The Orphic Voice, page 13
Any account of Shakespeare’s natural history in this play would be hopelessly incomplete unless it mentioned the central aspect under which nature is presented, the theme of love, or, to give it its natural rather than human name, fertility. With this theme the play begins, looking forward to the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta which is to be its close. The discussion of Hermia’s fate is in these terms,
To live a barren sister all your life,
Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless Moon.
Thrice blessed those that master so their blood
To undergo such maiden pilgrimage,
But earthlier happy is the rose distill’d,
Than that which withering on the virgin thorn,
Grows, lives and dies in single blessedness. [1.1]
Oberon and Titania complain of ill weather in these terms —the harvest rotted, the folds empty—repeated in Titania’s lovely description of the young mother before her boy is born, a galleon with full sails:
Which she with pretty and with swimming gait,
Following (her womb then rich with my young squire)
Would imitate and sail upon the land.
It falls away in the middle of the play, only to be picked up when the royal pair find the sleeping lovers: “Begin these wood-birds but to couple now?” and moves to its triumphant fulfillment in Theseus’ “Lovers, to bed,” and the blessing the fairies give to each bride-bed, the children to be perfect and the field-dew sprinkled in token of it all.
It is not only Shakespeare who gives fertility a central place in the workings of a postlogical natural history. Bacon does so too. In Aphorism 1 of the Parasceve we read:
Natural History therefore is threefold. It treats of the liberty of nature, or the errors of nature, or the bonds of nature: so that we may fairly distribute it into history of Generations, of Pretergenerations, and of Arts; which last I also call Mechanical or Experimental History.
The term “generation” is, it should be realized, partly a recording of fact and partly a choice of metaphor—that is to say, it is partly subject matter and partly methodology. Much of nature does in fact reproduce itself by generation, but much does not, and it is worth noticing that Bacon chooses to spread the living metaphor over inanimate nature rather than figure (as is done where the image of machinery is used, for instance) the living by the nonliving. It is clear in the Globi Intellectualis, chapter 4, that this is what he is doing, for there his history of generations begins with ether and meteors. This is a mythical turn of thought.40 To see the whole of nature as a generative process is part of postlogic, and allows the thinking organism to figure in itself the processes it is reflecting upon.
Alongside generations and in unity with the whole natural process, Bacon sets down arts. He has more to say about this aspect of postlogical natural history in the Descriptio Globi Intellectualis:
And I am the rather induced to set down the history of arts as a species of natural history, because it is the fashion to talk as if art were something different from nature, so that things artificial should be separated from things natural, as differing totally in kind; whence it comes that most writers of natural history think it enough to make a history of animals or plants or minerals, without mentioning the experiments of mechanical arts (which are far the most important for philosophy) . . . Therefore as nature is ever one and the same, and her power extends through all things, nor does she ever forsake herself, these three things should by all means be set down as alike subordinate only to nature; namely, the course of nature; the wandering of nature; and art, or nature with man to help. And therefore in natural history all these things should be included in one continuous series of narratives.
That makes the unity of nature and art plain enough. This is not only a Baconian doctrine, however; Shakespeare holds it too:
Yet nature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean: so, over that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes . . . this is an art
Which does mend nature,— change it rather; but
The art itself is nature.
This is Polixenes in The Winter’s Tale. The views of each man are very important, for they set up an immense continuity which is part of the conditions for postlogical thought.
“Art” or “arts” has a multiplicity of meanings. It could mean, in Bacon’s period, operations of almost any sort, from the art of interpreting nature which Bacon seeks, through the liberal arts, some of which we should nowadays call sciences, to the practical arts of the craftsman, and eventually to magic, Prospero’s “so potent art” or “that damned art” of Doctor Faustus. Practice and operation, it suggests, are unified in the general scheme of nature as process or “nature with man to help.” It is this, in part, which Bacon sees. Dynamic process interested him deeply; so his forms turn into laws of motion, and the inquisition on motion was one of the first he undertook, so crucial did he hold it to be. Technology was for him part of this process, but the utilitarian Bacon, the father of the industrial revolution, does not on his own terms exclude the poet. Later centuries made that false division. If art is taken in this broad sense, as it should be, poet and technologist are connected by analogous operations but on different bits of nature, so to speak. Postlogical thinking, which accepts this over-all unity of process in nature and art, will take this into account.
As so often happens, Bacon’s theory will not go as far as his practice. In the Parasceve, Aphorism 4, he states: “History of Arts, and of Nature as changed and altered by Man, or Experimental History . . . is drawn either from the mechanical arts or from the operative parts of the liberal arts.” (In the similar passage in De Augmentis, II.2, he calls them “the liberal sciences.”) In a fragment, Cogitationes de Scientia Humana, he construes these “operative parts” as music, perspective, and medicine. But his own practice goes far beyond this. A direction is already implicit in the mention of liberal arts; for these, we remember, begin with the trivium, the mind operating in figures of language which are then to be directed in the quadrivium toward the universe of nature. Because Bacon is a poet searching for the methods of postlogic, which is an operation of mind and language directed toward nature, he is profoundly concerned with the point at which nature and language meet. This would seem at first sight to be the mind, but Bacon says more than that. In fact, his interest in this meeting point of nature, mind, and language explains his preoccupation with the mechanical arts. Those who think his interest was solely practical have mistaken what he means by power.41 He is interested in the mechanical arts because he believes that at this point nature will be more ready to give evidence and to reveal what she secretly knows. He expresses this belief in a series of metaphors.
