Three Early Articles
by Maurice Spector (1916)
Shakespeare’s Age and our Own
by Maurice Spector
Canadian Forward, December 2, 1916.
What a certain critic has said of Plato may with
equal truth, be allowed of Shakespeare: “He is for all time; yet to
understand him rightly, he must be studied in relation to his own age.”
That is to say, it is impossible to abstract Shakespeare from the
historical period in which he worked. For one need not be an extreme
adherent of the theory that the environment is the greatest determining
factor in an artist’s development, in order to admit readily that the
various characteristics of the dramatist’s age were far too significant to
have missed exercising a pervading influence on his achievements. It is
our present purpose to make a brief study of these characteristics and to
compare or contrast them with the outstanding features of the Twentieth
Century.
The spirit of the Elizabethan age was dominated by
two epoch-making historical movements—the Renaissance and the Reformation.
The former, by opening the flood-gates of classical culture, broke the
spell of Europe’s long intellectual torpor of the Middle Ages, and
inaugurated a period of enlightenment. The mind, released from the iron
sway of mediaeval religious orthodoxy with its constant brooding on the
problem of heaven and hell, was free now to speculate on new contents and
new forms for those contents whether they dealt with astronomy or
literature. The Reformation too, was not only a religious experience of
the Northern European nations; it was also an additional invaluable
impetus to the spirit of criticism independence and protest which is
fundamental for all original thought. The outcome of the iterating
influence of these two movements, was to make the Elizabethan Age
eminently practical and positive. Accordingly Professor Dowden, a critic
of Shakespeare, asserts that “in that period instead of substituting
supernatural powers and persons and events for the natural facts of the
world, men recurred to these facts and found in them inspiration.”
As the “heirs of all preceding ages” we have
naturally inherited and retained both the positivism and the Protestantism
of the Elizabethan Age. Superficially it might appear, then, that the form
and spirit of the two ages under consideration were similar. But in
reality there is a profound difference owing to the very fact of the
development of the positivism and Protestantism which were only in their
genesis during the Elizabethan Age.
The freedom of scientific research has become a
matter of course with us and anyone attempting to restrict it would be
justly considered an absurd anachronism. Science has in our days been so
widely applied to practical life, and the development of machinery has
been so amazingly extensive that the external structure of society would
seem radically changed to a resurrected Elizabethan. Our methods of
transportation communication and production, with all pertaining thereto,
have made an industrial age. They have destroyed feudalism, with its
problems and relations, ad [and] instead raised new problems peculiar to
industrialism. The class-struggle is now no longer between the noble nad
the burgher, but between the middle class—burgher class—and the
proletariat. We read very little of any activities of the Elizabethan
proletariat—it seems to have lacked effective protesting force and
individuality; whereas the modern proletariat which daily streams in
thousands in and out of the factories, is a power to be reckoned with in
the social and political life of the state. It is the demos which is
leading the new proletariat movement, this time not against religious
corruption but against social corruption and injustice. For here lies an
important difference between our age and the Sixteenth Century—it is more
concerned with social problems than with religious issues. And herein is
evidenced the greatest positivism of modern democracy, which strives to
solve practical questions of human social conditions rather than the
problems of religion.
Democracy, the general critical interest and active
participation of the people—the masses—in social as well as the political
aspects of natural life, that is the concept which marks such a vestal
distinction between our age and Elizabeth’s. The latter was an
aristocratic, monarchical age, to which democracy as we understand it, was
unknown, or at least unfamiliar. It is indeed true that Puritanism had a
democratizing tendency, but the prominence of the religious issue almost
obscured the political in its struggle with the royal authority. The fact
of the Restoration finally states the lack of fundamental democracy at
that time.
As might be expected, the attitude towards
democracy in political and social life of the two periods is reflected in
their respective literatures. Elizabethan drama is said to be a drama
without a “tendency,” whereas modern drama is represented by a Shaw, an
Ibsen, or Strundling, has a “tendency,” that is, the former drama takes no
definite or particular stand on a certain question dealing with social or
political life, while the latter is a direct criticism of some phase of
modern life. This phenomenon is obviously a result of the fact that the
Elizabethans did not feel any stir of social protest around them. The
people were too absorbed in guarding and strengthening the foundations of
English national liberty, to criticize existing institutions. A dramatist
like Shakespeare, of the universal mind, is yet so far a child of his age
that he ignores or holds up to ridicule the common people, but writes
several plays dealing with English national history. It is on this ground
that Whitman condemns the great poems (Shakespeare’s included) as being
“poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people, the
life-blood of democracy....They had their birth in courts... and all smell
of prince’s favours.”
But how differently moulded would the contents of
Shakespeare’s dramas have been had he lived in our eventful century when
the struggle for the attainment of social democracy occupies the chief
place on the world stage. If modern social life contains such
potentialities as inspired the work of a Henrik Ibsen a Bernard Shaw, and
an Anatole France, it is an interesting and fascinating speculation to
consider to what extent it would have influenced the master genius greater
than them all—Shakespeare.
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