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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 14, No. 10. August 9, 1951

The Age

The Age

The Elizabethan Age we all know, was a turning-point in the history of England. The Tudors had more absolute power than any sovereigns before or since. It was Henry VII who, on Bosworth field, finally quailed the robber barons who formed the feudal elite, and it was Charles I with whose blue blood was written the charter giving power to the great middle class. The tudor monarchy can be said to have held the reins in a hiatus.

But beneath the apparently smooth surface of Bess's England, lay the conflict. Bess herself was part of it. Why did she have to quell the Northern Earls at the beginning of her reign, and arrest Peter Wentworth for sedition at the end of it? Because all her life was a delicate tightrope act, an attempt to hasten the death of a dying power, and kill a rising one in the womb at the same time. The Renaissance was the natural process of the freeing of the individual, spiritually and materially, from feudalism and its world-outlook. It was a conflict of a traditional, stagnant philosophy, with absolute standards in all matters physical and metaphysical, and a nascent, immature and rampant individualism which seemed to have no moral principles.

Shakespeare, holding the mirror faithfully up to nature, recorded it all. Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth, although in terms of a different time, all have aspects of this conflict as their basic themes. Macbeth is actuated purely by ambition, with the aid of the forces of hell, in committing the acts that make the plot and lead to his downfall. In this play, as Professor Stoll has inferred we see the supernatural aligning itself on either side of the conflict—the ghost of Ban-quo representing the "nemesis," the wronged powers of good, and the Witches as the devil's agents, spurring on the devilishness that is in all flesh. Both these unseen powers are straight from medieval theology, and they symbolise the plot on a higher plane.

In Lear, the title figure is an old, idealistic fuedal monarch with his faithful pillars in the persons of Gloucester and Kent. Opposed to them is the anarchistic, selfish, pragmatic philosophy of the two elder (laughters and Edmund. The latter, even more than Macbeth, or any of the cruder products of Marlowe or any other dramatist, is the symbol of the "Machiavellian," the evil individualist who acknowledges none of the restraints of the "scholastic" attitude, but only his own base material interests. His speech that:

"This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behaviour—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and the stars," (1,2), asserts the self-sufficiency of the individual, and denies that "there is a divinity that shapes our ends," Hamlet's credo. Edmund revolts against the whole theory of "degree", the core of scholasticism, which Shakespeare has expressed elsewhere:

"The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre
Observe degree, priority and place,
Institute, course, proportion, season, form,
Office in all line of order."

(Troilus and Cressida, 1,3).