The first and most frequent is that, by these arts, nature or matter is imprisoned and handcuffed and so made more tractable and ready to give evidence. He calls this “the vexations of art.” The myth of Proteus is a favorite image of his in this connection. The metaphor goes further, however, logically pursuing the image Bacon has embarked on, the juridical processes of his own period which he knew, as an eminent lawyer, very well; one might say too well. For the second part of the metaphor is that nature is to be put to the question—that is, tortured if necessary to extort the necessary evidence. This underlies Bacon’s constant use of “Inquisitio” (Filum Labyrinthi sive Formula Inquisitionis); the direct Englishing of that still carries a hateful sound to our ears, and “interrogation,” with which Bacon concludes the Parasceve (“to examine nature herself and the arts upon interrogatories”), a yet worse because a more modern one.
So-called confessions extracted by torture have become so abhorrently familiar that it is hard to bring one’s mind to see in this figure of Bacon’s what he saw, a legitimate procedure to compel not just speech but the spoken truth from the obdurately silent. Attendance at sessions of such a kind formed part of Bacon’s duties, as we know.42 Bacon uses the metaphor about nature because in his view she could be made to speak out and to speak true if the right expedient were employed. We no longer share the complacency at the method nor the belief in it as a means to truth, and it is with relief that we can turn to Shakespeare at this very point. He too will deal with mechanical arts as part of natural history, thus matching the last fifty titles in Bacon’s Catalogue of Particular Histories which begin with cookery and baking and continue through wood-working and weaving and the like—all, as Bacon insists, under the heading of natural history. Shakespeare, however, does not deal with them by torture. He gives us instead the Dream clowns, unmenaced in the freedom and folly their creator so largely bestows upon them.
The six mechanicals are no mere accident of comic relief in this play. They are Shakespeare’s equivalent of Bacon’s insistence on the need to observe the mechanical arts. Shakespeare does not argue the point: he presents characters. But each writer is making a case for the special status of the arts in the widest sense, human operation upon nature, as part of natural process and the point at which forms—in nature, mind, and language—interact and interpret one another. They are, for Shakespeare as for Bacon, the bridge between the study of natural history and the study of forms as such. Bacon, true to his Orpheus, directs toward philosophy whatever profit may come from the study of these arts: “My meaning plainly is that all mechanical experiments should be as streams flowing from all sides into the sea of philosophy” (Parasceve, Aphorism 5). Carefully, however, he keeps his own art, that of interpreting, separate from the mechanical arts; the latter are to be referred, for translation and collating, to the former. Shakespeare, no less true to his Orpheus, goes much further. In an astonishing stroke of genial generosity he unites himself and his art with the mechanicals, lending them his own craft of poetic and mythological drama, since if natural process is really all of a piece and includes arts of all kind, such a union is only logical. Where once again Bacon stops half way, Shakespeare follows through the logic of postlogic. His mechanicals here take on exactly the task he has himself in hand, the production of a play on the occasion of a wedding.43
What Shakespeare presents us with, in these clown scenes, is in the best Baconian sense a “mechanical experiment.” Philostrate in v.i makes this plain:
THESEUS: What are they that do play it?
PHILOSTRATE: Hard-handed men, that work in Athens here,
Which never labour’d in their minds till now.
With these simple minds, versed only in mechanical skills and now attempting art of another kind, a mythological and linguistic piece of work, Shakespeare conducts his own experiment. That is why their play is so important, their sole purpose in Shakespeare’s play. All four of their communal scenes are devoted to it—to its casting, its rehearsing, its near-abandonment as marred without Bottom, and then his return with the news “our play is preferred,” and lastly its performance. And between the first two and the last two Shakespeare sets the obligato of Bottom’s adventure, which is an experiment of a rather different kind, though Bottom calls it “Bottom’s dream,” so that we are still within the main framework of Shakespeare’s method, and we are accompanied by poetry all the way through. We shall begin with poetry in simple and essential form—the actors’ marvelous names and trades.
