Sarah Willie-LeBreton:	Good afternoon everybody and welcome to the faculty lecture series. It's my pleasure to introduce Peter Schmidt, who will be introducing Nora Johnson, today's speaker.
Peter Schmidt:	Thank you, Sarah and thank you all for coming. You're in for a treat today, there's going to be lots of laughter, I think connected with this talk. Nora Johnson is my lovely colleague and it's a real honor to introduce her. She's an incredibly wise member to have in the department. Also, she's really witty, I always go away from a conversation with her in a better mood than I began it with. I think you'll hear a little bit of the nice mix of both those qualities today on the talk, I'm confident.
	The title of the talk is Shakespearean Melodramas, Edwin Booth and High Culture in America. A special focus on the 19th century. Before I give you some of the highlights from her CV, just part of the ritual of introductions, I'd like to read a little bit from a certain American novel that will give you a sense of the presence of Shakespeare in America in the 19th Century. The many different ways in which Shakespeare's plays were used and abused to the delight of audiences all over the country.
	It was such a phenomenon, that this certain author named Mark Twain could put a little episode involving Shakespeare in the middle of Huckleberry Finn. What I'd like to do is read the introduction to this set piece and then just a little smidgen of it. This is Huck Finn narrating and he's describing the king, the king and the duke had captured Huck and made him as a kind of a servant here. They're improvising new ways to make money on a gullible public, after being run out of some towns that prior to that with other schemes that had failed. The latest scheme that they've come up with is, "Let's stage a Shakespeare play and bring people in and charge money for this."
	The king decides he's got to practice some set piece speeches from Hamlet Soliloquy, some things. Of course the joke here is that he's being drawing little lines and snippets from just about every play imaginable and then putting it in a blender and coming out with this little hurray. Here's Huck's comment on this Shakespearean acting that was very popular in the 19th Century. "It was beautiful to see him, he strikes a most noble attitude with on leg shoved forward and his arms stretched way up and his head tilted back, looking up at the sky. Then he begins to rip and rave and grit his teeth. After that, all through his speech, he howled and spread around and swelled up his chest and just about knock the spots out of any acting ever I see before." 
	This is the speech, I learned it easy enough while he was learning it and I'll read just an excerpt from it here. "In customary suits of solemn black, but that the undiscovered country from whose born, no traveler returns, breeze forth the contagion upon the world and thus the native hue of resolution, like the poor cat of the adage, is sickly nor with care. All the clouds that lowered or are house tops, with this regard, their currents turned into rye and lose the name of action. Just a consummation devotedly to be wished, but soft due the fair Ophelia, ought not thy ponderous and marble jaws. Get thee to a nunnery, go."
	Now I'll give you a little bit more of a sense of how to contextualize the popularity of Shakespeare and what it was done in Shakespeare's name in the 19th Century. Here, she has given talks and led lectures and handled discussions at all kinds of interesting places, including the Folgers Shakespeare library and the Harry Ransom humanity center, where she's gotten study grants. She's got an article in a book called Global Economics, A History of the Theater Business, The Chamberlains' Men, The King's Men and Their Plays, 1599 to 1642, an anthology of essays are coming out shortly. She has an article called Spectacle Magic and the Fantasy of Immateriality, Jona Kent and Jona Cumber and the construction of the author in early modern stage. She very much works with pre-Shakespearean material, as well as post-Shakespearean material.
	Some other pieces include, Body and Spirit, Stage and Sexuality in The Tempest, for English literary history, which was collected in a volume by Stephen Orville, who's one of the top Shakespeareans in the entire world in a volume of essays called Political Shakespeare. Some papers and lectures that she's given, at places like Chicago, Princeton, Stratford on Avon, where there's an annual Shakespeare conference and Bermuda. Include titles like, I am no clown to amuse in Hamlet, Edward Booth, and The Seductions of Entertainment and Magic Theater, History in Modernity. The Bermuda talk interests me very much and I imagine that the movies are still vexed by Nora's presence, that's a little illusion to the Tempest. Nora is wise and witty and logical. Thanks very much. Please give her a good round of applause.
Nora Johnson:	Thank you. Peter, thank you very much for that wonderful introduction and for the remainder about Mark Twain, which everybody always asks me about and I always forget to say anything about. You've taken care of that nicely. Thank you also to the office of the president and the provost for sponsoring this talk. Thank you Sarah Willy for your work. I want to say thanks for the sabbatical support that made this past year of research possible. It really has been an opportunity to pick up stuff I have no business touching. I think that that's a wonderful contribution that Swarthmore can make to our lives.
	The ability to take my time with material that is in some ways far beyond my reach and thank you in advance for your patience with that process. Thanks also to two wonderful faculty writing groups that I've been able to belong to. One from Mellin funding and the other from similarly lucky people last year who were on leave. I've received really a wonderful education from both of these groups. As Peter suggested, Shakespeare was everywhere in 19th Century America. It's said that the stereotypical library of a settler's cabin out West contained the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, whether people could read or not. Dan Rice, an equestrian performer and sort of a con artist, called himself at some stages in his career, The Shakespearean Clown.
	I think he probably did do some Shakespeare on horseback, there's some suggestion that there was equestrian performance in costumes. I'm not sure it does much for the language of the text. He certainly did mock speeches from Hamlet and Othello that are extant. In America, as in England, there was a thriving culture of Shakespearean burlesque, comic parodies, often of tragedies, especially Hamlet and Macbeth. Based on the premise that audiences knew the plays well enough that they could understand the terrible relentless puns and the kinds of garbling that Peter read to you and the physical humor. There were many, many minstrel parodies of Shakespeare's plays and minstrel songs that riffed of of Hamlet, for instance.
