Antitheatrical prejudice

"Antitheatrical prejudice" refers to the notion that there has been enmity against theater and theater-making artists in the Western world. The theory was first formulated by Jonas Barish, scholar of theater history, in his book The Antitheatrical Prejudice. Often, at the height of theater's popularity in a historic moment, when the theater's ability to serve as a positive force for community is felt, the converse of antitheatrical prejudice is also concurrent.

In many Western languages acting, theatricality, operatic, melodramatic, and 'making a spectacle of oneself' have negative, hostile, or belittling connotations. In French, joust la comedie is dismissive of a theatrical act and if one is behaving properly, not theatrically or falsely. In Italian, one may be fare la commedia, and in German, sich in Szene setzen—all terms with origins in theatre history.

Much of Barish's argument relates to the theater's ability to stir enjoyment, incite potentially problematic action, to wrestle with problems stemming from the act of mimesis, and from a distrust of the profession of acting.

Barish also identifies antitheatrical tendencies amongst theater makers themselves, including but not limited to playwright Ben Jonson, actor and director Constantin Stanislavski, who equates theatricality with a negative sense of the conventional or over-acting, and playwright George Bernard Shaw, who once stated, "The curse of our stage at present is the shameless prostitution of the art of acting into the art of pleasing. The actor wants 'sympathy': the actress wants affection. They make the theatre a place where the public comes to look at its pets and distribute lumps of sugar to them."

In Antitheatrical Prejudice, Barish intended to prove that "The durability of the prejudice would seem to reflect a basic attitude toward the lives of men in society that deserves to be disengaged and clarified... The ultimate hope [of the book] is to illuminate if possible the nature of the theatrical, and hence, inevitably, of the human."

Barish states that "The theater being the most volatile of the arts, the most telling in its impact, the most provocative of mass emotion, as well as the most productive of visible disorder in the lives of its practitioners, who must move in a perpetual glare of artificial light and public curiosity, it tends to provoke the sternest dismissals from those whose true suspicion is of the unfettered imagination in any form. Those who have most darkly mistrusted the theater--Plato, the Puritans, the Jansenists, Jean-Jacques Rousseau--have tended to see in it a paradigm case for what is baleful in all the arts."

In a more contemporary sense, scholar Eileen Fisher finds matters of the antitheatrical to be wholly "internal spats, self criticism from theater practitioners and fine critics. Such 'prejudices' are usually based upon aesthetic dismay at our theaters' rampant commercialism, general triteness, boring star-system narcissism, and overreliance on Broadway-style spectacle and razzmatazz."

Plato and ancient Greece

File:Portrait of Plato; bust. Wellcome M0005618.jpg

Portrait of Plato; bust. Wellcome M0005618

Plato's The Republic

In Plato's view, expressed in The Republic, the poet's profession is second rate. Rather than, for instance, actually embarking on heroic deeds he must instead write as realistically as possible about those deeds. This uncovering of the truth in representation, says Barish of Plato, is to compensate for poets "worthlessness in action by making himself expert at the art of mimicking the actions of others."

Mimesis is regarded as deeply suspect due to its power over man's formative mind. An actor of the stage must then "be prohibited from miming illiberal or base characters, lest they receive taint from them. They must not imitate women either, or slaves, or villains, or madmen, or 'smiths or other artificers, or oarsmen, boatswains, or the like.' They must, in fact, confine themselves to imitations of members of their own sex, their own social level, their own professional class and moral outlook. Whatever takes them into another realm of the mind by distancing them from their 'essential' selves, whatever momentarily provides them with an alternate role, a new soul, thereby unfits them for their work in society."

The power and purpose of theater in ancient Greece cannot be understated. These suspicions of human moral corruption are linked to this important position of art making to the Greeks. Through this lens it's easier to understand Barish's claim that "the more seriously, indeed, one credits the power of art to vitalize and transfigure, to heal and sustain, the more seriously one must reckon with its potentiality to debilitate and debase."

Plutarch's "Were the Athenians More Famous in War or in Wisdom?"

It is possible that this copy of Plutarch's essay, which reflects many of the dissenting views of Plato, could be an exercise in arguing an opinion not necessarily his own. In any case, his main argument here revolves around the idea of imitation as it affects society rather than the individual who may take on new, undesirable traits through the act of mimesis. Plutarch wonders what it has to say about us that we see pleasure in watching an actor participate with strongly negative emotions on stage where the opposite would not be true in life.

Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity

Cicero writes that "dramatic art and the theatre is generally disgraceful" and this seems to be a majority opinion in the height of the Roman Empire. Permanent theater spaces were forbidden to be built, indicating a low priority for the theater in the official sense, and forms of performance shifted to popular entertainments.

