Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I

The Elizabethan World View

The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre
Observe degree priority and place
Insisture course proportion season form
Office and custom, in all line of order;
And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
In noble eminence enthron’d and spher’d
Amidst the other, whose med’cinable eye
Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil
And posts like the commandment of a king,
Sans check, to good and bad. But when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents, what mutiny,
What raging of the sea, shaking of earth,
Commotion in the winds, frights changes horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixure. Oh, when degree is shak’d,
Which is the ladder to all high designs,
The enterprise is sick. How could communities,
Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenitive and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns sceptres laurels,
But by degree stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark, what discord follows. 
    (Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, I. iii. 75-137)

[The following excerpts are from scholarly texts by E. M. W. Tillyard. Both explicate the ideas of world order prevalent in the Elizabethan age. The medieval idea of an Ordered Chain of Being constituted a grand "unified theory," actually a belief system: the Elizabethans believed in a hierarchical ordering of all existence from heavenly bodies to a hierarchical ordering in society with a semi-divine monarch at the head to a hierarchical ordering of human physiology and psychology. These hierarchies were connected by a complex of "correspondences."  Tillyard argues that Ulysses speech on "degree" from Troilus and Cressida is Shakespeare's most comprehensive document on the Chain of Being. 
     Of the "chaos, when degree is suffocate,/ Follows the choking," which concludes Ulysses' speech, Tillyard comments: "If the Elizabethans believed in an ideal order, animating earthly order, they were terrified lest it should be upset, and appalled by the visible tokens of disorder that suggested its upsetting. They were obscessed by the fear of chaos and the fact of mutability; and the obsession was powerful in proportion as their faith in the cosmic order was strong.... to an Elizabethan [chaos] meant the cosmic anarchy before creation and the wholesale dissolution that would result if the pressure of Providence relaxed and allowed the law of nature to cease functioning."
     This concept of order, and conversely the constant threat of disorder, goes a long way to informing many aspects of Shakespeare's plays, particularly the histories and tragedies: among those aspects are Shakespeare's translation of source material into the plot structures of his plays, the psychology of his characters, the imagery that informs their speeches, and their fate they must confront. 

E. M. W. Tillyard, "The Elizabethan World Order," Shakespeare’s History Plays (The Macmillan Co., 1946): 10-20. Most readers of Shakespeare know that his own version of order or degree is in Ulysses’s speech on the topic in Troilus and Cressida…. Its doctrine is primarily political but evidently goes far beyond mere practical politics. First, we learn that the order which prevails in the heavens is duplicated on earth, the king corresponding to the sun; then that disorder in the heavens breeds disorder on earth, both in the physical sublunary organization and in the commonwealth of men. When Shakespeare calls degree the ladder to all high designs he probably has another correspondence in mind: that between the ascending grades of man in his social state and the ladder of creation or chain of being which stretched from the meanest piece of inanimate matter in unbroken ascent to the highest of the archangels. The musical metaphor in "Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark what discord follows" is far more than a metaphor; it implies the traditional Platonic doctrine that (in Dryden’s words):
    From harmony, from heavenly harmony
    This universal frame began,
    and that at the world’s last hour
    Music shall untune the sky.
     Finally, when an Elizabethan audience heard the words "chaos, where degree is suffocate," the educated element at least would understand chaos.... as a parallel in the state to the primitive warring of elements from which the universe was created and into which it would fall if the constant pressure of God’s ordering and sustaining will were relaxed.
    The above references are fragmentary but they show that Shakespeare had in mind a complete body of doctrine…. The Elizabethan conception of world-order was in its outlines medieval although it had discarded much medieval detail. The universe was a unity, in which everything had its place, and it was the perfect work of God. Any imperfection was the work not of God but of man; for with the fall of man the universe underwent a sympathetic corruption. But for all the corruption the marks of God’s perfection were still there, and one of the two great roads to salvation was through the study of created things. But though the idea of unity was basic, the actual order of the world presented itself to the Elizabethans under three different, though often related, appearances: a chain, a series of corresponding planes, and a dance to music.
     As a chain, creation was a series of beings stretching from the lowest of inanimate objects up to the archangel nearest to the throne of God. The ascent was gradual, no step was missing; and on the borders of the great divisions between animate and inanimate, vegetative and sensitive, sensitive and rational, rational and angelic, there were the necessary transitions. One of the noblest accounts of the chain of being is by Sir John Fortescue, the fifteenth century jurist:

