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The Cultural Value of Shakespeare in Twenty-First-Century Publicly-Funded Theatre in England

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The Cultural Value of Shakespeare in Twenty-First-Century Publicly-Funded Theatre in England THE CULTURAL VALUE OF SHAKESPEARE IN TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY PUBLICLY-FUNDED THEATRE IN ENGLAND by EMILY CAROLINE LOUISE LINNEMANN A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY The Shakespeare Institute College of Arts and Law The University of Birmingham September 2010 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT This thesis argues that in the plural cultural context of the twenty-first century the value of Shakespeare resides in his identity as a free and flexible resource. This adaptable Shakespeare is valuable to theatres because they are dialectical spaces. Free-resource Shakespeare is able to contain a range of different cultural values and theatres provide a space for producers and consumers of culture to negotiate between them. It has been established that tensions of cultural value, for example innovation/tradition or commercial/non-commercial govern the production, dissemination and critique of culture. Building on this idea, this work shows that when tensions are dealt with as negotiations rather than confrontations, new cultural value is generated. It identifies Shakespeare as a site for the debate of value tensions and contends that he can be simultaneously commercial and non-commercial, traditional and innovative. Cultural value is thus created because Shakespeare is reinvigorated and redefined through a process which negotiates between tensions. In publicly-funded theatre this process manifests itself in an ambiguous relationship to the market, myriad adaptations and a move towards event-theatre. The cultural value of Shakespeare in publicly-funded theatre mirrors the continual redefinition of the Shakespearean object and, rather than being a concrete ‘thing’, is better defined as a constant process. Acknowledgements: My sincere thanks go to my supervisor Kate McLuskie, my co-supervisor Kate Rumbold and my colleague on the ‘Interrogating Cultural Value’ project, Sarah Olive. Their support, academic input, enthusiasm, generosity in sharing ideas and friendship have helped me through every step of the thesis. I owe much to Andy Kesson for insightful and helpful proofreading and to Lizz Ketterer for both proofreading and locating the ‘ghost book’. The support from my family and my husband has been a tremendous help and is very much appreciated, to them I am incredibly grateful. Finally, I am indebted to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, for providing me with the financial means with which to undertake this project. For Max and the many Burdens in my life: Caroline, Rod, Ruth, Helen and Alice CONTENTS Introduction 1 Cultural Value: The debate so far 28 The Value(s) of Public Funding 56 ‘Shakespeare Got to Get Paid Son’: Economics and Cultural Value 100 Killing Bill? The Cultural Value of Adapting Shakespeare 143 Intercultural Shakespeare: Innovation or Utopian Primitivism? 186 More than Plays on Stages? The RSC’s Complete Works Festival 234 Conclusion: ‘Always in Process, Always Propagating’ 275 Appendix 291 Bibliography 321 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND GRAPHS Fig. 1 John Holden’s Value Triangle 50 Fig. 2 Government Spending at the DCMS 2007-8 66 Fig. 3 Money Allocated to Government Departments in £bn 67 Fig. 4 A Comparison of Cinema Profits and Arts Subsidy 68 Fig. 5 Regularly-Funded Organisations by Art Form 69 Fig. 6 Comparison between the RSC’s and Shakespeare’s Globe’s Income Sources 72 Fig. 7 Percentage of ACE Grant Money Received 2008/11 74 Fig. 8 Plays by Number of Different Productions 81 Fig. 9 Brecknock’s Performing Arts Value Chain 119 INTRODUCTION This thesis investigates the cultural value of Shakespeare in twenty-first-century publicly- funded theatre in England. It began life as a section of a grant proposal for a wider project, „Interrogating Cultural Value: The Case of “Shakespeare”‟.1 The success of the proposal is testament to the Arts and Humanities Research Council‟s belief in the value of the academic study of Shakespeare. However, the „Interrogating Cultural Value‟ project aimed to discover how Shakespeare‟s value operates outside of the academy and how notions of culture and value are influencing cultural policy in general and the production, re-production and dissemination of Shakespeare in particular. The initial five research questions laid out for the „Interrogating Cultural Value‟ project as a whole were as follows: How is the concept of Shakespeare‟s „value‟ being used in different intellectual and policy arenas of contemporary culture? Is it possible to align changes in these uses with specific and particular cultural and social forces? How do these uses inform and how are they inflected by the cultural institutions that fund, regulate and reproduce „Shakespeare‟? What is the relationship between the terms used to define the value of „Shakespeare‟ and those used in other areas of cultural and heritage values? How far do new technologies of access inflect perceptions of the value of „Shakespeare‟? These research questions have developed since the project‟s inception and this thesis reflects this development by considering what the „use‟ of value might entail and asking whether some values remain the same in spite of changes in culture and society. Of particular 1 The project ran from 2006-2010. Included in the project team were Kathleen McLuskie, Kate Rumbold and Sarah Olive and Emily Linnemann. 