The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded | Page 3

to be intelligible in their own perilous times,--but in characters
that only became legible, and illuminated, as it were, in the light of a
subsequent period.
The reader will soon perceive that the new philosophy, as here
demonstrated, was of a kind that no professor could have ventured
openly to teach in the days of Elizabeth and James. The concluding
chapter of the present work makes a powerful statement of the position
which a man, conscious of great and noble aims, would then have
occupied; and shows, too, how familiar the age was with all methods of
secret communication, and of hiding thought beneath a masque of
conceit or folly. Applicably to this subject, I quote a paragraph from a
manuscript of the author's, not intended for present publication:--
'It was a time when authors, who treated of a scientific politics and of a
scientific ethics internally connected with it, naturally preferred this
more philosophic, symbolic method of indicating their connection with
their writings, which would limit the indication to those who could
pierce within the veil of a philosophic symbolism. It was the time when
the cipher, in which one could write 'omnia per omnia,' was in such
request, and when 'wheel ciphers' and 'doubles' were thought not
unworthy of philosophic notice. It was a time, too, when the
phonographic art was cultivated, and put to other uses than at present,
and when a '_nom de plume_' was required for other purposes than to
serve as the refuge of an author's modesty, or vanity, or caprice. It was
a time when puns, and charades, and enigmas, and anagrams, and
monograms, and ciphers, and puzzles, were not good for sport and
child's play merely; when they had need to be close; when they had
need to be solvable, at least, only to those who should solve them. It
was a time when all the latent capacities of the English language were
put in requisition, and it was flashing and crackling, through all its
lengths and breadths, with puns and quips, and conceits, and jokes, and

satires, and inlined with philosophic secrets that opened down "into the
bottom of a tomb"--that opened into the Tower--that opened on the
scaffold and the block.'
I quote, likewise, another passage, because I think the reader will see in
it the noble earnestness of the author's character, and may partly
imagine the sacrifices which this research has cost her:--
'The great secret of the Elizabethan age did not lie where any
superficial research could ever have discovered it. It was not left within
the range of any accidental disclosure. It did not lie on the surface of
any Elizabethan document. The most diligent explorers of these
documents, in two centuries and a quarter, had not found it. No faintest
suspicion of it had ever crossed the mind of the most recent, and
clear-sighted, and able investigator of the Baconian remains. It was
buried in the lowest depths of the lowest deeps of the deep Elizabethan
Art; that Art which no plummet, till now, has ever sounded. It was
locked with its utmost reach of traditionary cunning. It was buried in
the inmost recesses of the esoteric Elizabethan learning. It was tied
with a knot that had passed the scrutiny and baffled the sword of an old,
suspicious, dying, military government--a knot that none could cut--a
knot that must be untied.
'The great secret of the Elizabethan Age was inextricably reserved by
the founders of a new learning, the prophetic and more nobly gifted
minds of a new and nobler race of men, for a research that should test
the mind of the discoverer, and frame and subordinate it to that so
sleepless and indomitable purpose of the prophetic aspiration. It was
"the device" by which they undertook to live again in the ages in which
their achievements and triumphs were forecast, and to come forth and
rule again, not in one mind, not in the few, not in the many, but in all.
"For there is no throne like that throne in the thoughts of men," which
the ambition of these men climbed and compassed.
'The principal works of the Elizabethan Philosophy, those in which the
new method of learning was practically applied to the noblest subjects,
were presented to the world in the form of AN ENIGMA. It was a form
well fitted to divert inquiry, and baffle even the research of the scholar

for a time; but one calculated to provoke the philosophic curiosity, and
one which would inevitably command a research that could end only
with the true solution. That solution was reserved for one who would
recognise, at last, in the disguise of the great impersonal teacher, the
disguise of a new learning. It waited for the reader who would observe,
at last,