in a favorable position to take in. To
the upper-class attendant at the play the unity of the piece must have
been less dominant. And surely this must have tended to shape the play,
to make it a democratic people's product. For it is an axiom that the
dominant element in an audience settles the fate of a play.

But this new plaything, the theater, was not only the physical
embodiment of the drama, it became a social institution as well. Nor was
it without its evils. The splendors of Elizabethan literature have often
blinded criticism to the more sleazy aspects of the problem. But
investigation has made apparent enough that the Puritan attitude toward
the new institution was not without its excuse. As we have seen, from
the very first a respectable middle class element of society looked
askance at the playhouse, and while this view became exaggerated with
the growth of Puritanism in England, there is nothing to be gained in
idealizing the stage conditions of that time, nor, more broadly, to deny
that the manner of life involved and in some regards the nature of the
appeal at any period carry with them the likelihood of license and of
dissipation. The actor before Shakespeare's day had little social or
legal status; and despite all the leveling up of the profession due to
him and his associates, the "strolling player" had to wait long before
he became the self-respecting and courted individuality of our own day.
Women did not act during the Elizabethan period, nor until the
Restoration; so that one of the present possibilities of corruption was
not present. But on the other hand, the stage was without the
restraining, refining influence of their presence; a coarser tone could
and did prevail as a result. The fact that ladies of breeding wore masks
at the theater and continued to do so into the eighteenth century speaks
volumes for the public opinion of its morals; and the scholar who knows
the wealth of idiomatic foulness in the best plays of Shakespeare,
luckily hidden from the layman in large measure, does not need to be
told of the license and lewdness prevalent at the time. The Puritans are
noted for their repressive attitude toward worldly pleasures and no
doubt part of their antagonism to the playhouse was due to the general
feeling that it is a sin to enjoy oneself, and that any institution
which was thronged by society for avowed purposes of entertainment must
derive from the devil. But documentary evidence exists