THREE CHILDREN OF THE UNIVERSE, EMERSON'S VIEW OF SHAKESPEARE, BACON AND MILTON.

By William M.Wynkoop '38. The Hague: Mouton & Co.,1966. 199 pp. 22 Dutch guilders.

The title of Professor Wynkoop's study is taken from a passage in The Poet: "For the Universe has three children, born at one time, which reappear under different names in every system of thought, whether they be called cause, operation and effect; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto,-and Neptune; or theologically, the Father, the Spirit, and the Son; but which we will call here the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer. . . . These three are equal. Each is that which he is, essentially, and each of these has the power of the other latent in him and his own patent."

Shakespeare (the Knower), Bacon (the Doer), and Milton (the Sayer) exemplified for Emerson not only the three stages of the English Renaissance, but also the history of the world - the Greek (Classical), Christian (Romantic), and Modern (Reflective or Contemplative); or, theologically, Innocence, the Fall, and Redemption. These stages are duplicated in the life of each individual; "The boy is a Greek; the youth, Romantic; the adult, Reflective." The first period is marked by a fusion of thought and feeling; the second, by the conspicuous absence of such a fusion. In the third, the opposition of Classic and Romantic is resolved into a higher unity.

Shakespeare, with his unified and harmonious vision, represents the first period. He is both Father (the Creator) and Knower (the passive receiver of truth). Bacon, in whose worldly-wise Essays Emerson detected "A mean cunning like the hiss of a snake," exhibited the tension between the physical and the spiritual which marks the second period. In Professor Wynkoop's words, he "manifested not only the opposition of tendencies that were united in Shakespeare and Milton but also action that suggested the Doer and the 'Double Consciousness' accompanying the Fall that occurs on the second stage of moral and religious growth." Milton, in whom "inspiration" replaces the "intellect receptive" of the Knower and the "intellect constructive" of the Doer, reconciles and transcends both.

This is a careful and informative study. It is, however, rather oddly structured. The members of Emerson's universal trinity are, in theory, equal. Yet almost half of ThreeChildren deals with the first-born, Shakespeare; Bacon receives a scant twenty pages, Milton thirty. One also regrets the author's decision to exclude any consideration of the influence of Shakespeare, Bacon and Milton on Emerson's intellectual development.

A specialist in Elizabethan and Jacobeanliterature, Mr. Andrews is Instructor in English at Princeton University.