Ages it shared the fate of many analogies and was pressed to its utmost limits with scholastic thoroughness. As Taylor tells us (Mediaeval Mind, 11. 276):

it was used to symbolize the mystery of the oneness of all mankind in God, and the organic co-ordination of all sorts and conditions of men with one another in the divine commonwealth on earth; it was also drawn out into every detail of banal anthropomorphic comparison. From John of Salisbury to Nicholas Cusanus, Occam and Dante, no point of fancied analogy between the parts and members of the body and the various functions of Church and State was left unexploited.

And similarly Gierke (Political Theories of the Middle Ages, trans. Maitland, pp. 22 sq.) tells us that

John of Salisbury made the first attempt to find some member of the natural body which would correspond to each portion of the State... Later writers followed him, but with many variations in minor matters. The most elaborate comparison comes from Nicholas of Cusa, who for this purpose brought into play all the medical knowledge of his time1.

As, in fact, we read the medieval political treatises, we are reminded of the monkish work, De partibus Virginis Mariae, in which the limbs of the Virgin are tortured one by one into the most extraordinary mystical meanings. Some of the parallels, of course, are natural enough: that the head, for instance, should be the King is not surprising. The eye, again, might well be a sentry or a watchful magistrate, and the arm is easily supposed

Gierke's notes and references (p. 132) are specially informing and interesting: e.g. he points out that to Nicholas of Cusa the teeth were the privy council, the liver the judiciary, and the stomach the grand council.

to be a soldier. But that the heart should be the counsellor or senator does a little astonish us; and it is precisely here that we begin to suspect Shakspere of medievalism, and to see that he is not drawing out a symbolism of his own, but adopting one ready-made. For, in the medieval writings on law or politics, it is almost always cor or pectus that is Senatus. Take for example the Policraticus of John of Salisbury—perhaps the most representative of all these writings. Basing himself, as he professes, on the so-called Plutarch's Institutio Trajani, John writes as follows (Policraticus, ed. Webb, I. 283, section 540 c):

Princeps vero capitis in re publica optinet locum uni subjectus Deo et his qui vices illius agunt in terris, quoniam et in corpore humano ab anima vegetatur caput et regitur. Cordis locum senatus optinet, a quo bonorum operum et malorum procedunt initia. Oculorum aurium et linguae officia vendicant sibi judices et praesides provinciarum. Officiales et milites manibus coaptantur. Qui semper adsistunt principi, lateribus assimilantur. Quaestores et commentarienses (non illos dico qui carceribus praesunt, sed comites rerum privatarum) ad ventris et intestinorum refert imaginem. Quae, si immensa aviditate congesserint et congesta tenacius reservaverint, innumerabiles et incurabiles generant morbos, ut vitis eorum totius corporis ruina immineat. Pedibus vero solo jugiter inherentibus agricolae coaptantur.

Here then we have the kingly-crowned head, the soldier hand, and above all the counsellor heart; while the slight differences between John and Shakspere tend to diminish as we read the hundred odd following pages in which the conception is worked out in fuller detail.

We even notice in a later sentence a suggestion for Menenius's gibe1 at the "great toe of the assembly":

Pedes quidem qui humiliora exercent officia, appellantur, quorum officia totius rei publicae membra per terram gradiuntur. His etiam aggregantur multae species lanificii artesque mechanicae, quae in ligno ferro ere metallisque variis consistunt (Webb, 11. 58, section 618 d),

while the way in which Shakspere's thoughts dwelt upon the symbolism is clearly shown in the famous passage in Henry V about the advised head that defends itself at home while the armed hand doth fight abroad:

Manus itaque rei publicae aut armata est aut inermis. Armata quidem est quae castrensem et cruentam exercet militiam, inermis quae justitiam expedit (Webb, II. 2, section 589 a);

and the Archbishop's speech on the honey-bees, though doubtless directly derived from Lyly, owes something to the same metaphor. This is not, of course, to maintain that Shakspere, like Chaucer, had studied John of Salisbury for himself; all we are here contending for is that, by some process of permeation or other, such medieval ideas as John expresses in a scholastic manner had reached Shakspere as part and parcel of the general intellectual equipment of his time. It may well have been some homily or sermon that formed the channel of transmission—just as, in a very probable view, stories like those of the "Cock and the Fox" came to the common people and to Chaucer through the sermons of Holkot.

1 The pain of the workers is the gout in the State's feet (John of Salisbury, vi. 20). Is not "My foot my tutor" (Tempest, 1. 2. 469), though due perhaps primarily to Lyly, traceable ultimately to John or another medieval publicist whose views were similar to John's?

Theologians of the type of Dr Shaw or Vice-Chancellor Perne, preaching on politics as they so often did in those days, may well have made the conception familiar; nor is it the habit of preachers, when once they have got hold of a parable, to refrain from pressing its details1.

Bearing in mind, then, that Shakspere's view of the body politic was identical with this medieval one which we have sketched, we are now able to see a closer aptness than we might have expected in the speech of King Claudius to Laertes (Hamlet, I. 2. 45):

What wouldst thou beg, Laertes,

That shall not be my offer, not thy asking?
The head is not more native to the heart,
The hand more instrumental to the mouth,
Than is the throne of Denmark to thy father.

This is not a series of vague and general metaphors, but symbolism precise, definite, and technical: as technical, in fact, as one of Donne's medical or scientific similes. "The head" is the King as the crowned chief of the State, Claudius himself; "the heart" is the counsellor-it is indeed Polonius in his capacity as the Burleigh of Denmark. The next line puts the same thing once more, but with a slight alteration in the symbolism. Claudius now appears as the "hand,” that

1 It may be desirable here to say that I do not believe in a Jewish origin of the idea of the "body politic." In a note on the passage of Coriolanus which we are here considering, Aldis Wright remarks that of the ten sephiroth or Intelligences spoken of in the Kabbala, the first, which is called the crown, is placed in the head, while the heart is the seat of understanding; and every reader of the Old Testament knows that "men of heart" are really men of brain, while fools are spoken of as destitute of "heart." But, in the form the idea assumes in the Kabbala, there is every reason to believe that it was the Jews who borrowed from classical authors, and not vice versa. Though Jewish scholars may have helped to spread such notions, yet (whatever we may think of the "Plutarch" on whom John of Salisbury professes to rely) the ultimate source was certainly classical, and the method of developing it ecclesiastical.

is the King as soldier, who beareth not the sword in vain; while Polonius, who had just before been the senator or counsellor, takes now the allied character of the "mouth" or orator-a description which, so far as it can be earned by verbosity, no one, surely, ever better deserved1.

1 It is perhaps not too fanciful to compare here Milton's famous designation of the 'corrupted clergy" as "blind mouths": gentry who, like Polonius, know how to talk, but in their lack of foresight prove very bad sentries. This explanation is at any rate far less fantastic than that of Ruskin in Sesame and Lilies. It may interest Baconians to observe that Bacon's idea of Fortune, as given in his Essays, is quite different from Shakspere's.