In this order hot things are in harmony with cold; dry with moist; heavy with light; great with little; high with low. In this order angel is set over angel, rank upon rank in the Kingdom of Heaven; man is set over man, beast over beast, bird over bird, and fish over fish, on the earth, in the air, and in the sea; so that there is no worm that crawls upon the ground, no bird that flies on high, no fish that swims in the depths, which the chain of this order binds not in most harmonious concord. God created as many different kinds of things as he did creatures, so that there is no creature which does not differ in some respect from all other creatures, and by which it is in some respect superior or inferior to all the rest. So that from the highest angel down to the lowest of his kind there is absolutely not found an angel that has not a superior and inferior; nor from man down to the meanest worm is there any creature which is not in some respect superior to one creature and inferior to another. So that there is nothing which the bond of order does not embrace. And since God has thus regulated all creatures, it is impious to think that he left unregulated the human race, which he made the highest of all earthly creatures.

The last sentence illustrates to perfection that same striving for unity and for correspondences that was so strong among the Elizabethans.
      For the way one large class is linked with another in the chain of being take a passage near the beginning of the second book of Higden’s Polychronicon. Higden’s evidence is of exactly the right kind. He can be trusted to give the perfect commonplace and he was extremely popular not only in his own day but well into the Tudor period. The opening of his second book is for a brief summary of "degree" as good as anything I know:

In the universal order of things the top of an inferior class touches the bottom of a superior: as for instance oysters, which, occupying as it were the lowest position in the class of animals, scarcely rise above tile life of plants, because they cling to the earth without motion and possess the sense of touch alone. The upper surface of the earth is in contact with the lower surface of water; the highest part of the waters touches the lowest part of the air, and so by a ladder of ascent to the outermost sphere of the universe. So also the noblest entity in the category of bodies, the human body, when its humours are evenly balanced, touches the fringe of the next class above it, namely the human soul, which occupies the lowest rank in the spiritual order. For this reason the human soul is called the horizon or meeting-ground of corporeal and incorporeal; for in it begins the ascent from the lowest to the highest spiritual power. At times even, when it has been cleansed of earthly passions, it attains to the state of incorporeal beings.

It was this key position in the chain of being, not the central position of the earth in the Ptolemaic astronomy, that made man so interesting among the objects of creation. Subject to lunar vicissitudes unknown in higher spheres and by its central position the repository of the dregs of things, the earth was not happily situated. But from before Plato till beyond Pope man’s amazing position in creation—a kind of Clapham Junction where all the tracks converge and cross—exercised the human imagination and fostered the true humanist tradition; and at no period of English history so powerfully as in the age of Elizabeth. Here is a typical account of man’s position between angel and beast, his high capacities and his proneness to fall, front Sir John Hayward, Shakespeare’s contemporary:

Thou art a mart, endued with reason and understanding, wherein God hath engraven his lively image. In other creatures there is sonic likeness of him, some footsteps of his divine nature; but in man lie hath stamped his image. Some things are like God in that they are; some in that they live; some in their excellent property and working. But this is not the image of God. His image is only in that we understand. Seeing then that thou art of so noble a nature and that thou beaten in thine understanding the image of God, so govern thyself as is fit for a creature of understanding. Be not like the brute beasts, winch want understanding: either wild and unruly or else heavy and dull…. Certainly of all the creatures tinder heaven, which have received being from God, none degenerate, none forsake their natural dignity and being, but only man. Only man, abandoning the dignity of his proper nature, is changed like Proteus into divers forms. And this is occasioned by reason of the liberty of his will. And as every kind of beast is principally inclined to one sensuality more than to any other, so man transformeth himself into that beast to whose sensuality lie principally declines (David’s Tears, 1623).

