Shakespeare and the Modern Stage Part 9

A French critic once remarked that a whole system of philosophy could be deduced from Shakespeare's pages, though from all the works of the philosophers one could not draw a page of Shakespeare. The second statement--the denial of the presence of a page of Shakespeare in the works of all the philosophers--is more accurate than the a.s.sertion that a system of philosophy could be deduced from the plays of Shakespeare. It is hopeless to deduce any precise system of philosophy from Shakespeare's plays. Literally, philosophy means nothing more recondite than love of wisdom. Technically, it means scientifically restrained speculation about the causes of human thought and conduct; it embraces the sciences of logic, of ethics, of politics, of psychology, of metaphysics. Shakespeare's training and temper unfitted him to make any professed contribution to any of these topics.

Ignorant persons argue on hazy grounds that the great avowed philosopher of Shakespeare's day, Francis Bacon, wrote Shakespeare's plays. There is no need to confute the theory, which confutes itself.

But, if a confutation were needed, it lies on the surface in the conflicting att.i.tudes which Shakespeare and Bacon a.s.sume towards philosophy. There is no mistaking Bacon's att.i.tude. The supreme aim of his writings was to establish the practical value, the majestic importance, of philosophy in its strict sense of speculative science.

He sought to widen its scope, and to multiply the ranks of its students.

Bacon's method is formally philosophic in texture. He carefully scrutinises, ill.u.s.trates, seeks to justify each statement before proceeding to a conclusion. Every essay, every treatise of Bacon, conveys the impression not merely of weighty, pregnant eloquence, but of the argumentative and philosophic temper. Bacon's process of thinking is conscious: it is visible behind the words. The argument progresses with a c.u.mulative force. It draws sustenance from the recorded opinions of others. The points usually owe consistency and firmness to quotations from old authors--Greek and Latin authors, especially Plato and Plutarch, Lucretius and Seneca. To Bacon, as to all professed students of the subject, philosophy first revealed itself in the pages of the Greek writers, Plato and Aristotle, the founders for modern Europe of the speculative sciences of human thought and conduct. Greatly as Bacon modified the Greek system of philosophy, he began his philosophic career under the influence of Aristotle, and, despite his destructive criticism of his master, he never wholly divested himself of the methods of exposition to which the Greek philosopher's teaching introduced him.

In their att.i.tudes to philosophy, Shakespeare and Bacon are as the poles asunder. Shakespeare practically ignores the existence of philosophy as a formal science. He betrays no knowledge of its Greek origin and developments.

There are two short, slight, conventional mentions of Aristotle's name in Shakespeare's works. One is a very slight allusion to Aristotle's "checks" or "moral discipline" in _The Taming of the Shrew_. That pa.s.sage is probably from a coadjutor's pen. In any case, it is merely a playful questioning of the t.i.tle of "sweet philosophy" to monopolize a young man's education.[25]

[Footnote 25: Tranio, the attendant on the young Pisan, Lucentio, who has come to Padua to study at the university, counsels his master to widen the field of his studies:--

Only, good master, while we do admire This virtue and this moral discipline, Let's be no Stoics, nor no stocks, I pray, Or so devote to _Aristotle's checks_, As Ovid be an outcast quite adjured.

(_The Taming of the Shrew_, I., ii., 29-33.)]

