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 passionate 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 circumstance
that Bacon, who cited the aphorism from Aristotle in his _Advancement
of Learning_, substituted, like Shakespeare in _Troilus and Cressida_,
the epithet "moral" for "political." The proverbial currency of the
emendation deprives the coincidence of point.
The repetition 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 godfathers 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 attitude; it is the antithesis of
the scientific attitude. 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 assertion. 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 Rasselas, whose faith in it
dwindled, when he perceived that the professional philosopher, who
preached superiority to all human frailties and weaknesses, succumbed
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,
passion, 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 circumscribed 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
circumstances and fortunes. No obvious trace of his own personal
circumstance 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 pronouncements on phases of
experience that it is difficult and dangerous to affirm which
pronouncements, if any, present most closely his personal sentiment.
He fitted the lips of his _dramatis personæ_ 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 passions of its
creator, even although they are for the most part absorbed past
recognition in the mighty mass, 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 assume 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 compassion. At a much
later period Shakespeare set the same plea in the mouth of Isabella in
_Measure for Measure_. The passages are too familiar to justify
quotation. Very brief extracts will bring out clearly the identity of
sentiment which finds definition in the two passages.
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 God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God'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 passages 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.
Eo scilicet formosius id esse magnificentiusque fatebimur quo in
maiore praestabitur potestate (I., xix., 1):--
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself.
(_M. of V._, IV., i., 193-5.)
Quod si di placabiles et aequi delicta potentium non statim fulminibus
persequuntur, quanto aequius est hominem hominibus praepositum miti
animo exercere imperium? (I., vii., 2):--
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice.
(_M. of V._, IV., i., 196-7.)
Quid autem? Non proximum eis (dîs) locum tenet is qui se ex deorum
natura gerit beneficus et largus et in melius potens? (I., xix., 9):--
Consider this,
That in the course of justice none of us
Should see salvation.
(_M. of V._, IV., i., 198-200.)
Cogitato ... quanta solitudo et vastitas futura sit si nihil
relinquitur nisi quod iudex severus absolverit (I., vi., 1).
This remarkable series of parallelisms does not affect the argument in
the text that Shakespeare, who reiterated Portia's pleas and
phraseology in Isabella's speeches, had a personal faith in the
declared sentiment. Whether the parallelism is to be explained as
conscious borrowing or accidental coincidence is an open question.]
Here are Isabella's words in _Measure for Measure_ (II., ii., 59
_seq._):--
No ceremony that to great ones 'longs,
Not the king's crown, nor the deputed sword,
The marshal's truncheon, nor the judge's robe,
Become them with one half so good a grace
As mercy does.
How would you be
If He, which is the top of judgment, should
But judge you as you are?
O, it is excellent
To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.
Mercy is the predominating or crowning virtue that Shakespeare demands
in rulers. But the Shakespearean code is innocent of any taint of
sentimentality, and mercifulness is far from being the sovereign's
sole qualification or primal test of fitness. More especially are
kings and judges bound by their responsibilities and their duties to
eschew self-glorification or self-indulgence. It is the _virtues_ of
the holders of office, not their office itself, which alone in the end
entitles them to consideration. Adventitious circumstances give no man
claim to respect. A man is alone worthy of regard by reason of his
personal character. Honour comes from his own acts, neither from his
"foregoers," _i.e._, ancestors, nor from his rank in society. "Good
alone is good without a name." This is not the view of the world,
which values lying trophies, rank, or wealth. The world is thereby the
sufferer.[30]
[Footnote 30:
From lowest place, when virtuous things proceed,
The place is dignified by the doer's deed:
Where great additions swell's, and virtue none,
It is a dropsied honour: good alone
Is good without a name; vileness is so:
The property by what it is should go,
Not by the title; ... that is honour's scorn,
Which challenges itself as honour's born,
And is not like the sire: honours thrive
When rather from our acts we them derive
Than our foregoers: the mere word's a slave,
Debauch'd on every tomb; on every grave
A lying trophy; and as oft is dumb
Where dust and damn'd oblivion is the tomb
Of honour'd bones indeed.
(_All's Well_, II., iii., 130 _seq._)]
The world honours a judge; but if the judge be indebted to his office
and not to his character for the respect that is paid him, he may
deserve no more honour than the criminal in the dock, whom he
sentences to punishment. "A man may see how this world goes with no
eyes," says King Lear to the blind Gloucester. "Look with thine ears;
see how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark, in thine ear;
change places, and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the
thief? Thou hast seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar? And the
creature run from the cur? There thou mightst behold the great image
of authority; a dog's obeyed in office." "The great image of
authority" is often a brazen idol.
