Shakespeare and Civilizing Process

Peter J. Leithart, October 13, 2006

Notes for my lecture at the upcoming Moscow Ministerial Conference.

INTRODUCTION
I was assigned a lecture on Shakespeare and pop culture, and I'm almost going to do that. Not that Shakespeare and pop culture is an irrelevancy. There are a variety of ways to handle this question, all valuable. We could look at how and why pop culture adapts Shakespeare (e.g., Hamlet in the Lion King or Strange Brew), or review burlesque parodies of Shakespeare (popular in the 19th century, culminating in Tom Stoppard and the Reduced Shakespeare Company), or explore how and why contemporary "serious" Shakespearean productions accommodate to pop culture expectations (Baz Luhrmann's MTV Romeo + Juliet, Michael Keaton's Monty-Pythonesque Dogberry, a Royal Shakespeare Company poster for Coriolanus with the caption, "a natural born killer too").

I have something else in view in this lecture. Scholars debate whether the label "popular culture" is legitimately applied to the festivals, carnivals, and entertainments of the early modern period. Rather than enter that debate, I'll be using the terms "high" and "low" to describe the spheres of culture I'm examining. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White argue in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986) that categories of "high" and "low" cut across various spheres of cultural life, and that the classification of high and low in one sphere is inseparable from the same classification in another sphere. Thus, "The ranking of literary genres or authors in a hierarchy analogous to social classes is a particularly clear example of a much broader and more complex cultural process whereby the human body, psychic forms, geographic space, and the social formation are all constructed within interrelating and dependent hierarchies of high and low." "High" literary works, which appeal to the higher faculties and the upper classes, are those that eschew concerns for "lower" bodily functions.

The distinction of high and low culture can be defined institutionally. Institutions of elite culture include museums, universities, symphony orchestras, the Episcopal church. "Theater" counts as an institution of elite or high culture. How did this happen? Specifically, how did Shakespeare, who is full of "low" humor and crass characters, become part of "high" culture? To offer a very partial answer to this question, I want to examine the changing reception and perception of Shakespeare as exemplifications of what the German sociologist and historian of manners Norbert Elias called "the civilizing process." My focus will be on the early reception of Shakespeare – that is, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. My goal is not to answer questions about how to evaluate popular culture, but to suggest some of the complexities of identifying what counts as popular culture and what doesn't.

THE CIVILIZING PROCESS
Elias begins Part I of his book, The Civilizing Process (1939) by asking how the "modes of behaviour considered typical of people who are civilized in a Western way" came about. Through a careful survey of etiquette books and other documents dealing with topics like table manners, bodily functions, blowing one's nose, spitting, etc., Elias argues that Westerners went through a gradual and uneven affective transformation during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By the end of the process, behaviors considered normal in the Middle Ages had been ruled "barbarous," and the civilized separation from all barbarity signaled major changes in feelings of delicacy, shame, refinement, and repugnance.

These changes began in court society, and from that center, refinement spread throughout Western societies through the increasingly complex webs of social connections that bound the court to the rest of society, as well as through manners books that promoted court etiquette as the model of manners. New standards of behavior were badges of inclusion in court society, and were gradually internalized. The story of the transformation of manners thus was, for Elias, part of the story of the political centralization of Western states, and their monopolization of force, during the early modern period. He wrote, "Only with the formation of this kind of relatively stable monopolies do societies acquire those characteristics as a result of which the individuals forming them get attuned, from infancy, to a highly regulated and differentiated pattern of self-restraint; only in conjunction with these monopolies does this kind of self-restraint require a higher degree of automaticity, does become, as it were, 'second nature.'"

Whatever the final verdict on the specifics of Elias's theory, he gives us a way of understanding the formation of "low" culture in distinction from "high" culture. High culture is court culture and the culture of all those places outside the court that conformed to court etiquette. Low culture is that culture that fails to, or refuses to, conform to the requirements of court. What Elias enables us to see, further, is that "low" culture as understood in modern Western societies is a contingent cultural form. Elias's "civilizing process" has to do with the elimination of the "low" from "higher" society.

SHAKESPEARE
The early reception of Shakespeare is a particularly apt illustration of Elias's concerns because Shakespeare's plays display such a jumble of high and low. Bawdy jokes jostle in the same scene with some of the most elevated speeches ever written. And the jumble of high and low in script and on the stage was matched by the jumble in the audience, which included workers and apprentices as well as nobles, scientists, writers, craftsmen, and merchants. For some critics (Q. V. Leavis), this is all to Shakespeare's, and the Elizabethans', credit. Elizabethan civilization was an Edenic age of unified culture, where the lower classes received their entertainment descending from the dramatic heights of Shakespeare rather than from the likes of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Steven King.

Sociologist Mike Featherstone notes that in 1500 the upper classes might have despised the common people, but they shared the carnivalesque popular culture of "folksongs, folktales, devotional images, mystery plays, chapbooks, fairs, and festivals." But "by 1800 their descendants had ceased to join spontaneously in popular culture and were rediscovering it as something exotic and interesting." Shakespeare's plays were written during the period prior to the self-exile of high culture from low culture.

Shakespeare did not remain popular, or part of "low" culture. His elevation is a long and complicated story. It begins, in one sense, with the publication of the First Folio, which transferred the plays from the stage to the page. The professionalization of English literature study in the 19th century added to Shakespeare's prestige but also distanced Shakespeare from mass entertainments. No doubt language plays a large role; Elizabethan English is no longer standard for anyone, and only those with a fairly refined grasp of the language or long experience with Shakespeare can easily follow a play.

Yet, to a certain extent, the elevation of Shakespeare to "high" culture was a deliberate process. Through the centuries, many have sought to purge low elements from Shakespeare (Bowdler's Family Shakespeare and Charles and Mary Lamb's Stories), including inappropriately tragic endings (Nahum Tate's 1681 Fool-less, happy-ending version of King Lear dominated productions until the 19th century).

Changes in the performance and evaluation of Shakespeare after the Stuart Restoration (1660) show something very like Elias's civilizing process at work. Charles II put the theater directly under royal control, and theaters moved geographically closer to the court. At the same time, courtly sensibilities began to dominate productions and criticism. Critics of a neoclassical bent (Milton, Dryden) criticized Shakespeare's confusion of high and low, such as his inclusion of "rustics" in tragedies, and William Davenant, one of the patentholders for legitimate Restoration theater, revised Shakespeare's texts not only to make them more accessible but to make them more refined (e.g., "grunt" in Hamlet's "To be or not to be" changed to "groan"). Though the de-popularization of Shakespeare is due to many factors, the regulation of the theater to appeal to civilized courtiers undoubtedly played a role.

Continental evaluations of Shakespeare often followed the same line. French critics such as Voltaire considered Shakespeare uncultivated, and Frederick the Great of Prussian considered Shakespeare suitable only to the tastes of "savages of Canada."

CONCLUSION
Several conclusions follow from this brief survey. First, the example of Shakespeare shows that "high" and "low" (or, elite and popular) are not stable spheres of culture but shift over time. Thus we have "classic" rock-n-roll, classic TV (Gilligan's Island!!); thus too we have serious academic studies of blockbuster films and of Madonna (high culture attention to low); thus too we have a Simpson's Hamlet (low culture homage to high). Second, one dynamic in the formation of "low" culture is the self-conscious disengagement of elites, who form a high culture in opposition to the low.

Finally, the process of purgation we see in the early reception of Shakespeare has frequently been repeated in the history of popular culture. In his monumental history of American popular culture, LeRoy Ashby traces numerous examples of entertainments being cleansed as they move from the sideshow to the big tent.