Bacon Delia Salter
The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded
Surely this is a little like 'the language' of Periander's message, when he bid the messenger observe and report what he saw him do. It is very important to note that ideas may be conveyed in this way as well as by words, the author of the Advancement of Learning remarks, in speaking of the tradition of the principal and supreme sciences. He takes pains to notice, also, that a representation, by means of these 'transient hieroglyphics,' is much more moving to the sensibilities, and leaves a more vivid and durable impression on the memory, than the most eloquent statement in mere words. 'What is sensible always strikes the memory more strongly, and sooner impresses itself, than what is intellectual. Thus the memory of brutes is excited by sensible, but not by intellectual things;' and thus, also, he proposes to impress that class which Coriolanus speaks of, 'whose eyes are more learned than their ears,' to whom 'action is eloquence.' Here we have the advantage of the combination, for there is no part of the dumb show, but has its word of scientific comment and interpretation.
'Art cold [to the Fool]?
I am cold myself. Where is this STRAW, my fellow?
The art of our necessities is strange,
That can make vile things precious. Come, your hovel.
Come, bring us to this hovel.'
For this is what that wild tragic poetic resistance and defiance comes to – this is what the 'unaccommodated man' comes to, though it is the highest person in the state, stripped of his ceremonies and artificial appliances, on whom the experiment is tried.
'Where is this straw, my fellow? Art cold? I am cold myself.
Come, your hovel. Come, bring us to this hovel.'
When that royal edict is obeyed, – when the wonders of the magician's art are put in requisition to fulfil it, – when the road from the palace to the hovel is laid open, – when the hovel, where Tom o' Bedlam is nestling in the straw, is produced on the stage, and THE KING – THE KING – stoops, before all men's eyes, to creep into its mouth, – surely we do not need 'a chorus to interpret for us' – we do not need to wait for the Poet's own deferred exposition to seize the more obvious meanings. Surely, one catches enough in passing, in the dialogues and tableaux here, to perceive that there is something going on in this play which is not all play, – something that will be earnest, perhaps, ere all is done, – something which 'the groundlings' were not expected to get, perhaps, in 'their sixe-penn'orth' of it at the first performance, – something which that witty and splendid company, who made up the Christmas party at Whitehall, on the occasion of its first exhibition there, who sat there 'rustling in silk,' breathing perfumes, glittering in wealth that the alchemy of the storm had not tried, were not, perhaps, all informed of; though there might have been one among them, 'a gentleman of blood and breeding,' who could have told them what it meant.
'We construct,' says the person who describes this method of philosophic instruction, speaking of the subtle prepared history which forces the inductions – 'we construct tables and combinations of instances, upon such a plan, and in such order, that the understanding may be enabled to act upon them.'
'They told me I was everything.'
They told me I was everything,' says the poor king himself, long afterwards, when the storm has had its ultimate effect upon him.
'To say ay and no to everything that I said! – [To say] ay and no too WAS NO GOOD DIVINITY. They told me, I had white hairs in my beard, ere the black ones were there. When the rain came to wet me once, and the wind to make 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.'
'I think the king is but a man, as I am' [says King Hal], 'All his senses have the like conditions; and his affections, though higher mounted, when they stoop, stoop with the like wing.'
But at the door of that rude hut the ruined majesty pauses. In vain his loving attendants, whom, for love's sake, this Poet will still have with him, entreat him to enter. Storm-battered, and wet, and shivering as he is, he shrinks back from the shelter he has bid them bring him to. He will not 'in.' Why? Is it because 'the tempest will not give him leave to ponder on things would hurt him more.' That is his excuse at first; but another blast strikes him, and he yields to 'the to and fro conflicting wind and rain,' and says —
'But I'll go in.'
Yet still he pauses. Why? Because he has not told us why he is there; – because he is in the hands of the Poet of the Human Kind, the poet of 'those common things that our ordinary life consisteth of,' who will have of them an argument that shall shame that 'resplendent and lustrous mass of matter' that old philosophers and poets have chosen for theirs; – because the rare accident – the wild, poetic, unheard-of accident – which has brought a man, old in luxuries, clothed in soft raiment, nurtured in king's houses, into this rude, unaided collision with nature; – the poetic impossibility, which has brought the one man from the apex of the social structure down this giddy depth, to this lowest social level; – the accident which has given the 'one man,' who has the divine disposal of the common weal, this little casual experimental taste of the weal which his wisdom has been able to provide for the many – of the weal which a government so divinely ordered, from its pinnacle of personal ease and luxury, thinks sufficient and divine enough for the many, – this accident – this grand poetic accident – with all its exquisite poetic effects, is, in this poet's hands, the means, not the end. This poor king's great tragedy, the loss of his social position, his broken-heartedness, his outcast suffering, with all the aggravations of this poetic descent, and the force of its vivid contrasts – with all the luxurious impressions on the sensibilities which the ideal wonders of the rude old fable yield so easily in this Poet's hands, – this rare accident, and moving marvel of poetic calamity, – this 'one man's' tragedy is not the tragedy that this Poet's soul is big with. It is the tragedy of the Many, and not the One, – it is the tragedy that is the rule, and not the exception, – it is the tragedy that is common, and not that which is singular, whose argument this Poet has undertaken to manage.
