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Bacon Delia Salter
The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded

CHAPTER IV

RALEIGH'S SCHOOL, CONTINUED. – THE NEW ACADEMY

EXTRACT FROM A LATER CHAPTER OF RALEIGH'S LIFE

Oliver. Where will the old Duke live?

Charles. They say he is already in the forest of Arden, and a many merry men with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England: they say many young gentlemen flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world.

As You Like It.

Stephano [sings]. Flout 'em and skout'em; and skout'em and flout 'em, Thought is free.

Cal. That's not the tune.

[Ariel plays the tune on a tabor and pipe.]

Ste. What is this same?

Trin. This is the tune of our catch, played by – the picture of —Nobody.

But all was not over with him in the old England yet – the present had still its chief tasks for him.

The man who had 'achieved' his greatness, the chief who had made his way through such angry hosts of rivals, and through such formidable social barriers, from his little seat in the Devonshire corner to a place in the state, so commanding, that even the jester, who was the 'Mr. Punch' of that day, conceived it to be within the limits of his prerogative to call attention to it, and that too in 'the presence' itself [See 'the knave' commands 'the queen.' —Tarleton] – a place of command so acknowledged, that even the poet could call him in the ear of England 'her most dear delight' – such a one was not going to give up so easily the game he had been playing here so long. He was not to be foiled with this great flaw in his fortunes even here; and though all his work appeared for the time to be undone, and though the eye that he had fastened on him was 'the eye' that had in it 'twenty thousand deaths.'

It is this patient piecing and renewing of his broken webs, it is this second building up of his position rather than the first, that shows us what he is. One must see what he contrived to make of those 'apartments' in the Tower while he occupied them; what before unimagined conveniencies, and elegancies, and facilities of communication, and means of operation, they began to develop under the searching of his genius: what means of reaching and moving the public mind; what wires that reached to the most secret councils of state appeared to be inlaid in those old walls while he was within them; what springs that commanded even there movements not less striking and anomalous than those which had arrested the critical and admiring attention of Tarleton under the Tudor administration, – movements on that same royal board which Ferdinand and Miranda were seen to be playing on in Prospero's cell when all was done, – one must see what this logician, who was the magician also, contrived to make of the lodging which was at first only 'the cell' of a condemned criminal; what power there was there to foil his antagonists, and crush them too, – if nothing but throwing themselves under the wheels of his advancement would serve their purpose; one must look at all this to see 'what manner of man' this was, what stuff this genius was made of, in whose hearts ideas that had been parted from all antiquities were getting welded here then – welded so firmly that all futurities would not disjoin them, so firmly that thrones, and dominions, and principalities, and powers, and the rulers of the darkness of this world might combine in vain to disjoin them – the ideas whose union was the new 'birth of time.' It is this life in 'the cell' – this game, these masques, this tempest, that the magician will command there – which show us, when all is done, what new stuff of Nature's own this was, in which the new idea of combining 'the part operative' and the part speculative of human life – this new thought of making 'the art and practic part of life the mistress to its theoric' was understood in this scholar's own time (as we learn from the secret traditions of the school) to have had its first germination: this idea which is the idea of the modern learning – the idea of connecting knowledge generally and in a systematic manner with the human conduct – knowledge as distinguished from pre-supposition – the idea which came out afterwards so systematically and comprehensively developed in the works of his great contemporary and partner in arts and learning.

We must look at this, as well as at some other demonstrations of which this time was the witness, to see what new mastership this is that was coming out here so signally in this age in various forms, and in more minds than one; what soul of a new era it was that had laughed, even in the boyhood of its heroes, at old Aristotle on his throne; that had made its youthful games with dramatic impersonations, and caricatures, and travesties of that old book-learning; that in the glory of those youthful spirits – 'the spirits of youths, that meant to be of note and began betimes' – it thought itself already competent to laugh down and dethrone with its 'jests'; that had laughed all its days in secret; that had never once lost a chance for a jibe at the philosophy it found in possession of the philosophic chairs – a philosophy which had left so many things in heaven and earth uncompassed in its old futile dreamy abstractions.

