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ELIZABETHAN THEATRE AND MODERN CINEMA fessor Harbage is not too optimistic when he writes: 'A universal audience and an immediacy of relationship between audience and artist may be conditions impossible to recover. Even in Shakespeare's days these conditions were a felicitous accident.'1 So far, I fully agree with him. But his further conclusions distinctly trespass on the historian's proper field: 'One truth remains by which we may be both warned and comforted: the human fabric has not deteriorated, and it is as vain to inveigh against our generation as against Shakespeare's. Under right conditions the "people generally" are still "very acceptive". Their capacity to respond to what is great and beautiful remains undiminished, if less frequently exercised. It was impossible to produce anything too good for the race in Shakespeare's day, and it is equally impossible now.'2 Here again Professor Harbage separates the basic human elements from their environmental framework. Only the synthesis of both makes human beings into what they are.
You may object, of course, to my somewhat pessimistic outlook in respect of the future of popular art — has there not been a recent film Henry V? Indeed, this was a great venture, and one probably gives no trade secrets away in saying that this film was made against the resistance of the narrow-minded 'showmen' within the film industry. But the artistic courage of the small band of producers and directors broke this resistance down. To those who have watched the social composition of the audiences who came to see Henry V it was no surprise that it was a modern universal audience who enjoyed Shakespeare, now as ever. But does one swallow make a summer?
If we are conditioned to be passive, if our emotions and behaviour patterns continue to be shaped unchallenged by ever changing stimuli and excitements without substance, perhaps then very soon the human fabric will be such that no new Battle for Britain, no epic of Arnheim can be sustained, or that we grow weary of the arduous and humble struggle of our daily task and leave it to our masters to praise perennial economic freedom and benevolently to give us panem et circensesl3
1 Shakespeare's Audience, p. 167. 2 Ibid. p. 67.
3 I should like to draw here the reader's attention to the suggestive introduction to Edward SackvilleWest's The Rescue, London 1945. There we read on p. 8: 'Radio is in fact susceptible of carrying far more degrees of dramatisation than the stage or the screen, because of the extreme flexibility of the medium and its wide powers of imaginative suggestion.' Indeed Radio at its best may be nearer to the Elizabethan theatre than the film medium could ever be.
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