The other mention of Aristotle is in _Troilus and Cressida_, and raises points of greater interest. Hector scornfully likens his brothers Troilus and Paris, when they urge persistence in the strife with Greece, to "young men whom Aristotle thought unfit to hear _moral_ philosophy" (II., ii., 166). The words present the meaning, but not the language, of a sentence in Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics" (i. 8). Aristotle there declares pa.s.sionate youth to be unfitted to study _political_ philosophy; he makes no mention of _moral_ philosophy. The change of epithet does, however, no injustice to Aristotle's argument. His context makes it plain, that by _political_ philosophy he means the ethics of civil society, which are hardly distinguishable from what is commonly called "morals." The maxim, in the slightly irregular shape which Shakespeare adopted, enjoyed proverbial currency before the dramatist was born. Erasmus introduced it in this form into his far-famed _Colloquies_. In France and Italy the warning against instructing youth in _moral_ philosophy was popularly accepted as an Aristotelian injunction. Sceptics about the obvious Shakespearean tradition have made much of the circ.u.mstance that Bacon, who cited the aphorism from Aristotle in his _Advancement of Learning_, subst.i.tuted, like Shakespeare in _Troilus and Cressida_, the epithet "moral" for "political." The proverbial currency of the emendation deprives the coincidence of point.

The repet.i.tion of a proverbial phrase, indirectly drawn from Aristotle, combined with the absence of other references to the Greek philosopher, renders improbable Shakespeare's personal acquaintance with his work. In any case, the bare mention of the name of Aristotle implies nothing in this connection. It was a popular synonym for ancient learning. It was as often on the lips of Elizabethans as Bacon's name is on the lips of men and women of to-day, and it would be rash to infer that those who carelessly and casually mentioned Bacon's name to-day knew his writings or philosophic theories at first hand.

No evidence is forthcoming that Shakespeare knew in any solid sense aught of philosophy of the formal scientific kind. On scientific philosophy, and on natural science, Shakespeare probably looked with suspicion. He expressed no high opinion of astronomers, who pursue the most imposing of all branches of scientific speculation.

Small have continual plodders ever won, Save base authority from others' books.

These earthly G.o.dfathers of heaven's light, That give a name to every fixed star, Have no more profit of their shining nights Than those that walk, and wot not what they are.

(_Love's Labour's Lost_, I., i., 86-91.)

This is a characteristically poetic att.i.tude; it is the ant.i.thesis of the scientific att.i.tude. Formal logic excited Shakespeare's disdain even more conspicuously. In the mouths of his professional fools he places many reductions to absurdity of what he calls the "simple syllogism." He invests the term "chop-logic" with the significance of foolery _in excelsis_.[26] Again, metaphysics, in any formal sense, were clearly not of Shakespeare's world. On one occasion he wrote of the topic round which most metaphysical speculation revolves:--

We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded by a sleep.

(_Tempest_, IV., i., 156-8.)

[Footnote 26: The speeches of the clown in _Twelfth Night_ are particularly worthy of study for the satiric adroitness with which they expose the quibbling futility of syllogistic logic. _Cf._ Act I., Scene v., ll. 43-57.

_Olivia._ Go to, you're a dry fool; I'll no more of you: besides you grow dishonest.

_Clown._ Two faults, Madonna, that drink and good counsel will amend: for give the dry fool drink, then is the fool not dry: bid the dishonest man mend himself; if he mend, he is no longer dishonest; if he cannot, let the botcher mend him. Anything that's mended is but patched: virtue that transgresses is but patched with sin; and sin that amends is but patched with virtue. If that _this simple syllogism_ will serve, so; if it will not, what remedy?]

Such a theory of human life is first-rate poetry; it is an illuminating figure of poetic speech. But the simplicity with which the theme is presented, to the exclusion of many material issues, puts the statement out of the plane of metaphysical disquisition, which involves subtle conflict of argument and measured resolution of doubt, rather than imaginative certainty or unconditional a.s.sertion. Nor is Hamlet's famous soliloquy on the merits and demerits of suicide conceived in the spirit of the metaphysician. It is a dramatic description of a familiar phase of emotional depression; it explains nothing; it propounds no theory. It reflects a state of feeling; it breathes that torturing spirit of despondency which kills all hope of mitigating either the known ills of life or the imagined terrors of death.

