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Shakespeare and High and Low Culture |
Excerpts from an interview with Karen Lyon, managing editor of the Folger Magazine, October 2002
LAWRENCE LEVINE: The lines between high and low culture in the nineteenth century were not so thick and people could pass back and forth. The audiences were not so segregated—well, they were by race and sometimes gender, but not by class. So you’d go to a Shakespeare performance and there would be all kinds of people in the audience, working class people and middle and upper class people, the aristocrats. And then by the end of the nineteenth century that begins to fractionate and you begin to get people being frozen out of Shakespeare and opera, it becomes hoity-toity.
It’s not that you’re not allowed in, but if you do go in, you’ve got to conform to certain standards of behavior and dress and decorum which working class people either can’t do or won’t do. So a lot of things are staked out by the upper and middle classes which were open to the working classes during the first half or the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century: Shakespearean plays, opera, certain kinds of music, museums. Museums became more exclusive places and the working classes are cut out of that because they work six days a week and museums are closed on Sunday. And they become more exclusive because there are fewer explanations, more assumptions that people know what they’re looking at. I think those lines are coming down now; I think things are much more porous. You go to the opera now and, while it’s hard to tell what class there is, you don’t have to conform to the decorum. People can come in jeans, they come in t-shirts, and it’s true of the symphony as well. I think there’s a greater range. Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Henry James—these people are now the stuff of movies.
Highbrow/Lowbrow is not necessarily my best book, but it’s been my key, because it’s opened my life to other disciplines. I’m invited to opera houses to give lectures. It’s really been a wonderful entrée.
I think a very important figure was Joe Papp, who decided to bring Shakespeare back to the people he thought Shakespeare was written for, and that’s the everyday Joe and Janes, and he did that. And I actually saw one of his early performances. He began by bringing flatbed trucks around and doing Shakespeare from the backs of those flatbed trucks in neighborhoods and in my neighborhood, up in the neighborhood of the George Washington Bridge, he did Romeo and Juliet, it must have in the 50s. And then the next stage, he had these portable auditoria that he would bring in and set them up in empty lots one afternoon and do Shakespeare. And then, of course, he got that nice site in Central Park. To see Romeo and Juliet on the streets of New York by people who kept their own accents—they did it with New York accents or Raul Julia did it with a Puerto Rican accent.
The notion that Shakespeare was ever popular culture is very hard for us. And that’s what led to my mystification when I discovered Shakespeare in parody. Shakespeare is high culture and can only be enjoyed by educated people, and that kind of stuff. And that still bugged me long after Papp. It was the mid to late 70s when I was discovering this stuff and still feeling that I wasn’t quite capable of writing about Shakespeare. Who was I? A friend finally pushed me to the Folger. A friend made an appointment with somebody there. I went with great trepidation and they were very nice to me, very cordial, and they asked me what I wanted to see. I had no notion in the world, so the one thing I knew was that there were playbills, so I asked to see the playbills and the minute I started looking at playbills I knew that Shakespeare was popular culture because you’d see these ubiquitous [pointing] hands: “See the witches [dance]!”
© 2002, Karen Lyon