Introduction

Summary

Since the late nineteenth century, theater practitioners have frequently sought to recreate the staging conditions of early modern England. Despite the wide variety of approaches employed by William Poel, Nugent Monck, Tyrone Guthrie, and the founders of the new Globe, I perceive a common philosophical underpinning to their endeavors. Rather than indulging in archaism for its own sake, they looked backward in a progressive attempt to address the challenges of the twentieth century. “The theatrical past” served for them as “a crack in the present through which one could grab at a future” (Womack 81).

The original nemesis of William Poel was the extravagantly picturesque style epitomized by Herbert Beerbohm Tree's 1900 A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which live rabbits scampered through an onstage forest. This mode of production was doomed with or without the influence of the Elizabethanists. Inflation, as Poel noted, was “a serious tax on the managerial purse” of theatrical producers (Monthly Letters 82). The cost of staging Shakespeare in this traditional mode soon became prohibitive, and Tree, who had originally scoffed at Poel's methods, began to cautiously adopt a similar approach. Lavishly pictorial Shakespeare was no longer a profit-making endeavor and by mid-century it survived only in heavily subsidized theaters.

Along with rising costs, an emerging rival medium contributed to the demise of this elaborate production style. Tyrone Guthrie notes that within a few years of Tree's triumphant Midsummer “D. W. Griffith had made Birth of a Nation.” The movies were a catastrophe for traditional producers, and the development of motion pictures with sound further wounded the stage. In 1932 Guthrie concluded, “No detached observer can seriously suppose that the big spectacular play has the slightest chance of survival against the big spectacular film” (Theatre Prospect 18). From that point onward, the prime objective of the Elizabethan movement was to provide a theatrical experience that film could not duplicate and thereby preserve a relevant place for live performance in the cinematic age.

Recent scholarship has positioned theater “as an implicit and explicit rival” of film and other electronic means of performance within a critique of globalization. Because theater is not “strictly reproducible,” it resists, in this view, the commodification on which late capitalism thrives (Burnett 13).