Stages of Subscription, 1880–1930

Stages of Subscription, 1880–1930 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:37944972 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Stages of Subscription, 1880–1930 A dissertation presented by Matthew Scott Franks to The Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of English Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts December 2016 © 2016 Matthew Scott Franks All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor Leah Price Matthew Scott Franks Stages of Subscription, 1880–1930 Abstract Subscription redistricted turn-of-the-century British and Irish theater audiences in seemingly contradictory ways, alternately appealing to coteries or crowds. At a time when women, the working classes, and the Irish were advocating for greater political representation outside the theater, subscribers circumvented the Lord Chamberlain and London commercial theater managers in order to legislate repertoires and policies on the rest of the public’s behalf. Printed subscription ephemera created virtual stages on which subscribers could enact and reimagine their social relationships, whether by pinning their tickets together in order to secure adjoining seats, or by crowding newspaper columns with letters protesting unfair treatment from theater managers, or simply by reading their name—or a name—next to others on a list. By listing plays in programs, prospectuses, and annual reports, private subscription clubs such as the Incorporated Stage Society assembled the very idea of a modern dramatic repertoire. Membership lists gendered club playgoers as unmarried women—precisely the demographic the Lord Chamberlain most sought to protect. Although metropolitan managers characterized provincial playgoers as pupils to be taught, patients to be nursed, or savages to be civilized, public subscription repertory theaters in Glasgow, Dublin, and Liverpool challenged these analogies by representing iii repertory audiences as “citizen” shareholders. Writing pseudonymous letters to newspaper editors, playgoers variously identified as clerks, schoolboys, dockers, and suffragists, staking claim to the day-to-day running of what they considered to be “Citizens’ Theatres” and “public institutions,” even though the theaters technically were private. George Bernard Shaw, Henrik Ibsen, St. John Hankin, John Galsworthy, Arthur Wing Pinero, and other late-Victorian and Edwardian playwrights used subscription lists as stage props to smuggle the public plot into the private drawing room, helping to explain how so-called “social drama” was able to bring large crowds to the stage while keeping casts small. Edward Gordon Craig’s theatrical little magazine The Mask separated “Theater” as subject from “theater” as building, launching an idea of World Theater that reflected the journal’s international subscribers as far afield as Syria, South Africa, Bolivia, and Japan even while Craig tried to convince English readers to give him a literal theater of his own. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 1. Play-producing societies and ephemeral repertoire 20 2. Provincial repertory theaters and audience impressions 60 3. Prop lists and assembled ensembles 100 4. Craig’s lists and readers theaters 133 Bibliography 165 v Acknowledgements At the top of the list, tremendous thanks to Leah Price, Martin Puchner, Derek Miller, and Elaine Scarry for their patience and generosity in advising this project. Claire Cochrane, Tracy Davis, Barry Houlihan, David Hutchison, Penelope Ismay, Patrick Lonergan, Deidre Lynch, Ros Merkin, Elizabeth Miller, John Plotz, Mia Smith, and Martha Vogeler provided gracious and much-appreciated expertise along the way. Michael Fountaine, Amy Zhang, and above all J. P. Wearing helped bring the database to life. Tarryn Chun, Rebecca Kastleman, Elizabeth Phillips, and members of the Harvard Drama Colloquium facilitated a vibrant intellectual community. Rachel Stern, Julia Tejblum, and Elizabeth Weckhurst have been great friends and colleagues. Gwen Urdang-Brown contributed warmth and wit. I’m further grateful to staff at the British Library, the British Library of Political and Economic Science, Houghton Library, the James Hardiman Library, the John G. Wolbach Library, the John Rylands Library, Liverpool Central Library, Manchester Central Library, the Mitchell Library, the National Archives Kew, the National Theatre Archive, the New York Public Library, the University of Glasgow Library, and the V&A Theatre and Performance Archives. Cabot House tutors, students, and staff have been among my most constructive interlocutors. Catherine Benson, James