Histriones and mimes

Theater in Rome is largely led by professional actor managers leading groups of actors (or histriones) consisting of foreigners, freedmen, and slaves. As Romans viewed public service for money to be disgraceful, this group became a disenfranchised class "virtually stricken, so far as the law was concerned, from the book of life" and were forbidden to vote, appoint or serve as attorneys, forbidden to leave the profession, and required to pass their employment on to their children. Mimes, which included female performers, were heavily sexual in nature and often equated with prostitution. Attendance at mime performances "must have seemed to many Romans like visiting the stews--equally urgent, equally provocative of guilt, and hence equally in need of being scourged by a savage backlash of official disapproval."

Tatian and Tertullian's De spectaculis

Both Taitian and Tertullian (c. 160 CE-200 CE) represent some of the earliest stirrings of Christian writings suspicious of the theater because of the pleasure it brings. In De spectaculis, Tertullian argues that even moderate pleasure is to be avoided and that theater, with its large crowds and deliberately exciting mimetic performances, leads to "mindless absorption in the imaginary fortunes of nonexistent characters." To Tertullian, acting is ever amassing system of falsifications, his own identity (a deadly sin), an impersonation of one who may be vicious (a further sin) "First the actor falsifies his identity, and so compounds a deadly sin. If he impersonates someone vicious, he further compounds the sin." And if modification is required, say a men representing a woman, it is a "lie against our own faces, and an impious attempt to improve the works of the Creator."

St. John Chrysostom

"He who converses of theatres and actors does not benefit [his soul], but inflames it more, and renders it more careless... he who converses about hell incurs no dangers, and renders it more sober." To St. John Chrysostom it is the converse of pleasure that brings salvation.

St. Augustine's Confessions

The following passages are expressed in St. Augustine's Confessions. "I find in these examples nothing worthy of imitation. To the end that we may be true to our nature, we should not become false by copying and likening to the nature of another as do the actors and the reflections in the mirror ... We should, instead, seek that truth which is not self-contradictory and two-faced."

"For in the theatre, dens of iniquity though they may be, if a man is fond of a particular actor, and enjoys his art as a great or even as the very greatest good, he is fond of all who join with him in admiration of his favorite, not for their own sakes, but for the sake of him whom they admire in common; and the more fervent he is in his admiration, the more he works in every way he can to secure new admirers for him, and the more anxious he becomes to show him to others; and if he find any one comparatively indifferent, he does all he can to excite his interest by urging his favorite's merits: if, however, he meet with any one who opposes him, he is exceedingly displeased by such a man's contempt of his favorite, and strives in every way he can to remove it. Now, if this be so, what does it become us to do who live in the fellowship of the love of God, the enjoyment of whom is the true happiness of life...?"

The Church and the Middle Ages

Engraving depicting an early Chester mystery play

There is very little material that survives of antitheatrical prejudice in the Middle Ages, partially because the theater existed almost entirely out of the culture of the Church, a body that previously rebelled against its cause. Theater in the Middle Ages takes its subject matter from religion and seems to have been largely endorsed and only peripherally shunned.

A treatise of miraclis pleyinge

This anonymous text from a fourteenth-century sermon, generally agreed to be of Lollard inspiration, while a minority opinion, is one of the only surviving examples of antitheatrical prejudice in the Middle Ages. It is not clear if the anonymous text is referring to the performance of mystery plays on the streets or liturgical drama in the church or possibly the author is making no distinction. Barish traces the meanings of the preacher's prejudice to "the lifelike immediacy of the theater, which puts it in unwelcome competition with the everyday realm and with the doctrines espoused in schools and churches."

Due to a play's basic objective to please, the preacher finds their purpose to be suspect as Christ never laughed. If one laughs or cries at a play it is because of the "pathos of the story" and their expression of emotion is therefore useless in the eyes of God. To this preacher it is the playmaking itself that is to blame for their sinful nature. "It is the concerted, organized, professionalized nature of the enterprise that offends so deeply, the fact that it entails planning and teamwork and elaborate preparation, making it different from the kind of sin that is committed inadvertently, or in a fit of ungovernable passion."

Ben Jonson and Christian-Platonic-Stoic tradition

File:Ben Jonson by George Vertue 1730 (cropped).jpg

Ben Jonson by George Vertue 1730 (cropped)

Barish describes Ben Jonson's attitude towards his audience as ranging from "gingerly to stormy" and that playgoers merely attended the theater "in order to parade their fine clothes and gape at those of their neighbors--to make spectacles of themselves, in fact, and so compete with the play." Jonson's plays thus reject the Elizabethan theatricality that often featured exaggerated and grandiose pyrotechnics, ghost effects, and crane systems for lowering an actor to the stage deck. These things, said Jonson, offended "nature and truth after it's long bondage to false conventions." Jonson is probably writing of the expensive, exclusive spectacles known as court masques for which he was a primary writer. Clothing was an object of Jonson's prejudice as they leant themselves towards unpleasing mannerisms and an artificial triviality.

It isn't simply the mechanics that concern Jonson. "He works to make his dialogue less ornamental, more lifelike, more obedient to the twists and turns of the thinking mind, but at the same time he enlarges its role, making it to duty, it would seem, for the element of spectacle he has so strenuously downgraded."

