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ON THEATRE AND CINEMA— UNIVERSAL
And give them title, Rule, and approbation, With senators on the bench. This is it, That makes the wappen'd widow wed again.
Come damn'd earth,
Thou common whore of mankind. . . .
More than twenty years later, Marx quotes the same passage in Das Kapital1 as evidence for these sentences : 'Just as all the qualitative differences between commodities are effaced in money, so money on its side, a radical leveller, effaces all distinctions. But money is itself a commodity, an external object, capable of becoming the private property of any individual. Thus social power becomes a private power in the hands of a private person.' Marx's pivotal concept which he took over from Hegel, the estrangement of the human being [Selbstentfremdung des Menschen) is the basis of his often misunderstood and maligned 'materialism'. As Marx was able to illustrate his social theory by Shakespeare's idea of money, so perhaps the great poet's contemporary audiences may have grasped the universal appeal of his verses.
As I shall say more presently about Shakespeare's audience, I should perhaps illustrate the point I have made about Moliere by comparing his conception of the world and its problems by quoting one or two pensees from Pascal, his great contemporary, for both lived in the same world. 'G'est sortir de l'humanite que de sortir du milieu. La grandeur de Fame humaine consiste a savoir s'y tenir; tant s'en faut que la grandeur soit a sortir, qu'elle est a n'en point sortir.' Or: 'Gradation: Le peuple honore les personnes de grande puissance. Les demi-habiles les meprisent, disant que la naissance n'est pas un avantage de la personne, mais du hasard. Les habiles les honorent, non par la pensee du peuple mais par la pensee de derriere. Les devots qui ont plus de zele que de science les meprisent, malgre cette consideration qui les fait honorer par les habiles, parce qu'ils en jugent par une nouvelle lumiere que la pitie leur donne. Mais les chretiens parfaits les honorent par une autre lumiere superieure. . . .' This profound social subordination is more than political conformity.
Obviously, there are historic periods where a certain measure of apparent social stability prevails. There are others where 'class struggles' break up this apparent social stability and demand a decisively new social integration. As a recent critic has put it
1 Cf. Das Kapital, Vol. i , Chapter III. 32