The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded Part 21

_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 pet.i.tioner 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 repet.i.tion, 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 repet.i.tion. 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 l.u.s.t-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 repet.i.tion. 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 coa.r.s.e 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 ma.s.s 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 ma.s.s 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 ma.s.ses 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 pa.s.sed for civilization then. It involved necessarily, indeed, the most searching and relentless criticisms of the existing inst.i.tutions 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 pa.s.sion--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 const.i.tutes 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 hara.s.s 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 a.s.sumed--there he stands.

We know, indeed, in this instance, that there is gentle, nay, n.o.ble 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 a.s.sume 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 circ.u.mstance 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 cla.s.s 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 p.r.i.c.ks, 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 inst.i.tutes, 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 inst.i.tution 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 pract.i.tioners 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 mult.i.tude, 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.