Unless philosophy can make a Juliet, Displant a town, reverse a prince's doom, Hang up philosophy, was the word of the poet of this new school in one of his 'lofty and passionate' moods, at a much earlier stage of this philosophic development. 'See what learning is!' exclaims the Nurse, speaking at that same date from the same dictation, for there is a Friar 'abroad' there already in the action of that play, who is undertaking to bring his learning to bear upon practice, and opening his cell for scientific consultation and ghostly advice on the questions of the play as they happen to arise; and it is his apparent capacity for smoothing, and reconciling, and versifying, not words only, but facts, which commands the Nurse's admiration.

This doctrine of a practical learning, this part operative of the new learning for which the founders of it beg leave to reintegrate the abused term of Natural Magic, referring to the Persians in particular, to indicate the extent of the field which their magical operations are intended ultimately to occupy; this idea, which the master of this school was illustrating now in the Tower so happily, did not originate in the Tower, as we shall see.

The first heirs of this new invention, were full of it. The babbling infancy of this great union of art and learning, whose speech flows in its later works so clear, babbled of nothing else: its Elizabethan savageness, with its first taste of learning on its lips, with its new classic lore yet stumbling in its speech, already, knew nothing else. The very rudest play in all this collection of the school, – left to show us the march of that 'time-bettering age,' the play which offends us most – belongs properly to this collection; contains this secret, which is the Elizabethan secret, and the secret of that art of delivery and tradition which this from the first inevitably created, – yet rude and undeveloped, but there.

We need not go so far, however, as that, in this not pleasant retrospect; for these early plays are not the ones to which the interpreter of this school would choose to refer the reader, for the proof of its claims at present; – these which the faults of youth and the faults of the time conspire to mar: in which the overdoing of the first attempt to hide under a cover suited to the tastes of the Court, or to the yet more faulty tastes of the rabble of an Elizabethan play-house, – the boldest scientific treatment of 'the forbidden questions,' still leaves so much upon the surface of the play that repels the ordinary criticism; – these that were first sent out to bring in the rabble of that age to the scholar's cell, these in which the new science was first brought in, in its slave's costume, with all its native glories shorn, and its eyes put out 'to make sport' for the Tudor – perilous sport! – these first rude essays of a learning not yet master of its unwonted tools, not yet taught how to wear its fetters gracefully, and wreathe them over and make immortal glories of them – still clanking its irons. There is nothing here to detain any criticism not yet instructed in the secret of this Art Union. But the faults are faults of execution merely; the design of the Novura Organum is not more noble, not more clear.

For these works are the works of that same 'school' which the Jesuit thought so dangerous, and calculated to affect unfavourably the morality of the English nation – the school which the Jesuit contrived to bring under suspicion as a school in which doctrines that differed from opinions received on essential points were secretly taught, – contriving to infect with his views on that point the lady who was understood, at that time, to be the only person qualified to reflect on questions of this nature; the school in which Raleigh was asserted to be perverting the minds of young men by teaching them the use of profane anagrams; and it cannot be denied, that anagrams, as well as other 'devices in letters,' were made use of, in involving 'the bolder meanings' contained in writings issued from this school, especially when the scorn with which science regarded the things it found set up for its worship had to be conveyed sometimes in a point or a word. It is a school, whose language might often seem obnoxious to the charge of profanity and other charges of that nature to those who do not understand its aims, to those who do not know that it is from the first a school of Natural Science, whose chief department was that history which makes the basis of the 'living art,' the art of man's living, the essential art of it, – a school in which the use of words was, in fact, more rigorous and scrupulous than it had ever been in any other, in which the use of words is for the first time scientific, and yet, in some respects, more bold and free than in those in which mere words, as words, are supposed to have some inherent virtue and efficacy, some mystic worth and sanctity in them.

