Bacon Delia Salter
The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded
Jaq. Ay, Sir, from one Monsieur Biron, one of the strange queen's lords.
Hol. I will over-glance the super-script. 'To the snow white hand of the most beauteous lady Rosaline.' I will look again on the intellect of the letter for the nomination of the party writing, to the person written unto (Rosaline). – [Look again. – That is the rule for the reading of letters issued from this Academy, whether they come in Don Armado's name or another's, when the point is not to 'miss the accent.'] 'Your ladyship's, in all desired employment, BIRON.' Sir Nathaniel, this Biron is one of the votaries with the king, and here he hath framed a letter to a sequent of the stranger queen's, which, accidentally or by way of progression, hath miscarried. Trip and go, my sweet; deliver this paper into the royal hand of the king. It may concern much. Stay not thy compliment, I forgive thy duty. Adieu.
Nath. Sir, you have done this in the fear of God, very religiously; and as a certain father saith —
Hol. Sir, tell me not of the father, I do fear colorable colors. But to return to the verses. Did they please you, Sir Nathaniel?
Nath. Marvellous well for the pen.
Hol. I dine to-day at the _father's _of a certain pupil of mine, where, if before repast, it shall please you to gratify the table with a grace, I will, on my privilege I have with the parent of the foresaid child, or pupil, undertake your ben venuto, where I will prove those verses to be very unlearned, neither savouring of poetry, wit, nor invention. I beseech your society.
Nath. And thank you, too; for society (saith the text) is the happiness of LIFE.
Hol. And, certes, the text most infallibly concludes it. – Sir, [to Dull] I do invite you too, [to hear the verses ex-criticised] you shall not say me nay: pauca verba. Away; the gentles are at their games, and we will to our recreation.
Another part of the same. After dinner.
Re-enter Holofernes, Sir Nathaniel, and Dull.
Hol. Satis quod sufficit.
Nath. I praise God for you, Sir: your reasons at dinner have been sharp and sententious; pleasant without scurrility, witty without affection, audacious without impudency, learned without opinion, and strange without heresy. I did converse this quondam day with a companion of the king's, who is intituled, nominated, or called Don Adriano de Armado.
Hol. Novi hominem tanquam te. His manner is lofty, his discourse peremptory, his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, and his general behaviour, vain, ridiculous and thrasonical. He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, and, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it.
Nath. A most singular and choice epithet! [Takes out his table-book.]
Hol. He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument, ['More matter with less art,' says the queen in Hamlet], I abhor such fantastical phantasms, such insociable and point device companions, such rackers of orthography, as to speak doubt fine when he should say doubt, etc. This is abhominable which he would call abominable; it insinuateth me of insanie; Ne intelligis, domine? to make frantic, lunatic.
Nath. Lans deo bone intelligo.
Hol. Bone – bone for bene: Priscian, a little scratched 'twill serve. [This was never meant to be printed of course; all this is understood to have been prepared only for a performance in 'a booth.']
Enter Armado, etc.
Nath. Videsne quis venit?
Ho. Video et gaudeo.
Arm. Chirra!
Hol. Quare Chirra not Sirrah!
But the first appearance of these two book-men, as Dull takes leave them to call them in this scene, is not less to the purpose. They come in with Antony Dull, who serves as a foil to their learning; from the moment that they open their lips they speak 'in character,' and they do not proceed far before they give us some hints of the author's purpose.
Nath. Very reverent sport truly, and done in the testimony of a good conscience.
Hol. The deer was, as you know, in sanguis, ripe as a pomewater, who now hangeth like a jewel in the ear of Coelo, the sky, the welkin, the heaven, and anon falleth like a crab on the face of terra– the soil, the land, the earth. [A-side glance at the heights and depths of the incongruities which are the subject here.]