	In New York in the 1820s, William Brown and his African American Shakespeare company was shut down by rioters, some of whom were probably circus clowns from another part of New York, who took offense at the notion that free black citizens would dare to perform Richard III. Brown himself was influential in the development of the famous Black Tragedy in his career, Ira Aldridge, whom some of you may have heard of, who became an international celebrity later in his career.
	Famous actors toured the U.S. from England, also from Germany, Italy, Poland, usually performing in their native language with an English speaking supporting cast. These are all strange Shakespearean forms that it's just so hard for us to remember. There were also American actors like Booth, who went to Europe and performed in English while the rest spoke German. There were thriving Yiddish Shakespeare productions. The Mormons in Salt Lake City built an enormous theater that featured all sorts of edifying theater and plays, especially including Shakespeare. That became one of the regular stops for more famous actors and struggling actors who were headed out west. You always stopped in Salt Lake City to entertain Mormons before going on to California.
	Richard III was among the most popular and frequently performed plays of any kind during Century in this country. American audiences understood it to be transparently pro-democracy, the wonderful garblings of Shakespeare's plays that really pick up a kind of energy that it seems important to look at, to talk about all of this in any coherent way that was an impossible task. In so far as a narrative has been constructed, it tends to be the narrative of a scholar named Lawrence Levine, who in his book, Highbrow, Lowbrow, argues that from the early 19th Century into the 20th, Shakespearean theater went from being a cultural space in which high and low mingled with relative comfort to being the preserve of the elite.
	In other words, you have highbrow and lowbrow Shakespearean in the 20th Century, at least by mid-century, in a way you never did in the 19th. Attempting to examine Levine's argument in light of what I've been learning over the past year or so, I kept coming upon this uncomfortable realization. I wasn't quite finding that Levine was wrong, but I kept finding ways in which I kept saying the evidence seems to complicate his model. That's an argument that I've made before about other cultural forms, in other countries, in other centuries. Finding myself in that place again, I determined that I needed to step back and think more generally about how people in my field make models at all about historical change and cultural hierarchies.
	They are very difficult concepts to pin down and we get [inaudible 00:11:06] to these models sometimes and that's what I want to talk about. Though I have thought myself as writing in particular about comedy and I still am, I ended up stuck with the saddest, most melancholic person in the entire 19th Century, Edwin Booth. Also, really compelled about a memoir I read about him. I felt that I need to work out its strange asset and its strange relationship to the Levine argument that I've been pondering. That's what this work does, as a kind of preface to the work that complicate the model. This is talking about the model. There are a few bits of information I want to go over, because the reach of this talk is deliberately, idiosyncratic, as you'll see on your hand out.
	There you have just from the movie database, I have some summaries of the film, Stella Dallas and Letter From an Unknown Woman, which are not from the 19th century. Pictures at the top of Edwin Booth, the one in his street clothes and the other in his famous costume with Hamlet and at the bottom a quotation that I'll read for you. I also just want to say a word about what melodrama is, because it's a notoriously difficult genre to define in any way. There are many arguments about whether a given thing really is or is not a melodrama and how we could say what melodrama might be.
	There seem to be several characteristic functions of melodrama and structures in melodrama that may or may not be present in any one overwrought emotion, as you can imagine, the word melodramatic conjures that up for us. Moral polarities, the mustache twirling villain and the purer than pure heroin, those are the obvious ones. Often a sense of moral knowledge that's occluded until the end of the play when suddenly there's the revelations, you're my uncle, you've been my uncle all along, you're a millionaire, but also you're a villain and now your villainy can be exposed, so a sense of astonishing revelation.
	Along with its interest in astonishing revelation, there's a noted lack of interest in logical plot development. I say that as kindly as I can. [inaudible 00:13:13] in the sense of pity, extreme pity for the sufferings of others and sensationalism. Again, a given melodrama may or may not be sensationalistic, it may or may not emphasize moral polarities, but in general, you'll get family resemblance between these aspects. It's also is a genre that bleeds into everything. There are the women films like the ones I've mentioned there, The Weepies from the 20th Century, Westerns are often patterned after melodrama, the proverbial story about the victim on the train tracks who's rescued by the heroine justice, the train comes forward is a classic melodramatic story.
	Melodrama at this point is the evening news, the news is produced absolutely according to melodrama, political campaigns are running according to melodrama, which is why you have to bring out your wife and your children and you have to talk about your hard childhood. These are required gestures for us, culturally. The Olympics, sports routines are absolutely melodrama. Many of you remember several years ago when the Olympics began to be about the hardships of the athletes. You can't actually see a track event anymore, you only get the last little bit where the melodramatic conclusion comes in and the rest is about their life's story.
	Now the Edwin Booth and this is the quote at the bottom of your page. "Mr. Booth held his somber mood and posture as long as he could, then bowed gravely, not a trace of smile on his face. They out there kept it up, until he was forced to step out of character and wanly smile upon him. More applause, he rose now, but in his dignity and reseated himself. More applause, he rose again and had a slightly more human smile this time and sat down. Again, he rose, bowed and waited, but as the reception would not let up, he came down to the footlight and just stood there helplessly. As if he had forgotten he was on stage, he looked out upon that wonderful and beautiful audience and his eyes filled with tears. Aggressive tears they were, no blinking them back.
	When his audience saw those tears, they began all over again. I saw him utterly conquered by his audience and his audience utterly conquered by him before he had spoken one word. How young he looked with the border lights shining upon his brow hair. Why, he's just a boy, San Francisco's boy, even the fire boy come again, how could he help it after that welcome?" This is from Katherine Goodale's memoir, Behind the Scenes with Edwin Booth, written in 1981. There is much in Katherine Goodale's account of Edwin Booth playing Hamlet in San Francisco that might make us rethink our narratives of progress and we find that on the 19th Century's stage.