The faint, shadowy glimpses which Shakespeare had of scientific philosophy gave him small respect for it. Like the typical hard-headed Englishman, he doubted its practical efficacy. Shakespeare viewed all formal philosophy much as Dr Johnson's Ra.s.selas, whose faith in it dwindled, when he perceived that the professional philosopher, who preached superiority to all human frailties and weaknesses, succ.u.mbed to them at the first provocation.

There are more things in heaven and earth Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.[27]

For there was never yet philosopher That could endure the toothache patiently.[28]

[Footnote 27: _Hamlet_, I., v., 166-7.]

[Footnote 28: _Much Ado About Nothing_, V., i., 35-6.]

Such phrases sum up Shakespeare's habitual bearing to formal philosophy. The consideration of causes, first principles, abstract truths, never, in the dramatist's opinion, cured a human ill. The futility of formal philosophy stands, from this point of view, in no further need of demonstration.

II

But it is permissible to use the words philosopher and philosophy, without scientific precision or significance, in the popular inaccurate senses of shrewd observer and observation of life. By philosophy we may understand common-sense wisdom about one's fellow-men, their aspirations, their failures and successes. As soon as we employ the word in that significance, we must allow that few men were better philosophers than Shakespeare.

Shakespeare is what Touchstone calls the shepherd in _As You Like It_--"a natural philosopher"--an observer by light of nature, an acute expositor of phases of human life and feeling. Character, thought, pa.s.sion, emotion, form the raw material of which ethical or metaphysical systems are made. The poet's contempt for formal ethical or metaphysical theory co-existed with a searching knowledge of the ultimate foundations of all systematised philosophic structures. The range of fact or knowledge within which the formal theorist speculates in the fields of ethics, logic, metaphysics, or psychology, is, indeed, very circ.u.mscribed when it is compared with the region of observation and experience over which Shakespeare exerted complete mastery.

Almost every aspect of life Shakespeare portrays with singular evenness of insight. He saw life whole. The web of life always presented itself to him as a mingled yarn, good and ill together. He did not stay to reconcile its contradictions. He adduces a wealth of evidence touching ethical experience. It may be that the patient scrutiny of formal philosophers can alone reveal the full significance of his harvest. But the dramatist's exposition of the workings of virtue or vice has no recondite intention. Shakespeare was no patient scholar, who deliberately sought to extend the limits of human knowledge. With unrivalled ease and celerity he digested, in the recesses of his consciousness, the fruit of personal observation and reading. His only conscious aim was to depict human conduct and human thought. He interpreted them unconsciously by virtue of an involuntary intuition.

Shakespeare's intuition pierces life at the lowest as well as at the highest level of experience. It is coloured by delicate imaginative genius as well as by robust and practical worldliness. Not his writings only, but the facts of his private life--his mode of managing his private property, for example--attest his alert knowledge of the material and practical affairs of human existence. Idealism and realism in perfect development were interwoven with the texture of his mind.

Shakespeare was qualified by mental endowment for success in any career. He was by election a dramatist, and, necessarily, one of unmatched versatility. His intuitive faculty enabled him, after regarding life from any point of view that he willed, to depict through the mouths of his characters the chosen phase of experience in convincing, harmonious accord with his characters' individual circ.u.mstances and fortunes. No obvious trace of his own personal circ.u.mstance or experience was suffered to emerge in the utterances of his characters, who lived for the moment in his brain. It is a commonplace to credit Shakespeare with supreme dramatic instinct. It is difficult fully to realise the significance of that attribute. It means that he could contract or expand at will and momentarily, his own personality, so that it coincided exactly, now with a self-indulgent humorist like Falstaff, now with an introspective student like Hamlet, now with a cynical criminal like Iago, now with a high-spirited girl like Rosalind, now with an ambitious woman like Lady Macbeth, and then with a hundred more characters hardly less distinctive than these. It means that he could contrive the coincidence so absolutely as to leave no loophole for the introduction, into the several dramatic utterances, of any sentiment that should not be on the face of it adapted by right of nature to the speakers' idiosyncracies. That was Shakespeare's power. It is a power of which the effects are far easier to recognise than the causes or secret of operation.

