318
PARTISAN REVIEW
page, but rather to raise a baton and redirect the traffic of ideas - even when
the ideas before him are good ones, necessary ones. He sees what he
perceives to be roads not taken, grand opportunities lost. The impulse is un–
deniably grandiose. But it is also, in the last analysis, critical; therefore it is
part of the job description.
Lawrence Levine's
Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural
Hierarchy in America
has affected me in just this way. Thoughtful, probing,
packed through its rifts with provocative lore, the book is in many ways ex–
emplary - it is even written with grace and care. And yet when I set it
aside, I felt a most ungrateful twinge of disappointment.
It
was as if Levine
had been building steadily toward what Prufrock called an "overwhelming
question" - or connection - only to veer sharply to the side when the mo–
ment of truth arrived.
But first, about the book and its successes. As the subtitle indicates,
Highbrow/Lowbrow
traces the process whereby an open and pluralistic
American culture - "culture" used here primarily in its artistic sense - be–
came, over the course of the nineteenth century, stratified according to class
and perceived value distinctions. Levine's lengthy opening chapter looks
closely at changes in the performance and reception ofShakespeare's plays in
1800s America. Subsequent chapters demonstrate that the very same kinds
of shifts were taking place with respect to opera, classical music, and art, ac–
companied by an increasingly rigid definition of "high" and "low" culture. The
epilogue addresses itself, if glancingly, to debates being waged in our culture
today, most notably the controversy surrounding Allen Bloom's
The Closing
of the American Mind.
Shakespeare was not always the exclusive property of self- flattering
elites. We know, of course, that aristocrats and common folk stood elbow to
elbow in the Globe Theater in Elizabeth's day. Levine convinces us that this
was true as well in the cities and pioneer towns oflate eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century America. Audiences representing a full cross-section of
the population jammed theaters of every description to see the plays per–
formed. Shakespeare was, he asserts, more popular here for a time than in
England. The documentation is as amusing as it is instructive:
In 1816 in Lexington, Kentucky, Noah Ludlow performed
The Taming
ofthe Shrew, Othello,
and
The Merchant of Venice
in a room on the second
floor of an old brewery, next door to a saloon, before an audience
seated on backless cushionless chairs. In the summer of 1833, Sol
Smith's company performed in the dining room of a hotel in Tazewell,
Alabama . .. His "heavy tragedian" Mr. Lyne attempted to recite the
"Seven Ages of Man" from
As You Like It
while "persons were passing
from one room to the other continually and the performer was obliged
to move whenever anyone passed."
