The Orphic Voice, page 12
Come, sit thee down upon this flowery bed,
While I thy amiable cheeks do coy,
And stick musk-roses in thy sleek smooth head,
And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy.
And the mechanicals themselves have their security and their welcome in the royal courtesy of Theseus, where love shifts from love between man and woman to a love which is nearer charity in the theological sense. Though warned by Philostrate that “it is nothing, nothing in the world,” it is their play which he chooses,
I will hear that play.
For never anything can be amiss
When simpleness and duty tender it.
The whole passage, in Act v, Scene 1, is eloquent of a kingly heart. Hippolyta in her turn watches over the young lovers. After Theseus in Act I, Scene 1, decrees that Hermia’s failure to obey her father and marry the man she does not love will bring her “to death, or to a vow of single life,” he says immediately to Hippolyta, “Come my Hippolyta, what cheer my love?” as if she needed to be distracted from inwardly taking Hermia’s part; and after the return of the four lovers from the forest, it is she who believes their strange tale of change and chance, against Theseus’ incredulity,
But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigur’d so together,
More witnesseth than fancy’s images,
And grows to something of great constancy;
But howsoever, strange, and admirable.
She affirms the dream—a communal dream—as learning, and she has the last word over Theseus’ common sense.
Love is treated in this play as if it were not a moral phenomenon. Perhaps there is a slight censure on Titania for ungenerosity: “Why should Titania cross her Oberon?” which is followed by her enchanted beguilement with Bottom. Lysander is called, mistakenly, “this lack-love, this kill-courtesy,” but here again the reproach is only for making an inadequate response to love’s demands. Mistakes are made frequently, right through to the mistake by which Pyramus and Thisbe meet their ends, but the only mistake which is reproved is made by the one completely detached character in the play, the Puck (“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”) who alone is held to account— “What hast thou done? Thou has mistaken quite.” The other characters are in a sense compelled into their errors as one is in a dream, and therefore the play is without any moral note, as a dream is and as nature is. “I am convinced,” Coleridge says, “that Shakespeare availed himself of the title of this play in his own mind, and worked upon it as a dream throughout.”36 The unmoral condition, love in the natural world, are part of the privileges which dream affords him, permitting an innocence which mirrors the innocence of nature. (Lust has no entry to this play; whereas in The Tempest it is admitted, only to be exorcised, as if Shakespeare made there the fuller picture without abandoning the dream).37
Love appears here in its variety: marriage and fertility, with their natural contrast to virginity, the constant argument of the first hundred lines of the play which set the theme; love as innocence, as tenderness, as friendship. But through this subject matter the play will explore, by a five-times repeated theme with all its cross-connections, possible relations in the world of nature as perceived by the mind, “that commerce between the mind of man and the nature of things” as Bacon said, which needs to be “restored to its perfect and original condition.” In Bacon, we remember, the note of Eden, of a kind of paradisiacal state of innocent knowledge, crept in; it is there too in the Midsummer Night’s Dream.
First, Shakespeare draws his instrument together. It consists of play, dream, and poetry, connected by countless cross-references. In Act I, Scene 1, the theme of the play, true love, is said to be “Swift as a shadow, short as any dream.” There are dreams within dreams in this work, just as there is a play within the play. Hermia’s dream of a serpent in II.2; the insistence of Oberon (III.2), there called “King of shadows,” that the lovers are to return to Athens in their right minds and right relationships, thinking no more of the night’s events than as “a dream and fruitless vision,” or, later, in IV.1, as “the fierce vexation of a dream.” When at last they are restored to themselves, they leave saying, “And by the way let us recount our dreams.” At the very end of the play, in Puck’s final speech, this is said,
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this (and all is mended)
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream . . .
where the whole play is given dream status, the characters are shadows, and the audience involved in the dream and dreaming it. It is of plays that Theseus says, “The best in this kind are but shadows.” But perhaps the best comment of all is that of Bottom, in his last speech in IV. 1 when he is awakened and restored to his own shape. There he discusses his dream, and at the end says, “I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream, it shall be called Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death.” So dream and play and love and death are drawn together here, by the fool in his own way as perfectly as by the lovers or the fairies.
Shakespeare picks up precisely what Bacon wants to reject—poetry, theater, dreams, and shadows—with an immense respect for each, and presents through them a vision of his method, a mythological vision of the relationship between man’s mind and the natural universe. It is not an abdication from rationality but a widening of it to include the world of dreams as well. It is as if Bacon were imprisoned in that palace of the mind of which he speaks more than once; but Shakespeare, while he sets us to begin with in the palace of Theseus, as the stage directions disclose, is ready to take us out of it, “And I am to entreat you, request you, and desire you, to . . . meet me in the palace-wood, a mile without the town, by moonlight: there will we rehearse.” Between these two the scenes alternate; in the palace all is clear and comprehensible, but it is in the palace wood that most of the metamorphoses take place which are the substance of the play, and at the end the creatures of the wood move into the palace to bless it.
