Before the Bard: "Shakespeare" in Early Eighteenth-Century London

Abstract

Before the Bard: “Shakespeare” in Early Eighteenth-Century London Robert D. Hume Why did the London audience of 1703 tolerate William Burnaby’s abominable perversion of Twelfth Night? I heard this question asked at a recent thesis defense at the University of Toronto, and its implications have continued to haunt me. The simplest answer is to impugn the taste of the audience—but pondering the matter, I am inclined to think that few (if any) members of the audience could have realized that Love Betray’d (Lincoln’s Inn Fields, late January? 1703) had any connection to Shakespeare’s play or that they would have been disturbed by the fact if they had been aware of it. Our view of Shakespeare and theirs are radically incommensurable, and the difference demands some consideration—unless we are prepared simply to regard them as benighted and ignorant fools. We need to ask an embarassingly large and treacherous question: what did the London audience know about Shakespeare before Bardolatry, and how did it know? An obvious point should be acknowledged at the outset: the audience changes, and even at a single date the London audience is anything but homogeneous. We cannot pretend to talk about a single audience, but must discriminate a minimum of three semi-distinct groups. One comprises a handful of serious literary people—playwright adapters like Dryden, scholars like Gerard Langbaine. From Shakespeare allusions in playtexts we can be certain that at least a small cadre of people had actually read plays not known to be in the repertory. A second group is regular playgoers, some of whom no doubt bought printed plays at times or even bought them systematically. Pepys is a good example. The third group, no doubt much the largest, consists of more casual or occasional theatergoers, relatively few of whom are likely to have bought many play scripts. Recorded views of Shakespeare naturally come almost entirely from the first group, but the tastes and preferences of the third group must have had a powerful effect on the theaters’ repertory. We need, therefore, to attend not only to what the most knowledgeable literary people in [End Page 41] London knew but what ordinary playgoers could have known and are likely to have known. The methodological problems are daunting. Indeed, they are even more formidable than the usual difficulties inherent in historicist attempts to recreate outlooks now remote from us. Scholars have spent the last 200 years scrounging for every scrap of evidence and every passing allusion to a national monument. The results are useful but inevitably distortive: a large heap of “evidence” about reputation has been accumulated, but a balanced picture of historical actuality demands attention to blanks, absences, ignorance, and silent indifference. The rise of Bardolatry signalled in the 1769 Jubilee has been charted and recharted, its excesses deplored even as its detractors marvel (for example) at the failure of Pepys to appreciate plays whose greatness most later commentators accept as a matter of faith or even fact. Our knowledge of the story (rustic simpleton is gradually recognized as universal genius) and our deeply ingrained prejudices about the valuation of Shakespeare make sympathetic attention to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century viewpoints close to impossible. A great deal has been written about Shakespeare in the eighteenth century, some of it extremely helpful. In the last few years the work of Gary Taylor and Michael Dobson in particular has substantially altered and improved our understanding of the subject, and I am indebted to both of them. Dobson asks, centrally, how and why “this extraordinary change in Shakespeare’s status came about,” and answers his question in cultural-ideological terms. 1 Taylor offers a refreshingly realistic account of changing views of Shakespeare, trying to reconstruct a pre-Bardolatrous perspective for the pre-1750 period. 2 Both naturally work from the considerable mass of (mostly familiar) evidence of what people said about Shakespeare and the adaptations made from his plays. My own concerns are narrower and more particular. Resisting the temptation to read the evidence in light of later developments, I want to argue that the major shift toward Bardolatry happened only after 1730. And instead of dwelling yet again on familiar...