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Nature and Shakespeare

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Edgar C. Knowlton
Edgar C. Knowlton*
Affiliation:
State Teachers College La Crosse, Wisconsin
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Extract

Adoctrine of Nature constitutes the core of the view of life held by Shakespeare. Whether or not the sonneteer unlocked his heart, it is clear that if the works of Shakespeare are considered as an integrable whole, he laid bare many results of his probings amid the secrets of Nature. The present intent is to learn by this approach something about his philosophy of ethics, art, and politics. Indications are that, like Spenser in the Cantos of Mutabilitie, he had more than an intelligent gentleman's interest in the theme.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , September 1936 , pp. 719 - 744
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1936

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References

1 “The Goddess Nature in Early Periods,” JEGP, xix (1920), 224 ff.; “Nature in Old French,” MP, xx (1923), 309 ff.; “Nature in Early Italian,” MLN, xxxvi (1921), 329 ff.; “Nature in Early German,” JEGP, xxiv (1925), 409 ff.; “Nature in Middle English,” JEGP, xx (1921), 186 ff.; “Spenser and Nature,” JEGP, xxxiv (1935), 366 ff.

2 LLL ii.i.10–12.

3 Rom iii.ii.80 ff.; KJ iii.i.43–54; JC v.v.73–75 (cf. Drayton's Baron's War, canto iii, for the same phrasing in part); Ven ll. 11–12, 727–768, 953–954.

4 TAth iv.iii.426 ff.

5 TAth iv.iii.177 ff.

6 TAnd iv.i.55: wonder why Nature creates places befitting evil “unless the gods delight in tragedies.”

7 Luc 1373 f.; Sonnet 20 (Walsh cites Ausonius, “In puerum formosum,” R. M. Alden, ed. Variorum Sonnets, Boston, 1916). Cf. definition 8 below. Further cases of the creator: Rom ii.iii.9 ff.; Sonnets 67 (cf. Sidney, A. and S., 101), 68, 126, 127 (cf. Sidney, op. cit., 7); MND v.ii.35 ff.; AYLI i.ii.35 ff., iii.ii.30 ff., 148 ff.; MAdo iv.i.130; iii.i.63 (making antick), 49, iii.iii.14 ff.; HV iii.vii.42–44; TC i.ii.22 ff., iv.iv.77 ff., v.i.5, 39; TN ii.iv.85 ff., iii.iv.402 ff.; MWW iii.iii.69 ff., MV i.i.51 ff.; AWEW i.iii.137 ff., ii.iii.138 ff., i.ii.20 f., iv.v.10; Mac iii.i.97 ff.; Oth ii.i.239 ff. (probably); WT ii.iii.98 ff. Cf. I HVI v.iii.54; III EVI iv.vi.72–73; Per i.ii.8 ff., ii.ii.5–7; TAnd v.i.28 ff.; HVIII i.ii.108 ff. The tradition does not require the Creator to make all human beings lovely or to avoid all things unpleasant; cf. II HIV iv.iii.128 ff., iv.iv.121–122. A source of Shakespeare, A. Brooke's Romeus and Juliet (1562), ed. J. J. Munro (New York, 1908), has Nature as creator: ll. 192 ff., 260, 421–422, 1067 ff., 1301 f., 1325.

8 Ven 169–174; Sonnet 4 (cf. Sonnet 9; Brown cites Massinger, Fatal Dowry, Sonnets, Var. ed.). Nature's processes and her phenomena are sometimes easily explained, but they may be easily misinterpreted, especially by those who are prejudiced; cf. KJ iii.iv.153–159. Moreover, the phenomena are to a large degree secret, as the tradition had acknowledged as long ago as Heraclitus; cf. Ant i.ii.10 f.; TC iv.ii.74 f.; AWEW v.iii.101–103. Cf. Romeus and Juliet, op. cit., 569, in connection with Friar Laurence.

9 AWEW i.ii.74 f., iv.iii.272 ff., v.iii.72; II HIV iii.i.6; Mac iii.ii.38 f., iv.i.98–99, ii.ii.40–41; Sonnet 122. Cf. HVIII iii.ii.147 ff.; Per iii.ii.8–9 (cf. 24–26).

