Robert Ornstein

[In the following excerpt, Ornstein focuses on the problem of critical interpretation associated with the "hectic portraits of vice and depravity " that characterize Jacobean tragedies. He emphasizes the gradual transition between the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, stressing the uncertainty associated with a changing epistemology.]

We applaud the Jacobean tragedians but we do not always approve of them. Their poetry seems at times superior to their principles and their sense of the theater more highly developed than their sense of values. Because we do not find in other Jacobean literature a cynicism comparable to theirs or detect in Jacobean culture the wormwood ingredients which might explain their distaste for society, we wonder what reality if any lay behind their hectic portraits of vice and depravity. We do not assume that scholarly research can ever explain the flowering of tragic drama in the first decade of the seventeenth century, but we do expect that a study of the cultural background will help us to understand the dramatists' preoccupation with evil and their heightened awareness of the tragic anguish and disorder of experience.

Because we cannot find in Elizabethan literature the seeds of Jacobean pessimism, we assume that some fairly sudden shock of disillusion darkened the literary imagination at the turn of the century. And because we realize that a tragic sense of life is alien to our conception of the Elizabethan humanistic temper, we look for ideological conflicts which might have shattered the once traditional confidence in rational order and cosmic harmony. We look for the challenge of antihumanistic philosophies which might have created Jacobean skepticism or uncertainty about the nature of man and the universe. The late Theodore Spencer advanced the brilliant hypothesis that such a challenge to humanistic ideals was focused in the works of Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Copernicus. More recently Paul N. Siegel has extended this hypothesis by emphasizing the social, economic, and political tensions of late Elizabethan society and by labeling Donne and Marston spokesmen for new antihumanistic attitudes. We must be careful, however, not to exaggerate the subversive influence of ideas which the Jacobeans themselves did not find greatly disturbing. One doubts, for instance, that other Jacobeans took Marston more seriously than Jonson did. And there is no evidence that the many Jacobean readers of Montaigne recognized that his skepticism was shaking the Elizabethan world view "to its foundations."

It would be a mistake to assume that belief in rational order was challenged in the early seventeenth century as fundamentalist belief in the Bible was challenged by Darwinian theory in the Victorian age. What we call "the Elizabethan World Picture" died quietly of old age, cherished by the metaphysical poets and by Milton long after it had ceased to interest seventeenth-century philosophers. The encyclopedias of Du Bartas and La Primaudaye continued to be printed and to be popular well into the century. Nature moralized remained a profound inspiration to the literary mind even while a mathematical conception of the physical universe opened new horizons for scientific investigation. Even Bacon admitted, nay insisted, that through a study of the universe man discovers the regularity of natural causes which bears witness to a divine plan. In the seventeenth century the Elizabethan world view slowly defaulted to the scientific because of its seeming sterility, because it offered ancient moral and metaphysical formulas to an age eager for empirical and utilitarian knowledge. Moreover the transfer of authority from the humanistic to the scientific epistemology went peacefully unnoticed because in England, unlike in Italy, there had never been a conflict between humanistic and scientific interests.

Modern scholars, who see with centuries of hindsight the essential myopia of Bacon's prophetic vision, may be forgiven their dislike of Verulam. But a nostalgia for the medieval synthesis of knowledge and faith does not justify the accusation that Bacon inaugurated the seventeenth-century divorce of science from moral or religious ideals. We can scarcely attribute to Bacon's influence a habit of thought which had been developing since the height of Scholastic philosophy. The disintegration of the medieval synthesis began, as Wilhelm Windelband remarks, with Duns Scotus' separation of philosophy and theology. "The more philosophy established itself by the side of theology as an independent secular science, the more its peculiar task was held to be the knowledge of Nature. In this result all lines of the philosophy of the Renaissance meet. Philosophy shall be natural science,—this is the watchword of the time." Bacon is a child—perhaps a thankless child—of his time. His critical spirit and his plans for the investigation of nature are at once a culmination and an annihilation of the humanistic intellectual adventure. While he eloquently defends scientific research against obscurantist opposition, he presupposes, without lengthy argument, that natural philosophy will be completely dissociated from religious dogma. He assumed quite correctly that his contemporaries were prepared to accept the philosophical authority of a completely unmoral, unreligious concept of physical nature, which testifies only indirectly to the existence of a providential order.

When we read Bacon in the quiet of our studies we can hear in the background the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of the medieval sea of faith. If Bacon's contemporaries did not hear it, it was because there were a hundred more immediate and strident alarums. The gradual encroachment of secular interests on ecclesiastical authority had been so long a part of Renaissance life that Bacon's inversion of the medieval hierarchy of studies and his contemptuous references to the barren inquisition of final causes did not seem very shocking. His defense of socially useful scientific research, confined to its proper sphere of inquiry and circumscribed by religious and moral doctrine, was eminently successful. Indeed, the separation of science and religion seemed to guarantee the sanctity of religious belief by eliminating possible conflicts between empirical reason and faith.

So long as we continue to portray Elizabethan thought as a set of fixed postulates which have no relation to Bacon's new epistemology, so long will we have difficulty connecting Elizabethan and Jacobean literary attitudes. For it is the evolving form of Elizabethan speculations—the changing humanistic approach to politics, to moral philosophy, and to nature—which explains the "un-Elizabethan" character of Jacobean tragic thought. Instead of hunting subversives and antihumanists, our goal in succeeding pages will be to discover how humanistic interests in the world of man led to the search for intrinsic values in experience which we find in Jacobean tragedy. Then it will become clear that the "crisis" which Jacobean tragedy reflects is epistemological, not moral or ideological. The dramatists are not torn between humanistic and antihumanistic views of man. They are caught between old and new ways of determining the realities upon which moral values rest. In an age of rapid intellectual and cultural change, they—and not they alone—confound knowledge with knowledge.