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Shakespeare's Poetics

in Relation to King Lear

by Russell Fraser

This critical study seeks to give as com-
plete an account as possible of the Shakes-
pearean experience, particularly in terms of
the tragedy of King Lear, but in general
within the context of all Shakespeare's work
and that of the age in which it was created.

In assessing that achievement, the author
argues that the plays are more than splendid
verse and exciting theater and evocation of
memorable character; and that a total read-
ing of them, and of the basic principles or
poetics on which they depend, involves a
reading of the world and man's place in the
world that remains essentially true. Because
Shakespeare's understanding of the relation
between conduct and its consequences does
not vary, although it deepens, the plays from
first to last redact one another, and neces-
sarily. To elicit, and to describe that under-
standing is to attempt a definition of Shake-
speare's poetics.,

That poetics is a legacy to the dramatist of
a particular moment in time. For that reason,
Mr. Fraser has been led to examine contem-
porary poems, sermons, proverbs, ballads, and
pictures. Many of these, because they reveal,
in their use of like symbols, the same notion
of the way the world goes, are involved with
the imagery of Shakespeare's plays.

It has been the author's purpose to deter-
mine the degree, the nature, and the meaning
of that involvement in terms of the imagery
of King Lear.

822.33
Fraser $5^00

Shakespeare 8 s poetics
In relation to King Lear.

822.33
Fraser $5^00

Shakespeare f s poetics
in relation to King Lear.

SHAKESPEARE'S POETICS

Edited by Russell A. Fraser

THE COURT OF VENUS (1955)
THE COURT OF VIRTUE (1961)

SHAKESPEARE'S
POETICS

In Relation to

King Lear

by
RUSSELL A. FRASER

Nashville, Tennessee
VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRES C

First published in 1962
by Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited
Broadway House, 68-74 Carter Lane

London, E.G. 4, England

Russell A. Fraser 1962

{ Published in the United States of America
by Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee, U.S.A.
1966

JVb part of this book may be reproduced

in any form without permission from

the publisher, except for the quotation

of brief passages in criticism.

Printed in Great Britain

Library of Congress catalogue card number: 62-51 "?8i

Totus mundus agit histrionem

CITY (110=) PUBLIC
6615661

CONTENTS

PREFACE P a S e X*

i. C KING LEAR' IN THE RENAISSANCE i

II. PROVIDENCE 17

III. KIND 30

IV. FORTUNE 46
V. ANARCHY AND ORDER 6l

VI. REASON AND WILL 85
VII. SHOW AND SUBSTANCE
VIII. REDEMPTION

ix. SHAKESPEARE'S POETICS 138

WORKS CONSULTED l68

INDEX 175

PLATES

Between pages 68 and 69

I. OCCASION ON HER WHEEL

(Geoffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes, Leyden, 1586, Sig. Z$r, p. 181.)

II. JONAH DELIVERED, AND CHRIST RESURRECTED

(Hans Holbein, Icones Historiarum Veteris Testamenti, Lyons, 1547, no. 109

[Green edn., London, 1869].)
in. PRUNING A TREE; PUNISHING A FELON
(Jacob Bruck, Emblemata Moralia & Bellica, Argentorati, 1615,
emblem 18.)

IV. HERCULES SEEKS THE GOLDEN APPLES

(Georges Guigue, U Entree de Frangois Premier . . . en . . . Lyon, Lyons, 1899,

following p. 42.)

V. THE OPERATION OF THE ORBS

(Gabriele Rollenhagio, Nucleus Emblematum Selectissimorum, Cologne, 1611,

emblem 3 1.)

VI. PROVIDENCE APPOINTS THE VICTOR

(Bruck, Emblemata Bellica, supra, pt. 2, emblem 22.)

VII. THE EYE OF PROVIDENCE

(Sir Walter Ralegh, The History of the World, London, 1614, t.p.)

VIII. VIOLENCE DESTROYS ITSELF

(A. de Sousa de Macedo, LusitaniaLiberata (J. Droeshout), London, 1645, t.p.)

IX. THE JESSE TREE

(John Stow, The Annales of England, London, 1592, t.p.)

X. THE JESSE TREE

(R. Day, A Booke of Christian Prayers, London, 1578, t.p.)

xi. LIFE IN DEATH: THE SKELETON BEARS A TREE
(W. Cunningham, The Cosmographical Glass, London, 1559.)

XII. THE ROOTS OF VIRTUE

(Don Juan de Horozco, Libro Segundo De Las Emblemas Morales, Segovia,
1589, Sig. Esr, p. 29.)

XIII. TRUTH BROUGHT TO LIGHT BY TIME

(Truth Brought to light and discovered by Time, London, 1651, t.p. [by J.

Droeshout] .)
viii

PLATES

XIV. TIME AND HIS DAUGHTER TRUTH

(Thomas Peyton, The Glasse of Time, London, 1620, t.p.)

XV. THE TRIUMPH OF TRUTH

(lani lacobi Boissardi Vesuntini Embkmatum liber, Frankfurt, 1593, Sig. 041%

P- 95*)

XVI. TIME DELIVERS TRUTH

(Whitney, Emblemes, Sig. Agv, p. 4.)

XVII. THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE

(Rollenhagio, Nucleus Emblematum, emblem 6.)

XVIII. VIRTUE TRIUMPHS OVER FORTUNE

(Rollenhagio, Nucleus Emblematum, emblem 10.)

XIX. THE WINDS OF CHANCE

(Bruck, Emblemata Moralia & Bellied, emblem 22.)

XX. BLIND FORTUNE

(H. Bodius, Vnio Dissidentium, Coloniae, 1531, t.p.)

XXI. THE HALCYON

(Alciati, Emblematum Libellus, Paris, 1536, p. 23.)

XXII. WISDOM REPUDIATES FORTUNE

(Boissard, Emblematum liber, Sig. ?4r, p. 103.)

XXIII. AENEAS BEARS ANCHISES

(Emblemes d*Alciat, Paris, 1561, Sig. C>4v, p. 216.)

XXIV. THE DEATH OF ABSALOM

(Boissard, Emblematum liber, Metz, 1588, Sig. Qlr, p. 121.)

XXV. 'iNTESTINAE SIMULTATES*

(Whitney, Emblemes, Sig. A4r, p.7)

Between pages 132 and 133

XXVI. THE KING CONTAINS HIS KINGDOM

(Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, London, 1651, t.p.)

XXVII. THE DEATH OF CAPANEUS

(Boissard, Emblematum liber, Sig. O3r, p. 109.)

XXVIII. THE PUNISHMENT OF MARSYAS

(Horozco, Emblemas, Sig. M3r, p. 83.)

XXIX. PHAETON HURLED FROM HEAVEN

(Alciati, Emblematum Libellus, p. 68.)

XXX. IXION BOUND TO THE WHEEL

(Rollenhagio, Nucleus Emblematum, emblem 57.)

XXXI. PROMETHEUS AND THE VULTURE

(Alciati, Emblematum Libellus, p. 32.)

XXXII. DOOMSDAY

(Johan Bocksperger, Neuwe Biblische Figuren, Frankfurt, 1564, Sig. O3r.)

PLATES

XXXIII. THE SACRIFICE OF THE PELICAN

(New Testament, London, 1552, by R. Jugge.)

XXXIV. THE WOODWOSE

(J. Berjeau, Early Dutch, German, & English Printers* Marks, London, 1869,

no. 2.)

XXXV. TWO WILDMEN

(Ad Serenissimum . . . lacobum Quintum . . . strena, Edinburgh, c. 1530?)

XXXVI. BESTIAL TERMINI

(Sir A. Fitzherbert, La Graunde Abridgement, London, 1565, t.p.)

XXXVII. IGNORANCE AS A MONSTER

(Emblemes d'Alciat, Sig. P4V, p. 232.)

XXXVIII. ART CORRECTS NATURE

^Gesare Ripa, Iconologia, Padua, 1611, Sig. D^JT, p. 31.)

XXXIX. THE BEAR LICKS ITS CUB

(Boissard, Emblemata, Frankfurt, 1596, Sig. Mar.)

XL. NAKED TRUTH

(William Burton, The Description of Leicester Shire, London, 1622, t.p.)

XII. THE WOLF CONFUSES SHADOW AND SUBSTANCE

(Fables D'Esope, Paris, 1689, Sig. Asr, p.5.)

XLII. TRUST AND CIRCUMSPECTION: THE HEART AND THE SEEING HAND

(Rollenhagio, Nucleus Emblematum, emblem 72.)

XLIII. THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE ANTS

(Phillipe Desprez, Le Theatre des Animaux, Paris, 1620, Sig. Gy:, p. 53.)

XLIV. e SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDl'

(Rollenhagio, Nucleus Emblematum, emblem 86.)

XLV. DEATH THE LEVELLER

(Rollenhagio, Nucleus Emblematum, emblem 48.)

XL VI. VlTA AULICA SPLENDIDA MISERIA*

(Boissard, Emblematum liber, Sig. Olr, p. 89.)

XL VII. THE FLY AND THE CANDLE

(Rollenhagio, Nucleus Emblematum, emblem 40.)

XLVIII. JUSTICE WEIGHS POVERTY AND POWER

(M. SilesiOj The Arcadian Princesse, London, 1635, t.p.)

XLIX. THE FOOL BEARS HIS ASS ON HIS BACK

(Sebastian Brant, La nefdesfolz du monde, Paris, 1497, Sig. e4r, fol. XXIIII).

L. THE NAKED SURVIVE

(loannes Sambucus, Emblemata, Antwerp, 1564, Sig. Olv, p. 210.)

LI. THE GREAT TREE SHATTERS

(Fables D'Esope, p. 241.) "

LII. THE DRY BONES ARE MADE FRUITFUL

(Rollenhagio, Nucleus Emblematum, emblem 21.)

Lm. CHRIST RESTORES THE LOST SHEEP

(John Calvin, Sermons . . . on . . . Timothy and Titus, London, 1579.)

PREFACE

I have written of Shakespeare because I believe that his
plays are more than splendid verse and exciting theatre and
the evocation of memorable characters: I think a total
experiencing of them, and of the basic principles or poetics on
which they depend, involves a reading of the world and man's
place in the world that remains essentially true. I have sought,
in exploring that opinion, to give as complete an account as I
can of the Shakespearean experience, particularly in terms of
one play but in general against the context of all of Shakespeare's
work and that of the age in which it was created.

I wish to thank for their help Professor Erwin Panofsky of
The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; my colleague.
Professor Alan S. Downer; and the staff of the British Museum;
the Bodleian Library; the Firestone Library, Princeton Uni-
versity; and the Houghton Library., Harvard University. My
work has been generously supported by the American Council
of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, and
Princeton University, which designated me a Junior Fellow of
the Council of Humanities.

This book is for George Frost who, though he deplored so
much writing on Shakespeare, would perhaps have accepted
one book more, as from a friend.

RUSSELL A. FRASER

London, 1961

KING LEAR IN THE RENAISSANCE

JL F I enumerate In a work of art those pure forms which carry
primary meanings, I subject that work of art to pre-icono-
graphical description. Thus, in describing King Lear, one
might list the configurations or forms he finds in that particular
play: pelicans, vipers, blind men, mad men.

To go beyond such elementary listing, and treat those
configurations as carriers of secondary meanings, to treat, that
is to say, not simply the thing itself but what that thing stands
for beyond the primary level of mere denotation, is to enter on
iconography. A pelican is a kind of bird. But conventionally it
has been used as an emblem of Christ, who feeds or repasts his
flock the phrase belongs to Laertes, in Hamlet with his own
life's blood. A winged man, a lion, an ox, an eagle, these, in
conjunction, in Christian literature and art, figure by conven-
tion the Four Evangelists. The image of a fish betokens Jesus
Christ. In vaticinal poetry, men and women are symbolized
in the character of animals and birds. The magpie may stand
for an odious priest, and the dragon for any Welsh prince; or,
if the time is propitious, for Owen Glendower ; or later, Robert
Aske, the Lincolnshire rebel; or, it may be, for Anti-Christ,
the Dragon of Babylon.

The form, then, is charged with a secondary meaning. It
has become an image. King Lear, of course, is compounded of
images. It is the business of the iconographer to describe them. 1

1 Thus the work of Robert B. Heilman, This Great Stage, Baton Rouge, La.,
1948; and Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us, New
York, 1935.

C KING LEAR 3 IN THE RENAISSANCE

But to see in those images the manifestation of underlying
principles, symbolic of the basic attitude of a nation, or class,
or era; to get at the psychology, the state of mind, which may
be implicit or even unconscious, that led Shakespeare and his
fellows to see and use the pelican, say, as a symbol pat to their
purpose, this is the business of iconology. Ideally, the iconologist
will muster many documents poems, sermons, proverbs,
ballads, pictures concurrent in time with the work he has
chosen to discuss, and revealing, in their use of like symbols,
pretty much the same notion of the way the world goes.

The documents at issue, if one is treating of the Renaissance,
are likely, all of them, and whatever their formal nature, to be
illustrative or graphic in manner, if not expressly pictorial.
What they would communicate, they are likely to couch in the
form of a similitude or image, and this on the principle, as
Bacon puts it, that 'that which is sensible more forcibly strikes
the memory and is more easily imprinted on it than that which
is intellectual 5 . To stigmatize pride: Vz" grand orgueil\ is nothing.
To embody pride in the Tower of Babel, as Holbein does in his
looms Historiarum^ i& to yoke the abstraction to earth. The
bizarre notion of a virgin who conceives and remains a virgin
still is only a piece of mystification until it is represented as the
garden enclosed, the sealed fountain, the shut gate, the immac-
ulate mirror. That man is sometimes feeble or vicious is only a
commonplace, not really apprehensible, in a sense not really
true, until analogy demonstrates and so approves it:

How from the finny subject of the sea
These fishers tell the infirmities of men.

(Pericles, 2.i.52f.)

Figures are useful, indispensable even, in that they 'reduce
intellectual conceptions to sensible images 5 . 2 What is more,
resort to them is a matter of innate predilection.

Euen litle children as soone as they can vse their hands at
libertie, goe with a Cole to the wall, indeuoring to drawe the
forme of this thing or that,

and for the reason, according to Samuel Daniel, that c to

1 Lyons, 1547, Sig. Bav.

2 Bacon, De Augments Scientiarum, Bk. 5, ch. 5.

'KING LEAR' IN THE RENAISSANCE

represent vnto the sence of sight ... is more natural in act,
and more common to al creatures then is hearing.' 1

We have of course our images also, although, with a kind of
heroic fatuity, we have sought since the late seventeenth
century more and more to dispense with figurative language,
have denied, at least implicitly, that we lean on it at all. But
even if you concede that Avogadro's Hypothesis is really a kind
of figure, you will agree, I suppose, that the terms in which it is
couched are nothing like so analogical as those which the
Renaissance astronomer Robert Recorde employed to describe
the constellation Andromeda, whose head lyeth on the navel
of Pegasus 5 . 2 Recorde did not seek to be poetic, in the facile
and faintly pejorative sense of the word. He might have said
simply, with Ben Jonson in Discoveries, that 'Whosoever loves
not Picture is injurious to Truth 3 . Himself a partisan of the
truth, he attended and necessarily to the metaphorical way.

The mind of Recorde, like that of Shakespeare I would
add, the mind of the Renaissance is enamoured of what is
literal and concrete. Rim ne vit qtfen detail. The extraordinary
popularity of the emblem defined by Francis Quarles as e a
silent Parable' 3 is one manifestation of the zeal for particulars.
When, in 1531, the Italian jurist Andrea Alciati published his
premier collection, he offered only a slender volume of less than
one hundred emblems. Forty years later, Alciati's Emblematum
Libellus had grown in bulk to ten times its initial size. Its great
vogue was by no means peculiar to itself: more than seven
hundred volumes of emblem literature were in print in Shake-
speare's lifetime. In England, in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, virtually every writer of standing drew in his published
work on the new form, inaugurated in Italy only a few years
before. 4

1 Sig. Alv, Epistle to the Reader, in Daniel's translation of Paolo Giovio,
London, 1585.

2 The Castle of Knowledge, London, 1556, p. 265.

3 'Epistle to the Reader', Emblemes, 1635.

4 A partial list of those whose debt to emblem literature has been documented
includes Lyly, Nashe, Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, Joshua Sylvester, Marlowe,
Marston, Chapman, Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Webster, Heywood,
Burton, Sir Thomas Browne, George Herbert, Crashaw, Milton, Marvell, Bunyan,
Quarles, Henry Peacham, Wither, William Drummond, Henry Vaughan. See
Praz, Studies, I, 193-206; E. N. S. Thompson, Bypaths, ch. II, 'Emblem Books',
pp. 29-67.

C KING LEAR' IN THE RENAISSANCE

Not only the emblem flourished, but exemplary literature in
general. The reasons in each case are essentially the same. If
you would instruct, you must dramatize, give your precept
some palpable, at best some historical, antecedent :

For the remembrance of matters past, furnisheth men with
examples sufficient to guide and direct them in their consultations
of future things. 1

Hence the vogue offlorilegia, and the De Casibus theme :

Stately and proud, in riches and in traine,
Whilom I was powerfull and full of pompe.
But what is he, whome rule and emperie
Have not in life or death made miserable?

(Edward II, 11. 1879-82)

If you would clarify, you must levy on metaphor: Toesie is
a speaking picture, and picture dumb Poesie.' 2 Hence the
currency of illustration, in sacred books and profane books :
Amman's Icones Novi Testament^ published at Frankfurt in 1571,
offers in colour scenes from the New Testament; Thomas
Crannier's Catechismvs defines the Ten Commandments, not
abstractly but by depicting them. Philippe Desprez, early in
the following century, ekes out his Biblical tags with pictures of
animals, documenting, making manifest, the thesis. 3 Editions of
Aesop are the grand exemplar of the method : the mere moral, a
thing of bare bones, is not felt to suffice. 4 When Pericles, in
Shakespeare's play, would express his love for Thaisa, he is
not content simply to declare it. He must exemplify it, rather,
as his knightly competitors do, by means of a device or impresa:

A withered branch, that's only green at top ,*
The motto, 'In hac spe vivo.' (2.2.43f.)

When Francis Bacon, assisting at the trial of Essex, would make
clear the nature of that nobleman's ill-fated rebellion, he does
not argue in terms of a disembodied principle: words, words,

1 Plutarch, Morals, tr. Philemon Holland, 1603, p, n ; quoted Lily B. Campbell,
Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes, Cambridge, 1930, pp. a6

2 Holland's Plutarch, p. 34, quoted Campbell, pp. s6f.

8 Thus he gives a cut of the lion entoiled in the net, at which his friend the rat
is nibbling, and comments: 'Chactm pent faire recompense . . . fais bien au iuste, &
tu trouveras grande retribution. Eccles. 12.1.2.* See Sig. ASV, p. 6.

4 See, for example, Fables D'Esope, avec les Figures de Sadeler, Paris, 1689.

'KING LEAR' IN THE RENAISSANCE

words, but calls to mind the Duke of Guise, thrusting himself
into the streets of Paris, and seeking, like Essex, to cover his
treason with c an all-hail and a kiss to the City'; or, a more
learned exemplum, summons up the case of Pisistratus, c of
whom it was so anciently written how he gashed and wounded
himself, and in that sort ran crying into Athens that his life was
sought and like to have been taken away; thinking to have
moved the people to have pitied him and taken his part by such
counterfeited harm and danger: whereas his aim and drift was
to take the government of the city into his hands, and alter the
form thereof, 5 When Sir John Eliot would bring home to the
Commons the danger to liberty centring in Charles's counsellor
Buckingham, he enforces a parallel with Sejanus, thereby
making the danger a palpable, a particular thing. On Bucking-
ham's fall, Eliot, still refusing to be placated, is analogical still:
Though our Achan is cut off, the accursed thing remains.' 1

The age of Shakespeare finds its way to truth by means of
indirections, through analogies and images, those stricken
metaphors which Sprat and the Fellows of the Royal Society
sought to banish from wit's commonwealth. As you might
expect, the images tend to recur. The contracted similitudes of
Taverner or Whitney are those of the dramatist also. They are
likely, moreover, to shadow the same understanding. Whitney,
in A Choice ofEmblemes (1586), will illustrate the twin resource
of Scripture, to save, or 'serve only for springes and snares',
by presenting a single flower, fruitful of honey and poison. 2
And after Whitney, Shakespeare or, more precisely, Friar
Laurence, in Romeo and Juliet:

Two such opposed kings encamp them still
In man as well as herbs, grace and rude will.

(2.3.27Q

Ben Jonson's Sir Politic Would-Be is alive also to the sense of
Whitney's gloss, familiar also with the emblem which gives it a
local habitation:

The spider and the bee oft-times

Suck from one flower.

(Volpone, 2.i,3of.)

x Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex, London, 1928, pp. 252, 250; John
Richard Green, A Short History of the English People, New York, 1900, II, 631, 637.
2 Sig. G2r,p. 51.
S.P.-B 5

'KING LEAR' IN THE RENAISSANCE

Shakespeare's Escalus, in a celebrated crux, remarks of
Claudio, In Measure for Measure, and, presumably, of the deputy
who has sentenced him to death :

Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.
Some run from brakes of ice, and answer none,
And some condemned for a fault alone.

(2.1.38-40)

But if Escalus is cryptic, it is not by intention. His purpose is
rather, by means of a speaking picture, to clarify; as Whitney,
dilating on the sovereign power of chance, would clarify also,
and in similar manner. Observing the fox on ice, as it did
c to . . . peeces brake', he finds in that misadventure the moral:

No subtill crafte will serue,
When Chaunce doth throwe the dice. 1

The many collections of 'parables and semblables 3 drawn,
most of them, at least purportedly, from the wisdom of the
ancients again, the penchant for analogy, or precedent
demonstrate also their connexion with the greater writing of
the age, help even to form it. Thus the Chiliades of Erasmus
moralizes, before the fact, the unhappy case of Macbeth:
'Quodfactum est> infactum fieri nonpotest. The thynge that is done
can not be vndone.' 2 The Chiliades was recognized widely and as
widely esteemed as a storehouse of classic and pseudo-classic
wisdom. As such, it was redacted by moralists like William
Baldwin, Richard Taverner, Thomas Palfreyman, and John
Hall, whose versions were rifled in turn by Elizabethan dramatists
and poets. In the same way, the commonplaces of Renaissance
dictionaries, which resorted for their proverbial wisdom to
classical authorities, found their way into the literature of the
age. 3

Comparisons, illustrations, the saws and sayings appended
to them, are consequential, then, in this: they tend to fix, in
the popular imagination, an image or grouping or attitude or

1 Emblems, Sig. GSV, p. 22.

2 Prouerbes or Adagies, gathered ouU of the Chiliades of Erasmus by Rycharde Tauerner,
London, 1552, Sig. Egr, fol. xxxv.

3 See Starnes and Talbert, Classical Myth and Legend in Renaissance Dictionaries,
Chapel Hill, N.C., 1955; Baldwin, A treatise of Morall Phylosophie, London, 1547
and ?i55O,* Palfreyman, A Treaties of Morall philosophy e, London, 1567; Hall,
The Court of Virtue 9 London 1565.

'KING LEAR' IN THE RENAISSANCE

bias which,, canonized by use and wont, help to explain and to
determine, in obvious ways or subtle, the dramatist's handling
of his materials. Sometimes the image is familiar enough, of
sufficient currency and antiquity, to strike with immediate
effect, and so to constitute a kind of shorthand. If you want
to present an indubitable villain, you will say with Hieronimo,
in The Spanish Tragedy (4.4.135): 'And let their beards be of
Judas his own colour 5 ; or, less explicitly, with Shakespeare's
Rosalind, in As Ton Like It (3.4.7) : c His very hair is of the dis-
sembling colour. 5 Judas, in the medieval drama as in the
Renaissance, is always red-haired. 1 If you want, in abbreviated
fashion, to represent the intervention in human affairs of a
destiny or fate beyond human contriving, you will, with "King
John, propitiate dreadful Occasion. (4.2.125) A distich is
enough, for the image of the goddess, whose head is partially
bald, whose hand holds a razor, whose winged feet stand on the
whirling wheel is, by virtue of the emblem book, a popular
cliche. 2 (Plate I) The various sins or vices are known also by
their customary marks. Lust you may always recognize by the
sharp whip she carries at her girdle. That is how Webster, in
The White Devil (2.1), describes her. No less conventional is
the image of a woman distracted:

Enter Cassandra, raving, with her hair about her ears. 3

(Troilus and Cressida, 2.2)

The melancholy lover opens himself to you at once: his arms
are folded like a rabbit on a spit athwart a thin-belly doublet
this to keep down his rising heart, his hose is ungartered, his

1 See the representations of him in Amman, Icones Novi Testamenti, 1571, Sigs.
E4r, Fir.

2 See also sHIV, 4.1.70-73; Lucrece, 11. 869-82; and, for other representations of
Occasion: Alciati, Emblematum Libellus, Paris, 1536, p. 20; Emblemes d'Alciat, Lyons,
1 564, Sig. K$v, p. 1 50 (given also in Henry Green, Shakespeare and the Emblem Writers,
London, 1870, p. 259); Rollenhagio, Nucleus Emblematum Selectissimorum, Cologne,
1611, emblem 4; Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, New York, 1939, fig. 35; Boissard,
Emblematum liber, Metz, 1588, Sig. Hsr, p. 61. Tourneur, in The Revenger's Tragedy,
makes his hero, Vendice, say of 'that bald madam*, Opportunity or Occasion :
'If I meet her,/Pll hold her by the foretop fast enough ;/Or, like the French mole,
heave up hair and all.* (i.i) Until confused with Fortune during the Middle
Ages, Occasion or Opportunity was conceived of as a nude young man with winged
shoulders and heels, and balancing a pair of scales on the edge of a shaving knife.
His head displayed the proverbial forelock, which Shakespeare glances at, in
All's Well: 'Let's take the instant by the forward top.' (5.3.39)

3 And see RIII, 2.2, for the description of Queen Elizabeth.

C KINO LEAR* IN THE RENAISSANCE

bonnet unhanded, he pulls his hat penthouse-like over the shop
of his eyes. 1

Stage persons, by definition, are not truly dimensional.
They assume the aspect of life to the degree that the dramatist
establishes in them a connexion with what is given, outside the
theatre. He achieves the connexion by appealing to the popular
wisdom, embodied in stereotypes, in 'quaint Emblems and
devices begg'd from the olde Pageantry of some Twelfe-
nights entertainment at Whitehall', as Milton in Eikonoklastes
described them. 'Having told you that her name was Justice/
says Thomas Dekker of an allegorical figure in a pageant
prepared for King James, e l hope that you will not put me to
describe what properties she held in her hand, since every
painted cloth can inform you.' 2 The representations woven on
tapestry or arras the sort of hoary fables which lachimo
peruses, hiding in Imogen's bedroom, that he may write down
c the contents o' the story' (Cymbeline, 2.2. 26f.) constitute for
the dramatist a point of departure. 'Every painted cloth' has
made familiar the sense of the Seven Deadly Sins, the Combat
between the Virtues and the Vices, the Triumph of Truth, the
empery of Fortune, the character of Pride and Luxury,
Patience and Perseverance. 3 The dramatist is able, therefore,
in a way to skimp his business, to evoke his protagonist by a
series of notations, generally no more than just sufficient if he
is crude, some foible, or trick of speech, 4 or morality name,
which is itself the only felt source of praise or blame attaching
to the stock figure who bears it. Tendered its cue, the audience
does the rest, collaborates insensibly in the creation of character.
Hence the efficacy of convention : what seems impoverished in
print need not, in the theatre, be absolutely poor. Enter Shame,
Ambidexter, Meretrix, and Commons Cry. If you will: Enter,
Sir Epicure Mammon.

Everyone will think of the Malevoles and Vendices, the
Cataplasmas and Corvinos of the Jacobean stage; or, earlier

i-LLL, 3.1.18-21, 4.3.1 35f.; Two G. } 2.1. 19-22, 79; ATLI, 3.2.392-400; and
see TA 9 3.2.6f.

2 The Magnificent Entertainment given to King James, 1604.

3 S. G. Chew, The Virtues Reconciled, Toronto, 1947, pp. 23**., lists conventional
representations on tapestries.

*So Dekker's Margery Eyre, in The Shoemakers' Holiday , and her recurrent,
'But let that pass.*

C KING LEAR 3 IN THE RENAISSANCE

and even more explicit, of Marlowe's show of the Seven Deadly
Sins traditional matter, given, and so ready to the dramatist's
hand. C I am one that loues an inch of raw Mutton better then an
ell of fride stock-fish.' But what Faustus sees is allegory still,
only the medieval abstraction, made more expressive but not,
essentially, more dramatic. Shakespeare's use of convention, as
it is less overt, is more interesting. Only rarely is he concerned,
as in zHenry IV, to present on stage an allegorical figure : Enter
Rumour, painted full of tongues. But the impress on his work of
what is traditional, of what is given, is evident, nonetheless, if
oblique and, I daresay, unconscious. Lear is a proud man, and
not the personification of Pride; and yet, as surely, he owes
something in his creation and reception to the first of the capital
sins, in the same way that Holofernes, who is also sui generis., is
indebted to the Pedant of the Commedia del? Arte. Shylock, in his
origins, is cousin german to avarice; and Cleopatra and Antony
to lust; and Hotspur to anger; and Falstaff to gluttony; lago to
envy. Sloth is harder; but it has, I think, to do with that man
who, slow to stir about his business, is called duller than the
weed that roots itself on Lethe wharf. The description, of course,
is of Hamlet.

Shakespeare's stage, lacking the proscenium arch and front
curtain depending from it, teases the dramatist with this
problem, among others : how to get a man off, whom the plot
in some drastic way has made incapable. If the man is dead, the
problem is easily resolved : let some other lug his guts into the
neighbour room. 1 If, on the other hand, he is only asleep and
not yet to be wakened; or thrust in the stocks and not yet to be
freed, then the dramatist must leave him, whatever the
perplexity of the spectators, while the action continues on its
way. The Soul of Mankind, in the fifteenth-century Morality,
The Castle of Perseverance, must lie dormant on stage, beneath the
bed of Mankind but exposed to the view of the audience, from
the very beginning of the play. But in that awkward situation
there is unexpected profit. The curiosity of the audience is

1 The removal of the body needs only to be plausible, as when young Clifford
bestows the corpse of his father, fallen in the battle of St. Albans. (sHVI, 5.2)
More impressive, however, are those scenes in which necessary stage business is
made also to delineate character and so to advance the plot, as when Crookback,
having murdered the King, says whimsically to his victim, Til throw thy body in
another room.* (sHVI, 5.6.ga)

'KING LEAR' IN THE RENAISSANCE

piqued, its expectation aroused. Nor Is that curiosity slaked
until the crisis of the action, which is to say until the moment
of the hero's regeneration when, as the MS. reads, the Soul of
Mankind c schal ryse and pleye 3 . 1

Shakespeare also, like the author of the Morality, puts to
positive use his silent actors. Thus Demetrius and Lysander,
Helena and Hermia, sleep on the open stage, according to the
Folio version of A Midsummer Might's Dream, all through the
Act that is, through the interval between Acts III and IV.
They are not in fact roused until Theseus bids the huntsmen
wake them with their horns; and this despite the eruption on
stage of Titania and Nick Bottom, a rout of fairies (making
rural music with tongs) and, behind them, Oberon their king.
'All this', observes an editor, 'is Improbable, not to say fantastic. 5
It is rather, I think, deliberate at least a willing acquiescence
in the limitations of the stage and, given the play's business,
at once probable and decorous. For what could more emphatic-
ally make the point of the play than the living tableau with
which Act IV opens : the sleeping lovers, whose love is engen-
dered in the eye and, over against them, the delicate queen,
cozened also by appearance, kissing the large ears of a clown.
The enforced presence of the two couples is turned to advantage,
made to serve, by juxtaposition, as an emblem, dumb poesy,
of all the play.

Tell me where is fancy bred,

Or in the heart or in the head ?

Now, the practice of juxtaposing mutely comparing, to
elicit a comment is not peculiar to the theatre nor original
with it. In a pair of sixteenth-century tapestries, a man and
woman are contrasted. The one, caught in a trap, is released by
the hand of God. The other, trapped also but busy with
mundane pleasures. Is succoured by Blind Cupid, who involves
her of course in destruction. The situation in each case is
superficially the same, and crucially different in its issue. But
the comment is in the juxtaposition. 2 (Shakespeare also, in

1 The same use of the convention is illustrated, if not so dramatically, by the
enfeebled state initially of Good Deeds in The Summoning of Everyman.

2 Allegory of Profane and Sacred Love, Paris, Muse"e des Arts Decoratifs;
figs. 1 1 6, 1 17 in Studies in Iconology. Below the trapped man are representations of a
phoenix (figura resurrectionis) and pelican (figura passionis). See chs. VIII and VI.

C KING LEAR 5 IN THE RENAISSANCE

The Tempest, and in precisely the same manner, reserves
explicit comment, is content to rely on the perception of his
audience. He presents to you Caliban, a proper slave im-
properly seizing his freedom this, at the end of Act II; and
Ferdinand, a prince and so in expectation a master, un-
expectedly forfeiting his this, without intermission, at the
beginning of Act III. The one, abjuring labour, will bear no
more sticks; the other, welcoming labour, enters bearing a log.
The parallel is perfect in that it enforces, not sameness but
distinction : the emancipation of the servile man is imprison-
ment, rightly read; the fettering of that man who is ostensibly
free, as it serves to try him, to quicken in him the understanding
that poor matters often point to rich ends, is in actual fact
emancipation.)

The Biblia Pauperum and Speculum Salvationis are marked also
by complementary representation. If a centre panel illustrates
a scene from the New Testament, analogues or complements
from the Old Testament will flank it. So Christ carrying the
Cross is juxtaposed with Isaac carrying wood for his own im-
molation; and Jonah delivered, with Christ resurrected from
the tomb. (Plate II) The Last Supper is prefigured (and
clarified) by Melchizedek giving Abraham the bread and wine,
and Moses and Aaron collecting the manna from Heaven. 1 An
Elizabethan artist, portraying the death of Christ, will pose
against the dead body the exuberant figures of children,
oblivious of loss and grief and decay, and in themselves a pledge
of renewal. 2 A Tudor portrait will flatter a young man in his
pride; and place in his hand, or lay at his feet, a grinning skull. 3
From the living tree, a man will prune the dead branch, and
recapitulate thereby the beheading of a felon, the cutting away
of an infected member from the state. (Plate III) An illustrator
of Bibles like Hans Sebald Beham (1500-50) will set Christ in
his triumph, miraculously multiplying the loaves and fishes,

1 Fig. i and pp. 7f. in Strachan, Early Bible Illustrations, Cambridge, 1957.

2 Isaac Oliver, 'The Burial of Christ*, c. 1556-1617, British Museum; and
Woodward, Tudor and Stuart Drawings, London, 1951, pi. u.

3 So the portraits of Edward Grimston, 1590, by an unknown artist, Gorham-
bury, the Earl of Verulam; Sir Thomas Gresham, School of Holbein, London,
Mercers* Hall; and Sir Thomas Aston, by John Souch, 1635, City Art Gallery,
Manchester. See Collins-Baker and Constable, English Painting of the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries, Florence and Paris, 1930, pis. 34, 8; and E. K. Waterhouse,
Painting in Britain 1550 to 1790, London, 1953, pi. 36.

'KING LEAR' IN THE RENAISSANCE

beside the austere Christ, ascending a barren hill, there presum-
ably to begin his fasting in the wilderness alone. Respice finem.
Both scenes, at once antithetical and complementary, are given
in a single cut. And so the correspondence is suggested. 1 The
emblem writer Boissard, depicting the creation of man., reveals,
amid the idyllic scene in which Adam, awakening, is set, the
serpent. In the moment of birth is death. 2 The audiences', as a
recent critic has remarked, 'were trained by their whole
dramatic tradition' one might add, and by conversance with
pictorial literature c to feel an allegorical significance behind a
formal or rhythmic grouping.'

But not only painting and engraving but also the conventions
of the tableaux vivants suggest and inform dramatic pictures. The
manner, a silent but an eloquent parallel, is kindred. Louis de
Nevers, Count of Flanders, grants privileges to the city of
Bruges (or so the citizens trust, in fashioning the pageant),
while Moses from the mountain brings the Tables of the Law.
Philip II, his father having abdicated, goes to Italy and the Low
Countries to be installed as king, and admires in street theatres
constructed for his progress the analogical figures of Solomon
and David, Titus and Vespasian, and (ironically) Abraham and
Isaac. The motifs and forms on which the pageant is founded
are common coin, moreover, throughout Europe. When, a few
years later, Philip enters London as the husband of Mary
Tudor, he sees on his route the same allegorical groupings,
wrested anew to speak to his present situation, as had been
offered him at Antwerp in 1549. The tableau vivant was as
familiar, then, in England as abroad. 3 Its conjunction with the
drama is explicit in the final act of The Tempest^ when Prospero
pulls the curtain, discovering the young lovers at chess, and
discourses on them, in his role as doctor or presenter, to Alonso.
So the orator-expositor who presented the street shows revealed

1 Sig. OOiiv in Biblia Insignium Historiarum simulachris . . . Gryphius, 1541.

2 Sig. C4r, 'Creatio Hominis', in Theatrum Vitae Humanae, Metz, 1596.
Bocksperger's emblem of the temptation defines the future in the present: in the
foreground Adam and Eve hearken to the serpent; afar off they are driven from
Paradise. See Neuwe Biblische Figure^ Frankfurt, 1564, Sig. Alv.

8 From the beginning of the century, the erecting of street theatres was
customary, first in London as part of the Lord Mayor's Pageant or to celebrate a
royal entry (as in 1501, 1520, 1522, 1533, 1546, 1553, 1554, 1558), and later, in
Elizabeth's reign, in the provinces, to honour the progresses of the Queen : G. R.
Kernodle, From Art to Theatre, Chicago, 1944, p. 70. And see pp, 60, 68 a and fig. 26.

'KING LEAR' IN THE RENAISSANCE

to his audience a silent tableau and proceeded to expound it. 1
Sometimes, on stage, the tableau is reminiscent merely, like
that of

Patience gazing on kings' graves and smiling
Extremity out of act;

(Pericles,

or that of Love, as valorous as Hercules,

Still climbing trees in the Hesperides.
(Love's Labours Lost, 4.3

Behind the image is a tangible representation: Hercules, figur-
ing this great man or that, in quest of the golden apples. 2 (Plate
IV) The dramatist remembers a formal grouping and glances
at it cursorily in his verses. It is the stuff of an image. It does not
otherwise impinge on the play. Sometimes, however, the
grouping, while essentially static, is recreated on stage to form
the living picture of a memorable moment, as in the emblematic
scene in which Philip of France drops the hand of King John :

England, I will fall front thee;

(King John, 3.1.320)

or, even more striking, as in the little tableau with which Titus
Andronicus commences, when the bickering contenders for the
imperial throne, vying with one another from opposite sides of
the stage, are overtopped abruptly by the brother of the hero^
the grand disposer of their fortundb

Enter Marcus Andronicus, aloft, with the crown.

(i.i)

And sometimes the stage emblem ramifies, speaks to the
entire business of the play. Like meets like when Sly, the
drunken tinker, looks down from above and comments without
comprehending on the story of a shrew in which every decorous
convention is flouted. (Taming of the Shrew, 1.1.255) Heroism

1 Kernodle, pp. 134-47, cites many examples of the collaboration of street
shows with the Elizabethan theatre.

2 Guigue, p. 42, comments on the tableau: 'Mais ce qui caracte"rise Faction
que veut representer cetre composition bizarre, toute impregne'e de symbolisme
complique", c'est un superbe pommier, couvert de pornmes d'or, par rappel des
Hesperides le roi Francois etant Hercule.' A similar illustration appears in
G. Mourey, Le Livre des Fttes Fran faises, Paris, 1930, p. 27, fig. 16.

'KING LEAR' IN THE RENAISSANCE

and ranting come perilously close together when Henry V, the
ideal king of the commentators, exhorts his men once more into
the breach; and Pistol, Nym, and Bardolph, as it were the other
face, are driven to it, protesting. (Henry F, 3.1,2) Lepidus, a
triple pillar of the world, drunk in Italy, is made to enforce a
parallel more acute and more cynical when he is carted off,
cheek by jowl with Pacorus, a Parthian chief and an enemy to
Rome, slain by Ventidius, a subordinate merely, but true to his
business, in Syria, half-way across the world. 1 (Antony and
Cleopatra, 2.7; 3.1) In the juxtaposing of the two events, like and
unlike, the dramatist, in an emblem or mute figure, addresses
the audience, obliges it to compare, and so, willy-nilly, to judge.
Shakespeare, in a similar manner, addresses the audience in
Lear. Edgar, far off and in hiding, is made to occupy the stage
simultaneously with Kent, set in the stocks before Gloucester's
castle. (2.2,3) Simultaneous action of this kind is partly, I
suppose, a legacy to the Renaissance of the medieval drama,
which derives it, and necessarily, from the fixed or conventional
representation that marks the performance of the earliest plays.
Action in the church nave oscillates between locus, sedes, and
domus, the given areas or positions which are always on stage,
which indeed are all the stage. This means that the domus, say,
will have to represent the manger in which Christ is born, and
the sedes or seat the throne of Herod, in pretended fact far
away, in actual fact a few paces away. So much for the illusion of
reality. Shakespeare, however, accepting his inheritance, dis-
covers novel uses for it, taking a hint perhaps from the static
character of the tableau vivant, which manages to be eloquent for
all that its action is merely ceremonious. He presents on stage, as
he is constrained to do, Kent and Edgar, at once together and
apart. But in the unrealistic defiance of the possible that has
brought the two good men, unjustly made wretched, together, he
voices an appeal to a higher reality, an unspoken comment close
to the heart of the drama. The audience sees the better how the
world wags. When Goneril and Regan, dead, are carried on
stage to be posed with Edmund, dying; when Coriolanus falls,
and Aufidius stands on the body ; when another tableau Hal,
the victor of Shrewsbury, surveys at his feet Hotspur and Falstaff,
each of them prone, and each, in a sense, the embodiment of

1 The modern and quite arbitrary division into acts largely obscures the effect.

'KING LEAR' IN THE RENAISSANCE

courses he might have followed, of characters he might have
assumed, it seems plausible to suggest a collaboration with the
dramatist of the street pageant and pictorial literature, in the
fashioning of stage glosses, of emblematical scenes.

The emblem or image is memorable to the degree that it is
suggestive: it bodies forth, it crystallizes, the better to instruct.
Those who climb on Fortune's wheel come full circle, at last.
Pride, that spends its mouth to no purpose, is subversive at last
of itself. Frivolity is dieted; ill-weaved ambition is shrunk. The
gloss is not private to Shakespeare, but the common property of
his age. Nor is the emblem or image, which is its stalking horse,
likely to be idiosyncratic. I should think, therefore, to find the
analogies of proverb lore, the continued and fixed representation
of themes and allegorical conventions like the Dance of Death
or the Seven Deadly Sins, the illustrations in catechisms, in
tapestries, in the Biblia Pauperum, in emblem books and
bestiaries, and on Elizabethan title pages, the traditional
arrangement' of the figures in street pageants, all involved,
necessarily, with the imagery of Shakespeare's plays. It is my
purpose to determine the degree and the nature and also the
meaning of that involvement in terms of the imagery of one
particular play.

I propose, then, to treat of the iconology of King Lear. In that
play, I find the following central motifs: the idea of Providence;
of Kind; of Fortune; of Anarchy and Order; and Reason and
Will; and Show against Substance; and Redemption. Each of
these motifs may be fixed or crystallized in an image. With
those crystallizing images call them emblems, or icons I am
concerned. It is my intention, moreover, to locate the central
motifs of King Lear in the work of other men roughly contem-
poraneous with Shakespeare, and then at length to make plain,
as best I can, what the currency of those motifs really means.

Though Shakespeare may have looked into Whitney and did
certainly read Holinshed, I have no interest in establishing
whether he ever saw one of the emblems I have represented,, or
read in any of the volumes I have cited. I have not sought to
study the influence of this on that. Neither would I pretend
that Shakespeare is simply the voice of his time, a lyre swept
by tendencies, by what are called main currents: a Churchyard
or a Tusser, writ large. If he is of his time, he is alien to it also.

'KING LEAR' IN THE RENAISSANCE

On occasion, in making use of a conventional image that, for
example, of the kingfisher or halcyon he will find in the image
a legend antithetical to that perceived by the greatest number
of his contemporaries. The same eccentricity will, I take it, be
remarked in any other dramatist of stature. And so I do not
think to discover in Lear a precise delineation of the Elizabethan
World Picture nor, certainly, a panegyric thereon. And, if the
writings of his age afford a clue to Shakespeare, I do not
suppose that they suffice to explain him. The poet who puts to
use the threadbare commonplaces of an indifferent philosophy
does not so much redact as transmute them. Shelley is not
Shaftesbury redivivus. It remains, however, true that Shake-
speare's imagery is rooted in his time, that he levies on what is
traditional and most common. Though the great play and the
inconsiderable homily are, in the crucial sense, more different
than the same, I think it fruitful to try to illuminate the one by
resort to the other, not least when images occurring in them both
suggest a divergent understanding; and by collation, by
comparison and contrast, to divine the common spirit inter-
penetrating each, the spirit of man in a particular time to
quote Professor Wittkower's tribute to Fritz Saxl 'working in
the images he made to express himself.

The images of Shakespeare and his particular time are not,
as it happens, valid coin any more. There is in real fact no
goddess Fortuna, nor any wheel that she spins, on which the
reckless ascend and descend. God's eye does not look down,
from the summit of creation, on the demi-god man at the centre
of creation. The strife of wit and will has been displaced by that
of Id, Super-Ego, and Ego. And whoever would figure the king
as the vessel and the master of his people 1 must be either
disingenuous or simple. But the imagery of Lear\ if you put
away the vizard or correlative and look for the thing bodied
forth, has pith in it still: it enjoins on man certain governing
imperatives, eliciting these from a reading of his nature; it
affirms the result when those imperatives are disputed or
ignored. The affirmation remains tenable, at least admissible.
But that is understatement.

1 In the manner of the illustration on the title page of Hobbes's Leviathan
London, 1651. See ch. V, pi. XXVI.

II
PROVIDENCE

" NE of the crucial questions posed by King Lear is uttered by
Albany, horrified, and bemused, at the curse Lear loads upon
GoneriL

Now, gods that we adore, whereof comes this ?

(1.4.312)

Albany addresses himself to a single and specific situation. But
the question reverberates. It rises from particulars to encompass
and to query all the awful business of the play, to ask: What is
the root of unnatural conduct? Whence comes evil?

It comes in part from impiety. Its root is in the mistaking by
man of his relation to the macrocosm, to the greater world
which contains him. The Epicurean, to use Shakespeare's word,
disallows the relation altogether. He is to the Renaissance, by
virtue of his absolute naysaying, a scandalous and so an
absorbing figure. Sir Philip Sidney, in the Arcadia, puts the
characteristic words in his mouth:

to thinke that those powers (if there be any such) above, are
moved either by the eloquence of our prayers, or in a chafe by
the folly of our actions; caries asmuch reason as if flies should
thinke, that men take great care which of them hums sweetest,
and which of them flies nimblest. 1

The conventional discourse of the impious man, elaborated by
Sidney, is adhered to by Shakespeare's Edmund, a generation
later. Edmund scorns to "make guilty of our disasters, the sun,

1 The Countesse of Pembroke* Arcadia, vol. I of The Complete Works, ed. Albert
Feuillerat, Cambridge, 1912, pp. 4o6f.

PROVIDENCE

the moon, and the stars'. He sneers at heavenly compulsion,
at spherical predominance. Like Cassius, he is emancipated :

You know that I held Epicurus strong.

(Julius Caesar, 5.1.77)
Like I ago, he is self-sufficient:

'Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus.

(Othello, i.3.322f.)

He discountenances wholly a divine thrusting on. (1.2.128-49)
He is audacious to do so. What is more, he is wrong.

These late eclipses in the sun and moon
portend no good to us.

(l.2.II2f.)

