Imagining Shakespeare's Original Audience, 1660-2000

Groundlings, Gallants, Grocers

Bettina Boecker

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137379955
• eBook ISBN: 9781137379962
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Comparatively little is known about Shakespeare's first audiences. This study argues that the Elizabethan audience is an essential part of Shakespeare as a site of cultural meaning, and that the way criticism thinks of early modern theatregoers is directly related to the way it thinks of, and uses, the Bard himself.

1

Shakespeare’s Elizabethan Audience in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-century Shakespeare Criticism

A bare 50 years lie between Shakespeare’s death in 1616 and the re-opening of the theatres after the Civil War. Nevertheless, a feeling of dissociation and historical distance is a leitmotif of post-Restoration discourses on Shakespeare and his age. The Civil War marked a decisive watershed not only in political, but also in cultural terms, and Shakespeare’s times were regarded as belonging to another era altogether, one which had practically no continuities with the present.¹ That this present constituted an advance over the unenlightened and uncultivated past was a view widely held. In the field of culture and the arts, this perceived progress manifested itself primarily in a new ‘refinement’. Where literature, more particularly the drama was concerned, many considered refinement a matter of adherence to the neoclassicist poetics imported from France. Meeting these new, or rather re-discovered, requirements concerning content and form was taken for a sign of cultivation, a marker both of the quality of the literary text and of the education of its author. Given these parameters, Shakespeare’s disregard for neoclassicist rules posed a considerable problem for, in effect, a newly refined England was in the process of elevating an often patently unrefined author to the status of a national icon.

Because of the plays’ presence on the Restoration stage and their enduring popularity, Shakespeare stood not so much for a new beginning as for historical continuity. But as both the period’s editions and its adaptations of Shakespeare’s works make clear, this persistence came at the price of often rather substantial changes to the received text. From the turn of the seventeenth century onwards, such attempts to align Shakespeare with current moral values and standards of taste were no longer restricted to the plays, but began to extend to the author himself, the man about to become the national poet. Correcting the perceived faults in Shakespeare’s works was not sufficient: the age also felt a need to explain them, and to explain them in a manner which deflected all blame from the Bard himself. For Shakespeare’s apologists, the commercial nature of the early modern stage offered what seemed the best of all possible excuses: as Shakespearean drama was a literary commodity available to everyone able to pay the comparably small entrance fee to the theatres, it seemed self-evident that this forced the Bard to cater to the likes and dislikes of his paying customers. This notion is integral to the so-called ‘historical apology’ for Shakespeare, that is the line of reasoning which explains the ‘weaknesses’ of his plays as resulting from his historical situation. Shakespeare’s Elizabethan audience, as imagined by eighteenth-century critics, is the incarnation of this apology. It embodies everything about his age that post-Restoration England deemed objectionable. Pope’s ‘Preface of the Editor to the Works of Shakespeare’ is a locus classicus for this argument:

It must be allowed that Stage-Poetry of all other is more particularly levell’d to please the Populace, and its success more immediately dependent upon the Common Suffrage. One cannot therefore wonder, if Shakespeare, having at his first appearance no other aim in his writings than to procure a subsistence, directed his endeavours solely to hit the taste and humour that then prevailed.²

Material need forces Shakespeare to cater to the ‘common suffrage’, a circumstance which, according to Pope, has an extremely negative impact on his work. This is not least because Shakespeare’s audience was primarily composed, or so Pope claims, of ‘the meaner sort of people’ – ‘tradesmen’, ‘mechanicks’, in short: the Elizabethan lower classes.³ Pope’s historical apology clearly includes a sociological one. It is not only the rude, semi-civilised age that is to blame for Shakespeare’s shortcomings, it is a specific stratum of the Elizabethan population that keeps him from realising his full artistic potential. Nevertheless, the Bard is not entirely determined by his audience. Almost involuntarily, his genius keeps breaking through the maze of contemporary ideas of good drama. Even in the worst parts of his plays, Pope observes:

[...] our Author’s Wit buoys up, and is borne above his subject: his genius in those low parts is like some Prince of a Romance in disguise of a Shepherd or peasant: a certain Greatness and Spirit now and then break out, which manifests his higher extraction and qualities.⁴

