Shakespeare’s Elizabethan Audience in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century

  • Bettina Boecker
Chapter
Part of the Palgrave Shakespeare Studies book series (PASHST)

Abstract

As the preceding chapters have shown, critical commonplaces about Shakespeare’s supposedly lower class audience, particularly about the groundlings, reflect the class mentality that informed centuries of Shakespeare criticism. In the course of the twentieth century, this kind of thinking rapidly lost its social acceptability, a development which could not but affect the way in which critics interpreted what they knew, or thought they knew, about Renaissance theatregoers. In his 1949 study The Populace in Shakespeare, Brents Stirling stated: ‘During the recent past there has been such concern over social and political democracy and, simultaneously, such a growth of Shakespeare scholarship that a merging of the two currents has been inevitable.’1 This merging manifests itself not only in a growing number of studies on the representation of the populace in Shakespeare’s plays, but also, and especially, in the discourse on the Elizabethan audience. The American critic, Alfred Harbage, is a seminal figure. His 1941 monograph Shakespeare’s Audience is the first book devoted entirely to this topic, and remains a formative influence to this day. Although Harbage’s study clearly stands in the tradition of critics like Hazlitt or Ward, it marks a caesura in the discourse on early modern theatregoers. For the first time, their influence on Shakespearean drama is presented as thoroughly positive.

Keywords

Twentieth Century Public Theatre Globe Audience Cultural Icon American Critic 
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Notes

  1. 1.
    Brents Stirling, The Populace in Shakespeare, New York: Columbia University Press, 1949, 64.Google Scholar
  2. 2.
    Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare’s Audience, New York: Columbia University Press, 1941, 159.Google Scholar
  3. 6.
    Alfred Harbage, As They Liked It: An Essay on Shakespeare and Morality, New York: Columbia University Press, 1947, 3.Google Scholar
  4. 7.
    ‘Harbage’s view might be seen as influenced by democratic sentiments prominent in the war against fascism.’ (David Margolies, ‘Teaching the Handsaw to Fly: Shakespeare as a Hegemonic Instrument’, Graham Holderness (ed.), The Shakespeare Myth, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988, 42–53: 53).Google Scholar
  5. 8.
    Frances Perkins, ‘What Is Worth Working For in America?’, Robert P. Lane (ed.), Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work, 1941, New York: Columbia University Press, 1941,Google Scholar
  6. cited in Clarke A. Chambers, The New Deal at Home and Abroad, New York: Free Press Macmillan, 1965, 75–83: 77.Google Scholar
  7. 9.
    Andrew Adonis, Stephen Pollard, A Class Act: The Myth of Britain’s Classless Society, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1997, 28.Google Scholar
  8. 10.
    Cited in Nicholas Timmins, The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State, London: HarperCollins, 2001, 2nd edition, 92.Google Scholar
  9. 12.
    Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions, New York: Columbia University Press, 1952, 25.Google Scholar
  10. 13.
    Richard Wilson, Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority, New York: Harvester, 1993, 23.Google Scholar
  11. 20.
    Ann Jennalie Cook, ‘Audiences: Investigation, Interpretation, Invention’, John D. Cox, David Scott Kastan (eds.), A New History of Early English Drama, New York: Columbia University Press, 1997, 305–20: 316.Google Scholar
  12. 21.
    Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, Robert Schwarz (ed.), Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978, xvi. The German original (Shakespeare und die Tradition des Volkstheaters: Soziologie Dramaturgie — Gestaltung) was published in 1975.Google Scholar
  13. 22.
    Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985, 168 and passim.Google Scholar
  14. 23.
    Jean E. Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England, London: Routledge, 1994, 13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  15. 24.
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  16. 30.
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  17. 31.
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  18. 32.
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  19. 34.
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  20. 35.
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The great consensus?

  1. 39.
    Harbage is referring to S. L. Bethell, Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition, London: Staples Press, 1944. Just like Harbage, Bethell claims there is a nexus between Shakespeare’s popular audience and the particular qualities of his drama.Google Scholar
  2. 44.
    F. R. Leavis, ‘Joyce and “The Revolution of the Word”’, Scrutiny Vol. II No. 2, 1933, 193–200: 199.Google Scholar
  3. 45.
    Two examples may suffice here. Germaine Greer writes: ‘The playhouses [...] were [...] the only places where all the denizens of London, from the meanest pickpocket to the grandest functionary, could foregather and actually experience their membership of a community [my emphasis]. Even the largest churches did not afford the same spectacular possibilities, for the pulpit was raised above the congregation who stood all on one plane. In the theatre the audience could see itself as a tapestry of faces, surging below in the pit and rising on the tiers around the wooden walls, with the actor on his promontory, the projecting stage, at their mercy’ (Germaine Greer, Shakespeare, Oxford: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1986, 19). Even Stephen Greenblatt states: ‘The Shakespearean theatre depends upon a felt community.’ (Stephen Greenblatt, ‘The Circulation of Social Energy’, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, 1–20: 5.)Google Scholar
  4. 47.
    Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, 8.Google Scholar
  5. 48.
    Anthony B. Dawson, Paul Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England: A Collaborative Debate, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 89.Google Scholar
  6. 49.
    John Drakakis, ‘Theatre, Ideology and Institution: Shakespeare and the Roadsweepers’, Graham Holderness (ed.), The Shakespeare Myth, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988, 26–41: 35.Google Scholar
  7. 50.
    Gurr describes Harbage as ‘work[ing] in the 1930s and 1940s when the political climate encouraged him to identify Shakespeare as a truly “popular” playwright appealing to a whole and united nation’ (Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, 3).Google Scholar
  8. Jamieson mentions ‘Harbage’s democratic assumptions of the American forties’ (Michael Jamieson, ‘Shakespeare in Performance’, Stanley Wells (ed.), Shakespeare: A Bibliographical Guide, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, 37–68: 45).Google Scholar
  9. 53.
    Alan Sinfield, ‘Introduction: Reproductions, Interventions’, Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds.), Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985, 130–33: 131.Google Scholar
  10. 54.
    Ann Jennalie Cook, The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare’s London, 1576–1642, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981, 8.Google Scholar
  11. 69.
    Michael D. Bristol, Big-time Shakespeare, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, 37.Google Scholar
  12. 74.
    I quote from an early version in Jonathan Dollimore und Alan Sinfield (eds.), Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985, 18–47: 41. In Shakespearean Negotiations, the passage has been slightly modified (55): ‘[...] [E]ven with 2 Henry IV, where the lies and the self-serving sentiments are utterly inescapable, where the illegitimacy of legitimate authority is repeatedly demonstrated, where the whole state seems, to adapt More’s phrase, a conspiracy of the great to enrich and protect their interests under the name of commonwealth, even here the state, watchful for signs of sedition on the stage, was not prodded to intervene.’ The Elizabethan audience has become a quantité negligeable.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Bettina Boecker 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  • Bettina Boecker
    • 1
  1. 1.University of MunichGermany

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