth. The world was very guilty of such a ballad some three ages since: but, I think, now 'tis not to be found; or, if it were, it would neither serve for the writing, nor for the tune.

Armado. I will have the subject newly writ over, that I
may example my digression
by some mighty precedent.
Love's Labour's Lost.

But the king's philosophical studies are not yet completed; for he is in the hands of one who does not rely on general statements for his effects; one who is pertinaciously bent on exploring those subterranean social depths, that the king's prayer has just glanced at—who is determined to lay bare to the utmost, to carry the torch of his new science into the lowest recess of that wild, nameless mass of human neglect and misery, which the regal sympathy has embraced for him in the general; though not, indeed, without some niceties of detail, which shew that the eye of a true human pity has collected the terms in which he expresses it.

That vast, immeasurable mass of social misery, which has no learned speech, no tragic dialect—no, or 'it would bear such an emphasis,' that 'its phrase of sorrow might conjure the wandering stars, and bid them stand like wonder-wounded hearers'—that misery which must get a king's robe about it, ere, in the Poet's time, it could have an audience, must needs be produced here, ere all this play was played, in its own native and proper shape and costume, daring as the attempt might seem.

The author is not satisfied with the picturesque details of that misery which he has already given us, with its 'looped and windowed raggedness,' its 'houseless head,' its 'unfed sides'; it must be yet more palpably presented. It must be embodied and dramatically developed; it must be exhibited with its proper moral and intellectual accompaniments, too, before the philosophic requisitions of this design can be fulfilled.

To the lowest deeps of the lowest depths of the unfathomed social misery of that time, the new philosopher, the Poet of the Advancement of Learning, will himself descend; and drag up to the eye of day,—undeterred by any scruple of poetic sensibility,—in his own unborrowed habiliments, with all the badges of his position in the state upon him, the creature he has selected as one of the representatives of the social state as he finds it;—the creature he has selected as the representative of those loathsome, unpenetrated masses of human life, which the unscientific social state must needs generate.

For the design of this play, in its exhibition of the true human need, in its new and large exhibition of the ground which the Arts of a true and rational human civilization must cover, could not but include the defects of that, which passed for civilization then. It involved necessarily, indeed, the most searching and relentless criticisms of the existing institutions of that time. That cry of social misery which pervades it, in which the natural, and social, and artificial evils are still discriminated through all the most tragic bursts of passion—in which the true social need, in all its comprehension, is uttered—that wild cry of human anguish, prolonged, and repeated, and reverberated as it is—is all one outcry upon the social wisdom of the Poet's time. It constitutes one continuous dramatic expression and embodiment of that so deeply-rooted opinion which the New Philosopher is known to have entertained, in regard to the practical knowledge of mankind as he found it; his opinion of the real advances towards the true human ends which had been made in his time; an opinion which he has, indeed, taken occasion to express elsewhere with some distinctness, considering the conditions which hampered the expression of his philosophical conclusions; but it is one which could hardly have been produced from the philosophic chair in his time, or from the bench, or at the council-table, in such terms as we find him launching out into here, without any fear or scruple.

For those who persuade themselves that it was any part of this player's intention to bring out, for the amusement of his audiences, an historical exhibition of the Life and Times of that ancient Celtic king of Britain, whose legendary name and chronicle he has appropriated so effectively, will be prevented by that view of the subject from ever attaining the least inkling of the matter here. For this Magician has quite other work in hand. He does not put his girdles round the earth, and enforce and harass with toil his delicate spirits,—he does not get out his book and staff, and put on his Enchanter's robe, for any such kind of effect as that. For this is not any antiquary at all, but the true Prospero; and when a little more light has been brought into his cell, his garments will be found to be, like the disguised Edgar's—'Persian.'

It is not enough, then, in the wild revolutionary sweep of this play, to bring out the monarch from his palace, and set him down at the hovel's door. It is not enough to open it, and shew us, by the light of Cordelia's pity—that sunshine and rain at once—the 'swine' in that human dwelling, and 'the short and musty-straw' there. For the poet himself will enter it, and drag out its living human tenant into the day of his immortal verse. He will set him up for all ages, on his great stage, side by side with his great brother. He will put the feet of these two men on one platform, and measure their stature—for all their senses have the like conditions, as we have heard already; and he will make the king himself own the KINDRED, and interpret for him. For this group must needs be completed 'to the eye'; these two extremes in the social scale must meet and literally embrace each other, before this Teacher's doctrine of 'MAN'—'man as distinguished from other species'—can be artistically exhibited. For it is this picture of the unaccommodated man—'unaccommodated' still, with all his empiric arts, with all his wordy philosophy—it is this picture of man 'as he is,' in the misery of his IGNORANCE, in his blind struggle with his law of KIND, which is his law of 'BEING,'— unreconciled to his place in the universal order, where he must live or have no life—for the beast, obedient to his law, rejects from his kinds the degenerate man—it is this vivid, condensed, scientific exhibition, this scientific collection of the fact of man as he is, in his empiric struggle with the law which universal nature enforces, and will enforce on him with all her pains and penalties till he learns it—it is this 'negation' which brings out the true doctrine of man and human society in this method of inquiry. For the scientific method begins with negations and exclusions, and concludes only after every species of rejection; the other, the common method, which begins with 'AFFIRMATION,' is the one that has failed in practice, the one which has brought about just this state of things which science is undertaking to reform.

