Cymbeline - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

iv.
Actors, authors and other interested parties (including
audiences) had been decrying the low taste of the
fashionable theatre for a long time - George Frederick
Cooke hoped that posterity would not believe that The
Castle Spectre had played to better audiences than
7
Shakespeare's works' - but the Victorian theatre partook
of its age's self-consciousness, and sought institutional
respectability by earnestness and its scenic expression,
historic!sin. The narrowing of the gap between study and
stage was part of this endeavour, and its expression was
the printing, provision and use of books of the plays performed.
Reviewers at Sadler's Wells and at other theatres
saw not only honest pleb audiences, but honest plebeians
clutching copies of the play. ?.;t. Benson's success at
the Lyceum in the late '90s and early lyOOs seemed to show
that theatrical self-improvement was still a viable
financial proposition, and l-iax 3eerbohia described the
"thousands of simple, earnest folk" who would floc:i. to the
Lyceum,
week after week, every one of them carrying
the Clarendon Press edition of the play to
be performed, and would sit religiously
through the performance, rarely raising their
eyes from the text, and utilising the entr'­
actes by reading up the pithy "notes" of ;r.
A. or Professor B.°
The academic nature of these enterprising self-improvers is
in marked contrast to the more siuiply theatrical interests
of their mid-century forbears, armed with acting editions
or, if they were of a more literary turn of mind, Knight's
Cabinet Shakespeare or Ticker's Penny edition.
If there was such a difference between t i e approaches
of the earnest in 1847 and the earnest in 1896 (brought up,
suggested a reviewer of Irving's Oyrabeline, on Gervinus and
Dowden) it probably supplemented the proclaimed change in
taste. Audiences were supposedly nore refined by mid-