Nath. Truly, Master Holofernes, the epithets are sweetly varied, like a scholar at the least, but, etc…
Hol. Most barbarous intimation! [referring to Antony Dull, who has been trying to understand this learned language, and apply it to the subject of conversation, but who fails in the attempt, very much to the amusement and self-congratulation of these scholars]. Yet a kind of insinuation, as it were, in via, in way of explication [a style much in use in this school], facere, as it were, replication, or rather ostentare, to show, as it were, his inclination, after his undressed, unpolished, uneducated, unpruned, untrained, or rather unlettered, or ratherest unconfirmed fashion, – to insert again my haud credo for a deer… Twice sod simplicity, bis coctus! Oh thou monster ignorance, how deformed dost thou look!
Nath. [explaining] Sir, he hath never fed of the dainties bred in a book; he hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink; his intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal – only sensible in the duller parts;
And such barren plants are set before us that we thankful should be, (Which we of taste and feeling are) for those parts that do fructify in us more than he.
For as it would ill become me to be vain, indiscreet, or a fool, So were there a patch set on learning to see HIM in a school. [That would be a new 'school,' a new 'learning,' patching the 'defect' (as it would be called elsewhere) in the old.]
Dull. You two are book-men. Can you tell me by your wit, etc.
Nath. A rare talent.
Dull. If a talent be a claw, look how he claws him with a talent.
Hol. This is a gift that I have; simple, simple; a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions: But the gift is good in those in whom it is acute, and I am thankful for it.
Nath. Sir, I praise the Lord for you, and so may my parishioners; for their sons are well tutored by you, and their daughters profit very greatly under you; you are a good member of the COMMON-WEALTH.
He is in earnest of course. Is the Poet so too?
'What is the end of study?' – let me know.
'O they have lived long in the alms-basket of WORDS,' is the criticism on this learning with which this showman, whoever he may he, explains his exhibition of it. And surely he must be, indeed, of the school of Antony Dull, and never fed with the dainties bred in a book, who does not see what it is that is criticised here; – that it is the learning of an unlearned time, of a barbarous time, of a vain, frivolous debased, wretched time, that has been fed long – always from "the alms-basket of words." And one who is acquainted already with the style of this school, who knows already its secret signs and stamp, would not need to be told to look again on the intellect of the letter for the nomination of the party writing, to the person written to, in order to see what source this pastime comes from, – what player it is that is behind the scene here. 'Whoe'er he be, he bears a mounting mind,' and beginning in the lowness of the actual, and collecting the principles that are in all actualities, the true forms that are forms in nature, and not in man's speech only, the new IDEAS of the New Academy, the ideas that are powers, with these 'simples' that are causes, he will reconstruct fortuitous conjunctions, he will make his poems in facts; he will find his Fairy Land in her kingdom whose iron chain he wears.
'The gentles were at their games,' and the soul of new ages was beginning its re-creations.
For this is but the beginning of that 'Armada' that this Don Armado – who fights with sword and pen, in ambush and in the open field – will sweep his old enemy from the seas with yet.
O like a book of sports thou'lt read me o'er,
But there's more in me than thou'lt understand.
Look how the father's face
Lives in his issue; even so the race
Of Shake-spear's mind and manners brightly shines
In his well turn'd and true filed lines,
In each of which he seems to shake a lance,
As brandished in the eyes of – [what? – ]Ignorance!
BEN JONSON.
Ignorance!– yes, that was the word.
It is the Prince of that little Academe that sits in the Tower here now. It is in the Tower that that little Academe holds its 'conferences' now. There is a little knot of men of science who contrive to meet there. The associate of Raleigh's studies, the partner of his plans and toils for so many years, Hariot, too scientific for his age, is one of these. It is in the Tower that Raleigh's school is kept now. The English youth, the hope of England, follow this teacher still. 'Many young gentlemen still resort to him.' Gilbert Harvey is one of this school. 'None but my father would keep such a bird in such a cage,' cries one of them – that Prince of Wales through whom the bloodless revolution was to have been accomplished; and a Queen seeks his aid and counsel there still.
