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These were boisterous audiences - heckling, applauding, calling for fa–
vorite scenes to be reprised - but they were not altogether ignorant. They
knew at least enough to hoot at puns and one-liners and to hiss in anticipation
of upcoming villainy. Certainly they were no less boisterous in responding to
the other offerings on the bill: the plays were often sandwiched between
song and dance routines, bawdy farces, and juggling acts. "[Ilhe play may
have been the thing," quips Levine, "but it was not the only thing."
By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, this democratic plu–
ralism began to yield to the pressures of stratification. Shakespeare's plays
were gradually uprooted from the soil of competing popular entertainments;
performances were cleansed of "low" effects and were more and more often
given in separate theaters. And as the Bard came to be seen as one of
"theirs," working class audiences stuck with the burlesques and music halls.
An
aura of sanctity soon enveloped Shakespeare and his works.
Levine finds a number of reasons for this transformation. For one thing,
massive immigration from non-English-speaking countries was changing the
character of the working classes - fewer and fewer people were able to
parse out the lines. Growing literacy, too, exerted a paradoxical impact; it
"encroached upon the pervasive oral culture that had created
in
nineteenth–
century America an audience more comfortable with listening than reading."
But suggestive as this is, one wonders what actual effect "letters" were
having on the defecting constituency.
The real momentum for change was, as Levine points out, rooted in a
more fundamental play of historical forces:
The process that had seen the noun "class" take on a series of
hierarchical adjectives - "lower," "middle," "upper," "working" - in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was operative for the
noun "culture" a hundred years later. Just as the former development
mirrored the economic changes brought about by the Industrial
Revolution in England so the latter reflected the cultural conse–
quences of modernization.
An
increasingly powerful elite, in other words, began to look for ways
to mark out its superiority - it claimed the Bard and defined the new terms
for
his
appreciation.
The argument of
Highbrow/Lowbrow
is carried out mainly by way of
carefully marshalled examples. And by the time Levine has discussed the
parallel sacralization of the other arts, there is no gainsaying his underlying
thesis: that culture is not an absolute, but a production of multiple social
forces. The "classic" is a chameleon entity, adapting to the pressures of its
lobbyists; it is an exclusionary barrier lowered against the masses by elites, a