But if man is allied to the beasts in sensuality and to God and the angels in understanding, he is most himself in being social. This passage, translated from the Italian about 1598, would have been accepted without question by every educated Elizabethan:

Man, as he is in form from other creatures different, so is his end from theirs very diverse. The end of other creatures is no other thing but living, to generate those like themselves. Man, born in the kingdom of nature and fortune, is not only to live and generate but to live well and happily. Nature of herself provideth for other creatures things sufficient unto life, nature procureth man to live, but reason and fortune cause him to live well. Creatures live after the laws of nature: man liveth by reason prudence and art. Living creatures may live a solitary life: man alone, being of himself insufficient and by nature an evil creature without domestical and civil conversation, cannot lead other than a miserable and discontented life. And therefore, as the philosopher saith very well, that man which cannot live in civil company either lie is a god or a beast, seeing only God is sufficient of himself, and a solitary life best agreeth with a beast (Hannibal Romel, Courtier’s Academy).

It is with such a doctrine in mind that Shakespeare’s Ulysses speaks of communities,
    Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities,
    Peaceful commerce front dividable shores,
standing by degree in authentic place. Such things are the organisations and activities proper to man in his place in the scale of being.

Correspondences: For the full exercise of medieval and Elizabethan ingenuity we must turn to the sets of correspondences worked out between the various planes of creation. These planes were God and the angels, the macrocosm or physical universe, the body politic or the state, and the microcosm or man....  Shakespeare touches on one of the fundamental correspondences in Ulysses’s speech on degree when he speaks of
    the glorious planet Sol
    In noble eminence enthron’d and spher’d
    Amidst the other, whose medicinable eye
    Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil,
    And posts like the commandment of a king.
But le roi soleil is only a part of a larger sequence of leadership, which included: God among the angels or all the works of creation, the sun among the stars, fire among the elements, the king in the state, the head in the body, justice among the virtues, the lion among the beasts, the eagle among the buds, the dolphin among the fishes….
     Of all the correspondences between two planes that between the cosmic and the human was the commonest. Not only did man constitute in himself one of the planes of creation, but he was the microcosm, the sum in little of the great world itself. He was composed materially of the four elements and contained within himself, as well as his rational soul vegetative and sensitive souls after the manners of plants and animals. The constitution of his body duplicated the constitution of the earth. His vital heat corresponded to the subterranean fire; his veins to rivers; his sighs to winds; the outbursts of his passions to storms and earthquakes There is a whole complex body of doctrine behind the account of how Lear
    Strives in his little world of man to outscorn
    The to and fro conflicting wind and rain.
Storms were also frequent in another correspondence, that between macrocosm and body politic. Storms and perturbations in the heavens were duplicated by commotions and disasters in the state. The portents that marked the death of Caesar were more than portents; they were the heavenly enactment of the commotions that shook the Roman Empire after that event. Irregularities of the heavenly bodies duplicate the loss of order in the state, in the words of Ulysses,
    but when the planets
    In evil mixture to disorder wander,
    What plagues and what portents, what mutiny,
    What raging of the sea, shaking of earth,
    Commotion in the winds, frights changes horrors,
    Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
    The unity and married calm of states
    Quite from their fixture.
Last may be cited the correspondence between microcosm and body politic, it can take the form of Brutus in his agony of doubt comparing his own little world to a city in insurrection. But its most persistent form was an elaborate analogy between the various ranks in the state with different parts of the human body.

