The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded

by Delia Salter Bacon

There is, indeed, no lack of the instinctive element in this heroic 'composition;' there is no stronger and more various and complete development of it. That 'lumen siccum' which his great contemporary is so fond of referring to in his philosophy, that dry light which is so apt, he tells us, in most men's minds, to get 'drenched' a little sometimes, in 'the humours and affections,' and distorted and refracted in their mediums, did not always, perhaps, in its practical determinations, escape from that accident even in the philosopher's own; but in this stormy, world-hero, there was a latent volcano of will and passion; there was, in his constitution, 'a complexion' which might even seem to the bystanders to threaten at times, by its 'o'ergrowth,' the 'very pales and forts of reason'; but the intellect was, notwithstanding, in its due proportion in him; and it was the majestic intellect that triumphed in the end. It was the large and manly comprehension, 'the large discourse looking before and after,' it was the overseeing and active principle of 'the larger whole,' that predominated and had the steering of his course. It is the common human form which shines out in him and makes that manly demonstration, which commands our common respect, in spite of those particular defects and o'ergrowths which are apt to mar its outline in the best historical types and patterns of it, we have been able to get as yet. It was the intellect, and the sense which belongs to that in its integrity—it was the truth and the feeling of its obligation, which was sovereign with him. For this is a man who appears to have been occupied with the care of the common-weal more than with anything else; and that, too, under great disadvantages and impediments, and when there was no honour in caring for it truly, but that kind of honour which he had so much of; for this was the time precisely which the poet speaks of in that play in which he tells us that the end of playing is 'to give to the very age and body of the time its form and pressure.' This was the time when 'virtue of vice must pardon beg, and curb and beck for leave to do it good.' It was the relief of man's estate, or the Creator's glory, that he busied himself about; that was the end of his ends; or if not, then was he, indeed, no hero at all. For it was the doctrine of his own school, and 'the first human principle' taught in it, that men who act without reference to that distinctly human aim, without that manly consideration and kind-liness of purpose, can lay no claim either to divine or human honours; that they are not, in fact, men, but failures; specimens of an unsuccessful attempt in nature, at an advancement; or, as his great contemporary states it more clearly, 'only a nobler kind of vermin.'

During all the vicissitudes of his long and eventful public life, Raleigh was still persistently a scholar. He carried his books—his 'trunk of books' with him in all his adventurous voyages; and they were his 'companions' in the toil and excitement of his campaigns on land. He studied them in the ocean-storm; he studied them in his tent, as Brutus studied in his. He studied them year after year, in the dim light which pierced the deep embrasure of those walls with which tyranny had thought to shut in at last his world-grasping energies.

He had had some chance to study 'men and manners' in that strange and various life of his, and he did not lack the skill to make the most of it; but he was not content with that narrow, one-sided aspect of life and human nature, to which his own individual personal experience, however varied, must necessarily limit him. He would see it under greater varieties, under all varieties of conditions. He would know the history of it; he would 'delve it to the root.' He would know how that particular form of it, which he found on the surface in his time, had come to be the thing he found it. He would know what it had been in other times, in the beginning, or in that stage of its development in which the historic light first finds it. He was a man who wished even to know what it had been in the Assyrian, in the Phenician, in the Hebrew, in the Egyptian; he would see what it had been in the Greek, and in the Roman. He was, indeed, one of that clique of Elizabethan Naturalists, who thought that there was no more curious thing in nature; and instead of taking a Jack Cade view of the subject, and inferring that an adequate knowledge of it comes by nature, as reading and writing do in that worthy's theory of education, it was the private opinion of this school, that there was no department of learning which a scholar could turn his attention to, that required a more severe and thorough study and experiment, and none that a man of a truly scientific turn of mind would find better worth his leisure. And the study of antiquity had not yet come to be then what it is now; at least, with men of this stamp. Such men did not study it to discipline their minds, or to get a classic finish to their style. The books that such a man as this could take the trouble to carry about with him on such errands as those that he travelled on, were books that had in them, for the eager eyes that then o'er-ran them, the world's 'news'—the world's story. They were full of the fresh living data of his conclusions. They were notes that the master minds of all the ages had made for him; invaluable aid and sympathy they had contrived to send to him. The man who had been arrested in his career, more ignominiously than the magnificent Tully had been in his,—in a career, too, a thousand times more noble,—by a Caesar, indeed, but such a Caesar;—the man who had sat for years with the executioner's block in his yard, waiting only for a scratch of the royal pen, to bring down upon him that same edge which the poor Cicero, with all his truckling, must feel at last,—such a one would look over the old philosopher's papers with an apprehension of their meaning, somewhat more lively than that of the boy who reads them for a prize, or to get, perhaps, some classic elegancies transfused into his mind.

