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PERSPECTIVES OF A SOCIOLOGY OF FILM Audience: 'The wide range of social classes from which the audience was drawn, and the various types of education and training which they had received, gave the dramatist great opportunities, but . . . it seems necessary to differentiate, so that when we are told by a modern critic that of any typical audience at the Globe the majority were likely to have received an education of the grammar-school type, we must proceed cautiously . . . Dramatists must live, and "those that live to please, must please to live", so that Shakespeare and his fellows were constantly forced to remember that "whole theatre of others". These people lacking this elaborate training in rhetoric, were as mixed in their scholarly attainments as they were in their social grades. Many were literate, but a minority were not even that. The literate ranged from those who had acquired just enough knowledge to read at their Petty or ABC schools, to those who had got into the lower forms of Grammar schools. Those who could read fluently had presumably read some of the voluminous literature which poured from the London presses, and this literature, diverse as was its nature, had a strong rhetorical (my italics) basis. Even the illiterate by the constant listening to sermons, proclamations, addresses of welcome, official speeches, and the like, were accustomed to certain forms of literary devices, although they were completely ignorant of the names of such things . . . The Elizabethans were trained listeners; where we rely on the eye and the printed book, they relied on the ear? This is, indeed, an exemplary and masterly piece of sociological interpretation of literature.1
If it is correct to assume, and I think it is, that we live to-day more by way of visualisation, what are the reasons for this phenomenon, if we compare ourselves with the Elizabethans? It would seem that this is a consequence of the modern rationalised structure of our lives, as Georg Simmel has already so clearly seen in his Soziologie (1908, p. 650 sq.): 'Accordingly, people who see without hearing are very much more confused, perplexed, and troubled
1 It is interesting to compare Mr. Bennett's lecture with another recent publication, Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition, by G. L. Bethell, London, 1944. Here the author takes the Elizabethan 'audience', about whose classstructure not one word is uttered, as norm for our contemporary 'naturalism' for which Ibsen is taken as example. No modern poet — if one thinks of Ibsen's later plays — has been less naturalistic than Ibsen! Mr. Bethell attributes to the Elizabethans a 'multi-consciousness' without any attempt at a sociological concretion of the term. All the same, I believe that Mr. Bethell has a glimpse of the social purpose of drama, for he writes on p. 83: 'Only the popular mind, as revealed in the popular theatre, preserved in crude melodrama something of the ancient wonder and a sense that man is not in himself an adequate cause of his own remarkable history. On this, if on anything, the future of the drama — as of any social decency — must ultimately depend'.
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