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The Modern Stage of Capitalism: the Drama of Markets and Money (1870-1930) The Modern Stage of Capitalism: The Drama of Markets and Money (1870-1930) The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Sniderman, Alisa. 2015. The Modern Stage of Capitalism: The Drama of Markets and Money (1870-1930). Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:17467505 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 The Modern Stage of Capitalism: The Drama of Markets and Money (1870-1930) A dissertation presented by Alisa Sniderman to The Department of Comparative Literature in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Comparative Literature Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts April 2015 © 2015 Alisa Sniderman All rights reserved. Dissertation Adviser: Martin Puchner Alisa Sniderman The Modern Stage of Capitalism: The Drama of Markets and Money (1870-1930) Abstract The Modern Stage of Capitalism tells the story of why and how modern drama captured the spirit of capitalism in all its contradictions. Although the bourgeois novel has long been considered the definitive genre of capital, at the end of the nineteenth century, Western theatre was in the perfect position to explore the ambiguous impact of capitalist culture. It was at the zenith of the economic hierarchy of the arts and at the nadir of the aesthetic hierarchy. Even with the serious drama of the day, modern theatre could not entirely purge itself of the tarnish of commerce. This enmeshment in commerce and the market economy generated a wealth of formal innovations and a wide range of responses to capitalist culture that went beyond moral outrage. Dramatists from Ibsen and Shaw to Brecht and O’Neill were neither apologists for, nor mere detractors of capitalism; they explored the bonds and clashes between religious values and secular economic virtues, drawing parallels between the institution of theatre and the brave new world of capitalist modernity. Besides dramatic texts, this interdisciplinary project relies on archival research of theatre productions, socio-economic theories that the playwrights responded to (Smith, Marx, Weber, Morris, Taylor), and critical theory that examines the relationship between economics and literary studies (Bourdieu, Jameson, Moretti). The present study takes modern theatre as a case study to show that products of culture engage with capitalism in a network of both promotional and antagonistic relations. The modern stage became a testing ground for the ideas of capitalist culture including the work ethic, competition, and the accumulation of capital. iii Table of Contents Part One: Capital I. Introduction 1 II. Play the Market: Representations of Capitalist Economy in Henrik Ibsen, Adam Smith, and Émile Zola 21 III. The Invisible Stage Hand, or the Drama of Capitalist Realism 94 Part Two: Labor IV. Machine Art: From German to American Expressionist Theatre 145 V. It’s a Jungle Out There: Human, Animal, and Capital in the Early Drama of Brecht and O’Neill 209 VI. Conclusion 252 VII. Bibliography 258 iv Figures 1.1 View of the Paris Bourse, an illustration from Edmond Texier, Tableau de Paris, vol. 2 (Paris: Pauli et Le Chevalier, 1853), 9 1.2 Book cover of Coulisses de Bourse et de Théâtre (1882) by Edmond Benjamin and Henry Buguet, 10 v Acknowledgements I thank Martin Puchner for his generous guidance and invaluable feedback from the onset of my dissertation to its completion. He believed in and encouraged the project before a word was written. His mentorship has been a gift throughout my graduate study. William Mills Todd III has provided continual guidance, kind support, and words of wisdom throughout my years at Harvard, first when I was an undergraduate and then a graduate student. His course, Literature as Institutions, has had a profound influence on the way I think about literary and dramatic texts and their relationship to history and economics. David Damrosch’s sharp eye and critical insights have greatly enriched the project and made me consider questions and problems I would not have otherwise noticed. I could not have asked for a more supportive committee, and I owe its members the deepest thanks. For intellectual conversation, encouragement, and mentorship, I thank Justin Weir, Svetlana Boym, David Rodowick, John Hamilton, Karen Thornber, Christie McDonald, and Marc Shell. Many thanks to Wanda Di Bernardo and Isaure Mignotte for administrative support and words of kindness. Something more than a thank you goes out to Zachary Sniderman for his support, patience, and every meal cooked in the past six years. Parts of this dissertation were written with the generous support of the Whiting Foundation, The Krupp Family Foundation, and the Harvard—École Normale Superieure Exchange Program. vi For my mother vii Introduction “Money