[1] This, one may suspect, was also the position of Webster, who
praises Shakespeare, but groups him with Dekker and Heywood, and
mentions him after Chapman, Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher
(Preface to the _White Devil_).
[2] I am obliged to speak summarily. Some of these things declined in
popularity as time went on.
[3] The examples just cited show his method at its best, and it would
be easy to mention others far less satisfactory. Nor do I doubt that
his plays would be much more free from blemishes of various kinds if
his audience had added to their virtues greater cultivation. On the
other hand the question whether, or how far, he knowingly 'wrote down
to' his audience, in the sense of giving it what he despised, seems
to me very difficult, if not impossible, to answer: and I may mention
some causes of this difficulty.
(1) There is no general presumption against interpolations in an
Elizabethan drama published piratically or after the author's death.
We have, further, positive grounds of the strongest kind for
believing that 'Shakespeare's plays' contain a good deal that
Shakespeare never wrote. We cannot therefore simply take it for
granted that he wrote every silly or offensive thing that we find in
the volume; and least of all should we do this when the passage is
more or less irrelevant and particularly easy to excise. I do not say
that these considerations have great importance here, but they have
some; and readers of Shakespeare, and even some scholars, constantly
tend to forget them, and to regard the texts as if they had been
published by himself, or by scrupulously careful men of letters
immediately after his death.
(2) We must never take for granted that what seems to us feeble or
bad seemed so to Shakespeare. Evidently he was amused by puns and
quips and verbal ingenuities in which most of us find little
entertainment. Gross jokes, scarcely redeemed in our eyes by their
humour, may have diverted him. He sometimes writes, and clearly in
good faith, what seems to us bombastic or 'conceited.' So far as this
was the case he was not writing down to his audience. He shared its
tastes, or the tastes of some section of it. So it may have been,
again, with such a blot as the blinding of Gloucester on the open
stage.
(3) Jonson defied his audience, yet he wrote a good deal that we
think bad. In the same way certain of Shakespeare's faults _cannot_
be due to condescension to his audience: _e.g._ the obscurities and
distortions of language not infrequent in his later plays. And this
may be so with some faults which have the appearance of arising from
that condescension.
(4) Other defects again he might have deliberately defended; _e.g._
the highly improbable conclusions and the distressing mis-marriages
of some of the comedies. 'It is of the essence of romantic comedy,'
he might have said, 'to treat such things with indifference. There is
a convention that you should take the characters with some degree of
seriousness while they are in difficulties, and should cease to do so
when they are to be delivered from them.' Do not we ourselves adopt
this point of view to some extent when we go to the theatre now?
I added this note after reading Mr. Bridges's very interesting and
original contribution to the Stratford Town edition of Shakespeare
(vol x.). I disagree with some of Mr. Bridges's remarks, and am not
always repelled by things that he dislikes. But this brief note is
not, of course, meant for an answer to his paper; it merely suggests
reasons for at least diminishing the proportion of defect
attributable to a conscious sacrifice of art to the tastes of the
audience.
[4] To us their first appearance is of interest chiefly because it
introduces the soliloquy 'How all occasions.' But, it is amusing to
notice, the Folio, which probably represents the acting version in
1623, omits the soliloquy but retains the marching soldiers.
[5] I do not refer to the Globe.
[6] The latter, no doubt, accompanied by the band, except when the
clown played the tabor while he danced alone.
[7] This may possibly be one of the signs that _Macbeth_ was altered
after Shakespeare's retirement or death.
[8] Surely every company that plays Shakespeare should include a boy.
There would then be no excuse for giving to a woman such parts as
Ariel and Brutus's boy Lucius.
[9] This question will not be answered by the citation of one famous
speech of Cleopatra's--a speech, too, which is strictly in character.
But, as to this matter and the other considerations put forward
above, I must add that, while my impression is that what has been
said of Shakespeare holds of most of the contemporary dramatists, I
have not verified it by a research. A student looking for a subject
for his thesis might well undertake such a research.
[10] When the lecture was given (in 1902) I went more fully into
details, having arrived at certain conclusions mainly by an
examination of Elizabethan dramas. I suppress them here because I
have been unable to study all that has since been written on the
Elizabethan stage. The reader who is interested in the subject should
refer in the first instance to an excellent article by Mr. Archer in
the _Quarterly Review_ for April, 1908.
[11] This is a description of a public theatre. A private one, it
will be remembered, had seats in the area (there called the pit), was
completely roofed, and could be darkened.
[12] 'The doors are open, and the surfeited grooms Do mock their
charge with snores,' says Lady Macbeth on the stage below; and no
doubt the tiring-house doors _were_ open.
[13] This view, into the grounds of which I cannot go, implies that
Juliet's bedroom was, in one scene, the upper stage, and, in another,
the back stage; but the Elizabethans, I believe, would make no
difficulty about that.
[14] Perhaps. It seems necessary to suppose that the sides of the
backstage, as well as its front, could be open; otherwise many of the
spectators could not have seen what took place there. But it is not
_necessary_, so far as I remember, to suppose that the sides could be
closed by curtains. The Elizabethans probably would not have been
troubled by seeing dead bodies get up and go into the tiring-house
when a play or even a scene was over.
[15] Where this contrivance was used at all it probably only
announced the general place of the action throughout the play: _e.g._
_Denmark_, or, a little more fully, _Verona_, _Mantua_.
[16] It is possibly significant that _Macbeth_ and the _Tempest_,
plays containing more 'shews' than most, are exceptionally short.
