Wednesday, September 5, 2007

THE PLAY'S THE THING: Matt's post about Broadway's position in the media marketplace offers a neat segue into our next topic in pop-culture history. After all, in the early-19th-century United States, live theater was popular culture. At least, that's the argument made by historian Lawrence Levine in his book, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, which is excerpted in Chapter 2 of our textbook. Specifically, Levine claims that performances of William Shakespeare's plays attracted large, enthusiastic, diverse audiences throughout the antebellum period and across the expanding nation. His evidence is pretty impressive, ranging from playbills advertising Shakespeare alongside minstrel shows and acrobatic troupes to the numerous 19th-century parodies of the Bard's work, which worked only if audiences knew the originals. (Levine's work isn't readily available online, but for a wonderful collection of materials on this theme, check out Shakespeare in American Life, a Web-based exhibit from the Folger Library featuring images, documents, and sound and video clips.)

Levine's analysis goes one step further, though, as he argues that, despite (or perhaps because of) Shakespeare's antebellum popularity, his work soon ceased to be pop culture in America, instead entering the realm of the "highbrow." Levine offers several reasons for this shift: increasing ticket prices, the growing availability of commercial amusements, the enshrinement of Shakespeare in academia, and especially class tensions over culture. This last factor is epitomized in the Astor Place Riot of 1849, in which working-class supporters of American actor Edwin Forrest clashed with highbrow fans of British actor Charles Macready. (Pop-culture digression: the story of the riot inspired Richard Nelson's 1992 play, Two Shakespearean Actors, starring SpyDaddy and the voice of Disney's Robin Hood.) After Astor Place, the story goes, Shakespeare was gradually "sacralized," taken off the people's entertainment menu and transformed into cultural spinach, to be consumed only by those intellectual elites who properly appreciated it.

But is this argument persuasive? Even Levine himself granted in a 2002 interview that he might have overstated his case, admitting, for instance, that Joe Papp's Public Theater has brought Shakespeare to the peepul with its free performances in Central Park. The mass media have extended Shakespeare's reach even more, whether you're talking about the dozens of feature films of the plays or the many television parodies. That said, it seems undeniable that Shakespeare still carries a highbrow air, a mark of cultural sophistication that's not consistent with "pop culture" as most folks understand it.

So, ThingThrowers, I turn it over to you. William Shakespeare: pop or not pop? That is the question.

No comments:

Post a Comment