A SHAKESPEARE DISCOVERY
By Dr. ERNEST BARKER
READING Sir Thomas Elyot's The Book Named the Governor last summer (I wanted to construct a lecture on "the Ttdor conception of the 'Gentleman," and this seemed to me a good quarry), I came upon what I thought was a discovery. Probably it is nothing of the sort : multi nostra ante nos dixerunt. But I am encouraged by my friend, Professor Dover Wilson, to ccmmunicate what I found ; and since- he assures me that it is new to him, I venture to hope that it will be new to most of my readers'.
The play of Troilus and Cressida has moved me for many years ; more, perhaps, than any other play of Shakespeare. There are' many reasons for this ; but one among others is the fact that I am a professor of political science, and the play contains more political science, in one of its most famous scenes, than I have ever taught or am likely to teach. the scene is the third scene in the first Act, in which Agamemnon, Nestor and Ulysses are discussing the difficulties of the Greeks before Troy, and the causes of their difficulties. In the course of this discussion Ulysses makes a famous speech on the conception of "degree." • The speech turns on the conception that a principle of hierarchical order pervades the system of the physical universe, and should equally, and by analogy, pervade the social and political systems which men have-built for themselves.
Degree being vizarded
The unworthiest-shows-as fairly in. the mask.
The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre How could communities,
Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities, . a But by degree stand in authentic.place ?
Take but degree away, untune that string, And, hark, what discord follows 1 . . . Observe degree. . . . _ Great Agamemnon, This chaos, when degree is suffocate, Follows the choking [of the common weal].
I think I must have tried to translate this passage into Greek iambics when I was at school. Something, at any rate, impressed it on my mind ; and when I wrote my first book, over thirty years ago, I quoted it as a parallel to some passages in the plays of Euripides, which seemed to me to follow a similar line of thought. I have read Troilus and Cressida more than once since that time (purely per &lett°, and not for the sake of political science) ; and I have found more and more of wisdom—and also of mystery—in the play.
judge then of my surprise when I read Elyot's book, last midsummer, and found the core and substance of the speech of Ulysses in the first two chapters of The Govettor. On reflection, however, I ceased to be surprised. Elyot's was a famous book : and in the 50 years after its publication in 1531 it had gone through eight editions. It was natural that Shakespeare should have read it : it was natural that he should have been impressed by its noble opening : it was natural that he should convey it (as he conveyed North's Plutarch in his Antony and Cleopatra) to his own purposes. It was all the more natural, since Elyot, in the middle of his second chapter, after laying down his principle of degree (he uses the very word) as necessary to the order of the universe and that of human society, specifically alludes to the example of "the princes of Greece" at Troy. "For at that time no little murmur and sedition was moved in the host of the Greeks, which notwithstanding was wonderfully pacified, and the army unscattered, by the majesty of Agamemnon, joining to him counsellors Nestor and the witty Ulysses." With this cue before him it was easy for Shakespeare to use the whole previous argument of Elyot in the discussion scene in which he gathers together these three princes of the Greeks.
It would be a waste of time to quote the sentences of Elyot which Shakespeare has used. Any reader of Elyot's first chapter (on "the signification of a public weal ") will see the connexion at once. He will also see that Elyot's sentences are only the cue or the match, and that Shakespeare, once fired by their inspiration, bursts upwards like a rocket into his own great imaginative poetry. I will only cite one or two sentences—more particularly those bearing on the few lines of Shakespeare which I have quoted already. "In everything is order, and without order may be nothing stable or permanent. And it may not be called order, except it do contain in it degrees, high and base, according to the estimation of the thing ordered. . . . Moreover, take away order from all things, what should then remain ? Certes, nothing finally, except some man would imagine eftsoons Chaos, which of some is expound a confuse mixture. . . . Hath He not set degrees and estates in all His glorious works ? . . . The fire, as the most pure element, having in it nothing that is corruptible, in its place is highest, and above other elements.'', (This last is the cue for Shakespeare's
"And therefore is the glorious planet Sol In noble eminence enthroned and sphered Amidst the other.")
I have said enough—perhaps too much. And yet I will add one other thing. Shakespeare's Ulysses begins his speech with a reference to the polity of the bees :
"When that the general is not like the hive, To whom the foragers shall all repair, What order is expected ? "
This, too, is in Elyot—not in his first, but in his second chapter, a little before his mention of the princes of the Greeks. "In a little beast, which of all other is most to be marvelled at, I mean the Bee, is left to man by nature, as it seemeth, a perpetual figure of a first governance or rule : who hath among them one principal Bee for their governor." Elyot devotes a page to the bee. "But," he concludes, "because I would not be long therein, I would that if the reader hereof be learned, that he should repair to the Georgics of Virgil." I, too, following him "would that if the reader hereof be learned, that he should repair to the Governor of Elyot."
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