Part 24 (1/2)

I have begun with these questions because I sy 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 perforht into histhe _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 assue of Shakespeare's theatre and audience, however trivial it may appear, , the 'soul'

of a play or a scene If our own souls were capacious and vivid enough, every atoain on the er of devotion to such knowledge lies h toilsohtful, is difficult; and we iven passage Shakespeare has used what he found in his authority; and we excuse ourselves fro why he used it and what hethat would please his audience; and we dis that perhaps it also pleased _hie 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 le and simple Such errors provoke the man who reads his Shakespeare poetically, and ht not to fall into thee that er 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

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Shakespeare, we knoas 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 lie, the author of reat 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 reat 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 ly, 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 une for the latter It was for the latter that Shakespeare reatly admired and loved him, was still of opinion that he condescended to his audience[1]

So far we seeround; and yet even here there is soine 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 coentlemen, 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 audiencesonly 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 enerally, 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 e should despise, but appears also to have admired e admire, and to have tolerated more poetry than s have formed the majority of the 'public'

audience or have been omnipotent in their theatre, when it was possible for dras 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 interuished the more popular audience, and the ree 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; s, ballads, jokes, dances, and clownage in general; and, lastly, target-fighting and battles[2]

We eneral ter that he neither resisted the wishes of his audience nor gratified them without reserve He accepted the type of dra its fundamental character And in the saave the audience what it wanted, but in doing so gave it what it never dreah ers in _Hamlet_ and the old countryman in _Antony and Cleopatra_ It liked a 'druot _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 iine 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 conde to the _Tempest_ and the _Winter's Tale_ when, a few years after the probable date of their appearance, he spoke of writers who ' 'tales, te in 'a servant-monster' or 'a nest of antiques' Caliban was a 'ape at monsters; and so, it appears, that wonderful creation was to Jonson sos, 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 hiet 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 fulainst Caliban, he s

But my present subject is rather the tastes of the audience than Shakespeare's way of ive two illustrations of them which may have some novelty His public, in the first place, dearly loved to see soldiers, coe 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 coe directions (which may be defective, but cannot well be redundant) that in this one play there were represented a pitched battle of two ar-ladders, two street-scuffles, four single coenuine play of Shakespeare's, I suppose, is soto end; and we kno in _Henry V_ he la four or five ht ill-disposed in brawl ridiculous

Still he does show them; and his serious dramas contain such a profusion of coht noould dreas perhaps in the English history-plays, and we find them in abundance there: but not there alone The last Act in _Julius Caesar_, _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 _Hae[4] At worst there can be street-brawls and single fights, as in _Ro Shakespeare we scarcely realise howhim 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 treative a picture of thole ared, but ht, and rush off again; and this pair is succeeded by a second, and perhaps by a third This hurried series of single coave soes and confusion of a battle Our tendency, on the other hand, is to contrive one spectacle with scenic effects, or even to exhibit one nificent 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 re-ht But the Elizabethan public went to see perforo to see cricket or footballwhich at other tie of the ht, 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 si his audience

Our second illustration concerns the popular appetite for s and dances[6] was censured as a corrupt gratification of this appetite And so it hen the songs and dances were excessive in nu 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, weactor in the cos and dances, the musicians, at least in some plays, perfor certain speeches by low music--a practice which in some performances of Shakespeare now has becohts, and (to a slight extent) of Shakespeare It seeht_ lowlines ('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 fro 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 ine a dead march, two other hteen alarums; and there are besides five directions for drus, 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 dru Lear_, and about twenty-five in _Macbeth_, a short play in which hautboys seem to have been unusually favoured[7] It is evident that the audience loved these sounds, which, froes of special kinds, seem to have been intended chiefly to stirandeur or of awe

