Shakespeare and Democracy, by Alwin Thaler. The University of Tennessee Press, 1941. $2.50.
Shakespeare’s Audience, by Alfred Harbage. Columbia University Press. 1941. $2.25.
It is a pity that by far the flimsiest essay in Prof. Thaler’s book should have been placed foremost to provide a title for the whole volume. That this kind of thing may be thought necessary in the present season to justify the appearance of a scholarly work is to be deplored. And nothing is sadder than to see a most admirable word used for this purpose.
To anyone who enjoys or studies a poet without bothering about his capacity to teach or ability to carry a message, it is quite a little revelation to discover that a curious quarrel has been going on between two types of Shakespeareans, the warm-blooded kind that uses the present tense to assert that Shakespeare rises to the height of our modern concept of democracy, and the cold-blooded kind that uses the past tense to retort that Shakespeare’s social and political thinking belonged exclusively to his own Tudor England. In discussing this controversy Professor Thaler tends to reduce it to the question of whether Shakespeare was a Whig or a Tory and suggests a compromise grounded on the local occurrence of conservatives with good liberal instincts. That Shakespeare was no anti-Semite is plainly disclosed by Shylock’s apologia “Hath not a Jew eyes?”; that he had socialistic inclinations is shown by Gloucester referring to “the superfluous and lust-dieted man”; and that he could peep through the arras of ages at a nightshirted figure counting the sheep of the world in the darkness of Berchtesgaden1 is implied by “uneasy lies the head.” Just as smoothly anything else might be proved by appropriate quotations. The gnostic value of the combination Shakespeare and Democracy is exactly similar to that of “Shakespeare and Aristocracy” or “Shakespeare and Vivisection” or “Shakespeare and unser Shakespeare,”2 whether in the last case the lessee be a chubbily sentimental Goethe, a muddled metaphysician of the old German school or a heavy heil-Hitlerite of the new one. Except when the study of Shakespeare’s text is an adventurous quest scientifically conducted by those who know the delights of Q1 and Q2 and F1, the interest of the reader is apt to shift from Shakespeare to the character of this or that commentator applying his own philosophy to more or less misread plays. Thus one finds oneself more fascinated by what according to Prof. Thaler Walt Whitman thought of Shakespeare (if that can be called thinking) than by the futile problem of whether Shakespeare was or was not what Whitman thought him to be.
The rest of the essays in the book are much more to the point. Professor Thaler brilliantly refutes the view held apparently by less keen-witted students that no conscious art is perceptible in Shakespeare’s work, a view derived from the notion that art is something apart from (and less than) the merits of a book. At a time when authentic art is proclaimed an esoteric crime, an antisocial sin to be branded by the familiar accusation of flaunting one’s weakness for Proust (or whoever happens to be the black beast of the mass-minded critic) while the healthy crowd of average readers is clamoring to be taught, led and saved, one is very grateful to Professor Thaler for indirectly disposing of the myth that Shakespeare being “above art” may be safely accepted as a reading pabulum by those who like their writers raw. In another chapter the author examines the hypothesis that certain hints and gaps point to lost scenes in the texture of Macbeth and arrives to the conclusion supported by similar cases of refraction of sense in other Shakespearean plays, that those scenes were never written. Further on a study attempting to trace the “original Malvolio,” although containing a delightfully documented description of the supposed prototype, is less satisfying: we know so few of the people that Shakespeare may have known, and what we know of them is really so little, and the inventiveness of genius complicates so prodigiously the business of reversing the process of literary transmutation, that most researches of that kind, no matter how convincingly they disclose the explorer’s acumen, must necessarily remain mere gossamer and gossip. Shakespeare himself, if confronted by Professor Thaler’s plausible guess, a guess that might even have been made by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, would very likely reply that he had had quite another person in view or had evolved Malvolio out of perfectly anonymous impressions. The human mind is so built that the acquisition of precise knowledge in the present seems to be facilitated by the fact of the limitless past being limited (always in the present) by its documentary remains; but the nearest approach to the truth at the likeliest point within these limits may really prove to be a distance of many dim miles if we apply to the past the complex aspect of our sensorial and spatial present. Incidentally, the evidence of Sir Thomas Browne having read Shakespeare seems to be founded as far as I can make out from Prof. Thaler’s present inquiry (or perhaps one ought to go back to his Shakespeare Silences3 for further information?) on Browne mentioning “The tale of Oberon” which Prof. Thaler takes to be an allusion to A Midsummer Night’s Dream; but might one not suggest that “The tale of Oberon” was popular in England in the latter half of the sixteenth century in Bourchier’s translation from the French?4
Although here and there a prying reader may espy a few mixed metaphors, such as “these two were not songbirds of a feather…but criticism makes strange bedfellows” (which conveys a quaint picture of a nightingale and a thrush neatly tucked up in one big bed) these essays are clearly and concisely written. They do not form a deliberately planned whole but afford some pleasant rambles along the footnote-bordered paths all around the “Shakespear Tombe in Stratford.”
