Much Ado About Everything. Peter Milward

my little eye something beginning with – “, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral. Yet paradoxically enough, he found he couldn’t remain on the level of the things he saw with his eyes, but he must go on to investigate the energy, the electricity, the gravity, the momentum of the things around him, inasmuch as they aren’t merely static but are charged with a hidden dynamism. And so he came to the stage of shutting his eyes to the natural world, and surrounding himself with increasingly abstract calculations, in an “Abolition of Man”.

      On Wisdom

      “Who is Silvia?” sings Proteus, one of Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, before varying his question in further detail, “What is she, that all our swains commend her?” Finally, he answers himself, “Holy, fair, and wise is she, the heavens such grace did lend her, that she might admired be.”

      “Holy, fair, and wise” – “fair”, yes, we expect the heroine to be fair. Beauty is what we expect of any young woman looking forward to the married state. But “wise”, and “holy” – that is more than we expect of her. Yet Shakespeare, to his credit, expects his heroines to be wise as well as beautiful. He expects them to be at least wiser than his heroes. In fact, his heroes look like fools in contrast with his heroines. Certainly, Proteus is a fool in contrast with Silvia, who soon sees through his betrayal of his friend, the other gentleman, Valentine.

      Moreover, the wisdom of the heroines is shown not only in contrast with the folly of the heroes, but also in comparison with the professed “fools”, who are invariably wiser than the so-called wise men around them. As Viola, the heroine in Twelfth Night , says of the fool named Feste, “This fellow’s wise enough to play the fool,” considering that “to do that well craves a kind of wit.”

      Here, then, we have three wise men, appropriate for the feast of the Epiphany, to be celebrated on the twelfth night of the Christmas season, namely, the heroine, the fool, and – who do you think? Why, the dramatist, Shakespeare himself. And how does he show his wisdom in this play? Why, by associating himself with the heroine and the fool in his celebration of the Christmas festivity.

      Here, moreover, in the traditional celebration we have not only the three wise men from the East, but also the holy family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, as well as the three shepherds – to form a triple triplicity of adoration. And that may remind us that, as we read again and again in the sapiential writings, “The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord.”

      Then, from the beginning, whether from the hills over Bethlehem, or from the far country of the East, we come straight to the end, to the stable of Bethlehem, in the new-born baby with his mother – as Shakespeare adds in the opening scene of Hamlet, “So hallowed and so gracious is the time.”

      And so we pass from wisdom to holiness, just as Proteus passes from the beauty and wisdom to the holiness of Silvia. Indeed, much as we may be surprised at his mention of “holiness” among her three attributes of “holy, fair, and wise”, it is on her holiness that he lays most emphasis in what follows.

      Then what follows? Like the poet in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Proteus looks first to heaven before descending to earth in Silvia, and then he immediately soars up to heaven again, “The heavens such grace did lend her, that she might admired be.” For him her “grace” isn’t merely the grace which is but a synonym for beauty, but the grace of God which descends from heaven – as in the Annunciation, when the angel greets the Virgin Mary, “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee!” and as in the resulting Incarnation, when “the Word is made flesh” bringing “grace for grace”.

      This is precisely what the dramatist in his wisdom reveals in his ideal heroines – in Desdemona, whom the gallant Cassio greets on her safe arrival in Cyprus, “Hail to thee, lady, and the grace of heaven, before, behind thee, and on every hand, enwheel thee round!” and in Juliet, who is described by her lover to the friar as allowing “grace for grace, and love for love”.

      Evidently, in his portrayal of his ideal heroines, such as Silvia and Juliet and Desdemona, Shakespeare is thinking of them not merely as he imagines them from the stories he has read about them in his dramatic sources, but rather as to them he applies the ideal of the Virgin Mary as it has come down to him through the long line of Catholic tradition – through such saints as the French Bernard and the Spanish Ignatius, and such poets as the English Chaucer and the Italian Dante.

      Needless to say, this is a tradition with its deep roots in the Bible, not only in the person of the Virgin Mary, as she is presented in the first two chapters of Luke’s Gospel, but also as she is envisaged in the Old Testament, both as the Woman of prophecy and as the Lady Wisdom. But then, as Jesus himself comes to be recognized not only as the Son and the Word but also as the Wisdom of the Father, so Mary is recognized as the Seat of Wisdom – as depicted in Christian art, holding the child Jesus on her knees.

      Among the medieval universities, therefore, she is honored with churches dedicated to her, such as the church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford and that of St Mary the Great in Cambridge. Nor may we forget the cathedral of Notre Dame in the heart of Paris with its university on the Left Bank. What they offer their students is merely knowledge, whether the old science based on the philosophy of Aristotle, or the “new science” heralded by Sir Francis Bacon. But what Mary offers over and above such merely human knowledge is divine wisdom.

      In this basic contrast of knowledge and wisdom, moreover, the former considers Man in relation to Nature by means of concentrated study of the natural world, while the latter considers Man in relation to Grace, which has no need of study but is freely given from on high to those who are, like Jesus and Mary, meek and humble of heart. So while the former is increasingly masculine, in moving from the old to the new science, the latter is fundamentally feminine, in looking from male reason to female intuition.