It is in the Tower now that we must look for the sequel of that holiday performance of the school. It is the genius that had made its game of that old love's labour's lost that is at work here still, still bent on making a lore of life and love, still ready to spend its rhetoric on things, and composing its metres with them.
Nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest.
He is building and manning new ships in his triumphant fleet. But they are more warlike than they were. The papers that this Academe issues now have the stamp of the Tower on them. 'The golden shower,' that 'flowed from his fruitful head of his love's praise' flows no more. Fierce bitter things are flung forth from that retreat of learning, while the kingly nature has not yet fully mastered its great wrongs. The 'martial hand' is much used in the compositions of this school indeed for a long time afterwards.
Fitter perhaps to thunder martial stower
When thee so list thy tuneful thoughts to raise, said the partner of his verse long before.
With rage
Or influence chide or cheer the drooping stage,
says his protegé.
It was while this arrested soldier of the human emancipation sat amid his books and papers, in old Julius Caesar's Tower, or in the Tower of that Conqueror, 'commonly so called,' that the 'readers of the wiser sort' found, 'thrown in at their study windows,' writings, as if they came 'from several citizens, wherein Caesar's ambition was obscurely glanced at' and thus the whisper of the Roman Brutus 'pieced them out.'
Brutus thou sleep'st; awake, and see thyself.
Shall Rome [soft – 'thus must I piece it out.']
Shall Rome stand under one man's awe? What Rome?
* * * * *
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves that we are underlings.
* * * * *
Age, thou art shamed.
It was while he sat there, that the audiences of that player who was bringing forth, on 'the banks of Thames,' such wondrous things out of his treasury then, first heard the Roman foot upon their stage, and the long-stifled, and pent-up speech of English freedom, bursting from the old Roman patriot's lips.
Cassius. And let us swear our resolution.
Brutus. No, not an oath: If not the face of men, The sufferance of our soul's, the time's abuse, If these be motives weak, break off betimes, And every man hence to his idle bed; So let high-sighted tyranny range on, Till each man drop by lottery.
It was while he sat there, that the player who did not write his speeches, said —
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; If I know this, know all the world beside, That part of tyranny that I do bear, I can shake off at pleasure.
And why should Caesar be a tyrant then? Poor Man! I know he would not be a wolf, But that he sees the Romans are but sheep: He were no lion, were not Romans hinds.
But I, perhaps, speak this
Before a willing bondman.
Hamlet. My lord, – you played once in the university, you say?
Polonius. That did I, my lord; and was accounted a good actor.
Hamlet. And what did you enact?
Polonius. I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed i'the Capitol;
Brutus killed me.
Hamlet. It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf
there. – Be the players ready?
Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ, and the liberty. These are the only men.
Hamlet. Why do you go about to recover the wind of me, as if you
would drive me into a toil?
Guild. O my lord, if my duty be too bold, my love is too
unmannerly.
Hamlet. I do not well understand that. Will you play upon this pipe?
Guild. My lord, I cannot.
Hamlet. I pray you.
Guild. Believe me, I cannot.
Hamlet. I do beseech you.
Guild. I know no touch of it, my lord.
Hamlet. 'Tis as easy as lying. Govern these ventages with your fingers and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music. Look you, these are the stops.
Guild. But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony: I have not the SKILL.
Hamlet. Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of ME? You would play upon ME; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of MY MYSTERY; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my key; and there is much music, excellent voice in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood! do you think I AM EASIER TO BE PLAYED ON THAN A PIPE? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot PLAY upon me.
Hamlet. Why did you laugh when I said, Man delights not me?
Guild. To think, my lord, if you delight not in man, what lenten entertainment THE PLAYERS shall receive from you. We coted them on the way, and thither are they coming to offer you – SERVICE.
BOOK I.
THE ELIZABETHAN ART OF DELIVERY AND TRADITION
PART I.
MICHAEL DE MONTAIGNE'S 'PRIVATE AND RETIRED ARTS.'
