[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.