This passage from Nigel Cliff's The Shakespeare Riots got a laugh-out-loud response from me:
Shakespeare was revered as a seer and a prophet, the master spirit of the Anglophone civilization, but his plays were also the stuff of log-cabin wisdom, the staple of schoolboy speechifying, and above all the stock-in-trade of popular drama. With one or at most two theaters in all but the biggest cities, men and women of every class went to the same shows and watched the same medley of "legitamate" plays and the skits and songs, farces and acrobatic dsplays that were served up as after-pieces or entr'actes, and no one thought of removing Shakespeare to a separate category called Culture...Some spectators became so wrapped up in the action that they forgot they were watching a play at all. In Albany a canal boatman was enraged by Iago's scheming: "You damned lying scoundrel!" he roared as he rose to his feet, "I would like to get hold of you after the show and wring your infernal neck!"
Ah, the good ole' days when art could move us so...
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