Shakespeare: High or low culture?
Thursday Theses: Where does the Bard stand in cultural history, specifically when it comes to elite arts?
Quoting Shakespeare may be the height of pretention in today’s society.
I mean, you could certainly quote something more obscure but people at least have the connection to make regarding Shakespeare.
So as I rambled off a few lines of Hamlet’s “What a piece of work is man” monologue, I’m not sure it was received gracious by co-workers, but self-effacing and calling into account one’s pretention seems to be a fair solvent towards dismissing them.
It’s an interesting thing, drawing in these cultural pieces and having them become signifiers that trigger assumptions.
But the man whose name immediately calls to mind high culture is also the man who wrote jokes in his play about how alcohol affects a man’s… eh, performance.
From MacBeth:
“Drink sir, is a great provoker of three things… nose painting, sleep and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes; it provokes the desire but takes away the performance.”
Still, Shakespeare is elevated to a perch while he is historically thought of as a man for all crowds and all times.
Today, his work is a victim of a “high culture”-“low culture” schema.
Perhaps it’s the artistic populist in me, but these distinctions don’t seem particularly fitting.
These cultural paradigms are inverted, rearranged, and transformed by that omnipotent trickster called Time.
Naturally, there’s a lot about the schema that draws up an aroma of classism and eurocentrism.
But as of writing this, I’ve been reading Harold Bloom’s delectable colossus that is “Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human.”
It’s a treasure trove of literary, humanistic depth that lies in the Bard’s plays.
I’ve also finished an essay on the history of Shakespeare’s reputation in the literary world by the incredible, oft-too-seldom-mentioned Jacques Barzun.
The cultural historian lights the fuse with the provocative title “How the Romantics Invented Shakespeare.”
He goes on to talk about how shortly after his life, Shakespeare’s work fell out of favor as being too coarse and low-class.
Barzun connects minds down through the years who dismissed Shakespeare.
Then with the Romantics, renewed Bard-adoration came on the scene.
Still, even into the 20th century, Shakespeare gets ripped by big names, including Tolstoy.
T.S. Elliot thought Hamlet was a failure.
I did not think I was going to be getting into a fight with T.S. Elliot today…
Anyway, all of this goes to prove a point, namely that Shakespeare has not always enjoyed his reign as a theatre god.
And that highlights one feature of our high culture-low culture dilemma.
I am willing to leave it, still, as a dilemma.
That is, I’m thinking now of the fanfic apologists of the internet and feeling remorse about my pseudonymous contributions to that domain in the bowels of a forum out there somewhere.
It may just be a curmudgeonly impulse that I have now turned my back on fan fiction, but alas, here we are.
I’m interested in where this culture of the masses comes from.
If you’ve been reading Laterally from the beginning, you know I’ve dedicated an edition to ethnomusicology with the Lomax family, who worked to preserve pieces of American vernacular culture via recording — and I also discussed what could be called a vox populi theory that was held by some Romantics regarding where cultural gems are born.
Let’s think of modern examples.
Bob Dylan, who comes out of a scene defined by the influence of an ethnomusicology that dug into the roots of American song, has a pretentious fanbase (wherein I’d include myself but I doubt I’d pass muster among the true Dylanologists).
From the roots to the treetops.
Why would we care to divide hip hop and opera?
Why should Groucho Marx be on a different level from Aristophanes’ The Clouds?
Well the question of taste comes into play, and if we were to have Atticus of Instagram show-down against Samuel Taylor Coleridge in an Epic Rap Battle of History, I doubt we would want to leave it up to democracy.
Atticus’ quote-poetry would be hard to defend as a high art.
But generational turnover always seems to produce interesting effects.
The avant-garde outsiders yesterday rule the roost at the art museum today.
These seem to be the necessary cycles — and I hope we see more research in the social sciences digging into whether or not there’s a specific dynamic in communities about this, about our familiarity with innovations, about the development of tastes, about the creation of these categories of culture.
What draws high culture and low culture together is an education that is all at once classical, contemporary, broad, and lifelong.
The cycle goes on in the shifts of cultural prestige.
And there’s something to be accepted there.
There’s something to embrace.
And there’s something to shudder at.
…. what if Bored Apes become high culture one day?