Katherine Newey suggests that “a class-based divide between popular culture and literary or ‘high,’ remaining to this day, emerged in debates over the reform of the theatre [in the 19th century]. Much of what still endures of the concept of ‘legitimate’ theatre in the early twenty-first century was formed out of the debates, law-suits, petitions to Parliament, Select Committee enquiries, rampant commercialism, and puffery of pre-Victorian theatre industry in London.” (more…) Read more

Arthur F. Kinney writes that “Until very recently – and in some scholarly circles still today – it has been argued that the working class – the journeymen, apprentices, and men and women servants sometimes known as subalterns – had neither the money nor the liberty to attend plays. There is strong documentary evidence that this is not so. Many of the journeymen and apprentices may have attended Merchant Taylors School, so that they were well educated; Thomas Heywood’s play... Read more

Arthur F. Kinney writes that “Until very recently – and in some scholarly circles still today – it has been argued that the working class – the journeymen, apprentices, and men and women servants sometimes known as subalterns – had neither the money nor the liberty to attend plays. There is strong documentary evidence that this is not so. Many of the journeymen and apprentices may have attended Merchant Taylors School, so that they were well educated; Thomas Heywood’s play... Read more

Michael Burleigh details the decimation of the bishoprics and clergy in Franch during the Revolution. This had the unintended consequence of raising the profile of the Pope: Without local or regional authorities to look to, the remaining French clergy looked all the way to Rome: “Ineluctably, the papacy assumed a solitary dignity in a drastically simplified landscape, and ultramontanism, or overarching loyalty to the pope, grew among the clergy as a defence mechanism against those who paid their salaries [the... Read more

Levine: “In 1853 Putnam’s Magazine had proposed that P. T. Barnum . . . be named the manager of New York’s Opera. ‘He understands what our public wants, and how to gratify that want. He has no foreign antecedents. He is not bullied by the remembrance that they manage so in London, and so in Naples, and so in St. Petersburg. He comprehends that, with us, the opera need not necessarily be the luxury of the few, but the recreation... Read more

Levine: “In 1853 Putnam’s Magazine had proposed that P. T. Barnum . . . be named the manager of New York’s Opera. ‘He understands what our public wants, and how to gratify that want. He has no foreign antecedents. He is not bullied by the remembrance that they manage so in London, and so in Naples, and so in St. Petersburg. He comprehends that, with us, the opera need not necessarily be the luxury of the few, but the recreation... Read more

In his Highbrow/Lowbrow , Lawrence Levine writes that “it is hard to exaggerate the ubiquity of operatic music in nineteenth-century America. In 1861 a band played music from Rigoletto to accompany the inauguration of President Lincoln. In the midst of the Civil War a soldier in the Twenty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment wrote home: ‘I don’t know what we should have done without our band. Every night about sun down [bandmaster Patrick S.] Gilmore gives us a splendid concert, playing selections... Read more