In general Shakespeare embodies and exemplifies his method without commenting on it. There is one exception to this, however, in the Dream, and it is particularly valuable because it is made by a character who might represent Bacon at his most rational and antipoetic. This is Theseus, in his famous speech on imagination in lunatic, lover, and poet. He begins, in no vein of compliment:
More strange than true. I never may believe
These antique fables nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
One can almost hear the dry voice of Bacon appealing to the dry light of rationality. Theseus goes on to say that these three types “are of imagination all compact.” He notes and dismisses the illusions of the first two, in two lines apiece. But when we come to the poet, it is as if Shakespeare forgets who is speaking for six lines and speaks himself, and there is a shift in the sense of “imagination,” from negative to positive. The lines are so well known that I shall certainly give them in full, because the better known a quotation is, the less likely we are really to pay attention to it.
The Poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the Poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing,
A local habitation, and a name.
Immediately after, Shakespeare-Theseus becomes Bacon-Theseus again, with “such tricks hath strong imagination.” Meantime, however, the statement stands. It gives us the universe for the poet’s scope, the working imagination incorporating the intellectual figures and ideas it has perceived into shapes—that is, natural shapes such as come in a few lines later, bushes and bears and so on; and the poet’s use of language gives them a place in the world and a name—one might say an ecology and a classification. Poetry’s task lies somewhere between mental figures and created forms, relating the one to the other reciprocally by words. It comes down to the universe of nature, to forms and to a working method of mind and language which in Shakespeare’s case will take the form of poetic drama. This is Shakespeare’s method, or myth.
Is Bacon’s method different? Far from it. It is, in direction and operation, identical. There are three main parts to Bacon’s doctrine: his concept of forms, his project for a natural history, and his proposed reform of logic (i.e. of the mind’s ways of working with a language). Philosopher and playwright offer corroboration, the one to the other, of the means by which postlogical thought can be realized.
6
Almost as easy as to unravel a Bottom when you begin at the right end
BACON chose to designate the three principal aspects of his new vision by terms already old and carrying many meanings. He did so deliberately, and this is interesting, for it shows Bacon acting as a poet, prepared to accept the ambiguity which words have by nature because he saw in that quality something more to his purpose than a brand-new technical term. In the Advancement, Book II, he says, “in this and other particulars, wheresoever my conception and notion may differ from the ancient, yet I am studious to keep the ancient terms.” Pietas toward language is proper in a poet; so is the renewal of old words, and in Bacon the renewing of words is part of the renewing of the vision of nature itself, which he calls interpretation. So each of these three venerable terms is to be emptied and refilled. “The art which I introduce . . . is a kind of logic; though the difference between it and the ordinary logic is great; indeed immense.” “Matter rather than forms should be the object of our attention, its configurations and changes of configuration, and simple action, and law of action or motion; for forms are figments of the human mind, unless you will call those laws of action forms.” (This is in fact what he means to do.) “Of this reconstruction the foundation must be laid in natural history, and that of a new kind and gathered on a new principle . . . But my history differs from that in use (as my logic does) in many things,— in end and office, in mass and composition, in subtlety, in selection also and setting forth, with a view to the operations which are to follow.”
All three, the living principle of the Instauratio, come together near the beginning of Book II of the Organum. Aphorisms 10 and 11 recall once more the novelty of what is being attempted, but they emphasize also the interconnection of these three. First, Bacon commends to us his Natural and Experimental History, supplemented by Tables and Arrangements of Instances to help in the management of the material supplied. Then we are to “use Induction, true and legitimate induction, which is the very key of interpretation. But of this,” he goes on, “which is the last, I must speak first, and then go back to the other ministrations.” So ends that Aphorism, and the next one begins immediately, “The investigation of Forms proceeds thus . . .” Induction, then, is to proceed to the interpretation of nature through forms, drawing its material from the natural history, which Bacon describes in the introduction to the Parasceve as “the primary material of philosophy and the stuff and subject-matter of true induction” (Aphorism 2).
Indeed, so closely allied were natural history and intellectual method in Bacon’s mind that he could never decide which to work on first. At the end of Book I of the Organum (see Aphorisms 101 and 130), we find him resolving to go ahead with the art of interpreting nature; but he only carried this out in very small part, and changed his mind about the priority. In his preface to the third part of the Instauratio, immediately preceding the Historia Ventorum, he discusses this very point:
Having in my Instauration placed the Natural History —such a Natural History as may serve my purpose— in the third part of the work, I have thought it right to make some anticipation thereof, and to enter upon it at once. For although not a few things, and those among the most important, still remain to be completed in my Organum, yet my design is rather to advance the universal work of Instauration in many things, than to perfect it in a few . . . It comes therefore to this; that my Organum, even if it were completed, would not without the Natural History much advance the Instauration of the Sciences, whereas the Natural History without the Organum would advance it not a little.
In the end he left everything unfinished.