	Accustomed to hearing about the gradual taming of unruly audiences and self aggrandizing actors over the course of the century, we may be prepared for the austere demeanor with which Booth attempts in 1887 to resist the audiences' applause. For the straining towards what will later become theatrical realism and for the deference to Shakespeare's text. The specific entrance Goodale describes here is in fact designed to deflect attention away from Booth as a star and towards what Goodale calls specifically, the development of the play. Rather than making his first appearance in the throne room when Claudius addresses him and now our cousin Hamlet and our son, enter Edwin Booth, led to thundering applause.
	Rather than doing that kind of star entrance, Booth has began to sit himself on stage before curtain goes up, by being discovered, Goodale writes, "He deprived himself of that keyed up entrance that artificially stimulates an audience's expectancy." This is what we should expect from one the key figures in the movement to enshrine Shakespeare as an icon of high culture. A chased, tasteful performance that subordinates personal charisma to artistic integrity. Booth's first appearance turns deliberately against the kinds of entrance the comic performers used in Shakespeare's own day, poking their head out from behind the tapestries, mugging shamelessly in order to enhance their own performance authority.
	It marks instead Booth's relative proximity to the standards of performance in the modernist theater, as Goodale writes in her 1931 memoir. Sometimes one hears it said or [inaudible 00:17:24] that the methods that Edwin Booth would be too out of date to sway a modern audience. No one who saw his art as he listened to the king's first speech from the throne could endorse such a mistaken estimate. This is the imprint of this modernity, this is a declaration of that.
	The impact of this tasteful restraint upon this audience in 1887 should introduce a note of caution about the inexorable march of the theatrical reappointment. As Goodale reports, Booth's very rejection of audience appeal turns the audience into something almost uncontrollable. She times the first applause at more than five minutes and goes on to report numerous outbursts throughout the play. Lines that now seem merely familiar rather than deeply moving inspire something like hysteria from the crowd. The play is the thing in which I'll catch the conscious of the king had 16 calls and asked for more.
	O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right yield at eight calls. When the play is done, the audience enacts what Goodale calls, refined bedlam. "Ladies climb up on their seats, scream out for, "Booth, Booth," and then more calls." This is a clear theatrical triumph. Much of Booth's career, a high water mark for the separation of high and low culture in America. It must be admitted as theater historians will often note, that spectators like this are importantly unlike the so called Gallery Gods of the early century who were rowdy young men, who threw things and forced the performers to speak lines over again if they liked them and recited the lines along with them and demanded dances and were terribly unruly and rioted. This more modern audience reveres Booth, because he represents a new sense of Shakespeare's [inaudible 00:19:03] democratic elitism.
	Goodale's observation about the adoring fans' power, that audience tonight had done something to him, reminds us that the new high Shakespeare may have acknowledged affinities with the old popular ones. When the cannons of high culture stretch far enough to include screaming ladies climbing on their seats, we should suspect that something much more interesting than refinement as we know it, is holding's way. In order to trace what that more interesting something might be, I want to build upon the mildly puzzling final lines of the passage quoted above, "How young looked with the border lights shining upon his brown hair."
	There are two overlapping strands of thought here, each with a rich prehistory in Booth's life and in Goodale's memoir. The first to be bracketed for the time being has literally to do with Booth's brown hair and Ms. Goodale's relationship to it. The second has to do with Booth's past as San Francisco's fire boy. That's a reference to just a run of the mill melodrama that he played early in his career, he was presumably the fire boy who turns out to be the hero after all, just like the gallery gods in the audience. He's a young youth and the play would be celebrating him as the great moral figure. If the adoration of this audience makes him devolve from a prince, In his dignity to something, "Slightly more human, to a helpless weeper," it also seems to be carrying it back in time to his early days as an entertainer in Gold Rush California, when he played in sensational melodramas like this one.
	In Goodale's reading at least, the audience's affection for him as an elite Shakespearean player contains a strong element of nostalgia for the earlier forms of populist theater. That his status near the end of the century puts him to disavow. Booth had spent the years between 1852 and 1856 in California, performing like so many actors under the most up haphazard conditions and with the most transparent financial motives. Many performers were willing to travel west during this time, subjecting themselves to humiliation and discomfort in order to siphon off some of the excess gold that miners really literally threw at people who entertain them. It was for such reasons that Edwin Booth's father, the actor Junius Brutus Booth, had caused the Isthmus of Panama and sailed to San Francisco with 18 year old Edwin in tow in his customary role as his father's caretaker. 
	The Senior Booth was a known bigamist, who was by this time in his life crippled by mental illness and alcoholism, admired physically and vocally by a badly healed broken nose, but he continued to draw good audiences for his eerily impassioned playing. I think he was having breakdowns on stage. After about a year in California, he died on his return to East, leaving Edwin Booth to make his way on stage in San Francisco, Sacramento and the many mining camps in Northern California and the Central Valley. This was a past that Booth and his publicity machine called up, albeit in a very sanitizing version, repeatedly during his later career.
	However nostalgia may have covered his history pretty later, there could be no real illusion in the 1850s that Edwin Booth was much more than an entertainer, behold into audiences with spare cash and bad manners. He did perform in Shakespearean roles including Richard III and Hamlet. Sometimes he was mentioned in the newspapers, sometimes he passed unremarked. He did play opposite legitimate players including his own brother, who was a theatrical manager. He also acted in the company of child performers like Kate and Ellen Bateman, who were managed by PT Barnum. They were particularly known for performing exceptional Shakespeare plays and at one point, he appeared with them in Richard II and the little girls who were about six and eight years old played Richard. Sorry.
	You have to picture of course solemn Noble Edwin Booth with these little kids being the military leaders and an adult cast behind them doing ... It was a great sensation, they were very popular. If such productions were able to count as high culture, they were never the less positioned alongside plays that made no pretense of transcending market forces like the San Francisco fire boy, apparently. Like his father before him, Booth was sometimes too drunk to speak his lines properly and sometimes unable to go on stage. He gradually acquired the expertise and the reputation to return east and to begin a higher profile career. In the coming years, he would become known as a refined and elegant interpreter of tragedies, particularly excelling in Hamlet.
