Abstract
-
With more than pow’r of parliament you sit,
-
Despotic representatives of wit!
-
For in a moment, and without much pother,
-
You can dissolve this piece, and call another!
-
As ‘tis no treason, let us frankly see,
-
In what they differ, and in what agree,
-
The said supreme assembly of the nation,
-
With this our great Dramatic Convocation!
-
Business in both oft meets with interruption:
-
In both, we trust, no brib’ry or corruption;
-
Both proud of freedom, have a turn to riot,
-
And the best Speaker cannot keep you quiet.
English playwright John Burgoyne was not being entirely facetious when he wrote this prologue comparing the audience’s authority to that of Parliament. By most accounts, eighteenth-century English audiences had remarkable sovereignty over their arts experiences— from determining the actual flow of content during the event to making public judgment on its value, efficacy, and meaning afterward. They did indeed hold the power, in the manner of Parliament, to “dissolve this piece, and call another!” Part of that power came from the fertile nature of the venue-audience exchange; audience to performer, performer to audience, and intra-audience discourse all included a variety of approbative and disapprobative gestures that constituted an acceptable (indeed expected) standard of active behavior while inside eighteenth-century playhouses. But importantly, a significant part of the audience’s power arose from what I will call the audience-community exchange; the audiences’ participation, as individuals and as members of various subcultures, in a variety of activities centered on public meaning making and evaluation taking place outside of the playhouse or concert hall or gallery. As I illustrate later, prior to the twentieth-century acts of social interpretation were commonplace in Western society, taking the form of competitions, querelles, pamphlet wars, audience leagues, arts appreciation societies, and other public forums for discussion and debate over the meaning and value of a work of art.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
L Hughes, The Drama’s Patrons: A Study of the Eighteenth-Century London Audience (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1971), 4.
Richard Butsch, The Citizen Audience: Crowds, Publics, and Individuals (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 144.
Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 25–26.
Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, Third Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Martha Feldman, Opera and Sovereignty (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 2007), 7.
Susan Wollenberg and Simon McVeigh, Concert Life in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2004), 80.
Arthur Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, Second Edition. Rev. John Gould and D. M. Lewis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 272.
Frederic William John Hemmings, The Theatre Industry in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 129.
Quoted in Calvin Tompkins, Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970), 78.
John A. Davis, “Opera and Absolutism in Restoration Italy, 1815–1860,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History xxxvi, no. 4 (Spring 2006): 569–594.
James Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 16.
Selma Jeanne Cohen, Dance as a Theatre Art: Source Readings in Dance History from 1581 to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Book Company, 1992), 21.
Michael Gross, Rogues’ Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money that Made the Metropolitan Museum (New York: Broadway Books, 2009), 55.
Tate Wilkinson, Memoirs of His Own Life. 4 vols. (London: Wilson, Spence, and Mawman, 1790), 111.
Judith W. Fisher, “Audience Participation in the Eighteenth-Century London Theater,” in Audience Participation: Essays on Inclusion in Performance, ed. Susan Kattwinkel (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003).
Dennis Kennedy, The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 15.
Arthur Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, Second Edition. Rev. John Gould and D. M. Lewis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 273.
Melveena McKendric, Theatre in Spain, 1490–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 192.
Jeffrey Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680–1791 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), 9.
Frederic William John Hemmings, The Theatre Industry in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 123, 126.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations: A Norton Critical Edition, ed. Edgar Rosenberg (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999), 194.
Quoted in Lynne Conner, Pittsburgh in Stages: Two Hundred Years of Theater (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 25.
Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 92
Carlotta Sorba, “To Please the Public: Composers and Audiences in Nineteenth-Century Italy,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History xxxvi, no. 4 (Spring 2006): 597.
John A. Davis, “Opera and Absolutism in Restoration Italy, 1815–1860,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History xxxvi, no. 4 (Spring 2006): 582.
Thomas Forrest Kelly, Five Nights: Five Musical Premieres (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 299.
H. Barton Baker, “Famous Theatrical Riots,” Belgravia: An Illustrated London Magazine 36 (July to October 1878), 482.
Peter Wilson, The Athenian Institution of the Khoregia: The Chorus, the City and the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 96.
Robert G. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 183.
Calvin Tompkins, Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1970), 84–85.
Eliot Forbes, Thayer’s Life of Beethoven (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), 187
Kenneth Hamilton, After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 86
Oliver Daniel, Stokowski: A Counterpoint of View (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1982), 288–89
Matthew Riley, Musical Listening in the German Enlightenment: Attention, Wonder and Astonishment (London: Ashgate, 2004), 1–2.
Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience: London Theatre-going, 1840–1880 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001), 98.
Paula M. Niedenthal, Lawrence W. Barsalou, Francois Ric, and Silvia Krauth-Gruber, “Embodiment in the Acquisition and Use of Emotion Knowledge,” in Emotion and Consciousness, eds., Lisa Feldman Barrett, Paula M. Niedenthal, and Piotre Winkielman (New York: Guilford Press, 2005), 22
Carl R. Plantinga, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 6.
William Webber, “Did People Listen in the 18th Century?,” Early Music 25, no. 4 (Nov., 1997): 681.
Tice L. Miller, Bohemians and Critics: American Theatre Criticism in the Nineteenth Century (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1981), 2–6.
Richard Butsch, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 9.
Peter Smith, “Ecology of Picture Study,” Art Education 38, no. 5 (September 1986): 48.
Nick Rabkin and Eric Hedberg, Arts Education in America: What the Declines Mean for Arts Participation (Washington: National Endowment for the Arts, 2011), 9.
Percy A. Scholes, Music Appreciation: Its History and Technics (New York: J. J. Little and Ives Company, 1935), 14.
William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968).
Copyright information
© 2013 Lynne Conner
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Conner, L. (2013). Eras of Social Interpretation. In: Audience Engagement and the Role of Arts Talk in the Digital Era. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137023926_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137023926_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-43838-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-02392-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)