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PHELPS ON PUBLIC CONTROL

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Phelps thought that if he could do so much during eighteen years by his personal, isolated, and independent endeavour, much more could be done in permanence under some public method of safeguard and guarantee. Phelps's services to the literary drama can hardly be over-estimated. His mature judgment is not to be lightly gainsaid. It is just to his memory to put his faith to a practical test.

VII

ASPECTS OF SHAKESPEARE'S

PHILOSOPHY 1

I

A FRENCH critic once remarked that a whole system of philosophy could be deduced from Shakespeare's pages, though from all the works of the philosophers one could not draw a page of Shakespeare. The second statement-the denial of the presence of a page of Shakespeare in the works of all the philosophers-is more accurate than the assertion that a system of philosophy could be deduced from the plays of Shakespeare. It is hopeless to deduce any precise system of philosophy from Shakespeare's plays. Literally, philosophy means nothing more recondite than love of wisdom. Technically, it means scientifically restrained speculation about the causes of human thought and conduct; it embraces the sciences of logic, of ethics, of politics, of psychology, of metaphysics. Shakespeare's training and temper unfitted him to make any professed contribution to any of these topics.

Ignorant persons argue on hazy grounds that the great avowed philosopher of Shakespeare's day,

1 This paper, which was originally prepared in 1899 for the purposes of a popular lecture, is here printed for the first time.

BACON'S PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD

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Francis Bacon, wrote Shakespeare's plays. There is no need to confute the theory, which confutes itself. But, if a confutation were needed, it lies on the surface in the conflicting attitudes which Shakespeare and Bacon assume towards philosophy. There is no mistaking Bacon's attitude. The supreme aim of his writings was to establish the practical value, the majestic importance, of philosophy in its strict sense of speculative science. He sought to widen its scope and to multiply the ranks of its students.

Bacon's method is formally philosophic in texture. He carefully scrutinises, illustrates, seeks to justify each statement before proceeding to a conclusion. Every essay, every treatise of Bacon, conveys the impression not merely of weighty, pregnant eloquence, but of the argumentative and philosophic temper. Bacon's process of thinking is conscious: it is visible behind the words. The argument progresses with a cumulative force. It draws sustenance from the recorded opinions of others. The points usually owe consistency and firmness to quotations from old authors-Greek and Latin authors, especially Plato and Plutarch, Lucretius and Seneca. To Bacon, as to all professed students of the subject, philosophy first revealed itself in the pages of the Greek writers Plato and Aristotle, the founders for modern Europe of the speculative sciences of human thought and conduct. Greatly as Bacon modified the Greek system of philosophy, he began his philosophic career under the influence of Aristotle, and, despite his destructive criticism of his master, he never wholly divested himself of the methods of exposition to which the Greek philosopher's teaching introduced him.

In their attitudes to philosophy, Shakespeare and Bacon are as the poles asunder. Shakespeare practically ignores the existence of philosophy as a formal science. He betrays no knowledge of its Greek origin and developments.

There are two short, slight, conventional mentions of Aristotle's name in Shakespeare's works. One is a very slight allusion to Aristotle's "checks" or "moral discipline" in The Taming of the Shrew. That passage is probably from a coadjutor's pen. In any case it is merely a playful questioning of the title of "sweet philosophy" to monopolize a young man's education.1

The other mention of Aristotle is in Troilus and Cressida, and raises points of greater interest. Hector scornfully likens his brothers Troilus and Paris, when they urge persistence in the strife with Greece, to "young men whom Aristotle thought unfit to hear moral philosophy" (II. 2, 166). The words present the meaning, but not the language, of a sentence in Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics" (i. 8). Aristotle there declares passionate youth to be unfitted to study political philosophy; he makes no mention of moral philosophy. The change of epithet does, however, no injustice to Aristotle's argument. His context makes it plain, that by

1 Tranio, the attendant on the young Pisan, Lucentio, who has come to Padua to study at the university, counsels his master to widen the field of his studies:

Only, good master, while we do admire
This virtue and this moral discipline,
Let's be no Stoics, nor no stocks, I pray,
Or so devote to Aristotle's checks,

As Ovid be an outcast quite adjured.

-The Taming of the Shrew, i. 2, 29–33.

SHAKESPEARE AND ARISTOTLE

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political philosophy he means the ethics of civil society, which are hardly distinguishable from what is commonly called "morals." The maxim, in the slightly irregular shape which Shakespeare adopted, enjoyed proverbial currency before the dramatist was born. Erasmus introduced it in this form into his far-famed Colloquies. In France and Italy the warning against instructing youth in moral philosophy was popularly accepted as an Aristotelian injunction. Sceptics about the obvious Shakespearean tradition have made much of the circumstance that Bacon, who cited the aphorism from Aristotle in his Advancement of Learning, substituted, like Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida, the epithet "moral" for "political." The proverbial currency of the emendation deprives the coincidence of point.

The repetition of a proverbial phrase, indirectly drawn from Aristotle, combined with the absence of other references to the Greek philosopher, renders improbable Shakespeare's personal acquaintance with his work. In any case, the bare mention of the name of Aristotle implies nothing in this connection. It was a popular synonym for ancient learning. It was as often on the lips of Elizabethans as Bacon's name is on the lips of men and women of to-day, and it would be rash to infer that those who carelessly and casually mentioned Bacon's name today knew Bacon's writings or philosophic theories at first hand.

No evidence is forthcoming that Shakespeare knew in any solid sense aught of philosophy of the formal scientific kind. On scientific philosophy, and on natural science, Shakespeare probably looked with suspicion. He expressed no high opinion of

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