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CHAPTER VI

APPRENTICESHIP

PROBABLY no conditions could have promised less for the production of great works of art than those which surrounded the theatre in Shakespeare's timeconditions so unpromising that the bitter antagonism of the Puritans is easily understood. It remains true, nevertheless, that in their warfare against the theatre the Puritans were not only contending with one of the deepest of human instincts, but unconsciously and unavailingly setting themselves against the freest and deepest expression of English genius and life. The story of the growth of the drama in the Elizabethan age furnishes a striking illustration of the difficulty of discerning at any given time the main currents of spiritual energy, and of separating the richest and most masterful intellectual life from the evil conditions through which it is often compelled to work its way, and from the corrupt accessories which sometimes surround it. The growth of humanity is not the unfolding of an idea in a world of pure ideality; it is something deeper and more significant it is an outpouring of a vast energy, constantly seeking new channels of expression and new ways of action, painfully striving to find a balance between its passionate

needs and desires and the conditions under which it is compelled to work, and painfully adjusting its inner ideals and spiritual necessities to outward realities.

It is this endeavour to give complete play to the force of personality, and to harmonize this incalculable spiritual energy with the conditions which limit and oppose free development, which gives the life of every age its supreme interest and tragic significance, and which often blinds the courageous and sincere, who are bent on immediate righteousness along a few lines of faith and practice, rather than on a full and final unfolding of the human spirit in accordance with its own needs and laws, to the richest and most fruitful movement of contemporary life. The attempt to destroy a new force or form in the manifold creative energy of the human spirit because it was at the start allied with evil conditions has often been made in entire honesty of purpose, but has been rarely successful; for the vital force denied one channel, finds another. The theatre in Shakespeare's time was a product of a very crude and coarse but very rich life; it served, not to create evil conditions, but to bring those already existing into clear light. The Puritans made the familiar mistake of striking at the expression rather than at the cause of social evils; they laid a heavy hand on a normal and inevitable activity instead of fastening upon and stripping away the demoralizing influences which gathered about it.

Shakespeare came at the last hour which could have made room for him; twenty-five years later he would have been denied expression, or his free and compre

hensive genius would have suffered serious distortion. The loveliness of Milton's earlier lyrics reflects the joyousness and freedom of the golden age of English dramatic poetry. The Puritan temper was silently or noisily spreading through the whole period of Shakespeare's career; within twenty-five years after his death it had closed the theatres and was making a desperate fight for the right to live according to conscience. Shakespeare arrived on the stage when the great schism which was to divide the English people had not gone beyond the stage of growing divergence of social and religious ideals; there was still a united England.

The London theatres stood in suburbs which would to-day be called slums; when complaint was made of the inconvenience of these outlying situations, it was promptly affirmed that "the remedy is ill-conceived to bring them into London;" in regard to the regulation that performances should not be given during prayer-time, "it may be noted how uncomely it is for youth to run straight from prayers to plays, from God's service to the Devil's." The theatres had come into existence under the most adverse conditions, but they had established themselves because there was a genuine force behind them. They had already touched the English spirit with definite influences. In the reign of Elizabeth's reactionary sister the freedom with which the stage, the predecessor of the newspaper as a means of spreading popular opinion and discussing questions of popular interest, had spoken had brought first more rigid censorship and

finally suppression of secular dramas throughout England. The court and the nobles reserved the privilege of witnessing plays in palaces and castles, but the play was too frank, in the judgment of many, to be allowed to speak to the people. The people were not, however, to be denied that which the higher classes found essential; regulations were eluded or disregarded, and plays were given secretly.

When Elizabeth came to the throne, the rules imposed on players were regulative rather than prohibitory; for Elizabeth had no mind to put under royal ban one of the chief means of easing the popular feeling by giving it expression, and of developing true English feeling by the presentation of the chief figures and the most significant events in English history. Companies were organized and licensed under the patronage of noblemen; theatres were built, and the drama became a recognized form of amusement in London. But from the beginning the theatre was opposed and denounced. Archbishop Grindall fought it vigorously, on the ground that actors were "an idle sort of people, which had been infamous in all good commonwealths," and that the crowds which attended the performances spread the plague by which London was ravaged for a number of years, and of which there was great and well-founded dread. In spite of the Queen's favour and of Leicester's patronage, theatres were compelled to take refuge in the suburbs. The struggle between the players, backed by the Queen, and the City authorities was long and bitter. The Corporation was determined to exclude players from

the City, and to prevent them from giving perform ances during service hours, on holidays, or during the prevalence of the plague. Bitter as the struggle was, however, neither side was willing to carry it to a decisive issue. The Queen, who knew to a nicety how far she could go in asserting the royal prerogatives, had no desire to antagonize a community of growing importance and power, and exceedingly jealous of its rights and privileges; the City had no wish to set itself in final opposition to that which a powerful sovereign evidently had very much at heart. The players ceased to give regular performances within the City limits, but became, in consequence of this opposition, a permanent feature of the life of the metropolis by building permanent buildings within easy reach of the City.

And the theatre throve in the face of an opposition which ceased to be official only to become more general and passionate. The pamphlet, which was soon to come from the press in great numbers and to do the work of the newspaper, began to arraign it in no measured tones; the Puritan preachers were unsparing in their denunciations. "It is a woful sight," said one of these pamphleteers, "to see two hundred proud players jet in their silks, when five hundred poor people starve in the streets." It does not appear to have occurred to this critic of the play that whatever force his statement had, weighed equally on the court, the nobility, and the very respectable but also very prosperous burghers who jostled the same poor on their way to church. There is more point in the frank ora

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