I do not think to confound Edmund with the opinion of
Gloucester, who believes very much in sequent effects. Put with
it, however, the opinion of Kent: men achieve great place
because 'their great stars Throned and set [them] high'.
(3*i.22f.) That they beget such different issue as the wicked
sisters and Cordelia is because 'The stars above us, govern our
conditions'. (4.3.35) Lear is of similar mind. He invokes the god
Apollo. (1.1.162) He swears 'By all the operation of the orbs
From whom we do exist and cease to be', (i.i.n^f.} He calls on
Nature, presumably interested and possibly responsive, to hear
him. (1.4.297-311) He is sure 'that in the pendulous air
[plagues] Hang fated o'er men's faults'. (3.4.68f.) Even his
denunciation of the forces of Nature as servile ministers (3.2.21)
is rooted in a belief in causality, albeit malign.

One may argue, of course, that to Shakespeare and his
audience, or to the more reflective persons in that audience,
Edmund is wisely sceptical, and Gloucester, Kent, and Lear
grossly superstitious. But aberrations in Nature, when recorded
in the writings of Shakespeare and his age, and in the writings
of the erudite man as well as the scribbler, do not get the laconic
treatment Edmund accords them. King Richard II might have
beaten down Bolingbroke's challenge had not his Welsh allies
thought to read in signs and vaticinal sayings the futility of
fighting any more:

The bay trees in our country are all wither'd.
And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven;
18

PROVIDENCE

The pale-fac'd moon looks bloody on the earth,
And lean-look' d prophets whisper fearful change.

(Richard II, 24.8-11)

Disaster on earth the death of a king requires celestial
sympathy, for the heavens and earth are conjunctive:

Comets, importing change of times and states.
Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky.

(i Henry VI, i.i.ssf.)

Evil rampant on earth man's ingratitude to man requires
celestial correction, a planetary plague hanging poison in the air
over the high-viced city. (Timon, 4.3.108-10) The accomplished
evil is scourged; evil to come the bloody reign of Crookback
is predicted :

The owl shrieked at thy birth . . .

The night crow cried, aboding luckless time.

Dogs howled, and hideous tempest shook down trees.

The raven rooked her on the chimney's top,

And chattering pies in dismal discords sung.

(3 Henry VI, 5.6.45-48)

Similar omens accompany the birth, in 1612, of the Scottish
hero Montrose, who is supposed, while still a sucking child, to
have eaten a toad: an evil sign, infallibly, to the pious who
happen also to be his opponents. But not only those whose wish
fathers the thought find the course they must follow set for
them by commotion in the heavens or in eccentric happenings
on earth. When Charles V, lingering in Brussels, delays his
promised abdication, a comet affrights him, portending war and
pestilence and the overthrow of princes; and so like Hamlet he
cries, c My fate calls out!' and makes ready to depart. 1

Richard ///, Richard II, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and King Lear:
each abounds in reference to untoward disorders. Regan, whose
evil business is accomplished out of season, threading dark-eyed
night (2.1.121), embodies and announces them. Their signifi-
cance is perfectly plain. The great and singular storm in King
Lear means precisely the same as the great and singular storm

^For the story of Montrose see John Buchan, Montrose, London, 1949, p. 3 in.
Motley, The Rise of the Dutch Republic, I, 129, quoting a contemporary (1555)
German chronicler, tells of Charles V.

PROVIDENCE

which accmopanies the murder of Duncan and, if you will, the
murder of Christ. It means that the heavens, as troubled with
man's act, begin to threaten his bloody stage. (Macbeth, s.^f.)
Owen Glendower, who is only partly a fool, was sensitive to
such threatenings. One is prone to sneer at Glendower, to mock,
as Hotspur mocks, his prophetical powers. It is, however,
Glendower who, overruled by prophecies, declines to do battle
at Shrewsbury, (i Henry IV, 4.3.18) The commonsensical Hot-
spur dies there.

What I would demonstrate is that the explicitly serious use
of the portent as symbol is one of the most wonted conventions,
not only in Shakespeare but in the Renaissance. Samuel
Harsnett, on whose Declaration of Egregious Popishe Impostures
Shakespeare probably drew for the names of the devils who lurk
about Poor Tom, found 'all the sensible accidents . . .
pendulous in the ayre'. The unknown author of The Birth of
Merlin discovered them roofing our heads. Burton, in the
Anatomy, laid corruption of the air, plagues, thunders, and fires,
to the intervention of malevolent spirits. 'The air is not so full
of flies in summer, as it is at all times of invisible devils.' 1 The
Catholic polemicist, Noel Taillepied, understood that

When some terrible political change is imminent, when a
monarchy is tottering to its fall, or a kingdom is threatened by war,
internal commotions, and republican sedition, such upheavals
are frequently presaged by mysterious phenomena, by ghostly
signs in the air, by prodigious happenings among the animal
creation. 2

Before the battle of Tippermuir to cite a specific instance of
change presaged by mysterious phenomena airy armies con-
tended, the sun shone at midnight, an unearthly choir sang,
and a cannon shot, warning of invasion in the west, was heard
over the whole kingdom. 3 Philip Melanchthon, Luther's
distinguished and scholarly colleague to choose at random a
Protestant polemicist, to complement the Roman Catholic

1 See Harsnett, edn. 1603, p. 159; The Shakespeare Apocrypha, ed. G. F. Tucker
Brooke, Oxford, 1908, p. 375 (4.1.220); The Anatomy of Melancholy, Pt. I, Sec. 2,
mem. I, subs. 2. See also Harsnett on 'sparrow-blasting', p. 136; Edgar on ''star-
blasting*, Lear, 34-59f.; and Shakespeare's Sonnet 14, 11. s, yf.

2 A Treatise of Ghosts, Paris, 1588, tr. Montague Summers, London [1933],
ch. XIV.

3 Buchan, p. 148.

PROVIDENCE

was sure that c No year escapes that sees a blazing comet 3 . 1
Accordingly, he undertook to c hold every man forewarned that
one should not neglect divine tokens'. Luther himself manifests
in his Table Talk (Tischrederi) entire faith in portents. His
opponent, the Anabaptist and rebel Thomas Miinzer, cleaved
with even more vigour to that faith. In 1525, on entering into
battle, he spied out a rainbow and thus exhorted his troops:
c God declareth plainly by the similitude that he sheweth on
highe, that he wyll aide us in the battell, and distroye the
tyrauntes.' 2

More often, the similitude does not hearten; it casts down.
Gloucester's dark mutterings find a parallel, perhaps a source,
in a pamphlet by the almanac writer, Edward Gresham. In
Strange . . . news which happened at Carlstadt (1606), Gresham
assures (and admonishes) his readers that

The Earth and Moon's late and horrible obscurations, the
frequent eclipsations of the fixed bodies . . . shall without
doubt . . . have their effects no less admirable than the positions
unusual.

Theodore Beza, Calvin's successor, entertained very much the
same belief. It is the burden of his comment on the nova a star
grown suddenly bright of 1572. He awaits with trepidation
the approach of the time, presumably a vexing time, when
c theffects themselves shall show'. Fear of sequent effects ran
also in the mind of the Englishman Grindal, Archbishop of
York, who wondered if the earthquake of 1575 did not portend
the death of Queen Elizabeth. 3 The lightning bolt which fired
and consumed the steeple of St. Paul's on June 4, 1561,
excited in Tom Nashe this ominous (and doggedly chauvinistic)
observation: c Did the Romans take it for an ill signe, when their
Capitol was strooken with lightning, how much more ought
London^ when her chiefe steeple is strooken with lightning?' On
June 8th, the Sunday following the fire, a sermon was preached

1 'Nulla aetas vidlt flagrantem impune cometam.' Quoted James Howard
Robinson, The Great Comet of 1680, Northfield, Minn., 1916, p. 8.

2 Llewellyn M. Buell, 'Elizabethan Portents: Superstition or Doctrine?*
Essays Critical and Historical Dedicated to LilyB. Campbell, Berkeley and Los Angeles,

i950> PP- 28 > 3of-

3 Beza, Of the ende of this worlde, tr. Thomas Rogers, London, 1577; John Strype,
The Life and Acts of Matthew Parker, Oxford, 1821, II, 397; Buell, pp. 32f.

S.P.-C 21

PROVIDENCE

at Paul's Cross, in which the fire was seen as a warning to the
realm of some greater misadventure to follow. In a published
report of the burning, which appeared two days later, Jeremiah
(as you might suppose) provided the prefatory quotation:

I wyll speake suddenlye agaynst a nation, or agaynste a kynge-
dome, to plucke it vp, and to roote it out, and distroye it ...

An insistence on design, however melodramatic, is explicit. 1
Holinshed's Chronicles, perhaps the work of reference to which
Shakespeare resorted most often, is rife with the same moralizing
of portents and prodigies. Even Lear's Fool, adverting to Merlin
(whose prophecies Holinshed preserves), assumes the manner of
a seer and foreteller of the future. Nor ought one to smile :
divination was a flourishing business: in the Catalogue of Printed
Books in the British Museum, twelve columns are given over to a
listing of works dealing with Merlin. 2

God's hand, then, is always raised to smite or reward, if only
one has wit enough to see it. If a two-headed calf comes forth
in Hampshire, or a strange fish is dragged from the Thames,
God speaks in the event. When Luther and Melanchthon,
joint authors of a chapbook attacking the papacy and the
monastic orders, cast about for an emblem of their enemies,
they find it in a dead monster fished from the Tiber in 1496, and
in a calf with a dewlap, born at Freiburg-in-Meissen in 1522.
The enormously popular and prolific literature of the ballad

1 Nashe comments in Christs Teares Over lerusalem, London, 1593, Sig. Zav.
Some notion of the extraordinary impact an incident of this nature could make for
may be gathered from the following beadroll of references to it: John Stow, The
Annales-f ed. Edmond Howes, London, 1615, pp. 646; Stow, Survey of London,
Everyman edn., n.d., pp. 2g6f.; Brief Discours de la Tempeste et Fouldre Advenue en
la Cite de Londres . . . sur. . . . sainct Paul. . . . Paris [1561]; ballads listed in
S.R., I, 202, 210, 263; and in Ghappell, Popular Music of the Olden Time, I, 117. See
also The True Report of the burning of the Steple andChurche ofPoules in London, printed
by William Seres on loth June, 1561; and Jeremiah, xviii.

2 Vol. XXXVI, cols. 249-60. The prevalence and importance of prophecy are
illustrated further by the fact that, in 1541, Henry VIII felt compelled to declare
a felony 'any false prophecy upon occasion of arms, fields, letters, names, cogniz-
ances, or badges'. Edward VI, in 1550, confirmed his father's prohibition.
Elizabeth forbade explicitly the use of animal symbolism. The Catholic Church,
too, felt the danger: in 1564, the Index librorum prohibitorum proscribed The Prophecies
of Merlin on the authority of the Council of Trent, which condemned books on
augury and divination. See Rupert Taylor, The Political Prophecy in England, New
York, 1911.

8 Deuttung der czwo grewlichen Figuren, Wittenberg, 1523; Buell, p. 29.

PROVIDENCE

and broadside moralizes incessantly, throughout the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, whatever is monstrous or bizarre.

Strange Wonders God to us doth send,
For to make us our lives amend.

Autolycus in The Winter's Tale may jest on ballads and
credulity : Stephano and Trinculo in The Tempest are credulous.
Even Montaigne is ready to read a moral in deformity. So is the
Tudor physician John Hall who, in The Court of Virtue, finds a
misshapen birth portentous. His contemporary, the author of
c A warnyng to England 3 , discovers in the immorality of the mother
the origin of The forme and shape of a monstrous Child, borne
at Maydstone in Kent', in the autumn of I568. 1 Everything
untoward had its ascertainable cause. The sweating sickness or
plague, which visited England in 1552, and claimed in one
week, and in the city of London alone, the lives of eight hundred
people, was so palpable a mark of divine displeasure that c this
nation 3 , wrote a contemporary of Shakespeare's, c was much
afeard of it, and for the time began to repent & remember
God, but 3 and the sequel is characteristic, and endearing
c as the disease relented, the deuotion decaied'. 2

The cosmology of the Renaissance not only agrees with, but
very nearly enforces, the notion that God watches over and
admonishes, even the least of His subjects. The Renaissance
mind, when not perverted, beclouded, was full of His proximity.
Caxton, following Ptolemy, undertook, in the encyclopedic
Mirror of the World, to define it, to put it on paper, and so make
it mathematically plain. Caxton's Universe was of course
geocentric. That in itself is not a fact of overweening importance,
if you hold with Sherlock Holmes that it is all one to us whether
the earth revolves around the sun or the sun around the earth.
The Ptolemaic theory is fraught, however, with this majestic
consequence: represent the Earth as the centre of the Universe,

1 See The Pack of Autolycus, ed. H. E. Rollins, Cambridge, Mass., 1927, pp.
139-45, 185-7; Sig. Nnlr in The Essayes or Morally Politike and Millitarie Discourses
of Lo : Michaell de Montaigne . . . done into English By . , . John Florio, London,
1603; The Court of Virtue, Sigs. S4r-5r; and, for other ballads on similar subjects,
A Collection of Seventy-Nitie Black-Letter Ballads and Broadsides, London, 1867, pp.
194-7, 27-30, 45-48, 63-66, iiaf., 145-7? 186-90, 201-04, 217-20, 243-6, and
xvi-xviii (an introductory discussion on prevalence and meaning).

2 Stow, AnnaleSy p. 605. See also Court of Virtue*. Sig. O7r; and A boke, or counseill
against the . . . sweatyng sicknesse. Made by Jhon Cains, London, 1552.

PROVIDENCE

and you make it thereby the centre of all God's concern,
Encircling the Earth were the triple spheres of water, pure air,
and fire. There followed next the seven spheres which housed
the seven known planets. Beyond them extended yet another.
This was the Firmament, containing the stars, 'Of whiche ben
knowen pryncypally 47 ... And of them ben taken 12 of the
most worthy whiche ben called the 12 Sygnes [of the Zodiac].' 1
Enclosing the whole was the Primum Mobile; beyond it: the
Blue Heaven, the Heaven Crystalline, the Heaven Imperial,
abode of the angels, and last, the Heaven Celestial, where God
sat His throne and viewed with a certain scepticism the self-
sufficient posturings of Edmund.

It is one part of that self-sufficiency that Edmund should
scoff at the stars. But here, in the mouth of Tecnicus, a character
reminiscent of Shakespeare's Friar Laurence, in John Ford's
The Broken Heart, is figured, not merely a more pious, but a more
truly sophisticated position: 'Tempt not the stars; young man,
thou canst not play with the severity of fate.' (1.3) Montaigne
went further. He found 'the power and domination' of the stars
to be exerted e not onely upon our lives, and condition of our
fortune . . . but also over our dispositions and inclinations,
our discourses and wils, which they rule'. Edmund is incredu-
lous, but here, in the preface to an ephemeral pamphlet, is his
wisdom stigmatized for the foolishness it is : 'Among al sinnes,
none is more odious before God, then is incredulitie : doubting
both of divine promises and threatnings.' Finally, Edmund is
impious. The terrible and all-embracing nature of his impiety,
and just what it gives away, are made plain, I think, by this
sentence of the Zwinglian theologian, Ludwig Lavater.
Portents, asserted Lavater, come from God

that we might understand that all these things happen not by
aduenture [chance], without the wil & pleasure of God, but
that life and deathe, peace and warre, the alteration of Religion,
the exchaunge of Empires, and of other things, are in his power,
that we might thereby learne to feare him, and to calle vppon
his name. 2

1 London, 1480, Sig. m4v.

2 See Florio's Montaigne, III, 205; Beza's Of the ends of this worlde; Buell, p. 262 ;
and Lavater, De spectris^ Zurich, 1570, tr. R.H.: 'Of ghostes,' London, 1572, II,
xvi (ed. J. Dover Wilson and May Yardley, Oxford, 1929, pp. i64f.).

PROVIDENCE

But to establish so much, that the men of the Renaissance,
learned and unlearned, were pious in the old-fashioned way, is
only, I daresay, to make a beginning. It is true, it gives one
warrant to say or surmise how Shakespeare and his fellows must
have treated the refusal of Edmund to endorse the notion of
divine thrusting on. But it does not speak at all to the nature of
that refusal, which is made, neither more nor less respectable
by the headshaHng of Edmund's contemporaries, however
many of them one may bring forward. Truth does not turn on
popular suffrage, nor is it qualified by the character of the man
who gives it voice.

Though all things foul would wear the brows of grace,
Yet grace must still look so.

It is a fact that the geocentric universe is dead; and that the
plagues which smote London and which John Stow described
had as much to do in their arising with a lack of sanitation as
with the displeasure of an ireful god; and that Miinzer's
peasant army, whatever the faith of its leader, went to the
slaughter, even so. I do not mean to pretend, then, that the
portent or prodigy are literal precursors of dreadful events. I
suppose that Melanchthon and Taillepied, Harsnett and Nashe,
describing them so, were deceived. It may even be true that
man keeps the universe alone.

And yet the superstitious Gloucester, even conceding a
universe from which the gods on whom he calls have all
departed, remains more acute than his emancipated son. His
belief in portents is to be construed as a kind of notation, a
figure, resting on and expressing the acceptance of a principle of
order and causality. The pious man of the Renaissance embodies
that principle in the idea, if you like in the creation, of a
personal and provident God. The embodiment itself may no
longer compel assent or respect. But the principle the figure
bodies forth, that every effect proceeds from its cause, that
sequence and not chaos is manifest in the creation, remains
compelling still. A man ignores or disputes it, to his cost. That
at least is the assertion Shakespeare's play undertakes to explore
and, in the event, to sustain. Edmund is in error, not because he
goes counter to the conventional wisdom, but because his
protestations are mocked in action, assayed and confounded by

PROVIDENCE

the course of the play. The plot is the testing of his egotism. It is
the plot, the experiment, and not a cluster of apophthegms,
which gives him the lie.

The Renaissance version of the universe we live in, however
grossly it may err in particulars, is valid, is tenable, metaphoric-
ally speaking, in that, no less than King Lear, it declares for the
contiguous nature of all things. That is why the engraver,
designing a title page for Matthias LobePs Stirpium Adversaria
Nova (1570), is not content to represent the map of Europe
alone: he must depict its near relation to the stars above us,
forever fixed in their orbit beyond the planetary spheres, forever
casting their influence, whether baleful or happy, on men. The
printer John Day, when he chooses a title page for Foxe's Book
of Martyrs (1570), does more than commemorate the heroic
individual bearing witness to the truth. He wants also to express
his author's vision, in its way more spectacular, of the indis-
soluble union of heaven and earth. For that reason he crowds
together, all within one frame, the priest before the altar, the
victim at the stake, the inspired prophet, a representation of the
persecuted Church, and of the Church when it turns to persecu-
tion, the blessed in their glory, the cursed in their torment and,
last and first, the figure of God, seated on the great globe itself,
and addressing and attending to His people. Just so does the
Nuremberg Chronicle, presenting in picture the universe described
in The Mirror of the World, portray the great design, in all its
meticulous detail, as conducting at last to God, enthroned at
the apex of His work and participating in it still. That is the
meaning of the many engravings of Jacob's dream of the ladder
ascending to Heaven, a commonplace of emblem literature
because it dramatizes with such clarity the faith of the Renais-
sance in contiguity. 1 To treat of the conjunction of things
human and divine, as does the iconologist Cesare Ripa in
depicting a man fallen on his knees and clasping a golden chain
which hangs from a star in the Heaven is, essentially, to affirm
the dependence of this upon that and of everything at last upon
cause. 2 It is in that sense, and not as antique error, that one is to

1 See, for example, the illustrations in Arias Montanus, Humanae Salutis Monu-
menta, Antwerp, 1571, under 'Humana Divinitas'; and in Strachan, Early Bible
Illustrations, fig. 45.

2 See Ripa, Iconologia^ Padua, 1611, under 'Congiuntione delle cose Humane
con le Divine'.

PROVIDENCE

interpret the universe of Caxton and the belief in the operation
of the orbs. The stars, declares the emblem writer, bend their
mysterious power on men. 1 (Plate V) But that is only his way of
speaking for sequence. The stars themselves are in fee to
necessity.

The villainous persons in Lear, rejecting sequence, entertain
no belief in Providence. All goes by chance. But the chanceful
and the self made are equally fables. That is the pith of an
emblem saluting David's conquest of Goliath. God's arm drives
the stone from the sling. 2 Let a battle be joined: whatever the
preponderance of power on one side, it is Providence that
determines the issue. The hand of God, suspended, grasping
the laurel wreath and the sword, appoints the victor. 3 (Plate
VI) It does not follow that the victor can afford to grow rusty in
what Shakespeare's Fluellen calls the disciplines of war.
Despite the modest disavowals of Henry V, it is his superior
direction, and not the intervention of the deity, that wins for
the English at Agincourt. Nor is the triumph at Bosworth Field
after all to be attributed to God.

Miracles are ceased,

And therefore we must needs admit the means
How things are perfected.

(Henry V, 1.1.67-69)

The unspectacular truth, to which the emblem testifies
obliquely, admits those means. But its kernel is in the discovery
that what a man is plays its part in what he does, in fact in what
he can do. Richmond is not victorious over Richard III because
he prays on the eve of battle. But his prayers betoken his
equanimity, his harmonious relation to all the ends and purposes
of his being. His is the unclouded mind on which good general-
ship depends. The guilty conscience of Richard argues,

1 See Rollenhagio's gloss, in Nucleus Emblematum, Sig. Bsv: 'Encor* que des
Astres la celeste puissance. Verse dessus nos corps leur secrete influence. 5

2 Sig. F2v in Holbein's hones, Lyons, 1549 (English version) : 'Dauid castyng
auuay Saul harnes, and tristing only in the pouur of God, vuyth a stone ouut of
hys slyng kylleth Goliath.* David, 4 Without being armed, in God confiding . . .
chaseth auuay the Philistians.'

3 Jacob Bruck glosses the emblem (LesEmblemesMoraulxetMilitaires, Strasbourg,
1616, Sig. B4v) : 4 Cui Vult. Et le nombre de gens, & la force de bras, Et les lames
luisant des tranchants coutelas Apportent au Colonel beaucoup grand advantage:
Mais encor pour cela, il n'est victorieux Si Dieu ne luy ennoy' la victoire des cieux
Dont a bon droit luy doibt faire honneur & hommage.*

PROVIDENCE

conversely, a mind at sixes and sevens, incapable of making
thoughtful provision. It is not the mind of the successful
commander.

Providence describes the participation of character in the
event. It dramatizes, further, the humbling proposition that
man is not the measure of all things. Let a man outgo all others
in accomplishment: still his puissance and knowledge are
derivative. The sailors adrift in a rudderless boat the theme of a
French tableau vivant do not founder. No doubt their seaman-
ship is all that it should be. But their safety depends at last on
the direction of the Queen, herself the vassal and vicegerent of
Providence, enthroned on a rainbow in Heaven. 1 This is not to
say that human enterprise is nothing, but only that it is not
everything. That is the moral the emblem writer educes, in
celebrating Drake's voyage around the world. All honour to
Drake. But his triumph is not engineered, either fortuitously or
of himself. From the clouds God's hand is extended. It clenches
a girdle made fast to the Golden Hind, and so draws the vessel
along. The motto: Auxilio divino: with the help of the Lord. 2 Sir
Walter Ralegh, embarked on a more colossal voyage, the
recording of the whole history of the world, discerns in that
history a similar agency. The title page of his great work depicts
those allegorical figures whose interaction makes up the story
he would tell: Good Report, Notoriety, Experience, Truth,
drawn naked a convention to which I shall want to return
and above them all, observing them always, the eye of
Providence. 3 (Plate VII)

The Heavens do participate. Order wields the world. The
revenging gods/ says Edmund whimsically, c 'Gainst parricides
. . . [do] all their thunders bend.' (s.i^yf.) He is right. Only
his whimsy is malapropos.

Jesters do oft prove prophets.

(5-3-72)

By the end of the play, Edmund is dead. The villainous Cornwall
dies also. His death, says Albany,

1 Kernodle, p. 95. The tableau was prepared for the entrance, in 1533, of
Queen Eleanor into Lyons.

2 Given in Whitney, Emblemes, Sig. Gar.

3 For similar title pages, see H. Hammond, A Pmcticall Catechisme, London,
1646; L. Roberts, The Merchants Mapp of Commerce, London, 1638.

PROVIDENCE

shows you are above,

You justicers, that these our nether crimes
So speedily can venge.

(4.2.78-80)

In the deaths of Goneril and Regan, Albany sees again c This
judgement of the Heavens'. (5.3.231) Kent is a good man, in
part because he fears it (1.4.17)5 aware that the ungodly shall
not stand in the judgement. Gloucester, tied to the stake,
anticipates that judgement, looks to the winged vengeance
(3. 7. 641), as the Psalmist looked to the lightning and the arrows
of Jehovah, and the Latin poet to the red right hand of Jove.
In the nether world, all things are felt as manifesting design.
Peter de la Primaudaye, a Frenchman who is also a popular
preceptor to the English, embodies, in the wonted figure, that
conviction of design : c All things are guided and gouerned by
the prouidence of God, who knoweth and ordereth casuall
things necessarily.' 1 Gloucester's miseries are causal in their
origin, not casual. Nor is Gloucester blinded because c The
gods . . . kill us for their sport' (4.i.38), but rather because

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us.

Thus Edgar, affirming and echoing the sentence of Cambria in
the old play that lies behind Shakespeare's:

The heauens are iust, and hate impiety. 2
To put it another way: propter hoc and not post hoc is king.

1 The French academie, London, 1618, p. 192.

2 The True Chronicle History of King Lezr, London, 1605, 1. 1909,

Ill

KIND

JL HE gods dispense justice. But they do not dispense poetic
justice. In the world of King Lear, the learned pate ducks to the
golden fool. (Timon, 4.3.1 ft.) The usurer hangs not only the
cozener but the innocent also. A dog's obeyed in office.

Hooking both right and wrong to the appetite.
To follow as it draws !

(Measure for Measure, 2 . 4. i y6f . )

Strength is by limping sway disabled. Albany's hopeful saying.

All friends shall taste
The wages of their virtue, and all foes
The cup of their deservings,

(5-3-302-4)

is a piece of simplicity. Lear's 'Never!' confounds it. Cordelia,
whose best meaning merits all honours, is not the first to find
out an ignominious death. fe-S-Sf.)

But and here the critical point, which the plot is at pains
to discover though a good man's fortune may grow out at
heels (2.2.164), a bad man's fortune will certainly do so, given
only the passage of time. Shylock may die in his bed, with all
his ducats restored to him (but not his daughter) ; or, like his
fellow-villain Barabas, the Jew of Malta, may be tipped at last
into the cauldron. This is to say: he may be lucky or unlucky:
the spinning of the wheel is independent of good conduct or
bad. But whether, in affluence or in penury, he will be found a
man or a cipher, turns, decidedly, on conduct. For the gods are

KIND

more than mere warders. They have given to man a fixed nature:
the Elizabethans call it kind. If a man violates that nature, if he
trespasses against kind, he is destroyed, not directly by the deity
in the old melodramatic way, but rather by the deity acting
through the man himself.

Sin debilitates the sinner. Because the plays are concerned, in
the manner of plays, to be clear and dramatic, the consequence
of that debility is apt to be physical, though it is no more terrible
for being so, but only more startling, more readily apprehensible.
The random spinning of the wheel is largely discounted. The
sins of Mowbray, engaged to do combat against Bolingbroke,
sit

so heavy in his bosom

That they may break his foaming courser's back
And throw the rider headlong in the lists.

(Richard II, 1.2.50-52)

The sins of the hero-villains, Brutus and Cassius, turn their own
swords against their proper entrails (Julius Caesar, 5.3.g4f.), as
the strangling of the law brings Lucan's Romans with 'conquer-
ing swords [to lanch] their own breasts'. (Pharsalia, tr. Marlowe,
11. sf.) The scheming lachimo, in Cymbeline, is bested, not simply
because he meets his superior in Posthumus, but because, as he
is forced to acknowledge, the heaviness and guilt with which he
is laden take off his manhood. (5. 2. if.) Self-indulgence is not to
be censured in abstractu: an infringement of the tables. It is
censurable because it is perilous. c Our senses,' wrote Montaigne,
glossing, in effect, one of Alciati's emblems, e Our senses are not
only altered, but many times dulled, by the passions of the
mind', 1 and so neglect all office whereto our health is bound.
(s.4.io6f.) To give over the safer sense (4.6.8if.) is to dissolve
the life that wants the means to lead it. (4.4. igf.) The choleric
lion set upon by the hunters and their dogs, as he is enraged,
works his own death: that is Alciati's point in depicting the
emblem. Anger swallows up reason, makes the wrathful man a
beast who, reckless of self-preservation, savages not another but
himself. Ira est mors. The lion in Droeshout's emblem, attacking
the dragon, is overcome by him, and this because, like the
wrathful man, he gives odds to his opponent. (Plate VIII) Of

1 Emblemes d'Aldat. . . . A Lyon, 1564, Sig. F4V, p. 88; Florio, IV, 70.

KIND

each it may be said : Their own wickedness hath blinded them.'
(Wisdom, ii.2 1 )

The sins of Lear wrench his frame of nature from the fixed
place (i. 4.290^)3 and leave him prey to madness. The sins of
Actaeon strip him of his manhood, convert him to the quarry
he has trained his dogs to hunt. Sambucus, treating of Actaeon's
demise, observes a nice piece of meiosis that 'Sensuality is
full of troubles'. 1 Alciati appends as moral the single word,
'Deslqyaute' : Actaeon, in the ultimate sense, has been false to
himself. 2 He has turned his own reasons into his bosom like
dogs upon their master (Henry F, 2.2.82f.), tearing the master.
Whitney's reading is more explicit, and periphrastic : those who,
like Actaeon,

do pursue

Their fancies fonde, and thinges vnlawfull craue,
Like brutishe beastes appeare vnto the viewe,
And shall at lengthe, Actaeons guerdon haue:
And as his houndes, soe theire affections base.
Shall them deuowre, and all their deedes deface. 3

In precisely the fashion of Lady Macbeth, Actaeon, 'by self and
violent hands', takes his life. It is not, as in the myth, that Diana
wills it that way, or that the God of the Hebrews or Christians
compels him to it. In the violent death of the wicked man there
is more art, which is to say more economy, more decorum.

Unnatural deeds
Do breed unnatural troubles.

(Macbeth, 5.i.79f.)

His life, like that of Cymbeline's wicked queen, being cruel to
the world, is in its conclusion most cruel to himself (5-5.31-33)5
and this for constitutional reasons :

As surfeit is the father of much fast,
So every scope by the immoderate use
Turns to restraint.

(Measure for Measure, 1.2.130-2)

The evil a man does is inimical to what he is. Simply by virtue

1 Sig. H8r, p. 128, in Emblemata . . . loannis Sambuci, Antwerp, 1564.

2 Emblemes d'Alciat, Sig. E7v, p. 78.
8 Emblemesy p. 15.

KIND

of his nature, his kind, he is unable to brook it. Man, in this
sense, may be called the slave of nature. For 'there is no sinne',
writes Primaudaye, c that can auoide punishment, and that
findeth not a ludge euen in him that committed it, to take
vengeance thereof, by meanes of the affections, which God hath
placed in man to that end*. 1

The malefactor bears his own cross. What is more, and more
appropriate, he fashions it himself. It is Lear's own unkindness
that stings his mind so venomously, that loads him with a
sovereign shame. (4.3.43-48) There is dramatic propriety in
the fact that, wherewith he sins, by the same is he punished, that
it is his own imagination which torments him. (Wisdom, xi.i6,
xii.23) The engineer, infallibly, is hoist with his own petar, an
irony the emblem books adumbrate over and over. Tyranny, to
Boissard, is full of fear, and rightly: it looks to, and occasions,
its own decay. With the same decorum the thief, in Whitney's
emblem, is throttled by his plunder, and the Cyclops, the author
of evil, made author also, and concurrently, of his own loss of
sight. 2 'Mischievous wickedness', writes Philemon Holland
(after Plutarch), 'frameth of herselfe, the engines of her owne
torment, as being a wonderful artisan of a miserable life.' 3 This
is to say, with Desprez in the Theatre des Animaux, that the
cozener is his own prime gull: 'Frauder lefraudeur* (p. 23) ; and
that the hunter, whose quarry is inhibited and out of warrant,
preys on no one more than himself. 4

Those who put off the nature belonging to them depart from
the fountain which refreshes their being. They shall be written
in the earth: the first wind that blows over them shall wipe
away their names. (Jeremiah, xvii.is) 'That nature which
contemns its origin/ says Albany,

Cannot be bordered certain in itself.
She that herself will sliver and disbranch
From her material sap, perforce must wither
And come to deadly use.

(4.2.32-36)

1 The French academie, pt. II, p. 506.

2 See lani lacobi Boissardi Vesimtini Emblematum liber, Frankfurt, 1593, Sig. Oar,
p. 91: *Metus Est Plena Tyrarmis'; Whitney, Emblemes, Sig. Fir, p. 41: Toena
sequens'; Emblemes d^Akiat, Sig. Nyv, pp. so6f: 'luste Vengence.*

8 Quoted Campbell, p. 21.

4 Sig. Bi v, p. 10 : 'Celuy qui chasse un autre, n'est mesme repos.*

KIND

The image, expressive almost of the physiological imperatives
of kind, is central to Lear and, beyond the play, to other work
of the playwright, and further, to the Renaissance itself. Its
function is to assert an organic relation between conduct and
the consequences of conduct. Necessarily it defines nature : not
a tissue of precepts but a fund of possibili ties whose character
and limitation are susceptible of testing. Shakespeare's play is
such a testing. A tree cut away from its roots, which are the
condition of its being, cannot survive. Neither can a man survive
who repudiates his condition. The nexus between crime and
punishment is that prosaic. The image derived from husbandry-
is met so often in the art and literature of the Renaissance
because no other renders man more exactly nor with more
implication.

This is the state of man; to-day he puts forth
The tender leaves of hopes, to-morrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honours thick upon him:
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,
And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely
His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,
And then he falls . . .

(Henry VIII, 3.2.352-8)

The good easy man is Wolsey.

But the same image defines his master. When, in 1509, Henry
VIII ascends the throne, not York and Lancaster, those abstrac-
tions, are united, but a white rose tree and a red. To represent
the accession of Elizabeth, it is necessary only to add to the tree
another branch. The genealogical tree, the civic counterpart of
the Tree of Jesse, is the chief resort of street pageants and
tableaux vivants, the convention to which they find it most natural
to turn, when they would trace the noble lineage of some exalted
person. So the ancestry of Louis XII is figured, on his entry into
Paris in the closing years of the fifteenth century, by a Us on
which are mounted the pictures of those kings who have gone
before, leading to the reigning sovereign at the top. At a street
theatre in Rouen in 1485 a revolving tree is made to present on
different levels the ancient worthies; in its topmost branches an
actor is enthroned as Charles VIII. In London in the middle of
the following century two trees, growing out of Edward III,

KIND

come together In the persons of Mary Tudor and Philip of
Spain. 1

The lofty place imputed to him flatters the monarch. But the
image instructs him also in his condition, which is kindred,
however splendid his degree, to that of the meanest subject.
He is

no more but as the tops of trees

Which fence the roots they grow by and defend them.

(Pericles,, i.2.3of.)

In nature the whole world is kin. The well-grown oak is more
like than unlike the under shrubs that it crushes to splits in its
fall. (Ford, *Tis Pity, 5.3) One emblem describes the noble and
the liege man. Mirabel, the hero of The Wild-Goose Chase,
wishes a long life in his father. He is

none of these that, when they shoot to ripeness,
Do what they can to break the boughs they grew on.

(i-3)

His psychology, his kind, is that of the kingly protagonist of the
old Leir play who, about to apportion his kingdom, addresses
his daughters as

florishing branches of a kingly stocke,
Sprung from a tree that once did florish greene,
Whose blossoms now are nipt with Winters frost.

(Sc. 3)

D'Amville, Tourneur's hero In The Atheist's Tragedy, thinks his
children

as near to me

As branches to the tree whereon they grow;

And may as numerously be multiplied.

As they increase, so should my providence;

For from my substance they receive the sap,

Whereby they live and flourish.

(i. i)

Solyman, in Fulke Greville's Mustapha, knows that

Flesh hath her buds, her flowers, her fruit, her fall.

(2.2)

1 See Kernodle, pp. 68, 76, 97f., 107. An illustration of Francis I, represented
as the top of a tree, is given in Guigue, facing p. 1 6.

KIND

Shakespeare's imagery partakes of that knowledge. His
greatest single source of imagery he finds in the countryside.
When he would body forth human beings, he depicts them most
often in terms of plants and trees. Juliet likens her love and
Romeo's to a bud, in hope a beauteous flower. Rendered lifeless
by the potion, she becomes the flower herself, blighted by an
untimely frost. (2.2.121) Desdemona, when Othello mistakes
her for the destroyer of their love, is altered from flower to
weed. 1 (4.2.67) Achilles, in whom the seeded pride has
flourished,

must or now be cropped
Or, shedding, breed a nursery of like evil.

( Troilits and Cressida, 1.3.316)

The sonnets, from first to last, are instinct with the sequence of
growth, perversion, and (ipso facto] decay.

The summer's flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity.

(Son. 94)

The image is more conspicuous still in the historical plays. It
informs the only sustained passage in i Henry VI that is worth
pausing over: the emblematic scene in which the rival parties
who will fight the civil war announce their division in the
plucking of the white rose and the red (2.4) ; and also the one
memorable line in the play, spoken by Talbot of his valorous
son, who rushed into battle

and there died,
My Icarus, my blossom, in his pride.

(4. 7 .i 5 f.)

It is most conspicuous and most decisive in the gardening
scene of Richard II (3.4), whose point the homilies had made
familiar long before Shakespeare:

Euen as a good gardiner is verye diligent about his gardeine,
watering the good and profitable herbes, and rootyng out the
vnprofitable wedes : So shoulde a kinge attende to his commen

1 In the same way, the adultery of Vittoria, in The White Devil (1.2), is likened
to the poisoning and blasting of herbs.

KIND

weale, cherishing his good and true subiectes, and punishing
suche as are false and vnprofitable. 1

In Richard III the royal house figures explicitly as a tree. Those
who comprise the house are so many branches, leaves, flowers,
fruit. The idea of the tree being planted, storm tossed, grafted,
rooted up, and withering at last, recurs constantly. It is levied
on again in the later plays, by Posthumus, holding Imogen in
his arms : Hang there Hte ^^ my ^

Tin the tree die!

(Cymbeline, 5.5.263)

and by Othello, intent on the murder of his wife:

When I have plucked the rose,

I cannot give it vital growth again,

It must needs wither: I'll smell it on the tree.

(5-2.13)

1 have begun to plant thee/ says Duncan of his greatest
supporter, 'and will labour to make thee full of growing'
(i.4.28), even as the Lord labours in planting the houses of his
people. Thou hast planted them, yea, they have taken root:
they grow . . . they bring forth fruit.' But, because of their
perversity, the Lord kindles fire on the tree, 'and the branches
of it are broken'. (Jeremiah, xi. 16-17, xii.s) In the same manner
when Macbeth becomes cankered, he is styled c ripe for shaking'. 2
(4.3.237) Like Gloucester, assailed by Cornwall, his corky arms
are bound fast (3.7.29) : he has no marrow in them. 3 Like the
dying Mortimer, in Shakespeare's first play, he is pithless,

a withered vine
That droops his sapless branches to the ground.

(i Henry VI;, 2.5.1 if.)

The fall of such a man is not adventitious: it is organic. That is
the point and the use of the image. Evil is felt as dessication.

If so the stocke be dryed with disdayne.

Withered and sere the branch must needes remaine.

(Leir, 11. I242f.)

1 Sig. Q,4r, fol. 1 1 6, in William Baldwin and Thomas Palfreyman, A treaty ce
of Moral philosophy, London, 1564.

2 So Edgar, in Lean *Know, my name is lost; By treason's tooth bare-gnawn,
and canker-bit.* (5.3. 12 if.)

3 Thus Harsnett, p. 23, writes of an old corkie woman 5 .
S.P.-D 37

KIND

The process is sequential, admits of no gainsaying:

The good soule graffeth goodnes, wher of saluation is the frute,
but the euel planteth vices, the frute wherof is damnation. 1

The tree infected: Lear's long-engrafted condition (1.1.300)5
is the right emblem of the wicked, who do violence on them-
selves. The tree, sound and whole, signallizes equally well
health, which is virtue, in the man; long-maturing friendship
between man and man; 2 continuity, a natural progression, in
the state; and even the triumph of life over death. The sons
of Edward III are felt as growing from their father: they
are seven fair branches sprung from a single root. (Richard
II, 1.2.13) Elizabeth also grows organically from that
monarch, verifying the prophecy Robert Greene assigns to
Friar Bacon:

From forth the royal garden of a king
Shall flourish out so rich and fair a bud.

(Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, 4.3)

(Plate IX) Henry VIII arises from Lancaster and York. 3 Jesse,
who is the ultimate source of the figure, gives rise to all his
descendants: e And there shall come forth a rod [virga] out of the
stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots.' (Isaiah,
xi.i-3) Sometimes the Virgin Mary (by confusion with virgo) is
taken as the chief of those descendants; her flos or flower is
Christ. And sometimes the rod or branch prefigures Christ
himself. But the whole process, whatever its particulars, is seen
always as the flowering of a single tree. 4 (Plate X) Even in the

1 Thus William Baldwin, borrowing from Seneca (by way of the Apophtkegmes
of Erasmus), in A treatise of Morall Phylosophie, London, 1547, Sig. 16 v. See also
Court of Virtue, Sig. R8v.

2 Friendship grows like a tree in Boissard, Emblematum liber, Metz, 1588, Sig.
Iir,p.65.

3 See Edward Hall, The union of the two . . . famelies of Lancastre & Torke,
1550, t.p.

4 Many illustrations are given in Arthur Watson, The Early Iconography of the
Tree of Jesse, Oxford, 1934. An article by the same writer, *The Imagery of the
Tree of Jesse on the West Front of Orvieto Cathedral' (pp. 149-64 in Fritz Saxl:
A Volume of Memorial Essays, ed. D. J. Gordon, London, 1957), documents the use
of the tree in religious architecture. In fact, all one need do to be impressed with
the extent of the convention is to look at the representations in stained glass in
almost any medieval cathedral.

KIND

charnel house, from the skeleton itself, the tree, signifying virtue,
flourishes and springs. 1 (Plate XI)

Only the actions of the just

Smell sweet, and blossom in their dust.

Virtue, the pure conscience, is man's laurel tree, impervious
to the lightning, the emblem of victory and joy. 2 The virtuous
man plants his roots in the house of the Lord : he shall stand
and flourish whatever storms come against him. (Plate XII)
But to abdicate virtue is to tear up one's roots, to be slivered
and disbranched, to wither and I quote from Whitney's
Choice of Emblemes c like the blasted boughes that die'. (P. 67)
Our vices manifestly are made instruments to plague us.
Men are punished with their own abominations. 3 Aquinas, who
sums up with more eloquence and precision even than Hooker
this conception of what may be called implicit Providence
entertained by the Renaissance and dramatized in Shakespeare's
play, finds

The rational creature, man . . . subject to Divine providence
in the most excellent way possible; it has a share of Eternal
Reason, whereby it has a natural inclination to its proper end
and act.

Because man is endowed with c the light of natural reason the
imprint of the Divine light ... he is able to discern what is
good and what is evil'. It is this ineradicable habit or law of the
mind', which must incite each man through the agency of
conscience c to good and [to] murmur at evil'. As man chooses
the evil way, he himself 'accuses, rebukes, and torments' himself. 4
The evil man, that is to say, does himself to death. Let humanity
commit vile offences, and it will fall perforce: the decisive
assertion to preying on itself. (4.2.47-50)

The gods are provident, no question. But to bring them
Vpon the stage . . . thundring, clapping, and flashing out

1 See also Horozco, Emblemas, Sig. Msr, p. 85. The emblems gloss, in some sense,
the saying of Psalm xcii: "The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree. . . .
They shall still bring forth fruit in old age.* (12, 14)

2 Conscience figures so in Sambucus, Emblemata, pp. I4f.; and in Whitney,
Emblemes, Sig. lar, p. 67.

8 Thus Jeremiah, ii.ig: 'Thine own wickedness shall reprove thee.'
4 Summa, I-II.9I.2; 1.79.12, 13.

KIND

. . . the huge thunder cracke of adiuration', 1 as Shakespeare
does in Cymbeline, is a piece of unnecessary crudeness. The gods
are subtler than that, more cunning, more covert. They do not
hurl thunderbolts. They work rather

With windlasses and with assays of bias,
[And so] By indirections find directions out.

They commend to the sinful man a poisoned chalice. (Macbeth^
1.7.10-112) He drinks it and dies. That is why Albany and
Cornwall, who have borne hard rein against the old kind king
(g.i.syf.), must fall to fighting among themselves. (2.1.1 if.,
3.1.19-21)

Mark the high noises.
(3-6.114)

That is why the usurpers quarrel in i Henry IV, why Regan
sickens, and Goneril must come to deadly use.

I had rather lose the battle than that sister
Should loosen him and me.

( 5 .i.i8)

If a man cannot be honest, neither can he be valiant, neither
can he be capable. He is

but naked, though locked up in steel,
Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted.

(2 Henry VI, 3.2.234f.)

That is why Albany grows full of alteration (4.2.3-11, 5,i.3f.,
21-27), why Macbeth

cannot buckle his distempered cause
Within the belt of rule.

It falls out, as you would think, that 'The tyrant's people on
both sides do fight' (5.7.25), that Malcolm and his English
allies

have met with foes
That strike beside us.

(5.7.28)

But there is in the fact this subtler truth: the tyrant is up-

1 Harsnett, p. 108.

KIND

braided, not merely by Ms people but, more cruelly and
decisively, by himself. Heavy conscience sinks his knee.
(Cymbeline, 5.5.413) His senses are pestered. They cannot choose
but recoil

When all that is within him does condemn

Itself for being there.

(5.2.23-25)
Give appetite his head,

And appetite, a universal wolf.
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce a universal prey,
And last eat up himself.

( Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.12 1-4)

The emblem writer, no less than the dramatist, discovers
evil eating up itself. That is how he interprets the fable of the
fox and the eagle. The wicked, as they are powerful, insult over
the weak. c Yet soone, or late, the Lorde in iustice strikes.' The
eagle that swoops down on the little foxes and destroys them
finds its own nest and offspring consumed, tdt ou tard. 1 It needs,
as I have said, only time. So Cordelia admonishes her sisters:

Time shall unfold what plaited cunning hides.
Who cover faults, at last shame them derides.

(i.i.283f.)

In the event Cordelia is justified. Time, necessarily, reveals
Truth. So profoundly does belief in that promised revelation
impinge on the imagination of the Renaissance that the
central fact of its theology, the epiphany of the divine principle
on earth, witnesses perhaps unconsciously to it. In sixteenth-
century religious art, Truth is unfolded when Mary unveils the
infant Jesus. Dekker, in The Whore of Babylon, dramatizes the
unfolding. In the dumb show preceding the play. Time and
Truth banish falsehood: here, the plaited cunning of the
Papists. In allegorical painting Rubens, in the sixteenth
century, Poussin, in the seventeenth, attest to the triumph of

1 Fables D'Msope, Paris, 1689, Sig. B4r, p. 23: 'Les medians qtd oppriment
par leur puissance les miserables, perissent tot ou tard.* For another representa-
tion, see Francis Barlow (1626-1702), 'Fox and Eagle', Oxford, Ashmolean Museum,
engraved for Ogilby's Aesopico, 1668 (given in Woodward, pi. 32). The quotation
is from Whitney, Emblemes, Sig. Fir, p. 41.

KIND

Truth. 1 Bronzino discovers Time and Truth tearing the specious
cover from Luxury: whom shame at last derides. In a Renais-
sance tapestry (after Bronzino), Time rescues Truth and
vindicates Innocence. 2 And so the twin functions of Time the
Revealer are presented. Shakespeare describes them in The
Rape of Lucrece:

To unmask falsehood and bring truth to light.

