It Had to Be Good to Get Where It Is

It’s a good thing that I was assigned the role of advocate for this reading, cuz I don’t have much in the way of quibbles with Levine. What I want to offer here are two minor interventions, two suggestions that I feel accord with Levine’s discussion but are things that he doesn’t ever quite say.

First of all I want to talk about how something becomes a “classic.” When articulating the way that Shakespeare’s oeuvre was transformed from popular culture to high culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Levine quotes someone named Alfred Harbage: “The plays of Shakespeare, he reflected ‘have ceased to be plays at all—they have become classics’” (32). Now, as we saw in the chapter, Levine cites a number of possible explanations for Shakespeare’s transition during this period: an influx of non-English speaking immigrants, the emergence of radio and cinema, business changes in the way theaters were operated, and so on. But one simple variable he doesn’t mention: time. Perhaps he treats it as a given, but clearly time is the most critical factor in determining the status of a piece of art as a “classic.” For instance, look at this weird Coke ad that I found: it suggests that Coke is parallel to Shakespeare to the extent that “It had to be good to get where it is.” In other words, both have stood the test of time.

While reading Levine and thinking about “classic” status, I thought of this great line in Roman Polanski’s film Chinatown that’s contributed by John Huston’s character. He says that “Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all become respectable if they last long enough.” (There's a certain ironic self-reference in this comment considering Chinatown revives 1940s film noir themes and aesthetics, but that's another story.) I’d argue the same happened with Shakespeare during the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Now, granted, Shakespeare’s work was already old during the earlier period that Levine characterizes as his popular American heyday (the 18th cent.). But I’d suggest that Shakespeare had to be displaced before he could really feel old: in the period in question things like radio, film, and television replaced Shakespare and the theater at large as the dominant popular, communal entertainment. In this way Shakespeare and drama were for the first time palpably of another era.

In recent years it seems that, with the proliferation of popular culture and entertainment, nostalgia and “classic” status come about at a much faster speed than in the past. There’s more coming and going, so there’s more to take the place of what we had before. Recall our discussion from Monday: many of us quickly became nostalgic about pogs, TV shows we grew up on, and so forth. Hell, Vh1 even started airing I Love the 90s as early as 2004. Everything gets respectable if it lasts long enough, and time has a way of making almost anything--even Mr. Ed, which, like Kathy joked, was an awful show--"a classic" once it's no longer the entertainment of the day. I think that happened with Shakespeare. As the age of the theater waned, his works became classic entertainment rather than mainstream entertainment; they became respectable objects instead of just diversions.

My second point can be made more briefly. Did anyone else think that it’s not a coincidence that the period when Shakespeare became elite entertainment was the same period in which English Studies and English Literature as disciplines were born? Levine almost suggests this when he talks about Shakespeare’s “shrine makers,” who believed that “the reading of Shakespeare is an art, and the editing of him a mystery” (70). And Levine mentions that some folks of this time argued that Shakespeare was “too complex for untrained minds” and that appreciating his works required “rigid mechanical training” (71, 73). But Levine is a historian, not an English person, so the development of “English Literature” might not have been on his mind. I’m no expert on the birth of English, but I think it’s fair to say that the early English field was obsessed with legitimating itself and justifying its necessity. For that reason it makes sense that early literature scholars would claim propriety and authority over Shakespeare’s works, in the process elevating them from entertainment to an object of study. I feel like the same sort of thing has happened with old movies and Film Studies. Take Hitchcock, for instance: when they originally came out, everyone and anyone saw Psycho, Vertigo, Rear Window, and so on, but in recent years I feel they’ve been sort of co-opted by the cognoscenti and academics, who, presumably, appreciate them on a level that the naïve rubes in the 1950s cinemas couldn’t.