That the dramatist’s genius (the term ‘prince’ is yet another emphatic reminder that Shakespeare’s better authorial self has nothing to do with the lower classes which allegedly populated his theatre) flashes up in such passages, but effectively fails to prevail against his age’s errors in taste, Pope considers a result of the lack of sophistication even in the age’s elites: ‘[n]ot only the common audience had no notion of the rules of writing, but few even of the better sort piqu’d themselves upon any great degree of knowledge or nicety that way.’⁵ Nevertheless, he is convinced that Shakespeare’s plays improve from the moment he gains the court’s protection.⁶ Literary quality is hence both instrumental to and a result of social differentiation: while the Elizabethan populace is blamed for those parts of the plays that Pope deems condemnable, the elements more in keeping with Augustan standards of taste testify to the influence of early modern elites. By allotting the ‘better’ Shakespeare to the upper echelons of society, Pope distances the Bard from the dangerously egalitarian world of the early modern theatre. This dissociation from the stage is then cemented by first differentiating between the poet and the dramatist, then constructing a well-neigh insurmountable opposition between the two. Shakespeare’s faults, Pope maintains, ‘are less to be ascribed to his wrong judgment as a Poet, than to his right judgment as a player.’⁷ The ‘bad’, ‘other’ Shakespeare is equated with the world of demand-driven theatre.

In the Dunciad, Pope presents a similarly negative view of the contemporary stage. Theobald ‘and others of equal genius’ are accused of having brought the entertainments of Bartholomew Fair, ‘the lowest diversions of the rabble in Smithfield’, to the London Theatres, ‘to be the reigning Pleasures of the Court and Town.’⁸ The detrimental influence of this particular subsection of the populace emerges as a historical constant: both in the theatres of Pope’s own day and age and in those of Shakespeare’s times, it is the lower classes who are effectively to blame for the desolate state of the stage.⁹ Pope’s construction of a Shakespeare whose faults can be put down to the influence of the early modern proletariat excludes the Elizabethan lower classes, just like their Augustan counterparts, from a literary culture that deserves its name.

Faults and beauties

The list of faults for which Shakespeare’s original audiences were held responsible is long, and testifies to the neoclassicist influence on the period’s Shakespeare criticism. His disregard for the unities, penchant for the tragicomical, lack of familiarity with classical authors, breaches of decorum, puns and apparent belief in (or at least representation of) the supernatural were all considered incompatible with the cultural standards of post-Restoration England. Their coexistence with the ‘beauties’ created a major difficulty for an overall evaluation of the Bard, and for assigning him a place in the cultural hierarchy of the new era. Dryden’s lamentations to this effect are representative for a whole generation of critics: ‘He [Shakespeare] is the very Janus of poets; he wears almost everywhere two faces; and you have scarce begun to admire the one, e’re you despise the other.’¹⁰

The historical apology provided a way of handling this polarity. As the embodiment of Shakespeare’s barbarous age, there is no ‘fault’ that the Elizabethan audience is not held responsible for and, like Pope, many critics make a point of not blaming the age as a whole, but rather the particular section of society that they assumed Shakespeare was writing for. Thomas Seward, in his preface to the 1750 edition of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays, claims:

The Taste of [the] Age called aloud for the assistance of Ghosts and Sorcery to heighten the Horror of Tragedy; this Horror Beaumont and Fletcher had never felt, never heard of but with Contempt, and consequently they had no Arche-types in their own Breasts of what they were called to describe. Whereas Shakespeare from his low education had believ’d and felt all the Horrors he painted, for tho’ the Universities and Inns of Court were in some degree freed from these Dreams of Superstition, the banks of the Avon were haunted on every Side.¹¹

While Beaumont’s and Fletcher’s education enables them to transcend their historical situation and become beacons of progress, Shakespeare shares the mind-set of the unenlightened masses, shackled by the intellectual limitations of his period. On the whole, such content-related criticism is much rarer, however, than strictures against the plays’ form, with objections against the various types of verbal exuberance being particularly widespread. Rhymes and puns were the primary targets, and almost unanimously condemned. On the Duke’s rhymed summary of his plot against Angelo in Measure for Measure (III.1.481–502), Edward Capell writes:

Speeches, and parts of speeches, in rime (some in measures properly lyrical, like the sententious one here) are found in all parts of Shakespeare; and should be looked upon as the time’s vices, sacrifices of judgement to profit, but not always unwilling ones; for such speeches are not of ill effect in all places, of which the present is an instance. But his lovers have cause to wish, notwithstanding, that he had less consider’d his audiences and comply’d less with their taste, for it happens but too often that constraints of rime or of measure operate badly on his expression, causing breaches of grammar, strange and scarce allowable ellipsis’s, and usage of terms improper.¹²

