Classic Poem

Why should we concern ourselves with Shakespeare's theatre and audience?
The vast majority of his readers since the Restoration have known
nothing about them, and have enjoyed his plays enormously. And if they
have enjoyed without fully understanding, it was for want of imagination
and of knowledge of human nature, and not from ignorance of the
conditions under which his plays were produced. At any rate, such
ignorance does not exclude us from the soul of Shakespearean drama,
any more than from the soul of Homeric epic or Athenian tragedy; and it
is the soul that counts and endures. For the rest, we all know that
Shakespeare's time was rough, indecorous, and inexpert in regard to
machinery; and so we are prepared for coarse speech and primitive
stage-arrangements, and we make allowance for them without thinking
about the matter. Antiquarians may naturally wish to know more; but what
more is needed for intelligent enjoyment of the plays?

I have begun with these questions because I sympathise with their
spirit. Everything I am going to speak of in this lecture is
comparatively unimportant for the appreciation of that which is most
vital in Shakespeare; and if I were allowed my choice between an hour's
inspection of a performance at the Globe and a glimpse straight into his
mind when he was planning the Tempest, I should not hesitate which to
choose. Nevertheless, to say nothing of the intrinsic interest of
antiquarian knowledge, we cannot make a clear division between the soul
and body, or the eternal and the perishable, in works of art. Nor can we
lay the finger on a line which separates that which has poetic interest
from that which has none. Nor yet can we assume that any knowledge of
Shakespeare's theatre and audience, however trivial it may appear, may
not help us to appreciate, or save us from misapprehending, the 'soul'
of a play or a scene. If our own souls were capacious and vivid enough,
every atom of information on these subjects, or again on the material he
used in composing, would so assist us. The danger of devotion to such
knowledge lies merely in our weakness. Research, though toilsome, is
easy; imaginative vision, though delightful, is difficult; and we may be
tempted to prefer the first. Or we note that in a given passage
Shakespeare has used what he found in his authority; and we excuse
ourselves from asking why he used it and what he made of it. Or we see
that he has done something that would please his audience; and we
dismiss it as accounted for, forgetting that perhaps it also pleased
him, and that we have to account for that. Or knowledge of his stage
shows us the stage-convenience of a scene; and we say that the scene was
due to stage-convenience, as if the cause of a thing must needs be
single and simple. Such errors provoke the man who reads his Shakespeare
poetically, and make him blaspheme our knowledge. But we ought not to
fall into them; and we cannot reject any knowledge that may help us into
Shakespeare's mind because of the danger it brings.

I cannot attempt to describe Shakespeare's theatre and audience, and
much less to discuss the evidence on which a description must be based,
or the difficult problems it raises. I must confine myself for the most
part to a few points which are not always fully realised, or on which
there is a risk of misapprehension.


1.

Shakespeare, we know, was a popular playwright. I mean not only that
many of his plays were favourites in his day, but that he wrote, mainly
at least, for the more popular kind of audience, and that, within
certain limits, he conformed to its tastes. He was not, to our
knowledge, the author of masques composed for performance at Court or in
a great mansion, or of dramas intended for a University or one of the
Inns of Court; and though his company for some time played at the
Blackfriars, we may safely assume that the great majority of his works
were meant primarily for a common or 'public' theatre like the Globe.
The broad distinction between a 'private' and a 'public' theatre is
familiar, and I need only remind you that at the former, which was
smaller, provided seats even in the area, and was nowhere open to the
weather, the audience was more select. Accordingly, dramatists who
express their contempt for the audience, and their disapproval of those
who consult its tastes, often discriminate between the audiences at the
private and public theatres, and reserve their unmeasured language for
the latter. It was for the latter that Shakespeare mainly wrote; and it
is pretty clear that Jonson, who greatly admired and loved him, was
still of opinion that he condescended to his audience.