(1. 940)

Early in the sixteenth century, a Venetian printer embodies
them in his emblem : Truth, attacked by the monster Calumnia,
rises toward Heaven out of the abyss, assisted in her progress by
Time. 3 Early in the seventeenth century, an English bookseller
does the same : in his device, winged Time rescues Truth from a
cavern as, in the device of Mary Tudor, Truth is brought by
Time from the pit. The Catholic Queen dies, a Protestant
succeeds, but the image and the understanding that informs it
remain constant. When Elizabeth enters London, a street
theatre offers for her instruction a tableau of two kingdoms,
figured by hills, one prosperous, one failing. From the cave
which divides them Time emerges with Truth, who carries in
her hand and presents to the Queen the Verbum Dei, the Bible
in English. 4 The darkness of the false faith is irradiated, in time,
by the light of the true. Time unfolds what cunning hides.

Nor must one take the words as pious ejaculation, a poet's
facile saw: Truth crushed to earth shall rise again. There is no

1 Richelieu ordered from Poussin, c. 1641, a Triumph of Truth. G. B. Tiepolo
executed drawings of Time and Truth, now in the Metropolitan Museum. Francois
Le Moine painted Time revealing a naked Truth over a prone figure holding a
mask (Wallace Collection, London). For a compendium of famous lines on Time
revealing Truth, see under 'Time and Truth' in B. Stevenson, Home Book of
Quotations, New York, 1934.

2 Bronzino's 'Allegory' is in the National Gallery, London. It is from a cartoon
of the London painting that the Florentine tapestry derives. Described Studies in
Iconology, pp. 84, 86-91, and illustrated fig. 66. For a full discussion of the subject,
see Panofsky's entire chapter, 'Father Time', pp. 69-93.

3 Marcolino da Forli's emblem for the Bottega della Verita is given, facing
p. 199, in Fritz Saxl, 'Veritas Filia Temporis', Philosophy & History: Essays Presented
to Ernst Cassirer, Oxford, 1936. The English reformer, an agent of Thomas Crom-
well, who prepares a primer of 1535, draws also on medieval pictures of Christ's
descent into Limbo in depicting the liberation of Christian Truth from Roman
Catholic hypocrisy. Illustrated Saxl, p. 205.

4 Kernodle, p. 97; Saxl, p. 207.

KIND

treacle, no mustering of spirits, no hint of Robert Browning at
the window in the emblem that adorns an anonymous account
of the Overbury murder: Truth Brought to Light and Discovered by
Time. A tree laden with books and documents sprouts from the
coffin, 1 (Plate XIII) The sense of the picture is patent: the
identity of the murderer is certain to follow. The engraver of
the title page is suggesting after Rosalind, in As Tou Like It
that only Time is requisite, the old justice that examines all
such offenders. He is content to let Time try. (4.1. 2031) But
there is in his acquiescence, as in Cordelia's adjuring of her
sisters, an intelligent, a reasoned confidence whose ground is
more than wishing and willing. He does not suppose that God
or His viceroy Time will pull a curtain to discover the murderer
behind it. It is rather that the murderer will discover himself,
on the analogy that poison, when it is quaffed, will commence,
however slowly, to bite the spirits.

Shakespeare's work from the beginning, drawing on the
analogy to dramatize the sequel of unnatural behaviour,
conveys that assurance. What is more, it confirms it in action.
Cardinal Beaufort, a wicked man, dying,

whispers to his pillow . . .
The secrets of his overcharged soul.

(2 Henry VI, 3-2.375f.)

The point of the scene from the very early play is remembered
and recapitulated later, in a graver and more terrible context:
Tnfected minds', says the Doctor, who ministers to Lady
Macbeth, c To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets.'
(5.i.8of.) Time's office and glory, asserts Lucrece it is her
comfort is to work that discharge, at last ( To mock the subtle
in themselves beguiled'. (1. 957) The murder of the Duke of
Gloucester will be redressed, says Gaunt to the importunate
widow, when Heaven sees the hours ripe on earth. (Richard //,
1.2.6-8) Isabella, cozened by Angelo, balked for the moment
of justice, awaits the unfolding, in

1 At the top, flanking the figure of King James beneath a curtain, are, left:
naked Truth, surmounting Error with his crutch; and, right: Time, treading on
the skeleton, the image of Death. John Droeshout's engraving is particularly
interesting and much the more compelling in that it fuses the image of Truth and
Time with that of husbandry.

KIND

ripened time

. . . [of] the evil which is here wrapped up
In countenance.

(Measure for Measure, 5.1.11618)

So, conversely, with the goodness which Kent disguises in
himself: the ill-suiting weeds in which he is attired are not to be
doffed, the truth which he embodies is not to be known, until
time thinks it meet. (4.7.6-1 1)

Truth, manifest in Goneril's letter to Edmund, will be revealed
to Albany c in the mature time'. (4.6.277-9) Edgar, the instru-
ment of the revelation, will appear to confirm it, 'When time
shall serve*. (5.i.48f.) Even Edmund bears witness to the empery
of Time. For the evil he has done, he is sure that c the time will
bring it out'. (s^iGsf.)

His assurance is verified. c He that covereth his sins, shall not
prosper', but not because Polonius might have said so.
Edmund's lines, and Cordelia's, and the Biblical Proverb
(xxviii.13) on which her couplet depends are sustained by the
action of the play. Time leads on the triumph of Truth. 1
(Plate XIV) Error, who is known by his crutch, cannot stand
in that ultimate judgement. Nor is it the dramatist who tells you
so, but the drama. Even Death is tumbled down, who lays his
icy hand on kings. Time treads on the skeleton, in Droeshout's
engraving. Death has no dominion over virtue, which is Truth. 2
(Plate XV) The gravamen of Boissard's image, in which the
skeleton holds aloft an hour-glass as, in Bernini's tomb of
Alexander VII, he raises toward the kneeling Pope a glass in
which the sands have all run, is not that Death triumphs over
humanity, but that Truth is triumphant over Time. 3

For Truth, to the Renaissance, is Time's daughter and heir.
(Plate XVI) Veritas flia temporis. Erasmus announces the
relation. Bacon corroborates it. The private man and the
sovereign agree in finding it valid. A minor English poet of the
seventeenth century celebrates it in his verses. A sixteenth-

1 At the top: emblems of the Trinity, Justice, Mercy, Nature, Love, Time and
his daughter Truth, Nemesis mounted upon Pegasus. At the sides: two crowned
women kneeling, one with two children, the other with what appears to be an
infant. Beneath them: the New Jerusalem and the Ark. At the foot: Peace, Justice,
and the author at the age of 3 1 . 2 Sola Vistus EstFuneris Expers (Boissard) . 8 Berni-
ni's tomb ( 1 67 1-8) is in St. Peter's, Rome.

KIND

century Italian is sure that 'Time . . . being the Father of
Truth cannot and will not suffer her to remain hidden under
any deceit or fraud 5 . Whitney's emblem communicates the
same assurance. Truth may be fettered in a dungeon :

Yet Time will comme, and take this ladies parte,
And breake her bondes, and bring her foes to foile.

Time, to paraphrase a doggerel couplet by Thomas Kyd,
'Time . . . the author both of truth and right . . . will
bring . . . [all] sins, all treachery to light'. Queen Mary,
who has her own reasons for crying Amen, engraves the Latin
motto on her coins and State seal, and takes it for the legend on
her crest. 1 It is much more than ill mannered to misconceive or
to call in question the relation which that legend announces.
It is fatal. That is the conclusion which the denouement of
King Lear enforces. Time brings in his revenges. Justice and
Providence obtain. 2 But the agent is the peccant man himself.

1 For Erasmus, see Adagiorum opus, Basle, 1526, p. 436; and Saxl, p. 200 n. :
*quendam veterum poetarum Veritatem Temporis Filiam vocasse, quod licet
aliquando lateat, temporis progressu in lucem emergat.' For Bacon: Works, Ellis
and Spedding, 1857, 1, 191 ; and Saxl, p. 220: 'Recte enim Veritas filia Temporis
dicitur, non Auctoritatis.* The English poet is Thomas Peyton (The Glasse of Time,
1620, the t.p. of which is reproduced here as pi. XIV). Anton Francesco Doni
writes of Truth as Time's daughter in La Moral Filosojia, Venice, 1552. See Gertrud
Bing, 'Nugae circa Veritatem: Notes on Anton Francesco Doni', pp. 304-12 in
Journal of the Warburg Institute, vol. I, London, 1937, p. 306, and fig. 46a. For Kyd,
see Sp. Trag. 3 2.4-i74f. Queen Mary is hailed by the Bishop of Winchester : 'Veritas
iam proxima est.* Chew, pp. 69-90, cites Renaissance works in which Truth
appears as Time's daughter.

2 God and let him be, at your pleasure, explicit, implicit God lives and sees
and, given time, will stretch forth his hand: Dominus mvit & mdet. Whitney,
Emblemes, Sig. fsr, p. 229, gives an emblem (available in Shakespeare and the
Emblem Writers, p. 416) depicting Adam hiding in the garden, and thinking,
oblivious of the sense of the Latin tag quoted here, to deny an answer to the voice
that seeks him out.

IV
FORTUNE

IN ow if a man disputes the regnancy of law, manifest in
portents and prodigies, and in the twin concepts of Providence
and kind, if he says, with Edmund,

Tut, I should have been that I am had the maidenliest star
in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing,

(1.2.142-4)

he is not, paradoxically, freeing himself. He is fettering himself.
It is true, I suppose, that Shakespeare, like Edmund, dis-
believed in judicial astrology. Henry Cornelius Agrippa,
defining that mock discipline, exposes sufficiently the vulgarity
of its pretensions:

There yet remaineth an other kinde of Astrologie, which is
called Diuinatorie, or ludiciall, the which entreateth of the
reuolutions of the yeares of the world, of natalities, of questions,
of elections, of intentes and thoughtes, it teacheth moreouer to
fore tell, to call backe, to auoide or flee the endes of all thinges
that maie happen, and the secrete disposition of Gods prouidence.

Calvin despises astrology, and rightly. 1 So do his more thought-
ful contemporaries. Gloucester, owing allegiance to a pseudo-
science, is therefore not sophisticated but simple. Edgar's
wonder, that his brother, whose professions he confounds with
belief, should grow to a sectary astronomical, his incredulity,
his amusement, are meet.

1 For Agrippa, see Sigs. M8v-Nir, in Of the Vanitu and Vncertaintie of Aries and
Sciences, tr. la. San [ford]. Gent., London, 1569. Calvin's disbelief is set forth in
An Admonicion against Astrology ludiciall) tr . G. G[ylby] ,1561. See particularly Sig. B I r .

4 6

FORTUNE
Do you busy yourself about that?

But tact is requisite here. Gloucester, making guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, seems to discounten-
ance free will. Edmund, ostensibly, defends it.

An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to
lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star !

But Gloucester's simplicity looks to the truth, albeit in
superstitious ways.

Blind fear that seeing reason leads finds
safer footing than blind reason stumbling
without fear.

(Troilus and Cressida, 3.2.76-78)

Gloucester is purblind: he has got his hieroglyphics wrong.
But, however obliquely, he perceives their existence. Supersti-
tion is not so mad as self-sufficiency. For it posits a cause.

Edmund is blind altogether. He owns to no agency. He
conceives of man as a natural, in his sense a bestial, a wilful,
phenomenon. He is therefore made thrall to a mechanistic
psychology, to a kind of puerile determinism, from which he
cannot possibly depart.

Men
Are as the time is.

His apprehension is that crude, his freedom that circumscribed.
Like Richard III, his predecessor in Shakespeare's gallery of
self-made men, he is precisely the slave of nature. (1.3.230.)
Characteristically, indeed inevitably, he apostrophizes Fortune
(2.1.19), on whose wheel, now ascending and now turning
downward again, the self-sufficient man, the individualist,
must always climb. 1 (Plate XVII)

^v-

1 Rollenhagio, Sig. Asr, glosses Iris emblem of Fortune: Le Sage cependant
mesprisant sa puissance, S'esleue iusque au ciel par sa ferme Constance.' For other
emblems of Fortune, see Lydgate, The Siege of Troy y MS Royal 18 Dii, c. 1450,
given in Farnham, The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy y facing p. 16;
Campbell, p. 12; Howard R. Patch, The Goddess Fortitna in Mediaeval Literature^
Cambridge, Mass., 1927 (12 plates).

FORTUNE

It is a slippery business. For the wheel, endlessly turning,
suggests not only its untrustworthy nature, but the insecurity of
Fortune herself. Art and literature describe it. The goddess in
whose service Edmund goes stands uneasily upon the sea. 1 One
foot seeks for its stay, the plunging dolphin. Another e is fixed
upon a spherical stone, which rolls, and rolls, and rolls'. The
veil that encircles her is bellied out by the winds. The mast is
shattered to which she clings for support. Safety eludes her;
danger is her constant companion. Like a ship at the mercy of
the waves, she never knows to what haven, or peril, she will be
carried. She is painted blind, with a muffler before her eyes. It
follows, to Primaudaye, that 'They are very blinde, who,
calling Fortune blinde, suffer themselves to be guided and led
by her'. e She is painted also with a wheel,' as Fluellen describes
her, in Henry F, and this 'to signify to you, which is the moral of
it, that she is turning, and inconstant, and mutability, and
variation,' (3.6.31-38) This Fortune is a right whore. Whatever
she gives

she deals it in small parcels.
That she may take away all at one swoop.

(White Devil, i.i)

The man is therefore Fortune's fool who calls himself Fortune's
steward : as Falstaff does when his banishment is almost upon
him. (2 Henry /F, 5.3.i36f.) Only those who will not see found
their hope and trust in Fortune. 2

1 See Corrozet, Hecatomgraphie, 1540, emblem 41 ; and Shakespeare and the Emblem
Writers, p. 262. Fors Fortuna, the mutable goddess, appears in Ovid, Tristia, V.
viii.i5-i8; Pliny the Elder, Natural History, ii.22; Horace, Odes, III.xxix.5if.;
Juvenal, Satires, X.363; Virgil, Aeneid, vi. 748; Tibullus, I.v.Sgf.; Cicero,
Oration vs. Piso, cap. x. See also Patch, The Goddess Fortuna, pp. 11-13, 12 if., 150;
and Patch, 'The Tradition of the Goddess Fortuna', Smith College Studies in Modern
Languages, Northampton, Mass., 1922, III, 131-235. The Romans, conceiving of a
goddess who rules the storm and guides or misguides the tossing vessel, paid homage
to Fortune of the sea.

2 Primaudaye, ch. 44: 'Of Fortune 5 , p. 192. A similar contempt is the burden of
the chapter entitled 'Of Fortune 9 in Baldwin-Palfreyman, edn. 1564, Sigs. X4r-6r.
Seneca reflects constantly on the fickleness of Fortune. H. V. Canter compiles a
catalogue of sententious references taken from the plays, in Rhetorical Elements in
the Tragedies of Seneca, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature,
Urbana, III, 1925, X, 97. Brant, Lanefdesfolz du monde, Paris, 1497, Sigs. f3v~4v,
includes a section on the mutability of Fortune, illustrated by a fine emblem of the
wheel. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna, p. 38, lists invidious epithets and adjectives
applied to Fortune, and current in Latin literature. He discusses and illustrates, on
pp. 49-57, 164, the variable character of the goddess. The four figures who are

4 8

FORTUNE

What help can be expected at her hands
Whose foot [is] standing on a rolling stone.
And mind more mutable than fickle winds?

(Spanish Tragedy, 1.2.28-30)

The intellectual acumen of Edmund is after all a pallid thing.
Now Kent also apostrophizes Fortune. (2.2.180; 5.3.28o)
He makes no question of her power to rain evil on the just and
the unjust. But Kent and the difference is absolute Kent,
like Banquo, keeps a bosom franchised. His equanimity in
defeat matches that of King Edward in Shakespeare's early
history, and rests on and betokens the same assurance.

Though Fortune's malice overthrow my state,
My mind exceeds the compass of her wheel.

(3 Hmy W> W-4&)

Like Sir Thomas More (as Roper reports him), he understands
that life and death are not within his keeping. More, announcing
to his friends his refusal to attend the coronation of Anne
Boleyn, is aware that his enemies, taking umbrage, may
destroy him. e lt lieth not in rny power but that they maye
deuoure me/ That much any man, whatever his strength or
present good fortune, must give away. The wise man adds,
however, this condition: c But god being my good lord, I will
provide that they shall neuer deffloure me.' 1 The same condition
is implicit in the behaviour and character of Kent. He may be
cast down, like Cordelia. But in respect of those hardships that
touch his own person, he is able, like Cordelia, to outfrown
false Fortune's frown (5.3.6), and this because, like the Pompey
of 'Antony and Cleopatra^ declines to be made the fool of Fortune.
The decision is free, and his own.

Well, I know not

What counts harsh Fortune casts upon my face,
But in my bosom shall she never come
To make my heart her vassal.

(2-6.54-57)

depicted, conventionally, as clinging to Fortune's wheel are called, significantly,
Regno, Regnaviy Sum sine Regno> and Regnabo. The first, as the wheel turns, shall be
last.

1 William Roper, The Lyfe of Sir Thomas Moore, kmghte, ed. Elsie V. Hitchcock,
London, 1935, p. 59.

FORTUNE

Choice Is explicit; and choice, in this ultimate matter,
Shakespeare never relinquishes. His tragic heroes enjoy, when
all is said, no more security than Oedipus. Physically they are
no freer than he, they see no further.

But, oh, vain boast!
Who can control his fate?

It is, however, Shakespeare's scheme, as it were his sole proviso,
to image this saving conviction: that the will need not become
the servant to defect, that man, who may be overthrown
tomorrow, may die, at his own election, a free man or a captive.
Choice is his : whether his neck submits to Fortune's yoke or his
mind continues dauntless, to ride in triumph over mischance.
(3 Henry VI, 3.3.16-18) That is all the volition Shakespeare
compounds for; but it is everything.

I will drain him dry as hay.
Sleep shall neither night nor day
Hang upon his penthouse lid.
He shall live a man forbid.
Weary sennights nine times nine
Shall he dwindle, peak, and pine.

But though his bark may be tempest tossed, consigned from the
moment of its putting forth to the malice and the whimsy of
Fortune:

Behold, he is in thine hand,

he cannot founder in his heart, the inmost place from which his
current runs, unless he himself allows Fortune dominion there.
Pericles, who bears a tempest which his mortal vessel tears,
keeps his integrity inviolate. And so he rides it out. (4.4.29-31)
Agreed, that Fortune is sovereign in all the chances of this
life. The man, in Gower's poem, who undertakes a voyage,
may wonder and fearfully, *If that fortuna with him stonde'.
(Confessio, 11.2529) He never knows, nor can he know. Even
Death, the last of all chances, is at the pleasure of Fortune. Sir
David Lindsay gives to one of his characters the saying, C I trow
wan-fortune brocht me heir 5 and 'heir' is the gallows, and the
speaker is about to be hanged. (Ane Satyre, 1. 4022) Fortune,
then, may dog a man to death. The Biblical reservation: e but
save his life 5 , is given away. So common is unmerited suffering

FORTUNE

that the Heavens have grown impervious to it. They can hear a
good man groan, and not relent or compassion him. (Titus,

But Fortune's dominion is not absolute, even so. Patience
triumphs over Fortune. 1 Manly excellence or virtue, dressed
out in the conventional accoutrements of Fortune, and standing
on the waves with a dolphin for support, bears a striking but a
specious resemblance to Fortune which, as it is specious,
dramatizes more vividly the difference between them, and the
superiority of the one to the other. 2 (Plate XVIII) Fortitude
also, thriving on Fortune's malice, is represented as Fortune's
superior.

But in the wind and tempest of her frown,
Distinction with a broad and powerful fan,
Puffing at all, winnows the light away,
And what hath mass or matter, by itself
Lies rich in virtue and unmingled.

(Troilus and Cressida, 1,3.26-30)

Fortune, as in Boccaccio's fable, having no portion in Poverty,
is bested by Poverty. 3 Reason is proof against her blandish-
ments, Nature having given us the wit to flout at Fortune.
(As Ton Like It, i.2.48f.) If the dwelling place of the goddess
attests to her power in disposing of all temporal things, it is
evidence also, to the reasonable man, that only bluntness of
mind will offer to build happiness on them. For Fortune lives
on a mountain, at the summit of earthly felicity.

I have upon a high and pleasant hill
Feign'd Fortune to be thron'd.

(Timon, i.i.65f.)

But the winds of chance assail that lofty place, and render
everything that lodges there uncertain.

1 'La Patience triomphe de la Fortune.* Boccaccio, Lorenzo de* Medici,
Froissart, Gower, Boethius, and others, moralize on the theme. See Patch, Fortuna,
p. 83, n. 2; and Rudolf Wittkower, * Chance, Time, and Virtue*, Journal of the
Warburg Institute, London, 1937, 1, 316-21.

2 The inferiority of Fortune to Wisdom is illustrated in Rollenhagio, emblem
97. A sword and palm are balanced on a winged ball and surrounded by a serpent,
the emblem of eternity. The gloss (Sig, D4r) : c Victrix fortunae sapientia. Ce
trencheant coutelas sur la boule volante, Et ce serpent convert de palme
triomphante, Vont demonstrans a Foeil, comme par la vertue La fortune est
vaincue, E son vol rabaru.*

8 De Casibus, III, i, pp. 6off. ; and Patch, Fortwa, pp. 73f., 64, n. i .

FORTUNE

They that stand high have many blasts to shake them.
And if they fall they dash themselves to pieces.

(Richard III, i . 3 . 2 5 gf . )

(Plate XIX) More's youthful verses for the beginning of the
Book of Fortune offer an alternative gloss :

Build not thine house on height up to the sky.
None falleth far, but he that climbeth high.
Remember, Nature sent thee hither bare;
The gifts of Fortune count them borrowed ware. 1

Those who bow their heads against the steepy mount, as
Timon does, thinking to climb his happiness (i.i.yyf.); who
labour to the top, like the wicked Tamora, trusting thereby to
be safe from Fortune's shot (Titus, 2.1. if.), fall to their destruc-
tion

When Fortune in her shift and change of mood
Spurns down her late beloved.

(Timon, i.i.86f.)

The conclusion you are to draw, and the course you are to
follow, are set forth in Boethius, who furnishes the text and
model for so many, like More, who come after him.

He that would build on a lasting resting-place; who would be
firm to resist the blasts of the storming wind . . . must leave
the lofty mountain's top . . . The hill is swept by all the might
of the headstrong gale . . . Let him fly the danger ... let
him be mindful to set his house surely upon the lowly rock. Then
let the wind bellow . . . thy life will be spent in calmness, and
thou mayest mock the raging passions of the air.

(Consolation of Philosophy, II, Metrum 4)

Shakespeare is more succinct, but hardly less explicit. He
witnesses to the casting down of Edmund. And the cause is not
the nature of whoremaster man. It is that Edmund has given
himself over to Fortune. But, after all, how should he not? If
you disbelieve that B follows A, if you have no faith in sequence,
where are you to go but to chance ? how else are you to read life
but as a lottery? But so to read is to misread, to say with
Leontes, in The Winters Tale,

1 Quoted in R. W. Chambers, Thomas More, Ann Arbor, Mich., 1958, p. 157.

FORTUNE

I am a feather for each wind that blows.

(2.3.154)

This is to give up volition, with which, the Renaissance was
certain, each man is endowed. It is to let

the unthought-on accident . . . [be] guilty
To what we wildly do ... [and thus to] profess
Ourselves to be the slaves of chance.

(44.548-50)
The result is predictable.

The wheel is come full circle, I am here.

(5-3-I74)

One is not to trust to Fortune, that arrant whore (2.4.52),
for Fortune is constant only in inconstancy. No faith inheres in
her. She is, herself, maimed and incapable. 1 To Shakespeare,
as to the Renaissance engraver (Plate XX) and his conven-
tional depiction tallies with a hundred others she is

That goddess blind,
That stands upon the rolling, restless stone.

(Henry V y 3.6.2 yf.)

Those who rise as the wheel rises, fall as surely as it falls :

Base fortune, now I see, that in thy wheele
There is a point, to which when men aspire,
They tumble hedlong downe.

(Edward II, 11. 2627-9)

So Mortimer, in Marlowe's play, and before him, the emblem
writers Sambucus and Whitney and Boissard. Seas alter, men
die, the bravest ship goes down :

Which warneth all, on Fortunes wheele that clime
To beare in minde how they have but a time. 2

The fickleness of Fortune, her giddiness, her blindness, these,
I take it, are given:

1 See Boissard, Emblematum liber, Sig. Osr, p. 93 : 'Nvlli Prestat Velox Fortuna
Fidem*; Horozco, Emblemas, Sig. ?5r, p. 109: 'Pensier Auana Fortuna Manca.*

2 See Whitney, Emblemes t Sig. Bsr, p. n; Sambucus, edn. 1584, Sig. Gyv,
p. 46; Boissard, Emblematum liber, Metz, 1588, Sig. Dir, p. 25: *Humanae vitae
conditio. 5

S.P.-E 53

FORTUNE

'Tis common.

A thousand moral paintings I can show
That shall demonstrate these quick blows of

Fortune's
More pregnantly than words.

(Timon, 1.1.89-92)

But to ebb and flow by the moon, to become a kind of shuttle-
cock, that is only a corner in the punishment reserved for those
who do homage to Fortune. The empery of Fortune effects
more than this : it works a metamorphosis in the man who avows
its dominion, it overcomes his virtue, at last it gathers up his
soul. The villain who announces his intention to play a part in
Fortune's pageant (2 Henry VI, i.2.66f.) chooses the exact
metaphor. Enrolled in the pageant he becomes a man of wax,
a lay figure whom others manipulate at their pleasure. Edmund,
as he is Fortune's acolyte, is like a man made after supper of a
cheeseparing. Goneril the whimsical is not herself any longer,
but Vanity the puppet (2.2.36), as devoid of real substance as
the wooden figures who act out the Morality plays.

This 5 a good block!

(4-6.185)

Brutus, who breaks at Philippi, is only another man fallen in the
chances of life. Cordelia falls also. But Brutus, who is cozened
by Cassius, who swallows the unconscionable saying that one
must be cruel only to be kind, who undertakes the murder of a
friend and finds reasons to cover it:

In your bad strokes, Brutus, you give good words,

(Julius Caesar y 5.1.30)

who, condemning suicide in Cato, ends a suicide himself, this
Brutus is a man broken in more than body. That, at least, is
how the emblem books moralize his story. Fortuna virtutem
superans. 1 Suicide is censured. It is the last link given its

1 See Andreae Alciati Emblematum Libellus, Paris, 1536, p. 44; Emblemes d*Alciat,
Sig. Kav, p. 148; and Whitney, Emblemes, Sig. Isv, p. 70. The sense of the latter is
suggestively different. The 'noble harte' of Brutus, assailed by grief, scorns flight :
*my flighte with handes shalbee*. Addressing himself to suicide, Brutus, 'with
courage great', discovers and announces that prowess waits on Fortune, and that
'fortunes force, maie valiant hartes subdue'. Whitney's Brutus is already the
ambiguous figure of Shakespeare's play, at once overthrown and overthrowing.

FORTUNE

antecedents, the necessary link in a painful and ignominious
chain.

How Shakespeare construed it is perhaps another matter
one, in any event, not responsive to easy apophthegms. Brutus,
believing suicide cowardly and vile, resolves to arm himself
with patience Edgar's counsel to Gloucester and look to
the providence of those high powers that govern us below.
(5.1.104-8.) But Brutus forswears his resolution, he plays the
Roman fool, and this because one is made somehow to feel
he bears too great a mind. Hamlet, acting on the gad, precisely
as Macbeth does:

The very firstlings of my heart shall be
The firstlings of my hand,

(4.i.i47f.)

shoots Ms arrow over the house and hurts his brother. His
punishment, and he perceives it, is the loss of his will. The
Heavens make him their scourge and minister. Yet Horatio's
farewell is just.

And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest !

Antony, who gives himself to dotage, has lost his way for ever
(Antony and Cleopatra, 3.n.3f.) ; and yet, palpably, not so.

Shakespeare I think has it both ways. His tragic heroes and
villains commit themselves to Fortune, and so are altered, one
would suppose irreversibly.

But when we in our viciousness grow hard

Oh, misery on 5 t! the wise gods seel our eyes,

In our own filth drop our clear judgements, make us

Adore our errors, laugh at *s while we strut

To our confusion.

(Antony and Cleopatra, 3.13.111-15)

But Shakespeare, perhaps unreasonably, allows a brief reprieve,
a final welling up or recrudescence.

Yet I will try the last,

Before the battle of Bosworth Field the rival captains address
their troops: first (in Shakespeare's source) the evil Richard,
and then, as the culmination, the pious and victorious

FORTUNE

Richmond. Shakespeare deliberately reverses the order, and so
makes more effective., and even attractive, the final speech of
his villain.

I have set my life upon a cast.
And I will stand the hazard of the die.

(Richard III, 5.4.9^)

I suppose dramatic exigency, the irresistible attraction of that
last efflorescence, to govern him here.

It does not always govern. Oswald is Fortune's fool, and
Oswald dies still abused. He turns the wrong side out (4.2.9), a
pretty thorough metamorphosis. Like Edmund, he repudiates
causality. He does not believe that base conduct leads on to bad
fortune. He is as duteous to the vices of his mistress as badness
could desire. (4.6.258^ In consequence, Nature disclaims in
him: his soul is his clothes (All's Well^ 2.5.48) : he might have
been made by a tailor. (2.2.5gf.) He is unmanned, and this in
accordance with the law which Mephistopheles, in a whimsical
context, announces to Faust. A man is free to choose of the
differing paths which present themselves to him (read : of this
character or that). But having chosen, he must cleave to his
choice. This is to say that, on his commitment, he is made the
slave of nature.

Das erste steht uns frei, beim zweiten sind wir Knechte.

Hence the terms with which Kent reviles Oswald. He is a
servile cur, a kingfisher, a creature bereft of all volition, one of
those who

Renege, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaks
With every gale and vary of their masters,
Knowing naught, like dogs, but following.

(2.2.84-86)

The halcyon smooths the commotion of the waves. He reaps
the reward of peace and complaisance. Ex pace ubertas. (Plate
XXI) He is, in iconography, a figure of peace. Turning his bill
into the prevailing wind, he knows the weather well. The
publisher, Fisher, who took the bird as his device because it
punned on his name, and Boissard and Giovio, the contrivers
of emblems, thought only to praise. Most Elizabethan writers
Gosson and Lyly, Lodge, Greene, and Nashe are of the same

FORTUNE

mind: Happy the Halcyons. 1 Shakespeare turns the cat in the
pan. His halycon Is a type of the opportunist, the idolater of
Fortune, whose wisdom, in proof, is no wisdom at all.

The knave turns fool that runs away.
The fool no knave, perde.

The halcyon's way, that of the follower-fool, is the way of
Oswald, who might have survived the character of knave,
beggar, and coward, and even the legacy descending to him as
son and heir of a mongrel bitch; but who falters absolutely in
his role as super-serviceable rogue. (2.2.17) For the man who
seeks only to ascertain which way the wind blows that he may
make himself the more conformable to it, this practical man,
by a pleasant irony, is just the one whom the wind will capsize.
Complaisance is not merely mean, but more pertinent to the
Oswalds and the Edmunds it is poor policy. A sport, a
weathercock, does not really look after itself. It has no autonomy.
Only to snuff the wind or, to alter the metaphor, to catch hold
of the wheel as it goes up the hill and so be drawn after (2.4.
72-75), is to change an active, a man's role, for a passive, to
become a sort of manikin, to be done to, not to do. The manikin,
whose hallmark is passivity, complaisance, has got to take his
chances. He but gender is inapposite : sticks and stones have
no gender is the natural fool of Fortune. To serve without let
is to please not oneself but some other. Libera Mens Servire
Negat^ The ever-faithful servant is a perpetual ass. 3 'And do not
stand on quillets how to slay him' (2 Henry VI, 3.1.261) is the
counsel a villain bestows on a fool.

Fortune's fool possesses no principles: these derive from the
perception of sequence, the fit, the immitigable relation of

1 See the printer's device in John Marston, The History of Antonio and Mettida,
The First Part, London, 1602; William Meredith Carroll, Animal Conventions in
English Renaissance Non-Religious Prose (1550-1600)1 New York, 1954, pp. io$t;
and Paolo Giovio, Dialogo dell* imprese, Venice, 1562, for an emblem of the halcyon
given in Shakespeare and the Emblem Writers, p. 392. Muir, in his edn. of Lear, p. 7$n.,
cites complementary references in T. Lupton, Tenth Book of Notable Things ; and
Jew of Malta, i . i .s8f.

2 See Whitney, Emblemes, Sig. Nsr, p. 101 : 'bondage is the Prison of the minde' ;
and Brack, Emblemata Bellica, emblem 18, from which the quotation is taken*

8 Fidus servus perpetuus asinus. This was the saying in old age of the Netherlander
Vigilius, a time-serving politician who, through a long life, sacrificed his country
to the Spaniards. See Motley, II, 287.

FORTUNE

things. He cannot, consequently, discriminate between loyalty
and slavishness. Oswald in a sense is loyal.

My lady charged my duty in this business.

(4.5.18)

But the man who does not ask. Who is my lady, and What is
my duty, is not loyal but obsequious, and fatally so.

Every good servant does not all commands :
No bond, but to do just ones.

(Cymbeline, 5.i.6f.)

The first command the sycophant follows, not thinking to
poise and query it, makes him a captive.

Freedom lives hence, and banishment is here.

(1.1.184)

The last command kills him. For the rub is that principles are
not a luxury, as the world likes to construe them, but indispens-
able. The unprincipled man never knows where he is. Aye and
no is parlous divinity, alike for the courtier and the king.

To plainness honour's bound
When majesty stoops to folly,
(1.1.150)

and not wholly for ethical reasons : to turn one's beak with each
gale of the master is hardly to look after oneself.

The villain thinks otherwise. He confounds his passivity
with forthputting behaviour.

For my state
Stands on me to defend, not to debate.

(5-*.68)

But the look of the thing requires a gloss. Really to defend my
state may require that I chastise it, resign it even. 'Wherein I
am false, I am honest; not true, to be true. 3 (Cymbeline, 4.3.42)
Debate, the poising of alternatives, marks the self-conscious man,
mere reflexive action the puppet. To say, blandly:

Now then, we'll use
His countenance for the battle,

(5.i.6af.)
or

FORTUNE

That eyeless head of thine was first fram'd flesh
To raise my fortunes, ( 4 .6. 22 8)

All with me's meet that I can fashion fit,

(1.2.200)

to say, in effect, that human beings are so many ciphers, their
sum a point d'appui 'To raise my fortunes', is to make a
cipher of oneself. For if a man cannot perceive the operation of
sequence, if he miscalls it flux presided over by a blind and
whimsical goddess, what is he then but a prisoner in flux.

The wise man for his part perceives that chance and caprice
are only the facade of things. So perceiving, he turns his back
on Fortune. 1 (Plate XXII) He understands, with Plutarch,
that 'as for the power of Fortune . . . it bringeth downe those
men that of their owne nature are cowards, fearefull and of
small courage'. 2 He knows that, in all last things, Fortune's
power is conditional.

Neither must we attribute cowardlinesse to misfortune, nor valure
and prudence to Fortune, who is not able to make a man great
without vertue.

And the corollary: neither can Fortune make a man mean
without his connivance. 'There is no time so miserable but a
man may be true. 5 (Timon, 4.3.461^) Fortune's sway encom-
passes everything, except the thing itself: the nature or definition
of a man. It holds no power there unless a man, warring on
himself, makes a breach in his own defences, unless, as the
metaphor has it, he elects to climb on the wheel. Primaudaye
is right: it is 'great blockishnesse to attribute ... all casuall
mishaps, both generall and particular, to certaine second
causes'. 3

For Fortune is after all a minor goddess, like the stars in
fee to necessity. Fortune rules the rim of the wheel. God sits at
the centre.

For Juno is the tresourere,

And fortune hir awmonere. 4

1 Expers Fortunae Est Sapientia.

8 The French academie, ch. 44: *Of Fortune*, p, 196.

s The French academie, p. 136.

4 Lydgate, Reson and SensuaUyte, 11. i35of.

FORTUNE

In The Rape of Lucrece, it is Time who turns the giddy round of
Fortune's wheel. (1. 952) In the earliest known Spanish
engraving on metal, Time, controlling Fortune, is himself
controlled with reins held in the hands of God. To Boethius
and to Dante, to Chaucer and Lydgate and Shakespeare,
Fortune or Chance is a handmaiden merely, like Providence
and the images derived from husbandry and Time a kind of
notation, serving to make clear and dramatic and pictorial the
way in which the evil man eats up himself. 1 Fortune is a
metaphor, describing what happens after the important
decisions have been made. The empery of Fortune is exercised
always, after the fact. That is why wisdom (which is freedom),
disbelieving in Fortune, is founded on the perception of
necessity. Or, if you prefer another text, the beginning of
wisdom is the fear of the Lord.

1 See Chew, p. 9; and Patch, Fortuna, pp. i8f., 28, 3 if.

V
ANARCHY AND ORDER

JL HE last and most terrifying role played by the impious man
is that of an anarch.

Blow, wind! Come, wrack!

But Lear offers the best example. He is unkind. Fortune in
consequence makes his heart her vassal. And so he is buffeted;
and so at last he despairs,

Bids the wind blow the earth into the sea.
Or swell the curled waters 'bove the main;

(S-i-Sf.)
calls upon the thunder to

Smite flat the thick rotundity o 5 the world !
Crack nature's moulds, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man !

(3-2.7-9)

To read through all of Shakespeare, and then to return to
passages like these, is to understand, I think, that he expresses
in them his sense of the ultimate horror. Whenever he wishes
to get at the nadir of human experience, he uses language of this
kind. It is the same in the very early plays and the very late.
Clifford, one of the principals in Shakespeare's second historical
drama, discovers the dead body of his father:

Oh, let the vile world end
And the premised flames of the last day
Knit Earth and Heaven together!

(2 Henry VI y 5.2.40-42)
61

ANARCHY AND ORDER

Timon the misanthrope speaks, in what is presumably the last

of Shakespeare's tragedies :

Piety and fear,

Religion to the gods, peace, justice, truth,
Domestic awe, night-rest and neighbourhood,
Instruction, manners, mysteries and trades,
Degrees, observances, customs and laws,
Decline to your confounding contraries,
And let confusion live !

(4.1.15-21)

Florizel, the young hero of The Winter's Tale, seeking fit
punishment for what is most heinous and least possible, is
ready, if his faith should ever fail, to

Let Nature crush the sides o' the earth together
And mar the seeds within!

(4. 4 . 4 88f.)

The rebel Northumberland, informed of the death of Hotspur,
his son, turns desperate:

Let Heaven kiss earth! Now let not Nature's hand
Keep the wild flood confined! Let order die!

(2 Henry IV, i.i.i53f.)

The murderous Macbeth bids the Witches make answer, even
though the waves

Confound and swallow navigation up;

Though bladed corn be lodged and trees blown down;

Though castles topple on their warders' heads ;

Though palaces and pyramids do slope

Their heads to their foundations; though the treasure

Of nature's germens tumble all together,

Even till destruction sicken.

(4.1.53-60)

To trace the concept of Nature's germens, rationes seminales,
the basic seeds of all living things, the stuff of creation, from
St. Augustine through Sts. Anselm and Bonaventure, Albertus
Magnus and Roger Bacon and Aquinas, is to be impressed,
not so much with the antiquity of that concept as with the
reverence accorded to it; and so with the magnitude, the more
than desperate abandon of the curse. The metaphor which

ANARCHY AND ORDER

gives substance to the maledictions of Lear and those who share
the abyss with him expresses the totality of their despair to the
degree that it summons up the long-continuing and deeply
disquieting sense of evil, for the dramatist and for his con-
temporaries, with which anarchy, the tumbling of Nature's
germens, is invested. 1 Shakespeare's play evokes that sense of
evil, neither for the first time nor the last. This is to say that in
its evocation it is conventional, of its time, save of course, and
always, for this : that no other play mirrors with such clarity or
terror the horror attaching to anarchy, to the abdication of
order and degree.

Great horror turns on great conviction: for who, without
standards, will decry, or recognize even, a departure from the
norm ? In this case of King Lear, the central witnessing is to the
primacy and Tightness of order. Shakespeare, exalting order,
appeals to sanctions almost mystical on their face but, in
essence, prosaic, entirely practical. Intelligence divines the
necessary: order is necessary if life is to be sustained: chaos,
the antithesis of order, is also the abrogation of life. When the
Renaissance anatomizes man, and the commonwealth in which
he is subject, and the universe in which he moves, it professes
to see everywhere gradations and connexions; it admits of no
interstices, of nothing capricious. It is, in its reading, not
Epicurean but Stoic. Bacon's Advancement, Caxton's Mirror of
the World, Batman upon Bartholemew, The Kalendar and Compost
of Shepherds, the catalogues of Lobel, Gesner, and Turner,
Robert Recorders The Castle of Knowledge^ the elaboration of
detail on the title pages of Elizabethan books: these attest to
the same impulse, are done in the same faith.

Often the result is tedium, a pedantic (inapplicable) heaping
up of detail. But the ordered vision of Hooker and the careful
articulation of much of Shakespeare's verse I have in mind
particularly Queen Margaret's nautical similitude before the
battle of Tewkesbury (3 Henry VI, 54.3-36), Canterbury's
analogy of the honey bees in the first act of Henry F, FalstafFs
disquisition on sherris, Menenius Agrippa's metaphor of the
body these are also a result.

1 The traditional view of anarchy as the ultimate disaster is treated by W. G.
Gurry, Shakespeare's Philosophical Patterns, Baton Rouge, La., 1937, ch. II : Tumbling
Nature's Germens*, pp. 29-49.

ANARCHY AND ORDER

Oft have I seen a timely parted ghost,

Of ashy semblance, meagre, pale, and bloodless,

Being all descended to the labouring heart.

Who, in the conflict that it holds with death,

Attracts the same for aidance 'gainst the enemy;

Which with the heart there cools and ne'er returneth

To blush and beautify the cheek again.

(2 Henry F/, 3.2.161-7)

When, in subsequent decades, men learn to prefer before all
temples the upright heart and pure, the vision breaks and the
sinews of poetry slacken. But not yet. To Shakespeare (as to
Topsell and John Gerard and Thomas Cooper and Primaudaye)
everything is at bottom contiguous; one explores the connex-
ions.

Lear, striving in his little world of man to outstorm the wind
and rain (3-i.iof.), is seen expressly as the microcosm, an
abstract or model of all other things, a faithful rendering in
little, agate-like, of the macrocosm, the greater world, which
contains him. Here is Bacon, in The Advancement of Learning,
on man figured as the microcosm, a kind of metonymy but
engrossed : one part implying but also including the whole :

Of all substances which nature hath produced, man's body is
the most extremely compounded. For we see herbs and plants
are nourished by earth and water; beasts for the most part by
herbs and fruits; man by the flesh of beasts, birds, fishes, herbs,
grains, fruits, water, and the manifold alterations, dressings, and
preparations of the several bodies, before they come to be his
food and aliment. Add hereunto, that beasts have a more simple
order of life, and less change of affections to work upon their
bodies: whereas man in his mansion, sleep, exercise, passions,
hath infinite variations: and it cannot be denied but that the
Body of man of all other things is of the most compounded mass. 1

Ulysses, in Troilus and Cressida, analysing the dissension which
frustrates the Greeks, isolates it to use Bacon's phrase in one
'exact or compendious image' :

Kingdomed Achilles in commotion rages
And batters down himself.

(2. 3 .i8 5 f.)

1 Book II, pp. logf., Everyman edn.

ANARCHY AND ORDER

King John, beset by the claims of conscience and the wicked
desire to achieve his cousin's death, finds in himself a civil
tumult reigning,

in the body of this fleshly land,
This kingdom, this confine of blood and breath.

(4.2.245-8)

Not man, generically (as Falstaff conceives of him), is warmed
and exhilarated by wine: rather is the little kingdom of man
incited by it to arm. 'And then the vital commoners and inland
petty spirits muster me all to their captain, the heart, who, great
and puffed up with this retinue, doth any deed of courage. 5
(2 Henry IV, 4.3.1 16-21)

It is, to alter the analogy, reminiscent of a nest of Chinese
boxes, this Renaissance notion of part within part, and of the
matchless congruence which this part displays in its connexion
with and dependence on that other. The Ptolemaic universe is
one emblem of that congruence. Copernicus, who begins its
destruction, finds nevertheless c a wonderful symmetry in the
universe, and a definite relation of harmony in the motion and
magnitude of the orbs'. 1 The hierarchy which obtains in the
well-ordered state offers a second emblem :

For government, though high and low and lower,
Put into parts, doth keep in one consent,
Congreeing in a full and natural close,
Like music.

(Henry V y 1.2.180-3)

The family has its dependencies : the man is the head of the
woman. To dispute the relation, as Henry's queen Margaret
does, who hampers and dandles her husband like a baby,
makes against what is congruous. Thus the (scandalous)
occasion of the proverb: 'Most master wear no breeches. 32
(2 Henry VI, i.3.i48f.)

When Albany steps forward, to defend, in legal and churchly
phrases, the right of his wife to marry the half-blooded fellow:

'Tis she is sub-contracted to this lord,

(5-3-87)

1 De revolutwnibus erbium cekstium, lib. I, cap. 10.

2 'The woman wears the pants'.

ANARCHY AND ORDER

the Impact of the tableau, which is, significantly, the moment
of peripeteia, derives from one's awareness that the canons of
church and law, now insisted on, however sardonically, have
been scanted throughout the play by Edmund and Goneril and
Regan. It is they who mimic, and not Albany, and we who recoil
at the mimicry. When another tableau Goneril and Edmund
play at chivalric romance :

Yours in the ranks of death,

(4.2.24)

their brute lust is made the more manifest by contrast with
the character it seeks to assume. One's sense of the convention
is never more acute nor more strongly asserted than when that
convention is guyed.

And, farewell, friends.

Thus Thisby ends.

Adieu, adieu, adieu.

Physiology also, and husbandry, furnish analogies. King
Lear levies on all these, at once to dramatize what happens
when the ideal is destroyed, and to set forth, by inference, the
seals or spells which make good the destruction. It is a play
about the relation of parent and child, husband and wife,
master and servant, health and sickness, custom and the
breach of custom, convention and aberration, the natural and
the perverse, the use and the misuse of power, loyalty and
sycophancy, chaos and concord.

The right relation lapses. The strong and manifold bond
(2.i.4gf.) no longer ties parents and children. Paternity is

disavowed.

I never got him.
(2.1.80)

A daughter's dower is her father's curse. (1.1.207) Children
make their parent an obedient parent, act towards him in the
tender of a wholesome weal. (1.4.230)

Old fools are babes again.

(i-s-tB)

A daughter, who knows or knew once the .offices of nature, the
bond of childhood (2.4.180), traduces her father to his vassal.
(2.1.91-95) Thefatherwho thinks, like Ferardo in LylfsEupkues,

ANARCHY AND ORDER

to reap comfort for his care and the assumption is laconic : that
is its point finds obstinacy paid for obedience and, for duty,
the dereliction of duty. A son-in-law, who is also a Hege man,
denies to speak with the king, his wife's father. It is as if the
fixed stars no longer held to their courses.

The images of revolt and flying off.

(2.4.90)

The kingly father, necessarily, is counselled:

You should be ruled and led.

(2.4.149)

He must kneel, for mere necessities, to the child. This father
makes his daughters his mother. (i.^iSyf.) That other becomes
as ward to the son. (i.2*73f.)

Aeneas, 'our great ancestor', on whose shoulders the wearied
Anchises, his father, is brought safely out of Troy (Julius
Caesar., 1.2.112-14), is the honoured and conventional emblem
of loyal and natural behaviour. (Plate XXIII) Pietas filiorum
in parentes* Shakespeare approves and dramatizes the legend in
the person of young Clifford, who bears the body of his father
'As did Aeneas old Anchises bear 5 . 1 (2 Henry F/, 5.2.62)
Edgar, disguised as Poor Tom, as he leads and supports the
blinded Gloucester (4.1), enacts the familiar emblem. Edmund,
who is called loyal and natural, distorts it to parody. In the
world of King Lear y Edmund is the new Aeneas.

The younger rises when the old doth fall.

