The Caroline Audience

Abstract

DR I. A. RICHARDS, examining the nature of 'meaning', has drawn attention to the importance of 'tone', i.e. the relationship between writer and reader which is suggested through the writer's manner of utterance.1 Certainly one of the most difficult barriers to negotiate is that set up by a wrong tone in something we hear or read. When the writer has us in view as among his potential audience, he is to be blamed for the erection of the barrier: he should find a way of reaching us if he knows he has something to tell us. But a writer of the past or of another nation than our own is not usually addressing us: his public is very different in its attitudes, conventions, acceptances, and it is to them that his tone must primarily be adapted. Consequently, in our judgment of past literature, we have always to consider the public addressed: we may then see why the tone of a literary work is not the one we most delight in, and may be prepared to recognize that this tone was apt in its context. (We may still reject the work for another reason, but at least we shall be saved from condemning an eavesdropped conversation because its language is not our own.) This matter of tone becomes particularly important in dramatic studies. We cannot enter a theatre without to some extent, partaking of a group-consciousness, which will make our demands on, and expectations from, the dramatist more rigid than are our isolated demands and expectations in private reading. But theatrical expectations vary greatly from one age to another, from one kind of theatre to another. Athens in the age of Pericles and London in the reign of Charles II produced theatres which were about as far apart as theatres can be, and the expectations of the two audiences consequently differed. A dramatist cannot work without some consideration, even if scornful, of his audience, and his 'tone' will arise from his attitude to their expectations. In trying to reach a correct understanding, therefore, of the drama of any period, we must try first to appreciate the character of its audience: only by knowing that so well that we can discount it shall we be able to follow the playwright's meaning unchecked by oddity of tone. In using 'tone' in this way, we must think not of mere turns of phrase in a dramatist's speech, but of the whole design, temper, embellishments of his work. These, quite as much as the individual words and sentences, are affected by the relations of writer and audience. The chorus, the 1 Practical Criticism, 2nd ed., 1930, pp. 182, 206-9.