So far we seem to be on safe ground; and yet even here there is some
risk of mistake. We are not to imagine that the audience at a private
theatre (say the Blackfriars) accepted Jonson's dramatic theories,
while the audience at the Globe rejected them; or that the one was
composed chiefly of cultured and 'judicious' gentlemen, and the other of
riotous and malodorous plebeians; and still less that Shakespeare tried
to please the latter section in preference to the former, and was
beloved by the one more than by the other. The two audiences must have
had the same general character, differing only in degree. Neither of
them accepted Jonson's theories, nor were the 'judicious' of one mind on
that subject. The same play was frequently offered to both. Both were
very mixed. The tastes to which objection was taken cannot have been
confined to the mob. From our knowledge of human nature generally, and
of the Elizabethan nobility and gentry in particular, we may be sure of
this; and Jonson himself implies it. Nor is it credible that an
appreciation of the best things was denied to the mob, which doubtless
loved what we should despise, but appears also to have admired what we
admire, and to have tolerated more poetry than most of us can stomach.
Neither can these groundlings have formed the majority of the 'public'
audience or have been omnipotent in their theatre, when it was possible
for dramatists (Shakespeare included) to say such rude things of them to
their faces. We must not delude ourselves as to these matters; and in
particular we must realise that the mass of the audience in both kinds
of theatre must have been indifferent to the unities of time and place,
and more or less so to improbabilities and to decorum (at least as we
conceive it) both in manners and in speech; and that it must have liked
excitement, the open exhibition of violent and bloody deeds, and the
intermixture of seriousness and mirth. What distinguished the more
popular audience, and the more popular section in it, was a higher
degree of this indifference and this liking, and in addition a special
fondness for certain sources of inartistic joy. The most prominent of
these, perhaps, were noise; rant; mere bawdry; 'shews'; irrelevant
songs, ballads, jokes, dances, and clownage in general; and, lastly,
target-fighting and battles.

We may describe Shakespeare's practice in broad and general terms by
saying that he neither resisted the wishes of his audience nor gratified
them without reserve. He accepted the type of drama that he found, and
developed it without altering its fundamental character. And in the same
way, in particular matters, he gave the audience what it wanted, but in
doing so gave it what it never dreamed of. It liked tragedy to be
relieved by rough mirth, and it got the Grave-diggers in Hamlet and
the old countryman in Antony and Cleopatra. It liked a 'drum and
trumpet' history, and it got Henry V. It liked clowns or fools, and it
got Feste and the Fool in King Lear. Shakespeare's practice was by no
means always on this level, but this was its tendency; and I imagine
that (unless perhaps in early days) he knew clearly what he was doing,
did it deliberately, and, when he gave the audience poor stuff, would
not seriously have defended himself. Jonson, it would seem, did not
understand this position. A fool was a fool to him; and if a play could
be called a drum and trumpet history it was at once condemned in his
eyes. One can hardly doubt that he was alluding to the Tempest and the
Winter's Tale when, a few years after the probable date of their
appearance, he spoke of writers who 'make nature afraid in their plays,'
begetting 'tales, tempests, and such like drolleries,' and bringing in
'a servant-monster' or 'a nest of antiques.' Caliban was a 'monster,'
and the London public loved to gape at monsters; and so, it appears,
that wonderful creation was to Jonson something like the fat woman, or
the calf with five legs, that we pay a penny to see at a fair. In fact
(how could he fail to take the warning?) he saw Caliban with the eyes of
Trinculo and Stephano. 'A strange fish!' says Trinculo: 'were I in
England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday
fool there but would give a piece of silver.' 'If I can recover him,'
says Stephano, 'and keep him tame and get to Naples with him, he's a
present for any emperor that ever trod on neat's-leather.' Shakespeare
understood his monster otherwise; but, I fancy, when Jonson fulminated
at the Mermaid against Caliban, he smiled and said nothing.

But my present subject is rather the tastes of the audience than
Shakespeare's way of meeting them. Let me give two illustrations of
them which may have some novelty. His public, in the first place, dearly
loved to see soldiers, combats, and battles on the stage. They swarm in
some of the dramas a little earlier than Shakespeare's time, and the
cultured dramatists speak very contemptuously of these productions, if
not of Shakespeare's historical plays. We may take as an example the
First Part of Henry VI., a feeble piece, to which Shakespeare probably
contributed touches throughout, and perhaps one or two complete scenes.
It appears from the stage directions (which may be defective, but cannot
well be redundant) that in this one play there were represented a
pitched battle of two armies, an attack on a city wall with
scaling-ladders, two street-scuffles, four single combats, four
skirmishes, and seven excursions. No genuine play of Shakespeare's, I
suppose, is so military from beginning to end; and we know how in Henry
V. he laments that he must disgrace the name of Agincourt by showing
four or five men with vile and ragged foils

Right ill-disposed in brawl ridiculous.

