We are often told that at one time Shakespeare bridged the gap between high and low culture and classical music composers were the rock stars of their time, pandering to popular taste. These statements generally imply there once existed a cultural garden of Eden where no one knew they were supposed to sit quietly until Wagner asked for the lights to be turned off. I am always interested to read researched accounts of what conditions were actually like at the time.
I was intrigued by a recent essay on Pacific Standard by Noah Berlatsky about how the divide between high and low culture developed. At one time, material like Shakespeare was enjoyed and valued by people from all walks of life.
In Philadelphia, Levine writes, there were 65 Shakespeare performances in the single year of 1835.
It wasn’t just Philadelphia either, as Tocqueville testified: “There is hardly a pioneer’s hut that does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare.” Levine writes that even illiterate men, like the famous scout Jim Bridger, would have Shakespeare read to them so they could memorize passages. In San Francisco, following the opening of the Jenny Lind Theater in 1850, “Miners … swarmed from the gambling saloons and cheap fandango houses to see Hamlet and Lear.” If the miners couldn’t come to the big city, Shakespeare came to them; major Shakespearean actors like Edwin Booth traveled out to mining camps where they acted from cobbled together stages.
However, a garden of Eden state of innocence didn’t necessarily exist. The way people experienced Shakespeare differed. There were those who valued pure Shakespeare for its sophistication and mastery of language. Others enjoyed wild adaptations that changed the endings, added ribald humor and mixed and matched plot and character, “Just as studios feel comfortable reworking stories about Spider-Man or Batman ad infinitum…”
“And over time, the intellectual elitists won; Shakespeare was purged of his pop associations, and became an elite pleasure.
This was in part because of changes in technology and preference—the growth of literacy, for example, ironically sapped the oral culture in which Shakespeare performance and recitation had been so natural. But the sacralization of Shakespeare was also, Levine says, pushed along by highbrow critics and patrons, who wrote against lowbrow theater-going habits, and created venues where Shakespeare was presented seriously, without melodramatic advertisements or farces.”
According to Berlatsky, some times the clashes between high and low brow were quite violent with mobs being fired upon by militia. Makes the effort to remove the intimidation factor associated with arts events seem relatively easy by comparison. While the situation obviously calmed down, the result was that high and low culture stopped communicating with each other and ultimately progressed to a point where they were unable to comprehend/tolerate what the other enjoyed.
Berlatsky notes a view expressed by Lawrence Levine that high and low culture began to converge once again in the 1980s. Berlatsky cites the example of
“directors like Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, and the Coen Brothers slide cheerfully from art to genre and back again, sometimes in the same scene; on television, high-quality shows like Game of Thrones and Mad Men deliberately tackle serious issues in the format of serial melodrama.”
Depending on your opinion of these directors and shows, there is cause for optimism that our society is gradually mending the rifts that developed.