But this levelling, which the man of the new science, with his new apparatus, with his 'globe and his machines,' contrives to exhibit here with so much 'facility,' is a scientific one, designed to answer a scientific purpose merely. The experimenter, in this case, is one who looks with scientific forebodings, and not with hope only, on those storms of violent political revolution that were hanging then on the world's horizon, and threatening to repeat this process, threatening to overwhelm in their wild crash, all the ancient social structures—threatening 'to lay all flat'! That is not the kind of change he meditates. His is the subtle, all-penetrating Radicalism of the New Science, which imitates the noiseless processes of Nature in its change and Re-formation.

There is a wild gibberish heard in the straw. The fool shrieks, 'Nuncle, come not in here,' and out rushes 'Tom o Bedlam'—the naked creature, as Gloster calls him—with his 'elf locks,' his 'blanketed loins,' his 'begrimed face,' with his shattered wits, his madness, real or assumed—there he stands.

We know, indeed, in this instance, that there is gentle, nay, noble blood, there, under that horrid guise. It is the heir of a dukedom, we are told, but an out-cast one, who has found himself compelled, for the sake of prolonging life, to assume that shape, as other wretches were in the Poet's time for that same purpose,—men who had lost their dukedoms, too, as it would seem, such as they were, in some way, and their human relationships, too. But notwithstanding this alleviating circumstance which enables the audience to endure the exhibition in this instance, it serves not the less effectually in the Poet's hand, as 'THE CONSPICUOUS INSTANCE' of that lowest human condition which this grand Social Tragedy must needs include in its delineations.

Here are some of the prose English descriptions of this creature, which we find already included in the commentaries on this tragedy; and which shew that the Poet has not exaggerated his portrait, and that it is not by way of celebrating any Anglo-Saxon or Norman triumph over the barbarisms of the joint reigns of REGAN and GONERIL, that he is produced here.

'I remember, before the civil wars, Tom o' Bedlams went about begging,' Aubrey says. Randle Holme, in his 'Academy of Arms and Blazon,' includes them in his descriptions, as a class of vagabonds 'feigning themselves mad.' 'The Bedlam is in the same garb, with a long staff,' etc., 'but his cloathing is more fantastic and ridiculous; for being a madman, he is madly decked and dressed all over with rubans, feathers, cuttings of cloth, and what not, to make him seem a madman, when he is no other than a dissembling knave.'

In the Bellman of London, 1640, there is another description of him—'He sweares he hath been in Bedlam, and will talk frantickely of purpose; you see pinnes stuck in sundry places of his naked flesh, especially in his armes, which paine he gladly puts himselfe to; calls himself by the name of Poore Tom; and coming near anybody, cries out, 'Poor Tom's a cold.' Of these Abraham men, some be exceeding merry, and doe nothing but sing songs, fashioned out of their own braines; some will dance; others will doe nothing but either laugh or weepe; others are dogged, and so sullen, both in looke and speech, that spying but a small company in a house, they bluntly and boldly enter, compelling the servants, through fear, to them what they demand.'

This seems very wicked, very depraved, on the part of these persons, especially the sticking of pins in their bare arms; but even our young dukeling Edgar says—

'While I may scape,
I will preserve myself: and am bethought
To take the basest and most poorest shape,
That ever penury, in contempt of MAN,
Brought near to beast: my face I'll grime with filth;
Blanket my loins; elf all my hair in knots;
And with presented nakedness outface
The winds, and persecutions of the sky.
The country gives me PROOF and PRECEDENT
Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,
Strike in their numb'd and mortified bare arms,
Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;
And with this horrible object, from low farms,
Poor pelting villages, sheep-cotes and mills,
Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers,
Enforce their charity.—'Poor Turlygood!' 'poor Tom!'
Thats something yet, Edgar I nothing am.