Still he does show them; and his serious dramas contain such a profusion
of combats and battles as no playwright now would dream of exhibiting.
We expect these things perhaps in the English history-plays, and we
find them in abundance there: but not there alone. The last Act in
Julius Cæsar, Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, Macbeth, and
Cymbeline; the fourth Act of Antony and Cleopatra; the opening Acts
of Coriolanus,--these are all full of battle-scenes. If battle cannot
be shown, it can be described. If it cannot be described, still soldiers
can be shown, and twice in Hamlet Fortinbras and his army march upon
the stage. At worst there can be street-brawls and single fights, as
in Romeo and Juliet. In reading Shakespeare we scarcely realise how
much of this kind is exhibited. In seeing him acted we do not fully
realise it, for much of it is omitted. But beyond doubt it helped to
make him the most popular dramatist of his time.

If we examine Shakespeare's battles we shall observe a certain
peculiarity, which is connected with the nature of his theatre and also
explains the treatment of them in ours. In most cases he does not give a
picture of two whole armies engaged, but makes a pair of combatants rush
upon the stage, fight, and rush off again; and this pair is succeeded by
a second, and perhaps by a third. This hurried series of single combats
admitted of speech-making; perhaps it also gave some impression of the
changes and confusion of a battle. Our tendency, on the other hand, is
to contrive one spectacle with scenic effects, or even to exhibit one
magnificent tableau in which nobody says a word. And this plan, though
it has the advantage of getting rid of Shakespeare's poetry, is not
exactly dramatic. It is adopted chiefly because the taste of our public
is, or is supposed to be, less dramatic than spectacular, and because,
unlike the Elizabethans, we are able to gratify such a taste. But there
is another fact to be remembered here. Few playgoers now can appreciate
a fencing-match, and much fewer a broad-sword and target fight. But the
Elizabethan public went to see performances of this kind as we go to see
cricket or football matches. They might watch them in the very building
which at other times was used as a playhouse. They could judge of the
merit of the exhibition when Hotspur and Prince Henry fought, when
Macduff 'laid on,' or when Tybalt and Mercutio used their rapiers. And
this was probably another reason why Shakespeare's battles so often
consist of single combats, and why these scenes were beloved by the
simpler folk among his audience.

Our second illustration concerns the popular appetite for musical and
other sounds. The introduction of songs and dances was censured as a
corrupt gratification of this appetite. And so it was when the songs and
dances were excessive in number, irrelevant, or out of keeping with the
scene. I do not remember that in Shakespeare's plays this is ever the
case; but, in respect of songs, we may perhaps take Marston's Antonio
and Mellida as an instance of abuse. For in each of the two Parts of
that play there are directions for five songs; and, since not even the
first lines of these songs are printed, we must suppose that the leader
of the band, or the singing actor in the company, introduced whatever he
chose. In addition to songs and dances, the musicians, at least in some
plays, performed between the Acts; and the practice of accompanying
certain speeches by low music--a practice which in some performances of
Shakespeare now has become a pest--has the sanction of several
Elizabethan playwrights, and (to a slight extent) of Shakespeare. It
seems clear, for example, that in Twelfth Night low music was played
while the lovely opening lines ('That strain again') were being spoken,
and also during a part of the dialogue preceding the song 'Come away,
come away, death.' Some lines, too, of Lorenzo's famous speech about
music in the Merchant of Venice were probably accompanied; and there
is a still more conspicuous instance in the scene where Lear wakes from
his long sleep and sees Cordelia standing by his side.

But, beyond all this, if we attend to the stage-directions we shall
realise that in the serious plays of Shakespeare other musical sounds
were of frequent occurrence. Almost always the ceremonial entrance of a
royal person is marked by a 'flourish' or a 'sennet' on trumpets,
cornets, or hautboys; and wherever we have armies and battles we find
directions for drums, or for particular series of notes of trumpets or
cornets appropriate to particular military movements. In the First Part
of Henry VI., to take that early play again, we must imagine a dead
march, two other marches, three retreats, three sennets, seven
flourishes, eighteen alarums; and there are besides five directions for
drums, one for a horn, and five for soundings, of a kind not specified,
by trumpets. In the last three scenes of the first Act in
Coriolanus--scenes containing less than three hundred and fifty
lines--there are directions for a parley, a retreat, five flourishes,
and eight alarums, with three, less specific, for trumpets, and four for
drums. We find about twenty such directions in King Lear, and about
twenty-five in Macbeth, a short play in which hautboys seem to have
been unusually favoured. It is evident that the audience loved these
sounds, which, from their prevalence in passages of special kinds, seem
to have been intended chiefly to stimulate excitement, and sometimes to
heighten impressions of grandeur or of awe.

But this is not all. Such purposes were also served by noises not
musical. Four times in Macbeth, w