American Vaudeville As Ritual

University of Kentucky UKnowledge Theatre History Theatre and Performance Studies 1965 American Vaudeville as Ritual Albert F. McLean Jr. Transylvania University Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation McLean, Albert F. Jr., "American Vaudeville as Ritual" (1965). Theatre History. 3. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_theatre_history/3 American Vaudeville as Ritual This page intentionally left blank American Vaudeville as Ritual UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY PRESS Copyright © 1965 by Th e University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, Th e Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved. Editorial and Sales Offi ces: Th e University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 www.kentuckypress.com Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-8131-3429-1 (pbk.: alk. paper) Th is book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials. Manufactured in the United States of America. Member of the Association of American University Presses For My Mother and Father This page intentionally left blank Preface J•S A PROLOGUE to The Adventures of Huckle ftberry Finn, its author gave notice that readers attempting to find a "moral" in his narrative would be "prosecuted." Some who pick up this book antici pating the nostalgic memorabilia of vaudeville may feel that for my attempt to find general meaning beneath the surface of entertainment, I deserve some mild prosecution. For this book takes vaudeville seriously, as a manifestation of psychic and social forces at work in American history. It deals not with memories or gossip but with symbols, not with "bills" and "acts" but with ritual. In short, this book attempts to make sense and some sort of order out of the tinsel and glitter known as vaudeville. VII While not immune to the gay and picturesque ele ments of this entertainment form, I am convinced that there is a place for raising serious questions and examining current illusions. I am of a genera tion which has known vaudeville only through fam ily tradition, hearsay, and its vestigial remains, and perhaps because of this I find it possible to seek in telligent perspectives from gazing upon what has now become the national past. This book had its genesis in a small packet of letters in our family attic, letters written to my maternal grandfather by his friend and former em ployer, B. F. Keith. The letters themselves are autobiographical, full of recollections about Keith's early wanderings as a mess boy, a door-to-door sales man, and a grifter with the circus, but they provide as well full accounts of American vaudeville in the eighties and nineties. These letters, since edited by me and published in Theatre Survey, fall into the familiar and predictable pattern of the American success story as Keith had found it in his own ca reer. But the juxtaposition of this pattern with the rise of vaudeville as an institution prompted a further idea which lies at the heart of this book that vaudeville as an entirety was a manifestation of the belief in progress, the pursuit of happiness, and the hope for material success basic to the Amer ican character. A decade and several trial papers after the initial discovery of the letters, the back ground materials which I had been laboriously col lecting began to take shape. My excursions down the byways of humor, theology, dramaturgy, and folklore all pointed to what seems to me to be the underlying truth about American vaudeville. It is not enough to say with the popularizers that vaudeville expresses the "American spirit." Nor is it sufficient to agree with R. G. Collingwood andother VIII sophisticated observers that modern mass entertain ment is merely a "grounding of emotional energy," a psychic safety valve for the mass man in his mo ments of quiet desperation. If the vaudeville per formance as a unique set of expressive sights and sounds had value beyond the claims of its partisan supporters or critics, this value lay in that difficult area of modern scholarly investigation that is known as "mythic thought," an area in which idea and emotion become fused and complementary and in which generalities about the "spirit" of a people are subjected to critical examination. Myth itself consists of interrelated constellations of images and symbols that both singly and collectively express the unconscious assumptions upon which men base their functional attitudes and beliefs. Vaudeville, as became clear in the course of my investigations, stood in relation to the American dream of human progress and personal achievement as primitive rit ual stood in relation to primitive myth. Its place in American life was neither that of a crude monument to national vitality and gaiety, nor was it simply a kind of relaxation. Instead it served as a means of assimilation and crystallization of very important and historically significant value judgments upon life in an expanding industrial democracy. Vaude ville, in short, was one way by which the American people, passing through a neoprimitive stage, sought perspectives upon their common experience. Ritual, in this context, extends beyond its dic tionary meaning as a recurring and systematic series of acts with formal (symbolic) meaning, to the point where Ernst Cassirer, in The Philosophy ofSymbolic Forms, has found it-as a developmental stage in the process of myth creation in which it both ac companies and produces myth in its verbal forms. Thus it is that vaudeville could absorb into itself, IX into its humor, songs, and playlets, the verbal myths of the society at large or of distinctive segments of the society, but since its primary medium was that of dramatic action, it tended to move further away from conceptual thought than myth. Not idea, not even a formal style was essential to the expressive ness of vaudeville as ritual, but rather those more directly sensory experiences which are imparted by rhythmic patterns of gesture, color, and sound. Not all of vaudeville, of course, qualified as ritual gest ure, for some of it was topical and ephemeral, a series of acts without particular or communicable symbolic meaning. Thus, the emphasis of this book upon ritual elements should not create the miscon ception that every vaudeville performance fulfilled a rigidly prescribed function and met an established standard. The very rapidity of its creation and of social change during its short life span precluded the development of a highly formalized or elaborate ritual. But ritual action and ritual meaning were implicit, nevertheless, in each gathering of an audi ence to watch the performers move through their various acts, and while the audience itself, like the primitive tribes participating in their indigenous rituals, was unaware of the myth-making process in which they were participating, it is now the role of the historian to extract thematic material from its ritual content and to interpret it as best he can. As this thesis is developed, my debt to the philos ophers, literary scholars, and historians who have brought to light the significance which symbol and myth have for civilized as well as for primitive cultures will become clear. It has required only a reasonable extensionoftheirthought, provoked bythe special problems of my investigation, to define popu lar stage entertainment as ritual-as one form of the symbolic activity appropriate to myth-making. The X value and meaning of myth as a symbolic emergence from the realms of feeling and of will have already been well educed for the formal arts, particularly literature, and my innovation lies solely in applying many of the same principles to the popular arts. The accumulating evidence to support the insight of Cassirer and others, that the myth-making faculty in man is constant and compulsive, is becoming more impressive each year, and while there is an understandable reticence on the part of scholars to seek out the myths of contemporary society in the same dispassionate manner in which they have studied the ethnic mythologies of ancient cultures, yet the truth lies merely around the corner. There is no single dominant ethnic tradition in America, and thus the old folk traditions have withered away. But there is, in this heterogeneous society, still a folk element which too seeks to evolve its usable myths; only instead of linking these myths with the relig ious aspirations of the community, the new urban folk has drawn its symbols from the secular magic of its era-the very scientism which set out to dispell forever the prestige of myth. Vaudeville stands in the center of this secular myth-making and has been engaged in a process of real significance for modern society, a process which has gone largely unperceived because of inadequate perspectives and inattention to the nature and history of mass entertainment. Necessarily this investigation leads off into two directions, one historical and the other critical. I have been forced by the nature of the material to engage in some rather wide, if elemental, sociologi cal and anthropological considerations.

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