The Facts About Shakespeare | Page 5

"private" theaters were
established within the city. But this triumph of the court over the long
opposition of the city was not an unmixed blessing for the drama.
The theaters in 1590 represented the public on which they depended for
support; by 1616 they were far less representative of the nation or
London, and more dependent on the court and its following. The
Blackfriars theater, before which gathered the crowd of coaches that
annoyed the puritans of the neighborhood, was a symptom of the
growth of wealth and luxury, and of the increased power of the
monarchy; the protests of the puritan neighborhood were an indication

of the growth of a large class hostile alike to an arbitrary court, luxury,
and the theater.
Shakespeare's lifetime, however, saw little of this sharp division into
parties or of that narrow moral consistency which Puritanism came to
require. Looking back on his age in contrast with our own, we are
perhaps most impressed by its striking incongruities. This London of
dirt and disease was also the arena for extravagant fashion and princely
display. This populace that watched with joy the cruel torment of a bear
or the execution of a Catholic also delighted in the romantic comedies
of Shakespeare. This people, so appallingly credulous and ignorant, so
brutal, childish, so mercurial compared with Englishmen of to-day, yet
set the standard of national greatness. This absurdly decorated gallant
could stab a rival in the back or write a penitential lyric. Each man
presents strange, almost inexplicable, contrasts in character, as Bacon
or Raleigh, or Elizabeth herself. The drama mingles its sentiment and
fancy with horrors and bloodshed; and no wonder, for poetry was no
occupation of the cloister. Read the lives of the poets--Surrey, Wyatt,
Sidney, Spenser, Raleigh, Marlowe, Jonson--and of these, only Spenser
and Jonson died in their beds, and Ben had killed his man in a duel.
The student of Elizabethan history and biography will find stranger
contrasts than in the lives of these poets, for crime, meanness, and
sexual depravity often appear in the closest juxtaposition with
imaginative idealism, intellectual freedom, and moral grandeur.
[Page Heading: Elizabethan Incongruities]
The Italian Renaissance, with its mingled passions for beauty, art,
blood, lust, and intellect, seems for a time transferred to London and
dwelling alongside of commerce and Puritanism. Yet these
incongruities of character, manners, and motives that seem so striking
to us to-day may probably be explained by conditions already described.
The opportunities created by the changes in church and religion, the
new education and prosperity, the new America, and the revived
classics, all tended to create a new thirst for experience. This thirst for
experience led to excess and incongruity, but it also furnished an
unparalleled range of human motive for a poet's observation and

imitation.
In the wide range of our poet's survey, there is, however, one notable
omission. The reign of Elizabeth, like those of her three predecessors,
was one of religious controversy, change, and persecution. But all this
strife, all this debate, repression, persecution, and all of this great
turmoil working in the minds of Englishmen, find little reflection in
Shakespeare's plays, and little in the whole Elizabethan drama.
Religious controversy had played a part in the drama of the reign of
Edward and Mary, but it rarely enters the Elizabethan drama, and then
mainly in the form of ridicule for the puritan. Shakespeare's plays seem
almost to ignore the most momentous facts of his time. They treat
pagan, Catholic, and Protestant with cordiality and only smile at the
puritan or Brownist. His England of the merry wives or Falstaff's
justices seems strangely untroubled by questions of faith or ritual.
There is, to be sure, plenty of religion and controversy in the literature
of the time, but the drama as a whole is singularly non-religious. It
reflects rather that freedom from restraint, that buoyancy of spirit, that
lively interest in experience, which had their full course in the few
years when the old garment was off and the new not quite fitted. The
immense intellectual and imaginative activity of the period consists
precisely in this freedom from restrictions, partisanship, dogmas, or
caste. Things had lost their labels and some time and argument were
required to find new ones. Ideas were free and not bound to any school,
party, or cause. You grasped an idea without knowing whether it made
you realist, romanticist, or classicist; papist, puritan, or pagan. After
centuries of imprisonment, individuality had its full chance in the world
of ideas as elsewhere.
[Page Heading: An Age of Freedom]
In a few years this was all over, and your sphere of life and the ideas
proper to that sphere were prescribed for you. By another century,
England had fought out the issues of creed and government with
expense of blood