But this is not all Such purposes were also served by noises not musical Four times in _Macbeth_, when the Witches appear, thunder is heard It thunders and lightens at intervals through the storhts within them, walk the streets of Ro which appalled Macbeth is repeated thrice at intervals while Lady Macbeth in vain endeavours to calm him, and five tiate has hardly been opened and the ins its hideous alaru excitement in the brawl that ruins Cassio, and its effect is manifest in Othello's immediate order, 'Silence that dreadful bell' I will add but one instance more In the days ofchariot-races, railway accidents, or the infernal regions, on the stage, it loved few things better than the explosion of fire-arms; and its favourite weapon was the pistol The Elizabethans had the same fancy for fire-arms, only they preferred cannon Shakespeare's theatre was burnt down in 1613 at a perforined, by a Providence which shared his opinion of the dra the play flew to the thatch of the roof and set it ablaze In _Haave the public plenty that they could not understand, but he made it up to them in explosions While Ha for the Ghost, a flourish is heard, and then the roar of cannon It is the custo drinks -scene at the end he proposes to drink one for every hit scored by his beloved nephew; and the first hit is duly honoured by the cannon Unexpected events prevented the celebration of the second, but the audience lost nothing by that While Ha, a sudden explosion is heard

Fortinbras is coh, the very last words of the play are, 'Go, bid the soldiers shoot,' and the very last sound of the performance is a peal of ordnance Into this most mysterious and inward of his works, it would see, as if in derision of his cultured critics, well-nigh every stimulant of popular excitement he could collect: 'carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts'; five deaths on the open stage, three appearances of a ghost, two of a rave at a funeral, the skulls and bones of the dead, a clown bandying jests with a prince, songs at once indecent and pathetic, -match, then a litter of corpses, and explosions in the first Act and explosions in the last And yet out of this sensational material--not in spite of it, but out of it--he made the most mysterious and inward of his drahts beyond the reaches of our souls; and he knew that the very audience that rejoiced in ghosts and explosions would listen, even while it aiting for the ghost, to that which the explosion had suggested,--a general disquisition, twenty-five lines long, on the manner in which one defect e harmony of discords, surely unexalance the essence of Elizabethan drama, of its poet, and of its audience

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We have been occupied so far with characteristics of the drama which reflect the more distinctively popular tastes objected to by critics like Jonson We ements common to all public theatres, whether the play performed were Jonson's or Shakespeare's; and in the first instance to a characteristic common to the public and private theatres alike

As everyone knows, the fee-plays were taken by boys, youths, orsometiarded this custom almost entirely from the point of view of decorum and morality And as to morality, no one, I believe, who examines the evidence, especially as it concerns the state of things that followed the introduction of actresses at the Restoration, will be very ready to dissent from their opinion But it is often assumed as a matter beyond dispute that, on the side of dramatic effect, the Elizabethan practice was extreht absurd This idea appears to erated Our practice ht_ to be much better; but that, on the whole, it is decidedly so, or that the old custo absurd about it, there seems no reason to believe In the first place, experience in private and semi-private performances shows that female parts may be excellently acted by youths or men, and that the most obvious drawback, that of the adult ht anticipate For a ination in the audience; but there is no more radical error than to suppose that an audience finds this irksoination at one point quickens it at other points, and so is a positive gain And we have further to remember that the Elizabethan actor of female parts was no amateur, but a professional as carefully trained as an actress nohile drae over the actress, that he was regarded simply as a player, and not also as a woman with an attractive or unattractive person[8]

In the second place, if the current ideas on this subject were true, there would be, it seems to me, more evidence of their truth We should find, for example, that when first the new fashi+on careat improvement on the old But the traces of such an opinion appear very scanty and doubtful, while it is certain that one of the few actors who after the Restoration still played fereat applause Again, if these parts in Shakespeare's day were very inadequately performed, would not the effect of that fact be distinctly visible in the plays themselves?

The roles in question would be less important in Shakespeare's dramas, for example, than in dramas of later times: but I do not see that they are Besides, in the Shakespearean play itself the female parts would be much less important than the edies and histories, it is true, the ier measure to men than to women But that is because the action in such plays is laid in the sphere of public life; and in cases where, in spite of this, the heroine is as prominent as the hero, her part--the part of Juliet, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth--certainly requires as good acting as his As to the comedies, if we ask ourselves who are the central or the ures in them, we shall find that we pronounce a woman's name at least as often as a man's I understate the case Of Shakespeare's mature comedies the _Merchant of Venice_, I believe, is the only one where this name would unquestionably be a man's, and in three of the last five it would alen's, Hermione's How shall we reconcile with these facts the idea that in his day the female parts were, on the whole, much less adequately played than the male? And finally, if the dramatists themselves believed this, why do we not find frequent indications of the belief in their prologues, epilogues, prefaces, and plays?[9]

We must conclude, it would seem, that the absence of actresses froh at first it reat difference to the dramas themselves

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