10 RII i.ii.13; AYLI ii.iv.55 ff.; Sonnets 18 (cf. 123 and Golding's translation of Metam., xv). Cf. III HVI iii.iii.103 ff.; TAth. v.iv.31–35; Per iii.ii.37 f., 82–84, 93–95; CE ii.ii.75 (cf. 106), case of baldness; CE i.i.33 ff., destructive storm. In certain instances it is hoped that the universe may be brought to an end by Nature: KL iii.ii.8–9; the oath of fidelity, WT iv.iv.490 ff., the despair (like that in KL) of Northumberland on hearing of his son's death, II HIV i.i.153–154. Cf. Romeus and Juliet, op. cit., ll. 1640 ff.

11 Cor iv.vii.41 ff.; i.i.43–44; n.iii.195, 203, 266; iii.ii.62; iv.vii.10–12; v.v.21–26; TAth v.i.229 f.; II EVI iii.i.257 ff.; animal, Mac ii.iv.168.

12 TAth v.i.204 ff., iv.iii.6 ff.; iii.i.64; Mac ii.i.50 ff., v.i.10 ff.

13 Ani v.i.28–30; Oth i.iii.62 ff.; cf. TAth v.iv.76 ff.; TAnd v.iii.149 ff., 166 ff.

14 Ham iv.vii.188; iv.81; Cor v.iii.25 (cf. “unnatural,” ll. 84, 184); Ham iii.iii.32. Nature approaches conscience, Mac i.v.41 ff.—especially 45; in l. 51, “nature's” presumably is an objective genitive, meaning the equivalent of “life's.” In Mac ii.i.8 ff., nature becomes equivalent to premonition, instinct, or hope against evil. Cf. Cor v.iii.25 ff., with “instinct”—approximately the same meaning for both.—Cf. Cambyses, Hazlitt's Dodsley (London, 1874), iv, 199, 209, 225, 229, 240.

15 Cf. “actions wrought against Nature reap despite,” Robert Greene, Pandosto (a source of WT), ed. P. G. Thomas (New York, 1907), p. 47; cf. also pp. 7–8, “showing him what an offence murder was to the gods; how such unnatural action did more displease the heavens than men.”

16 Shakespeare did not confine his objections to that sort of excess; cf. M. P. Tilley, “The Organic Unity of Twelfth Night,” PMLA, xxix (1914), 550 ff., who adduces the episode of Medina in the Faerie. Queene, ii.ii.

17 For another example of excess, cf. the comment on greed for gold and ambition, II HIV iv.V.66 f.

18 An old figure, used from time to time; cf. John of Salisbury, Polycraticus, Bk. vi, ch. 21, for an example of its persistence.

19 C. M. Gayley, Shakespeare and the Founders of Liberty in America (New York, 1917), compared this passage with Richard Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, i.x.i. Cf. further J. H. Hanford, “A Platonic Passage in Shakspere's ‘Troilus and Cressida,‘” SP, xiii (1916), 100 ff. Comparison is given with Boethius, Castiglione, Elyot, Hooker, and others.

20 Two remarks should be added concerning this play. It has a pagan atmosphere like several other plays of Shakspere. Thus in iii.iii.127–128, Ulysses cries out upon Nature as an equivalent to God or Heavens! Another passage has been abused out of its setting: “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,” where nature has been popularly pressed into the meaning of feeling. In the proper place, amid remarks by Ulysses to Achilles, it means new life, novelty even if it be superficial. Every one likes that sort of thing, welcomes it with arms outstretch'd, and neglects the thing that was.

21 Furness, Variorum, 1908. Comparison is further suggested with Bacon's essay, “Of Deformity.”—Other cases of Nature creating are in iv.iii.17 ff., i.ii.244 ff.

22 Possibly Shakespeare plays on the meaning of “dissembling” in the drama, since Anne (i.ii.185) accuses Richard of being a dissembler; cf. i.ii.238.

23 Part i, Shakespeare's Library, ed. W. C. Hazlitt (London, 1875), v, 235.—P. 270 affords an instance of Nature as creator; p. 316 (Part ii) of Nature equivalent to life, weak before death.

24 Cf. Mordred in Thomas Hughes, The Misfortunes of Arthur, Early English Tragedies, ed. J. W. Cunliffe (Oxford, 1912), when he declares (ii.i), “My will must go for right,” and in talking with Gawin (ii.iii), says,

You love the mean, and follow virtue's race,

I like the top, and aim at greater bliss.

(Cf. i.iv). (The mean is moderation, a chivalrous ideal from The Song of Roland and Chrétien on.) Cf. Jonson, footnote 43.