[17] It suffices for this rough experiment to read a column in an
edition like the Globe, and then to multiply the time taken by the
number of columns in the play.
[18] I do not know whether the average size of our theatres differs
much from that of the Elizabethan. The diameter of the area at the
_Fortune_ and the _Globe_ seems to have been fifty feet.
[19] I mean by a scene a section of a play before and after which the
stage is unoccupied. Most editions of Shakespeare are faulty in the
division of scenes (see _Shakespearean Tragedy_, p. 451).
[20] So it very nearly does in some Restoration comedies. In the _Way
of the World_ the scenery is changed only twice in the five acts,
though there are more than five scenes.
[21] The 'back' stage, which had curtains, must, I suppose, have been
too small to accommodate the number of persons commonly present,
alive or dead, at the close of a tragedy. I do not know if any recent
writer has raised and discussed the questions how often the back
stage is used in the last scene of an Elizabethan play, and, again,
whether it is often employed at all in order to produce, by the
closing of the curtains, the kind of effect referred to in the
paragraph above. Perhaps the fact that the curtains had to be closed
by an actor, within them or without, made this effect impossible. Or
perhaps it was not desired. In Shakespeare's tragedies, if my memory
serves me, the only sudden or startling appeals of an outward kind
(apart, of course, from actions) are those produced by supernatural
appearances and disappearances, as in _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_. These,
we have seen, were usually managed by means of the trap-door, which,
it would seem from some passages, must have been rather large. These
matters deserve investigation if they have not already received it.
[22] I do not refer to such deliberate and sustained effort as a
reader may sometimes make. It is not commonly realised that
continuous attention to any imaginative or intellectual matter,
however enjoyable, involves considerable strain. If at a lecture or
sermon a careless person makes himself observable in arriving late or
leaving early, the eyes of half the audience will turn to him and
follow him. And the reason is not always that the speaker bores them;
it is that involuntarily they seek relief from this strain. The same
thing may be seen in the concert-room or theatre, but very much less
at a panorama, because the mere use of the eyes, even when
continuous, is comparatively easy.
[23] I am not referring here, or elsewhere, to such a moderate use of
scenery in Shakespearean performances as most of our actor-managers
(_e.g._ Mr. Benson) now adopt. I regret it in so far as it involves a
curtailing of the play; but I do not think it withdraws from the play
any attention that is of value, and for some of the audience it
probably heightens the dramatic effect. Still, in my belief, it would
be desirable to decrease it, because the less there is of it, the
more is good acting necessary, and the more of the play itself can be
acted. Some use of scenery, with its consequences to the play, must
unquestionably be accepted as the rule, but I would add that it ought
always to be possible for us to see performances, such as we owed to
Mr. Poel, nearer to those of Shakespeare's time.
[24] When, in the time of Malone and Steevens, the question was
debated whether Shakespeare's stage had scenery, it was argued that
it must have had it, because otherwise the contrast between the words
and the visible stage in the passage referred to would have been
hopelessly ludicrous.
[25] 'Enter invisible' (a common stage-direction) means 'Enter in the
dress which means to the audience that you are invisible.'
[26] Probably he never needed to think of the audience, but wrote
what pleased his own imagination, which, like theirs, was not only
dramatic but, in the best sense, theatrical.
[27] Their abundance in _Hamlet_ results partly from the character of
the hero. They helped, however, to make that play too long; and the
omission of 'How all occasions' from the Folio doubtless means that
the company cut this soliloquy (whether they did so in the author's
life-time we cannot tell). It may be noticed that, where a play shows
clear signs of revision by Shakespeare himself, we rarely find a
disposition to shorten long poetical speeches.
In some of these lectures[1]--for the duties and pleasures that have
fallen to me as Professor of Poetry are now to end--I may have betrayed
a certain propensity to philosophise. But I should ask pardon for this
only if I believed it to intrude where it has no place, in the
imaginative perception of poetry. Philosophy has long been at home in
this University; in the remarkable development of English philosophical
thought during the last five-and-thirty years Oxford has played a
leading part; and I hope the time will never come when a son of hers
will need to apologise to his brethren for talking philosophy. Besides,
though I owe her gratitude for many gifts, and most for the friendships
she gave me, her best intellectual gift was the conviction that what
imagination loved as poetry reason might love as philosophy, and that in
the end these are two ways of saying the same thing. And, finally, I
hoped, by dwelling in these lectures (for instance, with reference to
the poets of Wordsworth's time) on the connection of poetry with the
wider life around it, to correct an impression which my opening lecture
seems here and there to have left. Not that I can withdraw or even
modify the view put forward then. So far as any single function of
spiritual life can be said to have an intrinsic value, poetry, it seems
to me, possesses it just as other functions do, and it is in each case
irreplaceable. And further, it seems to me, poetry attains its own aim,
and in doing so makes its contribution to the whole, most surely and
fully when it seeks its own end without attempting to reach those of
co-ordinate functions, such as the attainment of philosophic truth or
the furtherance of moral progress. But then I believe this because I
also believe that the unity of human nature in its diverse activities is
so intimate and pervasive that no influence can affect any one of them
alone, and that no one of them can operate or change without
transmitting its influence to the rest. If I may use the language of
paradox I would say that the pursuit of poetry for its own sake is the
pursuit both of truth and of goodness. Devotion to it is devotion to
'the good cause of the world'; and wherever the imagination is
satisfied, there, if we had a knowledge we have not, we should discover
no idle fancy but the image of a truth.