In the present connection it is happily only necessary to dwell on Shakespeare's dramatic instinct in order to guard against the peril of dogmatising from his works about his private opinions. So various and conflicting are Shakespeare's dramatic p.r.o.nouncements on phases of experience that it is difficult and dangerous to affirm which p.r.o.nouncements, if any, present most closely his personal sentiment.

He fitted the lips of his _dramatis personae_ with speeches and sentiments so peculiarly adapted to them as to show no one quite undisputed sign of their creator's personality.

Yet there are occasions, when, without detracting from the omnipotence of Shakespeare's dramatic instinct, one may tentatively infer that Shakespeare gave voice through his created personages to sentiments which were his own. The Shakespearean drama must incorporate somewhere within its vast limits the personal thoughts and pa.s.sions of its creator, even although they are for the most part absorbed past recognition in the mighty ma.s.s, and no critical chemistry can with confidence disentangle them. At any rate, there are in the plays many utterances--ethical utterances, or observations conceived in the spirit of "a natural philosopher"--which are repeated to much the same effect at different periods of the poet's career. These reiterated opinions frequently touch the conditions of well-being or calamity in civilised society; they often deal with man in civic or social relation with his neighbour; they define the capabilities of his will.

It is unlikely that observations of this nature would be repeated if the sentiments they embody were out of harmony with the author's private conviction. Often we shall not strain a point or do our critical sense much violence if we a.s.sume that these recurring thoughts are Shakespeare's own. I purpose to call attention to a few of those which bear on large questions of government and citizenship and human volition. Involuntarily, they form the framework of a political and moral philosophy which for clear-eyed sanity is without rival.

III

Shakespeare's political philosophy is instinct with the loftiest moral sense. Directly or indirectly, he defines many times the essential virtues and the inevitable temptations which attach to persons exercising legalised authority over their fellow-men. The topic always seems to stir in Shakespeare his most serious tone of thought and word. No one, in fact, has conceived a higher standard of public virtue and public duty than Shakespeare. His intuition rendered him tolerant of human imperfection. He is always in kindly sympathy with failure, with suffering, with the oppressed. Consequently he brings at the outset into clearer relief than professed political philosophers, the saving quality of mercy in rulers of men. Twice Shakespeare pleads in almost identical terms, through the mouths of created characters, for generosity on the part of governors of states towards those who sin against law. In both cases he places his argument, with significant delicacy, on the lips of women. At a comparatively early period in his career as dramatist, in _The Merchant of Venice_, Portia first gave voice to the political virtue of compa.s.sion. At a much later period Shakespeare set the same plea in the mouth of Isabella in _Measure for Measure_. The pa.s.sages are too familiar to justify quotation. Very brief extracts will bring out clearly the ident.i.ty of sentiment which finds definition in the two pa.s.sages.

These are Portia's views of mercy on the throne (_Merchant of Venice_, IV., i., 189 _seq._):--

'Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes The throned monarch better than his crown;

Mercy is above this sceptred sway; It is enthroned in the hearts of kings, It is an attribute to G.o.d himself; And earthly power doth then show likest G.o.d's When mercy seasons justice.

Consider this, That in the course of justice none of us Should see salvation.[29]

[Footnote 29: In a paper on "Latin as an Intellectual Force," read before the International Congress of Arts and Sciences at St Louis in September 1904, Professor E.A. Sonnenschein sought to show that Portia's speech on mercy is based on Seneca's tract, _De Clementia_.

The most striking parallel pa.s.sages are the following:--

It becomes The throned monarch better than his crown.

(_M. of V._, IV., i. 189-90.)

Nullum clementia ex omnibus magis quam regem aut principem decet.

(Seneca, _De Clementia_, I., iii., 3):--

'Tis mightiest in the mightiest.