This was the learning in which the art of a new age and race first spoke, and many an old foolish, childish, borrowed notion went off like vapour in it at its first word, without any one's ever so much as stopping to observe it, any one whose place was within. It is the school of a criticism much more severe than the criticism which calls its freedom in question. It is a school in which the taking of names in vain in general is strictly forbidden. That is the first commandment of it, and it is a commandment with promise.

The man who sits there in the Tower, now, driving that same 'goose-pen' which he speaks of as such a safe instrument for unfolding practical doctrines, with such patient energy, is not now occupied with the statistics of Noah's Ark, grave as he looks; though that, too, is a subject which his nautical experience and the indomitable bias of his genius as a western man towards calculation in general, together with his notion that the affairs of the world generally, past as well as future, belong properly to his sphere as a man, will require him to take up and examine and report upon, before he will think that his work is done. It is not a chapter in the History of the World which he is composing at present, though that work is there at this moment on the table, and forms the ostensible state-prison work of this convict.

This is the man who made one so long ago in those brilliant 'Round Table' reunions, in which the idea of converting the new belles lettres of that new time, to such grave and politic uses was first suggested; he is the genius of that company, that even in such frolic mad-cap games as Love's Labour's Lost, and the Taming of the Shrew, and Midsummer Night's Dream, could contrive to insert, not the broad farce and burlesque on the old pretentious wordy philosophy and pompous rhetoric it was meant to dethrone only, and not the most perilous secret of the new philosophy, only, but the secret of its organ of delivery and tradition, the secret of its use of letters, the secret of its 'cipher in letters,' and not its 'cipher in words' only, the cipher in which the secret of the authorship of these works was infolded, and in which it was found, but not found in these earlier plays, – plays in which these so perilous secrets are still conveyed in so many involutions, in passages so intricate with quips and puns and worthless trivialities, so uninviting or so marred with their superficial meanings, that no one would think of looking in them for anything of any value. For it is always when some necessary, but not superficial, question of the play is to be considered, that the Clown and the Fool are most in request, for 'there be of them that will themselves laugh to set on some barren spectators to laugh too'; and under cover of that mirth it is, that the grave or witty undertone reaches the ear of the judicious.

It is in the later and more finished works of this school that the key to the secret doctrines of it, which it is the object of this work to furnish, is best found. But the fact, that in the very rudest and most faulty plays in this collection of plays, which form so important a department of the works of this school, which make indeed the noblest tradition, the only adequate tradition, the 'illustrated tradition' of its noblest doctrine – the fact that in the very earliest germ of this new union of 'practic and theoric,' of art and learning, from which we pluck at last Advancements of Learning, and Hamlets, and Lears, and Tempests, and the Novum Organum, already the perilous secret of this union is infolded, already the entire organism that these great fruits and flowers will unfold in such perfection is contained, and clearly traceable, – this is a fact which appeared to require insertion in this history, and not, perhaps, without some illustration.

'It is not amiss to observe,' says the Author of the Advancement of Learning, when at last his great exordium to the science of nature in man, and the art of culture and cure that is based on that science is finished – pausing to observe it, pausing ere he will produce his index to that science, to observe it: 'It is not amiss to observe', he says – (speaking of the operation of culture in general on young minds, so forcible, though unseen, as hardly any length of time, or contention of labour, can countervail it afterwards) – 'how small and mean faculties gotten by education, yet when they fall into great men, or great matters, do work great and important effects; whereof we see a notable example in Tacitus, of two stage-players, Percennius and Vibulenus, who, by their faculty of playing, put the Pannonian armies into an extreme tumult and combustion; for, there arising a mutiny among them, upon the death of Augustus Caesar, Blaesus the lieutenant had committed some of the mutineers, which were suddenly rescued; whereupon Vibulenus got to be heard speak [being a stage-player], which he did in this manner.