During the ten years which intervene between the date of Raleigh's first departure for the Continent and that of his beginning favour at home, already he had found means for ekeing out and perfecting that liberal education which Oxford had only begun for him, so that it was as a man of rarest literary accomplishments that he made his brilliant debût at the English Court, where the new Elizabethan Age of Letters was just then beginning.

He became at once the centre of that little circle of highborn wits and poets, the elder wits and poets of the Elizabethan age, that were then in their meridian there. Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Lord Buckhurst, Henry Lord Paget, Edward Earl of Oxford, and some others, are included in the contemporary list of this courtly company, whose doings are somewhat mysteriously adverted to by a critic, who refers to the condition of 'the Art of Poesy' at that time. 'The gentleman who wrote the late Shepherds' Calendar' was beginning then to attract considerable attention in this literary aristocracy.

The brave, bold genius of Raleigh flashed new life into that little nucleus of the Elizabethan development. The new 'Round Table,' which that newly-beginning age of chivalry, with its new weapons and devices, and its new and more heroic adventure had created, was not yet 'full' till he came in. The Round Table grew rounder with this knight's presence. Over those dainty stores of the classic ages, over those quaint memorials of the elder chivalry, that were spread out on it, over the dead letter of the past, the brave Atlantic breeze came in, the breath of the great future blew, when the turn came for this knight's adventure; whether opened in the prose of its statistics, or set to its native music in the mystic melodies of the bard who was there to sing it. The Round Table grew spheral, as he sat talking by it; the Round Table dissolved, as he brought forth his lore, and unrolled his maps upon it; and instead of it,—with all its fresh yet living interests, tracked out by land and sea, with the great battle-ground of the future outlined on it,—revolved the round world. 'Universality' was still the motto of these Paladins; but 'THE GLOBE'—the Globe, with its TWO hemispheres, became henceforth their device.

The promotion of Raleigh at Court was all that was needed to make him the centre and organiser of that new intellectual movement which was then just beginning there. He addressed himself to the task as if he had been a man of literary tastes and occupations merely, or as if that particular crisis had been a time of literary leisure with him, and there were nothing else to be thought of just then. The relation of those illustrious literary partners of his, whom he found already in the field when he first came to it, to that grand development of the English genius in art and philosophy which follows, ought not indeed to be overlooked or slightly treated in any thorough history of it. For it has its first beginning here in this brilliant assemblage of courtiers, and soldiers, and scholars,—this company of Poets, and Patrons and Encouragers of Art and Learning. Least of all should the relation which the illustrious founder of this order sustains to the later development be omitted in any such history,—'the prince and mirror of all chivalry,' the patron of the young English Muse, whose untimely fate keeps its date for ever green, and fills the air of this new 'Helicon' with immortal lamentations. The shining foundations of that so splendid monument of the later Elizabethan genius, which has paralyzed and confounded all our criticism, were laid here. The extraordinary facilities which certain departments of literature appeared to offer, for evading the restrictions which this new poetic and philosophic development had to encounter from the first, already began to attract the attention of men acquainted with the uses to which it had been put in antiquity, and who knew what gravity of aim, what height of execution, that then rude and childish English Play had been made to exhibit under other conditions;—men fresh from the study of those living and perpetual monuments of learning, which the genius of antiquity has left in this department. But the first essays of the new English scholarship in this untried field,—the first attempts at original composition here, derive, it must be confessed, their chief interest and value from that memorable association in which we find them. It was the first essay, which had to be made before those finished monuments of art, which command our admiration on their own account wholly, could begin to appear. It was 'the tuning of the instruments, that those who came afterwards might play the better.' We see, of course, the stiff, cramped hand of the beginner here, instead of the grand touch of the master, who never comes till his art has been prepared to his hands,—till the details of its execution have been mastered for him by others. In some arts there must be generations of essays before he can get his tools in a condition for use. Ages of prophetic genius, generations of artists, who dimly saw afar off, and struggled after his perfections, must patiently chip and daub their lives away, before ever the star of his nativity can begin to shine.