	The picture that you there is the costume that he wore in 1865, when he achieved major celebrity and critical acclaim, because he performed Hamlet for 100 nights. Like a sporting events, but to them, that really crystallized him as the great Hamlet. Booth's form of celebrity, however, even once he had apparently risen above his days as an entertainer, often seemed to function as kind of pentimento. With the past threatening or promising, they've become visible in the present. Goodale imagines his audiences applause turning it back into the fire boy, but at other moments in his career, his performances were overlaid with a much more sinister kind of remembering.
	In April of 1865 of course, the third performing Booth brother, John Wilkes, assassinated Abraham Lincoln, he was also an actor. Devastated and afraid of angry mobs, Edwin Booth remained secluded in Boston, uncertain whether it would ever become safe, proper or commercially viable to appear on stage again. Remarkably, he was on stage within just nine months after this moment, greeted by an editorial threatening violence in the New York Herald and the glowing praises in [inaudible 00:24:15]. There's isn't time to go into it, but the review at that point really seems to talk about Booth as a test case for the quality of public life. The reviewer says he's never seen such an intelligence class of audience in New York. He says, "New Yorkers know how to welcome a fine actor." That's why they were so sympathetic to Edwin Booth.
	When he leaves out of course, is that the famous Astor Place riots in which New York audiences went mad and chased William Macready from the stage for perceived insults to Americans, was just 17 years prior. It's not just Booth who has to prove himself at that moment, it's really Booth and New York, mutually testing one another as fit for Shakespeare, fit for high culture. In this moment though that Katherine Goodale describes, looking like the lost boy of melodrama, crying while the lights play upon his brown hair, sharing wordlessly with his audience, the revelation that he had been there is all along. Booth seems to be wielding the popular power of sentimental drama, not elite culture. Or perhaps Goodale was wielding it on his behalf. At the same time that he establishes his distance from popular modes of playing.
	More is wrapped up in Goodale's description than just a baffling of our sense of progress in theater history though. There's also a subtle but definite calling of a commercial expediency in Goodale's remarks that centers again upon the color of Edwin Booth's brown hair. Goodale's pleasure in Booth's appearance have everything to do with her personal role in persuading Booth the wear a youthful brown hair piece. Booth's cooperative venture with the actor, manager Lawrence Barrett, the tour Goodale descried in her memoir became a three year series of tours throughout the States, offering mostly Shakespearean tragedy with the finest possible production values. With Barrett's skill at management and Booth's reputation for excellence, there seemed at last that America could support Shakespeare as he deserved. These were wildly popular, there were special train cars to bring people in to see the performances and it meant publicity and generally very high praise in the reviews and Booth made a lot of money.
	Goodale's memoir of the tour in 1886, '87 however suggested even at this apparent high point of artistic integrity, there were telling disturbances and here we begin to entangle the story of Edwin Booth's brown hair. Accompanying Booth as a supporting actress, Goodale was at that time a theatrical newcomer named Kitty Malone. The terms of her engagement by the company are particularly resonate for a study of Booth's position in the marketplace. Malone was a daughter of a friend of Barrett's, who agreed to take her on to play juvenile roles like Jessica in the Merchant of Venice. Her very nigh of taste seemed to have been deemed essential, strangely, by Barrett and by Arthur Branscombe Chase, the onsite manager who accompanied Booth during this period while Barrett remained behind. 
	Through what appears to be a combination of Booth's planning and that of his managers, Malone and the two other women become Booth's personal companions for the duration of the tour, taking their meals and even sleeping in his private car. Booth stooped to calling these specially chosen actresses his chickens. He praised them for their lack of competitiveness, their tact and their beautiful innocence. "It is mytonic that our profession breeds girls without jealousy. You make me happier than I expected to be again in the theater. Three of a kind and I have them in my company. Be kittens and puppies for a week, you are younger than one of you realized and this amuses me most of all. You do not have heirs for one another."
	This was, the memoir notes, repeatedly not a sexual arrangement. Booth, she represents as an aging, albeit devastatingly the attractive, pensive, temperate man, who needed pure and gracious female companionship, I insist on that, in order to keep from slipping into a depression. I'm not making this up at all. Her own privileges position, she contends, is entirely contingent on her ability to refrain from falling in love with him. Though as she gushes, it was in the air to be insane on Edward Booth in 1866. Her own desire for him is firmly subordinated, even more firmly she suggests, than that of the other chickens who are constantly busting into tears in front of him and proclaiming their love for him. She has none of that, firmly subordinated to her plucky common sense and virtue.
	Only Kitty apparently can withstand proximity, concealing her love like patients on a monument, smiling at Booth's overpowering charisma. Though this form of intimacy may be intriguing enough as an aspect of Booth's and Goodale's biographies, its resonance with the problem of art in the marketplace become so startling in Goodale's memoir as to outweigh all other concerns. Not content apparently, to use Kitty's relationship to Booth as a kind of general anti-depressant for the great actor. The manager Mr. Chase contrives to deploy her in a series of encounters that are aimed at getting Booth to do what is commercially expedient. He takes her aside one day and then enlists her aid in a delicate matter. "Miss Kitty, I, we, Mr. Barrett is trusting you with the responsibility that will tax all of your tact. Boil down my plight, lay in my selection to persuade Mr. Booth to wear a wig in Hamlet."
	This is apparently an unthinkable suggestion, Booth is Hamlet after all, sublime in his subjectivity of pure artist, spiritual beyond concern about the gray hair that ruins the verisimilitude of his performance. He knows, not seems, as Hamlet would say. Chased gracious and core-opted by the management however, Kitty affects a virtue seduction by asking very nicely, ultimately compelling Booth to surrender his principles. "I am not a clown to amuse in Hamlet, yet I will try it on." The wig is both attractive and natural as it turns out and Booth, Mr. Chase and Kitty all manage to put the horrible moment behind them. In fact, they seem collectively to have been experiencing amnesia about most of Booth's career. For in all the many decades he had been playing the part of Hamlet, he had of course already experimented with wigs and other kinds of costumes changes.
