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THE ELIZABETHAN THEATRE
dictory. 'Nothing we can discover', he writes, 'from examining their daily routine, their frugal expense accounts, and their quiet and sensible letters, suggests that Elizabethans, individually or collectively, were vastly different from us. Their nature cannot be deduced from the defeat of the Armada or the public hangings in Tyburn. We ourselves live in a spectacular age, without being individually spectacular.'1 On the other hand, Professor Harbage asks whether ignorance was so crippling in the time of Shakespeare as it is to-day. 'Cannot one say', he answers, 'without casuistry, that when theory is fallacious the ignorant benefit by their enforced reliance upon observable fact?'2 If this is correct, which I think it is, the Elizabethan audience would appear by no means to have been 'ninetenth illiterate'. Professor Harbage gives revealing facts about the distribution of ten thousand copies of the reading primer, The ABC and Little Catechism, in the single year of 1585. It is important to realise that this Elizabethan empiricism, which expresses itself on its highest level in Francis Bacon's philosophy, is certain of its place in the world — and what may be beyond it. Though our complex industrialism in culture and life is apparently rational, we know less about the meaning and the machinery of things — natural and spiritual — that surround us than did the Elizabethans. We have lost ourselves in our own perfection. It is this fundamental sociological phenomenon which the American historian has in mind.
Yet he insists on the sameness of human nature — then and now. 'The range of feeling must have been the same. People still are compounded of heaven and earth: kind fathers are harsh creditors; decent folk exchange ribaldries; and ruffians rescue puppies. We need to know more about human impulses in all ages before we grow rash about the Elizabethans. We need to distinguish between what is fundamental in human nature and what is superficial adjustment to environment (my italics). Perhaps the whole range of impulses was more operative in the less comfortable age of Shakespeare and more apt to impress itself upon art. It is more accurate to say that the audience expected brutality than that they demanded and enjoyed it.'3 I am not certain whether the distinction between the basic elements in human nature and the superficial adjustment to social environment can be maintained. I am inclined to believe that environment changes human nature, anyway in the long run.
In his concluding sentences Professor Harbage provides us with material for examining the relationship of the basic nature of the 1 Shakespeare's Audience, p. 139. 2 Ibid. 147. 3 Ibid. p. 153 sq.
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