25 Cf. Cymb. v.ii.4 ff.

26 Cf. Richard in The True Tragedy of Richard the Third, cited by Furness, Variorum Richard III, p. 514, in soliloquy, “Shall law bridle nature, or authoritie hinder inheritance? No, I say no.” In The True Tragedy, Richard expressed more clearly another motive than those emphasized by Shakespeare—a Renaissance ambition, Shakespeare's Library, p. 65:

Be as be may, I will fear colors nor regard ruth,

Valour brings fame, and fame conquers death.

27 iv.ii.221 ff. and 251 ff.

28 Cf. J. N. Figgis, From Gerson to Grotius, 2d ed. (Cambridge, 1916), p. 97. E. S. Meyer, Machiavelli and the Elizabethan Drama (Weimar, 1897), does not present a complete view in his study of the “Machiavellian types.” C. V. Boyer, The Villain as Hero in Elizabethan Tragedy (London, 1914), approaches the topic from another angle.—It may not be assumed that Shakespeare was versed in St. Augustine, but apparently he would sympathize with several observations of the Church Father, as in The City of God, xiii.3, “The enemies of God are not so by nature, but by will, which, inasmuch as it injures them, injures a good nature”; again xix.13, “There cannot be a nature in which there is no good”; cf. further his Nature of Good, ch. 17, Against the Epistle of the Manicheans, chs. 34 and 38, and On the Gospel of St. John, Tract. xlii.

29 The item concerning nature and art, ii.ii.184, is not significant.

30 The use of nature for life, opposed to death, iii.i.127–130, need not detain us.

31 Ham. iii.ii.23.

32 Rossiad, 447 ff., 547 f., 699, and so forth.

33 Cf. Margaret Farrand Thorp, “Shakespeare and the Fine Arts,” PMLA, xlvi (1931), 672–693.

34 This portion of the speech is not in the source of the play, Greene's Pandosto. On the doctrine cf. Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life (Boston, 1923), pp. 312–313; A. O. Lovejoy, “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,” PMLA, xxxix (1924), 239; Aristotle, Politics, ed. W. L. Newman (Oxford), i, 20; S. H. Butcher, Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art (London and New York, 1923), p. 119; Robert Bridges, The Testament of Beauty; E. Boutroux, “L'Art et la Nature dans Shakespeare et dans Bacon,” A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, ed. Sir Israel Gollancz (Oxford, 1916), pp. 383 ff.; Lovejoy, “Nature as Aesthetic Norm,” MLN, xlii (1927), 444–450.

35 Early play, revised about 1597. The discussion does not revolve about the word Nature, but about themes that in the tradition are constantly referred to the principles of Nature. No attempt is made to interpret the allegory or to determine the sources of the plot. In ii.i.10 ff., Boyet would compliment the Princess of France by the conventional assertion that Nature made a particular effort in creating her.

36 F. J. Furnivall, Introd. to the Leopold Shakespeare (1877), compares the theme with that of Tennyson's Princess. Cf. C. Gildon, “Remarks on the Plays of Shakespear” 1710, as given in the First Folio edit., ed. Charlotte Porter and H. A. Clarke (New York, 1903), p. 216: “The whole is a tolerable Proof how much in vain we resolve against Nature.” Georg Brandes, William Shakespeare (New York, 1898), i, 55, followed Edward Dowden, Shakspere: a Critical Study (London, 1875), pp. 55–56 in this view.

37 The use of Nature itself shows her as a creator: Leonato had protested that Nature was frugal in giving him but one child Hero (iv.i.129–131); Hero speaks of Nature in regard to Beatrice (iii.i.49 f., 63 ff.); Dogberry turns upside down the gifts of Fortune, of Art, and of Nature—a Greek and mediæval tradition (iii.iii.13 ff.)—“to be a well-favored man is the gift of Fortune; but to write and read comes by Nature.” With the second citation of Hero, cf. Earn i.iv.23 ff.

38 Œuvres Complètes, ed. P. Laumonier (Paris, 1914–19), iv, 364–374. Cf. G. H. Palmer, Intimations of Immortality in the Sonnets of Shakspere, Boston, 1912.—On the Abbey of Thélème, cf. Henri Chamard, Les Origines de la Poésie française de la Renaissance (Paris, 1930), pp. 178–186.

39 Cf. Lewis Campbell, Tragic Drama in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare (London, 1904), pp. 264–265.

