ABSTRACT
The various combinations of instruction and amusement that brought Shakespeare to the attention of periodicals for women, children, and the working classes had an effect on Victorian Shakespeare reception more generally. The performance of Shakespeare’s plays occasioned a particularly wide-ranging debate between 1843 and 1851, during what might fairly be described as a crisis in British theatre. After 1843, when the Theatres Regulation Act ended nearly two centuries of the patent theatres’ exclusive right to produce Shakespeare, theatre reviewing was the medium in which views on the relationship between Britain’s dramatic heritage and the political and economic contexts shaping its future could be tested. The Theatres Regulation Act is sometimes discussed, particularly in nineteenth-century accounts, as an attempt to bring Shakespeare to the so-called lower orders outside London’s West End in the same way that a missionary might bring Christianity to the savages inhabiting the far-flung reaches of the British empire. The periodicals, however, tell a different story about how London’s minor theatres had already made Shakespeare marketable at a time when the patent theatres had largely abandoned his works. In 1851, when the Great Exhibition at London’s Crystal Palace presented first an economic challenge to the very survival of London’s theatres and then a new international paradigm for their future success, the periodicals were again the medium in which developments were articulated and debated. The Theatrical Journal, Victorian Britain’s longest-lived theatrical periodical, provides an unusually comprehensive record of the theatrical world’s responses to this era of free trade. Throughout its thirty-two years of weekly publication, the Theatrical Journal frequently instructed its readers not just where to find the latest Shakespeare productions, but also how to appreciate them. This appreciation included, inevitably, reading the Theatrical Journal before venturing to the theatre. For less serious members of the Victorian audience, that is, those
willing to risk an untutored evening at the theatre, the magazine reserved its derisory view that “we should not think of putting a pine-apple before a pig, therefore we should not think of putting Shakspeare before them.”1 The Theatrical Journal’s evolving responses to two key moments of crisis in Victorian Shakespeare production, the adoption of the Theatres Regulation Act in 1843 and the opening of the Great Exhibition in 1851, are illustrative of the different sense of theatre history that emerges when the periodicals are considered as central evidence.
