Edwin Booth and Melodrama: Writing the History of Shakespearean Elitism (Report‪)‬

ONE NIGHT IN 1887, Edwin Booth stood before an adoring San Francisco audience, attempting to star in Hamlet. According to his supporting actress, Katherine Goodale, the audience's response almost made the performance impossible: The logic of Booth's performance in this scene is familiar to those who study the history of entertainment and cultural hierarchy. Straining nobly toward the elevation of Shakespearean performance to the status of high culture, Booth does everything he can to disavow the affection, the nostalgia, and the popular appeal of his relationship to the audience, but in Goodale's description, the audience can only see him as a local boy made good. (2) In the mid-nineteenth century, there was no great difference between a Shakespeare play and popular entertainment, according to scholars like Lawrence Levine. Shakespeare doesn't become a figure for high culture, according to Levine's book Highbrow/Lowbrow, before late century, when cultural arbiters like Booth work to elevate him, distancing themselves as Booth does here from everything vulgar and popular. (3) Booth's attempt at "wan" austerity thus marks his relative proximity to the standards of modernist theater, as Goodale points out in her 1931 memoir: "Sometimes one hears it said, or reads it, that the methods of Edwin Booth would be too out of date to sway a modern audience. No one who saw his art as he listened to the new King's first speech from the throne could endorse such a mistaken estimate" (177).