'"These poor innocent wretches appointed to cruel death, you have restored to behold the light: but who shall restore my brother to me, or life to my brother, that was sent hither in message from the legions of Germany to treat of – THE COMMON CAUSE? And he hath murdered him this last night by some of his fencers and ruffians, that he hath about him for his executioners upon soldiers. The mortalest enemies do not deny burial; when I have performed my last duties to the corpse with kisses, with tears, command me to be slain besides him, so that these, my fellows, for our good meaning and our true hearts to THE LEGION, may have leave to bury us."

'With which speech he put the army into an infinite fury and uproar; whereas, truth was, he had no brother, neither was there any such matter [in that case], but he played it merely as if he had been upon the stage.'

This is the philosopher and stage critic who expresses a decided opinion elsewhere, that 'the play's the thing,' though he finds this kind of writing, too, useful in its way, and for certain purposes; but he is the one who, in speaking of the original differences in the natures and gifts of men, suggests that 'there are a kind of men who can, as it were, divide themselves;' and he does not hesitate to propound it as his deliberate opinion, that a man of wit should have at command a number of styles adapted to different auditors and exigencies; that is, if he expects to accomplish anything with his rhetoric. That is what he makes himself responsible for from his professional chair of learning; but it is the Prince of Denmark, with his remarkable natural faculty of speaking to the point, who says, 'Seneca can not be too heavy, nor Plautus too light, for – [what?] – the law of writ– and – the liberty.' 'These are the only men,' he adds, referring apparently to that tinselled gauded group of servants that stand there awaiting his orders.

'My lord – you played once in the university, you say,' he observes afterwards, addressing himself to that so politic statesmen whose overreaching court plots and performances end for himself so disastrously. 'That did I, my lord,' replies Polonius, 'and was accounted a good actor.' 'And what did you enact?' 'I did enact Julius Caesar. I – was killed i' the Capitol [I]. Brutus killed me.' 'It was a brute part of him [collateral sounds – Elizabethan phonography] to kill so capitol a calf there. – Be the players ready?'(?). [That is the question.]

'While watching the progress of the action at Sadlers' Wells,' says the dramatic critic of the 'Times,' in the criticism of the Comedy of Errors before referred to, directing attention to the juvenile air of the piece, to 'the classic severity in the form of the play,' and 'that baldness of treatment which is a peculiarity of antique comedy' – 'while watching the progress of the action at Sadlers' Wells, we may almost fancy we are at St. Peter's College, witnessing the annual performance of the Queen's scholars.' That is not surprising to one acquainted with the history of these plays, though the criticism which involves this kind of observation is not exactly the criticism to which we have been accustomed here. But any one who wishes to see, as a matter of antiquarian curiosity, or for any other purpose, how far from being hampered in the first efforts of his genius with this class of educational associations, that particular individual would naturally have been, in whose unconscious brains this department of the modern learning is supposed to have had its accidental origin, – any one who wishes to see in what direction the antecedents of a person in that station in life would naturally have biased, at that time, his first literary efforts, if, indeed, he had ever so far escaped from the control of circumstances as to master the art of the collocation of letters – any person who has any curiosity whatever on this point is recommended to read in this connection a letter from a professional contemporary of this individual – one who comes to us with unquestionable claims to our respect, inasmuch as he appears to have had some care for the future, and some object in living beyond that of promoting his own immediate private interests and sensuous gratification.

It is a letter of Mr. Edward Alleyn (the founder of Dulwich College), published by the Shakspere Society, to which we are compelled to have recourse for information on this interesting question; inasmuch as that distinguished contemporary and professional rival of his referred to, who occupies at present so large a space in the public eye, as it is believed for the best of reasons, has failed to leave us any specimens of his method of reducing his own personal history to writing, or indeed any demonstration of his appreciation of the art of chirography, in general. He is a person who appears to have given a decided preference to the method of oral communication as a means of effecting his objects. But in reading this truly interesting document from the pen of an Elizabethan player, who has left us a specimen of his use of that instrument usually so much in esteem with men of letters, we must take into account the fact, that this is an exceptional case of culture. It is the case of a player who aspired to distinction, and who had raised himself by the force of his genius above his original social level; it is the case of a player who has been referred to recently as a proof of the position which it was possible for 'a stage player' to attain to under those particular social conditions.

