The "theaters" of this day are barely more than inclosures, with a raised platform for the performers, and straw for the audience to stand or go to sleep in, as they prefer. Votton, in a letter to Bacon, * says that the fire that destroyed the Globe theater burned up nothing but "a little wood and straw and a few forsaken cloaks." Sir Philip Sidney, writing in 1583, ridicules the poverty of the scenic effects and properties of the day in an often-quoted passage: "You shall have Asia of the one side and Afrieke of the other, and so many other under kingdomes that the plaier, when hee comes in, must ever begin with telling where hee is, or else the tale will not be conceived. Now, you shall have three ladies walk to gather flowers, and then you must believe the stage to be a garden: by-and-by we have news of a shipwreck in the same place; and we are to blame if we accept it not for a rock. Upon the back of that comes a hideous monster, with fire and smoke, and the miserable beholders are bound to take it for a cave, while, in the mean time, two armies fly in, represented with four swords and bucklers, and then what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field!" **
* Smith's "Bacon and Shakespeare," p. 74.
** "The Defence of Poesie," edition 1626, p. 592.
And M. Taine has drawn a life-like picture of the audience which applauded this performance: "The poor could enter as well as the rich; there were sixpenny, twopenny, even penny seats.... If it rained, and it often rained in London, the people in the pit, botchers, mercers, bakers, sailors, apprentices, receive the streaming rain on their heads... they did not trouble themselves about it. While waiting for the pieces they... drink beer, crack nuts, eat fruit, howl, and now and then resort to their lists: they have been known to fall upon the actors, and turn the theater upside down. At other times they were dissatisfied and went to the tavern to give the poet a hiding or toss him in a blanket,... When the beer took effect there was a great upturned barrel in the pit, a receptacle for general use. The smell arises, and then comes the cry, 'Burn the juniper!' They burn some in a plate in the stage, and the heavy smoke fills the air. Certainly the folk there assembled could scarcely get disgusted at any thing, and can not have had sensitive noses. In the time of Rabelais there was not much cleanliness to speak of. Remember that they were hardly out of the middle age, and that, in the middle age, man lived on a dunghill." Mr. White assures us further, that pickpockets were apt to be plentiful among this audience, and when discovered, were borne upon the stage, pilloried in full view, * and there left, the play going on meanwhile around them; and, moreover, that the best seats sold were on the stage itself; where any of the audience, who could pay the price, could sit, recline, walk, or converse with the actors engaged in the performance," while pages brought them rushes to stretch upon, and——
* "Kempe, the actor, in his 'Nine Days' Wonder,' a. d. 1600, compares a man to 'such an one as we tye to a poast on our stage for all the people to wonder at when they are taken pilfering.'" ("Shakespeare," by Richard Grant White, Vol. I., p. 183.) pipes of tobacco with which to regale themselves. * "Practicable" scenery of any sort, even the rudest, was utterly unknown, ** and it is thought that the actors relied on barely more than the written action of the piece for their guidance. In the plays of this period we come continually on such stage directions as "Here they two talke and rayle what they list;" "All speak "Here they all talke," etc., *** which proves that much of the dialogue was trusted to the inspiration of the moment—to which inspiration the gallants and pickpockets may not unnaturally have contributed.
* Ibid.
** Whenever we come on a stage direction, therefore, which
supposes "practicable" scenery in a play, we may assert with
confidence, that the same was written in or after 1662, up
to which date there was no such thing as practicable
machinery. In the original edition of "The Tempest," for
instance, there is no intimation, by way of stage direction,
that the first scene occurs on shipboard. In the first
edition of "As You Like It" there is no mention of a forest
in the stage direction. Nor in the early quartos of "Romeo
and Juliet" is there any intimation that Juliet makes love
in a balcony. "What child is there, that, coming to a play,
and seeing Thebes written in great letters upon an old door,
doth believe that it is Thebes?" says Sidney, in his
"Defence of Poesie."—(R. G. White's "Shakespeare's
Scholar," p. 489, note.) Trap-doors, however, were probably
in very early use; at least, we find in a comedy by
Middleton and Dekkar a character called "Trap-door." There
seems, also, to have been pillars that turned about, and a
writer in the times of James I. mentions that "the stage
varied three times in one tragedy."