And thus do we of wisdom and of reach,
With windlaces and with assays of bias,
By indirections, find directions out;
So by my former lecture and advice,
Shall you, my son. —Hamlet.
CHAPTER I
ASCENT FROM PARTICULARS TO THE 'HIGHEST PARTS OF SCIENCES,' BY THE ENIGMATIC METHOD ILLUSTRATED
Single, I'll resolve you. —Tempest.
Observe his inclination in yourself. —Hamlet.
For ciphers, they are commonly in letters, but may be in words. Advancement of Learning.
The fact that a Science of Practice, not limited to Physics and the Arts based on the knowledge of physical laws, but covering the whole ground of the human activity, and limited only by the want and faculty of man, required, in the reigns of Elizabeth and James the First, some special and profoundly artistic methods of 'delivery and tradition,' would not appear to need much demonstration to one acquainted with the peculiar features of that particular crisis in the history of the English nation.
And certainly any one at all informed in regard to the condition of the world at the time in which this science, – which is the new practical science of the modern ages, – makes its first appearance in history, – any one who knows what kind of a public opinion, what amount of intelligence in the common mind the very fact of the first appearance of such a science on the stage of the human affairs presupposes, – any one who will stop to consider what kind of a public it was to which such a science had need as yet to address itself, when that engine for the diffusion of knowledge, which has been battering the ignorance and stupidity of the masses of men ever since, was as yet a novel invention, when all the learning of the world was still the learning of the cell and the cloister, when the practice of the world was still in all departments, unscientific, – any one at least who will stop to consider the nature of the 'preconceptions' which a science that is none other than the universal science of practice, must needs encounter in its principal and nobler fields, will hardly need to be told that if produced at all under such conditions, it must needs be produced covertly. Who does not know, beforehand, that such a science would have to concede virtually, for a time, the whole ground of its nobler fields to the preoccupations it found on them, as the inevitable condition of its entrance upon the stage of the human affairs in any capacity, as the basis of any toleration of its claim to dictate to the men of practice in any department of their proceedings.
That that little 'courtly company' of Elizabethan scholars, in which this great enterprise for the relief of man's estate was supposed in their own time to have had its origin, was composed of wits and men of learning who were known, in their own time, to have concealed their connection with the works on which their literary fame chiefly depended – that that 'glorious Willy,' who finds these forbidden fields of science all open to his pastime, was secretly claimed by this company – that a style of 'delivery' elaborately enigmatical, borrowed in part from the invention of the ancients, and the more recent use of the middle ages, but largely modified and expressly adapted to this exigency, was employed in the compositions of this school, both in prose and verse, a style capable of conveying not merely a double, but a triple significance; a style so capacious in its concealments, so large in its 'cryptic,' as to admit without limitation the whole scope of this argument, and so involved as to conceal in its involutions, all that was then forbidden to appear, – this has been proved in that part of the work which contains the historical key to this delivery.
We have also incontestable historical evidence of the fact, that the man who was at the head of this new conjunction in speculation and practice in its more immediate historical developments, – the scholar who was most openly concerned in his own time in the introduction of those great changes in the condition of the world, which date their beginning from this time, was himself primarily concerned in the invention of this art. That this great political chief, this founder of new polities and inventor of new social arts, who was at the same time the founder of a new school in philosophy, was understood in his own time to have found occasion for the use of such an art, in his oral as well as in his written communications with his school; – that he was connected with a scientific association, which was known to have concealed under the profession of a curious antiquarian research, an inquiry into the higher parts of sciences which the government of that time was not disposed to countenance; – that in the opinion of persons who had the best opportunity of becoming acquainted with the facts at the time, this inventor of the art was himself beheaded, chiefly on account of the discovery of his use of it in one of his gravest literary works; – all this has been produced already, as matter of historic record merely. All this remains in the form of detailed contemporary statement, which suffices to convey, if not the fact that the forbidden parts of sciences were freely handled in the discussions of this school, and not in their secret oral discussions only, but in their great published works, – if not that, at least the fact that such was the impression and belief of persons living at the time, whether any ground existed for it or not.