(3-3-26)

The child-like office for which he is praised is not the succouring
of age, but its confounding with idle bondage and oppression.
(2.1.106) But as he confounds again, the wonted economy of
the play so is he confounded. Absalom also, the archetype of
filial ingratitude as Aeneas is of filial duty, Absalom, like
Edmund, misconstrues the relation of parent and child. 2 (Plate
XXIV) The mistaking of each is the destruction of each.

1 Whitney also, Embkmes, Sig. Xsr, p. 163; and Horozco, Sig. Rsr, p. 123,
moralize the piety of Aeneas. Bernini memorializes it in a statue of 161819 ^ *^e
Galleria Borghese, Rome. And see Green, p. 191 ; and Alciati, Emblematim Libellus,

P* 73*

2 The Death of Absalom is given also in Bocksperger, Sig. Glv.

6 7

ANARCHY AND ORDER

No doubt it is a foolish father who sees his son a gentleman
before him (3.6.i3f.), who gives everything to the son and, in
his waning age, sets foot under his table. ( Taming of the Shrew,
2.1402-4) But the son is more foolish, to build on the father's
ruin. 1 And not because the homilies say so. Of course, it is
precisely what they do say. We ought to have for our parents
in their old age, the same care that they had for us in our
childhood.' 2 So the good commonplace. The model of that
recommended care is Cordelia. Like the kind son of Sidney's
unfortunate king (Arcadia, 11.10), the only remnant of her
happiness is to do a service to her parent.

It is thy business that I go about.

(4.4.24)

But if one assents to Aesop's saw, and Cordelia's devotion, and
the unexceptionable saying of Corinthians that love 'seeketh
not her own things' (i.xiii.4-5), it is not from vague piety alone,
a merely sentimental concurrence. It is from the conviction that
he's mad who tears the hand that feeds him. (3.4.i5f.) Filial
ingratitude is suicide. It reflects, most dramatically because
most personally, the rash indifference to natural law which is
only the codification of the possible that reaches its apogee in
the disordered state, and culminates, willy-nilly, in chaos.

Intestine strife, is fearefull moste of all.

(Plate XXV)

That is why, at the beginning of his career, Shakespeare presents,
as the right emblem of the civil warfare his early histories
explore, the mortal conflict between fathers and sons.

England hath long been mad, and scarred herself
The brother blindly shed the brother's blood,
The father rashly slaughtered his own son,
The son, compelled, been butcher to the sire.

(Richard III, 5.5.23-26)

The conflict waxes. Not only great folks, despite the grave
digger in Hamlet, have countenance to do themselves hurt. The

1 Brant, Sigs. p i v-sv, includes in his catalogue of fools those who withhold honour
from their parents.

2 Fables D'Esope, p. 22 1 . Storks figure in Aesop's emblem as a corroboration of
the central point: they are supposed to help one another in flying. See Ripa,
Iconologia, under 'Commertio della Vita Humana',

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ANARCHY AND ORDER

mere servant rises, the prelude to Ms fall, declines to serve his
royal master, declines to acknowledge his existence.

My lady j s father.

(1.4.8?)

But the lackey, in his wilful disputing of decorum, has a
pattern before him to study. He is urged to rebel by the mistress
who ought to restrain him.

What grows of it, no matter.

(1.3.23)

Nor is the mistress content to corrupt the apprehension of a
servant. As he is enfranchised by her the enfranchisement of
Caliban :

Freedom, heyday!

(Tempest, 2.2.191)

so is her husband, by agreement her master, depressed:

Pray you, content.

(14.336)

Wives and daughters in King Lear change their thimbles into
gauntlets, their needles to lances, their gentle hearts to bloody
inclination. (King John, 5.2.156-8) A servant betrays his
lord, and so at last himself; a lord betrays his servant, and
himself. The worthy arch and patron (2.1.61), who owes and
professes good will to his fief:

My noble friend !

(2.1.88)

confounding expectation again, the source of the horror
does upon him the most terrible ill. So all things find out their
contraries. The intervention of a menial, who stabs the master
he has served ever since he was a child (3.7.72), answers to, and
pays home, that master's unkindness. It functions also as the
final notation in the paradigm, disorder. Nor is the yoking of
the words, so diverse in connotation, inapposite, really. Oswald
with a lorgnette, the card or calendar of gentry, Albany at the
distaff, Goneril with a drum, and Regan a baton, and the Duke
of Cornwall put down by a peasant: oxymoron is the figure for
Lear.

S.P.-F 69

ANARCHY AND ORDER

Society has Its norms; so does the body. The breaking of
hierarchy is the antithesis of the one. Disease is the antithesis
of the other. Each is seen as usurpation, the disputing of what
ought to be. Tragedy is the ultimate usurpation or incongruity.
It involves in its working out, the destruction of the good. That
fact, as it is monstrous, is either denied (the appeal to sentimen-
tality), or palliated by the absurd suggestion that the good
deserve their misfortunes (the appeal to the Elizabethan World
Picture). Juliet and Desdemona are said to be wilful: after all,
they disobey their parents. What ! My foot my tutor andsoforth.
Cordelia's silence is said to be self-indulgent : she shows herself
headstrong like the king. But the metaphor from sickness
enforces an understanding of the rigour of tragedy that is
neither timorous nor fanatic, that has nothing to do with justice
or injustice. Given its fevered origin, the issue of tragedy is
necessary, but in altogether impersonal ways :

Before the curing of a strong disease,
Even in the instant of repair and health,
The fit is strongest. Evils that take leave,
On their departure most of all show evil.

(King John, 3.4.112-15)

Contagion catches the good man. It taints the life of the
commonwealth, also. Rebellion, a constant in the Lancastrian
plays, engendered in the sick brain of the malcontent, grows to a
dangerous distemper in the whole body of the kingdom. Rank
diseases menace its heart. 1 The melancholic Jaques, who follows
the deposed Duke of As Ton Like It, discovers the world, topsy-
turvy as it is, on a sick bed : he would cleanse its foul body of
infection. (2.7.59-61) Richard II, deprived also of his right,
likens the depriving and its issue to a boil, pustulous with sin,
which

gathering head
Shall break into corruption.

The lords attending on King John find out his evil purpose in
his face. It reveals, in its malign alterations, a 'passion ... so

1 'The English state, the universe of this play [sHIV], is an unhealthy body
which needs a drastic purge, which may, indeed, be incurable': Traversi, An
Approach to Shakespeare, N. Y., 1956, p. 29; and see p. 36.

ANARCHY AND ORDER

ripe it needs must break. And when it breaks/ avers Pembroke,

anticipating the murder of Arthur,

I fear will issue thence

The foul corruption of a sweet child's death.

(4.2.79-81)

Gloucester rationalizes the treachery he imagines in Edgar,
once a son, 'Now outlaw' d from my blood' (3.4.171) not, I
think, a legalism only: Edgar, now attainted, but a physio-
logical description: Edgar, now wasted, corrupted, diseased.
Lear, baffled by Goneril's unkindness, must see her behaviour,
not as wilful but involuntary, a disease in the flesh, a swollen
boil,

A plague sore, an embossed carbuncle.
In my corrupted blood. (2.4.2258)

Sanity cannot abide any other explanation. And when that
other comes, its entail is madness, figured also as rebellion,
usurpation :

down, thou climbing sorrow I
Thy element's below. (2.4.57^)

But Lear is mad before. Careless of precedence, he is kinder
to his toe than to his heart. (3. 2.3 if.) Enter to him, admonishing,
Menenius Agrippa. Blind to use and wont, he disclaims, with
that other kingly anarch, Leontes, all paternal care (1.1.115),
esteeming only c our forceful instigation 5 . ( Winter's Tale., 2. i . 1 63)
He is, as he plumes the will, indifferent to the sanctions and
prohibitions of custom, not, in his simplicity, the antique face
of plain old form (Kingjohn^ 4-2.2i), but shrivelled to the dust
on antique time. He craves permission to sweep it away.
(CoriolanuS) 2.3.i25f.) After all it is Lear who gives Edmund,
the decrier of custom, his charter. Custom is a plague. (1.2.3)
Enter Coriolanus, raving.

Let me o'erleap that custom.

(2.2.140)

To do so is, however, to make a mortal breach in oneself.
That is why York, in Richard II, counsels his master to respect
the prerogative of a subject. To despise it is to

take from Time

His charters and his customary rights.
71

ANARCHY AND ORDER

The result of that usurpation is tragedy, to the sovereign and

to his subject:

Let not to-morrow then ensue to-day;
Be not thyself; for how art thou a king
But by fair sequence and succession ?

(2.1.195-9)

For custom is neither affectation nor idle ceremony. It is the
sign and flag of conduct which most nearly fulfills and agrees
with human nature or kind. Philip II, reproving a subordinate
for sacrificing an interest to a ceremony, is answered and rightly :
c How a ceremony? Your Majesty's self is but a ceremony! 5
What is customary and ceremonious has to do with what is
feasible in nature. Custom is in fact our vice-nature. So John
Donne, in c Love's Deity 5 and, before him, the Elizabethan
homilist: 'Custome is as it were an other nature.' 1 It follows
that the breach of custom is breach of all. (Cymbeline, 4. 2.1 of.)
Who pays allegiance to custom

Hath good assurance long to dure,
And who the same to rente is ryfe,
Regardeth neither helth nor lyfe. 2

Edmund, who overleaps custom, as he is less in blood than
others, wrongs others the more. (s^.iSyf.) He is the bastard,
who would top his legitimate brother. (i.2.2of.) He is the son
and the subject, who would undertake the murder of both
father and king.

Now, as Providence is the emblem of order in the universe,
and Fortune of disorder in the disposing of all temporal business,
so, in the commonwealth, the emblem of order is the king.

What is the body when the head is off?
(3 Henry 71,5.1.41)

Like the imperatives of kind, the duties owed to a king are, not
prescriptive but organic. When, in King John, the repentant
rebels determine to pay those duties once more, they see and
render themselves, and their relation to the sovereign, in terms
of natural phenomena.

We will un tread the steps of damned flight,
And, like a bated and retired flood,

1 Sig. Ddar in Baldwfn-Palfreyman, edn. 1564.

2 Hall, Court of Virtue, Sig. Riv,

ANARCHY AND ORDER

Leaving our rankness and Irregular course,
Stoop low within those bounds we have o'erlooked
And calmly run on in obedience
Even to our ocean.

(5-4-52-57)

The ocean is the king. He enfolds all Ms people. As Providence
towers over the world, so the king, who is the deputy of Pro-
vidence, however unworthy in himself (2 Henry VI, 3.2.285f.),
towers over the kingdom, contains it In his person. (Plate
XXVI)

Lear, alive belatedly to the magnitude of his charge, is more
than angered at the stocking of his messenger. He is Incredulous :
men do not exist who will work such violent outrage on respect.
(2.4.24) And yet, as it Is he who gives warrant to Edmund, so
is it he who, mistaking his own place (2.4.12), emboldens
Cornwall and Regan to engross the mistake. To shake all cares
and business (1.1.40) is not the business of a king. The tenor
of Leir's resigning in the old play is instructive in that it com-
municates a slackening of fibre:

Oh, what a combat feeles my panting heart,
'Twixt childrens loue, and care of common weale 1

(Sc. 3)

When, less than a decade before Shakespeare was born, the
king and emperor Charles abdicated his throne, he did so to
great applause. It was not, however, his ambition, merely to
slough a burden. He sought to exchange it for another, more
onerous. That, at least, Is the myth, the conventional reading.
Lear is culpable, not because he abdicates, in any case not in
that alone, but because of the manner in which he gives over. It
Is so fatuous and irresponsible, so patently self-indulgent, blind
pride going before the inevitable fall. Lear's abdication is a
kind of mean charade:

Unburdened [to] crawl toward death.

(1.1.42)

In that sense abdication is felt as c sloth and want of courage',
and so Philemon Holland, translating the Morally construes
it. 1

1 P- 383- Quoted CampbeH, p. 182.

ANARCHY AND ORDER

But if a man divests himself of rule (1.1.50), he must agree
to be ruled, henceforward to bear his ass on his back. 1 (i .4. i j6f.}
Lear grudges his assent: it was not what he meant at all. And so
he seeks to reassume, at least the privilege of kingship. But he
can no longer manage what he has given away. Sovereignty is
indivisible.

What, hath the firmament more suns than one ?

(Titus, 5.3-17)
The analogy from nature is common.

One Sonne ruleth over the day, and one Moone over the nyghte :
and to descende downe to the erthe, in a litell beest whiche of all
other is moste to be marvayled at, I meane the Bee, is lefte to
man by nature, as hit semeth, a perpetuall figure of a iuste
governaunce or rule: who hath amonge them one principall Bee
for theyr governour, who excelleth all other in greatnes.

But the primacy and indivisibility of a king rest also on Biblical
sanction. Again, Sir Thomas Elyot is apposite:

And if any desireth to have the governance of one persone proved
by histories, let hym fyrste resorte to the holy scripture: where he
shall fynde that almyghty god commanded Moses only to brynge
his elected people out of captivite, gyvynge onely to hym that
authoritie, without appoyntynge to hym any other assistence of
equall power or dignitie . . . And bicause Dathan and Abiron
disdayned his rule, and coveyted to be equall with hym, the
erthe opened, and fyre issued out, and swalowed them in. 2

The impact of the story, attested to by its currency, derives
from the conclusion it enforces. When Mary Stuart returned
from France in 1561, the citizens of Edinburgh, to impress on
her their hatred of idolatry: more gods than the one true god,
represented in a tableau vivant the destruction of Dathan,
Abiram, and Corah. Earlier in the century, Holbein reflected
on their protest and its answering* The Erastian propagandist
who composed The Pilgrim's Tale saw also any challenge to
undivided authority as bringing with it immediate requital.
He cited also as his exemplum the lot of Dathan and Abiram
who, Tor resistinge moses . . . sonk vnto hell'. The emblem
writers for their part are alert to the moral, explicit (they would

1 See Plate XLIX, ch. VIII.

2 Elyot, The boke named the Governour, London, 1531, Sigs. ATV, A8v.

ANARCHY AND ORDER

say) in the fate of the Reubenite chieftains: the king's prerogative
is single. 1 It is one of the ironies of the play that Lear, a king
and no king, should be answered out of Ms own mouth, should
find his passionate protest annulled in dispassionate ways. The
buckler that defends him so long as he wears it, an impersonal
thing, shows him its other face when he hands it to another.
The buckler, the office, is no more partial than roan Barbary,
who bears King Richard today and, Richard dismounting,
King Bolingbroke tomorrow.

The king, putting off his prerogative, is guilty. That is a
given, and verified and requited in proof: at Pomfret, at Dover.
But the successor, usurping the prerogative, or using it only to
abuse it, is also guilty. His punishment follows.

So shaken as we are, so wan with care.

(j Henry IV, r.i.i)

Macbeth steals the ruler's garment. It does not fit: he is a
dwarfish thief whose robe hangs loose about him (5.2.20-22),
an insufficient pretender on whom the cloak of office

lies as sightly . . .
As great Alcides' shows upon an ass.

(King John, 2,1.143^)

For that reason his imposture is discovered. It is a measure of
his puerility that he does not appreciate his own slightness.
His case is mirrored faithfully in that of the pigmies, who
presume on their master Hercules, sleeping. 2 Macbeth creeps
on Duncan, asleep, and Caliban on Prospero, and the mongrel
Oswald and his betters on Lear. The sleeping king betrays his
trust.

I, thus neglecting worldly ends.

(Tempest, 1.2.89)

But those who move against him under cover of that betrayal
nod also.

So doves do peck the falcon's piercing talons.

(5 Henry VI, 1.4.41)

*See Boissard, Emblematum liber, Sig. T^r, p. 149; 'Sacerdotes honorandi';
Kernodle, p. 69; Icones, Sig. Eir; The Court of Venus, ed. R. A. Fraser, Durham,

N.C,, I955.P- i<>4> L 9*

z See Whitney, Embkmes, Sig. B4v, p. 16 : *Quod potes, tenta.*

ANARCHY AND ORDER

Lear's indignant cry, C I think the world's asleep' (i.^if.), is
approved in a double sense. There's a divinity that hedges the
office of the king. (3.7.57)

The divinity that wards, and the sacrosanct flesh are, like
Providence and Fortune, symbolic merely. The Elizabethans,
or some of them, mistook the symbol for literal fact. If no one
makes that mistake any longer, if the outwall or symbol has
been corroded to rubbish with time, the imperatives it was
fashioned to express remain, at least viable, still. Degree is not
the specious mask of thrones to bear down Nature: the eccentric
proposal Fulke Greville allows to a character in one of his plays
(Mustapha, 4.4) It is the line of demarcation that separates
disparate things, and so preserves the integrity, and efficiency,
of each. When Shakespeare wants an emblem of disorder, he
offers the firm soil winning of and losing to the watery main, an
interchanging of states which cancels the autonomy of either. 1
(Sonnet 64) That is why Laertes, hastening against the king,
is seen as the ocean, eating at the flats, overpeering of his list
(Hamlet, 4.5.99-105) : in sum, taking to himself, not simply what
is interdicted: there is no force, after all, in arbitrary pro-
hibition; but rather, taking to himself what is inimical to him-
self, what is subversive of, and contrary to, his nature. And the
striking effect of the analogy in that particular scene in Hamlet
is not diminished but engrossed by the fact that its application
is deeply incongruous. The king in question is the shadow of a
king, a cutpurse of the title. But when Claudius says,

There's such divinity doth hedge a king
That treason can but peep to what it would,

(4.5.122-5)

his almost blasphemous enunciating of what may be called the
proper reticulation of things is made the more compelling of
acknowledgement, just in proportion to the element of falsity
in the speaker, a clown in regal purple dressed. The exception
affirms the rule. Milton's Satan is a parody of God, and Sycorax
a parody of Prospero; and the parody, the simulacrum,
heightens one's understanding of, and reverence for, the thing
itself. We mind true things by what their mockeries be. (Henry
F, 4. Prologue) The parody enforces discrimination.

1 And see sHIV, i.i.6af.; TC, 1.3.10-13.

7 6

ANARCHY AND ORDER

To say, then, with the homilist: As well assault the heavens
as the throne, is to utter a similitude, expressive of the notion
that no man is omnicompetent, nor the other face of the coin
entirely negligible, either. The saluting of another's pre-
rogative is the condition of the saluting of prerogative in oneself.
The relinquishing of a portion of my freedom is the condition
of my freedom. The Renaissance, endorsing the proposition,
is, characteristically, oblique, analogical. It figures order in
the heavens, embodies order on the throne, and then brings
forward Capaneus, in contempt of both. Capaneus assails the
ruler and challenges the god.

Trout for factitious bait.

He ends as you would think, consumed with the lightning in
scaling the walls. (Plate XXVII) Marsyas., the satyr of Phrygia,
essays the same challenge. He avows himself, in music, Apollo's
superior: he is bested by Apollo and bound and flayed alive.
(Plate XXVIII) Niobe, despising divine privilege and, the
moralists would interpolate, privilege divinely appointed is
bereft of her children and turned into stone. 1 As men c puffe
them vp with pride 3 , so does the frog, a homelier anarch, a more
vulgar kind of fool, who would rival the ox in size as the addle-
pated commoner would rival the king. The result is substantially
the same, and also the moral: Arrogance renmrsee*

Phaeton, to whom Shakespeare likens the reckless king
Richard II (3*3.i78); Icarus, whom John Higgins in the
Mirror for Magistrates describes inferentially in terms of the
foolish parent of King Lear; 3 Ixion, for his attempt on the
Queen of Heaven, one of the four chief sinners punished in
Hades; most conspicuously, Prometheus, not the aspiring hero
of Shelley but the overreacher of Alciati and Aneau who finds
out his just deserts: these, to the Renaissance, are the most
popular archetypes of usurpation and its issue. Phaeton, playing
at the role of Apollo, is hurled for his incapacity from the chariot
he rashly assumes. 4 (Plate XXIX) Icarus, as he shuns the good

1 See Whitney, Emblemes, Sig. Bsr, p. 13.

2 See Desprez, Le Theatre, Sig, A^r, p. 7.

8 LI. 37-39 : *A fethered king that practisde for to flye and soare: Whereby he
felt the fall God wot against his will, And neuer went, roode, raignde nor spake,
nor flew no more/ Quoted Muir, p. 238.

4 In Temerarios (Alciati).

ANARCHY AND ORDER

sense of the saying. Noli altum sapere* makes one of those who
'paste theire reache doe mounte'. He is incompetent; he falls
to his decay. 2 As Lear, for his sins, is bound to the wheel of fire
(4.746), so Ixion, for taking to himself the prerogative of a
god, revolves in perpetual torment on the wheel. 3 (Plate XXX)
For the concord which pervades the cosmos must expel, as
foreign to it, all that is discordant, a man who claps on wings, a
man who looks into the sun. This is to paraphrase Bradley
(whose master is Hegel) on the nature of Shakespearean
tragedy. But the notion is an old one, and familiar to Shake-
speare. Its root is in Pythagoras and his disciples. Plato and
Cicero expound it. Pliny likens the sun to the intellect of the
universe, and discovers it routing the darkness, not only from
the sky but even from the minds of men. 4

Dispute the primacy of the sun, and darkness mantles the
reason. Caliban casts out Ariel. The reign of Jack Cade or Jack
Straw commences: the reign of chaos and old night. It is
Catiline, in Jonson's play, the classic figure of the rebel, who
calls on chaos. Thus the admonition of Erasmus : 'The thynges
that be aboue vs belonge nothynge vnto vs . . . it becometh
not lacke strawe to reason of princes matters.' 5 The same words
are seized on by Alciati to moralize the punishment of

1 See the printer's device in T. Morton, Apologia Catholica, London, 1605: a
scroll on which the words, Noli altum sapere, appear, and beneath which an old man
is standing, is secured to the branches of an olive tree. The device was used originally
by the Parisian printer, Charles Estienne (1551-61). With Estienne's motto,
compare the saying, Nimium sapere, applied explicitly to the flight and fall of Icarus
by Sambucus, Embtemata, Sig. B8v, p. 32. Phaeton is depicted also in Emblems
d'Alciat, Sig. Fav, p. 84; Green, pp. s85f.; and by Michelangelo in three chalk
drawings, intended to denote his own presuinptuousness in addressing himself to
Gavalieri. See Studies in Iconology, figs. 1624, an( i P- sign, for a list of traditional
allegorical interpretations of Phaeton as overreacher.

2 For representations of Icarus, see Emblemes d'Alciat, Sig. I4r, p. 135; Whitney,
Emblemes, Sig. Dav, p. 28; Alciati, Emblematum Libellus, p. 57; and Green, pp. 288f.

3 Rollenhagio, Sig. C2v, glosses the crime and punishment of Ixion : *Sequitur
sua poena nocentem. De rhomme impenitent le forfaict execrable, Ne demeure
impuni, ains tousiours miserable II sent la main de Dieu, qui avec pieds boiteux
Exige tost ou tard un tourment rigoureux.'

4 Timaeus; Somnium Scipionis; Natural History, 11.5. J. A. K. Thomson, Shake-
speare and the Classics, London, 1952, pp. i42f., quotes the latter passage and offers
additional documentation.

5 Sig. Cjr in Richard Taverner, Proverbes or Adagies, gathered oute of the Ckiliades 9
London, 1552. See also Taverner's trans, of Flores . . . sententiarum, under
'Socrates'; and Greene, Friar Bacon, 1.2, in which the clown Miles speaks of 'the
fable of the Fox and the Grapes; that which is above us pertains nothing to us'.

ANARCHY AND ORDER

Prometheus 3 the great breaker of concord, the master thief of
what belongs to another. 1 (Plate XXXI) The pain he suffers,
he solicits. That is why the emblem writer finds the tearing of
Prometheus analogous to the self torment of a guilty conscience. 2
Prometheus is consumed by the gnawing vulture of the mind.
(Titus, 5.2.31) It is he himself, another Lear, who, abjuring his
place, the vestment or outward sign of his nature, ties to him
sharp-toothed unkindness, like a vulture. (2.4.i35f.)

The Renaissance, because the result of challenging order is
so clear and acutely disagreeable, never stints in celebrating
its virtues.

In every thyng is ordre: and without ordre may be nothing stable
or permanent: And it may nat be called ordre excepte it do
contayne in it degrees, high and base, accordynge to the merite
or estimation of the thynge that is ordred. 3

Neither does the Renaissance tire of representing the torment
inflicted by the vulture of sedition, to take a phrase from
i Henry VL (4.3.47) In a classical mood it will refer you to the
punishment of Tityus who, for presuming to attack Latona, the
mother of Apollo and Diana, must acquiesce, eternally, in the
eating of his liver, the seat of his unlucky aspiration. In a
whimsical mood it will seek out in the bestiaries its emblem of
presumption and the ills attending on it. Case in point: the
raven. He looks hard at himself, and discovers there the puissance
of the eagle; and so finds out the reward of all myopic creatures,
a place in tomorrow's bill of fare. 4

Take but degree away.

The entire action of Shakespeare's two historical tetralogies
dramatizes the wisdom of Ulysses, the pertinence and tightness
of his warning.

1 Qual supra nos } nihil ad nos. The torture of Prometheus is given also by Boissard,
Embhmatvm liber, Metz, 1588, Sig. Gir, p. 17, under 'Periculosa scrutatio'; Aneau,
Pitta Poesis, Lyons, 1555, p. 90 (in Green, p. 267) ; Emblems d* Alciat, Sig. Isv,
p. 134 (in Green, p. 266, who draws from different edns.: Lyons, 1551, and
Antwerp, 1581) ; and, in painting by Rubens. See Stud, in Icon., fig. 161 .

2 Whitney, EmbUiws* p. 75.

3 Elyot, The Governour> Sig. ASV.

4 Michelangelo (in a chalk drawing) and Titian depict the torture of Tityus.
See Stud, in Icon.* figs. 159, 160. The raven and eagle appear hi Desprez, Le Theatre^
p. 16: *Ne cherche point les choses plus hautes que toy.'

ANARCHY AND ORDER

Take away ordre from all thynges, what shulde than remayne?
Gertes nothynge finally, except some man wolde imagine eftsones,
Chaos . . . where there is any lacke of ordre, nedes muste be
perpetuall conflicte . . . whan ... [a man] hath distroyed
that wherewith he dothe participate by the ordre of his creation,
he hym selfe of necessite muste than perisshe, wherof ensuethe
universall dissolution. 1

Degree must obtain, else man will prey on man, and chaos,
Elyot's 'confuse mixture', come again.

Chaos is the absence of the justice which is order. When
justice lies hidden, all earthly things fall in confusion. 2 The
emblem of that confusion is Doomsday, the promised end
(5.3.263), the commingling of land, sea, and sky, the confound-
ing of light and dark, the warring of the elements, the collapsing
of the Earth about the Poles. 3 (Plate XXXII) Chaos, 'that
indigest' (King John, 5.7.26), as it is the negation of form, is
necessarily the annulling of life. The abhorrence of it is accord-
ingly proverbial, as with most things that are deeply felt:

The man I hate
Worse than confusion.

Seneca, whose tragedies afford to the Renaissance a general
conspectus, dilates on it in the Hercules Oetaeus:

A day will come when all the laws of the universe will be over-
thrown : the South Pole will crush all Libya, all the land of the
nomad Garamantes; the North Pole will crush all that is beneath
it and that the dry Boreas beats down upon; and the trembling
Sun will be dislodged from the sky, bringing light to an end; the
heavenly palace in its fall will bring down East and West, all
the gods will perish and collapse in the general chaos. Last of all,
Death will pronounce the final sentence of extinction against
itself.

(ILnoaff.)

1 Elyot, The Governour, Sig. Asv. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture, ch. 2,
draws in his discussion of order on Elyot, Spenser, Hooker, Chapman, and Shake-
speare.

& 'Est Mundanaram talis confusio rerum. Quo Regina latet Tempore lustitia.'
So Aneau, Picta Poesis, p. 49 (in Green, p. 449).

* Bocksperger's emblem glosses Revelation, vi.12 13. For another representa-
tion of Chaos, see Whitney, Emblemes, Sigs. Qiv-ar, pp. isaf. (in Green, p. 450).

ANARCHY AND ORDER

The Scriptures also are taken as announcing that chaos follows
the suffocating of degree. (Troilus andCressida, i/j.iasf.) It Is of
Matthew xxiv that Gloucester is thinking when he cites his
dark prediction and finds it fulfilled, (1.2.1 12-24) Degree being
honoured, men come within their awful banks again. (2 Henry
IV i 4.1.176) But given., the choking of degree, and the waters
make head against the kingdom of the shore. Cataracts and
hurricanoes rain on the world. (3.2.2) Nature, contemning its
origin, is no longer bordered in itself. (4.2. 32!) Once law con-
tained it, folded it the phrase is Sidney's 'within assured
bounds'. Those bounds past, c mans nature infinitely rangeth*. 1
The end of all things Kent and Edgar and Albany discern in
the close of Lear's story. 2 It is conceived in anarchy, the ultimate
gainsaying of kind. It fulfils, in its close, the pledge of its
beginning.

Now to qualify a little. There is a considerable gulf rather,
a universe opens between Shakespeare and the mere preceptors
whose constant business is to deprecate rebellion, whatever its
terms. It would be a simple matter, and to a degree entertaining,
to eke out the saws and sayings of Richard Taverner with those
of William Baldwin and Thomas Palfreyman, who also redacted
Erasmus; 3 and Robert Crowley, whose concern was to stig-
matize those c manye abuses, that maye and ought to be put
away'; 4 and John Hall who, in The Court of Virtue^ concurred
enthusiastically with the injunction:

Let no man from his calling fall,
But eche man in his state remayne:
Let not the common people deale
With matters highe of common weale. 5

Never a man's thought in the world keeps the roadway better
than theirs. Even Ovid, than whom, I suppose, no more amoral
writer ever lived, is made to jog along with them and so to
proclaim the same forced and unlovely conclusions. The witty
changes he treats of are seized on by moralists like Arthur

1 Sidney, 'Arcadia', in Works, ed. Feuillerat, II, 195.

2 See Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, London, 1904, p. $28n.

3 In A treatise of Morall PkylosopMe, London, 1547; 'augmented, & ...
enlarged*, 1557^^.

4 One and thyrtye Epigrammes, London, 1550.

5 Sig. Msr. And see Baldwin-Palfreyman, edn. 1564, Sig. Q,4r.

ANARCHY AND ORDER

Golding and Thomas Peend to illustrate and to popularize the
virtues of circumspection and humility. Golding, in his trans-
lation of the Metamorphoses (1567)5 extracts a moral lesson from
each of the fifteen books. His allegorical misreading is anticipated
in Peend's Pleasant Fable of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis (1565).
When, earlier in the century, another Hall, the chronicler
Edward, doing his loyal but insufficient best to prove the
righteousness of Henry in every particular, insisted suavely that
c the affayres of Princes be not ordered by the commen people,
nor were it convenient that all thynges be opened to theim', 1
Shakespeare, reading that passage, as I imagine he did, must
surely have nodded, in a more or less perfunctory manner, and
passed on.

For the context is everything. Shakespeare's conventional
contemporary would no doubt have given his immediate
suffrage a muted suffrage, however, for the conventional
person abhors vociferating, is bland if he is anything to the
public peace and quiet, whatever the context. Shakespeare,
caring also for stability, and with a passion entirely unconven-
tional, is concerned just by virtue of that passion to look further
and determine whence genuine stability comes. He does not
execrate the plebs in Coriolanus because they are rank smelling
(well, not chiefly for that), or and this is the mistaken saying
of most of those who comment on the play because they
clamour for liberty; but rather because, like Coriolanus himself,
who is also Shakespeare's butt, and on whom also and
impartially he loads his contempt, they would bury all which
yet distinctly ranges. This is not to be enamoured of liberty,
but licence, and the hero of the play, more than any other, is
given to confounding the two. True liberty is beyond his ken.
The king sits his throne. He does not sit on the people. 2

The conventional Elizabethan, who reads or has read to him
the florilegia, and who gives back without reflection or qualifi-
cation the servile commonplaces heaped up in those volumes,
would have raised his hands in horror, to the degree that he
took seriously the summons to obedience, at the usurpation of

1 The Triumphant Reigns of Kyng Henry the VIII, ecL Charles WMbley, London,
1904, II, 197.

2 See Boissard, Emblematwn liber, Sig. Dar, p. 1 1 : 'Libertas Vera Est Afifectibvs
Non Servire'; and Rollenhagio, emblem 55, glossed Sig. Gav: *Consensu populi
regnum subsistif.

ANARCHY AND ORDER

Bolingbroke or Henry Tudor. Richard of Bordeaux was after
all anointed king. So for that matter was Crookback. And as
Charles I might well have exclaimed, 'Not all the water in the
rough rude sea 5 but every schoolboy (as they say) knows the rest.

Shakespeare, concurring, appends however two qualifica-
tions. When King John, whose throne is menaced by the claims
of Constance and Arthur, steps forward to assert, with the
requisite pomp, Our strong possession and our right for us',
Shakespeare does not concede that really there is no more to
say. He gives to Queen Elinor the rugged retort, 'Your strong
possession much more than your right, Or else it must go wrong
with you and me'. (1.1.39-41) And so it proves, and does.
The career in part belongs to the talents. David would do well
to be superior to Absalom, and Moses to the Reubenites, and
Harry to Hotspur, not only in title but, more crucially, in fact.
The title is supposed to betoken the fact.

And the second proviso: a king's prerogative extends only
so far as reason gives scope. To plead that prerogative, as the
king in Pericles does, to justify the murder of his guest:

It fits thee not to ask the reason why,
Because we bid it, (i.i.i57f.)

is to forfeit prerogative altogether. Kingly privilege is tethered,
not infinite. Despotism and sovereignty do not jump together.
They are not the same but antithetical.

Boundless intemperance
In nature is a tyranny.

(Macbeth, 4.3.66!)

The captain whom Edmund solicits to murder Lear and
Cordelia, and who is content to abide the saying of his chief,
c Thy great employment Will not bear question' (5-3-32f.), is
just such a man as the critics, elaborating and, as I think,
misconstruing, the Elizabethan psychology, hypothesize. Lucio
describes him, in Measure for Measure. He is a motion generative,
a masculine puppet. (3.2.119) The good servant does not say,
when murder is commanded of him:

My commission

Is not to reason of the deed, but do't.
(Pericles, 4.

ANARCHY AND ORDER

He says rather, with Plsanlo in Cymbeline, a servant who keeps
his wits and hence his virtue about him :

If it be so to do good service, never
Let me be counted serviceable.

(3.2.i4f.)

Obedience is a virtue only in so far as the thing commanded of
one is a good thing. Thus Fulke Greville, in Mustapha (2.1):

And while none dare shew kings they goe amisse.
Even base Obedience their corruption is.

To obey without let is to forfeit the human condition, to

float upon a wild and violent sea
Each way and move.

(Macbeth, 4.2. 2 if.)

The complaisant man is a weathercock, Kent is not complaisant,
and so he keeps his autonomy to the end. Gloucester, who must
relieve Lear, If I die for it 5 (3.3. i8f.), whose duty, the apposite
word, cannot suffer him to obey his master's injunction (3.4.
I52f.) ; the old man, who must relieve Gloucester, 'Come on 't
what will' (4. 1.50) ; the servant who bars the way to Cornwall
and so of course violates degree: these men read obedience and
the bounds of obedience aright. Edmund, who perseveres in a
dubious course of loyalty (3.5-2f., 2 if.), and Oswald, a cruder
sycophant, and the captain, responsive to any order so long as
it is man's work (5.3.39) : these men forget the nature of a man,
and what he can do with impunity, and what, in the doing,
destroys him.

That thou mayest rightly obey power, her bounds know;
Those past, her nature, and name is chang'd; to be
Then humble to her is idolatrie.

The servile man and the merely fractious are one. In
Caliban, now grovelling before his master and now seeking to
paunch him with a stake, the two are met. It is easier of course
(and more convenient) to censure fractiousness than servility.
But to look nearer is to see that there went but a pair of shears
between them.

VI
REASON AND WILL

, culminating in absolute confusion, rises from man's
mistaking of his relationship to the greater world of which he is
part, and to whose laws he must render allegiance. But whence
comes the mistaking itself? Why, like Edmund, does man lapse
in error? The answer it is Hamlet's to Gertrude is that
reason panders will. Man is flawed, and tending always to fall.
When Gower, in his role as Chorus to Pericles, comes on stage
to introduce the play, he, whom the dramatist has brought to
life again, describes himself, not simply as taking human shape,
but as 'Assuming man's infirmities'. The phrases are felt as
implying one another. When Prospero, in The Tempest^ ad-
monishes Ferdinand: 'The strongest oaths are straw to the
fire in our blood* (4.1.52^), it is his own embittered history to
which he is appealing.

We are all men

In our own natures frail and capable
Of our flesh.

(Henry VIII 3 5.3.10-12)
There is a

taint of vice whose strong corruption
Inhabits our frail blood.

(Twelfth Night, 3.

The indwelling taint is an abstraction. The Renaissance,
instinctively dramatic or pictorial, embodies it in the figure of a
fettered slave, symbolic of the unregenerate soul made captive,
in Milton's phrase, by foul exorbitant desires. In that manner

S.P.-G 85

REASON AND WILL

Michelangelo, in the Tomb of Julius II, represents the tension
between reason and will. Edmund Spenser, in the second book
of The Faerie Queene, chooses a more audacious image. Man is a
living disjunction : 'th'eternall Lord in fleshly slime Enwombed.' 1
The antithesis between the two principles, one conducting to
fulfilment, the other to destruction, is sharpened in King John.
To Shakespeare, in that play, a man's 'purpose and his
conscience 5 , enemies, by definition, are 'two dreadful battles'
or armies. (4.2.77f.) War is open and unceasing between them.
Man, on such a reading, is neither angel nor devil, but a
poignant commingling of each. That is the burden of Fulke
Greville's great lament:

Oh, wearisome condition of humanity,
Born under one law, to another bound;
Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity,
Created sick, commanded to be sound.

Lear calls man a centaur (4.6.126), and the image, despite
Lear's misanthropy, is apt: horse and rider indivisible, reason
armoured in grace astride ebullient will. It is Machiavelli's
metaphor also, though he, also, misconstrues it. 2 Friar Laurence
discerns in man two kings for ever warring the scruple of ill,
the form of plausive manners and the issue of their contest is
the business of Shakespearean tragedy. The issue is so often a
quarry of the slain because man is prone, by the accident of
birth, by e the imposition Hereditary ours' I quote Polixenes,
in The Winter's Tale (i.2.74f.) to lust after evil, and so work
his own decay.

We are all frail.

(Measure for Measure, 2 .4. 1 2 1 )

But frailty, capability, which is proneness, argue the
existence of alternatives: the cramping and denial of proneness.

1 Michelangelo's use of the symbol is anticipated by Antonio Federighi's Holy
Water Basin in the Cathedral at Sienna. See Stud, in Icon., p. 194, fig. 138. For
Spenser, see^.Q,., Bk. II, Canto x, Stanza 50, 11. af.

2 Freud, in The Ego and the Id, pours old wine in new bottles : c ln its relation
to the id ... [the ego] is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the
superior strength of the horse.' John F. Danby, Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature: A
Study of ''King Leaf, London, 1958, pp. 32-34, cites Bacon, Launcelot Andrewes,
and Spenser on the duality of man's nature, symbolized not only by the figure of
the centaur but by that of the half-bestial Pan and the Mermaids of the Bestiaries.

REASON AND WILL

It Is true, the perverted will Is one part of a man's endowment.
In some sense it Is natural that one should follow Its soliciting,
and this whatever the Importunities of the reason. Hume's
maxim Is therefore worthy of endorsement : every man should,
in principle I would add. In policy be held a knave. It Is
salutary to be aware of the enemy within : awareness begets
vigilance, a looking to one's defences, and so lessens the chance
of usurpation. For that reason, what is natural Is identified with
what is evil: man is encouraged to stiffen up the sinews. And
hence it is useful to see in Caliban, in whom rude will is
ascendant absolutely, a type of the natural man; and in
Gonzalo's Utopia, whose motto Is passivity and the absence of
law, the condition of c mere 5 Nature. Prospero, the artificer, the
civilized man who manipulates Nature, Is the more likely to be
realized if he Is confronted with the wild man, Nature's slave,
and forced to acknowledge in him an alternative version of
himself. The wise man will put off ease, he will arm himself In
rigour, to the degree that what is abhorrent is supposed to be
natural or easy.

But to scrutinize more carefully the controlling word,
natural. If disorder Is natural, whence comes order? If our
discontents are the price we pay for civilization, what inclines
us to honour the account? To survive, it Is clear, one must
coerce Ms nature; and yet as clearly, to survive one must
enlarge and express It. Nature errs in Othello; it does not follow
its bent. (1.3.62) Because it does not, the hero Is destroyed.
Because it does, In As Ton Like It, the hero is fulfilled. It is his
kindness, his nature, that cause him to save his wicked brother's
life. (4.3.i29f.) Nature, given scope, turns a rebel from rebellion
in i Henry VI. It is said to make him suddenly relent. (3.3.59)
Edgar and Cordelia, not Edmund and the sisters, are Nature's
servants or stewards. If, then, passion and reason self-division
cause, the enmity between them does not infer two natures in
man, the one counterpoising the other. The image of man as
microcosm is illuminating here : the organism, compounded as
it is of varying constituents which may even contend with one
another, is most nearly itself when harmony obtains, the basis
of which is subordination, when this party, whose pretensions
to lead are approved by experience, is brought forward and
given hegemony over the others. Though the differing voices

REASON AND WILL

which speak to a man's inner ear urge him in different direc-
tions, they are not equally compelling or substantial. It is not
that reason is master of more eloquence than will, but that the
course of action it commends is seen, in the event, to be superior.
Reason's counsel, accepted, conduces to good. The counsel of
the will is catastrophic. To accept the dictates of reason is
therefore natural or kind in that they enable a man to survive.
After all to plume the will is unnatural, abnormal, because it is
destructive of the self. The claim of virtuous conduct to be
identified with natural behaviour is essentially pragmatic. It is
supported in proof. The good man is therefore the natural man.

Edmund will not have it so. To him the saying of the Lord
Chancellor in Henry VIII, of Viola in Twelfth Night, of Angelo
in Measure for Measure, is a tepid and a partial saying. Edmund
abhors qualification. Like Machiavelli, he takes the potential
for the thing itself. When, announcing his evil bias, he summons
Nature to his support (1.2.1), it is a wholly maleficent goddess
he apostrophizes, if you will the Setebos of Caliban, in whom
the possibility of good does not inhere. Lear also invokes Nature.
(1.4.297) His appeal is a horrid one, the conveying of sterility
on his child. But, however perverse, it depends on the equating
of what is natural with what is kind. A daughter has wronged
him. It is Nature's part to punish the daughter, and so to
redress the wrong. Implicitly, Lear's prayer defines Nature.

Edmund disputes the definition. 1 His whoremaster man
dwells in a universe presided over, neither by God nor by
Satan, but, more prosaic than either, by self-interest, incarnate,
and very narrowly construed. Edmund's Nature is made of the
old stock which Hamlet hypothesizes, which virtue cannot
inoculate. (3.i.u8f.) Nor is that Nature self-consciously evil,
as Lucifer is, who had in him the power of election. To treat of
good or evil is to speak beside the point. Men are as the time is.
They cannot well be otherwise. When Lear withholds his hand
from Gloucester:

Let me wipe it first,

1 The play may be taken as an essay in discrimination. 'The words "nature",
and "natural", "unnatural" occur over forty times in King Lear* which, moreover,
'incorporates the living parts of both Ecclesiastical Polity [represented by "the Lear
party"] and Leviathan [represented by Edmund].' So Danby, pp. i8f.

REASON AND WILL

he manifests. In Ms madness, the psychology 7 that Edmund,
rather more phlegmatically, has announced from the beginning.
Man comes crying hither. He is a whited sepulchre; a verminous
fellow crawling between heaven and earth; a ruined piece of
Nature, who is herself a ruin.

Shakespeare does not pay homage to the sentimental creed
of total depravity. But he is not concerned either to scant the
possibility of evil.

Oh, undistinguished space of woman's will !

(4.5.278)

I do not know that he believed with Samuel Harsnett in the
literal existence of devils. Nor does it matter very much. I am
sure that he found them, at least a suitable metaphor for the
wickedness latent in the heart.

Demand me nothing. What you know you know.
From this time forth I never will speak word.

It is lago who vows silence. Presumably he is true to his promise.
And the chill it engenders is in the impression it creates of a
knowing of evil which staggers comprehension, and ought to be
beyond it, and is not. lago is a demi-devil, and also, like
Edmund, a Machiavel, whose popularity on stage is traceable,
perhaps, not to strange oaths or to esoteric cruelty but, more
suggestive and more appalling, to his essential blandness of
manner. Aaron, the wicked Moor of Titus Andronicus, is an early
version of lago and Edmund. Aaron is a passionless rogue. His
pursuit of evil is artistic in that it is disinterested.

Oh, how this villainy
Doth fat me with the very thoughts of it!

(3.i.203f.)

But Shakespeare, imitating but in unpractised ways the awful
whimsicality of Barabas in The Jew of Malta, takes the audience
too palpably by the lapels. And so Aaron's lipsmacking at the
prospect of murder and rape makes, not for shuddering but
hilarity. lago is not given to smacking his lips. His villainy is
altogether laconic. Evil is a word he does not know how to
gloss. The melodramatic villain is a figure of fun.

Chop off his headj man somewhat we will do.

(Richard III, 3. i . 1 93)
8 9

REASON AND WILL

The self-conscious villain one can assimilate also: Angelo,
Claudius. But the monster one boggles at, who rubs a quat to the
sense, or undertakes a murder, with the same efficiency and,
worse, the same phlegm. The sulphurous pit opens in him, a
potential of evil which the dramatist discloses, I think almost
with astonishment.

Ask me not what I know.
(5-3- 161 )

When Goneril speaks those words and, with neither joy nor
trepidation, without a grain of remorse, gives herself over to
death, it is as if Shakespeare plumbs the Lake of Darkness, and
is bemused.

Who is't can read a woman?

(Cymbeline, 5.5.48)

Lear seeks to explore and to anatomize the darkness. The
images of bestiality which abound in the play 1 are all of them
analogues, essays in definition, of man's horrid potential.
Goneril, like the she wolf, is ravenous for prey (1.4.330) and,
like her a wry conjunction of Lear's epithet and natural lore
chooses a mate that has made itself foul in pursuing the female. 2
She is one with the kite and the vulture : like them, she snuffs up
decay. 3 (1.4.284; 2.4.137) Venomous, subtle, and treacherous,
she finds her emblem in the serpent who, despite Lepidus and
Antony, is not bred in the earth, but in the body of a man. 4
(2.4.163; 5.3.84) Adam and the serpent are one.

This thing of darkness I
Acknowledge mine.

(Tempest, 5.1.275^)

Lear's daughters are doghearted daughters (4.3.47) : full of

1 Lear contains 133 separate references to 64 different animals. See Muir,
pp. Ix-lxi.

2 See The Whole Works of Roger Ascham, ed. J. A. Giles, London, 1864, III, 153;
The Life and Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Robert Greene^ M.A., ed. A. B.
Grosart, London, 1881-6, IV, 132; Carroll, pp. irgf.

3 See Sidney, Arcadia, I, 79, 47of.; Carroll, pp. 108, 119.

4 So Edward Topsell, The History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents, London, 1658,
p. 595 : 'Pliny affirmeth [serpents] to be engendered of the marrow in the back-bone
of a man.' See also Pliny, Natural History^ tr. H. Rackham, Loeb Classics,
Cambridge, Mass., 1938-40, III, 411, 413; The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B.
McKerrow, London, 1904, II, 138; Carroll, p. 114.

REASON AND WILL

envy, currish, contemptible in nature. 1 They share Ms slyness
with the fox (i.4.34o), and his ferocity with the boar (3.7.58),
and Ms inscrutable cruelty with the tiger. 2 (4.2.20) Like the
pelican they tap out and drunkenly carouse the blood of their
father. (3.4. yGf.) Lear repasts them with Ms blood; they offer
death for life. 3 (Plate XXXIII)

The pious sacrifice at wMch Shakespeare glances in King
Lear is recapitulated, not only in the drama of his contempor-
aries, but in emblem literature, in painting and engraving, in
colophons, and in the tableaux mvants. Leir, in the old chronicle
Mstory, is

as kind as is the Pellican,
That kills itselfe, to saue her young ones Hues.

