The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded | Page 5

memories; those "royal pursuivants" with which our mother-land still
follows and retakes her own. It was written in the land of our old kings
and queens, and in the land of our own PHILOSOPHERS and POETS
also. It was written on the spot where the works it unlocks were written,
and in the perpetual presence of the English mind; the mind that spoke
before in the cultured few, and that speaks to-day in the cultured many.
And it is now at last, after so long a time--after all, as it should be--the
English press that prints it. It is the scientific English press, with those
old gags (wherewith our kings and queens sought to stop it, ere they
knew what it was) champed asunder, ground to powder, and with its
last Elizabethan shackle shaken off, that restores, "in a better hour," the
torn and garbled science committed to it, and gives back "the bread cast
on its sure waters."'
There remains little more for me to say. I am not the editor of this work;
nor can I consider myself fairly entitled to the honor (which, if I
deserved it, I should feel to be a very high as well as a perilous one) of
seeing my name associated with the author's on the title-page. My
object has been merely to speak a few words, which might, perhaps,
serve the purpose of placing my countrywoman upon a ground of
amicable understanding with the public. She has a vast preliminary
difficulty to encounter. The first feeling of every reader must be one of
absolute repugnance towards a person who seeks to tear out of the
Anglo-Saxon heart the name which for ages it has held dearest, and to
substitute another name, or names, to which the settled belief of the
world has long assigned a very different position. What I claim for this
work is, that the ability employed in its composition has been worthy of
its great subject, and well employed for our intellectual interests,
whatever judgment the public may pass upon the questions discussed.
And, after listening to the author's interpretation of the Plays, and
seeing how wide a scope she assigns to them, how high a purpose, and
what richness of inner meaning, the thoughtful reader will hardly return
again--not wholly, at all events--to the common view of them and of
their author. It is for the public to say whether my countrywoman has
proved her theory. In the worst event, if she has failed, her failure will

be more honorable than most people's triumphs; since it must fling
upon the old tombstone, at Stratford-on-Avon, the noblest tributary
wreath that has ever lain there.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE PLAYS OF SHAKSPERE.
* * * * *
INTRODUCTION.

CHAPTER I.
THE PROPOSITION.
'One time will owe another.'--Coriolanus.
This work is designed to propose to the consideration, not of the
learned world only, but of all ingenuous and practical minds, a new
development of that system of practical philosophy from which THE
SCIENTIFIC ARTS of the Modern Ages proceed, and which has
already become, just to the extent to which it has been hitherto opened,
the wisdom,--the universally approved, and practically adopted,
Wisdom of the Moderns.
It is a development of this philosophy, which was deliberately
postponed by the great Scientific Discoverers and Reformers, in whose
Scientific Discoveries and Reformations our organised advancements
in speculation and practice have their origin;--Reformers, whose
scientific acquaintance with historic laws forbade the idea of any
immediate and sudden cures of the political and social evils which their
science searches to the root, and which it was designed to eradicate.
The proposition to be demonstrated in the ensuing pages is this: That
the new philosophy which strikes out from the Court--from the Court

of that despotism that names and gives form to the Modern
Learning,--which comes to us from the Court of the last of the Tudors
and the first of the Stuarts,--that new philosophy which we have
received, and accepted, and adopted as a practical philosophy, not
merely in that grave department of learning in which it comes to us
professionally as philosophy, but in that not less important department
of learning in which it comes to us in the disguise of amusement,--in
the form of fable and allegory and parable,--the proposition is, that this
Elizabethan philosophy is, in these two forms of it,--not two
philosophies,--not two Elizabethan philosophies, not two new and
wondrous philosophies of nature and practice, not two new Inductive
philosophies, but one,--one and the same: that it is philosophy in both
these forms, with its veil of allegory and parable, and without it; that it
is philosophy applied to much more important subjects in the disguise
of the parable, than it is in the open statement; that it is