1 importance for this thesis was the way in which Shakespeare‟s value was used, affirmed and recreated by English publicly-funded theatres. The parameters of this research were defined as Shakespeare, England and publicly-funded theatre for several reasons. Taking into account an obvious research bias within the Shakespeare Institute, Shakespeare still offers a logical choice for an exemplar of the use of cultural value within the publicly-funded arts. One of the best-funded theatres in England – the Royal Shakespeare Company – largely focuses on his work and many theatres without an explicit link to Shakespeare include at least one play in their annual repertory.2 Furthermore, as a cultural object in general, Shakespeare appears to have hit the „big-time‟.3 His plays are being constantly produced and re-produced and, with every iteration, new cultural value is both released and created for Shakespeare and the institutions which produce him. The focus on England is mainly a practical one which helps to contain the research within a manageable context. However, it is also affected by the way in which art is funded in the United Kingdom as a whole. There is not a UK Arts Council but instead four separate councils for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. In this sense, English publicly- funded theatres represent one particular group of organisations which are governed by policies specific to England. In the future, developing this project further could include an investigation of Shakespeare‟s value within the UK‟s other nations and other funding frameworks. Publicly-funded theatre is the final parameter for this project because it is the place where many of the debates surrounding culture and cultural value stop being theoretical and become practice. It is a site where concepts of value in the policy arena become real values transmitted through creativity and innovation; a place where cultural and social forces are not only written 2 In 2007-8 there were 105 individual productions of Shakespeare‟s plays or Shakespeare-related plays in publicly-funded theatres. See chapter 2 and appendix. 3 Michael D. Bristol, Big-time Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1996). 2 about but where they act upon production. Within these spaces, Shakespeare – who „Shakespeareanises everything‟ – has a clear use value.4 Publicly-funded Shakespeare is at once the great „Shakespeareaniser‟ described by Terry Eagleton and the tabula rasa onto which other cultural forms and values can be grafted. Able to take on new and ever-shifting values from policy and to maintain a connection with „traditional‟ values, Shakespeare offers publicly-funded theatres the perfect cultural resource. By holding these values in tension and allowing for a negotiation between them, performing Shakespeare can increase the cultural value of the theatre, the funders and his works. Theatres are just one of a number of institutions that reproduce Shakespeare, providing a kind of regulation in the choices they make about how to represent him to their audience.5 Examining the role and reproduction of Shakespeare within publicly-funded theatre allows us to consider the relationship between terms used to describe the cultural value of theatre, Shakespeare and heritage. This is because theatres are at once sites of cultural production and innovation and of heritage and tradition; they both produce and preserve Shakespeare. Importantly, it is only by placing Shakespeare within this public and theatrical context that his specific cultural value can be articulated. We need to be able to identify the strands of value connected with public funding, theatre and Shakespeare in order to be able to identify which values are unique to Shakespeare and which can be attributed to the environment in which he is situated. 4 Terry Eagleton, „Afterword‟ in The Shakespeare Myth, ed. by Graham Holderness (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), pp. 202-8 (p. 206). 5 In England others include schools which follow the national curriculum, television, advertising and universities. 3 Publicly-Funded Shakespeare in the Digital Age It is to the environment in which he is situated that this introduction now turns.
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