Hereditary rulers form no inconsiderable section of Shakespeare's
_dramatis personæ_. In _Macbeth_ (IV., iii., 92-4) he specifically
defined "the king-becoming graces":--
As justice, verity, temperance, stableness,
Bounty, perseverance, mercy, lowliness,
Devotion, patience, courage, fortitude.
But the dramatist's main energies are devoted to exposure of the
hollowness of this counsel of perfection. Temptations to vice beset
rulers of men to a degree that is unknown to their subjects. To
avarice rulers are especially prone. Stanchless avarice constantly
converts kings of ordinary clay into monsters. How often they forge
Quarrels unjust against the good and loyal,
Destroying them for wealth.
(_Macbeth_, IV., iii., 83-4.)
Intemperance in all things--in business and pleasure--is a standing
menace of monarchs.
Boundless intemperance
In Nature is a tyranny: it hath been
Th' untimely emptying of the happy throne
And fail of many kings.
(_Macbeth_, IV., iii., 66-9.)
A leader of men, if he be capable of salvation, must "delight no less
in truth than life." Yet "truth," for the most part, is banished from
the conventional environment of royalty.
Repeatedly does Shakespeare bring into dazzling relief the irony which
governs the being of kings. Want of logic and defiance of ethical
principle underlie their pride in magnificent ceremonial and
pageantry. The ironic contrast between the pretensions of a king and
the actual limits of human destiny is a text which Shakespeare
repeatedly clothes in golden language.
It is to be admitted that nearly all the kings in Shakespeare's
gallery frankly acknowledge the make-believe and unreality which dogs
regal pomp and ceremony. In self-communion they acknowledge the
ruler's difficulty in finding truth in their traditional scope of
life. In a great outburst on the night before Agincourt, Henry V.--the
only king whom Shakespeare seems thoroughly to admire--openly
describes the inevitable confusion between fact and fiction which
infects the conditions of royalty. Anxiety and unhappiness are so
entwined with ceremonial display as to deprive the king of the reliefs
and recreations which freely lie at the disposal of ordinary men.
What infinite heart's-ease
Must kings neglect that private men enjoy!
And what have kings that privates have not too,
Save ceremony, save general ceremony?
And what art thou, thou idol ceremony?
What kind of god art thou, that suffer'st more
Of mortal griefs than do thy worshippers?
What are thy rents? what are thy comings-in?
O ceremony, show me but thy worth!
What is thy soul of adoration?
Art thou aught else but place, degree, and form,
Creating awe and fear in other men?
Wherein thou art less happy being fear'd
Than they in fearing.
What drink'st thou oft, instead of homage sweet,
But poison'd flattery? O, be sick, great greatness,
And bid thy ceremony give thee cure!
Think'st thou the fiery fever will go out
With titles blown from adulation?
Will it give place to flexure and low bending?
Canst thou, when thou command'st the beggar's knee,
Command the health of it? No, thou proud dream
That play'st so subtly with a king's repose:
I am a king that find thee; and I know
'Tis not the balm, the sceptre, and the ball,
The sword, the mace, the crown imperial,
The intertissued robe of gold and pearl,
The farced title running 'fore the king,
The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pomp
That beats upon the high shore of this world,--
No, not all these, thrice gorgeous ceremony,
Not all these, laid in bed majestical,
Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave
Who, with a body fill'd and vacant mind
Gets him to rest, cramm'd with distressful bread.
(_Henry V._, IV., i., 253-287.)
Barely distinguishable is the sentiment which finds expression in the
pathetic speech of Henry V.'s father when he vainly seeks that sleep
which thousands of his poorest subjects enjoy. The sleepless king
points to the irony of reclining on the kingly couch beneath canopies
of costly state when sleep refuses to weigh his eyelids down or steep
his senses in forgetfulness. The king is credited with control of
every comfort; but he is denied by nature comforts which she places
freely at command of the humblest. So again does Richard II.
soliloquize on the vain pride which imbues the king, while death all
the time grins at his pomp and keeps his own court within the hollow
crown that rounds the prince's mortal temples. Yet again, to identical
effect is Henry VI.'s sorrowful question:--
Gives not the hawthorn-bush a sweeter shade,
To shepherds looking on their silly sheep,
Than doth a rich-embroidered canopy
To kings that fear their subjects' treachery?
(III. _Henry VI._, II., v., 42-5.)