CHAPTER IV

THE INFLUENCE OF THE AUDIENCE

Shakspere, we know, was a popular playwright. I mean not only that many of his plays were favorites in his day, but that he wrote, mainly at least, for the more popular kind of audience, and that within certain limits, he conformed to its tastes. A. C. BRADLEY, Oxford Lectures on Poetry.

I

THE shape of the special theater for which a dramatist has composed his plays, its size, its scenery, and its lighting, all exert an influence upon the playwright and combine to condition the form which his work must take, even if they do not more or less modify its content also. But the strongest pressure upon the content of the drama of any special period and of any special place is that of the contemporary audience for whose delight it was originally devised. How any author at any time can tell his story upon the stage depends upon the kind of stage he has in view; but what kind of story he may tell depends upon the kind of people he wants to interest. As Dryden declared in one of his epilogues:

"They who have best succeeded on the stage

Have still conformed their genius to the age." And this couplet of Dryden's recalls the later lines of Johnson:

"The drama's laws the drama's patrons give,

And we who live to please, must please to live."

In other words, the dramatic poet is not independent of his audience, as the lyric poets may be, since he can never be satisfied with mere self-expression. His work depends for its effect upon his hearers, and he has to take them into account, under penalty of blank failure. He must give them what they want, even if he gives them also what he wants. The author of a drama cannot labor for himself alone; he has to admit the spectators as his special partners. There is ever a tacit agreement, a quasi-contract between the playwright and the playgoers. As the ingenious and ingenuous Abbé d'Aubignac asserted, more than two centuries ago, when he was laying down laws for the drama: 'We are not to forget here (and I think it one of the best Observations I have made upon this matter) that if the subject is not conformable to the Manners as well as the Opinions of the spectators, it will never take.” And a later remark of his proved that he possessed the prime requisite of a dramatic critic, in that he had worked out his principles not merely in the library but also in the theater itself: "For if there be any Act or Scene that has not that conformity to the Manners of the spectators, you will suddenly see the applause cease, and in its place a discontent succeed, though they themselves do not know the cause of it."

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Just as the theater for which Sophocles wrote differed in almost every way from the theater for which Shakspere wrote, so the audience that the Greek poet had to please, if he was to win the awarded prize, was very unlike the audience that the English poet had to please, if he was to make his living as a professional playwright. There is not a wider difference between the theaters of Louis XIV's time, wherein Molière's

comedies were first produced, and the cosmopolitan modern playhouses wherein Ibsen's dramas are performed, than there is between the burghers of Paris, whom the French humorist had to amuse, and the narrow-minded villagers of Grimstad, whom Ibsen had always before him as the individual spectators he wished to startle out of their moral lethargy.

Even though the playwright has ever to consider the playgoers, their opinions and their prejudices, he is under no undue strain when he does this; and the most of his effort is unconscious, since he is always his own contemporary, sharing in the likes and dislikes of his fellow-countrymen, the very men whom he hopes to see flocking to the performance of his plays. Sophocles did not need to take thought to avoid what would be displeasing to the thousands who sat around the hollow slope of the Acropolis; he was an Athenian himself; and yet, no doubt, he acted always on the advice Isocrates used to give to his pupils in oratory, who were told to "study the people." Shakspere did not have to hold himself in for fear of shocking the energetic Elizabethans; he was himself a subject of the Virgin Queen, one of the plain people, with an instinctive understanding of the desires of the playgoers of his age. As M. Jusserand has acutely asserted, the English playgoing public of Shakspere's time demanded nourishment suited to its tastes, which were spontaneous and natural; it imposed these on the playmakers; it loved, like all peoples, to see on the stage, made more beautiful or more ugly, that is to say, more highly colored, what it found in itself embryonically, what it felt and could not express, what it could do and yet knew not how to narrate."

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Molière was able to choose themes to interest his contemporaries because he was himself a Frenchman, sympathizing with the sentiments of his time and governed by the same heredity as the spectators of his plays. He is himself the superb example of the truth of Nisard's assertion that "in France the man of genius is he who says what everybody knows; he is only the intelligent echo of the crowd; and if he does not wish to find us deaf and indifferent, he must not astonish us with his' personal views he must reveal us to ourselves." And as Molière is the type of the urban and urbane French dramatic poet, guided by the social instinct, ever dominant in France, so is Ibsen rather a rural type forever preaching individualism to the dwellers in the tiny seashore village where he spent his youth, and giving little thought to the inhabitants of the larger world where he had lived since his maturity. Although cosmopolitan audiences have appreciated Ibsen's power and skill, it was not for cosmopolitan audiences that he wrote his social dramas, but for the old folks at home in Norway, whom he wanted to awaken morally and mentally. And here, in his memory of the feelings and of the failings of the men and women among whom he grew to manhood, we can find the obvious explanation of that narrow parochialism which is sometimes revealed most unexpectedly in one or another of his plays.

II

A certain knowledge of the people to whom the playwright belonged, and for whom he wrote, is a condition precedent to any real understanding of his plays. And, on the other hand, a study of the drama of any period

or of any place cannot fail to supply interesting information about the manners and customs, the modes of thought, and the states of feeling of the people of that country at that time. For example, the medieval drama seems to have had its earliest development in France, and perhaps for this reason one mystery is very like another mystery all over Europe, whether it is French or English, Italian or German; but one of the variations from this monotony is to be found in the scene between Joseph and Potiphar's wife, which the English redactors treated in outline only or omitted altogether, but which the French compilers elaborately amplified for the greater joy of their compatriots. To this day the French are willing to laugh loudly at the humorous side of conjugal infidelity, whereas, we who speak English are unwilling to take this other than seriously. Here we can see reason why many a skittish farce, which has amused thousands in Paris, has failed to please in New York and in London.

The lack of popular appreciation about which Terence often complained bitterly was due to his incompatibility with the only audiences which Rome then knew. He proportioned his intrigues and polished his dialogue when his spectators were accustomed to coarse buffoonery. Terence was born out of his time; and he might have been a really successful writer of comedies had he lived in the Italian Renascence, when he could hope for an audience of scholars swift to enjoy his delicate finish and his delightful felicity of phrase. As it was, Terence, refusing to gratify the tastes of the populace of his own time, had to confess failure. The more practical Lope de Vega accepted the audiences of his day for what they were, less vio