all too ready to take himself seriously, all too similar to Shakespeare’s Malvolio, who is described as “a kind of Puritan”.
Rather, in so far as Bacon projects himself into Pilate, his over-riding interest is in “empire”, considering the newly founded British Empire as an extension of the ancient Roman Empire. Then, unlike Pilate, he envisages the British Empire, under the name of “Britannia”, as founded on two principles. The one is the Protestant principle, looking back to the Book of Nature, as Luther was looking back to the Book of Scripture, and the other, the scientific principle, looking forward to a new kind of knowledge as a source of power. In all this he is serious, leaving no room for jesting.
Then, I ask again, where does jesting come in, with the typical English sense of humor? It comes in, I answer, with two Englishmen who lived in the successive reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. The first is, of course, Sir Thomas More, famous (as I have just hinted) for his propensity to indulge in what he delighted to call “merry fooling”. And just such a propensity we also find in his Elizabethan successor, William Shakespeare, who became a “gentleman” without achieving knighthood.
These two Englishmen, I may add, come together in the character of the good old Gonzalo in the last of Shakespeare’s complete plays, The Tempest. Into the mouth of this good old man the dramatist puts a description of an ideal commonwealth or Utopia, which he goes on to dismiss as a “kind of merry fooling”. So in that description we may see both More and Shakespeare in one.
In the case of More, it was said of him that one could never tell when he was jesting and when he was serious. Or rather, it was held against him that when he was speaking in seeming seriousness, he was really jesting, and when he seemed to be jesting, he was really serious. Such was precisely his English sense of humor. Even when he was condemned to death for treason against the king, he couldn’t help making jests both when he was going up the scaffold, and when he was preparing for execution. Right up till the end he was “God’s jester”.
And the same may be said of Shakespeare, not only in his comedies, but also in his tragedies and then in his tragi-comedies. (I don’t count his so-called “histories”, as they are either comedies or tragedies.) Above all, there is Falstaff, whose very name, as False-staff, conjures up that of Shakespeare, as Shake-spear, or Shake-shaft, or Shake-scene.
The scenes in which Falstaff chiefly appears are those in which his Prodigality is set off by Prince Hal as the Prodigal Son of Henry IV. Then as a result of his association with Falstaff, Prince Hal declares, “I am now of all humors that have showed themselves humors since the old days of Goodman Adam.” In other words, he has become humorous in both senses of the word, both as subject and as object of humor – both in laughing at Falstaff and being laughed at by Falstaff.
That was in Part I of Henry IV, and now in Part II it is Falstaff who makes the parallel claim, “The brain of this foolish-compounded clay, man, isn’t able to invent anything that tends to laughter more than I invent or is invented on me. I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.” What intolerable boasting, we may think, if we take his words seriously! But Falstaff is never to be taken seriously, and in these words he is jesting even more than usual.
These are but two examples, of the Prodigal Son and the Vice of Prodigality, in Prince Hal and Falstaff, following on the other example of Gonzalo, revealing something of Shakespeare’s so-called “enigma”, or his underlying sense of humor. So now let me end with another example, revealing not only his humor but also his serious meaning, when it is said of Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure, that “his givings out were of an infinite distance from his true-meant design”.
On Knowledge
Over the past four centuries we have become accustomed, if not inured, to the axiom that “Knowledge is Power”. As Bacon taught the English speaking world – though the writings he regarded as basic to his “new philosophy” he presented in Latin, as he felt himself unable to trust in the longer continuance of English – it is by knowing the secrets of Nature that one harnesses the hidden power of Nature to the service of Man.
Then what he promised, as herald of a new knowledge in the early seventeenth century, has come to its fulfillment in the early twenty-first century. Then in what, we may ask, does that fulfillment consist? Well, among other things, it has led to the devastation of two world wars, to the development of the atomic and the hydrogen bomb. And then there is the sophisticated technique of the computer and the prevalence of “the sciences” over “the humanities” in universities all over the world.
Another name for this kind of empirical or experimental knowledge is Art – as when we speak of the degrees awarded to graduating students as B.A. for Bachelor of Arts or M.A. for Master of Arts, whatever their specialization may be. Such was the Art represented by those dramatists of the Elizabethan age who had graduated from the universities and were called “the university wits”. Such was also the Art associated with the name of one dramatist of that age, Ben Jonson, who went up to neither university but acquired an expertise in Art superior to that of all the university wits.
Then in contrast to Ben Jonson and the others, Shakespeare, who went up to neither university and never boasted of any expertise in Art, has come to be regarded as the supreme representative of Nature. As John Dryden said of him, “He needed not the spectacles of books to read Nature. He looked inwards and found her there.” His was the school not of artifice but of experience, not of book learning but of human life. His might well have been the advice given by the poet Wordsworth to his sister Dorothy, “Come forth into the light of things. Let Nature be your teacher!”
Then, we may ask, wasn’t Shakespeare saying in effect the same thing as Bacon? Didn’t they both lay emphasis on the Book of Nature and on the knowledge to be derived not from books but from experience? Weren’t they both heralds of what Shakespeare calls a “brave new world”? No, I answer, Shakespeare wasn’t saying the same thing as Bacon. He didn’t mean the same thing as Bacon does by “experience” or “experimental knowledge”. He wasn’t a herald of the new age that was then dawning over the world. His standpoint was diametrically opposed to that of Bacon. One might even call them, as Hamlet calls himself and Claudius, “two mighty opposites”.
On the one hand, in his approach to Nature, Bacon was neither poetic nor human but strictly scientific. He took the things in the world of Nature as objects for his detailed and prolonged study, not so much in themselves or for themselves as in the regulated conditions of a laboratory. He proceeded by way of scientific calculation, cataloguing and comparing the various exhibits that come under his gaze. His was above all the way of method, which involves the dehumanizing of Man and the denaturalizing of Nature.
On the other hand, Shakespeare was, as Milton says of him, “Fancy’s child, warbling his native woodnotes wild.” He looked up at the stars in the night sky above him, and down at the flowers in the daytime growing at his feet. He reveled in the world around him, and was enraptured at the various sights of sunrise and sunset – without bothering to know, with Copernicus or Galileo, whether the Sun goes round the Earth or the Earth round the Sun. His Hamlet tells Ophelia, “Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move, Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love.” What does it matter whether the stars are fire or not, whether the sun moves or not? The important thing in his life is that he loves her.
In other words, Shakespeare stood for human tradition, which remains the same from age to age, so long as the natural world remains the same. He wasn’t concerned to know the secrets of Nature or to gain power over Nature – which practically means gaining power over other human beings as well. He wanted to leave Nature alone, or at most to improve on the fields and the forests by using them for farming and forestry, for producing food and building a home for his family. His ideal as an Englishman was simply what he calls through the mouth of John of Gaunt “this England”.
But Bacon couldn’t let well alone. He must be forever prying into the secrets of Nature. As a member of the new Protestant establishment, he felt himself at the beginning of a new age, and a new British Empire, with the ideal of “Rule, Britannia!” ever echoing in his ears. That was an ideal to be achieved not only by religious