Considering what a barbaric age it was that the English mind was emerging from then; and the difficulties attending the first attempt to create in the English literature, anything which should bear any proportion to those finished models of skill which were then dazzling the imagination of the English scholar in the unworn gloss of their fresh revival here, and discouraging, rather than stimulating, the rude poetic experiment;—considering what weary lengths of essay there are always to be encountered, where the standard of excellence is so far beyond the power of execution; we have no occasion to despise the first bold attempts to overcome these difficulties which the good taste of this company has preserved to us. They are just such works as we might expect under those circumstances;—yet full of the pedantries of the new acquisition, overflowing on the surface with the learning of the school, sparkling with classic allusions, seizing boldly on the classic original sometimes, and working their new fancies into it; but, full already of the riant vigour and originality of the Elizabethan inspiration; and never servilely copying a foreign original. The English genius is already triumphant in them. Their very crudeness is not without its historic charm, when once their true place in the structure we find them in, is recognised. In the later works, this crust of scholarship has disappeared, and gone below the surface. It is all dissolved, and gone into the clear intelligence;— it has all gone to feed the majestic current of that new, all-subduing, all-grasping originality. It is in these earlier performances that the stumbling-blocks of our present criticism are strewn so thickly. Nobody can write any kind of criticism of the 'Comedy of Errors,' for instance, without recognizing the Poet's acquaintance with the classic model, [See a recent criticism in 'The Times.']—without recognizing the classic treatment. 'Love's Labour's Lost,' 'The Taming of the Shrew,' the condemned parts of 'Henry the VI.,' and generally the Poems which are put down in our criticism as doubtful, or as the earlier Poems, are just those Poems in which the Poet's studies are so flatly betrayed on the surface. Among these are plays which were anonymously produced by the company performing at the Rose Theatre, and other companies which English noblemen found occasion to employ in their service then. These were not so much as produced at the theatre which has had the honor of giving its name to other productions, bound up with them. We shall find nothing to object to in that somewhat heterogeneous collection of styles, which even a single Play sometimes exhibits, when once the history of this phenomenon accompanies it. The Cathedrals that were built, or re-built throughout, just at the moment in which the Cathedral Architecture had attained its ultimate perfection, are more beautiful to the eye, perhaps, than those in which the story of its growth is told from the rude, massive Anglo-Saxon of the crypt or the chancel, to the last refinement of the mullion, and groin, and tracery. But the antiquary, at least, does not regret the preservation. And these crude beginnings here have only to be put in their place, to command from the critic, at least, a similar respect. For here, too, the history reports itself to the eye, and not less palpably.

It may seem surprising, and even incredible, to the modern critic, that men in this position should find any occasion to conceal their relation to those quite respectable contributions to the literature of the time, which they found themselves impelled to make. The fact that they did so, is one that we must accept, however, on uncontradicted cotemporary testimony, and account for it as we can. The critic who published his criticisms when 'the gentleman who wrote the late Shepherd's Calendar' was just coming into notice, however inferior to our modern critics in other respects, had certainly a better opportunity of informing himself on this point, than they can have at present. 'They have writ excellently well,' he says of this company of Poets,—this 'courtly company,' as he calls them,—' they have writ excellently well, if their doings could be found out and made public with the rest.' Sir Philip Sidney, Raleigh, and the gentleman who wrote the late Shepherd's Calendar, are included in the list of Poets to whom this remark is applied. It is Raleigh's verse which is distinguished, however, in this commendation as the most 'lofty, insolent, and passionate;' a description which applies to the anonymous poems alluded to, but is not particularly applicable to those artificial and tame performances which he was willing to acknowledge. And this so commanding Poet, who was at the same time an aspiring courtier and meddler in affairs of state, and who chose, for some mysterious reason or other, to forego the honours which those who were in the secret of his literary abilities and successes,—the very best judges of poetry in that time, too, were disposed to accord him,—and we are not without references to cases in antiquity corresponding very nearly to this; and which seemed to furnish, at least, a sufficient precedent for this proceeding;—this so successful poet, and courtier, and great man of his time, was already in a position to succeed at once to that chair of literary patronage which the death of Sir Philip Sidney had left vacant. Instinctively generous, he was ready to serve the literary friends whom he attracted to him, not less lavishly than he had served the proud Queen herself, when he threw his gay cloak in her obstructed path,—at least, he was not afraid of risking those sudden splendours which her favour was then showering upon him, by wearying her with petitions on their behalf. He would have risked his new favour, at least with his 'Cynthia,'—that twin sister of Phoebus Apollo,—to make her the patron, if not the inspirer of the Elizabethan genius. 'When will you cease to be a beggar, Raleigh?' she said to him one day, on one of these not infrequent occasions. 'When your Majesty ceases to be a most gracious mistress,' was this courtier's reply. It is recorded of her, that 'she loved to hear his reasons to her demands.'

But though, with all his wit and eloquence, he could not contrive to make of the grand-daughter of Henry the Seventh, a Pericles, or an Alexander, or a Ptolemy, or an Augustus, or an encourager of anything that did not appear to be directly connected with her own particular ends, he did succeed in making her indirectly a patron of the literary and scientific development which was then beginning to add to her reign its new lustre,—which was then suing for leave to lay at her feet its new crowns and garlands. Indirectly, he did convert her into a patron,—a second-hand patron of those deeper and more subtle movements of the new spirit of the time, whose bolder demonstrations she herself had been forced openly to head. Seated on the throne of Henry the Seventh, she was already the armed advocate of European freedom;—Raleigh had contrived to make her the legal sponsor for the New World's liberties; it only needed that her patronage should be systematically extended to that new enterprise for the emancipation of the human life from the bondage of ignorance, from the tyranny of unlearning,—that enterprise which the gay, insidious Elizabethan literature was already beginning to flower over and cover with its devices,—it only needed that, to complete the anomaly of her position. And that through Raleigh's means was accomplished.