Marilynne Robinson - The Givenness of Things

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My intention is to open the question of the mind-set of Shakespeare’s audience, a self-selecting crowd of Londoners with no more in common than a free afternoon and the price of admission. The argument that Shakespeare was actually someone else, the Earl of Oxford, say, is based on his apparently extensive knowledge of court life. But what we know of court life is largely what Shakespeare tells us about it. And, for the most practical reasons, the knowledge that was actually crucial to him was the kind that would make his plays intelligible and engrossing to his public. This would place him closer to the man or woman in the street than to more rarefied circles, a perspective that would have come naturally to him, if Shakespeare was Shakespeare. Obviously his career depended on his making a sound estimate of their interests and capacities. And here we are, centuries on, granting him more weight and subtlety than we grant any theologian or philosopher, on the basis of his estimate of his audience. There seems to be an assumption among critics that the deep parts of his plays were written for that small class trained in the universities or sophisticated by some other means, while the groundlings were there for the clowns and the sword fights. But what if there was an intellectual tradition shared by Shakespeare and his larger audience, so strong and well established that it was capable of serving as a medium for ideas of great complexity, yet so long stigmatized as subversive or heretical, and still, rightly, so much a source of anxiety to those in power, that allusions to it are oblique and implicit? What if this tradition, unacknowledged by modern scholars and critics, was a robust conceptual frame, brought to the plays by the audience and shared and explored by the playwright? If there is a continuity of thought and perspective between William Langland’s Piers the Ploughman , written in the fourteenth century, and John Bunyan’s seventeenth-century Pilgrim’s Progress , both masterpieces of the vernacular tradition, an ongoing vernacular culture accounts for this continuity.

Under Edward VI there was indeed a surge of interest in the works of Chaucer, Langland, Lydgate, and Gower. Then the fashion changed, and they, together with contemporary writers in the popular style, were ridiculed by Elizabethan critics such as Philip Sidney. But Spenser was among those who emulated the old style. Shakespeare foregrounded “ancient Gower” in the late play Pericles, Prince of Tyre . With archaisms of verse and language, he drew explicit, even emphatic, attention to his source. This might account for the great popularity of the play as well as the fact that it was omitted from the First Folio. Again, if Shakespeare’s view of Shylock and Othello seems anomalously generous and complex in a culture from which Jews had been expelled in 1290 on the pretext of blood libels, and which they would not be permitted to enter again until 1657, Piers the Ploughman may shed light on popular feeling toward them. Perhaps cynicism about the motives of a king who made himself wealthy by this expropriation preserved an unofficial memory of the Jews among the people, as having been wronged in a way that was familiar to them. Or perhaps there were Jews who remained in England and were not betrayed to the authorities. Repression discredits law, after all, and dignifies resistance. A century after the expulsion, William Langland wrote this:

“But all the clergy of the church,” I said, “say in their sermons that neither Saracens nor Jews nor any other creature in the likeness of Christ can be saved without baptism.”

“I deny it,” said Imagination, frowning, for the Scripture says, “The just man shall scarcely be saved on the Day of Judgment. Therefore he shall be saved … For there is a baptism by water, a baptism by the shedding of blood, and a baptism by fire, which means by steadfast faith — The divine fire comes not to consume, but to bring light.

“So an honest man that lives by the law that he knows, believing there is none better (for if he knew of a better he would accept it) — a man who has never treated anyone unjustly, and who dies in the same spirit — surely the God of truth would not reject such honesty as this. And whether it shall be so or not, the faith of such a man is very great, and from that faith there springs a hope of reward. We are told that God will give eternal life to His own, and His own are the faithful and true.”

And this: “Faith alone is sufficient to save the ignorant. And that being so, many Jews and Saracens may be saved, perhaps before we are.”

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Here Langland compares the spiritual state of Muslims, whom he takes to have strayed from an original Christianity, to that of good Christians who are misled by incompetent priests. Clearly there is no reason to think of the dominant classes in fourteenth-century society as more generous and sophisticated in their thinking than the popular audience of Langland’s book, nor to suppose that the past is more naive or intolerant than the present. This is certainly relevant to the question of Shakespeare’s audience.

It is usual for scholars to say that these old writers were inappropriately made to serve the purposes of Puritanism — there may be no meaning at all in the fact that the Puritan Oliver Cromwell negotiated the return of the Jews to England, many of whom had by then found refuge in the tolerant and Calvinist Low Countries. In any case, it is difficult to know what such an assertion means, since scholars never offer a definition of Puritanism. If the movement was so diffuse as to make definition impossible, then statements that treat it as unitary, as this one does, are misleading. We can say that Puritanism was a popular political movement, whatever else. History is unambiguous on this point. Phenomena of its kind, broad-based and durable, never simply fall from the sky. If the old masterpieces of the vernacular style seemed to English readers of the Reformation period to be in harmony with then contemporary grievances and aspirations, this should surely be taken as good evidence that they were indeed in harmony with them. Modern critics cannot claim equal standing. And of course those who identified with these books would also have been formed by them. The strongly biblical language in Piers the Ploughman , Langland’s emphasis on the concern for the poor that is so strongly insisted upon in both Testaments, and on the poverty of Christ, would make the English Bible, Wycliffe’s, then Tyndale’s, the text that created continuity between the earlier writers and the Puritans. Beyond question, if one were to venture a definition of Puritanism, it would include their deep interest in the Bible and deep knowledge of it. The meaning of the existence of the Bible in English, the assertion of the dignity and beauty of the language of the common people implicit in these works of translation, as in original works, is consistent through the centuries, and religious and political in its implications.

Roger L’Estrange, censor to Charles II after the Restoration, called for the proscription of older as well as current books and pamphlets, on the grounds that “being Written in times of Freedom, and Menag’d by great Masters of the Popular Stile, they speak playner and strike homer to the Capacity and Humour of the Multitude.” Suppressions were to be accomplished by means of the suite of penalties usual at the time—“Death, Mutilation, Imprisonment, Banishment,” etc. Penalties were to fall upon anyone involved in the dissemination of proscribed material, including sailors, ballad singers, and carters, unless they informed on others. It is reasonable to wonder what was lost, and interesting to note that writers for the multitude could be acknowledged masters of their style. L’Estrange says, “For the Authors, nothing can be too Severe, that stands with Humanity, and Conscience. First, ’tis the Way to cut off the Fountain of our Troubles. Secondly, There are not many of them in an Age, and so the less work to do.” The demand for the kind of literature to be suppressed is reflected in the difficulties L’Estrange anticipates in banning it. Printers would be expected to fail if they could not sell it, and therefore would be inclined to sell banned books for the greatly enhanced value they would have as a consequence of their being banned. As the merest aside, I will mention here that the writer most widely read in England while Shakespeare wrote was the French theologian John Calvin. This is a fact of such obvious significance that its eclipse amounts effectively to another proscription. It is no accident, after all, that the revolutionary side in the civil war were and are called Calvinists.