But the poet is not contented with the minuteness of this description. This character appears to have taken his eye as completely as it takes King Lear's, the moment that he gets a glimpse of him; and the poet betrays throughout that same philosophical interest in the study, which the monarch expresses so boldly; for beside the dramatic exhibition, and the philosophical review of him, which King Lear institutes, here is an autographical sketch of him, and of his mode of living—

'What are you there? Your names?'

cries Gloster, when he comes to the heath, with his torch, to seek out the king and his party; whereupon Tom, thinking that an occasion has now arrived for defining his social outline, takes it upon him to answer, for his part—

'Poor Tom; that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall-newt, and the water-[newt]; that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, swallows the old rat, and the ditch-dog; drinks the green mantle of the standing pool; who is whipped from tything to tything' [this is an Anglo-Saxon institution one sees]; 'and stocked, punished, and imprisoned; who hath had three suits to his back' [fallen fortunes here, too] 'six shirts to his body, horse to ride, and weapon to wear.'

The Jesuits had been, then, recently and notoriously at work in England, endeavouring professedly to cast out 'the fiend' from many possessed persons; and it appeared, to this great practical philosopher, that this creature he has fetched up here from the subterranean social abysses of his time, presented a very fitting subject for the operations of practitioners professing any miraculous or superior influence over the demons that infest human nature, or those that have power over human fortunes. He has brought him out here thus distinctly, for the purpose of inquiring whether there is any exorcism which can meet his case, or that of the great human multitude, that no man can number, of whose penury and vice he stands here as the elected, pre-eminent, royal representative. In that survey and report of human affairs, which this author felt himself called upon to make, the case of this poor creature had attracted his attention, and appeared to him to require looking to; and, accordingly, he has made a note of it.

He is admirably seconded in his views on this subject, by the king himself, who, in that fine philosophic humour which his madness and his misery have served to develop in him, stands ready to lend himself to the boldest and most delicate philosophical inquiries. For the point to be noted here,—and it is one of no ordinary importance,—is, that this mad humour for philosophical investigation, which has seized so strangely the royal mind, does not appear to be at all in the vein of that old-fashioned philosophy, which had been rattling its abstractions in the face of the collective human misery for so many ages. For the helplessness of the human creature in his struggle with the elements, and those conditions of his nature which put him so hopelessly at the mercy of his own kind and kindred, seem to suggest to the royal sufferer, who has the advantage of a fresh experience to stimulate his apprehension, that there ought to be some relief for the human condition from this source, that is, from PHILOSOPHY; and his inquiries and discoveries are all stamped with the unmistakeable impress of that fire new philosophy, which was not yet out of the mint elsewhere—which was yet undergoing the formative process in the mind of its great inventor;—that philosophy, which we are told elsewhere 'has for its principal object, to make nature subservient to the wants and state of Man';—and which concerns itself for that purpose with ideas as they exist in nature, as causes, and not as they exist in the mind of man as words merely.

If there had been, indeed, any intention of paying a marked compliment to the philosophy which still held all the mind of the world in its grasp, at that great moment in history, in which Tom o' Bedlam makes his first appearance on any stage, it is not likely that that sage would have been just the person appointed to hold the office of Philosopher in Chief, and Councillor extraordinary to his Majesty.

The selection is indeed made on the part of the king, in perfect good faith, whatever the Poet's intent may be; for from the moment that this creature makes his appearance, he has no eyes or ears for anything else. And he will not be parted from him. For this startling juxtaposition was not intended by the Poet to fulfil its effect as a mere passing tableau vivant. The relation must be dramatically developed; that astounding juxtaposition must be prolonged, in spite of the horror of the spectators, and the disgust and rude displeasure of the king's attendants. They seek in vain to part these two men. The king refuses to stir without him. 'He will still keep with his philosopher.' He has a vague idea that his regal administration stands in need of some assistance, and that philosophy ought to be able to give it, and that the Bedlamite is in some way connected with the subject, but confused as the association is, it is a pertinacious one; and, in spite of their disgust the king's friends are obliged to take this wretch with them. For Gloster does not know, after all, it is 'his own flesh and blood' he sees there. He cannot even recognize the common kindred in that guise, as the king does, when he philosophises on his condition. And the rough aristocratic contempt and indifference which is manifested by the king's party, as a matter of course, for this poor human victim of wrong and misfortune, is made to contrast with their boundless sympathy and tenderness for the king, while the poet aiming at broader relationships, finds the mantle of his humanity wide enough for them, both.

As for the king,—startled in the midst of those new views of human wretchedness which his own sufferings have occasioned, and while those desires to remedy it, with which his penitence is accompanied, are still on his lip, by this wild apparition and embodiment of his thought, in that new accession of his mental disorder, which the presence of this object seems to occasion, that confounding of proximate conceptions, which leads him to regard this man as a source of new light on human affairs, is one of those exquisite physiological exhibitions of which only this scientific artist is capable.

