Popular Shakespeare

Annabel Patterson notes ( Shakespeare and the Popular Voice ) that contemporary critics, whatever their own political outlook, assume that Shakespeare was an advocate of Elizabethan hierarchy. This view, however, is a product of the 19th century. Dryden, Johnson, and others criticize Shakespeare for violating the conventions of his genre, for including comedy in tragedy, for instance, but attribute this to his accommodation to the audience: “That is to say, Shakespeare erred by being popular himself.”

Dryden wrote, “Our Poets present you the Play and the farce together; and our Stages still retain somewhat of the Original civility of the Red-Bull,” the latter notorious for catering to popular tastes. For Dryden, “Shakespeare will be rescued as the supreme native dramatist despite that barbarous ‘civility.’”

Milton too criticized English drama for its illegitimate generic mixtures, and also attributed it to the need to please audiences. Tragedy must be defended “from the small esteem, or rather infamy, which in the account of many it undergoes at this day with other common Interludes; happ’ning through the Poet’s error of intermixing Comic stuff with Tragic sadness and gravity; or introducing trivial and vulgar persons, which by all judicious hath been counted absurd; and brought in without discretion, corruptly to gratify the people.”

It was Coleridge who introduced the theory of a socially conservative Shakespeare, at the same time he elevated Shakespeare above contemporary politics. In a lecture on the Tempest (1818), Coleridge declared that “In other writers we find the particular opinions of the individual; in Massinger it is rank republicanism; in Beumont and Fletcher even jure divino principles are carried to excess; – but Shakspere never promulgates any party tenets. He is always the philosopher and the moralist, but at the same time with a profound veneration for all the established institutions of society, and for those classes which form the permanent elements of the state – especially never introducing a professional character, as such, otherwise than as respectable. If he must have any name, he should be styled a philosophical aristocrat, delighting in those hereditary institutions which have a tendency to bind one age to another, and in that distinction of ranks, of which, although few may be in possession, all enjoy the advantages.” When dealing with mobs, he “always seems to make sport with the passions and follies of a mob, as with an irrational animal. He is never angry with it, but hugely content with holding up its absurdities to its face; and sometimes you may trace a tone of almost affectionate superiority, something like that in which a father speaks of the rogueries of a child.”

In addition to his desire to “dispose of the neoclassical postulate that Shakespeare was a disorderly playwright,” Coleridge was further motivated by the upheavals of his own day; out of this, Patterson argues, came “a disinterested, yet firmly arristocratic Shakespeare.”