40 One may not raise the question of whether from the point of view of Shakespeare Lear was unnatural in exiling Cordelia, since that decision was an indispensable premise in the old fairy story or myth. And undoubtedly for Shakespeare, as for the authors of Greek tragedy and Job, the universe, whether governed by Nature or God, involved suffering of the innocent; for example, of Cordelia.

41 The view that he seeks revenge for his father's account of his birth as given Kent in i.i, is not admissible. In that scene he does not hear what Gloucester says to Kent before introducing him. In the present scene he speaks—from the standpoint of Elizabethan stagecraft—in an expository soliloquy, wherein he should bring revenge as a motive if such it be.

42 There are both good and bad men of virtù. Bussy d'Ambois in Chapman's play is of a higher type than Edmund. Suggestions as to the range of the Italian man of virtù may be derived from W. H. Woodward, Studies in Education during the Age of the Renaissance, (Cambridge, 1906), pp. 6, 49 f., 56 f., 246–248, 256, 261–262, 277, 319.

43 Cf. Jonson's Catiline, Cicero's speech on ambition, iii.ii, and Cato's speech to Gabinius on laws, v.iv. Cf. also Shakespeare's source in Sidney's Arcadia, where the bad son deprived his father of eyesight, and his mother was guilty of “ambition, smooth malice, desperate fraud, and poisonous hypocrisy.” The old prince of Paphlagonia blamed himself too, “drunk,” as he says, “in my affection to that unlawful and unnatural son of mine.”

44 On the subject of such prayers, it is interesting to compare Euripides's Hippolytus, ll. 415, 522, with the discussion by L. E. Matthaei Studies in Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 1918), p. 80.

45 Coleridge's misinterpretation of Edmund's speech is due to confusion about nature. One clerical theory has been that nature, especially since the fall in the garden of Eden, has been evil. A knowledge that the theory exists causes critics sometimes to misapply it.—Possibly Tennyson's remarkable handling of atmosphere in The Last Tournament, wherein the poet was conscious of King Lear, was due in part to Coleridge's practice in verse and his theories as to sin and this play.—Other abuses of reason than Edmund's may have offered suggestions to Shakespeare, as in the Arcadia, the argument of Cecropia to Pamela and the justification which Amphialus offered for his treason. For the use of Nature by two different sorts of persons cf. also Celestina, trans. from the Spanish by J. Mabbe, ed. H. W. Allen (London, n.d.), pp. 1, 17, 74–75, 81, 105–106, 142, and the English interlude based on it, ll. 1 ff., 45–47, 564–565.

46 Ed. Sidney Lee (New York, 1909).

47 Italics mine.—Cf. King Lear, ii.iv.181, Lear to Regan, “The offices of Nature, bond of childhood,” referring to her knowledge of filial duties.—Gloucester's references to the behavior toward animals on such a night, iii.vii.63 ff., may be compared to Sir Thomas Elyot's The Governor, Everyman ed., pp. 186–188.

48 It may be noted that the dramatist employed a text about Lear in Warner's Albion's England. In Bk. iii, ch. xiv, Lear prays; what can he do but die: nay try, the rule may fail and Nature may ascend, nor are they ever surest friends on whom we most do spend.“ In other words, Cordelia may, despite all help him.

49 This is not to ignore the monsters of the deep and other fearful references in King Lear.—William Archer, Introd. to King Lear, ed. of the Jefferson Press (Boston 1908), pp. xvii-xviii and xxviii, developed a Darwinian hypothesis of a higher nature which is grateful and humane, evolved out of a nature concerned for the survival of the fittest, and a “Nature, red in tooth and claw.” This suggestion is unhistoric in approach.

50 iv.ii.25 ff., expressing a similar sentiment, is probably not wholly Shakespeare's; iv.ii.356 ff. refers to the natural feelings of a human being; v.v.152–153 to the regular course of Life, or Nature; v.iv.38, 48–49 to birth and beauty.

61 S. P. Sherman, “The Humanism of Shakespeare,” The Nation (New York), 102 (1916), 456–459, and reprinted as “Shakespeare, Our Contemporary,” On Contemporary Literature (New York, 1917), pp. 285–305.

62 For Nature see (Sir) Thomas Hoby's Elizabethan trans, of Il Cortegiano, National Alumni (1907), pp. 93. 110, 206 ff., 296–309, 329, 343–355, 364–366.