The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded | Page 9

the explanation of their
designs; postponing their honour to ages able to discover their worth;
this is the proposition which is derived here from the works in which
the tradition of this learning is conveyed to us.
But in the part of this work referred to, from which the ensuing extracts
are made, it was the life, and not merely the writings of the founders of
this school which was produced in evidence of this claim. It was the
life in which these disguised ulterior aims show themselves from the
first on the historic surface, in the form of great contemporaneous
events, events which have determined and shaped the course of the
world's history since then; it was the life in which these intents show
themselves too boldly on the surface, in which they penetrate the
artistic disguise, and betray themselves to the antagonisms which were
waiting to crush them; it was the life which combined these
antagonisms for its suppression; it was the life and death of the
projector and founder of the liberties of the New World, and the
obnoxious historian and critic of the tyrannies of the Old, it was the life
and death of Sir Walter Raleigh that was produced as the Historical
Key to the Elizabethan Art of Tradition. It was the Man of the Globe
Theatre, it was the Man in the Tower with his two Hemispheres, it was

the modern 'Hercules and his load too,' that made in the original design
of it, the Frontispiece of this volume.
'But stay I see thee in the hemisphere Advanced and made a
constellation there. Shine forth, thou Star of Poets, and with rage Or
influence, chide or cheer the drooping stage, Which since thy flight
from hence hath mourned like night, And despairs day, but for thy
Volume's light.
['To draw no envy _Shake-spear_ on thy name, Am I thus ample to thy
book and fame.'--BEN JONSON.]
The machinery that was necessarily put in operation for the purpose of
conducting successfully, under those conditions, any honourable or
decent enterprise, presupposes a forethought and skill, a faculty for
dramatic arrangement and successful plotting in historic materials,
happily so remote from anything which the exigencies of our time have
ever suggested to us, that we are not in a position to read at a glance the
history of such an age; the history which lies on the surface of such an
age when such men--men who are men--are at work in it. These are the
Elizabethan men that we have to interpret here, because, though they
rest from their labours, their works do follow them--the Elizabethan
Men of _Letters_; and we must know what that title means before we
can read them or their works, before we can 'untie their spell.'

CHAPTER II.
THE AGE OF ELIZABETH, AND THE ELIZABETHAN MEN OF
LETTERS.
'The times, in many cases, give great light to true interpretations.'
Advancement of Learning.
'On fair ground I could beat forty of them.'
'I could myself Take up a brace of the best of them, yea the two

tribunes.'
'But now 'tis odds beyond arithmetic, And manhood is called foolery
when it stands Against a falling fabric.'--Coriolanus.
The fact that the immemorial liberties of the English PEOPLE, and that
idea of human government and society which they brought with them
to this island, had been a second time violently overborne and
suppressed by a military chieftainship,--one for which the unorganised
popular resistance was no match,--that the English People had been a
second time 'conquered'--for that is the word which the Elizabethan
historian suggests--less than a hundred years before the beginning of
the Elizabethan Age, is a fact in history which the great Elizabethan
philosopher has contrived to send down to us, along with his
philosophical works, as the key to the reading of them. It is a fact with
which we are all now more or less familiar, but it is one which the
Elizabethan Poet and Philosopher became acquainted with under
circumstances calculated to make a much more vivid impression on the
sensibilities than the most accurate and vivacious narratives and
expositions of it which our time can furnish us.
That this second conquest was unspeakably more degrading than the
first had been, inasmuch as it was the conquest of a chartered,
constitutional liberty, recovered and established in acts that had made
the English history, recovered on battle-fields that were fresh, not in
oral tradition only; inasmuch as it was effected in violation of that
which made the name of Englishmen, that which made the universally
recognised principle of the national life; inasmuch, too, as it was an
undivided conquest, the conquest of _the single will_--the will of the
'one only man'--not unchecked of commons only, unchecked by barons,
unchecked by the church, unchecked