Bacon's servants to be approaching this condition in 1594, for in some letters written from Gorhambury he gives an account of her contrary humours in which the following expressions occur: "I will give none offence to make her angry; but nobody can please her long together." "There is not one man in the house but she fall out withal." "She hath fallen out with Crossby and bid him get him out of her sight." The story of Lear is taken from Holinshed and Geoffrey of Monmouth's pretended " History," and it is a curious fact that it shows certain deviations from the latter similar to those in the story of Lear which appears in the Faerie Queene (II. x. 27-31). The final fate of Lear however in the latter is different. A good deal has been written about the "anachronisms " in Shakespeare. Thus a writer in the Spectator2 remarked: "He gave Scotland cannon three hundred years too early and made Cleopatra play at billiards. Look at his notion of the very manners' of early post-Roman Britain in Cymbeline and King Lear. A playwright with a good smattering of knowledge and a supreme genius might do these things, but surely not Bacon." In my book on Spenser I have argued that these are just the things that Bacon would do from his entire indifference to accuracy and his habit of seeing everything in the light of his own times and experience. This class of criticism is not new and it was severely handled by Johnson in his Preface to Shakespeare: "His adherence to general nature," he writes, "has exposed him to the censure of critics, who form their judgments upon narrower principles. . . His story requires Romans or kings, but he thinks only on men," and so on. In point of fact the writer from whom I quote fell into an error in the case of Lear, who was one of the mythical sovereigns of "Brutus' sacred progeny" who is said to have reigned in Britain before " Ferrex and Porrex 1 Spedding, Letters and Life, i. 310-312. " and within 700 years of the sack of Troy, whenever that may have been (F. Q. II. x., and Geoffrey of Monmouth). In selecting this character for his story the author was following the example of the Greek tragedians in using native legend as a vehicle for presenting great examples. He also follows them in mixing up the past with contemporary life and making the characters speak in contemporary language, though it is true that he takes greater liberties in this way than they did; but he was not writing under the strict and semi-religious conditions of the Attic stage. Something in this practice is also to be attributed to the habit of thought of the Renaissance, which saw everything in its own colours. But if we are to exercise our minds about the "anachronisms” in Shakespeare's plays, let us at least do so about the real ones, I mean the anachronisms in the thought, and find an explanation, if we can, for such a speech as this in the mouth of a prehistoric chieftain : Lear. No, no, no, no! Come let's away to prison; We two will sing like birds i'the cage : When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down, As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out, In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones, (V. 3). I suggested an explanation in my previous volume, that the expression "God's spies" means philosophers and comes from Epictetus, who says that philosophers are the "spies and messengers of God"; and that the "mystery of things is rerum causas, the quest of philosophy. The same thought occurs in the draft for a pardon after Bacon's fall, written, no doubt, as Spedding says, by himself: Cum praedilicto consanguineo nostro Francisco Vicecomite St. Alban propositum sit deinceps vitam degere quietam et tranquillam in studiis et contemplatione rerum, atque hoc modo etiam posteritati inservire, cujus rei per scripta sua jampridem edita specimen de se praebuit non vulgare 1 There are other examples of these curiously irrelevant passages in Shakespeare which the charm of language leads us to accept without questioning their propriety. There is another, for instance, in this play, where Lear, in his madness, is made to discourse on adultery and the sexual process in nature in language too dreadful to quote, but of great psychological interest (IV. vi.). But why should Lear say such things? And so, too, in the reflections which follow about the beadle, the justice, and the "scurvy politician"? Clearly he is being made the vehicle for the author's own reflections, and it is absurd therefore to say that Shakespeare always writes in character. The truth is, as I observed at the beginning of this book, that from Hamlet to Doll Tearsheet, his characters all talk Shakespeare, but the proportions are so well preserved and the illusion is so powerful, that we are deceived into the belief that we are reading about people with an objective existence, whereas apart from the personality of their creator they have none. They are emanations of self-consciousness, and their world is not the real world, but, as it were, a world a little raised above it. I do not wish to burden the reader with parallel passages, but a rather interesting series occurs in connection with Edmund's speech about the planetary influences : Edmund. This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune,—often the surfeit of our own behaviour,—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! All's Well. Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, 1 Spedding, Letters and Life, vii. 307. (I. ii). (I. 1). Faerie Queene. Right true; but faulty men use oftentimes To attribute their folly unto fate, And lay on heaven the guilt of their own crimes. In vaine (said then old Meliboe) doe men View of the State of Ireland. " (VI. ix. 29). But it is the manner of men, that when they are fallen into any absurditye, or theyr actions succeede not as they would, they are ready allwayes to impute the blame thereof unto the heavens, soe to excuse their owne follyes and imperfections." Bryskett's Discourse of Civill Life. "What a folly it is to beleeve that we cannot resist the inclinations of the stars. The beginning of all our operation is undoubtedly in ourselves And consequently we may by our free choice and voluntarily give ourselves to good or to evill, and master the inclination of the heavens, the starres or destinie, which troubleth so much the braines of some, that in despite of nature they will needes make themselves bond being free." I have alluded to these parallels in my book on Spenser : see the chapter on Bryskett, p. 590. Troilus and Cressida, perhaps 1603. The most remarkable` feature about this play is the animus which it shows against the Greeks, and the desire to exalt the Trojans as the ancestors of the Romans, and, according to the popular tradition, of the British (through Brute of Troy), at their expense. The same tendency is noticeable throughout Bacon's acknowledged writings. Bacon's quarrel with the Greeks arose mainly out of his dislike of Aristotle, but partly also from his admiration of the Roman type. The revolt against the authority of Aristotle was a movement of the times and was not originated by Bacon, but he was the first to give expression to it in a popular way, the philosophy of the Greeks being, as he maintained, "only strong for disputations but barren of the production of works for the life of man." There is a curious supposed mistranslation of Aristotle which occurs in this play, and also in Bacon's Advancement of Learning, of the word woλirikns by "moral," in the lines put into the mouth of Hector : not much Unlike young men, whom Aristotle thought (II. ii). In the Advancement Bacon writes: "Is not the opinion of Aristotle worthy to be regarded, wherein he saith, 'That young men are no fit auditors of moral philosophy, because they are not settled from the boiling heat of their affections, not attempered with time and experience? ... But is it not true also, that much less young men are fit auditors of matters of policy, till they have been thoroughly reasoned in religion and morality, lest their judgments be corrupted, and made to think that there are no true differences of things, but according to utility and fortune?" Bacon, however, knew what he was about in using the word "moral" in this passage, as is shown by the latter portion of the paragraph. In effect, he makes the Greek word πολιτικῆς serve for the two English words "moral" and "political" and he was right in doing this, as in Greece "politics," that is, the conduct of life by people living together in a city-state, embraced a wider field of conduct than in a modern state. I am informed by one who was at one time his pupil1 that the late Dr. Henry Jackson, of Trinity College, Cambridge, used to say that "moral philosophy was the correct translation here, "politics" in this passage being really equivalent to "ethics"; also that the same translation is found in Erasmus. The same mistranslation is also found in the Latin College play Pedantius, as to which see below, Chapter XII. If Bacon then wrote here as a scholar, it follows that in this passage in Troilus Shakespeare did also. The political theories in this play, mainly expressed in the speeches of Ulysses, are, in all respects, those of Bacon, as any one can see who reads his acknowledged writings. Ajax, the "beef-witted lord," is a type which the author, no doubt, gathered from his own experience. It seems possible that the unscrupulous, but affable, Lord Henry 1 Sir George Greenwood. |