Lawrence Levine
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Wikipedia
Featured:  |
"Culture is a process, not a fixed condition," writes Lawrence W. Levine in Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988). Exactly. Control of that process is what America's "culture wars" have always been about. Levine's anti-canonical book describes the 19th-century cultural struggle, in which a moneyed and educated class took control of such once-popular forms as Shakespeare and opera, embalming them and arrogating to itself the arbitration of Taste. --Charles Paul Freund via [1]
Although theater is today a highbrow form, this was not so until the nineteenth century. Historian Lawrence Levine articulated Shakespeare's popularity shift this way:
- “By the turn of the [nineteenth] century, Shakespeare had been converted from a popular playwright whose dramas were the property of all those who flocked to see them, into a sacred author who had to be protected from ignorant audiences and overbearing actors threatening the integrity of his creations."
