The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded

by Delia Salter Bacon

That the direct contemporary testimony on which history depends is, in this case, vitiated, tainted at its source, and through all its details—that the documents are all of them, on the face of them, 'suspicious,' and not fit to be received as historical evidence without the severest scrutiny and re-examination—this is the fact which remains to be taken into the account here. For this is a case in which the witnesses come into court, making signs, seeking with mute gesticulation to attract our attention, pointing significantly to the difficulties of the position, asking to be cross-examined, soliciting a second cogitation on what they say, telling us that they mortally hate obscurity, and would avoid it if they could; intimating that if their testimony should be re-examined in a higher court, and when the Star Chamber and the Court of Ecclesiastical Commission are no longer in session, it might perhaps be found to be susceptible of a different reading. This is a case in which the party convicted comes in with his finger on his lips, and an appeal to another tribunal, to another age.

We all know what age in the history of the immemorial liberties and dignities of a race—what age in the history of its recovered liberties, rescued from oppression and recognised and confirmed by statute, this was. We know it was an age in which the decisions of the Bench were prescribed to it by a power that had 'the laws of England at its commandment,' that it was an age in which Parliament, and the press, and the pulpit, were gagged, and in which that same justice had charge, diligent charge 'of amusements also, and of those who only played at working.' That this was a time when the Play House itself,—in that same year, too, in which these philosophical plays began first to attract attention, and again and again, was warned off by express ordinances from the whole ground of 'the forbidden questions.' We know that this was an age in which not the books of the learned only were subjected to 'the press and torture which expulsed' from them all those 'particulars that point to action'—action, at least, in which the common-weal of men is most concerned; that it was a time when the private manuscript was subjected to that same censorship and question, and corrected with those same instruments and engines, which made then a regular part of the machinery of the press; when the most secret cabinet of the Statesman and the Man of Letters must be kept in order for that revision, when his most confidential correspondence, his private note-book and diary must be composed under these restrictions; when in the church, not the pulpit only, but the secrets of the study, were explored for proofs of opposition to the power then predominant; when the private desk and drawers of the poor obscure country clergyman were ransacked, and his half-formed studies of sermons, his rude sketches and hypothetical notes of sermons yet to be—which might or might not be—put down for private purposes perhaps, and never intended to be preached—were produced by Government as an excuse for subjecting him to indignities and cruelties to which those practised upon the Duke of Kent and the Duke of Gloster, in the play, formed no parallel.

To the genius of a race in whose mature development speculation and action were for the first time systematically united, in the intensities of that great historical impersonation which signalises its first entrance upon the stage of human affairs, stimulated into preternatural activity by that very opposition which would have shut it out from its legitimate fields, and shut it up within those impossible, insufferable limits that the will of the one man prescribed to it then,—to that many-sided genius, bent on playing well its part even under those conditions, all the more determined on it by that very opposition—kept in mind of its manliness all the time by that all comprehending prohibition on manhood, that took charge of every act—irritated all the time into a protesting human dignity by the perpetual meannesses prescribed to it, instructed in the doctrine of the human nature and its nobility in the school of that sovereignty which was keeping such a costly 'crib' here then; 'Let a beast be lord of beasts,' says Hamlet, 'and your crib shall stand at the king's mess;' 'Would you have me false to my nature? says another, 'rather say I play the man I am'; to that so conscious man, playing his part under these hard conditions, on a stage so high; knowing all the time what theatre that was he played it in, how 'far' those long-drawn aisles extended; what 'far-off' crowding ages filled them, watching his slightest movements; who knew that he was acting 'even in the eyes of all posterity that wear this world out to the ending doom'; to such a one studying out his part beforehand under such conditions, it was not one disguise only, it was not one secret literary instrumentality only, that sufficed for the plot of it. That toy stage which he seized and converted so effectually to his ends, with all its masks did not suffice for the exigencies of this speaker's speech, 'who came prepared to speak well,' and 'to give to his speech a grace by action.'

Under these circumstances, the art of letter-writing presented itself to this invention, as a means of accomplishing objects to which other forms of writing did not admit then of being so readily adapted. It offered itself to this invention as a means of conducting certain plots, which inasmuch as they had the weal of men for their object, were necessarily conducted with secresy then. The whole play of that dramatic genius which shaped our great dramatic poems, came out, not on the stage, but in these 'plots' in which the weal of the unborn generations of men was the end; those plots for the relief of man's estate which had to be plotted, like murders and highway robberies, then, by bandits that had watch-words, and 'badges' and signals and private names, and a secret slang of their own.

The minds that conducted this enterprise under these conditions, were minds conscious of powers equal, at least, to those of the Greeks, and who thought they had as good a right to invent new methods of literary communication, or to convert old ones to new uses as the Greeks had in their day.

The speaker for this school was one who could not see why it was not just as lawful for the moderns to 'invent new measures in verses,' at least, as in 'dances,' and why it was not just as competent for him to compose 'supposititious' letters for his purposes, as it was for Thucydides to compose speeches for his; and though eloquence was, in this case, for the most part, dispensed with, these little every-day prosaic unassuming, apparently miscellaneous, scraps of life and business, shewing it up piece-meal as it was in passage, and just as it happened in which, of course, no one would think of looking for a comprehensive design, became, in the hands of this artist, an invention quite as effective as the oratory of the ancient.