It is clear that their names and callings are not just to be listed under Dramatis Personae, a mere program convention. They are built into that first scene of theirs where Peter Quince is calling the roll of his team. They are, you recall, Peter Quince; his trade is not called because he is doing the calling, but the stage directions give him a carpenter; Nick Bottom the weaver; Francis Flute the bellows mender; Robin Starveling the tailor; Tom Snout the tinker; and Snug (who is given no first name) the joiner. Now look at the names. Dover Wilson says of them that they are “technical names”:
Commentators have remarked that Bottom takes his name from the “bottom” or core of the skein upon which the weaver’s yarn is wound; but they have not noticed that most of the other clowns have technical names likewise. Thus Quince is simply a spelling of “quines” or “quoins,” i.e. wedge-shaped blocks of wood used for building purposes, and therefore appropriately connected with a carpenter; Snout means nozzle or spout (v. N.E.D. “snout” 4) which suggests the tinker’s trade in mending kettles; Snug means “compact, close-fitting, tight,”— a good name for a joiner; and Flute, the bellows-mender, would of course have to repair fluted church-organs as well as the domestic bellows. Starveling, indeed, is the only nontechnical name among them, though it is apt enough, referring as it does to the proverbial leanness of tailors, of whom it took “nine to make a man.”44
So far so good, but the names are not merely technical terms. They have that quality of association which goes with poetry, and the associations bear with them not merely the mechanical history of “things artificial” which Bacon commends, but also that other history, of “things natural.” “Snout” has obvious animal connections, and was used in Shakespeare’s time for fish and bird as well as beast. The name “Starveling” by its image of thinness brings in the body and food, and the word was used not only for human beings but also for animals or plants. “Snug” suggests a bodily, almost animal, warmth, as do the words “snuggle” or “nestle.” “Quince” is fruit and tree. Flute the bellows mender suggests by that combination of woodwind and bellows the moving breath which is life itself (lungs and bellows make as obvious a pair as do heart and pump), a life which is also capable of translation into music. His own quality of voice is drawn to our attention in his choice for Thisbe and his remonstrance, “Nay faith, let me not play a woman, I have a beard coming,” and in Bottom’s desire to out-flute Flute, “I’ll speak in a monstrous little voice.” Last and best, there is Bottom himself. He calls attention to his own name: “It shall be called Bottom’s Dream because it hath no bottom.” It carries its obvious bodily reference and also the trade meaning which I shall come back to before long. But meantime we can take stock of what the names so far have done for us. They imply the great unity of natural history, plants and trees, animals, man as body and mind, the arts. The mechanicals are dove-tailed into the whole universe of nature which is the subject matter of the Dream; but they have their own proper distinction in it. They are not bestialized, nor are they oafs or boors. They have struggled up out of the vegetable and animal into the human condition and they hold to their human status and, one might almost say, dignity, as Theseus recognizes, “If we imagine no worse of them than they of themselves, they may pass for excellent men.” Because they are human, they form a society, depicted here as the play’s cast, close-knit and friendly; and they speak.
Speech, the acting and speaking of their play (notice the constant reference throughout the Dream to cues) is their whole endeavor here, and to speech everything is referred. “Have you the Lion’s part written? pray you if it be, give it me, for I am slow of study,” says Snug in their first scene. Moon, Wall, Lion, all are somehow assimilated to the human condition and made to talk, not as in fairy tales with their own voices, but with those of Snug and Snout. Nature is acted upon by words, but not tortured into speech. Because of the simplicity of those who act her or act upon her, these virgin minds, Shakespeare comes as near as is possible to lending nature speech in them and their play. He can then observe the results.
In the very first exchanges between Quince and Bottom, something begins to happen. Bottom says, “You were best to call them generally,” where he means “severally”; and Peter Quince announces the play as “the most lamentable comedy.” Strange juxtapositions, exchanges, substitutions, occur in the mechanicals’ use of words. This pattern set up in their conversation is continued and intensified in their play.
A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus
And his love Thisby; very tragical mirth
their playbill reads, and Theseus comments, “That is, hot ice, and wondrous strange snow.” Sun and moon run together in one of Pyramus’ speeches, “Sweet Moon, I thank thee for thy sunny Beams.” The senses are exchanged for one another— “he goes but to see a noise that he heard and is to come again.” “I see a voice, now will I to the chink / To spy an I can hear my Thisby’s face”; “Tongue, lose thy light.” The animals undergo a series of verbal substitutions, begun in Bottom’s “I will roar you as gently as any sucking dove; I will roar you an ‘twere any nightingale,” and taken up by the verbal quibbling of the court occasioned by the play’s performance: “This lion is a very fox for his valour.” “True, and a goose for his discretion.” “Well moused, Lion.” These are of course only verbal play, but they shadow something else, as does Quince’s Prologue, where grammar and syntax are all upset, i.e. the forms and structures of language are changed, and the sense is contradicted by the form. This occasions the following remarks,
LYSANDER: He hath rid his Prologue, like a rough colt: he knows not the stop. A good moral my Lord. It is not enough to speak, but to speak true.
HIPPOLYTA: Indeed he hath played on his Prologue, like a child on a recorder, a sound, but not in government.
THESEUS: His speech was like a tangled chain: nothing impaired but all disordered.
They cannot manage their instrument, but their very mistakes draw attention to the nature of that instrument and show the language situation for what it is, a dynamic and not a static one. Mistakes are nearly always dynamic or working situations. Language is presented as a net of working forms, and even though the mechanicals cannot manage its poetry (for that is what its dynamism is) they point toward it, as Shakespeare’s perfected poetry could not do.