But as this letter is of a specially private and confidential nature, and as this poor player who did care for the future, and who founded with his talents, such as they were, a noble charity, instead of living and dying to himself, is not to blame for his defects of education, – since his acts command our respect, however faulty his attempts at literary expression, – this letter will not be produced here. But whoever has read it, or whoever may chance to read it, in the course of an antiquarian research, will be apt to infer, that whatever educational bias the first efforts of genius subjected to influences of the same kind would naturally betray, the faults charged upon the Comedy of Errors, the leaning to the classics, the taint of St. Peter's College, the tone of the Queen's scholars, are hardly the faults that the instructed critic would look for.

But to ascertain the fact, that the controlling idea of that new learning which the Man in the Tower is illustrating now in so grand and mature a manner, not with his pen only, but with his 'living art,' and with such an entire independence of classic models, is already organically contained in those earlier works on which the classic shell is still visible, it is not necessary to go back to the Westminster play of these new classics, or to the performances of the Queen's Scholars. Plays having a considerable air of maturity, in which the internal freedom of judgment and taste is already absolute, still exhibit on the surface of them this remarkable submission to the ancient forms which are afterwards rejected on principle, and by a rule in the new rhetoric – a rule which the author of the Advancement of Learning is at pains to state very clearly. The wildness of which we hear so much, works itself out upon the surface, and determines the form at length, as these players proceed and grow bolder with their work. A play, second to none in historical interest, invaluable when regarded simply in its relation to the history of this school, one which may be considered, in fact, the Introductory Play of the New School of Learning, is one which exhibits very vividly these striking characteristics of the earlier period. It is one in which the vulgarities of the Play-house are still the cloak of the philosophic subtleties, and incorporated, too, into the philosophic design; and it is one in which the unity of design, that one design which makes the works of this school, from first to last, as the work of one man, is still cramped with those other unities which the doctrines of Dionysus and the mysteries of Eleusis prescribed of old to their interpreters. 'What is the end of study? What is the end of it?' was the word of the New School of Learning. That was its first speech. It was a speech produced with dramatic illustrations, for the purpose of bringing out its significance more fully, for the purpose of pointing the inquiry unmistakeably to those ends of learning which the study of the learned then had not yet comprehended. It is a speech on behalf of a new learning, in which the extant learning is produced on the stage, in its actual historical relation to those 'ends' which the new school conceived to be the true ends of it, which are brought on to the stage in palpable, visible representation, not in allegorical forms, but in instances, 'conspicuous instances,' living specimens, after the manner of this school.

'What is the end of study?' cried the setter forth of this new doctrine, as long before as when lore and love were debating it together in that 'little Academe' that was yet, indeed, to be 'the wonder of the world, still and contemplative in living art.' 'What is the end of study?' cries already the voice of one pacing under these new olives. That was the word of the new school; that was the word of new ages, and these new minds taught of nature – her priests and prophets knew it then, already, 'Let fame that all hunt after in their lives,' they cry —

Live registered upon our brazen tombs, And then grace us in the disgrace of death; When spite of cormorant devouring time, The endeavour of this present breath may buy That honour which shall bate his scythe's keen edge, And make us HEIRS of all eternity– [of ALL]. * * * * * Navarre shall be the wonder of the world, Our Court shall be a little Academe, Still and contemplative in– LIVING art.