E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (Vintage Books).
"The Stars and Fortune":
     For the Elizabethans the moving forces of history were Providence, fortune, and human character…. We now come to the stars which, through obeying God’s changeless order, are responsible for the vagaries of fortune in the realms below the moon…. For the sway of fortune the image of the wheel is constant both in literature and in picture; and at times it is presented with such concrete circumstance as both to risk absurdity and to turn the spectator’s or the reader’s thoughts far from the stars with their subtly penetrating influences. There are those grossly physical pictures of human beings, realistically dressed, clinging or tied to what seems a large cart wheel, in process of being turned aloft or hurled in undignified somersault onto the ground; or there is this from Hamlet:
   Out, out, thou strumpet, Fortune. All you gods,
    In general synod take away her power;
    Break all the spokes and fellies from her wheel
    And bowl the round nave down the hill of heaven
    As low as to the fiends.
Nevertheless it was quite taken for granted that the stars dictated the general mutability of sublunary things, and that fortune was a part of this mutability applying to mankind alone....
     .... In the Elizabethan as in earlier ages the orthodox belief in the stars’ influence, sanctioned but articulated and controlled by the authority of religion, was not always kept pure from the terrors of primitive superstition…. Whether he were scrupulously orthodox or inclined to instinctive superstition, the Elizabethan believed in the pervasive operation of an external fate in the world. The twelve signs of the zodiac had their own active properties. The planets were busy the whole time; and their fluctuating conjunctions produced a seemingly chaotic succession of conditions, theoretically predictable but in practice almost wholly beyond the wit of man. Their functions differed, with the moon the great promoter of change. Though there were sceptics like Edmund in Lear and though the quack astrologer was hated and satirised, the general trend was of belief.
     It must not be thought that the evident havoc in nature’s order wrought by the stars at all upset the evidence of God’s Providence. The havoc was all within the scheme. The answer to the question why God allowed the havoc was almost self-evident. It was not primarily God who allowed it but man who inflicted it on both himself and the physical universe. In their own natures the stars are beneficent, and when they were first created they worked together to do good….
     It was the Fall that was primarily responsible for the tyranny of fortune, and, this being so, man could not shift the blame but must bear his punishment as he can. It was God of course who, prompted by the Fall, set the celestial bodies against each other in their influence on the sublunary universe, but he also tempers their opposition as a prudent king sets one ambitious noble against another, thereby preserving a balance of power…. the contrary motions of the heavens imply balance, and "mild Venus" checks "fell Mars." Degree is thus preserved.
     But however pessimistic orthodoxy could be about the heaviness of the punishment inflicted through fortune on man for his fall, it always fought the superstition that man was the slave as well as the victim of chance. The classic exponent of this doctrine was for the Middle Ages Boethius, and the Elizabethans accepted him also. The main theme of Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae is the power of man to survive the blows of fortune…. the large general contention is that man has it in him to survive the blows of fortune and that ultimately fortune herself is, like nature, the tool of God and the educator of man....
     Allowing not too much and not too little weight to the stars, we may hold that they are not autonomous causes but "open books, wherein are contained and set down all things whatsoever to come" (Sir Walter Raleigh, History of the World). But these books are beyond the wit of man thoroughly to read….
     It is undoubted that the stars sway the mind to certain states by acting on our physical predispositions. If a man is weak in will and naturally choleric, for instance, the stars may greatly influence him. Such a man may forget that reason should rule the passions and, prompted by stellar influence, may give way to them. In this he becomes near the beasts, "over all which, celestial bodies, as instruments and executioners of God’s providence, have absolute dominion." But over the immortal part of man the stars have no necessary sway. "Fate will be overcome, if thou resist it; if thou neglect, it conquereth." (Raleigh) And there are things to counter the stars’ influence, both in nature and in art. As for nature "Aristotle himself confesseth that the heavens do not always work their effects in inferior bodies, no more than the signs of rain and wind do not always come to pass. And it is divers times seen that paternal virtue and vice hath his counterworking to these inclinations." As for art Raleigh is eloquent on the power of education in reinforcing or mitigating the effects of the stars:

But there is nothing, after God’s reserved power, that so much setteth this art of influence out of square and rule as education doth: for there are none in the world so wickedly inclined but that a religious instruction and bringing up may fashion anew and reform them; nor any so well disposed whom, the reins being let loose, the continual fellowship and familiarity and the examples of dissolute men may not corrupt and deform.