	There are diaries of fans who adored Booth and kept obsessive journals about all of his performance and one of them, Mary Isabella Stone, complained just three years prior to this about the awful long haired wig that Booth had worn and the bad costume that obscured his "Great legs." This wig seems to have become unthinkable, only as part of intricate relationship between Chase, Booth and Kitty, which I want to suggest is also an intricate relationship between Shakespeare as high art, Shakespeare as a market commodity and Kitty's indomitable imperil virtue. There is more here the memoir implies, than an evasive maneuver around the vanity of an aging actor. Not least because the encounter is repeated later in other forms, the gesture of using Kitty to seduce Booth into what the market wants, begs to be read in terms of the relationship between commercialism and high culture in the 1880's. Kitty is called into action by Mr. Chase.
	Again, because Booth does not want to play the role of the Othello during the same triumphant return to San Francisco. He's known as the powerful Iago and local papers have been, at least according to Kitty, there's some doubt about whether this is actually right. She says, "The local papers have been wondering out loud about how his Othello compares to the role as played by Tommaso Salvini, a highly regarded actor who had been in town just recently performing the part in Italian as always, just the weak part of Booth's arrival." Yet the papers present a represent of popular desire to see Booth compete with Salvini, they did so in a very complicated, 19th century way.
	One, that's especially typical of the links between the publicity machines of the era and the profession of journalism. Here is Kitty's description of this process. "The almost daily repetition in the papers that Salvini had rested their Othello crown, seem not a sting, but a thinly veiled managerial device to arouse in Mr. Booth and I'll show them feeling." Mr. Chase's conviction that a bad notice would do his star good, seem to underlay all that was being written on the Salvini Othello. "Down in my heart, I was as sure as sure could be that Mr. Chase was working the press to do what he himself wanted to do most of all, prod Mr. Booth into playing Othello. If this were so, the management failed. Our star ignored the challenge."
	Mr. Chase wants Mr. Booth to play Othello, of course, because they'll make money when he does so. In a stunt, again worthy of PT Barnum, Chase uses the press to manipulate potential audiences in order to manipulate the star into pleasing the imaginary crowd by seeming to rise above them and teach them a lesson they were actually not asking to learn in the first place, because they didn't care very much about seeing this Othello. It's a perfect hype. He manipulates Kitty into taking up where this publicity machine stops, when our star appears to be impervious. On an afternoon when Booth has taken his chickens to Cliff House, Chase takes Kitty aside and ask her to make Booth more incline to co-operate.
	"Is this just another of your persuasions, Mr. Chase? Think how easy that wig was for you," he says. There is a courage born of despair, I soberly reasoned with him that in the case of the wig, I had merely been up against Mr. Booth's hesitancy. Really, he had decided to wear it before I ever said one word to him. "I know all about the wigs," says Mr. Chase. "Will you try for Othello? Because you must get Mr. Booth to go on as Othello here. It should be done for the last week, say on Tuesday." I told him I couldn't and I wouldn't, it was too soon. Mr. Booth would resent it this time and anyway, it wasn't professional etiquette. "I hope this might floor him." He drawled, being here today at the Cliff House, eating with Mr. Booth and driving from here in carriages with him, doesn't exactly come under the head of professional etiquette either, now does it?
	Mr. Booth never took members of his company yachting on the Pacific that I've heard of, directly imputing her integrity. In fact it seems to me that Goodale was taking an extraordinary risk as a narrator in this moment, when she includes his insinuations, Chase enlists Kitty as an accomplice. "I'd still clear of any managerial complication," he smiled provokingly. "I'd just let him see how much you want to see him act Othello. You do, don't you? He's going to thank you when it's over." I'd give a year of my life to see his Othello. I weekly yielded to my desire, but I refused to violate hospitality, not one word for me today. I would not be alone even with Mr. Booth for the rest of the outing, but I was. Another manager at Mr. Chase thought to it. Kitty's ostensibly unforced desires become the force by which Mr. Chase manipulates Booth's relationship again to a popular market.
	In light of the wig episode, it may be no surprise that the posters advertising Booth's appearance as Othello, the following Tuesday, were printed before Kitty and Booth ever discussed the topic. "She has done it," Booth announces to Chase after Kitty wins him over. Kitty herself is unable to explain his willingness, except to say that Booth knew, "He's acting was her chief pleasure in life." Perhaps he trusted his instinct to give me this pleasure for the reasons that I had not fallen in love with him.
	He may have deemed it poetic justice to reward a girl who was unsentimental over him. These instincts and pleasures, these inexplicable surrenders by both Kitty and Booth, the strange business of acknowledging that Kitty's compromised by this intimacy, even while she insists that she's a plucky heroine, deserving of his affection because she resist his charms. These are strategies of course, for concealing the workings of the marketplace as I've been saying. A certain amount of discovery clearly is possible here, centering on the observation that the great Booth has not transcended commercial concerns, but has rather shifted the focus of the market forces onto a sentimental girl, whom he manipulates in order to maintain a fantasy of purity. If Edwin Booth embodies the notion of Shakespeare as high culture, disdaining the low and the commercial, Kitty's memoir would seem to argue that high culture has simply learned to disavow its inevitable relationship to commerciality.
	Once again, we complicate the narrative of fragile separation between Shakespeare and the market, over the course of the 19th century in small way. These strategies of disavowal, seem to me, to demand a richer effective language, than terms like high, low and marketplace. The structures of desire, restraint, discretion, seduction, virtue and reward that Kitty and apparently Booth and Chase rely upon here, seem to me to come directly from melodrama. Kitty doubles as the virtuous heroine and the fallen woman, Booth is both hero and as well become powerfully apparent to seduce her. Chase is only inches away from being a mustache twirling villain.