And, in fact, it must be confessed, that this 'learned Theban' himself, notwithstanding the unexpected dignity of his promotion, does not appear to be altogether wanting in a taste, at least, for that new kind of philosophical investigation, which seems to be looked for at his hands. The king's inquiries appear to fall in remarkably with the previous train of his pursuits. In the course of his experiments, he seems himself to have struck upon that new philosophic proceeding, which has been called 'putting philosophy upon the right road again.'

Only the philosophic domain which that new road in philosophy leads to, appears to be very considerably broader, as 'Tom' takes it, than that very vivid, but narrow limitation of its fields, which Mr. Macaulay has set down in our time, would make it. Indeed, this 'philosopher,' that Lear so much inclines to, appears to have included in his investigations the two extremes of the new science of practice. He has sounded it apparently 'from its lowest note to the top of its key.'

'What is your study?' says the king to him, eyeing him curiously, and apparently struck with the practical result—anxious to have a word with him in private, but obliged to conduct the examination on the stage.

'How to prevent THE FIEND,' is Tom's reply. 'How to prevent the fiend and to kill vermin.'

This is the Poet who says elsewhere, 'that without good nature, men are themselves but a nobler kind of vermin.'

One cannot but observe, however, that Poor Tom's researches in this quite new field of a practical philosophy, do not appear to have been followed up since his time with any very marked success. One of these departments of 'his study' has indeed been seized, and is now occupied by whole troops of modern philosophers; but their inquiries, though very interesting and doubtlessly useful, do not appear to exhibit that direct and palpable bearing on practice, to which Tom's programme so severely inclines. For he is one who would make 'the art and practic part of life, the mistress to his theoric.' And as to that other mysterious object of his inquiries, Mr. Macaulay is not the only person who appears to think, that that does not come within the range of anything human. Many of our scholars are still of the opinion that, 'court holy water' is the best application in the world for him; and the fact that he does not appear to get 'prevented' with it; it is a fact which of course has nothing to do with the logical result. For our philosophers are still determined to reason it 'thus and thus,' without taking into account the circumstance, that 'the sequent effect' with which 'nature finds itself scourged,' is not touched by their reasons.

King Lear's own inquiries seem also to include with great distinctness, the two great branches of the new philosophical inquiry. His mind is indeed very eagerly bent on the pursuit of causes. And though in the paroxysms of his mental disorder, he is apt to confound them occasionally, this very confusion, as it is managed, only serves to develop the breadth of the philosophic conception beneath it.

'He hath no daughters, Sir.' 'Death, traitor! Nothing could have subdued nature to such a lowness, but—his UNKIND daughters.' It is, of course, his own new and terrible experience which points the inquiry, and though the physical causes are not omitted in it, it is not strange that the moral should predominate, and that his mind should seem to be very curiously occupied in tracking the ethical phenomena to their sources 'in nature.'

In the midst of the uproar of the Tempest, he does indeed begin with the physical investigation. He puts to his 'learned Theban' the question, which no learned Theban had then ever suspected of lying within the range of the scholar's investigations—that question which has been put to some purpose since—'What is the cause of thunder?' But his philosophic inquiry does not stop there,—where all the new philosophy has stopped ever since, and where some of our scholars declare it was meant to stop, notwithstanding the plainest declarations of its inventor to the contrary—with the investigation of physical causes.

For, after all, it is 'the tempest in his mind' that most concerns him. His philosopher, his practical philosopher, must be able to explore the conditions of that, and find the conductors for its lightnings. 'For where the greater malady is fixed, the lesser is scarce felt.' 'Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are his daughters.' After all, it is Regan's heart that appears to him to be the trouble—it is that which must first be laid on the table; and as soon as he decides to have a philosopher among 'his hundred,' he gives orders to that effect.

'Then let them anatomise Regan; see what breeds about her heart: Is there any CAUSE IN NATURE that makes these hard hearts?'

A very fair subject for philosophical inquiry, one would say; and, on the whole, as profitable and interesting a one, perhaps, as some of those that engage the attention of our men of learning so profoundly at present. In these days of enlightened scientific procedure, one would hardly undertake the smallest practical affair with the aid of any such vague general notions or traditional accounts of the properties to be dealt with, as those which our learned Thebans appear to find all-sufficient for their practices, in that particular department which Lear seems inclined to open here as a field for scientific exploration.

And it is perfectly clear that the author, whoever he may be, is very much of Lear's mind on this point, for he does not depend upon Lear alone to suggest his views upon it. There is never a person of this drama that does not do it.