The extremes of virtue and vice occur when education or evil communications confirm those whom the stars make naturally virtuous or vicious….
     In King Lear there is a great complexity of reference to fortune and the stars, yet the trend is that of the Mirror for Magistrates and of Raleigh; in no way unconventional. Gloucester is foolishly superstitious. Lear is the apparent victim of fortune, yet his "skill" somehow persists and he is able to carry conviction when he says to Cordelia
    we’ll wear out
    In a wall’d prison packs and sects of great ones
    That ebb and flow by the moon.
Edmund’s famous satire on superstition is less simple. Gloucester blames the recent eclipses for the present evils in society and gives a typical picture of "degree" upset: "Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide; in cities mutinies; in countries discord; in palaces treason; and the bond crackt ‘twixt son and father." Edmund, when his father goes out, comments satirically:

make guilty of our disasters the sun the moon and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves thieves and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards liars and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the dragon’s tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major; so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. Tut, I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardising.

Here Edmund shows himself the accomplished villain, the man who sins knowingly, who is the ape but not the servant of God. He is as sound as Raleigh on the impiety of allowing "second causes" to "despoil God of his prerogative" or of imagining that God "had constrained the mind and will of man to impious acts by any celestial inforcements," and he is justly the critic of his father’s superstitions. But he is brutish in "robbing those beautiful creatures of their powers and offices"; and brazen in arrogating to himself a viciousness that would have triumphed over every stellar inducement to virtue. However humorous his bogus nativity, we may be meant to look on Edmund as one of those superlatively vicious men whom the stars and their own wills have joined to produce. If this is so, there is dramatic irony in his denying the influence of the stars in words of wickedness that substantiate it in a sense quite other than he intended.
    Prospero is the opposite of Edmund, a man in whom reason is strong and who both defies the stars when they are hostile and, when they are kind, uses them to the general benefit. It is possible too that there is an intended connection between the stars and Caliban’s insusceptibility to "nurture" or education. The stars, said Raleigh, had absolute sway over plants and beasts. Caliban’s notable feeling for nature may mean a kinship with them in just this subservience. He is too much under the sky’s dominance ever to be other than he is.

" The Elements"
     [The educated Elizabethan] took the motions and properties of the four elements very much for granted. When Cleopatra said she was all air and fire, the educated part of the audience at least would understand without the slightest effort of memory. The property of air and fire was to go upwards in a straight line, as was that of earth and water to go down.
    .... [The elements] were certain qualities attributable to all matter. They were founded on the notions of hot and cold, dry and moist; and earth as an element was the name for the cold and dry qualities of matter in combination. In other words the elements were thought of through their effects. These effects working on a common substance were thought, in cooperation with stellar influence and the occasional extraordinary intervention of God, to explain the way the sublunary world was conducted….
    Heaviest and lowest was the cold and dry element, the earth. Its natural place was the centre of the universe, of which it was the dregs. Outside earth was the region of cold and moist, the water. That solid land should thrust itself above the waters was merely one of the many in-stances of an extrinsic cause making a thing depart from its own intrinsic nature. Outside water was the region of hot and moist, the air. Air though nobler than water was not to be compared with the ether for purity. Just as angels took their shapes from the ether, so the devils took theirs from the air, their peculiar region. Noblest of all is fire, which next below the sphere of the moon enclosed the globe of air that girded water and earth. It was hot and dry, rarefied, invisible to human sight, and was the fitting transition to the eternal realms of the planets. In this region meteors and other transient fires were generated. These, as transient, could not come from the eternal region of the stars.
    But though the elements were arranged in this hierarchy, in their own chain of being, analogous to that of the living creatures, they were in actuality mixed in infinitely varied proportion and they were at perpetual war with each other. For instance, fire and water are opposed, but God in his wisdom kept them from mutual destruction by putting the element of air between them, which, having one quality of both the others, acted as a transition and kept the peace…. The finest results came from a proper balance.
     References to the elements in Elizabethan literature are very many and their imaginative function is to link the doings of men with the business of the cosmos, to show events not merely happening but happening in conjunction with so much else…. Lear’s first words in the storm invoke explicitly all four elements in their uproars; and though these are presented not in abstraction but as manifested in the concrete natural happenings, basic elemental conflict is as much a part of his thought as is the actual violence of the weather:
    Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks, rage, blow.
    You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
    Till you have drencht our steeples, drown’d the cocks.
    You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
    Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
    Singe my white head. And thou, all-shaking thunder,
    Strike fiat the thick rotundity o’ the world.