'Come, bring us to your hovel.'
The royal command is obeyed; and the house of that estate, which has no need to borrow its title of plurality to establish the grandeur of its claim, springs up at the New Magician's word, and stands before us on the scientific stage in its colossal, portentous, scientific grandeur; and the king – the king – is at the door of it: the Monarch is at the door of the Many. For the scientific Poet has had his eye on that structure, and he will make of it a thing of wonder, that shall rival old poets' fancy pieces, and drive our entomologists and conchologists to despair, and drive them off the stage with their curiosities and marvels. There is no need of a Poet's going to the supernatural for 'machinery,' this Poet thinks, while there's such machinery as this ready to his hands unemployed. 'There's something in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out.' There's no need of going to the antique for his models; for he is inventing the arts that will make of this an antiquity.
The Monarch has found his meanest subject's shelter, but at the door of it he is arrested – nailed with a nail fastened by the Master of Assemblies. He has come down from that dizzy height, on the Poet's errand. He is there to speak the Poet's word, – to illustrate that grave abstract learning which the Poet has put on another page, with a note that, as it stands there, notwithstanding the learned airs it has, it is not learning, but 'the husk and shell' of it. For this is the philosopher who puts it down as a primary Article of Science, that governments should be based on a scientific acquaintance with 'the natures, dispositions, necessities and discontents of the people'; and though in his book of the Advancement of Learning, he suggests that these points 'ought to be,' considering the means of ascertaining them at the disposal of the government, 'considering the variety of its intelligences, the wisdom of its observations, and the height of the station where it keeps sentinel, transparent as crystal,' – here he puts the case of a government that had not availed itself of those extraordinary means of ascertaining the truth at a distance, and was therefore in the way of discovering much that was new, in the course of an accidental personal descent into the lower and more inaccessible regions of the Common Weal it had ordered. This is the crystal which proves after all the most transparent for him. This is the help for weak eyes which becomes necessary sometimes, in the absence of the scientific crystal, which is its equivalent.
The Monarch is at the hovel's door, but he cannot enter. Why? Because he is in that school into which his own wise REGAN, that 'counsels' so 'well' – that Regan who sat at his own council-table so long, has turned him; and it is a school in which the lessons must be learned 'by heart,' and there is no shelter for him from its pitiless beating in this Poet's economy, till that lesson he was sent there to learn has been learned; and it was a Monarch's lesson, and at the Hovel's door he must recite it. He will not enter. Why? Because the great lesson of state has entered his soul: with the sharpness of its illustration it has pierced him: his spirit is dilated, and moved and kindling with its grandeur: he is thinking of 'the Many,' he has forgotten 'the One,' – the many, all whose senses have like conditions, whose affections stoop with the like wing. He will not enter, because he thinks it unregal, inhuman, mean, selfish to engross the luxury of the hovel's shelter, and the warmth of the 'precious' straw, while he knows that he has subjects still abroad with senses like his own, capable of the like misery, still exposed to its merciless cruelties. It was the tenant of the castle, it was the man in the house who said, 'Come, let's be snug and cheery here. Shut up the door. Let's have a fire, and a feast, and a song, – or a psalm, or a prayer, as the case may be; only let it be within– no matter which it is':
'Shut up your doors, my lord; 'tis a wild night, – My Regan counsels well; come out o' the storm.'
But here it is the houseless man, who is thinking of his kindred, – his royal family, for whom God has made him responsible, out in this same storm unbonneted; and in the tenderness of that sympathy, in the searching delicacy of that feeling with which he scrutinizes now their case, they seem to him less able than himself to resist its elemental 'tyranny.' For in that ideal revolution – in that exact turn of the wheel of fortune – in that experimental 'change of places,' which the Poet recommends to those who occupy the upper ones in, the social structure, as a means of a more particular and practical acquaintance with the conditions of those for whom they legislate, new views of the common natural human relations; new views of the ends of social combinations are perpetually flashing on him; for it is the fallen monarch himself, the late owner and disposer of the Common Weal, it is this strangely philosophic, mysteriously philosophic, king – philosophic as that Alfred who was going to succeed him – it is the king who is chosen by the Poet as the chief commentator and expounder of that new political and social doctrine which the action of this play is itself suggesting.