(sc. 6)

The patriot, like the king, is a sacrificial figure. The emblem in
each case is the same. When, in 1582, the Duke of Anjou is
invested as sovereign of the Netherlands, a splendid allegory
is enacted before Mm in wMch Patriotism is personified by the
pelican. The new prince is congratulated; he is also advised.
For the pelican, in the words of Cesare Ripa, c never stirs from
her young, and when Nourishment fails, she feeds them with
her own Blood'. To restore them to life, to quote Bartholomeus,
she 'smite th herself in her side, that the blood runneth out, and
sheddeth that hot blood upon the bodies of her children, and
by virtue of the blood the birds, that were before dead, quicken
again*. That is why Mantegna and Breughel the Elder picture
Charity with a pelican, whose young are sustained by feeding
on its flesh. To Ripa the pelican is the emblem of Charity, the
wonted companion of Good Nature and Compassion. In 1568,
William of Orange, beginning his campaign to drive the
Spaniards from his country, emblazons on the banners of Ms

1 See A Petite Pattace of Pettie His Pleasure, ed. H. Hartman, New York, 1938,
pp. 186, so6f., 216; Coriolanus, 1.1.28; Othello., 5.2.361; Carroll, pp. ggf.

2 See Topsell, p. 221; Carroll, p. 104 ffox'). For the boar: Wilson, ArU of
Rhetorique 1560, ed. G. H. Mair, Oxford, 1909, p. 171 ; Carroll, p. 94. For the tiger:
The Works of Thomas Deloney, ed. F. O. Mann, Oxford, 1912, p. 90; Carroll, p. 117.

3 See also The Holy Bible, London, printed by Robert Barker, 1611, t.p.; A. F.
Johnson, A Catalogue of Engraved and Etched English Title-Pages ... to ... 1691,
Oxford, 1934, under Droeshout, no. 10; Whitney, EmbUmes, Sig. L4r, p. 87;
Camerarius, Symb. et emblematum, &c. } 1596, p. 87; Reusner, Emblemata, 1581,
Book II, p. 73; Carroll, p. 112; Epiphajiius, Physiologus, printed Christopher
Plantin, Antwerp, 1588, p. 30 (quoted Green, p. 394) ; and Muir, pp. i i8f.

REASON AND WILL

army the figure of a pelican who tears its breast to nourish its
offspring. John of Gaunt likens Richard II to those offspring,
spilling a parent's blood. 1 (2.i.i26f.) The metaphor, in fact, is
applicable to all men, by virtue of the primal sacrifice of Christ,
whom Dante describes as nostro Pellicano.

Like Christ, and the good king who is Christ's vicar, the
pelican is kind. The Renaissance, in representing her piety,
fashions an emblem of natural behaviour. It is clear that the
emblem does not answer to the definition which Edmund, by his
conduct, implies. It repudiates that definition as insufficiently
catholic. Neither does it infer, like the image of husbandry, the
limits which environ bad conduct. It is not negative or circum-
scribing. Its function is to body forth inclination and the conduct
it begets (read: natural behaviour), when reason, ensinewed by
grace, has triumphed over will. The nature the emblem purports
to describe given, the achieving of that triumph is manifest
in self-abnegation.

The business of the emblem is altogether with the sacrifice
of the parent, and not with the reception of the sacrifice. The
parent is kind. The behaviour of the offspring, whose survival
turns on that kindness, is no part of its concern. Shakespeare,
however, as he inverts the praise of the halcyon not an image
of peace but servility assimilates to his own purpose the
sacrifice of the pelican. The emblem dramatizes the norm. The
exalting of self in Goneril and Regan is made the more terrible,
to the degree that it is felt as divergence from the norm. Their
revolt assumes thereby the proportions of another fall of man.
(Henry F, 2.2.14-if.) In Shakespeare's lexicon, the sacrifice, if it
illustrates natural behaviour, functions also as an emblem of
parricide. The offspring of a loving father are rendered as
cannibals, consuming the father.

But the inversion is just, in the ironic way of Lear. It is the
father who invokes first the myth of Thyestes : c he that makes his

1 Motley tells of Anjou and Orange, III, 521, and II, 244. The engraving
attributed to Breughel is reproduced in Rene van Bastelaer, Les Estampes de Peter
Breughel, 1908, no. 134. And see Ripa, under 'Bonta' and 'Compassione'; Ripa,
London edn., p. 14; Kernodle, p. 67; Bartholomew de Proprietatibus Rerum, bk. xii,
829, tr. J. Trevisa, London, 1535 (quoted H. W. Seager, Natural History in Shake-
speare's Time, London, 1896, p. 239); the colophon of Sebastian Brant's La nefdes
folz du monde, Paris, 1497; and Praz, I, 67, for an illustration from Typotius,
Symbola.

REASON AND WILL

generation messes. 5 (i.i.i 19) This Is to say that bestiality is not
peculiar to Lear's wicked daughters. The king, disclaiming
propinquity, figures as the dragon (1.1.124), l& e man * n general
an ambiguous and manifold emblem: the chief of creatures and
the sum of all ill. 1 His abjuring of kind finds a complement in
Gloucester's. And hence what was felt as perverse In the begin-
ning becomes in the end almost conventional. Humanity dis-
solves: animality displaces it.

The strain of man's bred out
Into baboon and monkey.
(Tirnon, i.i

The state Itself is gored. (5.3.320) The masters who have its
leading, turn it to a shambles. But the masters also are turned
or bemonstered:

You men, you beasts.

(Romeo and Juliet , 1.1.90)

Edmund, the chief among them, is toad-spotted (5.3.138): It
Is the venom of the toad Edgar glances at in him. 2 Unaccom-
modated man, divested of nurture, is kin to the animal; at last
he is an animal himself. (s.^sGgf.) Kent, reduced, is a fellow to
the monkey. (2.4.7-9) Gloucester, reduced, goes down to the
bear pit. (3.7.54) Edgar, In the character of a madman, Is hog,
fox, wolf, dog, and lion (3.4.95-97)? all of them fit terms for the
old stock, the thing itself.

Shakespeare is not singular in spying out In man the capacity
of all 111, which stripes may move but not kindness. The Seven
Deadly Sins, whose sum is man in what Hobbes called the
condition of mere nature, find their appropriate and conven-
tional emblem in the brutish creatures to whom Poor Tom
compares himself. 3 The monstrous caricatures of human beings,
animal-like, vegetable-like, nightmarish in what they are and

1 Wilson's Arte of Rhetoriqw, p. 197; Carroll, p. 101.

2 Topsell, The Historu of Serpents, London, 1608, pp. 187-9. Beast images to
describe a traitor, the character assigned Edmund here, are frequent in Shake-
speare's early histories, and in particular in 2 and 3 Henry VI and Richard III. See
Spurgeon, pp. 228-30, 232f. Timon of Athens, among later plays, resorts conspicuously
to animal imagery, and for the same reason, I suppose, that one finds such imagery
so conspicuous in Lear: the unsparing nature of the vision.

3 See Morton W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins, East Lansing, Mich., 1952;
and especially Appendix I : *The Association of Animals and Sins.'

REASON AND WILL

what they do, in the pseudo-Rabelaisian Songes dwlatiques, hint
broadly, I suppose, at the fund of strange and bizarre possibilities
in man. The image in medieval art of an ape or monkey in
chains betokens the state of man before the New Revelation. In
the art of the Renaissance, the same image depicts the quelling
of man's latent bestiality. The ape, who resembles man without
the stiffening and distinguishing mark of reason, is taken as the
symbol of everything sub-human in man. That is his use in
Renaissance sculpture, to dramatize the debased condition of
the soul enslaved by matter. 1

Cousin to the ape is the wild man or woodwose, a semi-
human creature of great antiquity, pre-Christian in his origins,
who is believed to inhabit the forests. When Edward Hall
chronicles the coronation of Anne Boleyn, he remarks
particularly c a foyst or wafter full of ordnance' a barge on the
Thames,

in which was a great dragon continually moving and casting
wild fire, and round about the foyst stood terrible monsters and
wild men, casting fire and making hideous noise. 2

Those wild men, those wilful men, seem almost to haunt the
imagination of the Renaissance. They appear in the homilies,
in plays like The Tempest and poems like The Faerie Queene, and
on the title pages of Elizabethan books. Cloten in Cymbeline,
'this civilized Caliban', as Granville-Barker called him, an
uncertain mixture of human and beast, a creature partly
comical but sinister also, is one attempt on Shakespeare's part
at representing the wild man. He enters the drama in a medieval
Whitsun play which bears his name. 3 Gorboduc, the first English
tragedy, introduces him to the Elizabethan stage. He appears in
the dumb show which prefaces the first act of the play; and also
as Bremo in the comedy of Mucedorus. As a participant in
English and continental street pageants, he was a familiar and,
by intention, a deeply disquieting figure. In 1610, a St. George's

1 As in Michelangelo's tomb of Julius II, in which the ape accompanies a slave.
See Stud, in Icon., pp. 195?. and n., fig. 142 (for a seventeenth-century engraving of
the ape as an emblem of the subjugation of evil) ; and Ripa, under *Sensi* (*Gula*)
and *Sfacciataggine'.

2 Quoted in Theodore Maynard, The Cross and the Crown, New York, 1950, p. 91.
8 The magnus ludtis de homine salvatico, put on by the citizens of Padua, and per-
formed in 1208, 1224, and (in Switzerland) 1399.

REASON AND WILL

procession In Chester was led by a pair of hideous wild men,
whose black hair and beards were tangled in Ivy, and whose
hands wielded clubs and scattered fireworks before them.

Wild men and women were admitted also to the tableaux
vivants, as at Bruges In 1515. When the Emperor Charles V was
entertained at a street theatre In that city, savage creatures
stood guard before it. They Intruded their malformed or,
more precisely, unformed presence In romances like Valentine
and Orson, in Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Roman de la
Rose, and In Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d' Arthur. Hans Sachs
in a moment of eccentricity sentimentalized them, anticipating
the naive celebration of the primitive which Shakespeare, In
The Tempest, puts into the mouth of Gonzalo. Even the Court
knew them. In commemoration of Twelfth Night, they danced
before Henry VIII in the Great Hall at Greenwich. To divert
Elizabeth, during her stay with Leicester at Kenilworth Castle,
one of their number, taking advantage of a pause In the chase,
emerged from the shrubbery to address an incongruous compli-
ment to the Queen. Two centuries before, and on more than
one occasion, they took part in festivities at the Court of
Charles VI of France. Swiss tapestries of the fifteenth century
include them as a necessary part of the whole. The wild man,
like Caliban, is villainous to look on.

But, as 'tis,
We cannot miss him.

(Tempest, 1.2.31 of.)

This is to say: we cannot do without him. It is that unpalatable
truth which Prospero communicates to Miranda.

Heraldic devices of the early Tudor period represent the wild
man. In an English Book of Hours, he Indulges his characteristic
vice of raping women. Less sensationally, in Don Quixote, and also
in The Tempest, he Is set his characteristic task of performing heavy
labour. Piero di Cosimo paints him. Breughel the Elder, in a
woodcut, depicts the Play of the Death of the Wildman. His
ancestors are Pan and Silenus; his kindred are fauns, centaurs,
and sylvans. He is begotten by a satyr, whose commitment to
disorder Is similar to his own, and who excites in the Elizabethans
the same abhorrence and the same compulsion to keep him
before their eyes as a warning or cautionary tale. Thus the

REASON AND WILL

contract for the building of the Fortune requires columns
carved with satyrs, and not only for the two columns at the
front of the stage but also for those which surround the frame
of the theatre. 1

Woodwoses, crouching satyrs,, bestial termini, sagittaries:
the goatish disposition which is plenary to Edmund but only
partial to others, finds its outwall in them. 2 (Plates XXXIV-
XXXVI) They are, compounded, the beast in man, the roaring
lion of St. James, latent in every human being, the thing of
darkness to which even the best man is yoked. Unsophisticated
nature and the wild man are one.

Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life's as cheap as beast's.

(24.26gf.)

Take from nature what Edmund, reasoning the need, would
designate her accoutrements, expendable at will, and man is
worse than a beast. He is crueller because more capable; but
that is not it: he is crueller because an apostate. The cuckoo
that bit off the head of the sparrow (i.4.235f.) is sickening to
contemplate. But it does not know any other law. One is merely
sentimental to call it ungrateful. The copulation of the polecat,
the wren, the gilded fly (4.6.ii4f., i24f.) is (it may be) disgust-
ing; but Lear, who calls it lechery, is wrong. Only man is an
ingrate and lecher.

1 See F.Q_., I. vi (for the tale of Una, the Satyrs, and Satyrane), and VI, iv;
Richard Bernheimer, Wildmen in the Middle Ages, Cambridge, Mass., 1952, pp. 51,
59, 62, 67, 86, 93f., 100, 113, i46f., 156-68, 176-85; Robert Withington, English
Pageantry, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1918, 1, 72-77, and illustrations facing
pp. 74 and 102; Kemodle, pp. 64, 73, 134; Chambers, Eliz. Stage, II, 437. The
fourteenth-century Taymouth Book of Hours is in the B.M., fol. 6iv~io6v, and is
illustrated in Bernheimer, fig. 26, who gives also an illustration of Breughel's
woodcut, fig. 1 6. Illustrations of wild men in heraldic emblems of Henry VII are
given in Erna Auerbach, Tudor Artists, London, 1954, plates 8 (1517) and 9 (1518).

2 The motif of Plate XXXV occurs in the work of R. Chaudiere I, printer at
Paris, 1516-51, and Philippe Pigouchet, bookseller and printer, 1486-1512. See also
Berjeau, no. 8; and W. Dunbar, The Ballad of Lord Barnard Stewart [1508]. The
termini in Plate XXXVI are copied from the frame of a portrait of Erasmus,
supposed to be by Holbein, and engraved by Hans Lxitzelberger. See also H.
Braunschweig, The noble experience of the vertuous Handy Work of Surgery, Southwark,
1525 (in which a male and female woodwose are used as the printer's device) ; T.
Blenerhasset, The Seconde part of the Mirrourfor Magistrates, 1578, t.p. (upheld by
crouching satyrs) ; R. Whittington, De sittabanm quantitate, 1519 (sagittary and grey-
hound upholding Caxton's mark) ; R. Brathwaite, Natures Embassie: or, The Wilde-
Mans Measures, 1621, t.p. (dance of naked satyrs).

REASON AND WILL

Ingratitude is more hideous, more sharp, in the child than
in the sea monster or serpent (1.4.281-3, 31 of.), because the
child, by definition, is the pattern of gratitude. That is what is
meant by the offices of childhood. A woman, by definition, by
nature, is comely. That is why deformity shows more horrid
in her than in the fiend. (4.2.6o) Gloucester, apprised of the
treason of his son, is hardly capable of the wild surmise of belief.

He cannot be such a monster.

(1.2.102)

Edgar's supposed opinions are unnatural to his father, a whole
man; they are natural, only to a fragment like Edmund. 1
Gloucester calls them brutish, and then, on reflection, 'Worse
than brutish P (1.2.82) c Let Aesop fable in a winter's night': to
praise or blame an animal is to spend one's breath to no purpose.
And yet even the brute, the head-lugged bear in his torment
(4.2.4i), does not manifest such cruelty as man. 'All cruels
else subscribe 5 (3.7.64), which is to say, I take it:

Th'unkindest beast more kinder than mankind.

(Timon, 4.1.36)
Only man is not pregnant to pity.

That is how the story of Arion is moralized. At the great
entertainment at Kenilw r orth in 1575, a man appears before the
Queen in the character of Arion, riding the back of an enormous
dolphin. 2 The point in which Elizabeth is supposed to be
instructed is the same in the tableau as in the numerous emblems
which redact it.

No mortall foe so full of poysoned spite.
As man, to man. 3

Arion embarks on a journey by sea. The sailors, whose business
it is to transport him, choose in their wickedness to throw him
over the side. It is left to a dolphin to bring him safe to land.

1 Kent evinces the same disbelief as Gloucester, and for the same reason. He is
unable to conceive of Oswald as a natural phenomenon. (2.2.59^)

2 Withington, I, 69, quoting Stratt, Sports and Pastimes, London, 1801, pp.
xxxiif.

3 Whitney, Emblemes, Sig. Qsv, p. 124. And see Alciati, Emblematum Libelltts,
p. 15; Emblemes (PAkiat, Sig. H^r, p. 117; Whitney, Sig. S4v, p. 144; TwN,
1.2.15; Ovid, Fasti, II. 7gf.

REASON AND WILL

Animals show a man greater kindness than his fellows. Man
himself is a wolf to man. 1

The sailors who give their passenger to the sea, in a sense do
not know what they do. Their wickedness is a kind of mistaking.
It rises from ignorance, which Alciati describes as the origin of
evil, and which I take to be an expression and also a condition
of man's perverted will. Like its emblem, the woodwose, ignor-
ance is ugly to look on. 2 (Plate XXXVII) It ought, of itself, to
proclaim and attest to its own ugliness. 4 O thou monster
Ignorance, how deformed dost thou look! 5 But the speaker is
Holofernes, the foolish pedant of Love's Labour's Lost. (4.2.23)
What he descries and cries out on in another, he fails to see in
himself. The mariners are purblind also, which is to say wilful.
No more than Holofernes do they see their own deformity. But
the darkness in which they labour is not, necessarily, perpetual
darkness. Given, the accession of knowledge, and evil is dis-
covered for the misshapen leaven it is.

Their understanding

Begins to swell, and the approaching tide
Will shortly fill the reasonable shore
That now lies foul and muddy.

(Tempest, 5.1.79-82)

If ignorance is the curse of God, knowledge is the wing where-
with we fly to Heaven. (2 Henry VI, 4.7.78^) Ignorance is
dissipated, knowledge is attained to, as man silences the darken-
ing counsel of the will. The conditional relationship is precisely
that which the emblem of the pelican is intended to mirror.
Enlightened behaviour may be made natural behaviour,

If with the sap of reason you would quench,
Or but allay the fire of passion.

(Henry VIII, 1. 1.148!:)

Art and good learning stead a man in the endeavour. Jack
Cade the rebel in 2 Henry VI is knavish and foolish, only because

1 Homo homini lupus. And see Bruck, Emb. Bellica, emblem 2 (a cock fight,
complemented by men battling one another), glossed Sig. Bsr in Les Emblemes
Moraulxi 'Miserables humains, miserable leur vie, L'homme a Fhomme est un loup
plus cruel qu'une harpie."

2 'Telle figure a Pignorance*. And see Alciati, Emblematum Libellus, p. 50.

REASON AND WILL

he makes himself their enemy. That Is Shakespeare's point in
exploiting the comedy of Cade's rebellion. Vulgar error mis-
reads sophistication discovering in it a distorting of human
nature. But sophistication supplies what is wanting in nature.

Diligence, maie make the crooked righte. 1

It sponsors and strengthens those human, those reasonable
impulses that might otherwise be overborne by the will. The
sophisticated man and the natural man, in the ultimate sense
are the same. Art, whom the emblem writers figure as Mercury,
improves upon Nature, refines and instructs her. Time brings
forth crude matter. Mercury and fire perfect it. In that manner
alchemy is rationalized, in an allegorical engraving of is6g. 2
Mercury, in whom art and application are wed, tunes the
broken lute, in an emblem dating from the year of Shakespeare's
birth. The legend: industry corrects nature. 3 Art is sure:
Mercury rests on a cube. Fortune (as you would think) is
uncertain: Fortune's stand is a ball. 4 To leave to chance or
fortune the task of impressing form on what is, in the beginning,
amorphous, is to insure that a man will be no more than half
made up. Art is the bestowing of form, a fair woman who supplies
the stake which makes good the defects and weaknesses of
Nature by supporting the tender plant entwined around it.
(Plate XXXVIII) Romeo, made sociable again, made witful,
by Mercutio, receives the approbation of his friend: 'Now art
thou Romeo; now art thou what thou art, by art as well as by
nature.' (2.4.92-95) Nature, left to itself, does not suffice: it is
uncouth, malformed. It is however amenable. It may, by reason,

1 Whitney, EmbUmes, Sig. Mav, p. 92.

2 By Hieronymus Olgiatus, who illustrates the inscription, Hoc monstnan generat,
twnp&rfecit ignis et Azochy with the figure of a beautiful winged man enveloped by a
serpent and surrounded also by the Zodiac and by attributes of cosmic power. See
Stud, in Icon., pp. yaf., and fig. 37.

3 Industrie, naturam conigit. See Sambucus, Emblemata, Sig. Dsr, p. 57; and also
WMtney, Sig. Mav, p. 92; and Green, pp. 256

4 So the two are represented under the motto, Ars Naturam adiuuans, by Alciati,
edn. 1557, given in Green, p. 255. See also Emblems fFAlciat, Sig. H8r, p. 127. In
Renaissance iconography, Fortune is often contrasted with Virtue with the words:
'Sedes Fortuna rotunda; sedes Virtutis quadrate.' See Ripa under 'Fortuna* and
'Instability'; and Stud, in Icon., p. 225. Rollenhagio, emblem i, poses a wise man
with one hand on a book and the other grasping a globe, against a figure of Death
playing with the sceptre and crown: 'Vivitur ingenio, caetera mortis erunt.*

REASON AND WILL

by learning, be licked into shape, as the bear cub is given
shape by its mother. 1 (Plate XXXIX)

Cordelia, unlike Edmund, is not content with uncultivated
nature. She compels it, becomes

a queen

Over her passion, who most rebel-like
Sought to be king o'er her.

(4.3.15-17)

The image, man as a commonwealth or microcosm, in which
passion, the usurper, essays to lead the way, speaks precisely to
Shakespeare's chief preoccupation : the war between the rebel
and the ruler. Unlike Marlowe, in Dr. Faustus, and the masters
of the Morality play, he does not extrapolate. There are in his
work no good or evil angels, wrestling. The conflict is contained
within the man himself.

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
Thrall to these rebel powers that thee array.

In the well-governed commonwealth, as in the man rightly led,
rebellion is not suffered. It breaks down the pales and forts of
reason; it makes the reason pander to its own unhallowed
purpose: the case of Brutus, Othello, and Macbeth.

The Genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council, and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.

(Julius Caesar, 2.1.66-69)

The mortal instruments: my sinful earth, are not to sit down
with the Genius, whose highest part is reason (nous or logos}, in
determining the course of man's little kingdom. 2 They are to

1 'Ingeniu Doctrina et Literis Formandu'. The she bear licks her cubs in
Vaenius, Amorum Emblemata, emblem 29; Guillaume La Perriere, Le Theatre des
bons engins, emblem 98 (with the saying: 'L'homme par estude acquiert science et
civilite"'); Crispin de Passe, Emblemata Amatoria, 1596, fol. 2 (in Green, p. 349);
and de Passe, Thronus Cupidus (in Praz, I, 108). Titian takes the emblem as his
device, with the motto: 'Natura potentior Ars.' Perhaps tradition is thinking of the
unlicked bear cub in making bears the closest associates of the wild man. See
Bernheimer, p. 59; Praz, I, g6f. ; Carroll, p. 93.

2 The metaphor, and the psychology it expresses, enter the Renaissance through
the writings of Aristotle and Plato, whose debt is probably to the Pythagoreans.
See Thomson, p. 146.

IOO

REASON AND WILL

be rated from the council board. Their presence is a usurpation,
their business is the murder of a friend, to be sure under colour
of necessity.

I must be cruel only to be kind.

Albany, who, like Cordelia, has an eye for decorum, acknow-
ledges the primacy of reason. He forbears to tear his wife. It is
not fit to let his hands obey his blood. (4.2.63-66) The others,
Lear initially, Goneril, and Cornwall, give rein to the heyday in
the blood. Lear cannot support Kent's monition, either in his
nature or in his place, (i.x.iysf., 3osf.) His indulging of caprice
in the opening scenes of the play enacts the proposition, Tor
what I will, I will, and there an end'. (Two Gentlemen, 1.3.65)
Goneril, offering necessity, the tyrant's plea, bids the will
avouch all. (i.4.232f., 268f.) Cornwall, whose disposition will
not be rubbed or stopped (2.2.i53f.), like Macbeth enjoins his
power to do a courtesy to Ms wrath. (3.7.25f.)

But Lear is not static but dynamic. He learns to forbear; he
coerces the headier will, (s^iogf.) In that achievement the
tragedy is mitigated and the tragic protagonist redeemed. The
achievement is unhappily peculiar to him; in that fact the
tragedy is confirmed. Goneril and Cornwall, who ought to
banish the Caliban, to shut him up in perpetual durance,
choose instead to enlarge him. His scope is their captivity, his
life their death. It is also the death of the good, who suffer willy-
nilly for the choice of the wicked.

Whiles lions war and battle for their dens,
Poor harmless lambs abide their enmity.

(3 Henry VI, 2.5.74Q

Thus the tragedy differs from the homily.

Then bridle will, and reason make thy guide,

So maiste thow stande, when others doune doe slide. 1

The moralist abhors, and rightly, the triumph of will over
reason. He discovers in that triumph the confounding of the fool
who gives his countenance to it. The dramatist, who sees more,
and who, faithful to his vision, sets down what he sees, is
necessarily the more austere, and much the more impassioned.

1 Whitney, Emblemes, Sig. A3v, p. 6.
S.P.-H IOI

REASON AND WILL

In the usurpation of the will he discovers the overthrow of the
just with the unjust. When the blood begins to rule the safer
guides., not only Lear falls that is, if you Hke, poetic justice
but Cordelia. In her fall there is no justice. Terras Astraea
reliquit. There is only fidelity to fact.

1012

VII
SHOW AND SUBSTANCE

JEVEASON Is sovereign. Will is a liegeman. Reason's office is to
hedge round the will. But reason panders will. Reason is
beguiled by the fagade of things. It confuses show with substance.
Reason is purblind.

A man's equipment, by virtue, I suppose, of the imposition
hereditary ours, is clearly not all that it might be. The child who
is attracted by the checkered skin of a snake is stung because his
senses respond to its beauty; the passengers whom the crocodile
snares with his tears have their inborn compassion to thank.
Their mistake seems to turn on what they are, by definition. Man,
whom all agree in describing as fallible, is necessarily a creature
who squares his guess by shows. (All's Well, 2.1.153) He is
liable, therefore, to draw false conclusions from the evidence
available to him. Shakespeare's plays dramatize the mistread-
ings that follow, and the iron consequence those mistreadings
involve.

See how belief may suffer by foul show !

(Pericles, 4-4-23)

It is, to say the least, very hard. But Queen Margaret's
analogies in 2 Henry VI (3.1.226-30) of the innocent child and
the crocodile who appears to be mournful are not genuinely
apposite. The plays do not have to do with children, or with
technical matters on which only Pliny is competent to pass.
They are concerned with the reading of human situations by
adult persons who are or ought to be sophisticated, fully
fledged, and hence qualified to judge of what they see. Shake-
spearean tragedy, if it confesses man's weakness, insists also, and

103

SHOW AND SUBSTANCE

more emphatically, on his strength. It posits in its heroes
and villains an understanding of alternatives. They are not
constrained to mistake an indefinite, a lesser good for the one
good. Their ignorance, though an inheritance to them, is not
beyond their controlling. It is felt, therefore, as culpable ignor-
ance. There is no thought in the plays of mocking a man by
requiring perception of him and yet depriving him of sight.
The mock is rather that a man should have the use of eyes, and
yet see the way of blindness. (Cymbeline y 5.4.194-5) No blind
men stumble in Shakespearean tragedy; only seeing men. No
children or idiots or uninitiated men make the wrong choices
because they do not know any better; only the self-conscious are
permitted to choose. The bad choice or faulty inference is felt
to be avoidable, and so to merit, commiseration certainly, but
also indictment. If man is prone to misread, he is free and also
able to read aright.

It is because of that putative ability that blindness, which
disuses it, is stigmatized, by convention. To the medieval
moralist, blindness 'conveys to us only something negative and
nothing positive, and by the blind man we generally understand
the sinner 5 . Error, Fury, and Prodigality, as Cesare Ripa depicts
them, are blind. The blindness of Cupid, an attribute created
for him by the Middle Ages, attests, not to his caprice, but to
the medieval abhorrence of profane love. In an engraving of the
seventeenth century, it is Fortune who puts out the eyes of
Cupid. The indicated response to both figures, standing together
on the ball, is contempt: both are blind. But Cupid, in a paint-
ing by Lucas Cranach the Elder, who removes the bandage from
his eyes while standing on the works of Plato, excites not
contempt but admiration: his newfound knowledge makes him
over. He becomes an emblem of clear seeing or genuine love. 1
Blindness is badness ; the restoring of sight is the emergence of
good.

Now Gloucester is blind. He affects to delineate the quality
of nothing. (i.2.34f.) He plumes himself on his opacity.

1 See Petras Berchorius, Dictionarii sev npertorii moralis . . . pars prima-tertia,
Venice, 1583, under Gecus, Gecitas'; and 'Blind Fortune Blinding Cupid 1 , p. 157
in Otho Venius, Les Embltmes de V Amour Hitmain, Brussels, 1667. Cranach's *Cupid
Unblinding Himself' is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. See also Stud,
'Blind Cupid*, pp. 95-128, and figs. 105 (Venius) and 106 (Cranach).

104

SHOW AND SUBSTANCE

Gloucester needs no spectacles. (1.2.36) And so you may draw
him, as Hamlet draws Polonius.

Very like a whale.

Sight is given Mm; he disdains it: sight is taken from him.
Pluck out his eyes.

(3.7.5)

The King is blind also.

See better, Lear.

(1.1.160)

The darker purpose he wishes to express is more than the division
of a kingdom. (1.1.36) It is nothing less than to plunge the
scarabs in his eyes. Like Gloucester, he himself bereaves himself
of sight.

That such a king should play bo-peep.

(1.4.184)

Unlike Gloucester, he does not wear the stigma of his blindness :
the case of eyes. (4.6.147) He does not have to. To mark him
would be superfluous. His blindness has been patent from the
first: c he hath ever but slenderly known himself. 5 (i.i.2g6f.)
But self-knowledge is mandatory. So, unluckily, is a knowledge
of others. It is as fateful to err in ignorance as in cunning.
(Othello, 3.3.49) To think men honest that but seem to be so
Edgar's case, Othello's case is to take hands with Edmund and
lago. On the foolish honesty of a credulous man, the plots of a
villain ride easy, (i^.igyf.) Edgar, like his father, is blind.

But so, paradoxically, are Edmund and Goneril. 'Madman,
thou errest, 9 says Feste the Clown to Malvolio. C I say, there is
no darkness but ignorance, in which thou art more puzzled than
the Egyptians in their fog/ (Twelfth Night, 4,2.46-48) Edmund,
in his ignorance, confuses mere sight with perceiving.

I see the business.

(1.2.198)

He takes the symbol for the thing itself. Goneril is ignorant also.
She offers the symbol for the thing. She understands that the
one does not jump with the other. She thinks only to make the
imposture go down. That is the sense of her hypocrisy. The love

105

SHOW AND SUBSTANCE

she tenders Lear is dearer than eyesight. (1.1.56) But to practise
on others is to hoodwink oneself. * "Fly pride," says the peacock'
(Comedy of Errors, 4.3.81), the incarnation of pride and so the
emblem of hypocrisy, but also, and necessarily, of self-deception.
GoneriPs Ignorance is as efficacious as Edmund's: Imposition
turns on evil purpose : to address oneself to evil is to warp one's
nature to it. The dyer's hand acquires the colour of the dye.
The face and the vizard at last are the same. Show is at last not
to be distinguished from substance.

And knowing what I am, I know what she shall be.

(Othello, 4.1.74)

The credulous assertion is lago's, who, as he is the prime
hypocrite, is ipso facto the prime gull. His greatest punishment
is not the torture to which he is consigned. It is to believe good
>f no one. Goneril, who cozens others at hoodman blind,
nfallibly is cozened herself, The hypocrisy she ventures on is
in fact dearer than eyesight.

Do you see nothing there?
Nothing at all, yet all that is I see.

Goneril also is blind.

Cordelia and Kent, Edgar in good time, do not make the
mistake of Malvolio. They do not take the symbol for the thing
itself.

Nothing that is so is so.

(Twelfth Night, 4.1.9)

Nor do they offer that symbol in lieu of the thing.

Love, and be silent.

(1.1.62)

Cordelia's love is more ponderous than her tongue, (i.i.ygf.)
Her poverty, read thoughtfully, argues munificence : for want of
a speaking eye, she is the richer, (i.i.23of.) Kent professes to
be no less than he seems. (1.4.14) That is a measure, of his
goodness, surely; but more than that: in the root sense, it
describes his integrity. The hypocrite dismembers, and so dis-
ables, himself. He is a fraction.

I am not what I am.
106

SHOW AND SUBSTANCE

Kent, concurrently. is more than he seems. (3.r.44f.) He wraps
up his great quality in concealment (4.3.53) :

More valour in me than my habits show.

(Cymbeline, 5.1.30)

That is a measure of his cunning: he pays the debt he never
promised. Edgar, a fugitive, knows himself contemned. That
is better than to be contemned and flattered. (4.1. if.) Edgar,
who seems wretched, has the victory of Edmund, who pledges
more than he possesses. (5.1.42) It is a dangerous kind of
vaunting, likened by the emblem writer to that of the ostrich,
whose wings are fair enough and broad enough but, put to the
proof, unavailing. 1 Ml Penna, sed Vsus. They have only the look
of the thing. Edmund's case is the same. His appearance gives
him out to be substantial; he is as little substantial as a worm-
eaten nut. The rags of a carl put to shame the gilded arms of a
retainer. (Cymbeline, 5.5.4) The rude Guiderius in Cjmbeline
shames Cloten the prince. Posthurnus, the drudge of Nature,
outfaces lachimo. (5.2.4f.) Oswald, who wears a swashing and
a martial outside (As Tou Likelt> 1.3.122), is bested by Edgar, in
the character of a peasant and slave. (4.6.235, 241) Oswald,
as he is less than his outwall, cannot conceive of a man who is
more. Oswald is fooled to the top of his bent.

Ignorance is not bliss, but the courting of disaster. To see the
innocent flower but not the serpent beneath it is to go the way of
King Duncan. To be the serpent and yet resemble the flower,
is to go the way of Macbeth. (i.5.66f.) The king and the
murderer fall equally from ignorance. Each is the gull of appear-
ances. Duncan does not revel in his ignorance. His time is
abridged. Macbeth, as he is given greater scope, is the more
dramatically transformed. His nature, as it waxes in evil, wanes
in the capacity of spying out good. Thus it speeds its dissolution.
Only the beautiful soul perceives beauty. Goneril is deformed.
Her punishment follows :

Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile.

(4.2.38)

Rank corruption is not static. Progressively, it mines everything

1 Rollenliagio, Nucleus Emblemafum, emblem 36. See also Whitney, Emblemes,
Sig. Gar, p. 51.

IO7

SHOW AND SUBSTANCE
within. So far from discerning error, one grows to adore it.

He that is giddy thinks the world turns round.

(Taming of the Shrew > 5.2.26)

The mildness of a husband begins to seem a harmful mildness ;
his gentle course becomes the occasion of irony and blame.
(1.4.364-7; 4.2.1, I2f.) Thus the hard are hardened, the blind
are blinded more. They strut to their confusion.

Surrey, in the last of Shakespeare's histories, as he is deformed,
heaves the gorge at beauty:

All goodness
Is poison to thy stomach.

(Henry VIII, 3.2.282)

The Elizabethan homilist is more memorable than Shake-
speare's Wolsey: Tut not meate into a pyspot . . . Caste not
good sentences in to the mynde of a wycked person.' 1 Shake-
speare, in As Tou Like It, makes the proverb presentable : 'to cast
away honesty upon a foul slut were to put good meat into an
unclean dish.' (3.3.35^) Good counsel is squandered on evil
behaviour. Evil savours only itself. King Lear, as he does evil,
seels up his eyes. The result follows, and predictably. He confuses
the foul disease and the physician. (i.i.i66f.) He kills the physi-
cian. The disease kills him. He confuses show and substance,
invests Albany and Cornwall with power and pre-eminence,
retains for himself only the name and additions, which is to say
the titles, pertaining to a king. (1.1.132-41) In Gloucester's
phrase, he is 'Confined to exhibition!' (1.2.25) Then and this,
and not the act of abdication is the kernel of his fault he would
continue to manage the authorities he has given away. (1.3.16-
18) But like his fellow monarch in Sidney's Arcadia, who loses
his function to a bastard son, he comes to discover that, before
he is aware, he has left himself nothing but the name of a king.

His greatest blunder is of course to misconstrue Cordelia, the
epitome of the unprized that is precious. (1.1.262) To find that
misconstruction improbable, is one thing. It is improbable; it
has to be. To seek to gloss it over is, however, to miss the heart of
the matter. Coleridge, contemplating uneasily the incredible

1 *Cibum in metellamne immittas. J See Sigs. I8r v in Taverner, Prouerbes or
Adagies> gathered oute of the Chiliades, 1552.

108

SHOW AND SUBSTANCE

business of the opening scene, strives to rationalize it and so
to make it credible by finding 'some little faulty admixture of
pride and sullenness in Cordelia's "Nothing' 5 / 1 In fact one
wants to heighten and not to suppress the element of the bizarre
in the rejection of a daughter neither prideful nor sullen but
altogether guiltless. The less probable that rejection, the less
credible, the more does it tell you of the monstrous nature of
Lear's behaviour. The words of Perillus, who counsels Leir in
the old play, are apt:

Ah, who so blind, as they that will not see.

(sc. 6)

King Lear will not see, though he has his own lantern to light
him. (2 Henry /F, 1.2.52-54) Coleridge was right: the love test,
as the spring of all that follows., is fantastic. Rymer was right:
Othello hinges on a cheap trick of melodrama. But the beginning
of Lear and the decisive complication of Othello are what they
ought to be. Their eccentricity lights up what is at issue, what
ordinary realism would serve only to obfuscate.

Trifles light as air

Are to the jealous, confirmations strong
As proofs of Holy Writ.

(Othello, 3.3.322-4)

Cordelia's refusal to utter hyperbole:

I cannot heave
My heart into my mouth,

approves the Biblical saying, 'The heart of fools is in their
mouth: but the mouth of the wise is in his heart/ 2 But Lear
does not concur. He does not see, as France sees, that Cordelia
is most rich being poor, most choice when forsaken, most loved,
and loving, when despised (i.i.253f.); that, to paraphrase
Corinthians, she has nothing, and yet possesses all things.
By a kind of ghastly irony, he calls her himself the little-seeming

1 See Coleridge, Lectures and Notes on Shakspere and Other English Poets, London,
1883, p. 335; and Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions, p. 40.

2 Ecdesiasticus, xxi. 26. See the saying ascribed to Plato in Baldwin, Treatise,
London, n.d., Sig. NTT: 'The tongue of a wise man is in his heart, but the heart of a
foole in hys tang.'

IOg

SHOW AND SUBSTANCE

substance (1.1.201); he rejects her solid quality, because it is
unapparelled, for the hollow protesting of Goneril and Regan.
The wicked sisters apparel vice like virtue's harbinger. (Comedy
of Errors, 3.2.12) They are as rich in promise as an alehouse
painted sign. (Titus, 4.2.98) But rich honesty is not richly
apparelled. It dwells like a miser in a poor house. (As Ton Like It,
5.4.63f.) Truth also, as the Renaissance bodies her forth, is
unapparelled, like Cordelia. 1 (Plate XL) Cunning is plighted,
not candour. (1.1.280) Evil hides in pleats of majesty. (Lucrece,
L 93) Truth is stripped naked, clad only in itself. (4.3.44)

Lear, perversely blind, identifies nakedness with lack of
substance. He makes the mistake of the medieval artist who,
depicting a contest between Nature and Reason, clothes the
higher principle and leaves Nature, the lesser, unclothed.
Mantegna also, painting the two Venuses, indicates by her
nakedness the inferiority of Aphrodite to Urania. But the right
reading is otherwise. The lesser figure, Kent as Caius in
Shakespeare's play, is wrapped up in concealment. He is known
and honoured, his truth is made manifest, only as he puts off his
mufflings. (4.3.53-55) Conversely, Man the hero, in Henry
MedwalTs Nature, as he puts on those mufflings, is diminished.
His nakedness, initially, denotes his freedom from taint. In the
interlude, the innocence of the hero is established ; in the tragedy,
the redemption of the hero is prefigured, in the denuding of
either.

Off, off, you lendings ! Come, unbutton
here. 2 (3.4.1 i2f.)

Edgar also, stripped of his Persian attire, as he enacts c the naked
fellow' is made, not less but more. For nakedness is not the badge
of inferiority but Truth. Latin poetry celebrates the nakedness of
Truth. The New Testament affirms it. The Graces are naked to
betoken their candour. Even the medieval sculptor fashions a
nude Temperance or Chastity, taking the undraped Venus as his

1 The figures flanking the title, in Plate XL, represent Leicestershire and
Antiquity (holding a book and torch). Below them is a foot-plan of Lindley.
Naked Truth, at the top, holding in her hand her iinmemorial attribute, the sun,
finds her complement and antithesis in winged Fame. For other and similar images
of Truth, see Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gendeman y London, 1634, t.p.j Gh. II,
Plate VII, and Ch. Ill, Plate XIII.

2 T. N. Greenfield, 'The Clothing Motif in "King Lear",' Shakespeare Quarterly,
V, I954> 281-6.

IIO

SHOW AND SUBSTANCE

model. In the art of the Renaissance and after, representations
of Nuda Veritas become very nearly a convention. Botticelli
paints a naked Truth. Bernini unveils her. To Titian, contrasting
profane and sacred love, the nude Venus is the noble Venus,
Beauty and Wisdom and Love of Virtue are drawn naked, in
Ripa's Iconologia. God's Grace, as she is innocent, is naked.
Beneficence is unclothed, and hence divested of vainglory and
self-interest. Naked Truth holds the sun in her hand, to signify
her pleasure in clearness. Her foot tramples on the globe,
transcending mortality: she is, in her unambiguous purity,
immortal. A sixteenth-century Italian printer takes the naked
Truth as his emblem, A German printer, who is also a Protestant,
discovers in it a pledge of reformation. Mary Tudor, to a Catholic
like Cardinal Pole, epitomizes the Truth: in 1553, the year of
her crowning, c armed power prepared to destroye her, yet she
being a virgin, helpless, naked, and unarmed, prevailed.' The
Anabaptists, though as pious, were not so successful. On a wintry
night in Amsterdam in 1535, a dozen of them stripped and
ran naked through the streets, crying, e Wo, wo, wo ! The wrath
of God, the wrath of God! 5 Nor would they put on their
clothes when arrested. 'We are', they said, *the naked truth.'
Whether they went naked to the scaffold is unknown.

Thomas Middleton in the following century contrived to
enter, in the Lord Mayor's Pageant, at least a naked-seeming
Truth. John Davies of Hereford and Joseph Fletcher dwelt in
their poems on Truth's nakedness. Shakespeare did also, in the
first of his plays:

The truth appears so naked on my side
That any purblind eye may find it out.

(j Henry VI, 24.2of.)

Just as Cordelia is dismantled by the king of those many folds
of favour (i.i.22of.) in which she was accustomed to go, so does
she approximate more nearly to the person of Truth. 1 In time

1 The debate of 'Nature and Reason* (Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, MS. Fr.
379, fol. 33, c. 1500} is illustrated in Stud, m Icon., fig. HI; as are similar repre-
sentations of 'Nature and Grace* (on the Medal of Constantine, Vienna,
Kunsthistorisches Museum, c. 1400), fig. no; and *St. BasOius between Worldly
Happiness and Heavenly Life' (in a Byzantine miniature, Paris, Bib. Nat., MS.
Grec. 9123, fol. 272, ninth century), fig. 109. Mantegna's version of the Geminae
Veneres is included in his painting, *The Realm of Comus', in the Louvre. He reverses

III

SHOW AND SUBSTANCE

Lear acknowledges that it is so. He grows to understand that
those whose low sound reverbs no hollowness are not necessarily
empty hearted (i.i.i55f.); that those whose blood seems snow
broth may be given to luxury and riot (4.6.120-5); that the
gown of office, if it covers a king, will cover a dog as efficiently. 1
(4.6.161, 167) Then he can fall to railing against simulation,
the disparity between substance and show. But then it is too
late. 2

If good words and good feature ran in tandem with good
intent, Lear and Gloucester would not be put to so bitter a
schooling. But the good and the wicked are alike disobliging.
Truth's a dog must to kennel. (1.4.124) The good man, in his
whimsy, takes the basest and the poorest shape that ever penury
brought near to beast. (2.3.6-9) He presents himself to you in
the garb of a servitor or bedlam. To prosecute his intent, he
craves disguise. (1.4.2-4) As you value your life, you must

the Greek representation of Aphrodite Urania (Praxiteles, Knidos) as nude, and the
terrestrial Aphrodite (Kos) as clothed. Horace writes of 'nuda Veritas' in Carmina,
I. 24, 7; and Petronius of *nuda virtus' in Sat. 88. For a New Testament reference,
see Hebrews, IV. 13. Nude Truth enters the Middle Ages in the Quattrocento, by
virtue of a mistaken reading of Lucian's description of the Calumny of Apelles'.
The earliest known rendering, a miniature dating from 1350-1, is by Opicinus de
Ganistris (God, Pal. lat. 1993, fl- 2 ^)j % IJ 4 m ^^* zn ^ con - Giovanni Pisano
imitates the Venus Pudica in his pulpit (1302/1310) in the Cathedral at Pisa, fig.
113. Botticelli's 'Nude Truth' is a part of his * Calumny of Apelles' in the Uffizi.
Bernini's 'Naked Truth Unveiled', 1646-52, is in the Galleria Borghese, Rome; as
is Titian's 'Sacred and Profane Love,' .1515. For nudity in Ripa, see under Amor di
Virtu, Felicita Eterna, Amicizia, Anima, Bellezza, Chiarezza, Ingegno, Sapienza,
Virtu heroica, Benificio, Conversione, Gratio di Dio, Gloria, Natura, Verita;
and, in the Venice edn, of 1645, Idea. The Italian printer is Marcolino da Forli;
the German, John Knoblouch of Strasbourg (1521), whose mark is illustrated by
Saxl, p. 203. Saxl, p. 207, quotes Cardinal Pole. Motley, I, 80, tells of the Ana-
baptists. Middleton's pageant dates from 1613. Davies wrote of naked Truth in
Humours Heav'n on Earthy 1609; and Fletcher in The History of the Perfect-Cursed-
Blessed Man, 1628, in which Truth holds a sun, as she does in Bernini's Tomb of
Alexander VII, in St. Peter's, Rome. Gloucester puns on Truth's attribute in the
opening lines of RIIL See also Berchorius, Dictionarii, Venice, 1583, under Nudus,
Nuditas; and Stud, in Icon., ch. V, *The Neoplatonic Movement in Florence and
North Italy*, pp. 129-69, and in particular pp. 153-9.

1 So the comely figure of False-Semblant or Hypocrisy in The Romaunt of the
Rose: 'Whoso took a wethers skyn, And wrapped a gredy wolf theryn.' See Fragment
C, 11. 6 259 f.

2 See Spenser, -F.Q,., Book II, Canto x, stanza 31, on Lear's belated discovery:
'The wretched man gan then avise too late, That love is not, where most it is
profest.*

112

SHOW AND SUBSTANCE

pierce the disguise. It is no good to plead myopia, to answer
saying : When saw we thee an hungered, or athirst, or a stranger,
or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee ?
There is a sense in which the purblind man may be said to make
love to his myopic employment.

The wicked also raze their likeness. They are not always
vulpine, on their face. The heart of the fox is not figured by his
coat, or not always. 1

Who cannot steal a shape that means deceit?