"Man":
     In the chain of being the position of man was of paramount interest…. He was the nodal point, and his double nature, though the source of internal conflict, had the unique function of binding together all creation, of bridging the greatest cosmic chasm, that between matter and spirit. During the whole period when the notion of the chain of being was prevalent, from the Pythagorean philosophy to Pope, it was man’s key position in creation… Here is the Pythagorean doctrine as preserved by Photius, the Byzantine lexicographer, in his Life of Pythagoras:

Man is called a little world not because he is composed of the four elements (for so are all the beasts, even the meanest) but because he possesses all the faculties of the universe. For in the universe there are gods, the four elements, the dumb beasts, and the plants. Of all these man possesses the faculties: for he possesses the godlike faculty of reason; and the nature of the elements, which consists in nourishment growth and reproduction. In each of these faculties he is deficient; just as the competitor in the pentathlon, while possessing the faculty to exercise each part of it, is yet inferior to the athlete who specialises in one part only; so man though he possesses all the faculties is deficient in each. For we possess the faculty of reason less eminently than the gods; in the same way the elements are less abundant in us than in the elements themselves; our energies and desires are weaker than the beasts’; our powers of nurture and of growth are less than the plants’. Whence, being an amalgam of many and varied elements, we find our life difficult to order. For every other creature is guided by one principle; but we are pulled in different directions by our different faculties. For instance at one time we are drawn towards the better by the god-like element, at another time towards the worse by the domination of the bestial element, within us.

More than two thousand years later Pope described man in the same terms: his doubtful middle state.
    In doubt to act or rest;
    In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;
    In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer;
    Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err;
    Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
    Whether he thinks too little, or too much:
    Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus’d;
    Still by himself abus’d, or disabus’d;
    Created half to rise and half to fall;
    Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
    Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurl’d
    The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
The vitality of this great commonplace may have waxed and waned in the years between Pythagoras and Pope but it has never been stronger than in the age of Elizabeth. Not only did Man, as man, live with uncommon intensity at that time, but he was never removed from his cosmic setting. It is the combination of these two facts that gives to Elizabethan humanism its great force….
    