The letters which came out on the trial of Essex, in the name of Sir Antony Bacon, but in which the hand of Mr. Francis Bacon appeared without much attempt at disguise, were not the only documents of that kind for which the name of the elder brother, with his more retiring and less 'dangerous' turn of mind, appeared to be, on the whole, the least objectionable. An extensive correspondence, which will tend to throw some light on the contemporary aspect of things when it is opened, was conducted in that gentleman's name, about those days.

But much more illustrious persons, who were forced by the genius of this dramatist into his plots, were induced to lend their names and sanction to these little unobtrusive performances of his, when occasion served. This was a gentleman who was in the habit of writing letters and arranging plots, for quite the most distinguished personages of his time. In fact, his powers were greatly in request for that purpose. For so far as the question of mere ability was concerned, it was found upon experiment, that there was nothing he stopped at. Under a sharp pressure, and when the necessary question of the Play required it, and nothing else would serve, it was found that he could compose 'a sonnet' as well as a state paper, or a decision, or a philosophical treatise. He wrote a sonnet for Essex, addressed to Queen Elizabeth, on one very important occasion. If it was not any better than those attempts at lyrical expression in another department of song, which he has produced as a specimen of his poetical abilities in general, it is not strange that Queen Elizabeth, who was a judge of poetry, should find herself able to resist the blandishments of that effusion. But it was not the royal favourite only, it was not Essex and Buckingham only, who were glad to avail themselves of these so singular gifts, devoted to their use by one who was understood to have no other object in living, but to promote their ends,—one whose vast philosophic aims,—aims already propounded in all their extent and grandeur, propounded from the first, as the ends to which the whole scheme of his life was to be—artistically—with the strong hand of that mighty artist, through all its detail subordinated, were supposed to be merged, lost sight of, forgotten in an irrepressible enthusiasm of devotion to the wishes of the person who happened, at the time, to be the sovereign's favourite; one whose great torch of genius and learning was lighted, as it was understood,—lighted and fed, to light them to their desires. Elizabeth herself, unwilling as she was to add any thing to the powers with which nature had crowned this man, instructed by her instinct, that 'such men were dangerous,' was willing, notwithstanding, to employ his peculiar gifts in services of this nature; and so was her successor. And the historical fact is, that an extraordinary amount of business of one kind and another, passed in consequence through this gentleman's hands in both these reigns, and perhaps no one was ever better qualified by constitutional endowments, and by a predominant tendency to what he calls technically 'active good,' for the dispatch of business in which large and distant results were comprehended. And if in managing plots for these illustrious personages, he conducted them always with stedfast reference to his ulterior aims,—if, in writing letters for them, he wrote them always with the under-tones of his own part,—of his own immortal part that was to survive 'when tyrants' crests and tombs of brass were spent' running through them—if, in composing state papers and concocting legal advice, and legal decisions, he contrived to insert in them an inner meaning, and to point to the secret history which contained their solution, who that knows what those times were, who that knows to what divine ends this man's life was dedicated, shall undertake to blame him for it.

All these papers were written with an eye to publication; thay were written for the future, but they were written in that same secret method, in that same 'cipher' which he has to stop to describe before he can introduce the subject of 'the principal and supreme sciences,' with the distinct assurance that as 'matters stand then, it is an art of great use,' though some may think he introduces it with its kindred arts, in that place, for the sake of making out a muster-roll of the sciences, and to little other purpose, and that trivial as these may seem in such a connexion, 'to those who have spent their labours and studies in them, they seem great matters,' appealing to 'those who are skilful in them' to say whether he has not given, in what he has said of them, 'though in few words,' a proof of his proficiency. This was the method of writing in which not the principal and supreme sciences only, but every thing that was fit to be written at all had need to be written then.

'Ciphers are commonly in letters, but may be in words.' Both these kinds of ciphers were employed in the writings of this school. The reading of that which is 'in letters,' the one in which letters are secretly employed as 'symbols' of esoteric philosophic subtleties, is reserved for those who have found their way into the esoteric chambers of this learning. It is reserved for those who have read the 'Book of Sports and Riddles,' which this school published, and who happen to have it with them when it happens to be called for; it is reserved for those who have circumvented Hamlet, and tracked him to his last lurking place, and plucked out the heart of his mystery; for those who have been in Prospero's Island, and 'untied his spell.' This point gained,—the secret of the cipher 'in letters,'—the secret of 'the symbols,' and other 'devices' and 'conceits' which were employed in this school as a medium of secret philosophic correspondence, the characters in which these men struck through the works they could not own then, the grand colossal symbol of the school, its symbol of universality, large as the world, enduring as the ages of the human kind, and with it—in it, their own particular 'marks' and private signatures,—this mastered,—with the secret of this in our hands, the cipher 'in words' presents no difficulties, When we come to read the philosophical papers of this great firm in letters, with the aid of that discovery, we shall know what one of the partners of it means, when he says, that on 'account of the rawness and unskilfulness of the hands through which they pass, the greatest matters are sometimes carried in the weakest ciphers.'