(2 Henry VI, 3.1.79)

To know a man's mind, one must rip his heart. (4.6.262) For
the evil are often beauteous, 'empty trunks, o'er-flourished by
the Devil'. Only a child will wonder that a man's face can fold
up murder in a smile. (Titus, 2.3-266) Nature connives at the
practice of the hypocrite. Nature closes in pollution with a wall.
( Twelfth Night, 3.4.4O3f. ; i .2.48f.) To choose another metaphor :
Cucullus non facit monachum: But all hoods make not monks
(Henry VIII, 3.1.23), a proverb which might serve as the epi-
graph, if one is fond of summary tags, at once for Twelfth Night
and Measure for Measure, In those plays and, more notably, in
Lear, Shakespeare picks up, but to dispute, not endorse, the
pseudo-Platonic notion, widely received in the Renaissance,
that

the frame

And composition of the mind doth follow
The frame and composition of the body:
So, where the body's furniture is beauty,
The mind's must needs be virtue.

(Ford, "TuPity, 2.5)

Marlowe, in Hero and Leander, approved the saying: those com-
pounded of

misshapen stuff
Are of behaviour boisterous and rough.

(L 2 o 3 )

In the essay, e Of Deformity', Bacon gave it his testimony:
'Deformed persons are commonly even with nature. For as

1 To paraphrase Whitney (Emblemes^ Sig. Q.2V, p. 1 24), who warns us to beware,
not of open foes but those *that doe in secret lurke*.

SHOW AND SUBSTANCE

nature hath done ill by them, so do they by nature; being . . .
void of natural affection.*

It is a pleasant and a popular fancy. To look is to know. The
good man is good to look on; the evil man, by a stroke of luck,
is evil favoured. When Ripa wants an emblem of a virtuous
action, he finds it in the figure of a handsome young man, 1
whose superficial comeliness tells you what he is within. The
ugly man, conversely, says the poet Eustache Deschamps,
reveals in his face his ugliness of spirit :

Que horns de membre contrefais

Est en sa pensee meffais,

Plains de pechiez et plains de vices.

The young Crookback is as crooked in his manners as his shape.
(2 Henry VI, 5.i.i57f.) His rivals and victims you would suppose
to be sufficiently warned. But not so. After all he beguiles them,
so smooth does he daub his vice with show of virtue. (Richard
III, 3.5.29) It is Hastings, whose execution is already fixed, who
is sure that you may know his heart by his face. (3.4*55) And
so the lament:

Oh, that deceit should steal such gentle shapes,
And with a virtuous vizard hide foul guile !

(Richard III, 2.2.27f.)

The forehead reveals the man, says the commonplace. 2
Shakespeare's understanding is less eupeptic. The painted out-
wall as often as not betokens dearth. (Sonnet 146) Outward
show seldom jumps with the heart. (Richard III, 3.1.1 of.) Frontis
nulla fides. For

man is made, of suche a seemlie shape,
That frende, or foe, is not discern 3 d by face. 3

There's no faith in the forehead.

There's no art
To find the mind's construction in the face.

(Macbeth, 1.4.1 if.)

1 See Iconologia, under Attione virtuosa.

2 Frons Hominem PraeferL

8 Whitney, Emblemes, Sig. Nsv, p. 100. See also Sambucus (from whom Whitney
took the emblem), Embkmata, Sig. Mir, p, 177; and the figuring of the moral in
The History and Antiquities of Hawsted and Hardanck^ in the County of Suffolk, John
Cullum, London, 1813, pp. 159-65, cited Green, p. 129.

114

SHOW AND SUBSTANCE

The wolf has learned to mimic the lamb: in that way you are to
gloss the fable of the pullet that laid the golden egg. Ne regarder
a Fapparence. 1 Warm a snake in your breast, oblivious of its
nature, and the snake will sting your heart. (2 Henry FT,
3.i.243f.) The reward of the goat who gives suck to the wolf, as
the play is concerned to remind you, is that of the hedge sparrow :
its head is bit off by its young. 2 (i.4.235f.) But the wolf also is
gulled. Webster, in The White Devil, tells of Aesop's 'foolish dog
that let go the flesh to catch the shadow*. (5.1) As the wolf is
vicious, it is foolish: it worships shadows and adores false
shapes. (Two Gentlemen, 4.2.131) It confuses a man with the
bust of a man. (Plate XLI) It takes a mess of shadows for its
meat.

Unwitting faith is foolish faith. 8 The fable of the elephant and
the undermined tree dramatizes the saying. The improvident
elephant, whose legs are for necessity, not for flexure ( Troilus
and Cressida, 2.3.1 14^), sets his rest on a tree at which the hunters
have been digging, 'And downe he falles, and so by them was
slaine 3 . 4 The construction: simple strength, that declines to
look about it, is disabled by a limping but a provident weakness,
the case of Shakespeare's Caesar, a puissant man, and fatuous,
who loved

to hear

That unicorns may be betrayed with trees
And bears with glasses, elephants with holes.

(Julius Caesar, 2.1.203-5)

So much for the ignorance that is bliss. The emblem of a
heart and the seeing hand that holds it exemplifies the alternate
way. 5 (Plate XLII) Works are more substantial than words.
But Lear is covetous of words. And so like the elephant, he sets
his rest on nothing, the avowals of Goneril and Regan. He
trusts to summer days. He grows old, and forbears to grow wise.

1 Desprez, Le Theatre, p. 57.

2 See Whitney, Emblemes, Sig. Gir, p. 49.

3 Nusqttam tutajides, the legend Sambucus finds in the emblem of the elephant.

4 Whitney's verses on his fate, Sig. Tgv, p. 150. See also Sambucus, Entblemata y
Sig. M4v, p. 184, in Green, p. 196.

5 Rollenhagio's gloss, Sig. C^v, interprets the emblem: 'Fide, sed vide. Credule
ne croy pas aux paroles trop belles, Mais iuge tes amis par les ocuvres fidelles; Et
tousiours va portant un oeil dedans ta main., Croyant ce qu'elle tient pouvoir estre
certain.*

SHOW AND SUBSTANCE
How III white hairs become a fool and jester!

He does not consult for winter in the spring. And winter over-
takes him, as it overtakes the grasshopper, who believed he
had white hairs in his beard before the black ones were there
(4.6.g8), and who, in consequence, is set to school to an ant,
to learn there's no labouring in winter. 1 (2.4.68) (Plate
XLIII) To plead a lack of prescience does not suffice. Time,
which the grasshopper squanders in his ignorance, brings in its
revenges upon him. He is wasted by time. Lear, as his ignorance
is the more signal, is the more cruelly paid home. He scorns to
learn the uses of time. 2 And so he tastes his folly: he mounts the
wheel of fire. Ignorance is fatal: the old and reverend had better
be wise. (1.4.261) It is, moreover, wilful. And

to wilful men

The injuries that they themselves procure
Must be their schoolmasters.

(2.4.305-7)

Goneril and Regan are more ensteeped in ignorance than
Lear. Enamoured of power, they see between them and the
gilded tombs they covet only those obstacles that are tangible,
palpable: the appurtenances of physical power. That is why
Goneril, requesting Lear C A little to disquantity your train 3 ,
describes herself as one who 'else will take the thing she begs'.
(i.4.26gf.) That is why Regan, to whom Lear has given all,
announces baldly, with entire self-assurance, 'And in good time
you gave it'. (2.4.253) The meaning is that Lear is stripped of
real power.

For I lack soldiers.
(4.6.119)

1 See also Whitney, Embkmes, Sig. V4r, p. 159; and Freitag, Mythologia Ethica,
Antwerp, 1579, p. 29, who moralizes the fable of the grasshopper and the ant with
the motto, 'Contraria industriae ac desidiae praemia/ and who appends to his
emblem, as Desprez does (the one in Latin, the other in French), the Biblical saying
'The sluggard will not plow by reason of the cold; therefore shall he beg in harvest,
and have nothing* (Proverbs, xx-4). Green, p. 129, quotes Freitag. The fable of the
fly and the ant, as Gamerarius treats it, is analogous: 'At ego aestate mediocri
labore exerceor, vt hyeme quietam & securam vitam possim degere,' See T. W.
Baldwin, Shakespeare* ] s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, I, 62of.; Muir, p. 86n.; and
Proverbs, vi.6-8, xxx.25.

2 Ford, P&rkin Warbeck, 4.4: 'The use of time Is thriving safety, and a wise
prevention Of ills expected.'

116

SHOW AND SUBSTANCE

What is there, then, to balk his daughters in doing their will
upon him ?

Who can arraign me for 5 t?

(5-3-I59)

Edmund, in his capacity as idolater of the outside, the extrinsic,
in a word of all that is least consequential, offers, implicitly, an
answer. Age has no rights because it has no power. (1.2.50-53)
That is to say, there is no law but power, 'Our strong arms be
our conscience, swords our law.' (Richard ///, 5.3.311) It
follows, for Edmund, that

All with me's meet that I can fashion fit.

(1.2.191)

Strength alone marshals the way. Those who are weak had best
seem so. (2.4.203)

But appearances deceive. God is not, absolutely, on the side
of the big battalions. The wicked sisters see too little. And lead is
more precious than silver and gold, as Morocco, the unlucky
suitor in The Merchant oj Venice, whose apprehension is more
collied than his skin, learns at considerable cost. The wicked
sisters see too much. Like Stephano and Trinculo, the would-be
villains of The Tempest, they dedicate themselves to the achieve-
ment of trash. Court persons, who ebb and flow by the moon,
they find their emblem in Sisyphus, for ever rolling his stone. 1
Their ears are stopped to the sense of the melancholy question,
a Kingmaker's question:

Why, what is pomp, ride, reign, but earth and dust?

(3 Henry VI, 5.2.27)

Sandblind as they are, they do not understand that the trumpery
they covet is no more than stale to catch thieves, that the
treasures they would lay up are open to corruption. In the event,
the Scriptural saying is verified against them: sword, sceptre,
and crown shrivel to ashes. 2 (Plate XLIV) Goneril and Regan,

1 See Ripa, under Vita inguieta.

2 Rollenhagio glosses emblem 86 (Plate XLIV), Sig. Dav: 'Sic transit gloria
mundi. II n'est rien icy las d'eternelle duree, La gloire du monde semblable a la
fdmee, Plus elle va brave, ses comes eslevant, Plus elle s'esva novit, E devient
a neant.* For a similar emblem (no. 73) of the globe with a city revealed in the
centre, and smoke billowing up from it, Rollenhagio chooses as his legend the words,

S.P.-I 117

SHOW AND SUBSTANCE

who profess to be shrewd, are really most sanguine. Blithely they
cast about for a tree in which to build. But God has sold the
forest to Death. 1

Pulvis et umbra. The gloss (SIg. Gfv) : 'Humana fumus. Les sceptres, les honneurs,
E la gloire moidaine, Et tout ce qui depend de la grandeur humaine, N'est rien
qu'une fumee, E pure vacate", Qui perit en naissant come un fleur d'esteV Boissard,
beneath the words, 'Homo Buila*, depicts the treasures of the earth heaped up
beside a boy blowing bubbles, which are punctured as they ascend. Emb. liber,
Metz, 1588, Sig. C4r, p. 23.

1 In the words of Samuel Rutherford in a letter to Lady Kenmure, quoted
Buchan, p. 20.

118

VIII
REDEMPTION

, which Is yoke fellow to Ignorance, stems from a failure
rightly to distinguish the good. Lear documents amply the result
of that failure. Its decisive manifestation is in the opening lines
of the play. Thus one may speak of all that follows as a long
denouement. The action wanes as it waxes. But the play describes
a second curve, antithetical to the first. The action waxes as it
wanes. The new moon is cradled in the arms of the old. This is
to say that the delineating of the greatest evil is made that of the
greatest good. Where you find Goneril, there do you find
Cordelia. Edmund's cruelty is the occasion of Edgar's com-
passion, Lear's decline the condition of Lear's rejuvenescence.

There is some soul of goodness in things evil,
Would men observingly distil it out.

(Henry V, 4.1.4?.)

The rising action of the play, the suspense it engenders, is 5 not
in the adversity with which the characters are visited, but in
their discovery of the uses of adversity. When Lear's daughters
drive him out in the storm, there is in his banishment no
discovery, or peripeteia. The wicked daughters confirm, it is
true, their evil design. It is, however, a design that has been
long maturing, long patent. Only Lear is oblivious of it.

I know you what you are.

The exciting discovery he makes on the heath.

He had thought himself a king, in his lexicon a rare (an
impossible) being, fenced off from the ills that flesh is heir to.

119

REDEMPTION

He discovers that the king and the outcast are one, that but for
Idle ceremony the slave has the forehand and vantage of the
king. Ceremony, a king's prerogative, is not proof against the
fever. (4.6.107) Divest a king of his robes, undeck the pompous
body, and you find him a cipher (1.4.212, 251), just such a
forked animal as any other. (3.4.11 of.)

But now a king, now thus.

(King John, 5.7.66)

Who, from the skull of a king or a peasant, can distinguish the
king or the peasant? 1 (Plate XLV) In this sense the garment
determines the man. King Cophetua and the beggar maid are
not so much different as the same.

The king's a beggar, now the play is done.

(AWs Well, Epilogue)

One event happens to all. What is more : if man is kin to the
angels, he is also, however you clothe him, kin to the worm.

(4-1-33)

Discovering so much, Lear makes the unshunnable inference.

Men are players merely, chimeras who pursue the chimerical.
'We are both on the stage,' writes the Parliamentary general
Sir William Waller to the royalist friend whose defeat and
wounding he brought about at the battle of Lansdown. c We
are both on the stage, and we must act the parts that are
assigned to us in this tragedy. 32 But the universal theatre
presents more woeful pageants than the scene in which Waller
and his adversary play. (As Tou Like It, 2.7.137-9) All the
world's a stage to feed contention in a lingering act. (2 Henry IV \
i.i.i55f.) You great men take the centre, says the Bastard in
King John; lesser men stand around you

As in a theatre, whence they gape and point
At your industrious scenes and acts of death.

(2.i.375f.)

1 Rollenhagio, Sig. Civ, glosses the emblem of skull, sceptre, and farm tool:
*Mors sceptra ligonibus aequat. Le sceptre E le hoyau sont en leur fin semblables,
Payants egal tribut aux Parques redoutables; Gar qui pourra dire, que ce crane
hideux, Ait est6 d'un paisan, ou d'un Roy genereux? 1

2 Quoted in Patrick Cruttwell, The Shakespearean Moment, New York, 1 960,
p. 123.

120

REDEMPTION

The huriy ? by definition, is only a simulacrum of the genuine
drama. In that manner Nashe, in Summer's Last Will andTesta-
ment, describes it:

Heaven is our heritage.

Earth but a player's stage.

Totus mundus aglt histrionem. All the world plays the actor. 1 All

sweat without purpose, contend for a hollow applause. But you
cannot feed capons so. It follows that man's life is a great stage
of fools. (4.6.185) But the actor, as he plays his part there, is
played upon also. And so the further inference : man's life, even
at its zenith, is a theatre of all miseries. (Plate XLVI) His
tormentors are fleshly lust, sin, and death. 2 His insistent business
is sorrow, in all his entrances and exits. (4.6.180-5)

For sorrow holds man's life to be her own,

His thoughts her stage where tragedies she plays. 3

If man is no more than this, 4 who should be mindful of him, or
of the puerilities with which he wears out a life ? True wisdom
will hold the world but as the world. 5 To Herbert of Cherbury,
delivering his c Elegy Over a Tomb', the wise man is one who

did delight no more to stay

Upon this low and earthly stage

But rather chose an endless heritage.

Lear comes to concur in the wisdom of Antonio, the Merchant
of Venice. He holds the world but as the world. He laughs at
gilded butterflies (5.3. isf.) who attend on the flame that
consumes them. 6 (Plate XLVII)

1 Thomson, p. 113, drawing on T. W. Baldwin, traces the saying to Palingenius,
whose astronomical text, godiacus Vitas , was the most popular treatise of its kind in
the Renaissance. The idea is a commonplace. It occurs in Juan Vives and,
ultimately, in the Satyncim of Petronius.

2 Lascim caro, peccatwn y morsque.

3 Fulke Greville, Caelica, sonnet 86. See also Wisdom, 11.3,5 ; Florio's Montaigne,
Li 07; Holland's Pliny, vii, Proem, edn. 1601, p. 152, cited Muir, p. i8m.

4 With 3.4.105, cf. Hebrews, ii.6.

5 M V, 1.1.77. Jaques* famous speech in A TZJ, 2 .7. 1 39-65, is a parallel utterance.

6 Rollenhagio, Sigs. I&jr-v, glosses his emblem of the fly and the candle (Plate
XLVII) : f Cosi vivo piacer conduce a morte. La douce volupte" peste de nostre
vie, Est de mille peinnes E mille maux suyvie, Gar un poure amoureux semblable
a un flambeau, Se consume soy mesme, E se mene au tombeau. 5 Heinsius, Amatoria,
?i6i3, Sig. Fir, p. 32, gives a similar emblem.

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Thus hath the candle singed the moth.
Oh, these deliberate fools!

(Merchant of Venice, s.g.ygf.)

But he does not find out their folly with his eyes. He is able to
see truly only when he can see feelingly. Like Timon, 'He will
not hear, till feel 5 . (2.2.7) He who feels nothing knows nothing.
(4. i .7 if.) The eyes and ears are inadequate reporters. Gloucester
stumbled when he saw. (4.1.21) Bereft of sight, he ceases to
stumble. (3. 7.9 if.)

His overthrow heaped happiness upon him,
For then, and not till then, he felt himself.

(Henry VIII, 4.2.64Q

Given, Edgar once more in his touch, he'd say he had eyes again.

I see it feelingly.

(4.6.152)

Lear, humiliated and unheard before Cornwall's castle, and
later, goaded from that castle, grows an adept in the art of
feeling sorrows. (4.6.223)

I am not ague proof.
(4.6.107)

Wind and cold are councillors that feelingly persuade him what
he is. (As Tou Like It, 2.1.1 of.)

But to taste my own misery is common, is casual. Mere
existence entails it.

We came crying hither.

(4.6.182)

To sorrow for my neighbour, to make his misery mine, is the
uncommon case, and the harder. That is to shake the holy water
from one's eyes. (4.3.3 if.) Lear, like Cordelia, is vouchsafed
that kind of pity. It is the chief leaven of his schooling.

In, boy, go first.

(3.4.26)

Charity solicits him; like Edgar, he gives it room. (5.3.166)

I'll forbear. 1

(2.4.110)

1 Prospero, in The Tempest^ 5.1.25-27, is the comparable case.

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None Is without fleck. He declines, in consequence, to cast the
first stone. But none is without merit. He learns to feel for the
pariah, to assimilate him. The lash that falls on the prostitute is
laid on his own back as well. (4.6.165-70) He learns, as Kent
has learned, that self-love lacks in magnitude and savour, that a
man knows no greater love than to hold his life but as a pawn
for his friend. 1 (1.1.157)

But charity, if an attribute of Heaven, is not endemic in men
but achieved. Charity is not gratuitous. One must be brought
to thrust his fingers in the wounds, and not for ocular proof but,
to change the sense of the story, to confirm on one's own pulses
the misery of another. Lear, like Didymus called Thomas, is
made to bear witness. Only then does he grow pregnant to good
pity. (4.6.224) He feels necessity's pinch. (2.4.213)

But what I am want teaches me to think on.

(Pericles, 2.1.76)

It is at once his expiation and his schooling, a requital for wrong,
a changing of vile things to precious, of precious things the
sign and flag of temporal power to vile. (3.2.7of.) 'Like as
Golde and Siluer is tried in the fire: euen so are acceptable
men, in the fornace of aduersitie.' 2 The horror Lear treats of is
causal in its origin, and thus one can endure the play. But the
horror is also instrumental: it leads on to perceiving; and for
that reason the play is not depressing but inspiriting. 3

But suffering alone does not quit the king, nor make him wise.
Antonio and Sebastian seek the lives of Prospero and Alonso;
they suffer in consequence, but they are not schooled. They end
as they began, confirmed in evil.

But one fiend at a time,
I'll fight their legions o'er.

(Tempest, 3.3.io2f.)

As well as suffering, one must know repentance.

1 Camillo's office and understanding, in WT 9 4.2 .8f., parallel Kent's.

2 Sig. Fa fTv in Palfreyman, The Treatise of Heaumly Philosophic, London, 1578.
S R. W. Chambers, King Lear, Glasgow, 1940, p. 48, in a fine phrase, sees

Gloucester as climbing the Mountain of Purgatory, and levying on Keats the
play itself as a Vale of Soul-Making.

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Oh, my follies !
Kind gods, forgive me that,
(3-7-9 lf -)

Lear is elbowed by a sovereign shame: humanity renascent.
(4.3.44, 47-49) It brings him to beg forgetting and forgiving.
(4.7.84) But even more is incumbent on him. The good servant
in Pericles advises his master

To bear with patience
Such griefs as you yourself do lay upon yourself.

(I.2.6 5 f.)

Lear also must possess his soul in patience. 1 He must endure. 2
The progress he goes is the wonted progress of Shakespearean
tragedy, which descends, through chaos, to harmony at the
close. The way up and the way down are depicted in an un-
published commonplace book dating from about the year of the
first quarto of the play (1608), and ascribed to one Thomas
Trevelyon. The cycle of Peace and War, as Trevelyon repre-
sents it, turns downward on the entrance of Pride, whom you
know by her peacock-feathered head-dress, and the fan of
peacock feathers in her hand. In her wake come Self Indulgence
or Pleasure, and Envy gnawing at her heart, and War brandish-
ing the torch and sword. But as the lowest point is reached, a
return to the highest is predicted : enter Poverty in rags ; and
after Poverty, Humility; and then Patience with clasped hands
and eyes raised to Heaven. The final figure in the sequence,
whose way these others have been preparing, is Peace. 3 So
Lear, as he is patient, proceeds from misfortune to reconciliation.
And not only Lear. Edgar, made tame to Fortune's blows
(4.6.222), enjoins patience. (4.6.80) Edgar endures. (5.3.211)

1 In an emblem by Rollenhagio (no. 28: 'Victrix patientia duri'), a tree grows
despite the board that blocks Its progress. The gloss, Sig. Bar: T)e mesme que tu
vois une palme umbrageuse, Centre le pesant faix se dresser genereuse: Ainsi par
patience, on dompte le malheur, Et de luy triomphant, on en reste vainqueur.*

2 Vincit quipatitur. So Whitney, Emblemes, Sig. e2v, p. 220, moralizes the fable of
the oak and the weeds, bent before the storm. See also Desprez, p. 92 : 'Endurer,
quand on ne peut mieux*; and Rollenhagio, emblem 23, Tatior, vt potiar*. The
gloss, Sig. Biv: { Qui veut done recevoir quelque contentement, II faut premier le
mal porter patiemment.' Heinsius, Amatoria, Sig. Csr, p. 21, uses the same legend
for an emblem of Cupid (who replaces the bear in Rollenhagio J s emblem) taking
honey from a tree.

8 Chew, pp. 126-8.

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Kent, at the worst. Is equable still. (2.2.180) Cordelia is the
pattern of all patience. (4.3. jyf.) Gloucester, who would shake
off his affliction (4.6.35-38), who, in a real sense, is tempted by
the Fiend to throw himself down (4.6.2 ig), resolves at last to
bear affliction until affliction dies. 1 (4.6.75-77) But Lear himself
is the great exemplar.

Thou must be patient. 2

(4.6.180)

A man's office is to bear a cheek for blows, 3 to take the weight
of the time (5.3.323)3 to abide it. (5.2. gf.) Ripeness is all.
Charity, which saves because it instructs, rises from suffering
and repentance and endurance. These 5 in Shelley's phrase, are
the seals which bar the pit.

Now the humble, whom the world calls the foolish, are made
to suffer most, in the nature of things. They ought in logic to
enjoy a better chance, not to heap up the good things of Heaven
the crass promise of crude religions but rather to live the
good life, one founded in sophistication, in right reading.
Poverty, says Primaudaye, *is the mistress of manners ... a
schoole of vertue'. Philosophy finds her best scholars among the
poor. 4 Not to be foolish, or wicked: if you beat a man enough,
you make him insensible, no longer a man but a beast. But, in
the ideal case (which is, I take it, the concern of the play, any
play), the suffering man, who is likely to be one of the lowly, is
more sensible to feeling than another, and so more acute in
perceiving.

Nothing almost sees miracles
But misery. (a.iz.iyaf.)

The world, alive only to his beggarly status, dismisses the
fruit of that status. Thus the acuity of the humble man be-
comes, in popular estimation, the muddied vision of the fool.
Kent, who has more man than wit about him, who takes one's
part that's out of favour, had best put on the coxcomb. (2.4.42;
1.4.109-12) Kent is a fool; and Cordelia a greater, who pays
contempt with kindness and ends in prison for her pains.

1 Isabella's prayer, MM, 5.i.ii5f. } anticipates Gloucester's; 'Then, O you
blessed ministers above, Keep me in patience.*

2 See also 3.2 .37f.

3 With 4.2.51, cf. Matthew, v.sg.

4 The French academie, p. 149.

125

REDEMPTION

And my poor fool is hang'd !

(5-3-35)

But Kent, for all that he is merely a retainer, is wiser than the
king, in real fact the true blank of his eye. (1.1.159) The king is
a fool. Lear's wicked daughters, who rejoice at the banishment
laid on Cordelia, when all is said discriminate but poorly. It is
they who are all-licensed fools. (1.4.220) Lear's Fool, who pines
for Cordelia (i^.ygf.), is the better able to assay.

This is not altogether fool.

(14.165)

The Dutch patriots, who wore a coarse grey livery distinguished
only by the cap and bells, were not so foolish as their well-
attired oppressors, who had not the wit to understand that a
Brutus might be found beneath the costume of a fool,

Covering discretion with a coat of folly.

(Henry F, 2.4.38)

The besotted are wise; they see whose eyes are dazzled. 1

Much madness is divinest sense

To a discerning eye;

Much sense the starkest madness.

Gloucester, thrust out at gates to smell his way to Dover
(3-7-93^)? i s succoured by a bedlam beggar. Madmen lead the
blind. (4.1.46) Gloucester's title does not exalt him a step above
his fellows. Partly it is otherwise : as he ascends, he may be said
to descend. But the words themselves are beguiling.

If we consider how our common mother the earth, being prodigall
in giuing vnto us all things necessary for the life of man, hath
notwithstanding cast all of vs naked out of her bowels, and must
receiue us so againe into her wombe, I see no great reason wee
haue to call some rich, and others poore; seeing the beginning,
being, and ende of the temporall life of all men are vnlike in
nothing, but that some during this little moment of life haue that
in abundance and superfluitie, which others haue only according
to their necessitie. 2

1 The story of Egmonfs retainers and their taunting of Cardinal Granvelle is
given in Motley, I, 387. See also Florio's Montaigne, #1.284, 298, iv.ig, quoted
Muir, p. 252. Erasmus, in The Praise of Folly, plays on the ambiguity of the word,

fool. Enid Welsford, TTw Fool: His Social and Literary History, London, 1935? New
York, n.d., treats of it exhaustively.

2 The French academie, p. 148.

126

REDEMPTION

Hierarchy, In first and last things, is a nonce word. To acknow-
ledge the puissance of the lion or king is to be cognizant also
of the claims of the hare:

Those members . . . which we think to be less honourable,
upon these we bestow more abundant honour . . . [for] God
hath tempered the body together, having given more abundant
honour to that part which lacked. 1

The greater puissance is a fiction. The humble are exalted, and
the mighty put down.

Lear, like Gloucester, must learn of the humble. His tutors
are the Fool and Poor Tom. He calls them philosophers,
learned justicers, sapient sirs. And the jest is not that he errs,
but that he is right.

The wise man's folly is anatomized
Even by the squandering glances of the fool.
(As Ton Like It, a.

Foolishness is wisdom; and poverty, riches. Things hid from the
wise and the prudent are revealed to the babe. The saying of the
Evangelist (Matthew, 20.25) is tested and confirmed by the
playwright, who

in babes hath judgement shown
When judges have been babes.

(Airs Well, 2.i.i4if.)

As Lear's wits begin to leave him, he is lessoned, he grows wise.
A fantastic, crowned with wild flowers, he figures as Christ, who
is the king of fantastics.

O thou side-piercing sight I

(4-6-85)

But if the innocence of the infant is wisdom, the wisdom of the
world is great folly. The knave turns fool that runs away.
(2.4.85) Machiavelli is wrong. The shrewd choice is the stupid
choice. Goneril and Regan, who think it shrewd to take a
sister's portion, are not so well endowed as the sister who has
lost it. Burgundy, shrewdly rejecting the dowerless Cordelia, is

1 1 Corinthians, 201.23-24. And see ch. I, p. 4, n. 3; and 'Tous peuvent servir au
besoin* in Desprez, Sig. B2v, p. 12, for the fable of the lion and the hare, in which
the passage from Corinthians is applied.

127

REDEMPTION

not a tithe so perceptive as France, who takes her up. To see
nothing where everything Is patent ought, you would think, to
require a faith that reason without miracle could never Implant.
(1.1.221-3) It does not fall out so :

Fathers that wear rags

Do make their children blind,

( 2 . 4 -48f.)

and so the gods discover when they walk among men. But the
affluent, who bar their doors against a stranger, poorly led,
are not so sophisticated as the humble, who take him in. Pii
sunt cur a diis. 1 Baucis and Philemon find their reward.

Peter, deserting Christ when the great wheel begins to run
down hill, is not so sophisticated as Veronica, who tenders
Christ her veil. One must be a fool for Christ's sake. He who
would save his life must lose it. The last shall be first. Edgar, the
son and heir of his father, Is scanted.

Edgar I nothing am.

(2.3.21)

Become so little, he Is fulfilled. A rich man shall hardly enter
into the kingdom of Heaven. The bedlam and the pauper
occupy his room.

Willing misery
Outlives incertain pomp, is crown'd before.

(Timon, 4.3.244^)

Justice, which weighs poverty in the scale against temporal
power, gives you to see how light and how weak is that power. 2

(Plate XLVIII)

The latter quick up flew, and kicked the beam.

(Paradise Los^ IV. 1004)

Nothing comes of nothing: power is nugatory: it displaces no
air. 3 Edmund, who looks always to power, knows his mounted
scale aloft: his eyes are bent, as he tells you, on nothing. (1.2.31)

1 Ovid, Metamorphoses, Lib. viii, Fab. iv.gy. And see Matthew, xxv.34~46.

2 In Plate XLVIII the sub-title, The Triumph of Justice', is illustrated by
the different positions of forma Pauperis and Ira Potentis.

3 Ex nihilo nihil fit. See 1.1.90; and Muir, p. gn.

128

REDEMPTION

Riches, power, sapience as the world describes it, do not
denote real riches, power, sapience. The Beatitudes are apposite
here. Motley may be the garb of the wise man, a material fool
(As Tou Like It, 3.3.32), rich apparel the garb of the genuine
fool, he who wears motley in his brain. For those honours laid
upon him,

He shall but bear them as the ass bears gold,
To groan and sweat under the business.

{ Julius Caesar s 4 . 1 . 2 1 f . )

His pride of accoutrement marks him the servitor, and gull. 1

If thou art rich, thou'rt poor,
For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows,
Thou bear'st thy heavy riches but a journey,
And death unloads thee.

(Measure for Measure, 3.1.25-28)

But the genuine fool is not simply a beast of burden but the
servant of his servant: like Lear, he bears his ass on his back.
(i.4.i76f.) (Plate XLIX) It is the efficient cause of his destruc-
tion. It pulls him under. Thus the faithful steward to Timon of

Athens : , ^ f

thy great fortunes

Are made thy chief afflictions.

(4.2.43f.)

The wretch Edgar, at the worst, the lowest and most dejected
thing of fortune (4.i.2f.) as he is stripped naked by fortune,
finds his burden lightened. 2 (Plate L) He is the better able to
throw aside the torrent. His defects prove commodities.
(4.i.22) Like Crates of Thebes, as Tom Nashe describes him,
he gives what he has to the waters : his appetites are ungracious :
it is better that they should drown than he himself. 3 In that
sense, it is the naked who survive. Or, another metaphor: the
wretch, who is blown to the worst, embraces the storm, yields
and bends as it directs him (4.i.6f.) But the great man, who

1 In Titian's 'Sacred and Profane Love 5 (c. 1515, Galleria Borghese), the naked-
ness of 'Felicita Etema' (Ficino's Venere Celeste or eternal beauty) denotes her con-
tempt for perishable earthly things. The handsome and costly dress of TdicitS.
Breve' (Ficino's Venere Volgare or evanescent beauty) is emblematic of the ephem-
erality of mundane things. See Stud, in Icon., fig. 108, and p. 150.

2 Lemtas secura. And see Rollenhagio, emblem 74, glossed Sag. Dir : 'Omnia mea
mecum porto.*

s Nashe, Anatomie of Abswrditie, Works, ed. McKerrow, I, 34; cited E. Taylor,
'Lear's Philosopher 5 , SQJJl, 1955, 3%-

129

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is given to command, little given to defer, seeks to outstare it.
He is shattered. 1 (Plate LI) His means secure him.

Merciful Heaven,

Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt
Split 'st the unwedgeable and gnarled oak
Than the soft myrtle.

(Measure for Measure, 2.2.114-17)

And so the injunction : Take no thought for your life,, what ye
shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye
shall put on.'

The poor and the oppressed are the salt of the earth to the
degree that they inherit, not its riches but its wisdom. Poverty,
says the homilist, 'hath beene the onely and principall cause of
enriching many with . . . [the treasures of wisedome and
vertue]'. 2 If, unhappily, much of his eulogy is the conventional
humbug: money is the root of all evil still, the initial assertion
may stand. The play is its surety. Prisoners, idiots, beggars,
pedlars, slaves: all those whom the world, cozened by show,
duped by appearance, calls nothing, those to whom the world
denies substance, are invested with substance by Shakespeare.
His mind beats on them constantly: they afford him the stuff
of nearly half of the images he draws from classes and kinds of
humanity. 3 Lear's redemption is signallized by the unwonted
care he bestows on those poor naked wretches of whom, hitherto,
he had taken little care. (3.4.28, 32f.) Like Gloucester, whose
case exactly parallels his own, he would shake them the super-
flux:

So distribution should undo excess,
And each man have enough.

(4.i.7of.)

Heaven collaborates in the charity of Gloucester and Lear. To
the poor man, God holds out fullness; to the rich man, nothing

1 See also William Strachey's sonnet, 'On Sejanus 5 : 'How high a Poore man
showes in low estate Whose Base is firme, and whole Frame competent, That sees
this Cedar, made the Shrub of Fate, Th' on's little, lasting; Th' others confluence
spent' ; quoted Muir, p. xxiii In Marlowe's Edward //, Mortimer, just before his
fall, likens himself to 'lows huge tree', to whom all others are shrubs, 11. 2579^
Praz, I, 20 1, cites Horace, Odes, II, x, n, 12; and Ovid, Rem. Am., 370.

2 The French academie, p. 150.

3 Spurgeon, p. 33.

130

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at all. 1 Not to spy out the point of that final apportioning, to
shut one's mind against it, to believe that the poor are
intrinsically poor, that Cordelia, say, who utters nothing,
means in fact nothing Is to be reduced infallibly to nothing
oneself. So Lear Is reduced.

But not for ever. The play Is a kind of Commedia. Life peers
through the hollow eyes of death, 2 (Plate LII) The dry bones
are made fruitful. 3 Lear, forgetting

Aged contusions and all brush of time
. . . like a gallant in the brow of youth.
Repairs him with occasion.

(s Henry VI, 5-3-35)

As he ages, he grows young: the lost sheep Is restored, the man
who perishes Is reborn. 4 (Plate LIII) But rebirth is founded on
destruction. Mors vitae initium. The beginning of life Is death.

For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.

Lear verifies the paradox. Like the phoenix, to be reborn he
must consume his heart away. 5 Like the eagle s he must cast his

1 The apposite illustration is in Furmer, The Use and Abuse of Wealth, first pub.
in Latin, 1575, and trans, into Dutch by Coornhert, 1585, p. 6; given in Green,
p. 489. Timon of Athens, in its constant exalting of the poor above the rich, is a long
gloss on the sense of the emblem.

2 J2IJ, 2.1 .270. Rollenhagio, Sig, Bi v, glosses his emblem of grain growing from a
skull (Plate LII) : *Mors vitae initium. Come un grain de froument, dans la terre
mourant, En renaissant produict maint espi blondissant : Ainsi I'honime iuste par
sa mort naturelle, Commence a vivre heureux une vie eternelle.*

8 See Boissard, Emblematum liber, Metz, 1 588, Sig. E4r, p. 39 : 'In morte vita' ; and
Spes Alter a Vitae, in Camerarius, edn. 1595, emblem 100, pt. i, p. 102; given in
Green, p. 184.

4 See also Willard Farnham, The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy,
Berkeley, 1 936, p. 452 ; 'Lear loses the world only to save his soul* ; and Matthew,
xvi.25. Rollenhagio, Sig. Cir, glosses emblem 45 of a child and skull with the words :
e Ce qui perit renaist. 9 In Titian's 'Sacred and Profane Love*, Cupid, who is placed
near the figure of Venus Volgare, the generative goddess, stirs a fountain that is
really an ancient sarcophagus. Once it held a corpse; now it is the spring of life.
See Stud, in Icon.., p. 152, fig. 108. And so to T. S. Eliot.

5 Freitag appends to his emblem of the phoenix the quotation from Ephesians,
iv.22. See Mythologwa Ethica, 1579; and Green, p. 381. The phoenix is reborn in
Desprez, Le Theatre, p. 103; Boissard, Embkmatum liber, Metz, 1588, Sig. F4r, p. 47;
Whitney, Emblemes, Sig. Zir, p. 177 (in Green, p. 387) ; and on the t.p. and again
on the verso of the colophon, in each case with the motto 'Semper Eadem', in La
Pittvra di Leonbattuta Alberii Tradotta Per M. Lodovico Domenuhi, Venice, 1547. The

REDEMPTION

plumes before he can renew them. 1 Lux ex tenebris: 2 light treads
on the limping heel of darkness. A captive, Lear is given his
freedom; a sick man, he is given his health; a blind man, he is
given Ms eyes again; a tatterdemalion, he is newly arrayed. The
looped and windowed garments are forgotten, in which his
worser hours were clothed.

In the heaviness of his sleep
We put fresh garments on him.

(4-7-2 if.)

He is made by the dramatist to remark his change of raiment
(4.7.66f.) : it is not simply a physical change. Neither is it
adventitious, but rather a consequence of the discovery he
makes on the heath. His new learning begets compassion: he
grows pregnant to pity. That is to put off the old man, to put
on the new. (Ephesians, iv.22-24) Age, because it is corrupted,
is wasted. (Colossians, iii.8) 'Come, my old son,' says the
Duchess of York to Aumerle, the repentant rebel of Richard II,
C I pray God make thee new.' (5.3.146) Age dies a felon's death:
c our old man is crucified'. (Romans, vi.6) Youth gapes to be his
heir.

But youth, who is the scion, is also the parent of age. The
working out of that riddle is the essential business of Shake-
speare's last plays. Thus Pericles to his daughter Marina:

Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget.

(5-2.197)

In a curious and very tentative way, it is also the business of
Shakespeare's earliest comedies.

Would you create me new?

(Comedy of Errors, 3.2.39)

But, whereas in a play like The Comedy of Errors, the recreating
or renewal turns pretty much on sleight of hand, in the late
romances and in a tragedy like King Lear it is made a matter of

t.p. moralizes the emblem with the phrase, 'De la mia morte Eterna Vita I Vivo'.
Green, pp. 380-90, lists references to the phoenix as an emblem of redemption in
Shakespeare, in his contemporaries, and in older writers.

1 The eagle illustrates the legend, *Renovata luventus', in Camerarius, emblem
34, *ex Volatilibus', in Green, p. 369. And see Psalms, ciii.5.

2 Bruck, Emblemata Moralia & Bellica, emblem 12.

132

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

X
X
X

X
X

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

Abridgment CoEe<fl
rereuerend

XXXVI

XXXVII

XXXVIII

XXXIX

XLI

XLII

XLIII

XLIV

XLV

XLVI

XLIX

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organic change in the protagonist. A prince is bereft of all Ms
fortunes (Pericles , 2.1.9) Lear, Pericles, or Prospero. In his
adversity he makes himself over, puts on the whole armour
(Ephesians, vi.i i), the beaver, the brace, the coat of mail, that
formerly he had neglected to wear. In comedy, even in the late
comedies, though the protagonist suffers and changes, still the
armour is given him by the god from the machine : in Pericles.,
it is washed up from the sea. In tragedy, in Lear, though as in
the romances it is not his except he be born again, still he is
seen and felt to deserve it, even to seize and fashion it himself.
But the result of the metamorphosis in each case is the same. The
old Adam is put off. The new man succeeds him, whose marks
are forbearing and forgiving (4.7.84), and charity above all
these others. (Colossians, iii.i2-i4)

Lear puts on the new man. It is right to insist that he earns
his renewal. There is about Shakespearean tragedy, at least
the appearance of logic and sequence. No suggestion of the
miraculous intrudes in King Lear, as it does in Pericles and
Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. But if Lear earns
or merits regeneration, it is also tendered him, not obviously,
sensationally, as in comedy, but none the less gratuitously, if
you like graciously. Really, it is independent of his willing.
Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies, though superficially very-
different, are at bottom, in that particular, the same. The
comedies emphasize intrinsic weakness, made good by the
convolutions of the plot. Protagonists in comedy are felt to be
moved.

O Time, thou must untangle this, not 1 1

It is too hard a knot for me to untie 1

(Twelfth Night, a. 2.41 f.)

The tragedies have to do with strength. The tragic protagonist
succumbs, it is true, but of his own volition : strength turning
back on itself. He is, initially, one who moves.

I dare do all that may become a man.
Who dares do more is none.

The inference is clearly that Macbeth, a man sufficiently strong,
unmans himself. It can hardly be otherwise in tragedy, which is
fraught with suspense to the degree that it seems to admit of
alternatives. Tragedy rests, formally, on conflict and choice.
S.P.-K 133

REDEMPTION

Where everything is fated, nothing is dramatic. But when
Macbeth, resisting all this while the importunities of his wife,
declares suddenly, C I am settled' (1.7.79), and commits himself
to the murder of Duncan, it is hard, however closely you scru-
tinize it, to rationalize his choice. Why does he alter ?

Macbeth, as he is innocent, is in the state of grace, to use the
appropriate metaphor. But the perpetuating of his innocence
seems a condition of the perpetual dispensing of grace.

For every man with his affects is born,

Not by might mastered, but by special grace.

The best of intentions, if you endorse Berowne's counsel in
Love's Labour's Lost (i.i.i52f.), cannot stand against wilful
inclination. The plot of that play seems to offer corroboration.
In Henry V, it is the cool and temperate wind of grace that
overblows the clouds of evil behaviour. (3.3.30-32) Failing
grace, they would rain down contagion. The king's passion is
subjected to grace, as are the wretches fettered in his prisons.
(i.2.242f.) But it is, at least a question, how much credit is
owing to the king. For a man cannot enlist the aid of grace, as
he can compel to his support the aid of reason. Grace is not
within his giving; and yet it is indispensable. Withhold it, and
the wretches burst their fetters. In the Fray of Cupid and
Apollo, lust and reason, an engraving described by Vasari and
dated 1545, it is necessary for the Mind, a beautiful woman
poised on the clouds above the battle, to illuminate and so to
succour reason by the flame of divine wisdom. Without that
intervention, reason would falter. 1 'Our dull workings', of
themselves inadequate, function only as they are informed by
'the grace, the sanctities of Heaven'. (2 Henry IV, 4. 2. 2 if.)

Innocence, then, as it turns on the accession of grace, is
kindred to good fortune. It is as fragile as fortune and as
dependent for its life on caprice. c You are in the state of grace,'
says an impudent servant to Pandarus, in Troilus and Cressida.
(3.1.15) He means, You are fortunate, in favour. On the other
hand, a frustrated lover, in As Tou Like It, is necessarily content

1 The engraving, after Baccio Bandinelli, is reproduced in Stud, in Icon., fig. 107.
The Florentine neo-Platonism of Ficino is adduced as a gloss : 'For Reason can
conquer the flames of man's lower nature only by turning to a higher authority for
enlightenment.' See pp. 137, i4gf.

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with scraps of favour, because he is c in such a poverty of grace'
(3.5.100), because, that is to say, he is so little lucky. Helena, in
All's Wel^ will cure the king of his sickness, c The greafst Grace
lending grace'. (2.1.163) The proviso is crucial. It is always
crucial, though Shakespeare rarely adverts to it, and for the
very good reason that its felt presence is inimical to real drama.

Grace is the condition of survival. Man does not have the
bestowing of grace. But perhaps the indispensable gratuity, on
the face of it antipathetic to the spirit of drama, may be assimi-
lated and made dramatic, at least in part. For the offering of
grace is not niggardly but magnanimous; grace is open to all
men. But how does it happen that only some men receive it?
What does it mean, to be 'past grace 3 ? Imogen, in Cymbeline
(1.1.137), offers an explanation: Tast hope, and in despair;
that way, past grace 31 . Apemantus, in Timon, sneers at a page
who 'outruns' t grace'. (2.2.91) Richard III, affecting the
philosopher, is sententious: 'All unavoided is the doom of
destiny.' He is answered by Queen Elizabeth: 'True, when
avoided grace makes destiny.' (4.4.2 lyf.) Survival is the
accepting, destruction the eschewing of grace. Man is weak, but
grace buttresses his weakness. And grace is his if he will have it.
Therefore man, potentially, is strong. He falls, not of necessity,
but as he turns from the help that is offered him. To retrieve or
to maintain his innocence, he has only to cry grace.

But after all the argument, the attempt to bring what is
whimsical within the limits of the play, is not altogether success-
ful. Richard falls and after him, Edmund because he avoids
what he ought to receive. What occasions the avoiding? How
account for the folly that runs away from grace? And if the
receiving of grace is interdicted by despair, how account for the
despair? Lear adjures the wicked to cry grace. (3.2. 58f.) He is
one of the wicked himself. And grace is bestowed on him. But
his antagonists never taste it. You may say that they do not
want to. But that is to argue in a circle : why are they indifferent,
or hostile? Albany turns back, and Cornwall goes forward:
grace is given to the former, or accepted by him; it is withheld

1 J. M. Nosworthy, editing the New Arden Cymbeline, notes that commentators
have detected in this passage an allusion to Calvin's doctrine of election. 'It is
unlikely that these bear any relation to Shakespeare's own religious convictions.*
(Pp. iof.n.) But surely the attempt here is to get clear of Calvin's doctrine, and to
make explicable the dispensing or withholding of grace.

REDEMPTION

from the latter, or repudiated by Mm. But the giving and with-
holding, the accepting and repudiating, are equally capricious.
No man of himself can justify himself. The common measure is
not strength but debility.

None does offend, none, I say, none. 1

(4.6.172)

That is why, in the emblem, the halt conduct the blind (as, in
the play, the bedlam beggar has the leading of old Gloucester) ;
why, in the fable, the lowly rat must enfranchise the lion. 2 All
are blind, all are crippled.

Their malady convinces
The great assay of art.
(Macbeth, 4.3

But e the things which are impossible with men are possible
with God' (Luke a xxviii.sy) who, in His infinite whimsy,
separates the elect from those who are devoted to death. It does
not matter whether, disputing the current fashion, which makes
Shakespeare a scholar of St. Thomas, you put away grace and
choose another word in its room. The metaphor from theology
has at least the merit of defining the random nature of those
decisions on which the play turns. Who does not feel Angelo to
be as guilty as Claudius ? The attempt of each at repentance is
essentially the same.

Heaven hath my empty words,
Whilst my invention, hearing not my tongue,
Anchors on Isabel. Heaven in my mouth,
As if I did but only chew His name,
And in my heart the strong and swelling evil
Of my conception.

(Measure for Measure, 2.4.27)

Claudius is only more terse :

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.
Words without thoughts never to Heaven go.

(Hamlet, 3.3.97^)

1 See Romans, iii.23.

2 See (for the halt and the blind) Emblemes d'Alciat, Sig. N2r, p. 195; Whitney,

f Sig. Iir, p. 65; and (for the fable of the rat and the lion) Desprez, Sig.
p. 6.

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REDEMPTION

But Claudius dies, presumably unregenerate. Angelo is re-
deemed. The decision, what to do with either, is the dramatist's
alone, who plays Calvin's God. He looks down, as it were, and
observes of the one :

This my long sufferance and my day of grace
They who neglect and scorn shall never taste ;
But hard be hardened, blind be blinded more,
That they may stumble on, and deeper fall.