This is the Poet of the Woods who is beginning his 'recreations' for us here – the poet who loves so well to take his court gallants in their silks and velvets, and perfumes, and fine court ladies with all their courtly airs and graces, and all the stale conventionalitites that he is sick of, out from under the low roofs of princes into that great palace in which the Queen, whose service he is sworn to, keeps the State. This is the school-master who takes his school all out on holiday excursions into green fields, and woods, and treats them to country merry-makings, and not in sport merely. This is the one that breaks open the cloister, and the close walls that learning had dwelt in till then, and shuts up the musty books, and bids that old droning cease. This is the one that stretches the long drawn aisle and lifts the fretted vault into a grander temple. The Court with all its pomp and retinue, the school with all its pedantries and brazen ignorance, 'High Art' with its new graces, divinity, Mar-texts and all, must 'come hither, come hither,' and 'under the green-wood tree lie with me,' the ding-dong of this philosopher's new learning says, calling his new school together. This is the linguist that will find 'tongues in trees,' and crowd out from the halls of learning the lore of ancient parchments with their verdant classics, their 'truth in beauty dyed.' This is the teacher with whose new alphabet you can find 'sermons in stones, books in the running brooks,' and good, – good – his 'good' the good of the New School, that broader 'good' in every thing. 'The roof of this court is too high to be yours,' says the princess of this out-door scene to the sovereignty that claimed it then.

This is 'great Nature's' Poet and Interpreter, and he takes us always into 'the continent of nature'; but man is his chief end, and that island which his life makes in the universal being is the point to which that Naturalist brings home all his new collections. This is the Poet of the Woods, but man, – man at the summit of his arts, in the perfection of his refinements, is always the creature that he is 'collecting' in them. In his wildest glades, this is still the species that he is busied with. He has brought him there to experiment on him, and that we may see the better what he is. He has brought him there to improve his arts, to reduce his conventional savageness, to re-refine his coarse refinements, not to make a wild-man of him. This is the Poet of the Woods; but he is a woodman, he carries an axe on his shoulder. He will wake a continental forest with it and subdue it, and fill it with his music.

For this is the Poet who cries 'Westward Ho!' But he has not got into the woods yet in this play. He is only on the edge of them as yet. It is under the blue roof of that same dome which is 'too high,' the princess here says, to belong to the pygmy that this Philosopher likes so well to bring out and to measure under that canopy – it is 'out of doors' that this new speech on behalf of a new learning is spoken. But there is a close rim of conventionalities about us still. It is a Park that this audacious proposal is uttered in. But nothing can be more orderly, for it is 'a Park with a Palace in it.' There it is, in the background. If it were the Attic proscenium itself hollowed into the south-east corner of the Acropolis, what more could one ask. But it is the palace of the King of —Navarre, who is the prince of good fellows and the prince of good learning at one and the same time, which makes, in this case, the novelty. 'A Park with a Palace in it' makes the first scene. 'Another part of the same' with the pavilion of a princess and the tents of her Court seen in the distance, makes the second; and the change from one part of this park to another, though we get into the heart of it sometimes, is the utmost license that the rigours of the Greek Drama permit the Poet to think of at present. This criticism on the old learning, this audacious proposal for the new, with all the bold dramatic illustration with which it is enforced, must be managed here under these restrictions. Whatever 'persons' the plot of this drama may require for its evolutions, whatever witnesses and reporters the trial and conviction of the old learning, and the definition of the ground of the new, may require, will have to be induced to cross this park at this particular time, because the form of the new art is not yet emancipated, and the Muse of the Inductive Science cannot stir from the spot to search them out.

However, that does not impair the representation as it is managed. There is a very bold artist here already, with all his deference for the antique. We shall be sure to have all when he is the plotter. The action of this drama is not complicated. The persons of it are few; the characterization is feeble, compared with that of some of the later plays; but that does not hinder or limit the design, and it is all the more apparent for this artistic poverty, anatomically clear; while as yet that perfection of art in which all trace of the structure came so soon to be lost in the beauty of the illustration, is yet wanting; while as yet that art which made of its living instance an intenser life, or which made with its living art a life more living than life itself, was only germinating.