Shakespeare and the Nature of Man

MACMILLAN, $2.75

WHEN a professor’s book is praised by professors, the layman takes warning, but here is a book, praised by professors, which will rejoice the heart of any lover of Shakespeare within or far without the walls of learning. Year after year Shakespearean volumes pile up expounding the inscrutabilities of the text or expatiating on the still more baffling inscrutabilities of the poet’s history. How much do most of them affect our pleasure in reading the plays or watching them, streamlined for the modern stage? There are exceptions, of course: the magnificent Bradley, the indispensable Chambers; but here is a book important for you and me, opening wide the gates of common understanding. As one of the multitude which gazes dully at the Droeshout portrait or the Stratford bust and asks what the conviction, what the form of thought behind those dreary masks, I pay tribute to a book that brings light from East and West, from North and South.

Shakespeare lived in a time of world revolution — the world was Europe then — more important far than any political cataclysm. For much longer than a thousand years the speculation of mankind had been walled in by the conception of the Ptolemaic universe. Everywhere was the rule of immutable order. Heaven, Man, and Nature held their foreordered positions, each governed by an Angelic intelligence. The tiny speck of Earth, created little more than five thousand years before, occupied the precise center of the universe, for Man was the central care of God. The nature of things was rigid and unshakable. As for man, his end was to know God. For this divine purpose two books lay open to him — the direct Word of God in the Bible, and the indirect in the book of Nature. From these two, Man learned of the three great domains of his existence: the cosmos which held him, the created world in which he lived, and the ordained government of human society. These three formed one perfect and indivisible whole. They were interdependent; an injury to one was an injury to all.

In this secure universe Shakespeare had his being when, with terrific impact, Renaissance thought assailed it. Three spearheads led the attack. Galileo splintered the crystal sphere of Ptolemaic tradition; Montaigne struck down Man from his pride of place; the cynical subtleties of Machiavelli traduced the State. Indeed the times were out of joint. Two universes were in violent collision, and from out that conflict which probed the heart and mind and soul of man, the basic theme of Shakesperean tragedy was born.

So impetuous a summary, so bald a statement, is almost a travesty on Professor Spencer’s richly wrought and informative argument. Both in its large design and with detail in its special application to the plays, the author drives his thesis home.

The majestic order, seemingly ordained of God, had been fractured and it was given to the genius of Shakespeare to relate individual human experience with the conception of cosmic war. The Microcosm was set against the Macrocosm. Lear, Macbeth, and Hamlet walked a universal stage, and in the drama of their human agonies men could hear terrific overtones of the eternal conflict.

In style the book is admirable. The argument is lucid and explicit and the background a tapestry of wide and rich association. ELLERY SEDGWICK