The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded

by Delia Salter Bacon

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.'