As with Pope several decades earlier, the Elizabethan audience embodies the negative influence of his age on Shakespeare, while the commercial nature of the early modern theatre is presented as the main reason why its demands held such sway over the dramatist. The same pattern can be observed, again and again, when it comes to Shakespeare’s puns: in the criticisms of Dryden (1672)¹³, Gould (1685)¹⁴, Echard (1694)¹⁵, Rowe (1709)¹⁶, Stubbes (1736)¹⁷ and Grey (1754)¹⁸. ‘A quibble, poor and barren as it is, gave him such delight, that he was content to purchase it by the sacrifice of reason, propriety, and truth. A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it’¹⁹, sighs Johnson in 1765. Theobald, writing in 1726, holds that ‘flowers of Rhetorick’ were thrown in ‘ad captandum populum; or, to use the Poet’s own Phrase, to set on some Quantity of barren Spectators to laugh at.’²⁰ Again, those to blame for Shakespeare’s lapses are described in socially definite terms: populus clearly refers not to the people in the sense of the totality of the population, but to the lower classes.

On the other side of the social spectrum, James I was sometimes blamed for Shakespeare’s puns and quibbles, notably by Joseph Addison in the Spectator, who claims that James ‘made very few Bishops or Privy-Counsellors that had not some time or other signalised themselves by a Clinch, or a Conundrum.’²¹ Although he is well aware that few classical writers distinguish between ‘puns’ and ‘true wit’ (only Quintilianus and Longinus are credited with doing so), Addison nevertheless tasks modern authors with drawing this fine but decisive line. Unable to point to the authority of the classics in this particular case, he offers a more contractual model of why an abstention from punning should be considered binding: ‘[w]hen [the differentiation between puns and true wit] was settled, it was very natural for all Men of Sense to agree to it.’²² A manifestation of cultured taste and enlightenment values, the preference for wit over puns, arbitrary as it may seem in some cases, is both natural and sensible. An agreement on how to distinguish the one from the other, Addison suggests, is therefore easy to reach: both ‘nature’ and ‘sense’ are elevated to the status of objective categories, as the authority of natural reason supplements, and ultimately supersedes, the authority of classical writers.

Like his puns and quibbles, Shakespeare’s violations of the laws of probability are derided as concessions to the demands of his unrefined Elizabethan audience. Charles Gildon, for example, puts them down to ‘the Ignorant Mode of the Age in which he [Shakespeare] liv’d’,²³ though he accedes that Shakespeare faced a dilemma. While he recognised that the dramatic conventions of his own day and age were inadequate (as proof, Gildon cites the respective chorus’s references to the frequent changes of place in Pericles and the imperfect depiction of the battle scenes in Henry V), he was unaware of any alternative. Had he adhered to the neoclassical rules, Gildon claims, Shakespeare’s plays would be ‘far more noble’.²⁴ This verdict points towards the much-discussed question of Shakespeare’s (classical) learning. If and to what extent the Bard was familiar with the authors of Ancient Greece and Rome was one of the most hotly debated issues in eighteenth-century Shakespeare criticism. His (albeit rather loose) adherence to the unities of time, place and plot in The Tempest and The Merry Wives of Windsor seemed to suggest that he was aware of Aristotle’s corresponding rule. But if this was the case, the fact that he disregarded it in his other plays required an explanation – a considerable difficulty, which was usually resolved by citing the likes and dislikes of the Elizabethan audience: ‘[Shakespeare’s] Merry Wives of Windsor demonstrates how much he acted against his better judgement, when he stretched his wings into the extravagance of popular prepossessions.’²⁵ That this argument was usually constructed with its end (to rescue Shak...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Those Nut-cracking Elizabethans
• 1 Shakespeare’s Elizabethan Audience in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-century Shakespeare Criticism
• 2 ‘No man of genius ever wrote for the mob’: Shakespeare’s Elizabethan Audience and Romantic Shakespeare Criticism
• 3 Enter the Groundlings
• 4 Childish and Primitive: Shakespeare’s Elizabethan Audience and the Turn-of-the-century Theatrical Avant-garde
• 5 The Rediscovery of the Judicious Few
• 6 Neo-Elizabethanism
• 7 Shakespeare’s Elizabethan Audience in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century
• Appendix: The Grocer’s Wife
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index