We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
AUDIENCES— POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY admirably: Tour Moliere — et surtout pour son art, la comedie, delimitee de sa nature — il fallait, "en tout fuir les extremites", et ne pas rompre en visiere a tout le genre humain.'1 Once this social subordination, with its Christian basis, vanishes, the theatre and its universal audience disappear also. When, later in the eighteenth century, Lessing, Goethe and Schiller attempted to found a national theatre in Germany, they were bound to fail. The history of the European drama since the late eighteenth century — from Beaumarchais to Galsworthy or to Gerhart Hauptmann, is the theatre of the tiers etat.
If I am not mistaken, universal audiences in non-democratic societies — we confine ourselves to the historic theatre of Western civilisation — appear only within the framework of an 'organic' type of society. Shakespeare's theatre seems to illustrate this phenomenon strikingly, apart from the medieval European theatre which naturally reflects and interprets a universally held religious belief.
During the Tudor period, enough of this medieval background was still alive (and Shakespeare's image of the world was also sufficiently medieval) to ensure that a conformity between dramatic art and society as a whole was maintained. Tt,' writes R. H. Tawney, in his classic Religion and Rise of Capitalism (Pelican edition, p. 136 sq.), 'was (a system) of an ordered and graded society, in which each class performed its allotted function, and was secured such a livelihood, and no more than such a livelihood, as was proportioned to its status. . . . The statesmen concerned to prevent agitation saw in religion the preservation of order, and the antidote for the cupidity or ambition which threatened to destroy it, and reinforced the threat of temporal penalties with arguments that would not have been out of place in the pulpit. To both alike, religion is concerned with something more than personal salvation. It is the sanction of social duties and the spiritual manifestation of the corporate life of a complex yet united society. To both, the state is something more than an institution created for material necessities or political convenience. It is a link between the individual soul and that supernatural society of which all Christian men are held to be members. It rests not merely on practical convenience, but on the will of God.'
Yet soon capitalism cut itself loose from the body of religious traditions. Spiritual norms and economic institutions became separated, a process which lasted from the sixteenth century to the present day.
1 Cf. Valdemar Videl: Corneille etson temps — Moliere, Paris 1935, p. 507.
C 33 M.S.F.