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Shakespeare as Spectacle and History: The Victorian Period
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
Extract
The changes in social composition and cultural taste that came over theatre audiences in the late eighteenth century and in the first decades of the nineteenth century had a profound effect upon their attitude to, and consequently the production of, Shakespeare. The social mix of the London playhouse remained relatively unchanged through much of the eighteenth century. Within a fairly small auditorium the aristocratic and upper middle-class gentility of the boxes and the bourgeois respectability of the pit effectively dictated a style of drama and performance that most appealed to the tastes of this, the most dominant audience group. Combined with the limitations imposed upon the techniques of production by an adequate but undeveloped technology and the social stability provided by the slow pace of political and industrial evolution, the early and mid-Georgian theatre (including Shakespeare) preserved a remarkably uniform structure and dramatic viewpoint over a long period.
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- Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1976
References
Notes
1. Essays on the Drama (1858), p. 206.
2. The Leader, 14 02 1852.
3. The Life and Theatrical Times of Charles Kean, 2nd ed. (1859), II, 26.
4. The Examiner, 21 10 1838.
5. Preface, Hamlet (1878).
6. ‘Four Great Actors’, The Drama (1893), p. 104.
7. Quoted in Dutton Cook, Nights at the Play (1883), p. 207.
8. ‘The Living Shakespeare: A Defence of Modern Taste’ [1901], Thoughts and Afterthoughts, 3rd ed. (1915), p. 56.
9. ‘The Tempest in a Teacup’ [1904], op. cit., p. 213.
10. ‘The Living Shakespeare’, op. cit., p. 61.
11. The Renascence of the English Drama (1895), p. 136. Exactly the opposite argument is drawn today from the same choruses.
12. The Era, 9 10 1856.
13. The Times, 12 10 1882.
14. Quoted in Odell, G. C. D., Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving (1920), II, 430–1.Google Scholar
15. The Theatre, 04 1882, pp. 235–6.
16. ibid., February 1892, p. 104.
17. Quoted in Marker, F. J., ‘The First Night of Charles Kean's The Tempest – From the Notebooks of Hans Christian Andersen’, Theatre Notebook, XXV (Autumn, 1970), p. 23.Google Scholar
18. Nights at the Play, p. 208.
19. The Theatre, 04 1887, pp. 230–1.
20. ibid., March 1894, p. 152.
21. Essays on the Drama, p.142.
22. ibid., p. 77.
23. The Theatre, 12 1884, p. 310.
24. Quoted in Merchant, W. M., Shakespeare and the Artist (1959) p. 94.Google Scholar
25. The Life and Theatrical Times of Charles Kean, II, 382.
26. ibid., II, 203.
27. Quoted in Clement Scott, The Drama of Yesterday and To-day (1899), I, 292.
28. Preface, King Henry the Fifth (1859), p. vii.
29. The Life and Theatrical Times of Charles Kean, II, 169.
30. ibid., II, 379.
31. ibid., II, 59.
32. ibid., II, 210.
33. Squire, and Bancroft, Marie, Mr and Mrs Bancroft On and Off the Stage, 4th ed. (1888), II, 18.Google Scholar
34. For the following information I am indebted to Sybil Rosenfeld, ‘Alma-Tadema's Designs for Henry Irving's Coriolanus’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch (1974), pp. 84–95.
35. ibid., p. 95. Anne Bullen's coronation procession in Henry VIII, which Alma-Tadema also designed, was objected to by the Theatre on the grounds that, ‘seeing how much toil of research has been incurred in arriving at the accuracy of these costumes, they pass all too quickly, and the spectator can but regret that he has not more time to profit by the liberal education that might be afforded him as to the dress of our ancestors’. (February 1892, p. 105.)
36. ‘King Henry VIII’ [1910] Thoughts and Afterthoughts, pp. 291–2. Tree hoped that the production would convey an impression to contemporary audiences of ‘Henry in his habit as he lived, of his people, of the architecture, and of the manners and customs of that great age’ (p. 281).