These three together—forms, logic, and natural history —constitute the art or science which Bacon proposes. They can be compared, point by point, with the principles set out in Theseus’ speech; but more than this, the whole of Shakespeare’s play can be looked at in the light of these three themes. The first theme is nature—the whole universe (excepting the moral universe of man) with particular emphasis on the “biosphere”; beside this we can set Bacon’s natural history. The second theme is form—the transformation, transmigration, translation of forms in nature and the mind; beside this goes the Baconian concern with form. The third theme is method itself, imagination in the working mind appearing here as myth, poetry, and theater; beside this we shall put the Baconian logic or induction, which also deals with the mind working with language. Since the two allow of so close a comparison, I shall no longer talk about two separate methods but about postlogical thought as such. Bacon and Shakespeare jointly present it as natural history, forms, and method of mind and language.
Bacon discusses his natural history in some detail in the Parasceve and in chapters 2 and 3 of the Descriptio Globi Intellectualis. As early as the Advancement, however, the main lines are laid down, to be repeated and expanded a little in the De Augmentis.
The range of the work is stated in Aphorism 4 of the Parasceve:38 “In the history which I require and design, special care is to be taken that it be of wide range and made to the measure of the universe. For the world is not to be narrowed till it will go into the understanding (which has been done hitherto), but the understanding to be expanded and opened till it can take in the image of the world, as it is in fact.” The scope of postlogical thought, then, is to be the natural universe.
The next question is its nature. It is not to be a mere catalogue of what is in the world. Bacon discusses this in the Globi Intellectualis, chapter 3, claiming that the natural histories already in existence were of this faulty kind:
Besides, it is not of much use to recount or to know the exact varieties of flowers, as of the iris or tulip, no, nor of shells or dogs or hawks. For these and the like are but wanton sports and freaks of nature, and almost approach to the nature of individuals. And though they involve an exquisite knowledge of the particular objects, the information which they afford to the sciences is slight and almost useless. And yet these are the things which our ordinary natural history takes delight in.
Long after Bacon the debate still goes on about the usefulness to biology of “exquisite knowledge of particular objects.”39 But Bacon is laying down the principles for postlogical thought, not for specimen collecting. He has to make a shift of attention from entities to process, from the static to the dynamic; thus in the De Augmentis, 11.2, he remarks: “Natural History treats of the deeds and works of nature.” Nature is an action, to be reflected by natural history which is an activity in the mind. With this in view, we will begin looking for this natural history in two places, Bacon’s Catalogue of Particular Histories by Titles which follows the Parasceve, and the scope of natural subject matter in the Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Anyone who is interested may try an experiment with this play: Begin at the beginning and note down references to natural phenomena as they occur. The experimenter will almost certainly be exhausted before getting halfway through. The profusion is astonishing. For me the final touch came with the speech of Titania beginning, “Be kind and courteous to this gentlemen,” where in six or seven lines the listmaker suddenly and finally disappears from sight under showers of apricocks and figs and dewberries, not to mention honey and butterflies and bees and glow-worms. It seemed best to say at that point Benedicite omnia opera, and leave it at that. Shakespeare brings into this play element after element which Bacon lists in his first eighty titles of “Particular Histories.” The heavenly bodies, lightnings, thunders, winds, clouds, showers, hail, frost, snow, fog, dew, and the like, says Bacon—these are all in the Dream; seasons and temperatures of the year, of floods, heats, and the like—these are here, notably in Titania’s long speech about the bad weather; history of earth and sea, of the shape and compass of them— “I’ll put a girdle round about the earth,” says Puck, and there are references to the Antipodes; of geography, of mountains, vallies, woods, sands, rivers, of ebbs and flows of the sea—these are all here. Passing over Bacon’s next entries, the four elements, fire, metals, jewels, the magnet, which the play likewise produces, we come to the history of living things, of plants, trees, shrubs and herbs, and of their parts, wood, leaves, flowers, fruits—these are here, down to the red dots in the cowslips and the blades of grass. History of fishes will be matched only with dolphins, leviathans and, questionably, mermaids, but the birds flock in, doves, cocks, larks, owls, nightingales, ousels, throstles, cuckoos, wrens; and the history of quadrupeds is very wide, cats, dogs including spaniels and hounds, lions, leopards, tigers, monkeys, bears, bulls, horses, asses, boars, ounces, wolves, deer, hedgehogs—and that is not a complete list. Next for Bacon come serpents, worms, flies, and other insects, to which rather motley company the play adds newts and blind-worms, spiders, moths, snails, and beetles; then we come to man, his senses, beauty, sickness and health, limbs, flesh and blood—but we cannot pursue this any further. To lump all these together will bring us to Bacon’s No. 80, with fifty heads still to come on the mechanical arts. But before we come to them and to Shakespeare’s no less elegant matching of them in this play, there is one more point to be made about Shakespeare’s natural history, lest this list leave us, as the play most certainly does not, with the feeling of an enumeration rather than a Baconian action.