But the arts by which these new men of science contrived to evade the ignorance and the despotic limitations of their time, the inventions with which they worked to such good purpose upon their own time, in spite of its restrictions and oppositions, and which enable them to 'outstretch their span,' and prolong and perpetuate their plan for the advancement of their kind, and compel the future ages to work with them to the fulfilment of its ends; – the arts by which these great original naturalists undertook to transfer in all their unimpaired splendour and worth, the collections they had made in the nobler fields of their science to the ages that would be able to make use of them; – these are the arts that we shall have need to master, if we would unlock the legacy they have left to us.
The proof of the existence of this special art of delivery and tradition, and the definition of the objects for which it was employed, has been derived thus far chiefly from sources of evidence exterior to the works themselves; but the inventors of it and those who made use of it in their own speech and writings, are undoubtedly the persons best qualified to give us authentic and lively information on this subject; and we are now happily in a position to appreciate the statements which they have been at such pains to leave us, for the sake of clearing up those parts of their discourse which were necessarily obscured at the time. Now that we have in our hands that key of Times which they have recommended to our use, that knowledge of times which 'gives great light in many cases to true interpretations,' it is not possible any longer to overlook these passages, or to mistake their purport.
But before we enter upon the doctrine of Art which was published in the first great recognized work of this philosophy, it will be necessary to produce here some extracts from a book which was not originally published in England, or in the English language, but one which was brought out here as an exotic, though it is in fact one of the great original works of this school, and one of its boldest and most successful issues; a work in which the new grounds of the actual experience and life of men, are not merely inclosed and propounded for written inquiry, but openly occupied. This is not the place to explain this fact, though the continental relations of this school, and other circumstances already referred to in the life of its founder, will serve to throw some light upon it; but on account of the bolder assertions which the particular form of writing and publication rendered possible in this case, and for the sake also of the more lively exhibition of the art itself which accompanies and illustrates these assertions in this instance, it appears on the whole excusable to commence our study of the special Art for the delivery and tradition of knowledge in those departments which science was then forbidden on pain of death to enter, with that exhibition of it which is contained in this particular work, trusting to the progress of the extracts themselves to apologize to the intelligent reader for any thing which may seem to require explanation in this selection.
It is only necessary to premise, that this work is one of the many works of this school, in which a grave, profoundly scientific design is concealed under the disguise of a gay, popular, attractive form of writing, though in this case the audience is from the first to a certain extent select. It has no platform that takes in – as the plays do, with their more glaring attractions and their lower and broader range of inculcation, – the populace. There is no pit in this theatre. It is throughout a book for men of liberal culture; but it is a book for the world, and for men of the world, and not for the cloister merely, and the scholar. But this, too, has its differing grades of readers, from its outer court of lively pastime and brilliant aimless chat to that esoteric chamber, where the abstrusest parts of sciences are waiting for those who will accept the clues, and patiently ascend to them.