	It's easy enough to see that three of them are colluding in Kitty's telling us the story in the marketing of high culture. They're moving into the genre of melodrama, in part to disguise the agency, to make their actions just inevitable. Note that when Kitty calls every word poetic justice, she is all but admitting to their mutual authorship of the melodramatic tail. Compare her line, he may have deemed it poetic justice to reward a girl who was unsentimental over him with John Fontaine's much later famous remark in the melodramatic women's film Letter From an Unknown Woman, 1948. Says Fontaine to her late seducer, "I wanted to be the one woman who never asked you for anything." Beyond just identifying the pressures of commerciality, in other words lies the more difficult in compelling question. What it means that Kitty, Booth and Chase are writing melodrama around the marketing of Shakespeare and what it means that melodrama writes them.
	One of the strengths of melodrama as a vocabulary for this encounter has to do with its emotional capaciousness. In this case, its ability to do justice to the tremendous power of the play itself and performance and specifically as performed by Edwin Booth. This is after all, the stated object of Kitty's desire, the force to which she will yield weakly. Not Booth himself, but Booth as Othello. As Kitty tells it in 1931, Booth needs her desire. On the night of the performance, he calls her to the green room. Kitty will be in the audience that night not on stage, though in her telling of the story, she could scarcely play a more prominent role in the production. Booth has promised to perform the play specifically as a favor to her. He has arranged for her to sit in a private box and Mr. Chase has provided her with flowers and candy. She is in the rather precarious position of being a Othello's date for the evening. Along with her in the green room, Booth asks her what she thinks of him in his black makeup.
	"You are the first Othello I have seen, Mr. Booth, whose skin does not make me shudder at the very thought of Desdemona's marriage." I did not say another word on his appearance, what was the need? He knew what a thing of masculine beauty he was as Othello. Booth does indeed seem to know and here's his response. "You are a young girl, Desdemona's psychology is not unlike your own. She is not abnormal, I contend Othello should be attractive enough for Desdemona to fall in love with him. Othello is not a tragedy of abnormal passions, this is your night, I have not forgotten my promise." Then, as the overture begins, "I shall act to you," said in his most professional tones. However tempting it may be to question the word professional in this context, the conflation of seduction in artistry are clearly essential for this extraordinary description of Booth's greatness as Kitty sees it, in her vision of the article history, which interests me.
	Booth is a towering figure in part because he truly desires her spectatorship and needs to acknowledge an essentially illicit relationship to her virtue. In her position as privilege spectator that night, Kitty comes to speak as though she were the entire audience. They each and every one feels it, fall in love with him even as Desdemona. Again, everyone settles down as if suppressing a sigh of bliss. The plot is so reasonable all at once. Desdemona's love, inescapably natural. Then as anticipated, Othello strangles Desdemona. "The death scene is a blank in my memory, I do not know what Mr. Booth did in this act, I only know what I felt, he reduced me to unthinking state, I was nothing but feeling." It may well be understood why Kitty calls the next morning's reviews an anti-climax.
	Nevertheless, she continues to map herself and Desdemona onto the audience. In the next morning's morning, she writes, "Not a writer did here perceive a divided duty, divided allegiance, divided acceptance, divided opinion. Edwin Booth was crowned the greatest living Othello." Imagining now that she, the audience and the critics have all become enraptured Desdemona's, Kitty undoes the play's violent ending entirely. Desdemona had spoken cautiously, she says, "My noble father, I do perceive here a divided duty," and she goes on to parse it very carefully that she needs to obey her husband, she has to disobey her father to obey her husband, et cetera, et cetera. 
	Constrain to acknowledge her father's authority, even while defying him and able to defy him only by vowing obedience to her husband. Desdemona had skillfully carved out a place for her desires. The scene of her declaration is in fact just a momentary pause on the way to her death. In Othello, this apparent resolution, the one Desdemona attempts to affect in the lines above, unravels immediately. By managing to forget the play's ending and closer reflections with this moment, Kitty rewrites so to tell us strikingly as basically a comedy it is Shakespeare's play, it is Mr. Chase's marketing triumph, it is Edwin Booth's performance, but in the end, it is Kitty's blissful sighs in response to all of these master craftsmen that rule the day.
	No one can perceive the divided duty here. Though it's impossible to know and of course we would suspect it's not true, that each and every one of the night's spectators responded to Booth the way Kitty did, she may not be entirely [inaudible 00:41:46] in imagining her own desire as a wider cultural phenomenon. Booth's fame in this period has been intimately linked by critics to what Ann Douglas calls the feminization of American culture. The process through which femininity became accorded moral authority and that feminization takes melodrama of course, as one of its central structures. More precisely by using the Othello as an opportunity to demonstrate racial sympathy, to speak admiringly about Booth's black makeup and to describe Booth as welcoming Kitty or Desdemona's not abnormal desires, the memoir tapped into one great source, the great source, the feminized and radicalized melodramatic authority and the period, stows Uncle Tom's Cabin.
	To experience the plot of Othello as so natural, to gloss over the death scene or to reframe it as a mystical moment of confirmation, to imagine Booth's audiences as Desdemona not in the tragic moment of her death, but in the comic moment of freeing herself from fraternal authority by loving a Othello, maybe to claim for the sympathetic spectator of the play, much of what Harriet Feature Stowe claimed for readers of her novel that it would bring them to feel rightly. Writing in 1931 about her experiences in 1887 then, Kitty testifies to the persistence of certain melodramatic tropes across the crucial period of cultural change, by no means limited to a relationship with Uncle Tom's Cabin. I can't help hearing some early film and [inaudible 00:43:03].