is a kind of poetry.” –Wallace Stevens. “There is the capitalist art and the capitalist style of life.” —Joseph A. Schumpeter. Theatre and commerce. The coupling of these words might strike us as obvious and embarrassing, conjuring up images of second-rate Victorian melodramas and lavish Broadway spectacles. As American playwright Tina Howe puts it, “of all the arts, the theatre is the most conservative, because you have that ghastly problem of having to sell all the tickets every night.”1 As a result, when discussing modern theatre as art, critics tend to remember the noble ventures of the Independent Theatre movement in Europe and the Little Theatre movement in the United States that sprang up at the end of the nineteenth century to defy the boorish commercialism of conventional theatre. To talk about money and the material conditions of theatre making is often deemed so self-evident as to be uninteresting. This dismissive attitude is evident even in the economic histories of the theatre, such as The Business of the Theatre (1932) that covers American theatre from 1750 to 1932 and that the American Actors’ Equity Association commissioned Alfred L. Bernheim and the Staff of the Labor Bureau. Bernheim notes that “in modern times theatre has always been commercial” and lists Shakespeare as a prominent example of an artist who catered to his audience and to the tastes of his day.2 Yet instead of contemplating the relationship between modern theatre and the economic world in which it developed, Bernheim simply suggests that as long as profit-making doesn’t override aesthetic considerations, theatre is in the clear as far as artistic integrity goes. Yet artistic 1 Qtd. in Richard Toscan, Playwriting Seminars 2.0: A Handbook on the Art and Craft of Dramatic Writing with an Introduction to Screenwriting (Franz Press, 2012), 18. 2 Alfred L. Bernheim, The Business of the Theatre: An Economic History of the American Theatre 1750-1932, assisted by Sara Harding and the Staff of the Labor Bureau, Inc. (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1932), 3. 1 integrity and the question of respectability were at the center of modern drama. At the end of the nineteenth century, Western theatre was in the perfect position to explore the ambiguous impact of capitalist culture: it was at the zenith of the economic hierarchy of the arts and at the nadir of the aesthetic hierarchy. But even with the serious drama of the day, theatre could not entirely purge itself of the tarnish of commerce. It is easy to forget how uneasy the fathers of modern drama such as Ibsen, Chekhov, and O’Neill initially felt toward their attraction to an art deemed low by their contemporaries. “A play is a pension fund,” writes Anton Chekhov in a letter to his brother where he advises the latter to start scribbling for the stage because it doesn’t require much talent.3 Chekhov, who first begins his playwriting career by penning popular vaudevilles, would continue to have a love-hate relationship with the theatre. His ambivalent attitude eventually produced a masterpiece of modern drama—Чайка (1896; The Seagull)—a dramatic work that lays bare the inherent commercial values behind the façade of the art world and the social construction of “talent.” This sense of complicity and enmeshment in the market economy is precisely what elicited a rich variety of responses to capitalist culture in modern drama that went beyond apology or moral outrage. The History of the Drama of Capital To be sure, the history of the theatre, once divorced from ritual, has long been bound up with money and capital. In early modern Europe, professional theatre companies were already proto-capitalist joint stock companies that depended on large-scale credit made available by the 1571 usury statue. No wonder so many of Shakespeare’s plays, such as The Merchant of Venice 3 Chekhov to Al. P. Chekhov, 21 February 1899, in A. P. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem: Pis’ma [Complete Works and Letters: Letters], vol. 3 (Moscow: Nauka, 1976), 164. Translations from original are my own. 2 (1605) and The Life of Timon of Athens (1607), dramatize the vicissitudes of credit and debt.4 The last two decades in particular have witnessed significant scholarly attention paid to economic issues in Shakespeare and early modern English drama, a time when drama faced little competition from prose fiction.5 During the Restoration and early eighteenth century, morality plays about the perils of avarice and financial speculation were popular with the audiences. Thomas Shadwell’s The Volunteers, or the Stockjobbers (1693) predicted the crash of the South Sea Bubble that came in 1720. Caryl Churchill includes a scene from Shadwell’s play in Act One of her Serious Money (1987), which takes place at the London Stock Exchange.
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