Until its social message begins to bulge the second book provides the reader with some interesting facts concerning the Elizabethan theater. “The evidence for habitual riotousness in Shakespeare’s audience”—writes Professor Harbage—“becomes tenuous upon examination”—and considering the type of person who in those days was anxious to condemn the theater by heaping upon it solemnly stereotypic accusations (“scurrilous behavior,” as three consecutive Lord-Mayors of London put it) it is reasonable to think that on the whole this audience was brighter than its critics. Equally acceptable are the author’s comments on the fallacy of regarding the Elizabethans as “galvanic creatures…furious in hate and love…sensuous and sensual…” Finally, there is something to be said for Prof. Harbage’s inclination to idealize the groundlings, a tribe that has apparently died out nowadays much to Prof. Harbage’s regret. I admit that it might be an invigorating experience for a modern dramatist to turn his back upon the unruffled rows and featureless faces of modern playgoers and suddenly find himself addressing the Globe seething with those unfortunately extinct spectators, enthusiastic tinkers, pewterers and fellmongers, bright-eyed button-makers, cropped-haired apprentices, red-faced bookbinders and “pincht needie” creatures such as ditchers all spending the price of a quart of small beer—one Elizabethan penny or thirty-one Rooseveltan cents—to see Will Shakespeare stalk in as the Ghost. That is, I imagine, the general picture that Prof. Harbage’s account tries to convey. He is somehow less anxious to have us see the gentry in the 2d gallery, merchants and lawyers, and the young gallants and the old lords, and the Spanish Ambassador in the 3d orchestra seats. Why?
While he is dealing with the price of tickets his book is, I repeat, readable; it is his colorful generalizations that are all wrong. If, as he stoutly maintains, “a glimpse into the collective mind of the audience” is “equal to what a glimpse into Shakespeare’s world would be” then it must be sorrowfully admitted that the remarkable capacity of an audience to generate Shakespeares has singularly dwindled with time. Prof. Harbage proves by judicious calculations that prices at the Globe fitted the purse of London and were truly popular. “The price inflation at the private theatres begat no second Shakespeare.” The average daily attendance was about three thousand at all four theaters in Shakespeare’s day; so, knowing the exact number of playhouses and playgoers and the ticket prices in this country today, it might be easy to calculate how many thousands of times more difficult it is for a modern audience to exude a great dramatist. Any attempt on a writer’s part to take the opposite course and create his own audience is tabooed by the gist of Prof. Harbage’s book.
With all due respect to Prof. Harbage’s humane attitude toward a long deceased community and his spirited attempt to save it from biased accusations, I believe that he is quite unfair in regard to Shakespeare’s art. In his last chapter he roundly rebukes W. W. Greg for arguing (in 1916)5 that Shakespeare wrote at least two meanings into Hamlet, one for the bulk of the audience, the other for the “humaner” minds. He violently misses the essential point—namely that Dr. Greg’s inspired hypothesis regarding the dumb-show and Prof. Dover Wilson’s equally inspired explanation of that scene6 both belong to an order of thinking that might make any Shakespeare proud of writing for Wilsons and Gregs. He has a sly dig at the learned Edward Topsell, who (in 1607) “expressed his contempt for the ignorant…but earnestly believed in the existence of the unicorn”—though the dig somewhat miscarries as Prof. Harbage fails to realize that the reference was to the Indian rhinoceros. He is under the naïve delusion that “the caviary for the general” merely turns out to be a bombastic play. In a word Prof. Harbage is all for the million, against the judicious few.
But would Shakespeare be really pleased with Prof. Harbage’s notion of him? I doubt it. Hamlet’s quibbling (to take an instance from Dover Wilson’s What Happens in Hamlet) with its telescopic duplication and triplication of sense did not bother the groundlings because there was enough action in the play to keep them spellbound: the nimblest-witted apprentice boy took the quibbles as the gushing nonsense that a madman might be supposed to utter; but the very existence of these inner landscapes of the mind in Shakespeare’s greatest play “proves that he could count upon a section of the audience…capable of apprehending any subtlety he cared to put them to and moreover armed like Hamlet himself with tables to set down matters they could not at once understand or wished especially to remember” (Dover Wilson). By all means have a cake for the general, but cram it with plums for the judicious—this seems to have been—whether Prof. Harbage likes it or not—Shakespeare’s method.
In order to show the greatness of the London cockney of 1601 Prof. Harbage proceeds to describe in glowing terms the brains of a grocer and his family at a Shakespeare play. I am afraid that he completely confuses the issue. The point is not that the grocer, his wife and their young apprentice could or could not understand what the lord, his wife and their young son could not or could; the point is that not every grocer and not every lord could appreciate Hamlet at its worth, and naturally Shakespeare (as every honest writer) wrote with more pleasure for the more judicious of the lot. The question of the comparative percentage of perception among the groundlings and the nobles is hardly important but possibly it is not unreasonable to suppose that most of the students or inns-of-court men in the 2d seats might have been more likely to apprehend what most of the cordwainers in the 1d seats must have missed.
As to Prof. Harbage’s concept of an Elizabethan audience (in itself a vague and debatable entirety) as a composite William Shakespeare, this reminds one of the fashion (formally adopted by some scholars) of explaining the personality of Hamlet in terms of an ideal and conceptual Hamlet, the composite hero of all five “versions.” Unfortunately for Prof. Harbage’s contention (look at the audience and you will see Will) we do possess a tangible sample of what an Elizabethan audience—at its worst—was capable to do in the way of “creating” Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This “glimpse into Shakespeare’s world” is the maimed and botched First Quarto.
* From corrected typescript (LCNA, box 8, folder 9) of untitled and unlocated review, with VN’s later note “NY Sun?” Published in New York Sun, 1941[?].