	Booth and his makeup attempting to bring high culture and a right understanding of Othello's race to America, while nearly seducing an innocent girl, sounds like DW [inaudible 00:43:12] broken blossoms. Well perhaps the actual production of Othello might well closely resemble the companion piece, birth of a nation. The production of the memoir itself feels quite [inaudible 00:43:21] like a version of Letter From an Unknown Woman, in which a seduced and abandoned woman writes at the end of her life, a letter about she has raised her seducer's son in secret all these years, carefully cherishing the momentary intimacy that has been forgotten utterly by her elite musician lover.
	Along similar lines, Kitty's memoir is full of comments about how she never got over Booth, how he looms larger than her deceased husband, how she married a nice man because Booth told her to. She and her husband agreed together in fact, before she dies, that if they could come back from the dead, it would be to see Edwin Booth play Hamlet. They really did, she said. Not to be together, not for the signing of the Treaty of Versailles or anything, to see their children again, to Booth. Such evidence as it's available suggests that Booth was not in fact deeply preoccupied with Kitty, there is a letter extent in which he says she is a nice girl, she'll probably never amount too much as an actress.
	By making a big deal about what is finally a slight intimacy with Booth, Kitty proleptically aligns herself with a whole line of virtuous heroines and heroes from melodrama, speaking like Joan Fontaine for the desire to revivify the past, to expose and celebrate a hidden history, to establish some equality between what is low and forgotten and what is elite and forward looking. It is not hard to understand why when she's writing of Catherine Goodale in 1931, Kitty relishes a loving audience's power to melt Booth back into the San Francisco fire boy, a sentimental figure like her, wearing his commercially expedient wig and foolishly grateful for all the attention. The emotional language she uses by 1931, has become a way to telegraph a whole form of consciousness about hierarchy in the past. That's why Kitty and melodrama are so important to me, because a melodrama's power to structure past and present and high and low.
	This way of claiming emotional and moral power over the forces of modernization and elitism is by no means restricted to memoirs by supporting actress with that precious. In this final section of the essay, I want to outline ways in which Kitty's paradigm is in the end our own cultural, critical paradigm, an influence and barely acknowledge structure of feeling that helps to govern what we say about Shakespeare, about the popular and about our own [inaudible 00:45:30] scholars of theater history. When Levine makes his much sided argument about the cultural significance of Shakespeare in the 19th century, he falls into a difficulty that I think is very instructive. In Levine's model Shakespeare, gets sorted out as the century progresses, as I've said, into a figure for high instead of popular culture. Part of a larger regime of cultural hierarchy, so by the mid 20th century, the categories of high and low have some solidity to them. Levine notes that he's often accused of being nostalgic for some lost golden era of American unity, a charge he disputes.
	If a sense of loss does permeate this book and I suspect it does, it has to do with the loss of what I perceive to have been a rich shared public culture that once characterize the United States. As I trust the following chapters make clear, I do not mean to imply that the Americans of the past were the creators and products of a stable, unvarying, undifferentiated culture. What I mean in referring to a shared culture is that in the 19th century, especially in the first half, Americans, in addition to whatever specific cultures they were part of, shared a public culture less hierarchically organized, less fragmented into relatively rigid [inaudible 00:46:37] boxes, than their descendants were to experience a century later.
	I don't fundamentally disagree with this reading of Levine's, or with his notions of historical change. I do want to contend as I've begun to do in just that small way, that what looks to Levine like a relatively solid sense of high culture, is subject to multiple and almost conscious compromises with the low and the popular that do complicate his reading to some extent. For the purpose of the present argument, I'm most interested in the disavowal of affect that marks his self defense. If a sense of loss does permeate his book and I suspect it does, it's a near compulsory humanist gesture, the acknowledgement of some investment in the topic, that carefully stops short of hindering objectivity. It may remind us of Booth's wan smile, without the lapse into aggressive tears.
	The loss of intimacy described in Levine's book actually sounds like something worth getting choked up about. Here's another description that he writes, "Although in the mid 20th century there was no more widely known respected or quoted dramatist in our culture than Shakespeare, the nature of his relationship to the American people had changed. He was no longer their familiar, no longer part of their culture, no longer at home in their theaters around the movie and television screens that have become the 20th century equivalent of the stage. If Shakespeare had been an integral part of mainstream culture in the 19th century, in the 20th, he had become part of polite culture. An essential ingredient in a complex we call significantly legitimate theater." It isn't the highbrow Shakespeare who has been exiled from culture here, but rather the low popular intimate Shakespeare who enjoyed a good burlesque.
	Without actually trying to be funny, I want to suggest that the popular Shakespeare in Levine's argument looks a lot like Barbara Stanwyck at the end of the Stella Dallas on your sheets and wistfully surveying the scene of elite culture from what she has been excluded. In that film at the end, she is a terribly tacky woman who loves her daughter more than anything and has sacrificed everything to make sure her daughter could marry into a good family. In the end, she stands outside the living room window looking in at the home in which her daughter is marrying someone wealthy. She turns away alone in the dark.
	In the film, as you remember, she stands trashy, common and self–excluded, while her daughter marries a respectable man inside. Stanwyck's and Shakespeare's sacrifices are necessary, it seems, in order to produce a new, more refined generation. I want to be clear as Levine is about why his argument really does have a genuine, if only partially acknowledged element of pathos. It's not because we've lost a chance to experience the American equivalent of merry old England with its festival pleasures. Nor it is because we bid it farewell to the ideal of a noble common man. The mourning in Levine's work has instead to do with the long trajectory in which [inaudible 00:49:28] objectivity has been the province of high culture. Historically accurate Shakespeare productions are opposed to sentimental and inadequate distortions or to use the melodramatic term from my field, bastardizations.
