High and Low Theater

Katherine Newey suggests that “a class-based divide between popular culture and literary or ‘high,’ remaining to this day, emerged in debates over the reform of the theatre [in the 19th century]. Much of what still endures of the concept of ‘legitimate’ theatre in the early twenty-first century was formed out of the debates, law-suits, petitions to Parliament, Select Committee enquiries, rampant commercialism, and puffery of pre-Victorian theatre industry in London.”

She adds, “It was in this formative post-Revolutionary, pre-Victorian period, as Annabel Patterson argues, that strong actions were taken to ‘do away with’ the ‘shared belief in a populist Shakespeare.’ The result was an attempt to remove Shakespeare from the popular theatre, and annexe him to elite literary culture. This division between literature and theatre, between commercial success and aesthetic credibility endured throughout the nineteenth century, expressed in terms of ‘the National Drama’ of whom Shakespeare was the iconic representative.”

Critics endorsed the elevation of Shakespeare to high art. Henry Arthur Jones, in his The Renascence of the English Drama , distinguished between “the art of the drama on the one hand and popular amusement on the other” and emphasized “the greater pleasure to be derived from the art of the drama.” He added that the problem with contemporary drama was that “It is a hybrid, an unwieldy Siamese Twin, with two bodies, two heads, two minds, two dispositions, all of them, for the present, vitally connected. And one of these two bodies, dramatic art, is lean and pinched and starving, and has to drag about with it, wherever it goes, its fat, puffy, unwholesome, dropsical brother, popular amusement.”