Abstract
An Elizabethan audience composed of uneducated ruffians and/or childish sensationalists poses a number of problems for the would-be apologist of Shakespeare. If playwright and playgoers really move in totally different intellectual and moral spheres, dramatic communication is bound to fail — aside from the Bard’s grudging concessions to spectators ultimately unworthy of him. And as always, his readiness to make such compromises throws a rather bad light on the national dramatist. All these difficulties decrease considerably once the ‘judicious few’ which Coleridge had identified as Shakespeare’s ‘real’ audience, rather than the uncultured masses, are credited with having exerted the decisive influence on Shakespeare. The early modern playhouse then changes from a place of more or less continual theatrical failure into one of successful stage communication. The logic of the relation between dramatist and audiences remains the same, but is now presented from a totally different vantage point, for the influence of elite theatregoers is represented as thoroughly beneficial. Shakespeare writes as well as he does because of the judicious few. In the decades before the Second World War, following alterations in staging practices which turned Shakespeare from mass entertainment into something more intellectual and exclusive, this view becomes increasingly popular.1
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Notes
John Dover Wilson, The Elizabethan Shakespeare: Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy, London: Humphrey Milford, 1929, 24.
A notable exception is John Middleton Murry. In Shakespeare, written during his Marxist phase, he vehemently opposes the idea of Shakespeare as a sort of honorary aristocrat: ‘Shakespeare did not need to consort continually with young noblemen in order to create [aristocratic] characters; nor did he create them to please such an audience: he was merely embodying the conditions of the finest natural workings of his own mind.’ (John Middleton Murry, Shakespeare, London: Cape, 1936, 121.) While he remains thoroughly conventional in his ideas of what the groundlings were like and liked (Caliban is ‘the servant-monster that makes the groundlings goggle’, 137), he refuses to draw the conclusion proposed by many of his peers. Shakespeare admittedly made concessions to the groundlings in some places, but ‘surely it was a better way than being hand-fed by the aristocracy, gratification for dedication […]’. (190).
H. S. Bennett, Shakespeare’s Audience: Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy, London: Milford, 1944, 3.
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson, ‘Introduction’, William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, John Dover Wilson, Sir Arthur Quiller Couch (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923, VII–XXXIX: XXXIV.
Oscar James Campbell, ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost Re-Studied’, Studies in Shakespeare, Milton and Donne: By Members of the English Department of the University of Michigan, New York: Haskell House, 1925, 3–45.
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, ‘Introduction’, William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night or What You Will, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930, VII–XXVIII.
Leslie Hotson, The First Night of Twelfth Night, London: Hart-Davis, 1954.
Peter Alexander, ‘Troilus and Cressida, 1609’, The Library 9, 1929, 267–86.
William Witherle Lawrence, Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies, New York: Macmillan, 1931.
Oscar James Campbell, Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, San Marino (Cal.): Huntington Library & Art Gallery, 1938.
Gerald Eades Bentley, ‘Shakespeare and the Blackfriars Theatre’, Shakespeare Survey 1, 1948, 38–50: 46–48.
John Dover Wilson, The Essential Shakespeare [1932], Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962, 30–31.
Darrell Figgis, Shakespeare: A Study, London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1911, 81.
Henry N. Paul, The Royal Play of Macbeth: When, Why and How It Was Written by Shakespeare, New York: Macmillan, 1950, 3.
L. C. Knights, ‘Education and the Drama in the Age of Shakespeare’, T. S. Eliot (ed.), The Criterion 1922–1939, vol. XI: October 1931–July 1932, London: Faber and Faber, 1967, 599–625: 607–08.
The problem of irony
Gerald Gould, ‘A New Reading of Henry V’, The English Review 29, 1919, 42–55: 42.
W. W. Greg, ‘Hamlet’s Hallucination’, The Modern Language Review 12, 1917, 393–421: 415–17.
Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
W. W. Greg, ‘Re-Enter Ghost. A Reply to Mr J. Dover Wilson’, Modern Language Review 14, 1919, 353–69: 354–55.
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957, 41.
The cultured few and the unified public sphere
Ezra Pound, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941 [1950], D. D. Paige (ed.), New York: James Laughlin, 1971, 101.
Wyndham Lewis is an exception, for he basically refuses the idea of any kind of positive rapport between Shakespeare and his audiences. While aware of the demands and restraints placed upon him by the fact that he wrote for a living, Shakespeare, according to Lewis, effectively despised those who paid his way: ‘Shakespeare and the rest were hired entertainers, and not hiero-phants, they had to be supple and in some sense vulgar: and were as much in search of that terrible néant, “what the public wants” (only it was on the whole a little better public), as is any journalist to-day. And it is no doubt true that the artist, unless he is in some way godsman [sic] instead of Lord Leicester’s merely, or Lord Northcliffe’s, is coaxed or beaten off, and never allowed fully to possess, the perfection of expression. To a Shakespeare, these sad compromises and shifts, necessitated by the stupid and mean egotisms of his audience (whose tastes or lack of taste it is his unpleasant duty to learn by heart and have at his fingers’ ends) can hardly endear them to him. […] Nor would his audiences of gentlemen and ladies appeal to him much more than his pit. In fact, with their pretentious arrogance, greater power to interfere with him, and with the eternal cheap effrontery of the enfant gaté, they might appeal to him at most times even less. As a showman, his remarks would not, as is generally supposed, be addressed to the mere “rotten-breathed” of his audience, the many-headed multitude, only. The crowd of his more elegant clients were “many-headed”, too. Their breath probably did not smell especially sweet to the author of Timon. What is Shakespeare supposed to have thought of Lord Leicester’s guests? He saw a good deal of them. He must have thought a good deal in consequence.’ (Wyndham Lewis, The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays if Shakespeare [1927], London: Methuen, 1951, 172.)
F. R. Leavis, Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture, Cambridge: Minority Press, 1930, 25.
T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England, London: Faber and Faber, 1933, 153.
Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public [1932], London: Chatto and Windus, 1965, 85.
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© 2015 Bettina Boecker
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Boecker, B. (2015). The Rediscovery of the Judicious Few. In: Imagining Shakespeare’s Original Audience, 1660–2000. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137379962_6
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