The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded Part 6

_Nath_. I praise G.o.d 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 int.i.tuled, 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 fas.h.i.+on,--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 paris.h.i.+oners; 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 _s.h.i.+nes_ 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 a.s.sociate 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 s.h.i.+ps 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_ protege.

It was while this arrested soldier of the human emanc.i.p.ation 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.

_Ca.s.sius_. And let us swear our resolution.