The work is popular in its form, but it is inwoven throughout with a thread of lurking meanings so near the surface, and at times so boldly obtruded, that it is difficult to understand how it could ever have been read at all without occasioning the inquiry which it was intended to occasion under certain conditions, but which it was necessary for this society to ward off from their works, except under these limitations, at the time when they were issued. For these inner meanings are everywhere pointed and emphasized with the most bold and vivid illustration, which lies on the surface of the work, in the form of stories, often without any apparent relevance in that exterior connection – brought in, as it would seem, in mere caprice or by the loosest threads of association. They lie, with the 'allegations' which accompany them, strewn all over the surface of the work, like 'trap' on 'sand-stone,' telling their story to the scientific eye, and beckoning the philosophic explorer to that primeval granite of sciences that their vein will surely lead to. But the careless observer, bent on recreation, observes only a pleasing feature in the landscape, one that breaks happily its threatened dulness; the reader, reading this book as books are wont to be read, finds nothing in this phenomenon to excite his curiosity. And the author knows him and his ways so well, that he is able to foresee that result, and is not afraid to trust to it in the case of those whose scrutiny he is careful to avoid. For he is one who counts largely on the carelessness, or the indifference, or the stupidity of those whom he addresses. There is no end to his confidence in that. He is perpetually staking his life on it. Neither is he willing to trust to the clues which these unexplained stories might seem of themselves to offer to the studious eye, to engage the attention of the reader – the reader whose attention he is bent on securing. Availing himself of one of those nooks of discourse, which he is at no loss for the means of creating when the purpose of his essaie requires it, he beckons the confidential reader aside, and thus explains his method to him, outright, in terms which admit of but one construction. 'Neither these stories,' he says, 'nor my allegations do always serve simply for example, authority, or ornament; I do not only regard them for the use I make of them; they carry sometimes, besides what I apply them to, the seeds of a richer and bolder matter, and sometimes, collaterally, a more delicate sound, both to me myself, – who will say no more about it in this place' [we shall hear more of it in another place, however, and where the delicate collateral sounds will not be wanting] – 'both to me myself, and to others who happen to be of my ear.'
To the reader, who does indeed happen to be of his ear, to one who has read the 'allegations' and stories that he speaks of, and the whole work, and the works connected with it, by means of that knowledge of the inner intention, and of the method to which he alludes, this passage would of course convey no new intelligence. But will the reader, to whom the views here presented are yet too new to seem credible, endeavour to imagine or invent for himself any form of words, in which the claim already made in regard to the style in which the great original writers of this age and the founders of the new science of the human life were compelled to infold their doctrine, could have been, in the case of this one at least, more distinctly asserted. Here is proof that one of them, one who counted on an audience too, did find himself compelled to infold his richer and bolder meanings in the manner described. All that need be claimed at present in regard to the authorship of this sentence is, that it is written by one whose writings, in their higher intention, have ceased to be understood, for lack of the 'ear' to which his bolder and richer meanings are addressed, for lack of the ear, to which the collateral and more delicate sounds which his words sometimes carry with them are perceptible; and that it is written by a philosopher whose learning and aims and opinions, down to the slightest points of detail, are absolutely identical with those of the principal writers of this school.
But let us look at a few of the stories which he ventures to introduce so emphatically, selecting only such as can be told in a sentence or two. Let us take the next one that follows this explanation – the story in the very next paragraph to it. The question is apparently of Cicero, of his style, of his vanity, of his supposed care for his fame in future ages, of his real disposition and objects.
'Away with that eloquence that so enchants us with its harmony, that we should more study it than things' [what new soul of philosophy is this, then, already?] – 'unless you will affirm that of Cicero to be of so supreme perfection as to form a body of itself. And of him, I shall further add one story we read of to this purpose, wherein his nature will much more manifestly be laid open to us' [than in that seeming care for his fame in future ages, or in that lower object of style, just dismissed so scornfully].
'He was to make an oration in public, and found himself a little straitened in time, to fit his words to his mouth as he had a mind to do, when Eros, one of his slaves, brought him word that the audience was deferred till the next day, at which he was so ravished with joy that he enfranchised him.'
The word 'time' – here admits of a double rendering whereby the author's aims are more manifestly laid open; and there is also another word in this sentence which carries a 'delicate sound' with it, to those who have met this author in other fields, and who happen to be of his counsel. But lest the stories of themselves should still seem flat and pointless, or trivial and insignificant to the uninstructed ear, it may be necessary to interweave them with some further 'allegations on this subject,' which the author assumes, or appears to assume, in his own person.
'I write my book for few men, and for few years. Had it been matter of duration, I should have put it into a better language. According to the continual variation that ours has been subject to hitherto [and we know who had a similar view on this point], who can expect that the present form of language should be in use fifty years hence. It slips every day through our fingers; and since I was born, is altered above one half. We say that it is now perfect: every age says the same of the language it speaks. I shall hardly trust to that so long as it runs away and changes as it does.