*** These stage directions are taken from Greene's "Tu
Quoque," a. d. 1614, two years before Shakespeare died, and
long after, according to the commentators, he had ceased
writing for the stage.
The principal burden of entertaining the audience rested with the clown, who, unembarrassed by any reference to the subject-matter of the play, popped in and out at will, cracked his jokes, danced and sung and made himself familiar with the outsiders upon the stage. Before an audience satisfied with this rudimentary setting, upon a stage crowded with smirking gallants and flirting maids of honor, we are assured that Hamlet and Wolsey delivered their soliloquies, Anthony his impassioned oratory, and Isabella her pious strains; while the clowns and pot-wrestlers discoursed among themselves of Athens and Troy, and Hecuba and Althea, of Galen and Paracelus, of "writs of detainer," and "fine and recovery," and "præmunire," and of the secrets of the pharmacopoeia! "At this public theater," says Mr. Smith, "to which every one could obtain access, and the lowest of the people ordinarily resorted... we are called upon to believe that the wonderful works which we so greatly admire and feel we can only appreciate by careful private study—that not only Englishmen like Coleridge confess, in forty years of admiring study of Greek, Latin, English, Italian, Spanish, and German philosophers, literature, and manners, to have found bursting upon him with increased power, wisdom, and beauty in every step," * but foreigners like Schlegel, Jean Paul, and Gervinus, "have fallen down before in all but heathen adoration"—were performed. In 1880, when we force a common-school education at state expense upon the people, the Shakespearean plays are disastrous to managers.
* Bacon and Shakespeare, p. 91.
They "lose money on Shakespeare," and unless "carpentry and French"—unless ballet and spectacle are liberally resorted to, are draped down to desolate houses and financial ruin. "Shakespeare" is "over the heads" of ———— in these days of compulsory education. And yet we are calmly asked to credit the astounding statement that in and about the year 1600, in London, these grave, intellectual, and stately dialogues are taking by storm the rabble of the Bankside, and entrancing the tradesmen and burghers of the days when to read was quite as rare an accomplishment as serpent-charming is today—when, if sovereigns wrote their own names, it was all they could do—and when the government could not afford to hang a man who could actually write his name. * "And yet," to quote Mr. Smith again, "it was from the profit arising from this wretched place of amusement that Shakespeare realized the far from inconsiderable fortune with which in a few years he retired to Stratford-upon-Avon." If not actual intellectual giants, the rabble of that day must have been the superiors in literary perception of some very eminent gentlemen who were to come after them, like, for example, Fuller, Evelyn, Pepys, Dryden, Dennis, Kymer, Hume, Pope, Addison, Steele, and Jonson, whose comments on our immortal drama we have set forth in the First Part of this work. ** Only we happen to know they were not.
* Benefit of clergy was only abolished in England by acts
7 and 8, George IV., c. 28, sec. 3, In 1827, fifty-three
years ago; in the United States it had been disposed of
(though it had never been availed of) by act of Congress,
April 30, 1790.
** Ante, pp. 20-29.
As an alternative to believing that these pearls, over which this nineteenth century gloats, were cast before the swine of the sixteenth; the theory we are now considering offers, as less violent an attack upon common sense, the supposition that what we now possess under the name of "Shakespeare's plays" were not produced upon the stage of any play-house in those days, but were printed instead, the name of William Shakespeare having been attached to them as surety for a certain circulation. The well-attested fact that William Shakespeare was a play-writer is not ignored by this supposition; for the new theorists believe that, although no fragment of the Shakespeare work now survives, its character can be readily determined. From what knowledge we possess of the tone and quality of the audiences of those days, it is not difficult to imagine the rudeness and crudity of the plays.