There is, in this same induction by Webster, some dialogue that throws light also upon the estimation in which Shakespeare and his fellow actors regarded their calling and its duties and responsibilities, and is worth quoting:
“W. Sly: And I say again, the play is bitter.
“D. Burb.: Sir, you are like a patron that, presenting a poor scholar to a benifice, enjoins him not to rail against anything that stands within compass of his patron’s folly. Why should we not enjoy the antient freedom of poesy? Shall we protest to the ladies that their painting makes them angels? or to my young gallant, that his expence in the brothel shall gain him reputation? No, sir; such vices as stand not accountable to law should be cured as men heal tetters, by casting ink upon them.”
Above all things, may it be acknowledged that if the Fortune theatre, the great rival playhouse to the Globe, was the most successful and prosperous financially, the Lord Chamberlain’s troupe appealed, through Shakespeare, to the highest faculties of the audience, and showed in their performances a certain unity of moral and artistic tone.
The Plays and the Players.[ [2]
An Englishman visiting Venice about 1605 wrote in a letter from that city: “I was at one of their playhouses where I saw a comedy acted. The house is very beggarly and base in comparison with our stately playhouses in England, neither can the actors compare with us for apparel, shows, and music.” This opinion is confirmed by Busino, who has left an account of his visit to the Fortune playhouse in 1617, where he observed a crowd of nobility “listening as silently and soberly as possible.” And Thomas Heywood the dramatist, not later than 1612, affirms that the English stage is “an ornament to the city which strangers of all nations repairing hither report of in their countries, beholding them here with some admiration, for what variety of entertainment can there be in any city of Christendom more than in London?” In fact, the English people at this time, like the Greeks and Romans before them, were lovers of the theatre and of tragic spectacles. Leonard Digges, who was an eye-witness, has left on record the impression made upon the spectators by a representation of one of Shakespeare’s tragedies:
“So have I seen when Cæsar would appear,
And on the stage at half-sword parley were
Brutus and Cassius. Oh! how the audience
Were ravished, with what wonder they went thence!”
But plays as perfect in design as “Julius Cæsar,” “Othello,” and “Macbeth” were the exception, not the rule, upon the Elizabethan stage. They were the outcome of nearly twenty years’ experiment in play-writing, a period during which Shakespeare mastered his art and schooled his audience to appreciate the serious unmixed with the ludicrous. When he first wrote for the stage, plays needed to have in them all that the taste of the day demanded in the way of comic interlude and music. A dramatic representation was a continuous performance given without pause from beginning to end, and the dramatists, in compliance with the custom, used the double story, so often to be found in the plays of the time, in order that the movement should be continued uninterruptedly. The characters in each story appeared on the stage in alternate scenes, with every now and then a full scene in which all the characters appeared together. Ben Jonson condemned this form of play. He ridiculed the use of short scenes, and the bringing on to the stage of the characters in pairs. Yet he himself found it necessary to conform to the requirements of the day, as is shown in his first two comedies, written to be acted without pause from beginning to end. Later on he adopted the Terentian method of construction, that of dividing the plays into acts and making each act a complete episode in itself; and in his dedication prefixed to the play of “The Fox,” he claims to have laboured “to reduce not only the ancient forms, but manners of the scene.” There can be no doubt, therefore, that Ben Jonson disliked Shakespeare’s tolerance of the hybrid class of play then in vogue. Yet Shakespeare, if he thought it was not possible to work to the satisfaction of his audience according to the rules and examples of the ancients, none the less strove to put limits to the irregularities of his contemporaries. At the Universities scholars regarded his plays as compositions that were written for the public stage and therefore of no intrinsic value; while Londoners must have looked upon them as representations of actual life when compared with the formless dramas they were accustomed to see. He desired unity of fable with variety of movement, and endeavoured to abolish the use of impromptu dialogue by writing his own interludes and making them part of the play. Shakespeare wished to satisfy his audience and himself at the same time; and by the force of his dramatic genius he succeeded where others failed, and wrote plays which, if unsuitable for the modern stage, are still being acted.
About two-thirds of the plays which were acted at the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres are now lost to us; and this dramatic literature must have been of unusual excellence, unless we are to suppose that the law of the survival of the fittest may be applied to the lives of plays. From the names of extinct dramas, accessible to us in such places as Henslowe’s “Diary” or the Stationers’ Registers, it may be inferred that the groundwork of many of them consisted either of political or purely social and domestic topics. Domestic tragedy was one of the most popular forms of the drama. In fact the dramatists, in most instances, took the material for their plays from their own and their neighbours’ experiences, and all that was uppermost in men’s minds was laid hold of by them, and brought upon the stage with only a little transparent concealment. The topical Elizabethan drama, in the plays which have come down to us, viewed from a purely historical standpoint, is a very accurate though not very flattering embodiment of middle-class society in London in the sixteenth century. From it we learn the dangers incurred by the presence of a large class of riotous idlers, discharged soldiers and sailors, over whom the authorities exercised little control; we are given striking descriptions of the London “roughs”; of these “swagging, swearing, drunken, desperate Dicks, that have the stab readier in their hands than a penny in their purses.” We read, too, of the games that children played in the streets; of the assembling of the men of fashion and business in St. Paul’s; and of the dense crowding of the neighbouring streets at the dinner-hour, when the throng left the cathedral. The conversation that the characters indulge in, apart from the immediate plot, invariably relates to current events. In a play written about the time of the Irish rebellion, one of the characters talks about Ireland in a way that might apply to recent days:
“The land gives good increase
Of every blessing for the use of man,
And ’tis great pity the inhabitants
Will not be civil and live under law.”