And, inscrutably, of the other:

Once more I will renew

His lapsed powers, though forfeit and enthralled
By sin to foul exorbitant desires.

(Paradise Lost., III. 198-201, 175-7)

Lear's powers are renewed. The renewal, it is true, does not
save his life, as it saves the life of Angelo. But the difference, and
it is the great observable difference between comedy and tragedy,
is not so crucial as it looks. The clearest gods, who make them
honours of men's impossibilities, are said to have preserved
Gloucester in his supposed fall from the cliffs. (4.6. 73f.) They do
not care, as it happens, ultimately to preserve him, or his master
the king, as they do to choose at random Prospero and his
daughter, who put to sea in the rotten carcass of a butt, and who
are, for a wonder, transported safe to land. But they do bring
Lear and Gloucester out of the darkness, where Edmund and
the wicked sisters remain, and that, sub specie aeternitatis, is
intervention enough, an act as merciful, or whimsical, as the
staying of a tempest, the saving of a life. There is in it more than
nature was ever conduct of. (Tempest, 5.i.243f.) Arbitrariness
remains at the heart of the play.

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IX
SHAKESPEARE'S POETICS

IT is, I suppose, the arbitrariness of Lear that disconcerted
Nahum Tate, a good Augustan, and led him to revise and, as he
thought, to clarify the play. More indulgent than Shakespeare
and not so tentative, he was sure

(Whatever Storms of Fortune are decreed)
That Truth and Virtue shall at last succeed.

It is a pleasant and a good-natured conclusion to a harrowing
tale. Unhappily, the antecedent action seems not to confirm it.
But neither does that action, however harrowing, however
wanting in ruth, lend support to Swinburne's judgement, two
centuries later, that in the winding up of the business we are
left darkling, that 'redemption . . . [and] explanation . . .
are words without a meaning here.' 1 For though the play is
fraught with agony, it is not, what Symonds called it, an "inex-
plicable agony.' 2 King Lear, in this respect, does not differ from
the first and the least of Shakespeare's plays, except in excellence,
except in rigour : no less than the histories and the most benign
of the comedies, it discovers and communicates an ascertainable
design.

This is to say that Shakespeare is not so much protean as the
same. In comedy as in tragedy a very similar poetics informs his
work. The metaphors of Providence and Order, in the earliest
plays as in the latest, infer the relation that is to obtain between
man and the universe, and man and society. The war of Reason

1 A Study of Shakespeare [1876], London, 1902, p. 171.

2 Shakespeare's Predecessors in the English Drama, London, 1884, p. 370.

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SHAKESPEARE'S POETICS

and Will, the fierce dispute, in Keats's phrase, betwixt damna-
tion and impassioned clay, dramatizes the fragility of that
relation and the tension to which it is subjected. Kind denotes
the internal sanctions that enforce it. To treat of Anarchy or
Fortune is to represent what happens when those sanctions are
ignored and the relation disputed. To suggest that the ignorant
man invokes his own destruction is to say that he repudiates
Substance for Show. To explore the theme of Redemption is
to illuminate the means by which his mistake may be recovered.

The words themselves are of course unimportant; each
admits of alternatives. This metaphor, more exact and more
expressive, may be substituted at will for that other. But the
attitudes or principles the terminology embodies, the under-
standing of human conduct it implies, are not mutable but
fixed. The underlying principles which sustain Shakespearean
drama, and which may be described collectively as Shake-
speare's poetics, remain constant throughout his career in the
theatre. The opposite view and it has been on the whole the
more popular is put succinctly by the Italian patriot, Mazzini :
Shakespeare's 'drama is the drama of 'individuality* '; Shakespeare
'shows neither the consciousness of a law nor of humanity' ;
'enthusiasm for great principles [is in him] unknown'. This is the
Shakespeare whose plays are familiar mostly as a congeries of
elegant extracts. To read them in that manner is at least to know
them a little. It is, however, to misapprehend and totally their
nature and also their particular excellence. The same mis-
apprehension is rank in Shaw's preface to St. Joan. King Lear y I
should think, refutes it sufficiently.

But if great principles are manifest in Lear, they are ascertain-
able as well, in embryonic form, in so early a play as Richard II.

Foul sin gathering head
Shall break into corruption.

( 5 .i. 5 8)

The portents which prefigure and symbolize disaster in the
tragedies appear first in Shakespeare's work in the opening lines
of what is presumably his first play. Their function, and the
attitude or state of mind which assigns that function to them, is
the same in King Lear as in i Henry VI. The self-torment which,
in the second play of the trilogy, maddens Cardinal Beaufort on

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SHAKESPEARE'S POETICS

his deathbed is that which maddens Lady Macbeth. The bad
dreams which haunt Richard on the eve of Bosworth Field
anticipate, crudely but faithfully, the visitation which comes to
Brutus on the eve of Philippi. The death of Richard, however
melodramatic, is essentially the death of Edmund and Macbeth.
Nor are the parallels fortuitous. Because Shakespeare's under-
standing of the relation between conduct and its consequences
does not vary, although it deepens, the plays from first to last
redact one another, and necessarily. To elicit and to describe
that understanding, which is a legacy to the dramatist of a
particular moment in time, is to attempt a definition of Shake-
speare's poetics.

The early comedies, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's
Labour's Lost, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, are
all of them marked by a good deal of clowning, often tedious to
read, moderately amusing, if performed with sufficient tact, to
hear and to see. Generally the clowning has either to do with a
kind of crude farce: the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew is
an example; or with the exploiting of words, not as they
further the business of the play, but simply for their own sake,
for whatever pleasure is in them. There is, conventionally, a
wretched servant, a Mr. Malaprop, for ever at odds with his
master. His name is Grumio, in the Shrew, or Costard in Love's
Labour's Lost, or Launce in The Two Gentlemen, or Dromio in
The Comedy of Errors. When he walks he staggers, and when he
uses words, they are susceptible of every connotation but the
right one.

Doubtless, Shakespeare was amused. The savouring of verbal
blunders is an amiable and conspicuous vice in him, and
persistent. So is his propensity for fooling with the meanings of
words, dilating with a kind of horrid insistence on the ambiguity
of what looks to be plain. I suppose it a source of the great
precision of his style. The young ladies and gentlemen of Love's
Labour's Lost are, like Osric in Hamlet, absolute knaves who speak
by the card. But the fashion in which they riddle and equivocate
is apt to seem a tiresome business. Certainly it is rudimentary
humour. It is, however, significant in that it depends on one
device, however hoary; in that it confesses, and this in every case,
but one burden, which tallies nicely with the business of the
plays. The foolish servants, the termagant women, the lovers

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SHAKESPEARE'S POETICS

who protest too much, are 'senseless' 1 not because they can
stand against buffets and knocks, but just In this: each is
surpassingly stupid, mistaken incorrigibly stupid, one would
say rather, were it not for the comic denouement.

The character of Sly, the drunken tinker of The Taming of
the Shrew, is founded altogether on mistaking. The play com-
mences as Sly, besotted and asleep in front of an alehouse, is
carried off for a joke by a hunting party of noblemen, who wrap
him in fine clothes, lay him in bed, set a banquet beside him,
and then, as he wakes, pretend to pay him honour as their lord.
Of course the aplomb with which Sly reacts is amusing. He
accepts with an equanimity that only the man who is invincibly
ignorant could muster the good fortune of a title, an estate, even
a wife : 'Madam,' he says, 'undress you, and come now to bed.'
(Ind., 2.119) His easy complaisance anticipates successfully the
comic assurance of weaver Nick Bottom, in A Midsummer Nighfs
Dream, not a whit more vulgar than Christopher Sly, nor more
willing to let the world slip.

But the essence of this comedy is that Sly (like Bottom, in the
later play) is deformed. A beggar who forgets himself, he is, for
a little while, metamorphosed, to the delight of one of those
feline contrivers in whom Shakespeare appears to have
delighted. But if the anonymous Lord of the play finds in his
rather puerile charade 'pastime passing excellent 3 , as Portia
does in her mummery I think of the gulling of Shylock in the
fourth act of The Merchant of Venice; or Henry V in his I think
of his disguise before Agincourt as a soldier, or of that earlier
scene in which he toys with the conspirators who have plotted to
take his life, toys with them as a cat caresses a mouse, knowing
all the while that the mouse is to be eaten, as the conspirators
are to be hanged; if another example the Duke of Measure
for Measure, that connoisseur of the emotions of others, enjoys
exploiting those emotions : 'Be absolute for death' this, to the
wretched Glaudio in prison it is always the butt, the person
practised upon, who offers the occasion.

So Christopher Sly, to take him as the type of that recurrent
figure in Shakespeare's plays, the man who mars his own
features, and becomes a sport or puppet, by mistaking the role
in which he is cast. Edmund, in a graver context, mistakes the

*CE, 4.4.25-29; 7TS> 1.2.37.

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SHAKESPEARE'S POETICS

satisfying of the ego for the root and sole motive of conduct: the
revenging gods bend their thunders against him. Goneril misreads
her nature, its possibilities, its limitations : for her mistaking, she
is slivered and disbranched. Fortune's fool, as he is ignorant of
sequence, mounts the wheel : it throws him down as low as to the
fiends. The slave of nature, misconceiving what is proper to a
man, is turned for his error to something less : like Nebuchad-
nezzar, the archetype of the wild man, his hairs grow like
eagles' feathers, his nails like the claws of birds. (Daniel, iv.33)
Sly's kind and that of Edmund and his father, or Lear and his
unnatural daughters is human kind. He abjures it, becomes a
'monstrous beast . . . like a swine . . . foul and loathsome'.
(Ind., i-34f.) If he were Sensible', he would wonder with
Cassio, Othello's drunken lieutenant, 'that men should put an
enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! That . . .
[men] should, with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause, trans-
form . . . [themselves to] beasts!' (Othello, 2.3.292-4)

But of course he is not sensible; he is 'bestraught,' infused
with a foul spirit, an idle humour, possessed by strange lunacy,
by abject lowly dreams. (Ind., sc.2) He has put off himself, and
when he takes on the character of the nobleman who beguiles
him, the disparity between what he is, and what in fact he ought
to be, is made the more pronounced, and more risible. The
drunkard is a masquer; so are those others whose comedy he is
persuaded to witness. Thus a servant becomes the master he has
served; the master essays the role of a scholar.

Fathers commonly

Do get their children, but in this case of wooing,
A child shall get a sire. (2.1.41113)

A wandering Pedant takes the name of a wealthy old gentle-
man; he, because what is incongruous has been changed to the
matter of course, is called villain, knave, and cozener for going
under his legitimate title. Propriety, in the extended series of
mistakings which is the play, is separated from practice. The
exploiting of the disparity is one way to humour.

But more than deformity goes to make laughter. A monster
is most comical when he thinks himself comely, and seeks, more-
over, to impose his erring perception on the superior wit of
those who stand by.

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SHAKESPEARE'S POETICS

Known unto these, and to myself disguised !

( Comedy of Errors, 2.2.216)

These, my knowers, are the auditors of the play. They see the
masquer for what he is: the dramatist has given them to see.
They understand, by convention, what he should be. What is
more, they perceive and boggle at, the notion he entertains of
himself and would make them swallow, too, if he could. Well,
he cannot. And so they savour the grossness of the notion, so
little conformable to fact; and the infatuation of the fellow, in
thinking to make it go down; and their own acumen in finding

him out. T T , .

I know you what you are.

Deformity and self-delusion, taken together, are the twin
sources of humour in the plays. Because it is so fruitful and
dependable a conjunction, Shakespeare had recourse to it
constantly. Sir Andrew Aguecheek, in Twelfth Night,, is a man,
and so, by definition, forthputting in love. As it happens, he
belies the definition; he is an eccentric. But he thinks himself a
lover. And so the jest is readied. Confront him with Maria: he
has not wit enough to bring his hand to the buttery bar.
Malvolio is a steward, which is to say, an underling. Imagination
blows him. He puts on, in fancy, a branched velvet gown. He is
an absolute aberrant. His confounding is the absolute comedy.
Dogberry and Verges are men of the watch. Their business, you
would think, is with order. Not so: it is rather with confusion.
They themselves mistake the one for the other, and that is a
part of the jest. C I am a wise fellow . . . and one that knows
the law/ (Much Ado, 4.2.82, 85)

It is the same in Shakespearean tragedy. Shakespeare's
villains are as foolish, as mistaken, as the least self-conscious of
Shakespeare's clowns. The clue to their folly is in their avowal
of self-sufficiency, a disputing of the sanctions of Providence and
Kind. They venture to tell you, with King Edward the usurper
in 3 Henry VI, 'My will shall stand for law' (4.1.50); or with
Crookback, intent on displacing his brother, C I am myself
alone' (5.6.83) ; or with Jack Cade, an early and a ruffianly
Coriolanus, 'My mouth shall be the Parliament of England'
(j? Henry VI, 4.7.i6f.) ; or with Julius Caesar, c The cause is in my
will.' (2.2.71) Edmund in Lear, the most powerfully imagined
and precisely drawn of the villains, is also the most deformed and

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SHAKESPEARE'S POETICS

deluded. e l should have been that I am had the maidenliest
star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.' (i.2.i43f.)
This is security, in the Elizabethan sense. It is hubristic; it is
Epicurean, a favourite word of Shakespeare's. It rests on the
belief that man is the measure of all things, that the idea of
kind is a fiction, but

An old bellows full of angry wind.

Folly so gross is always entertaining. The infatuated man is
always a butt. Clarence, in the early tragedy of Richard III,
entertains: he praises his brother Richard to the murderers
whom Richard has sent against him. Hastings, in the same play,
on his way to the Tower, entertains: he jests with Buckingham,
who has connived in his impending death. Buckingham himself
entertains most of all: he sneers at Queen Margaret's prediction
that his death will follow after, and finds that prediction
unerring. The audience in each case is aware; the unhappy
protagonist is not. There is dramatic excitement, pleasure of a
kind, in the fact.

It is easier, I suppose, to savour that pleasure when the
audience has little sympathy with the speaker. Shylock exulting,
C A Daniel come to judgement!' (4.1.223) Caesar treading the
purple: c Hence, wilt thou lift up Olympus!' (3.1.74) this, just
before he is stabbed, which is to say proved mortal; even Brutus
crying, Teace, freedom, and liberty!' (3.1.110) as he bathes his
hands in Caesar's blood these speeches are right: the speaker
is fooled: it is good that he should be. Macbeth excels in that kind
of fooling. Its irony, like the irony of Oedipus the King, is, not
prophetic merely, but reminiscent, retrospective. Lady
Macbeth, careless of physiology, is sure that 'memory, the
warder of the brain, Shall be a fume'. (i.j.6^f.) She cannot sleep.
She is sure that C A little water clears us of this deed'. (2.2.67)
She cannot wash. She is sure that 'What's done is done' (3.2.12);
and must concede that * What's done cannot be undone'.
(5.1.75) One anticipates her concession, in a wry sense takes
pleasure in it. After all, she has initiated murder.

In comedy, in tragedy, Shakespeare discovers entertainment
in misapprehension. But the effect he is seeking, whether fear or
hilarity or grief, depends on the perception in his audience of a
norm that has been violated, a standard that has been mis-

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SHAKESPEARE'S POETICS

construed. That norm or standard the audience and the
dramatist must carry with them as a kind of phylactery whose
contents are at once deeply meaningful and so familiar, so much
a matter of common experience, as not to need telling over.
Order is such a norm, and chaos the confounding of it. Edmund
Dudley in The Tree of Commonwealth (1509-10) describes the one:

But let vs all consider that god hath set a due order by grace
betwene himself and aungells, and betwen angle [sic] and angell,
and by reason betwene Aungell and man, and betwene man and
man, & man & beast, and by nature only betwene beaste and
beaste, which order from the highest pointe to the lowest, god
willeth vs firmly to kepe. 1

But if the chaos which Lear describes is frightening to those who
witness the play, it is because they share with the playwright a
sense of the standard to which Dudley, in explicit ways, renders
homage. You cannot treat, as Shakespeare does in 2 Henry IV, of

the strond whereon the imperious flood
Hath left a witnessed usurpation,

without inferring the conventional, the wonted limits of land
and sea. There is no point, no fearful meaning in the vision of
Ulysses, in Troilus and Cressida, of the waters lifting their bosoms
higher than the shores (1.3. m), unless those waters, by
definition, are bounded.

The convention, which the clown and the villain misconster,
is the thing. Each image the dramatist fashions, every scene he
contrives, appeals to it, of necessity. Man, by convention, balks
when evil conduct is demanded of him. Signor Sooth, who never
balks or demurs, who answers always in affirmatives, is, it
follows, a knave or a fool. The man whom the common tongue
stigmatizes as a fool is supposed, by convention, to utter
inanities. If the dramatist represents him as telling home truths,
he forces you to query what is possibly a superficial convention
and, if you are perceptive, to put it aside for another, more
nearly emblematic of reality, which discovers little wisdom in
the wisdom of the world. Thus the sense of the grudging tribute
paid to the jester in Timon:

1 Manchester, 1859, p. 53.

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SHAKESPEARE S POETICS

Thou art not altogether a fool.

(2.2.119)

Honour and riches are understood to be ephemeral. You know
the genuine fool in that he thirsts after tottering honour, and
ties his treasure up in silken bags to pleasure death, to whom it
descends. (Pericles, 3.2.40-42) The normal man is the provident
man : he weighs time to the utmost grain. So Henry V, in whom
you recognize the legitimate king. (2.4.i37f.) The ignorant man
who squanders time is abnormal: Richard II, in whom you
recognize the pretender. Reflection, consideration are the
tokens of conventional behaviour. To think them otherwise, and
so, like Othello, to act on the gad, is, it follows, to act the part of
a villain :

No, to be once in doubt
Is once to be resolved.

Amity in the family is normal; discord in the family transgresses
the norm. And hence the shock explicit, in 5 Henry VI, in the
juxtaposing on stage of those patterns of ignorance, a son who
has killed his father, a father who has killed his son. (2.5) A
rational, a normal man acknowledges precedence ; the comedian
disregards it. That is the point of the similitude from Titus
Andronicus:

The eagle suffers little birds to sing
And is not careful what they mean thereby,
Knowing that with the shadow of his wings
He can at pleasure stint their melody.

(4.4.83-86)

My freedom, by convention, is here, in this long-familiar place.
To send me away is to inhibit my freedom. Banishment is there.
But if, on receiving my sentence, I am able to cry, with Kent in
King Lear, with Celia in As Tou Like It:

To liberty and not to banishment,

(1.3.140)

I give you to understand how radically my judge and ruler has
misapprehended the convention, and how disordered, how little
normal, and so how deserving of ridicule or censure is the state
over which he presides.

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The exploiting of misapprehension as a source of entertain-
ment is not peculiar to Shakespeare. It is a part of the craft,
then and now, of dramatists altogether unlike Shakespeare in
their idiom and, in other respects, in their practice: of Ben
Jonson, his contemporary; of Wycherley, to choose a Restora-
tion playwright; of Gerhart Hauptmann, to come to the present.
The great gull of The Alchemist, Sir Epicure Mammon, is, like
Shakespeare's Sir Andrew, a knight; but the title is his that he
may show you (unself-consciously) how little it suits him.
Tribulation Wholesome, in name a man of God, embodies in
proof the good sense of the saying: Cucullus nonfacit monackum.
Wycherley, in The Country Wife, gives you ladies whose face
between their forks presages snow. So much for appearance.
Hauptmann 3 s Von Wehrhahn ranks first, in status, among the
persons of The Beaver Coat. He wears a monocle, and cutaway.
He rules his court with the air of a Junker. He looks like a
Junker. In fact he is a fool, not a tenth part so shrewd as the
semi-literate washer woman to whom he condescends. The
first shall be last, and the last shall be first.

This confounding, devoid of serious consequence, and under-
stood by the audience to be a counterfeit presentment of what is
normally current, of what is kind, is the first principle of
Shakespearean comedy. Manifest in the earliest plays, one
meets it again, in the ludicrous confusion of A Midsummer Night's
Dream, and yet again, for the last time, in The Tempest, in that
more parlous confusion, begotten of ignorant fumes that mantle
the reason. It is a principle for ever the same. Given, Lysander,
in love with Hermia. Let him be changed to the lover of Helena.

I am not what I am.

Given, Sebastian, the brother and the subject of Alonso, King
of Naples, committed by nature to loyalty and love. Let him
leap winking into destruction, collaborate, to his own undoing,
in the murderous scheme of Antonio. Given, Prospero, the
rightful Duke of Milan, or Frederick, the wrongful Duke in As
Tou Like It, or Vincentio, in Measure for Measure, who rules over
Vienna, the bubbling stew of corruption, itself an incongruity
writ large. Take the one man from his throne, and set him down
in an island with only Caliban for subject, who first was his own
king. Corrupt the other from his obedience; let him usurp the

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sovereign power, let him banish his brother to the Forest of
Arden. Metamorphose Vincentio from a prince to a friar; let
Angelo, a deputy, put on the crown.

Deformed beyond deformity, unformed,
Insipid as the dough before it is baked,
They change their bodies at a word.

And then?

The question is from Yeats. The answer is that then the sport
begins. Put forward as your protagonist a paragon of women, a
Cordelia, and treat her as a scullion. In lieu of Cordelia if
comedy is your business put forward Bianca, the good
daughter in The Taming of the Shrew. The disparity between
what she is and what she is forced to become is so great, so
little credible, so little just, that it is, necessarily, greatly comic.
She is called a Minerva in wisdom (1.1.84), one w h humbly
subscribes to the pleasure of her parent (81), who renders to her
elders obedience in all things, so well does she understand her
duty. (2. i .6f.) Her reward is to bear the penance of her shrewish
sister's tongue (1.1.89), to be made that sister's bondmaid and
slave. (2.1.2) So much for use and wont, and the customary
sequence of things.

A reversal even more preposterous, and so even more comic,
is Katharina's, the Shrew's. Owning a body c soft and weak and
smooth, Unapt to toil and trouble in the world 5 (4.2.i65f.),
bound to give attendance on her lord, she figures none-
theless as c an irksome brawling scold' (2.2.188), a wench 'stark
mad or wonderful froward 5 , indeed a fiend of Hell. (1.1.69, 88)
She is

Katharine the Curst!
A title for a maid of all titles the worst.

(i.2.i2gf.)

As Bianca takes delight in music and poetry (1.1.93), so
like the dullard of whom Lorenzo warns you, in The Merchant of
Venice, unmoved with concord of sweet sounds, wields her lute
like a club against the head of her sister's lover. Bianca is pleased
best with true rules and old fashions. (3.i.8of.) Kate is an
innovator, to whom the precepts of husband and parent are as
light and as little commendable as chaff.

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To you your father should be as a god,

One that composed your beauties yea, and one

To whom you are but as a form in wax.

(Midsummer Night* s Dream, 1.1.47-49)

This is good orthodox doctrine. The heretic who is the shrew
will have none of it. So she rounds on her father: 'What hast
thou to do? Father, be quiet/ (3.2.2i8f.)

What makes for humour in this ranting discourse, this
cantankerous and untoward behaviour, is that it is unnatural
behaviour, restrained of course by the dramatist from logical
issue. Compare Goneril, in Lear:

Be then desired
By her that else will take the thing she begs.

(i4.268f.)

It is unnatural, and hence comic, because violence has been
done to the nature of woman, and the relation of woman to man,
as that nature and relation are understood or given in the play.
By definition a suppliant, the shrew has never prayed in her life
(4.i.8i), never learned to entreat. (4.3. yf.) The saying of her
husband, c She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house'
(3.2.232), seems to her the saying of a jolly surly groom. But
prayer, entreaty, and the subordination of a wife to her husband,
these, at least for the few hours' traffic of this play, are things
belonging to woman.

The beasts, the fishes, and the winged fowls
Are their males' subjects and at their controls.
Men more divine, the masters of all these,
Lords of the wide world and wild watery seas.
Indued with intellectual sense and souls,
Of more pre-eminence than fish and fowls,
Are masters to their females, and their lords.

(Comedy of Errors, 2.1.18-24)

You can, if you like, in despite of St. Paul, stand the old
notion on its head. The normality, which is for a while to be
confounded, you can make to consist in the empery of woman
over man. This of course is what Chaucer does, in The Wife of
Bath's Tale, and Shaw, in Candida, redacting A Doll's House,
and Fletcher, redacting Shakespeare, in The Tamer Tamed,

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and Shakespeare himself, in The Merry Wives of Windsor.
So Ford at last submits, in the climax of that play:

Pardon me. Wife. Henceforth do what thou wilt.

(4.4.6)

All that one needs, in any case, is a standard, so that when
Albany says, of Goneril,

Proper deformity seems not in the fiend
So horrid as in woman,

( 4 .2.6of.)
and when Kate says, of her sex,

To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor

. . . blots thy beauty . . .

Confounds thy fame . . .

And in no sense is meet or amiable,

(4.2.138-41)

the audience is able to concur, and to know why it concurs.

Often in comedy, and sometimes in what aspires to be
tragedy, the ordinance which is slighted was enacted only
yesterday and is apt to be rescinded tomorrow. You can find the
standard or norm of the typical Elizabethan farce in the courtesy
books, in Peacham, in Hoby. Thus the short life of most farcical
drama, which depends for its vitality on the idiom or dress or
manners of the moment, and which fails of its point as the
merely fashionable goes out of fashion. Shakespeare's farce is
generally more substantial. The canons whose disputing evokes
laughter owe their origin to something deeper and more per-
manent than the mode. It is true, in the early farces, as in the later
and more serious comedies, Shakespeare's persons are given
more than they might be to the less interesting kind of mistaking,
as of the meaning of words, the identity of twins. But in almost
all the plays I should say in all but The Merry Wives of Windsor,
which seems to me a mechanical rechauffe- the vital mistaking,
for which the others stand as symbols, is that of human nature
or kind.

The process by which the gull, the ignorant protagonist is
brought to confess his error, or treason really, his role hitherto
as 'foul contending rebel' (Taming of the Shrew, 5.2.159), would
be a painful process, no question, except for this : in comedy, the

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gull is not a legitimate person at all. The shrew, however vivid,
is not real. Neither is her husband nor, certainly, those lesser
protagonists, whose business in the play is to be beaten or fooled.
The banishing of real flesh and blood : flesh, which may be
tormented, blood, which may actually flow, this, I suggest, is
the second principle of Shakespearean comedy. The auditors
of such comedy may be likened to men who look down from
great heights on crows and choughs not half so gross as beetles,
on anchoring barks diminished to their cocks, on other men,
less happy, whose altercations appear like those of mice.

This trick of transporting the audience aloft makes perforce
in that audience for a certain detachment. Or if, as sometimes
happens, one is brought close to those who act out the play, he
is never made witness to any turmoil of spirit that is carefully
explored and capable of rationalization, to the real thing, that
is to say. He sees arms flailing, faces contorted; he hears im-
precations. All this is formal.

I have tremor cordis on me.

The first three acts of The Winter's Tale dramatize with tre-
mendous power the jealousy of Leontes. But, unlike the first act
of Macbeth, they do not investigate in detail the soul of the wrong-
doer, who is felt therefore neither to sin greatly nor to sin
wilfully. This is to say (with Dr. Johnson) that comic writers
are concerned with the face of the clock: Henry Fielding,
rather than with its inner workings : Samuel Richardson.

A further consequence of that concern is the drawing of a
charmed circle about the protagonists. Demetrius and Lysander,
the interchangeable lovers of A Midsummer Nighfs Dream, walk
together to the edge of catastrophe. He who fears for them,
however, as they bristle and gesticulate, who anticipates their
mingling in a tragic affray, even as Romeo and Paris, is not
alive to their invulnerability. Nor is it strength which protects
them; it is rather an essential supineness, as of the Raggedy
Ann, or Aunt Sally. Comic characters in Shakespeare are, in
curious ways, like the hero-villains of Shakespearean tragedy
after they have made the tragic and irreversible choice, which
means : when choice has been taken from them, when they have
become heteronomous. But Shakespeare, in the comedies, is
meddlesome and benign. He looks after the slaves and ministers

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who are incapable of looking after themselves. If by chance they
should collide, ill met by moonlight, neither will fall before the
sword of the other. The dramatist has made them of straw. It is
his way of hedging the bet.

The technique is familiar, and generally efficacious. When,
in Synge's The Tinkers Wedding, an avaricious priest is gagged
and tied and stuffed in a sack, you do not recoil at the hard
handling of a fellow human being. It is only another scarecrow
trussed up to be pummelled, after all only another Malvolio. So
long as the characters are impervious to hurt, or kept at a
remove, or approximate to stock figures, so long as they smack
of the pedant or braggart, or the rustic servant or parasite or
old pantaloon, you do not suffer for them or sympathize with
them, whatever the indignities they are made to endure. But if,
as sometimes happens, a mere figure of fun is conceded real
speech, if real lineaments reflect, however briefly, real emotion,
then the dramatist is in trouble, and the audience, for a moment,
at sea. It is as if the butt or cipher who, as I suggest, shares with
the tragic character an incapacity to fend for himself, were all
at once to share with him also the genuine pain that follows
that loss of autonomy. Edmund you observe abdicating to
Fortune, and Lear turning anarch, and Cornwall giving rein
to the will, and Goneril and Regan preferring the shadow
to substance. Each is disfranchised and made, in consequence, to
suffer. But the comic character is too circumscribed, really to
choose, and so your sense of justice is offended if, like the others,
who are or who seem to be observably culpable, he is permitted
to agonize at every pore. So long as Holofernes, the pompous
schoolmaster of 'Love' 's Labour's Lost, keeps true to his antecedents,
he offers legitimate sport. But when the Pedant of the Commedia
dell' Arte becomes the injured party or person, rather of the
last act of the play, when, beaten and sore, he exclaims to his
tormentors,

This is not generous, not gentle, not humble,

(5.2.632)

when Holofernes, so to speak, discovers a heart, one wishes
uneasily that he had not.

The baffled Shylock, the cuckolded Pinchwife, in Wycherley,
I think indecorous, inconsiderate, in much the same way:

SHAKESPEARE'S POETICS

better, in any case clearer, had the one continued to whet his
knife, with splendid and undivided malevolence, thus sparing
his auditors the notion that he also was a man; better, in any
case more consistently amusing, had the other, on apprehending
his defeat, forborne to stand doggedly, with his hat before his
eyes. The auditor is indifferent to the humanity of the gull. He
does not want to advert to it.

Shakespeare, in the comedies, contrives by and large that he
need not. The shrew whose taming he watches, he abides : she
is not a woman as Cordelia is, or Desdemona. Like in every
point to other creatures, she is unlike them in one : she has not
the capacity to suffer. She is a puppet, made to work for your
delectation and mine.

My falcon now is sharp and passing empty,
And till she stoop, she must not be full-gorged.

(4.i.i93f.)

The pleasure is in watching a creature not altogether human
compelled, by various sleights, to look upon her lure. It is an
intellectual, not an emotional, pleasure.

That is why Shakespeare's comedies are so full of riddling,
of arbitrary conundrums, whose solution is a mathematical
exercise. The close of Twelfth Night, of As Ton Like It and
Measure for Measure, of All's Well and Cymbeline coincides with,
in fact depends on, the working out of the riddle. The Wintefs
Tale puts the riddle at the heart of the play: 'the King shall live
without an heir if that which is lost be not found'. (3.2.135-7)
In Pericles it figures at the very beginning, and is not resolved
really until the hero finds the daughter whose office it is to beget
him anew:

He's father, son, and husband mild;

I mother, wife, and yet his child.

And the point of the parallel is that Pericles and Leontes, chief
actors in a sort of comedy, are, like Posthumus and Bertram,
Orlando and Viola and Mariana of the moated grange, neither
human nor free, as Shakespeare's tragic actors seem to be
human and free. In what they do, they are determined; and
also, at least ostensibly, in what they are. The conversion to
good conduct of the usurping Duke of As Tou Like It is, like the

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SHAKESPEARE'S POETICS

evil conduct that goes before it, simply prodigious. Shake-
speare, with his customary cheerfulness, attempts (without
success) to fob it off by introducing as agent that infallible sign
of the playwright's embarrassment or fatigue, e an old religious
man 5 . He is less cursory in reporting the conversion of Oliver,
the wicked subject, but no more convincing. Nor does the repen-
tance of Proteus convince, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. It is
hard to see how it could. For these are involuntary persons who
love and hate as if in fact they were star-crossed, predestined, or
(in the Galenic sense) the prey to an overmastering humour.
The comedies seem almost to dramatize the theology of Calvin.
The comic character is the slave of nature : Duke Frederick, who
falls to hating Rosalind, absolutely on the gad. He does not
deliberate; he is. But why he is as you see him is a question
neither you nor he can answer. Oliver hates his brother
Orlando, e y et I know not why.' (1.1.171) Cymbeline, with as
little cause, is attracted to Fidele: C I know not why nor where-
fore. 3 (5.5.95) The question that is asked of Parolles in All's Well
might be asked of Malvolio or Cloten or Caliban: 'Is it possible
he should know what he is, and be that he is? 3 (4.i.48f.) The
villainy of Leontes, unlike the villainy of Othello, whom he most
nearly resembles, does not emerge from within: reason pander-
ing will. It is affixed from without; it is given. Nor does reason
assist him in understanding his error. The situations which
characters in comedy confront may be described in terms of
those Elizabethan pictures, intelligible only from a particular
point of vantage,

perspectives which rightly gazed upon,
Show nothing but confusion, eyed awry
Distinguish form.

(Richard //, 2 . 2 . 1 8-2 o)

The normal intelligence, the conventional apprehension, do
not suffice.

But comic characters, if insufficient like fools and children,
are generally protected, as fools and children should be.
Pericles treats of disasters at sea. So do Twelfth Night and
The Tempest. But no one with his wits about him really supposes
that any of the characters in those comedies are going to drown.
Comic characters are denied the dignity of drowning. They are

SHAKESPEARE'S POETICS

denied the right to suffer. If they die., as happens rarely, they are
minor characters who are fashioned of wax, like Mamillius, the
little boy of The Winters Tale, and so beget no lamentation.
Even Antigonus, the luckless courtier of that play, who carries
out his king's command to abandon the infant Perdita on some
desolate sea coast, and who is eaten in consequence :

Exit, pursued by a bear,

even Antigonus must, one feels, have been swallowed up entire,
as the foolish duck is swallowed in Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.
You can still hear him, quacking inside. The end of Antigonus
is essentially comic, and very probably by intention: an attempt
on Shakespeare's part to palliate the unhappy business.

By the same token, no comic character may really be said to
be free. Leontes, of course, in The Winter's Tale, is capable
waiving his initial folly of good conduct or bad. The happy
ending seems to hang on his choice of the good.

Sir, you . . . have performed
A saintlike sorrow. No fault could you make
Which you have not redeemed, indeed paid down
More penitence than done trespass.

(5.1.1-4)

But the happy ending, if made acceptable, made suitable, to
those who look on by, say, the long travail of the King of
Sicilia, is ultimately a piece of contriving. The dramatist elects
to bring the riddle to good resolution. The dramatist plays God.
Without his benign intervention, his more or less arbitrary
decision, the sufferings of Leontes would be as bootless as the
sufferings of Gloucester and Lear.

I suppose that decision, to rescue a character unable to rescue
himself, to be the hallmark of the comedies. It is signalHzed by
the riddle: the play is a kind of mathematics: the characters are
so many ciphers: the dramatist, by virtue of superior wit,
conducts them at last to good fortune. The protagonist can do
nothing to extricate himself.

In tragedy it appears to be otherwise. The look of all of
Shakespeare's later tragedies is volitional. The insistence in all
of them is on the free will of the hero, or villain. The watchword
is causality. The dramatist does not admit of the interposition of

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SHAKESPEARE'S POETICS

chance, or caprice. 'The poet's function is to describe' I quote
from Aristotle's Poetics 'not the thing that has happened, but
a kind of thing that might happen, i.e. what is possible as being
probable or necessary. 5 (Ch. 9) It is probable that Othello will
swallow the insinuations of lago, and so strangle Desdemona in
her bed, because Othello plumes the will. It is necessary that
Antony decline to a sworder, that he find himself beguiled to
the very heart of loss : he has made rude will the lord of his
reason. To Shakespeare as a tragic dramatist, what's past is
always prologue. Things do not happen post hoc; they happen
p ropier hoc. (Ch. 10)

To wilful men

The injuries that they themselves procure
Must be their schoolmasters.

Man, by his own actions, determines his destiny. This, the
conventional reading of man's fate, is the view explicit in the
tragedies. Pico della Mirandola dramatizes it in a treatise
devoted, appropriately, to the dignity of man. God is the
speaker:

To thee, O Adam, we have given no certain habitation nor
countenance of thine owne neither anie peculiar office, so that
what habitation or countenance or office soeuer thou dost choose
for thyselfe, the same thou shalt enioye and posses at thine owne
proper will and election We have made thee neither a thing
celestial nor a thing terrestrial, neither mortal nor immortal, so
that being thine owne fashioner and artificer of thyselfe, thou
maist make thyselfe after what likenes thou dost most affecte.

(De Dignitate Hominis, para. 3)

The parallel utterance in Shakespeare is Helena's, in AlFs Well.
It is perhaps the clearest statement of man's freedom, and hence
of his responsibility, in any of the plays:

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to Heaven. The fated sky
Gives us free scope. Only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.

(1.1.231-4)

We are prone to that enervating dullness. It is a legacy to us
of the offending Adam. But it is not felt to be overmastering.

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SHAKESPEARE'S POETICS

The good man, repudiating what is base in his inheritance,
may display as much alacrity as he will:

Consideration like an angel came
And whipped the offending Adam out of him.

(Henry V, i.i.sSf.)

Always in the conclusion of the comedies, the latent remedy
emerges. The hero manifests a kindness nobler than revenge.
Valentine in The Two Gentlemen, Orlando in As Tou Like It,
Isabella in Measure for Measure, Posthumus in Cjmbeline,
Prospero in The Tempest, though they are put upon, choose to be
merciful.

Pardon's the word to all.

(Cymbeline, 5.5423)

And so the villain may look up and be happy: lachimo, Angelo,
Oliver, and Proteus. But their happiness is nothing to that of the
man who is able to tender the reprieve. His nature is made
stronger than his just occasion. (As Tou Like It, 43.i2g)

The possibility of that victory is always there in tragedy, if
not so often achieved. Without the possibility, tragedy is
insupportable. It is dangerous, if excessively common, to say
that the tragic hero is fated, dangerous because subversive of
tragic drama. There are no heroes or villains, no virtue or vice,
there is no victory or damnation in the close of the play, and
hence no suspense, no entertainment, unless you are able to
assume that heroism and virtue and victory were open at one
time to the protagonist. The goodness of Banquo, of Albany, of
Cordelia is useful dramatically and honourable ethically, only
if the badness of Macbeth and Cornwall and the sisters is felt
in some sense to be a voluntary badness. The appearance of free
choice is the indispensable condition of Shakespearean tragedy.
In the event, the worser element is always predominant: the
tragic hero is always destroyed. But there is always about the
conflict the look of freedom, of election. Macbeth need not
have murdered Duncan, nor Brutus collaborated in the assas-
sination of Caesar.

And yet, if it is good and necessary, ethically and dramatic-
ally, to make that assertion, one need not be altogether satisfied
with it. Tor the good that I would I do not: but the evil which
I would not, that I do. 3 The quotation from Romans (vii.ig)

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is so poignant because it is, recognizably, so true of every man's
experience. The hero, Antony or Lear, does not wish to lose his
way; his way is lost, even so. And thus the question Alcibiades
raises in Timon is uneasy with implication:

To be in anger is impiety;

But who is man that is not angry ?

(3-5-57f)

Lear's anger destroys him. Is it accurate and convincing to
suggest that he need not have given it room ? Troilus andCressida,
I think more than any other of Shakespeare's plays, is concerned
to answer that question. My election, says the hero, my commit-
ment to anger or lust,

Is led on in the conduct of my will,
My will enkindled by mine eyes and ears,
Two traded pilots 'twixt the dangerous shores
Of will and judgement.

(2.2.61-65)

The pilots, the senses, are traded: experienced. May one, there-
fore, rely on them wholly? Clearly one may not. As we are
nature's, says the Countess in All's Well, passions, which darken
judgement, are ours.

This thorn

Doth to our rose of youth rightly belong.
Our blood to us, this to our blood is born.

( i -3- * 35-7)
Sometimes the blood is

So madly hot that no discourse of reason,
Nor fear of bad success in a bad cause,
Can qualify the same.

(Troilus and Cressida> 2.2.115-18)

The pilots, our eyes and ears, are no friends to us then. They are
a sort of traitors. It is

As if those organs had deceptious functions,
Created only to calumniate.

( Troilus and Cressida, 5 . 2 . 1 2 3f. )

That Hamlet declines to sweep to his revenge, or Coriolanus or
Lear to bridle his pride, or Othello his jealousy, or Macbeth his

SHAKESPEARE'S POETICS

ambition, or Antony his lust, is perhaps at bottom no more
surprising than that Kate, in the Shrew, declines for so long to
know her keeper's call. Her mistaking and theirs is conventional
enough, the nub of many stories older than Shakespeare's. A
man is repelled by an ancient crone. If he succeeds in disputing
the verdict of his senses, the crone at once is seen to be beautiful.
Not many men are so shrewd, or so lucky. The moral, as Imogen
applies it, in Cymbeline, is that 'Our very eyes Are sometimes like
our judgements, blind.' (4.2.30 if.) It is this unhappy truth that
accounts for the fatuity of Malvolio, and Leontes, and Bertram,
in AlFs Well, whose essentially stupid rejection of Helena turns
on naive faith in what he sees, or thinks he sees :

In such a business give me leave to use
The help of mine own eyes.

(2.3.1 14f.)

A credulous trust in appearance beguiles the tinker, Sly. It
beguiles Gloucester, and costs him his life. It is the undoing of
Othello, whose eyes, he would swear to you, are witness of
Desdemona's lightness. It is the reason why Kent is mistaken by
Cornwall, who confuses the manners with the man. Lear also is
mistaken: his eyes are bleared by counterfeit supposes. He sees
when he is ready to forswear all belief in appearance. When at
last his eyes are opened, he will trust in them no longer, for the
eyes, which owe a friendly office to the reason, are prone, to
man's confusion, to pander for the will.

In tragedy as in comedy, the protagonists are mistaken, are
gulled. To paraphrase a line in The Two Noble Kinsmen, perhaps
the last play in which Shakespeare had any part, the
intemperate surfeit of their eyes distempers their other senses.
(4.3.76f.) This is to say that man is host to and in part the victim
of a

Bifold authority I Where reason can revolt
Without perdition, and loss assume all reason
Without revolt.

(Troilus and Gressida, 5.2.144-6)

The abrupt and absolute change which overtakes characters in
comedy begins to seem not so very remote from the preposterous
change which alters the tragic hero, making him swerve from
good conduct to bad. How different are Antony, and Macbeth,

SHAKESPEARE S POETICS

and Hector, in a perfect non sequitur intermitting his resolve
to send Helen out of Troy, from Burgundy the turncoat in
i Henry VI:

Either she hath bewitched me with her words,
Or nature makes me suddenly relent.

(3-3-58f.)

You cannot rationalize his conduct; neither can you the conduct
of the others. It is as if all men are named Proteus, and all
action is random action, and self-conscious decision no more
than a feather in the scale when weighed against contingency.
In the crisis of The Comedy of Errors., to cite one of the very earliest
of the plays, Antipholus of Syracuse runs for his life into the
priory where his long-lost mother is abbess. And so he is
brought to harbour, but blindfolded, in ways that have nothing
to do with his own deliberation or contriving. Our deep plots
pall; our indiscretion serves us well. In the latest of the plays,
the shaping divinity of which Hamlet is conscious is everything.
In Gymbeline,

Fortune brings in some boats that are not steer'd,

(4.3.46)

The passive voice governs. Virtue, in the conclusion of Pericles,
is

preserved from fell destruction's blast,
Led on by Heaven and crowned with joy at last.

The animus against the rich, a remarkable fact in the late
comedies, suggests the inconsequence of material power, and
thus complements the sense of those plays. The good and the bad
alike enjoy, only the illusion of power:

Whereby I see that Time's the King of men:
He's both their parent and he is their grave,
And gives them what he will, not what they crave.

(Pericles, 2.3.45-47)

Shakespeare's comedies, and especially the final comedies, are
a gloss on and a corrective of the optimism of the tragedies.

Man's freedom of action, it would appear, is very largely a
fiction. In the last analysis, good fortune or bad is absolutely

1 60

SHAKESPEARE'S POETICS

beyond his control. That much is certain, and will not come as a
revelation except to the eupeptic man who believes in poetic
justice. It is the discovery which Sophocles dramatizes in
Oedipus the King. But, what is far more important, and daunting,
good conduct or bad seems also to be determined, independent
of volition. How, then to restate the basic question can the
mistreadings of the tragic hero or villain be held against him ?
how can the good that he does redound to his credit?

The error of our eye directs our mind.
What error leads must err.

(Troilus and Cressida, 5.2.11 of.)

But the speaker is Cressida, in whom, perhaps, the wish is
father to the thought. The evil that she does, like all evil, like
Lear's initial mistaking, is committed in the name of the good.
The will, says St. Thomas, and Aristotle before him, never
moves except under the show of goodness. And c if the passions
of the minde be strong, 5 writes Hooker in The Ecclesiastical
Polity, 'they easily sophisticate the vnderstanding, they make it
apt to beleeue vpon very slender warrant, and to imagine
infallible truth, where scarce any probable shew appeareth.' 1
How else may one explain Lear's rejection of Cordelia? But
Hooker prefaces his equation of stupidity and sin with the
qualification, 'if the passions be strong'. The inference is that
day by day one may whip and attenuate those passions; or, and
this is what happens in tragedy, let them slip, until at last the
understanding is in fact powerless against them. Given, a long
indulgence of the passions, and the tragic hero is determined in
evil.

How use doth breed a habit in a man!

(Two Gentlemen, 5.4.1)

You can predict, from what you know of their characters, that
Morocco and Aragon, in The Merchant of Venice, like Goneril and
Regan in Lear, will have the wisdom by their wit to lose, when
the caskets are put before them.

There is a history in men's lives,
Figuring the nature of the times deceased.

(2 Henry IV, s.i

1 London, 1622, Book 5, Epistle Dedicatory, Sig. V"3v.

161

SHAKESPEARE'S POETICS

In this sense, 'Hanging and wiving goes by destiny. 5 (Merchant of
Venice, 2.9.83) But, given the long coercing of the passions, and
the hero need not be trapped by seeming truth :

That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat,
Of habits devil, is angel yet in this,
That to the use of actions fair and good
He likewise gives a frock or livery
That aptly is put on.

(Hamlet, 3,4.161-5)

The intellectualist view of evil, the view of Aristotle, Aquinas,
and Hooker, the view that Shakespeare, at least formally,
dramatizes in the tragedies, rests ultimately on choice. If c use
can almost change the stamp of nature 5 , reason need not pander
will. The slave of nature is, potentially, the servant of good.

Cymbeline, who is blind for so long to the wickedness of his
queen, cannot blame his senses: she was beautiful and full of
flattery.

It had been vicious
To have mistrusted her.

Still, his ignorance is felt as culpable; he need not have surren-
dered manhood with his trust :

yet, O my daughter,
That it was folly in me, thou mayst say,
And prove it in thy feeling.

(5.5.62-68)

Troilus concedes that 'some thing may be done that we will not',
but adds,

When we will tempt the frailty of our powers,
Presuming on their changeful potency.

(4.4.96-99)

It is only when the passions are nourished that pleasure and
revenge grow

more deaf than adders to the voice
Of any true decision.

(2.2.171-3)

That is how Lear's daughters explain the pleasure and revenge
which darken the understanding of the king. He is indeed

162

SHAKESPEARE'S POETICS

determined, unself-conscious, incapable any longer of meditated
choice. But if his unruly waywardness oversways him, it is
because that waywardness is long-engrafted. And it is the man
himself who has permitted it to grow. c The best and soundest
of his time hath been but rash.' (i.i.sgSf.) After all the tragic
hero is responsible. There are no situations which are not human
situations. If conduct seems involuntary, it is because you have
come too late to the play. Permissiveness goes before the loss of
freedom.