In that school of the tempest; in that one night's personal experience of the misery that underlies the pompous social structure, with all its stately splendours and divine pretensions; in that New School of the Experimental Science, the king has been taking lessons in the art of majesty. The alchemy of it has robbed him of the external adjuncts and 'additions of a king,' but the sovereignty of MERCY, the divine right of PITY, the majesty of the HUMAN KINDNESS, the grandeur of the COMMON WEAL, 'breathes through his lips' from the Poet's heart 'like man new made.'
Kent. Good, my lord, enter here.
Lear. Prythee, go in thyself. Seek thine own ease.
.. But, I'll go in.
In, boy, —go first – [To the Fool.]
You, houseless poverty' —
He knows the meaning of that phrase now.
'Nay get thee in. I'll PRAY, and then I'll sleep.'
[Fool goes in.]
'Poor, naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,' —
There are no empty phrases in this prayer, the critic of it may perceive: it is a learned prayer; the petitioner knows the meaning of each word in it: the tempest is the book in which he studied it.
'How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness defend you From seasons such as these? O, I have taken Too little care of THIS. [Hear, hear]. Take physic, POMP; [Hear.] Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayest shake the superflux to them, And show the HEAVENS more just.'
That is his prayer. To minds accustomed to the ceremonial a religious worship, 'with court holy water in a dry house' only, or to those who have never undertaken to compose a prayer for the king and all the royal family at the hovel's mouth, and in such immediate proximity to animals of a different species, it will not perhaps seem a very pious one. But considering that it was understood to have been composed during the heathen ages of this realm, and before Christianity had got itself so comfortably established as a principle of government and social regulations, perhaps it was as good a prayer for a penitent king to go to sleep on, as could well be invented. Certainly the spirit of Christianity, as it appeared in the life of its Founder, at least, seems to be, by a poetic anachronism incorporated in it.
But it is never the custom of this author to leave the diligent student of his performances in any doubt whatever as to his meaning. It is a rule, that everything in the play shall speak and reverberate his purpose. He prolongs and repeats his burthens, till the whole action echoes with them, till 'the groves, the fountains, every region near, seem all one mutual cry.' He has indeed the Teacher's trick of repetition, but then he is 'so rare a wondered teacher,' so rich in magical resources, that he does not often find it necessary to weary the sense with sameness. He is prodigal in variety. It is a Proteus repetition. But his charge to his Ariel in getting up his Masques, always is, —
'Bring a corollary,
Rather than want a spirit.'
Nay, it would be dangerous, not wearisome merely, to make the text of this living commentary continuous, or to bring too near together 'those short and pithy sentences' wherein the action unwinds and fashions into its immortal groups. And the curtain must fall and rise again, ere the outcast duke, – his eyes gouged out by tyranny, turned forth to smell his way to Dover, – can dare to echo, word by word, the thoughts of the outcast king.
Led by one whose qualification for leadership is, that he is 'Madman and Beggar, too,' – for as Gloster explains it to us, explaining also at the same time much else that the scenic language of the play, the dumb show, the transitory hieroglyphic of it presents, and all the criticism of it,
''T IS THE TIME'S PLAGUE WHEN MADMEN LEAD THE BLIND' —
groping with such leadership his way to Dover – 'smelling it out' – thus it is that his secret understanding with the king, in that mad and wondrous philosophical humour of his, betrays itself.
Gloster. Here, take this purse [to Tom o'Bedlam], thou whom the heaven's plagues Have humbled to all strokes: that I am wretched
Makes thee the happier: —Heavens, deal so still!
Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man
That slaves your ordinance, that will not SEE
Because he doth not FEEL, feel your power quickly;
So distribution should undo excess, And each man have enough.
Lear. O I have taken Too little care of this. Take physic, Pomp; Expose thyself to FEEL what wretches FEEL, That thou may'st shake the superflux to them, And show the Heavens more just.
Truly, these men would seem to have been taking lessons in the same school. But it is very seldom that two men in real life, of equal learning on any topic, coincide so exactly in their trains of thought, and in the niceties of their expression in discussing it. The emphasis is deep, indeed, when this author graves his meaning with such a repetition. But Regan's stern school-master is abroad in this play, enforcing the philosophic subtleties, bringing home to the senses the neglected lessons of nature; full of errands to 'wilful men,' charged with coarse lessons to those who will learn through the senses only great Nature's lore – that 'slave Heaven's ordinance – that will not SEE, because they do not FEEL.'
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.