The Elements and Man's Physical Life: Before enlarging on the use the great Elizabethan writers made of this supreme commonplace I must describe in outline the contemporary conception of man’s constitution and of his position in creation…. Man’s physical life begins with food, and food is made o the four elements. Food passes through the stomach to he liver, which is lord of the lowest of the three parts of the body. The liver converts the food it receives into four liquid substances, the humours, which are to the human body what the elements are to the common matter of the earth. Each humour has its own counterpart among the elements. The correspondence is best set out in a table.
   Element      Humour              Common quality
   Earth             Melancholy         Cold and dry
    Water          Phlegm                Cold and moist
    Air                Blood                  Hot and moist
    Fire              Choler                 Hot and dry
     In normal operation all the humours together are carried by the veins from the liver to the heart, a proper mixture of the humours being as necessary to bodily growth and functioning as that of the elements to the creation of permanent substances. The four humours created in the liver are the life-giving moisture of the body. They generate a more active life-principle, vital heat, which corresponds to the fires in the centre of the earth, themselves agents in the slow formation of the metals. This vital heat is mediated to the body through three kinds of spirit, which are the executive of the microcosm. The natural spirits are a vapour formed in the liver and carried with the humours along the veins. As such they have to do with the lowest or vegetative side of man and are under the dominion of the liver. But, acted on in the heart by heat and air from the lungs, they assume a higher quality and become vital spirits. Accompanied by a nobler kind of blood, also refined in the heart, they carry life and heat through the arteries. The heart is king of the middle portion of the body. It is the seat of the passions and hence corresponds to the sensitive portion of man’s nature. Some of the vital spirits are in due course carried through the arteries into the brain, where they are turned into animal spirits. The brain rules the top of man’s body, and is the seat of the rational and immortal part. The animal spirits are the executive agents of the brain through the nerves and partake both of the body and of the soul.
     I will revert to the higher functions of man later. So far the chief concern has been with the humours; and though the account may be over-simplified, it covers most of the assumptions made by the Elizabethans in speaking of the normal working of the body and of its relation to the other parts of creation. When they used the words temperament or complexion they had consciously in mind the tempering of one humour (or element, as they often said instead) by another, or the intertwining of the humours that was the cause of character. If a man was of a phlegmatic temperament, they meant that the four humours were mixed in a way that allowed phlegm, the cold and moist humour, to be the most emphatic. In Brutus, according to Antony’s testimony at the end of Julius Caesar the elements or humours were mixed just right. He was a perfectly balanced man....But it usually happened that one humour was, even if a little, prominent, giving a man his distinctive mark. On this rigidly physical theory of character the Elizabethans naturally felt themselves very close to the rest of nature and in particular very susceptible to the action of the stars.
     Besides these normal conditions of the humours, there were the abnormal. The normal series of changes by which the humours were thought to reach the brain have been described, but abnormally they may ascend straight from the stomach or other abdominal organ to the brain in a vapour, like vapour ascending from the earth to the air, to be distilled into rain. Catarrh comes from these evil vapours. There was also the terrible possibility of a humour not merely existing to excess, as in a perfectly sane man with some marked idiosyncrasy, but going bad. A humour could both putrefy or be burnt with excessive heat. The most famous kind of corrupt humour was the burnt or adust; and melancholy adust was the name usually given to it even if it was one of the other humours that had been impaired….
     I now revert to man’s higher faculties. Like the body, the brain was divided into a triple hierarchy. The lowest contained the five senses. The middle contained first the common sense, which received and summarised the reports of the five senses, second the fancy, and third the memory. This middle area supplied the materials for the highest to work on. The highest contained the supreme human faculty the reason, by which man is separated from the beasts and allied to God and the angels, with its two parts, the understanding (or wit) and the will. It is on these two highest human faculties, understanding and will, that Elizabethan ethics are based.
     Man’s understanding, though allied to the angelical, operates differently. The angels understand intuitively, man by the painful use of the discursive reason. Again, the angels have perfected their understanding and are replete with all the knowledge they are able to hold. Man, even though he may in the end rival the angels in knowledge, begins in ignorance. What marks man from angel and beast is his capacity for learning: both his "erected wit" in perceiving perfection and his aptitude for "nurture" or education in his raising himself towards it….
     Understanding and Will: It may not be an accident that of the heroes in Shakespeare’s four tragic masterpieces two, Othello and Lear, are defective in understanding and two, Hamlet and Macbeth, in will. In Lear, the references to his defects of understanding are particularly clear, though how clear cannot be perceived without the contemporary doctrine. When Goneril and Regan discuss their father after he has divided the kingdom, Goneril speaks of Lear’s "poor judgment" and Regan adds "yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself." The meaning here is very rich. We are told that Lear is uneducated; he has not grown up: the play will have the painful theme of the education of a man old and hence so set that only the most violent methods can succeed…. At Regan’s words the whole context of man in the universe would have been present to every educated man in an Elizabethan audience, thereby preparing him for Lear’s own frenzied questions of the status of man in nature and his kinship with the beasts and the elements.
     We must never forget that the Elizabethans thought of the understanding in close relation to the fall of man. The natural thirst for knowledge and wisdom still survives, but the soul’s instruments had been impaired and often shirk the labour by which knowledge is obtained.
     The understanding then had to sift the evidence of the senses already organised by the common sense, to examine the exuberant creations of the fancy, to summon up the right material from the memory, and on its own account to lay up the greatest possible store of knowledge and wisdom. It was for the will to make the just decision on the evidence presented to it by the understanding. For man’s will, like God’s and unlike that of natural agents, is free. Fire has no choice in the matter of consuming stubble; smoke cannot choose to go down rather than up. But, in the words of Hooker…, "There is in the will of man naturally that freedom whereby it is apt to take or refuse any particular object whatsoever being presented unto it." The right use of the will is "to bend our souls to the having or doing of that which they see to be good."
    It was against the will rather than against the understanding that morality habitually set the appetite or the passions, the product of the heart. They were not always in opposition; yet, their objects differing basically, at times they must be…. It is not in our power not to be stirred mentally by our appetites but it is in our power to translate them or not to translate them into action….
     If the fall of man had dimmed his understanding, even more had it infected his will. For though it was possible to make a wrong choice through an error of judgment, it was also possible for the will to be so corrupt as to go against the evidence of the understanding. One reason why Ovid’s words, "video meliora proboque/ Deteriora sequor," became a tag was that they expressed the consummation of corruption caused by the Fall. It is through the will’s corruption that the many diatribes against man, of which the following from Sir John Hayward is a fair sample, conduct their argument:

