The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded | Page 9

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 by council of any kind, the pure arbitrary absolute will, the pure idiosyncrasy, the crowned demon of the lawless, irrational will, unchained and armed with the sword of the common might, and clothed with the divinity of the common right; that this was a conquest unspeakably more debasing than the conquest 'commonly so called,'--this, which left no nobility,--which clasped its collar in open day on the proudest Norman neck, and not on the Saxon only, which left only one nation of slaves and bondmen--that this was a _subjugation_--that this was a government which the English nation had not before been familiar with, the men whose great life-acts were performed under it did not lack the sensibility and the judgment to perceive.
A more hopeless conquest than