Abstract
If Shakespeare studies have at times had an imperialistic habit of mind threatening to conquer the space of English studies, just as English studies have a way of being perceived to dominate other literatures, so has film in its global domination had a way of becoming an ally of Shakespeare, albeit a provisional one. Theater, however, has experienced a trajectory of prestige-decline and subsequent legitimation crisis, as theater departments and the recent job market can testify, carrying with it the decline of nineteenth-century Shakespearean theater as an elite cultural form. Except for the musical, theater generally receives a smaller and smaller demographic, and a more elderly one. The decline itself has been appropriated as theatrical entertainment in Mike Daisey’s current, one-man performance, How Theater Failed America.
… written on purpose, with much study to no end.
—John Taylor, the Water-Poet
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Notes
Donald Hedrick, “Bardguides of the New Universe: The Cultural Logic of Late Shakespeareanism”, in Shakespeare After Mass Media, ed. Richard Burt (New York and London: Palgrave, 2001), 35–57.
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For this observation in a contemporary theorization of entertainment, particularly in terms of the musical comedy, see Richard Dyer, Only Entertainment (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).
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Jeremy Lopez, Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 33
For these and the initial theorizations of early modern “entertainment value”, see Donald Hedrick, “Advantage, Affect, History, Henry V”, PMLA 118, 3 (2003): 470–87
For a thorough account of the jig, see Charles Read Baskervill, The Elizabethan Jig, and Related Song Drama (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1929).
Paul Yachnin, in Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England: A Collaborative Debate (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2007), 41.
For selected information on Taylor, see Bernard Capp, The World of John Taylor the Water-Poet, 1578–1653 (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994).
For the references to actor-wagers, see B.L. Joseph, Elizabethan Acting (London: Oxford UP 1964), 93–94.
Citations are to Francis Beaumont, “The Knight of the Burning Pestle”, in English Renaissance Drama, ed. David Bevington, Lars Engle, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Eric Rasmussen (W. W. Norton: New York, 2002).
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999), 804.
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Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972).
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1981).
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© 2010 Greg Colón Semenza
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Hedrick, D. (2010). Forget Film: Speculations on Shakespearean Entertainment Value. In: Semenza, G.C. (eds) The English Renaissance in Popular Culture. Reproducing Shakespeare: New Studies in Adaptation and Appropriation. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106444_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106444_13
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