Certainly, of all the creatures under heaven which have received being from God, none degenerate, none forsake their natural dignity and being, but only man. Only man, abandoning the dignity of his proper nature, is changed like Proteus into divers forms. And this is occasioned by the liberty of his will. And as every kind of beast is principally inclined to one sensuality more than to another, so man transformeth himself into that beast to whose sensuality he principally declines. This did the ancient wise men shadow forth by their fables of certain persons changed into such beasts whose cruelty or sottery or other brutish nature they did express.

...to an Elizabethan the old Platonic and consistently orthodox opposition between the bestial and the rational in man, between instinct and understanding, between appetite and will was starkly real.... 

The Elizabethans were interested in the nature of man with a fierceness rarely paralleled in other ages; and that fierceness delighted in exposing all the contrarieties in man’s composition. In particular by picturing man’s position between beast and angel with all possible emphasis they gave a new intensity to the old conflict. If in Spenser the conflict is more abstract and theological, in Shakespeare it is so concrete, so particularised into the objects of creation (and the beasts especially) that we are apt to forget that the abstraction was there….
     Shakespeare animates these conflicts by stating with unique intensity the range of man’s affinities whether with angel and beast or with the lovely or violent manifestations of inanimate nature; in other words by his living sense of man’s key-position in the great chain of being. It is scarcely necessary to illustrate. Hamlet is largely animated by Shakespeare’s consciousness of man’s being in action like an angel in apprehension like a god, and yet capable of all baseness. In Hamlet’s reference to his mother’s hasty marriage, "O heaven, a beast that wants discourse of reason/ Would have mourn’d longer," the whole context is there. The apostrophe to heaven is more than mere interjection and is meant to bring in man’s celestial affinities. Reason, man’s heavenly part, has been degraded and he has sunk lower than the beasts themselves. Gertrude’s sin is not against human decency alone but against the whole scale of being…. Lear and Timon of Athens are the two plays that would be especially impoverished if the theme of man’s relation to beast was cut out.