Читать книгу Much Ado About Everything - Peter Milward - Страница 12

Was Pilate really jesting? Once again let me return to my question. I really don’t know, and I doubt if Bacon knew either. Only, he projected his own propensity to jest into Pilate’s question. As Aristotle says, “Every knower knows what is like himself.” And so Bacon in attributing a jest to Pilate is really projecting a jest of his own into the mind of Pilate. As his predecessor among English lawyers would say, Pilate is merely indulging in merry fooling.

But, I ask, is that a moment to indulge in merry fooling, when it is a matter of life and death? Does one jest before sentencing a man to death by crucifixion? Rather, when Pilate asks the question, “What is truth?” doesn’t he mean, “I have no time for discussing such philosophical questions now. We must be serious.” Anyhow, he now knows all he needs to know, that Jesus is quite harmless, that he poses no danger to the state, that this is a problem for the Jews, not the Romans, to deal with.

But again, I ask, is Bacon really jesting when he speaks of Pilate as jesting? Is Bacon a typical Englishman with an Englishman’s sense of humor? What does he mean by “jesting” anyhow? Maybe he is just playing with words, and making a pun on “Jesus” and “jesting” – or rather, putting this pun into the mind of Pilate, though one may doubt if the Roman would have had an addiction to puns.

Anyhow, one may well doubt if Bacon had a sense of humor to put into the mind of Pilate. One may well doubt if Bacon was at all addicted to puns, though in his time puns were more acceptable to people then than they are to people now. If anything, Bacon was all too serious, 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”.