	Ideological critique is opposed to the kind of false consciousness that succumbs to the seductions of dominant discourse. Lower class feminized, hyper masculine. Those people fall for those things. It is sad actually, this is the cultural split that allows phony cowboys to win elections, while passionately committed leftists have no way to talk to voters outside of the cultural elite. What happened to popular Shakespeare has happened to all of us and though we may live well without Shakespeare, we do pay dearly for the larger social changes. When as critics we approach high and low cultural forms and their history, I want to argue. We may be bound to the melodramas from which we imagine ourselves to be distanced.
	The notion of a shared public culture comes back to us again and again, like A Letter From an Unknown Woman, a distance memory of a union that is tantalizing and discomforting. I began working on this topic because I was so struck by the parallels between the arguments that get made about 19th century America and the ones I was familiar with about Renaissance England. Both periods are said to begin with the union between high and low and to end with a rigidly enforced culture of hierarchy. In fact, some similar things get said about medieval drama and something similar get said about the 18th century. I'm not suggesting that these arguments are entirely wrong and of course we are talking about vastly different histories and circumstance here.
	How many times can a supposedly definitive cultural split take place like this? How is it that the splitting off of high from low seems inevitably to mark the close of one of our identified historical periods? It is just possible that certain tropes of lost intimacy are making us into the scholarly version of [inaudible 00:51:15], the troubled but brilliant artist who seduces Joan Fontaine and then forgets who she is and what she looks like. Like him, we're not quite able to recognize what doesn't fit our paradigm of tortured elitist isolation. Linda Williams has argued that when a melodrama's characteristic gestures is to modernize, to seek out new cultural problems, new unjust exclusions, new forms of suffering as [inaudible 00:51:37] for the generic mill.
	Part of the excitement she writes of mode, is the genuine turmoil and timeliness of the issues that takes up and the popular debate it can generate when it explores controversies not yet placed on the agenda of liberal humanism. The same could be said of the excitement generated within academic circles in recent decades. It's an excitement I share, I just want to think about it. I've been suggesting that some of the impasses our discipline has reached, oddly academics have never been more preoccupied with popular culture than we are now, precisely at the moment that we believe that we cannot be popular. Some of these impasses are connected to our engagement with the tropes of melodrama.
	The point is not to try to rid our thinking of melodramatic elements, the point is to argue for a reinvigorated study of genre and literary criticism. It's especially ironic that Shakespeareans are nervous about studying form, because we think it will compel us to talk about timeless, unchanging, universal truths that we reject categorically. On the contrary, if we need a deep engagement with literally form and we need to acknowledge our own co-operation with genre as critics, if we are to read history at all, our own or Shakespeare's. We could start by recognizing that melodrama is neither the thing from which Shakespeare and the objectivity of scholarship have to be rescued, nor the heartwarming answer to our modern cultural divides.
	It is instead a shared action through which we, like Kitty and Booth, simultaneously regret and replicate those divides. It gives us a way to voice democratic sympathies and it may be genuinely enabling us to attend to culture forms that a more frankly elitist academy would ignore. What else are we doing when we write literary history as repressed melodrama? Or in this case, when we write a melodrama about the suppression of melodrama itself? Williams has outlined the ways in which this mode teases us for the simultaneous pull forward in time, those miraculous interventions. You rescue the hero from the train tracks right before the train gets there, pulls us forward while simultaneously calling us back to an idealized past.
	McConaughey notes that melodrama in the 19th century theater functioned precisely to mark a thin border between elite and popular cultures. To quote Williams one more time, "The worst thing we can do to melodrama is condescend to it, the next worst thing is to ignore it." We could if there were time and I'm aware that we don't have time. We could talk about the history of melodrama in the development of elite literary culture in America. Peter Brookes has of course, written very influentially on melodrama's central place in the work of Henry James. Thomas Postlewait has a fascinating argument about how Eugene O'Neill's hatred of his father, who was a melodramatic actor, has seeped into and given shape to what he calls the suspect history of American drama. He speaks about [inaudible 00:54:13] journey into night as that melodrama wearing the mask of realism.
	Says that that's actually become the narrative of theater history for us. There are, in other words, plenty of indicators that melodrama is central to what we think of as modern and elite, not supplanted at all. In addition to telling the history of the genre though, which is an ongoing project, of course, we could meditate a little more on the opportunities it give us for thinking about itself. For this second approach, I want to turn very briefly to the work of Stanley Cavell, who finds in Stella Dallas the epitome of a genre he calls the The Hollywood melodrama of the unknown woman.
	Characteristically, Cavell imagines his melodramatic women to be offering us, if us is the history of male skeptical philosophy, which I'm saying it sort of is in his case. Offering us the potential for a real conversation with the low of the feminized and the melodramatic. In his reading of Stella Dallas, Stella is much more than preposterously dressed clueless victim of the canons of taste and elite decorum. She is instead a knowing performer, who accomplishes both the social successes of her daughter and the possibility of autonomous subjectivity for herself. By walking away like Ibsen Nora, another realistic tale that Cavell finds at the center of melodrama. By walking away like Ibsen Nora from the scene of marriage, Stella asserts or at least creates the imaginative room for her own perspective.
	A form of knowledge hidden from the limited imagination of her wealthy ex-husband. Cavell and Stella Dallas can't tell us exactly what it will mean to think about melodrama from within melodrama. They do suggest at least that we may learn to speak of the progress of cultural history and thus our own work, as something other than the endless vanquishing of low culture in the triumph of elitism. For Cavell, Stella's walking away teaches her and us that she has, "The right not to share their taste, the right to be something other than other than the victim and pupil of an exclusionary aesthetic." 
	It offers us too, in part because this walking away comprises a star turn by the formidable Barbra Stanwyck, what Cavell calls the promise of return, of unpredictable reincarnation. She is perhaps walking into exile, but in the very moment of her departure, the painful pleasure she gives us, assures us that she will appear again and again. Not vanquished by the future, but ready to reappear in any era. On the point of being excluded, powerful because endangered, both forgotten and unforgettable. Thank you.