Fry, Hannah Howard, Steven Howes, Jennifer Martin, and Elise Spiers have put me up during research trips. I owe the biggest thanks to my family: William, Bonnie, Jennifer, and Jean Franks, and, last but not least, Joseph O’Keeffe. vi Introduction In 1996, playwright August Wilson delivered a speech to the U.S. Theatre Communications Group in which he called subscribers the “life blood” of American theater. “But,” he continued, the subscription audience holds the seats of our theatres hostage to the mediocrity of its tastes, and serves to impede the further development of an audience for the work that we do. While intentional or not, it serves to keep blacks out of the theatre where they suffer no illusion of welcome anyway. A subscription thus becomes not a support system but makes the patrons members of a club to which the theatre serves as a clubhouse.1 Disparaged for their insularity, subscribers are as vital to today’s theater as Wilson’s hematic metaphor acknowledges. Although their numbers have fallen in recent years, subscribers remain the largest individual donors, the second-highest revenue contributors, and the surest return visitors to not-for-profit U.S. theaters.2 In Britain, government cuts are prompting more and more subsidized theaters to adopt similar membership schemes, from the National Theatre to the Donmar Warehouse to the Leicester Curve.3 For theater scholars, subscription lists offer among the clearest documentation of the individuals who have comprised theater audiences over the last century. Nevertheless, beyond industry books and marketing journals, we have largely ignored subscription’s origins or impact.4 1 August Wilson, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” American Theatre 13, no. 7 (1996): 14–16. 2 Glenn B. Voss and Zannie Giraud Voss, Theatre Facts 2014: A Report on the Fiscal State of the Professional Not-for-Profit American Theatre (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2014). 3 Lyn Gardner, “Theatre Membership Schemes: A Case of Short-Term Gain for Long-Term Pain?,” The Guardian, Jan. 24, 2014. 4 Danny Newman is widely credited for evangelizing postwar theater subscription. Danny Newman, Subscribe Now!: Building Arts Audiences Through Dynamic Subscription Promotion (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1977). For a British perspective, see Vanessa Rawlings-Jackson, Where Now?: Theatre Subscription Selling in the ’90s!: A Report on the American Experience (London: Arts Council of England, 1996). The neighboring disciplines of musicology, book history, and cultural studies have better 1 When we mention subscribers at all, we highlight their homogeneity. Richard Schechner has asserted that the tellingly-singular “subscription audience” is “not a very representative one”; for him and other critics, subscription forecloses diverse races, incomes, and ages by pursuing “that ‘2%’ of the population who will pay to go to the theatre”—in other words, those who are white, middle-class, and middle-aged or older.5 This perceived representational imbalance has even led director Andre Gregory to ask whether subscribers “maintain or strangle a theatre.”6 At once enabling and inhibiting, subscribers incarnate the buttoned-down bourgeois straw man that modern theater so pugnaciously and productively resists. Casting patrons as philistines and dinosaurs, subscriber-bashing upstages high modernism’s rejection of the uncultured masses. With financial commitment indicated by their title, subscribers (unlike theatergoers, audiences, or spectators) uncomfortably remind us that even avowedly not-for-profit theater needs playgoers with purses, prompting disgruntled Australian actress Anna Broinowski to punningly dub them “a bank of semi-comatose.”7 While money-minded managers and marketers flatter subscribers to their faces, artistically-inclined playwrights, directors, actors, and critics compound subscription’s reputation for stifling the performance explored the origins of subscription. See, for example, Otto Erich Deutsch, “The Subscribers to Mozart’s Private Concerts,” Music & Letters 22, no. 3 (1941): 225–34. For a discussion of Georgian opera’s “subscription culture,” see Jennifer Hall-Witt, Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780–1880 (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2007), 57–97. For subscription libraries, see Geoffrey Forster and Alan Bell, “The Subscription Libraries and Their Members,” in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, ed. Alistair Black and Peter Hoare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006),

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