But that fatal permissiveness remains a mystery which only
God can fathom. If man is free and responsible, man at what-
ever moment you meet him is also determined. 'Liberty, and
Necessity* declares Hobbes, in Leviathan, 'are consistent. 5 He
goes on to attempt a resolution of that paradox:

As in the water, that hath not only liberty, but a necessity of
descending by the Channel; so likewise in the Actions which men
voluntarily doe: which, because they proceed from their will,
proceed from liberty, and yet, because every act of mans will, and
every desire, and inclination proceedeth from some cause, and
that from another cause, in a continuall chaine, (whose first link
is in the hand of God the first of all causes,) [they] proceed from
necessity. So that to him that could see the connexion of those
causes, the necessity of all mens voluntary actions, would appeare
manifest. 1

The same perception, conspicuous in Shakespeare's comedies,
is I think implicit in the tragedies. To emphasize it would be to
enter a plea of no contest. And so it is tentative, and couched
always in a metaphor or symbol. But it is there. Why does
Macbeth murder Duncan? It is as if he proceeds to his crime
under some fatal hallucination, embodied dramatically in the
Witches, the extra-human. Why, really, does Othello murder
Desdemona ? Is there not something patently absurd in asserting
that he does so because he wants to ?

For nature so preposterously to err,

Being not deficient, blind, or lame of sense,

Sans witchcraft could not.

(1.3.62-64)

And in fact there is about the play the taint of witchcraft and

1 London, 1651, Sig. Piv, p. 108 (ch. XXI).

163

SHAKESPEARE'S POETICS

the arcane, repeated mention of foul charms, of drugs, of arts
inhibited and out of warrant, chains of magic, spells and
medicines bought of mountebanks. It is all, to quote lago, e as if
some planet had unwitted men'. (2.3.183) It may be true, what
Othello says of the handkerchief: 'There's magic in the web.'
(3.4.69) His rationalization, his explanation of the killing of
Roderigo suggests a reading of the play that has little to do with
the strife of wit and will:

It is the very error of the moon.

She comes more nearer earth than she was wont

And makes men mad.

(5.2.109-11)

Enchantment, in a similar manner, hovers about, serves to
rationalize, the decline of Mark Antony. It is fair and pertinent
to say that he knew what he was doing and chose, deliberately,
the worser course:

These strong Egyptian fetters I must break,
Or lose myself in dotage.

(l.2.I20f.)

And yet the images which characterize Cleopatra suggest that
the fetters are not merely to be willed away. For Cleopatra is
this great faery, and grave charm, this spell, this witch. Antony,
one feels, is not so much a culprit, as a man in the toils.

What is said of the rebels who follow Jack Cade (and the
Jews who decline to follow Christ) may be said of the hero-
villains of tragedy:

Oh, graceless men! They know not what they do.

(2 Henry VI, 4.4.38)

Only by receiving the gift of grace are they able to know. But
this supernatural and essentially anarchic intervention on their
behalf, because it is whimsical, gratuitous, makes against human
dignity and human endeavour. And thus no playwright is
permitted to believe in the principle of grace, except metaphoric-
ally, as a Marxist believes in the Dialectic but works to precipi-
tate the revolution, or as a Calvinist believes in predestination
but lives the good life in testimony of his election. Shakespeare
as a tragic dramatist endorses the Englishman's heresy,
Pelagianism. Really he has very little option. Milton, when he

164

SHAKESPEARE'S POETICS

comes to write his great dramatic poem, does the same. His
good angels stand by their own strength and not by the
compulsive grace of God. The treatise On the Christian Doctrine
reiterates the heresy. In the plays of Shakespeare, the inter-
position of grace is never observable. The vicious protagonist
in his viciousness grows hard, and thus is impervious to it.
Prodigal men, says Cicero, in Ben Jonson's Catiline, Teel not
their own stock wasting 3 . The virtuous protagonist does not
grow hard altogether (you must take the dramatist's word for
that), and so can accept of redemption. It is the necessity of
taking the dramatist's word that makes for the arbitrariness of
the plays. But if the play purports to be dramatic, you must
believe that the protagonist, however evil or bemused, has been
given a chance to save himself. This means, theologically, that
grace has been tendered him, and rejected. It means, dramatic-
ally, that the hero, rejecting the voice of reason, has commended
the poisoned chalice to his lips.

Shakespeare seems to dramatize that mysterious moment, in
Lear's banishing of Kent and Cordelia, or in Macbeth's
abdication in favour of his wife. The play, by its nature,
demands such a representation. But in fact the rejection, making
for the seeling of the eyes and the look of inevitability in the
doom of the hero, is always anterior to the beginning of the
play if you will pardon, for the sake of the point, a suggestion
of Mrs. Jameson and Mrs. Cowden-Clarke. Hamlet's malaise,
Lear's imperiousness, Antony's self-indulgence, Othello's
credulity, Macbeth's unholy ambition, Timon's fatuous refusal
to count the cost all these are given from the first. But one
assumes even so that the hero was at one time unspotted and so
autonomous, which is to say metaphorically, receptive to grace
and thus capable of achieving a final victory. That is the reason
why Ophelia is made to praise the Hamlet that was, and
Octavius his rival Antony, and Othello, at the end of his story,
himself. It is not true, that Lear has ever but slenderly known
himself.

When, however, you encounter him first, in the opening
scene of the play, he is as blind to what he is as the drunken
tinker or the shrew or the weaver who puts on the ears of an ass.
Now since man, by definition, is a rational or knowledgeable
being, to be mistaken, to be purblind, is ipso facto to be deformed.

SHAKESPEARE'S POETICS

The greater the deformity, the greater the disparity or gulf
between what one is and what, by convention, one ought to be,
the more amusing or more terrible is the character or the play.
Consider Caliban. The greatest disparity, as it is the prelude to
suicide, is evil. In tragedy the chains are struck from evil:
Edmund is enfranchised; the result is catastrophe. In comedy
evil is girt round, kept from doing any ultimate harm; the
result is laughter. That is why Lucifer is a comic figure in the
medieval drama. Consider Ancient Pistol. But here, two
provisos. You need, one, a fixed standard or norm or Coventry
Patmore's phrase a punctum indifferent or point of rest, so that
the audience will know when to laugh or cry, to hiss or applaud.
You do not shudder at the crimes of Richard III, or rejoice at
the follies of Malvolio, unless you understand that a king is not
to murder his subjects, or a steward to aspire to the hand of his
mistress. You do not to offer an analogy applaud variation
in a poet's verses unless you are conscious of the norm from
which he is departing. Sometimes the norm or standard is
embodied in character. Edgar in Lear is such a character. He
is the punctum indiferens of the play. He gives you to see just how
evil Edmund is: how aberrant. Horatio, the man who is not
passion's slave, is supposed to fulfil a similar office in Hamlet.
As it happens, he is a kind of failure.

The second proviso : you need a dramatist himself the deus
ex machina of the play ready at any moment to nip a desperate
situation before it can proceed to disaster : this, if you are dealing
with comedy. The presence of the puppet master is decisive.
In comedy,

The fingers of the powers above do tune
The harmony of this peace.

(Cymbeline, 5

If, conversely, the play is tragic, you need a dramatist just as
ready to step aside, forbear to meddle, and let the action run
on to its logical close. The entertainment in each case derives
from the exploiting of incongruity, which takes its rise from
ignorance. In comedy the incongruity may be very great. It is,
however, divested by the dramatist of serious consequence. No
sword is ever thrust all the way home. No character is endowed
with the capacity to suffer. The auditor is involved only

1 66

SHAKESPEARE'S POETICS

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In tragedy the ignorance of the protagonist is understood to
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it should be so lies, once again, with the dramatist. It is a wholly
arbitrary decision. But, once taken, it cannot be rescinded.
Tragedy is logical. That is why it is supportable. The dramatist
does no more than set things going. Like the God of the
eighteenth century, he winds up the watch and departs. His
protagonists, denied his protection, his intercession, are
destroyed. But he does not intercede, even so. It is not that he is
indifferent to them, but that he has relinquished control. No
longer the prime mover, estranged from his creations, unable to
mitigate their suffering, he can do no more than utter valedic-
tions.

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WORKS CONSULTED

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174

INDEX

Absalom, as emblem, of filial ingratitude,

76, 83

Actaeon, as emblem of kind, 32
Advancement of Learning, The : on micro-
cosm, 64; order, 63
Aeneas, as emblem of filial duty, 67
Aesop: on filial duty, 68; moral fables

of, 4
Agrippa, Henry Cornelius, on astrology,

4 6

Alberti, Leonbattista, 13 in.

Albertus Magnus, on Nature's germens,
62

Alchemist, The, 147

Alciati, Andrea: emblems pub. by, 3;
cited : Actaeon, 32 ; Aeneas, 67n. ; Ari-
on, 97n.; Art and Nature, 9gn.; Bru-
tus, 54n.; debility, is6n.; kind, 31-3;
ignorance, 98; Occasion, 7n.; Phae-
ton, 77n., 78n.; Prometheus, 77-9

Allegorical conventions, in Shakespeare,

Amman, lost: as illustrator, 4; on
Judas, 7n.

Anarchy and Order, motif in Shake-
speare, I38f., 145

Anatomic of Absurditie, The, xagn.

Anatomy of Melancholy, The, on portents,
20

Andrewes, Launcelot, 86n.

Aneau, Barthelemy: on chaos, 8on,;
Prometheus, 77, 79n.

Anselm, St., on Nature's germens, 62

Appearance and reality, in Shakespeare,
158-62

Aquinas, St. Thomas: on kind, 39;
Nature's germens, 62; and Shake-
speare, 136; on volition, i6if.

Arcadia: on beast imagery, 9on.;
Epicureanism, 17; filial duty, 68;
and Lear, 108; on order, 81

Arion, as emblem of man's cruelty, 97f.

Aristotle: on microcosm, icon.; in
Poetics, 156; on volition, i6i

Ascham, Roger, gon.

Aske, Robert, i

Aston, Sir Thomas, i in.

Astrology, Renaissance attitude toward,

as/-, 46f.

Atheist's Tragedy ', The, 35
Auerbach, Erna, g6n.
Augustine, St., on Nature's germens, 62
Avogadro's Hypothesis, 3

Bacon, Roger, on Nature's germens, 62
Bacon, Sir Francis: on Essex, 4f.;

imagery, 2; microcosm, 64; Nature,

86n. ; order, 63 ; show and substance,

H3f.; Time and Truth, 44f.
Baldwin, T. W., n6n., I2in.
Baldwin, William : Chiliades redacted by,

6; on custom, 72n.; Fortune, 48n.;

husbandry, 36f., 38; order, 81 ; show

and substance, iogn.
Ballads and broadsides, portents

moralized in, 22f.
Bandinelli, Baccio, I34n.
Barker, Robert, gin.
Barlow, Francis, 41 n.
Bartholomeus, Anglicus, on pelican,

Bastelaer, Ren 6 van, 92n.

Batman upon Bartholemew, on order, 63

Baucis and Philemon, 128

Beast imagery, in Lear, 9098

Beaver Coat, The, 147

Beham, Hans Sebald, complementary
representation in, nf.

Berchorius, Petrus: on blindness, 1040..;
Naked Truth, H2n.

Berjeau, J. Ph., g6n.

Bernheimer, Richard, 6n., loon.

Bernini, Giovanni Lorenzo : on Aeneas,
67n.; Naked Truth, in, ii2n.;
Time and Truth, 44

Beza, Theodore, on portents, 21, 24

Biblia Pauperum, complementary repre-
sentation in, n, 15

Biblical references: Colossians, I32f.;
Corinthians, 68, 109, i27n.; Daniel,
142; Ecclesiastes, 411.; Ecclesiasticus,
109; Ephesians, 13 in., 132; Hebrews,
1 1 2n,, i a in. ; Isaiah, 38 ; Jeremiah, 22,
33 37> 39 n -5 Luk e, *36; Matthew,

175

INDEX

81, 1250., 127, I28n., 13 in.; Pro-

verbs, 44, ii6n.; Psalms, 13211.;

Revelation, 8on.; Romans, 132,

I36n., 157; Wisdom, 32f., 12 in.
Bing, Gertrud, 45n.
Birth of Merlin, The, on portents, 20
Blenerhasset, Thomas, g6n.
Blindness and sight: in Lear, 122;

Renaissance and Middle Ages, 104
Bloomfield, Morton W., 93n.
Boccaccio, Giovanni, on Fortune, 51
Bocksperger, Johan : on Absalom, 67n. ;

chaos, Son.; complementary repre-

sentation in, I2n.
Boethius, on Fortune, 5 if., 60
Boissard, J. J. : complementary repre-

sentation in, 12; emblems, on

Fortune, 53; halcyon, 56; husbandry,

38n.; kind, 33; kingship, 82n.;

Occasion, 7n.; Prometheus, 7Qn.;

redemption, 13 in.; Reubenites, 75n.;

show and substance, n8n.; Time

and Truth, 44
Boleyn, Anne, 49
Bonaventure, St., on Nature's germens,

62
Botticelli, Sandro, on Naked Truth,

in, Ii2n.

Bradbrook, M. G., 10911.
Bradley, A. C.: on Doomsday, 8 in.;

Shakespearean tragedy, 78
Brant, Sebastian: on filial ingratitude,

68n.; Fortune, 48n.; pelican, 92n.
Brathwaite, Richard, 96n.
Braunschweig, H., 96n.
Breughel, Pieter: on pelican, 91, 92n.;

woodwose, 95

Broken Heart, The, on Providence, 24
Bronzino, II, on Time and Truth, 42
Brooke, C. F. Tucker, 2on.
Browne, Sir Thomas, indebted to

emblem literature, 3n.
Browning, Robert, 43
Bruck, Jacob: emblems, on bondage,

57n.; human cruelty, gSn.; Provi-

dence, 27n.; redemption, i32n.
Brutus, as emblem of suicide, 54!.
Buchan, John, ign., 2on., n8n.
Buell, L. M., 2 in., 22n., 24n.
Bunyan, John, and emblem literature,

Caelica, 121

Gaius, Dr. John, on plague, 23n.

Galvin, John: on astrology, 46; elec-

tion, I35n., 137; and Shakespeare's

comedies, 154
Gamerarius, Joachimus The Younger:

emblems, on fly and ant, ii6n.;

pelican, 9 in.; redemption, 13 in.,

Campbell, Lily B., 4n., 33n., 47n. 5 73n.

Candida, 149

Canter, H. V., 48n.

Capaneus, as emblem of disorder, 77

Carroll, W. M., 57n., gon., gin., 93n.,

icon.

Cassirer, Ernst, 42n.
Castle of Knowledge, The: on metaphor,

3; order, 63
Castle of Perseverance, The, stage conven-

tions of, gf.
Catiline: on chaos, 78; evil behaviour,

i6 5

Causality, Renaissance faith in, 25-29

Cavalieri, Tommaso, 78n.

Caxton, William: on order, 63;

printer's mark of, g6n. ; on Ptolemaic

universe, 23f., 27
Chambers, R. W., 52n., i23n.
Chambers, Sir E. K., 96n.
Chaos and order, in Shakespeare, 8of.,

i 45 f.
Chapman, George : and emblem litera-

ture, 3n.; on order, 8on.
Chappell, William, 22n.
Chaucer, Geoffrey: on Fortune, 60; in

Wife of Bath's Tale, 149
Chaudiere, R., 96n.
Chew, Samuel C., 8n., 45n., 6on.,

Burton, Robert: and emblem literature,
3n. ; on portents, 20

Chiliades, 6

Choice of Emblemes, A, see Whitney,

Geoffrey

Christian Doctrine, On the, 165
Churchyard, Thomas, 15
Cicero : on Fortune, 48n. ; order, 78
Coleridge, S. T., on Lear, io8f.
Collins-Baker and Constable, nn.
Commedia dell' Arte : and Holofernes, 1 52 ;

stage conventions of, 9
Confessio Amantis, on Fortune, 50
Consolation of Philosophy, The, on

Fortune, 52
Cooper, Thomas, on order, 64

176

INDEX

Coornhert, Dirck Volckertszoon, 13 in.

Copernicus, on order, 65

Corrozet, Gilles, on Fortune, 48n.

Country Wife, The, 147

Court of Venus, The, on Reubenites, 75n.

Court of Virtue, The: on custom, yan.;
husbandry, 38n.; order, 81; pro-
digious births, 23

Gowden-Clarke, Mrs. Charles, 165

Cranach, Lucas the Elder, on blindness
and sight, 104.

Cranmer, Thomas, 4

Crashaw, Richard, and emblem litera-
ture, 3n.

Crates of Thebes, 129

Cromwell, Thomas, 42n.

Crowley, Robert, on order, 81

Cruttwell, Patrick, 12 on.

Cullum, John, ii4n.

Curry, W. C., 6sn.

Custom, in Shakespeare, 7 if.

Danby, J. F., 86n., 88n.

Daniel, Samuel : and emblem literature,
3n.; on imagery, 2f.

Dante Alighieri: on Fortune, 60;
pelican, 92

Dathan, Abiram, and Corah (Reu-
benites), as emblem of sovereignty,
74 f.

Davies, John, on Naked Truth, in,
ii2n.

Day, John, on Providence, 26

De Dignitate Hominis, 156

Degree, in Shakespeare, 76

Dekker, Thomas : in Shoemakers 9 Holiday,
8n.; on tapestries, 8; Time and
Truth, 41

Deloney, Thomas, gin.

Deschamps, Eustache, 114

Desprez, Philippe: illustrator, 4;
emblems, on debility, is6n.; degree,
77n., 79n.; endurance, i24n.; kind,
33; phoenix, 13 in.; show and sub-
stance, i I5n., i i6n. (grasshopper and
ant); weakness and strength, i27n.

Determinism, in Lear, 46f., 49^, 52-60

Discoveries, 3

Disease imagery, in Shakespeare, 7of.

Doll's House, A, 149

Domenichi, Lodovico, 13 in.

Doni, Anton Francesco, on Time and
Truth, 45n.

Donne, John, on custom, 72
Don Quixote, on woodwose, 95
Doomsday, as emblem of chaos, 8o
Drake, Sir Francis, and Providence, 28
Droeshout, John : on kind, 3 1 ; pelican,

9 in.; Time and Truth, 43n., 44
Drummond, William, and emblem

literature, 3n.

Dudley, Edmund, on order, 145
Dunbar, William, g6n.

Eagle, as emblem of redemption, I3if.
Ecclesiastical Polity, Of the Laws of: on

nature, 88n.; reason and will, 161
Edward II, 4, 53, i3on.
Egmont, Lamoral, Count of, 1 26n.
Ego and the Id, The, 86n.
Eliot, Sir John, 5
Eliot, T. S., 1 3 in.
Elizabeth I, progresses of, I2n.
Ellis and Spedding, 45n.
Elyot, Sir Thomas: on chaos, 80;

kingship, 74; order, 79
Emblem literature, vogue of, 3f.
Epicureanism: in Renaissance, 63;

Shakespeare, 144; Sidney, 17
Epiphanius, St., 9 in.
Erasmus, Desiderius: on husbandry,

38n.; kingship, 78; and Macbeth, 6;

on order, 81; portrait of, 96n.; in

Praise of Folly, is6n.; on Time and

Truth, 44f.

Essex, Robert Devereux, Earl of, 4f.
Estienne, Charles, 78n.
Euphues, on order, 66f.
Everyman, The Summoning of, stage

conventions in, tof.
Exemplary literature, vogue of, 4-6

Fables D'Esope, 4in.

Faerie Queene, 7Jfo.*and Lear, ii2n.; on

nature, 86; woodwose, 94, 96n.
Farnham, Willard, 47n., 13 in.
Faust, 56
FaustuSy Dr., 100
Federighi, Antonio, 86n.
Feuillerat, Albert, I7n., 8 in.
Ficino, Marsilio, lagn., I34n.
Fielding, Henry, 151
Fisher, Thomas, on halcyon, 56
Fletcher, John, 149
Fletcher, Joseph, on Naked Truth, 1 1 1,

nan.

177

INDEX

Florio, John (trans, of Montaigne),
23n., 3 in., 12 in., I26n.

Foolishness and wisdom, in Shake-
speare, 125-31

Ford, John: on husbandry, 35;
Providence, 24; time, ii6n.

Forll, Marcolino da: on Naked Truth,
H2n.; Time and Truth, 42n.

Fortune: as emblem of temporal dis-
order, 72; and Mercury, 99; motif in
Shakespeare, 139; and Virtue, ggn.

Fortune Theatre, 96

Foxe, John, 26

Fraser, R. A., 75n.

Free Will, in Lear, 46, 49f., 52-60

Freitag, Arnoldus, n6n., 13 in.

Freud, Sigmund, on nature, 86n.

Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay: on
husbandry, 385 kingship, ySn.

Froissart, Jean, on Fortune, 5 in.

Furmer (Bernardus Furmerius), 13 in.

Gawain and the Green Knight, on
woodwose, 95

Gerard, John, on order, 64

Gesner, Conrad, on order, 63

Giles, J. A., gon.

Giovio, Paolo: Daniel's trans., 3n.; on
halcyon, 56f.

Glendower, Owen, i

Golding, Arthur, on order, 8 if.

Gorboduc, on woodwose, 94

Gordon, D. J., 38n.

Gosson, Stephen, on halcyon, 56

Gower, John, on Fortune, 5of.

Grace, in Shakespeare, 134-7, x ^4^

Granvelle, Anthony, Cardinal, i26n.

Granville-Barker, Harley, 94

Green, Henry (Shakespeare and the
Emblem Writers)^ 7n., 45n., 48n., 57n.,
67n., 78n., 7gn., Son., gin., ggn.,
icon., H4n., n6n., I3in., i32n.

Green, John Richard, 5n.

Greene, Robert: on beast imagery,
gon.; halcyon, 56; husbandry, 38;
kingship, 78n.

Greenfield, T. N., lion.

Gresham, Edward, on portents, 2 1

Gresham, Sir Thomas, nn.

Greville, Sir Fulke, Baron Brooke: on
degree, 76; husbandry, 35; kingship,
84; life as stage, 12 in.; nature, 86

Grimston, Edward, nn.

Grindal, Edmund, on portents, 2 1
Grosart, A. B., gon.
Guigue, Georges, i3n., 35n.

Halcyon: currency and use of the
image, 56f. ; and pelican, 92

Hall, Edward : on husbandry, 38 ; king-
ship, 82 ; woodwose, 94

Hall, John: and Chiliades, 6; on custom,
72n.; order, 81 ; prodigious births, 23

Hammond, H., 28n.

Harsnett, Samuel: on husbandry, 37n.;
nature, 89; portents, 20, 25; Provi-
dence, 39f.

Hartman, H., gin.

Hauptmann, Gerhart, 147

Hegel, G. W. F., 78

Heilman, R. B., in.

Heinsius, Daniel, 12 in., i24n.

Herbert, Edward, of Cherbury, on life
as stage, 121

Herbert, George, and emblem litera-
ture, 3n.

Hercules Oetaeus, on chaos, 80

Hero and Leander, 113

Heywood, Thomas, and emblem litera-
ture, 3n.

Higgins, John, on Icarus, 77

Hitchcock, E. V., 4gn.

HobbeSj Thomas: on Liberty and
Necessity, 163; nature, 93; t.p. of
Leviathan, i6n.

Hoby, Sir Thomas, 150

Holbein, Hans : on pride, 2 ; Providence,
27n.; Reubenites, 74; termini in,
g6n.

Holinshed, Raphael: on portents, 22;
and Shakespeare, 15, 22

Holland, Philemon : on abdication, 73 ;
exemplary literature, 4n.; kind, 33;
life as stage, 12 in.

Hooker, Richard: and Aquinas, 39; on
order, 63, 8on.; reason <and will,
i6if.

Horace: on Fortune, 48n.; Naked
Truth, i i2n. ; strength and weakness,
i3on.

Horozco, Don Juan de: emblems, on
Aeneas, 67n.; Fortune, 53n.; hus-
bandry, sgn.

Howes, Edmond, 22n.

Hume, David, on nature, 87

! 7 8

INDEX

Husbandry: currency of the image in
Shakespeare and the Renaissance,
34-39; and Fortune, 60; order, 66;
pelican, 92

Icarus, as emblem of disorder, yyf.
Icones Historiarum, 2
Iconography, defined, i
Iconology: defined, 2; of Lear, 15
Ixion, as emblem of disorder, 77f.

Jacob's dream of the ladder, as emblem

of contiguity, 26
Jameson, Anna Brownell, 165
Jesse Tree, 34f., 38
Jew of Malta, The: on halcyon, 57n.;

and Shakespeare, 89; Shylock, 30
Johnson, A. F., gin.
Johnson, Samuel, 151
Jonson, Ben: in Catiline, 78, 165; and

emblem literature, 3n. ; on metaphor,

3; and Shakespeare, 147; and

Whitney, 5

Judas, representations of, 7
Juvenal, on Fortune, 48n.
Juxtaposition, in theatre, in art, xof.

^Calendar and Compost of Shepherds, The,
on order, 63

Keats, John, i23n., 139

Kenmure, Lady, i i8n.

Kernodle, G. R. (From Art to Theatre),
I2n., isn., 28n., 35n., 42n., 75^,
92n., 96n.

Kind : as definition of nature, 3045 ;
motif in Shakespeare, 139, 143

King Lear: on anarchy, 6163, 66-72,
77-81; appearance and reality,
113-18; astrology, 46; beast
imagery, 90-98 ; blindness and sight,
104-7, logf., 122 ; chaos, 8of. ; custom,
7 if.; Epicureanism, I7f.; filial duty,
6jt ; foolishness and wisdom, 125-31 ;
Fortune, 47-61; free will and
determinism, 46, 49f., 52-60; and
Gresharn's pamphlet, 2 1 ; on halcyon^,
56f.; iconography of, i ; iconology of,
15; imagery of, 16; on kind, 32-45;
kingship, 72-76, 78, 81-84; l^ e as
stage, i2of.; microcosm, 64f.; mirror
of its time, 16; motifs and principles

in, 1 5, 1 38f. ; on Naked Truth, 110-12;

nature, 85-102; order, 63-66, 72-77,

79, 8184; origin of evil, 17; pelican,

9 if.; poetic justice, 30; portents,

1926; poverty and riches, 12731;

Providence, 27-29; regeneration,

122-33; an d stage conventions, 14;

on time, 116; Time and Truth,

41-44; woodwose, 94-96
King Leir: on blindness and sight, 109;

husbandry, 35, 37; kingship, 73;

pelican, 91; Providence, 29
Kingship, as emblem of order in

Shakespeare, 72-76, 78, 81-84
Knoblouch, John, on Naked Truth,

ii2n.
Kyd, Thomas, on Time and Truth, 45

La Perriere, Guillaume, loon.

La Primaudaye, Peter de: on Fortune,

48, 59; kind, 33; order, 64; poverty,

i25f., 130; Providence, 29
Lavater, Ludwig, on Providence, 24
Le Moine, Fran9ois, on Time and

Truth, 42n.
Leviathan: on Liberty and Necessity,

163; nature, 88n.; t.p. of, i6n.
Lindsay, Sir David, on Fortune, 50
Lobel, Matthias de: on order, 63;

Providence, 26

Lodge, Thomas, on halcyon, 56
Lorenzo de' Medici, on Fortune, 5 in.
Lucan, 31

Lucian, on Naked Truth, ii2n.
Lupton, T., on halcyon, 57n.
Luther, Martin, on portents, 2 if.
Lutzelberger, Hans, g6n.
Lydgate, John, on Fortune, 47n., 59n.,

60
Lyly, John : and emblem literature, 3n. ;

on halcyon, 56; order, 66f.

Machiavelli, Niccolo; on foolishness
and wisdom, 127; nature, 86, 88

McKerrow, R. B., gon., i2gn.

magnus Indus de homine salvatico, 94n.

Mair, G. H., gin.

Malory, Sir Thomas, on woodwose, 95

Mann, F. O., gin.

Mantegna, Andrea: on nakedness, no;
Naked Truth, inn.; pelican, 91

179

INDEX

Marlowe, Christopher: and emblem
literature, 311,; on Fortune, 53; in
Pharsalia, 31; on strength and weak-
ness, I3on.; and Shakespeare, 100;
on show and substance, 113; and
stage conventions, 9

Marston, John : and emblem, literature,
3n.; on halcyon, 57n.

Marsyas, as emblem of disorder, 77

Marvell, Andrew, and emblem litera-
ture, 3n.

Mary Tudor, as Naked Truth, 1 1 i

Maynard, Theodore, 9411.

Mazzini, Giuseppe, 139

Medieval drama: and Lucifer, 166;
Shakespeare's stage, gf., 14

Medwall, Henry, on nakedness, no

Melanchthon, Philip, on portents, 2 of.,
22,25

Merlin, works on, 22

Michelangelo Buonarroti: on ape as
evil, 94n.; nature, 86; Phaeton, 78n.;
Tityus, 79n.

Microcosm: in Renaissance, 64f.; in
Shakespeare, loof.

Middleton, Thomas: and emblem
literature, 3n. ; on Naked Truth, in

Milton, John: in Eikonoklastes, 8; and
emblem literature, 3n.; on nature,
85; Pelagian, i64f.; on Satan, 76

Mirror for Magistrates, A, on disorder, 77

Mirror of the World, The: on order, 63;
Ptolemaic universe, 23f., 26

Montaigne, Michel de: on fate, 24;
foolishness and wisdom, I26n.; kind,
31; life as stage, 12 in.; prodigious
births, 23

Montanus, Arias, 26n.

Montrose, James Graham, Earl of, and
portents, 19

Moralia 3 on kingship, 73

More, Sir Thomas, on Fortune, 49, 52

Morte d 3 Arthur, on woodwose, 95

Morton, Thomas, 78n.

Motley, John Lothrop (Rise of the Dutch
Republic), ign., 57n., g2n., ii2n.,
I26n.

Mourey, Gabriel, I3n.

Mucedorus, on woodwose, 94

Muir, Kenneth (New Arden Lear),
57n., 77n., gon., gin., n6n., i2in.,
I26n., i28n., ison.

Miinzer, Thomas, on portents, 21, 25

Mustapha: on degree, 76; husbandry,
35; kingship, 84

Naked Truth, in Renaissance, in Shake-
speare, 110-12

Nashe, Thomas: on beast imagery,
gon. ; and emblem literature, 3n. ; on
fire of Paul's, 2 if., 25; halcyon, 56;
life as stage, 121; nakedness, 129

Nature: kind defines, 3145; in Lear,
85-102

Nature, on nakedness, no

Nature's germens, 6163

Nebuchadnezzar, as woodwose, 142

Niobe, as emblem of disorder, 77

Nosworthy, J. M., i35n.

Nuda Veritas, in Renaissance art, in

Nuremberg Chronicle, on Ptolemaic
universe, 26

Occasion, representations of, 7n.
Oedipus the King, and Shakespeare, 50,

144, 161

Ogilby's Aesopico, 4 in.
Olgiatus, Hieronymus, 99n.
Oliver, Isaac, iin.
Order, Renaissance belief in, 25-29
Overbury, Sir Thomas, 43
Ovid: on Arion, 97n.; Baucis and

Philemon, 128; Fortune, 48n.;

moralized, 8 if.; on strength and

weakness, i3on.

Palfreyman, Thomas: on adversity,

I23n.; custom, 72n.; Fortune, 48n.;

husbandry, 36f.; order, 81; redacts

Chiliades, 6

Palingenius, Marcellus, 12 in.
Panofsky, Erwin, see Studies in Iconology
Paradise Lost, 128, 137
Passe, Crispin de, icon.
Patch, Howard R., 47n., 48n., 5 in.,

6on.

Patmore, Coventry, 166
Paul, St., 149
Paul's, fire of St., 2 if.
Peacham, Henry: courtesy writer, 150;

and emblem literature, 3n.; on

Naked Truth, lion.
Peend, Thomas, on order,, 82
Pelagianism, 164^

180

INDEX

Pelican: as emblem of natural be-
haviour, ion.; and ignorance, 98; in

Shakespeare, 9 if.
Parkin Warbeck, n6n.
Peter and the Wolf, 155
Petite Pallace ofPettie His Pleasure, A, 9 in.
Petronius: on life as stage, 12 in. ;

Naked Truth, nan.
Peyton, Thomas, on Time and Truth,

45n.

Phaeton, as emblem of disorder, yyf.
Pharsalia, 31
Phoenix, as emblem of redemption,

ion., isif.

Pico della Mirandola, 156
Piero di Cosimo, on woodwose, 95
Pigouchet, Philippe, g6n.
Pilgrim's Tale, The, on Reubenites, 74
Pisano, Giovanni, on Naked Truth,

H2n.

Plantin, Christopher, gin.
Plato: on microcosm, icon.; order, 78;

show and substance, iogn.
Pliny : on beast imagery, gon. ; Fortune,

48n.; life as stage, 12 in.; order, 78;

pseudo-natural history, 103
Plutarch: on exemplary literature, 4;

Fortune, 59; kind, 33
Poetics (Aristotle), 156
Pole, Reginald, Cardinal, on Naked

Truth, in, 1 1 an.
Portents and prodigies, in Renaissance

and Shakespeare, 18-24, X 39
Poussin, Nicolas, on Time and Truth,

4 i
Poverty and riches, in Renaissance and

Shakespeare, 127-31
Praise of Folly, The, i26n.
Praz, Mario (Seventeenth-Century Imagery),

3n., 92n., icon., ison.
Prokofiev, Sergei, 155
Prometheus, as emblem of disorder,

77-79
Prophecy, prevalence and importance,

22n.
Providence: as emblem of law, 46; of

order, 72f.; emblems illustrating,

27f.; and Fortune, 60; implicit in

nature, 45; kind exemplifies, 39;

motif in Shakespeare, 138, 143
Ptolemaic universe : as emblem of order,

65; and Renaissance thought, 23f.
Pythagoras, on order, 78

Quarles, Francis: defines emblem, 3;
and emblem literature, 3n.

Rackham, H., gon.

Ralegh, Sir Walter, on Providence, 28

Recorde, Robert: analogical, 3; on
order, 63

Redemption: Lear achieves, 11932;
motif in Shakespeare, 139

Renaissance: concrete style of, 3; on
disorder, 66752, 77-81 ; Fortune,
47-60; free will, 53-60; husbandry,
34-39; life as stage, 12 of.; nature,
85-102; order, 63-66, 72-77, 79,
81-84; pelican, 9 if.; Providence,
23f.; sequence, 25-29; Time and
Truth, 4145; virtue and beauty,
113-15

Reubenites, as emblem of disorder, 83

Reusner, Nicolaus, gin.

Revenger's Tragedy, The, 7n.

Richardson, Samuel, 151

Richelieu, Armand, Cardinal, 42n.

Ripa, Cesare: on ape as evil, g4n.;
blindness, 104; Fortune, ggn. ; mutual
help (storks), 68n.; Naked Truth,
in, H2n.; pelican, 91, g2n.;
Providence, 26; show and substance,
114; Sisyphus, H7n.

Roberts, Lewis, 28n.

Robinson, James H., 2 in.

Rogers, Thomas, 2 in.

Rollenhagio, Gabriele: emblems, on
Fortune, 47n., 5 in.; Ixion, 78n.;
kingship, 82n.; learning, 99n.;
mortality, 12 on.; Occasion, 7n.;
patience, 12411.; poverty and riches,
I2gn.; Providence, 2 7n.; redemption,
13 in.; show and substance, iO7n.,
H5n., H7n.; vanity, 12 in.

Rollins, H. E., 23n.

Roman de la Rose: on hypocrisy, Ii2n.;
woodwose, 95

Roper, William, 49

Royal Society, The, 5

Rubens, Peter Paul: on Prometheus,
7gn.; Time and Truth, 41!

Rutherford, Samuel, ii8n.

Rymer, Thomas, on Othello, 109

Sachs, Hans, on woodwose, 95
St. Joan, F39

181

INDEX

Sambucus, Joannes: emblems, on
Actaeon, 32; Fortune, 53; hus-
bandry, 39n.; Icarus, ySn.; industry
and nature, Qgn. ; show and substance,
i I4n., i I5n. (elephant and tree)

Sanford,J., 46n.

Satyricon, 12 in.

Saxl, Fritz, 16, 38n., 42n., 45n., nsn.

Seager, H. W., g2n.

Self-sufficiency, in Shakespeare, 46,

Seneca: on chaos, 80; Fortune, 48n.,
husbandry, 38n.

Seres, William, 22n.

Shaftesbury, third earl of, 16

Shakespeare, William: on anarchy,
61-63, 66-72, 77-8i; appearance
and reality, 113-18, 158-62; art and
good learning, 98-100; blindness and
sight, 104-7, logf., 122; civil war,
68; comedies of, 140-3, 147-55, *57~
60, i66; concrete style of, 3; on
custom, 7 if.; degree, 76; disease
imagery, 7of.; and emblem litera-
ture, sn.; on filial duty, 67f.;
foolishness and wisdom, 125-31;
Fortune, 47-61 ; free will and deter-
minism, 46, 49f., 52-60, io3f. 3
I57f.; grace, 134-7* l6 4 f -* halcyon,
56f.; and Harsnett, 20; and his age,
I5f.; and Holinshed, 15, 22; on
husbandry, 34-39; ignorance, 98-
100; imagery of, I5f.; on kingship,
72-76, 78, 81-84; last plays of, 132^;
on life as stage, I2o; and Marlowe,
100; on microcosm, 64, ioo;
motifs in, i38; on Naked Truth,
110-12; nature, 85-102; order, 63-
66, 72-77, 79, 81-84; Pelagian, 164;
on pelican, gi; portents and
prodigies, 18-25, J 39J poverty and
riches, 127-31; Providence, 2729;
regeneration, 122-33; and stage
conventions, 9-15; on suicide, 54-
56; Time and Truth, 42-44; trage-
dies of, 133, i43f., 155-67; and
Whitney, 5, 15; on woodwose, 94-96;
Works, cited or discussed: All's
Well, TDL., 56, 103, 120, 127, 135,
I53, 156, I58; Antony and Cleopatra,
*4, 49, 55, J 56, 158, 159. i64; As
Ton Like It, 7, 8n., 43, 51, 70, 87,
iO7f., no, 120, 12 in., 122, 127, 129,

I34f., I46, I53, 157; Comedy of
Errors, 106, 110, 132, 140, 143, 149,
1 60; Coriolanus, 63, 71, 82, 9 in., 143,
158; Cymbeline, 8, 31, 32, 37, 4o, 58,
72, 84, 90, 94, 104, 107, 133, 135,
*53 f -, i57-6o, 162, 1 66; Hamlet,
i, 40, 55, 68, 76, 88, iosf., is6f.,

140, 158, 1 60, 162, i Henry IV, 20,
40, 75; 2 Henry IV, 9, 48, 6a, 65,
7on., 76n., 81, 109, 115, 120, 134,

145, 161, 166; Henry V, 14, 27, 32,
48, 63, 65, 76, 92, 119, 126, 134,

141, 146, 157; i Henry VI, 19, s6,
79, 87, in, 139, 160; 2 Henry VI,
9*-> 43, 54, 57, 61, 6^., 67, 73, 9311.,
98, 113, 115, 131, i39f., 143, 164;
3 Henry VI, gn., 19, 49f., 63, 72, 75,
93n., 101, 103, 117, 143, 146; Henry
VIII, 34, 85, 88, 98, 108, 113, 122;
Julius Caesar, 1 8, 31, 54, 67, 100, 115,
129, 140, I43f., 157; King John, 7, 13,
65, 69, 7o, 72, 75, 80, 83, 86, 120;
King Lear, see separate entry; Love's
Labour's Lost, 8n. ; 13, 98, 134, 140,
152 ; Macbeth, 6, 20, 32, 37, 40, 43, 49,
55, 62, 75, Ssf., 101, 107, 114, 133,
136, 140, 144, 151, 156-9, 163, 165;
Measure for Measure, 6, 30, 32, 43,
83, 86, 88, 1 13, i25n., I29, 136, 141,
148, 153, 157; Merchant of Venice,
30, 117, I2i, 141, 144, 148, 152,
162; Merry Wives, 150; Midsummer
Night's Dream, 10, 141, 147, 149, 151;
Much Ado, 143; Othello, 18, 36, 70,
87, 89, 9in., losf., 109, 142, 146,
I53f., 156, 158, 163, 165; Pericles, 4,
13, 35, 50, 83, 85, 103, I23f., I32f.,
I 46 3 *53, 1 60; Rape of Lucrece, 42f.,
60, no; Richard II, i8, 31, 36, 38,
43, 7*, 75, 77, 92, 131*1., 132, 139,

146, 154; Richard II, 7n,, 27f., 37,
47, 52, 55*"*, 68, 89, 93n., ii2n.,ii4,
117, 135, 140, 144, 166; Romeo and
Juliet, 5, 36, 70, 86, 93, 99, 151;
Sonnets, 36, 76, 114; Taming of the
Shrew, 13, 68, 108, 140-2, 148-51,
153, 159; Tempest, 11-13, 23, 69,
75 f -, 85, 87, 90, 94, 98, 117, i22f.,
133, 137, 147, 154, 157, 166;
Timon, 19, 30, 5 if., 54, 59, 62, 93, 97,
122, 128, ism., 135, i45f., 158, 165;
Titus Andronicus, 8n., 13, 5 if., 74, 79,
89, no, 113, 146; Troilus, 7, 36,

182

INDEX

41, 47, 51, 64, 7611., 79, 81, 115, 134,
145, 158-62; Twelfth Mght, 85,
88, 97n. } losf., 113, 133, 143, 152-4,
I 59s *66> T" 2 " Gentlemen, 8n., 101,
115, 140, 154, 157, i6o; Two
Noble Kinsmen, 159; Winter 1 s Tale, 23,
52f., 62, 71, 86, 12311., 133, 151,

J 53-5 *S9
Shaw, G. B. : in Candida, 149; on

Shakespeare, 139
Shelley, P. B., 16,77, 125
Show and Substance, motif in Shake-

speare, 139
Sidney, Sir Philip: on beast imagery,

gon. ; and emblem literature, 3n. ; on

Epicureanism, 17; filial duty, 68;

and Lear, 108; on order, 81
Simultaneous action, i^f.
Sisyphus, 117
Socrates, 78n.
Songes drolatiques, 94
Sophocles, 1 6 1
Souch, John, nn.
Spanish Tragedy, The: on Fortune, 49;

Judas, 7; Time and Truth, 45
Speculum Salvationis, n
Spenser, Edmund: and emblem litera-

ture, sn.; on nature, 86; order, 8on.
Sprat, Thomas, 5

Spurgeon, C. F. E., in., 93n., ison.
Stage conventions, 8f., 10-15
Starnes and Talbert, 6n.
Stevenson, B., 42n.
Stoic philosophy, 63
Stow, John: on fire of Paul's, 22n.;

plague, 23, 25
Strachan, James, I in., 26n.
Strachey, Lytton, 5n.
Strachey, William, i3on.
Street theatres, I2n.
Strutt, Joseph, 97n.
Strype, John, 2 in.
Studies in Icortology (Erwin Panofsky),

7n., ion., 42n., 78n,, 79n., 86n., 99n.,

iO4n., 1 1 in., H2n., 12911., I3in.,

Suicide, in Shakespeare, 54-56
Summer's Last Will and Testament, 121
Summers, Montague, son.
Sweating sickness, 23
Swinburne, A. C., 138
Sylvester, Joshua, and emblem litera-
ture, sn.

Symonds, J. A., 138
Synge, J. M., 152

Tableau vivant, and stage conventions,

1214

Taillepied, Noel, on portents, 20, 25
Tamer Tamed, The, 149
Tate, Nahum, 138
Taverner, Richard: Chiliades redacted

by, 6; on degree, 78n.; order, 81 ; and

Shakespeare, 5, io8n.
Taylor, E. M. M., I2gn.
Taylor, Rupert, 22n.
Thompson, E. N. S., sn.
Thomson, J. A. K., 78n., loon., i2in.
Tibullus, on Fortune, 48n.
Tiepolo, G. B., on Time and Truth,

42n.

Tillyard, E. M. W., Son.
Time: and Fortune, 60; Lear, 116
Time and Truth, currency and meaning

of the image, 41-45
Tinker's Wedding, The, 152
9 Tis Pity She's a Whore: on chaos, 80;

husbandry, 35
Titian: on nakedness, i29n.; Naked

Truth, in, ii2n.; regeneration,

1 3 in.; Tityus, 79n.; unlicked bear

cub, loon,

Tityus, as emblem of discord, 79
Topsell, Edward: on beast imagery,

9on., gin., 93n.; order, 64
Tourneur, Cyril: on husbandry, 35;

Occasion, 7n.
Traversi, D. A., 7on.
Treatise of Heauenly Philosophic, The, i23n.
Tree of 'Commonwealth, The, 145
Trevelyon, Thomas, 124
Trevisa, J., 92n.
Truth Brought to Light and Discovered by

Time, 43

Turner, William, on order, 63
Tusser, Thomas, 15
Typotius, Jacobus,

Vaenius, Octavio (Otto van Veen),
loon.

Valentine and Orson, on woodwose, 95

Vasari, Giorgio, 134

Vaughan, Henry, and emblem litera-
ture, 3n.

Virgil, on Fortune, 48n.

183

INDEX

Vives, Juan, 12 in.
Volpone, 5

Waller, Sir William, on life as stage, 120
Waterhouse, E. K., nn.
Watson, Arthur, 38n.
Webster, John : and emblem literature,
3n.; on lust, 7; show and substance,

Welsford, Enid, ra6n.
Whibley, Charles, 8sn.
White Devil, The: on Fortune, 48;

husbandry, s6n.; lust, 7; show and

substance, 115
Whitney, Geoffrey (A Choice of

Emblemes) : emblems, on Actaeon, 32 ;

Aeneas, 67n.; Arion, 97n.; Art and

Nature, 99; bondage, 57n.; Brutus,

54n.; chaos, Son.; debility, I36n.;

endurance, I24n.; Fortune, 53;

Hercules, 75n.; husbandry, 39;

Icarus, 78n.; kind, 33; Niobe, 77n.;

pelican, gin.; phoenix, 13 in.;

Prometheus, 79; Providence, 28n.,

45n.; Reason and Will, loin.; and

Shakespeare, 5f., 15; on show and

substance, io7n., nsn., iisn., n6n.;

Time and Truth, 4 in., 45.
Whittington, Robert, g6n.
Wife of Bath's Tale, The, 149
Wild-Goose Chase, The, on husbandry, 35
William of Orange, on pelican, 9 if.
Wilson, J. Dover, 24n.
Wilson, Thomas, on beast imagery,

gin., gsn.
Wither, George, and emblem literature,

3n.

Withington, Robert, gSn., 97n.
Wittkower, Rudolf, 16, 5 in.
Woodward, John, i in., 4in.
Woodwose : and Nebuchadnezzar, 142;

in Renaissance, 94-96
Wycherley, William, 147, 152

Yardley, May, 24n.
Yeats, W. B., 148

Zpdiacus Vitae, 12 in.

184

RUSSELL FRASER is chairman of the De-
partment of English at Vanderbilt University.
A Shakespearean scholar, he is a specialist in
the literature of the English Renaissance. His
research has emphasized Elizabethan and
Jacobean poetry and drama. Now 38, Mr.
Fraser was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
Enlisting on his seventeenth birthday in 1944,
he spent two years in the United States Naval
Reserve. He earned his degree in 1947 from
Dartmouth College. Harvard University
granted him the M.A. in 1949 and the Ph.D.
in 1950.

He has been a member of the faculties of
the University of California at Los Angeles,
Duke University, Columbia University, and
Princeton University and has received fellow-
ships from the American Philosophical So-
ciety, the American Council of Learned So-
cieties, the Modern Language Association, and
the Council on Humanities.

Mr. Fraser visited the Soviet Union, Hun-
gary, and Czechoslovakia last year to arrange
for the exchange of faculty and graduate
students with universities in Communist
countries in his official capacity 3,5 a member
of the governing board of the Inter-Univer-
sity Committee on Travel Grants. Widely
published in scholarly journals, he is at pres-
ent working on a book dealing with Renais-
sance and medieval attitudes toward poetry
and the theater.

cz
5m

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