It's also clear that while Jonson is a principal figure in Jacobean and Elizabethan era theater, his intentions toward production weren't always the priority. Jonson has his work collected into a Folio printing in 1616 in order to commit them to "a more lasting medium" than the stage will not allow. Thus, he elevates his work to a more respectable form, literature, while denying the stage.

Many of these beliefs can be attributed to Jonson's belonging to the Christian-Platonic-Stoic tradition "that finds value embodied in what is immutable and unchanging, and tends to dismiss as unreal whatever is past and passing and to come." His plays feature characters then that remain silent or static in the face of great obstacles or present characters that are foolish because of their embracing of a changing world.

Puritan England

The Puritans found great trouble with the theaters reputation as a vile thing encouraging pleasure and an institution where men mimicked women as is forbidden in Deuteronomy in the Bible. Deuteronomy states that "The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, nether shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are an abomination unto the Lord thy God." Of this Stephen Gosson writes, the human mind "is simple without mixture or composition, therefore those instructions that are given to the minde must bee simple without mingle mangle of fish & flesh, good & bad... where both are profred, the hereditarie corruption of our nature taketh the worst and leaveth the best." Ultimately, this led to the closure of the English theaters in 1642, when the monarchy was overthrown.

File:Wenceslas Hollar - Prynne cropped.jpg

Wenceslas Hollar - Prynne cropped

Prynne's Histriomastix, the Players Scourge, or Actors Tragedie

Written in 1633, William Prynne's Histriomastix is a tome of an encyclopedia, scourging many different types of theater in broad, repetitious, and fiery ways. The title page reads: "Histrio-mastix. The players scourge, or, actors tragædie, divided into two parts. Wherein it is largely evidenced, by divers arguments, by the concurring authorities and resolutions of sundry texts of Scripture, That popular stage-playes are sinfull, heathenish, lewde, ungodly spectacles, and most pernicious corruptions; condemned in all ages, as intolerable mischiefes to churches, to republickes, to the manners, mindes, and soules of men. And that the profession of play-poets, of stage-players; together with the penning, acting, and frequenting of stage-playes, are unlawfull, infamous and misbeseeming Christians. All pretences to the contrary are here likewise fully answered; and the unlawfulnes of acting, of beholding academicall enterludes, briefly discussed; besides sundry other particulars concerning dancing, dicing, health-drinking, &c. of which the table will informe you."

The outstanding objective of Prynne towards the theater is that it encourages pleasure and recreation over work, and increases sexual desire with its excitement and effeminacy. While a particularly acute attack, Histromastix is a common antitheatrical view that dominated many English disbelievers from around 1575 to the closure of the theaters in 1642.

Thomas Becon's The Displaying of the Popish Mass

Thomas Becon writes of the problems introduced to the church by theatrical reenactments with any kind of embellishments."By introducing ceremonial costume, ritual gesture, and symbolic decor, and by separating the clergy from the laity, the church has perverted a simple communal event into a portentous masquerade, a magic show designed to hoodwink the ignorant." Of a mass with too much pomp, a spectator plays a passive, entertained role in a production led by a kind of surrogate for the message of God.

Seventeenth-century France

Like Puritanism in England, Jansenism is the moral adversary to the theater in France that has a similar tone of vitriol and absolutism. However, "the debate in France proceeds on an altogether more analytical, more intellectually responsible plane. The antagonists attend more carefully to the business of argument and the rules of logic; they indulge less in digression and anecdote."

Jansenism

Jansenists denied the freedom of human will stating that "man can do nothing--could not so much as obey the ten commandments--without an express interposition of grace, and when grace came, its force was irresistible" and that pleasure is forbidden because it makes an addict of us. Pierre Nicole speaks on the moral objection not for concern for the makers of theater, the vice den of the theater space itself, or the disorder it is presumed to cause, but rather the content that he finds "intrinsically corrupting." By an actor drawing up such base actions as lust, hate, greed, vengeance, and despair he must draw upon something immoral in his own soul not worth dwelling on. Even with positive emotions, they are still lies performed by hypocrites. The concern is a psychological one, for by experiencing these things, the actor must stir up the emotions in himself and the audience. Christian thought viewed these heightened, temporal emotions as something needing to swelled and denied. Therefore, both the actor and audience should feel shameful for its collective participation.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld's Reflexions diverses

Published in 1731, Francois de La Rochefoucauld writes of innate manners we are all born with and "when we copy others, we forsake what is authentic to us and sacrifice our own strong points for alien ones that may not suit us at all." By imitating others, including the good, all things are reduced to ideas and caricatures of themselves and even with the intent of betterment, it leads directly to confusion. Mimesis must, therefore, be abandoned entirely.

Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (painted portrait)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau holds the primary belief that all men are created good and that it is society that attempts to corrupt. Luxurious things are primarily to blame for these moral corruptions and, as stated in his Discourse on the Arts, Discourse, On the Origins of Inequality and Letter to d'Alembert, the theater is central to this downfall. Rousseau argues for a nobler, simpler life free of the "perpetual charade of illusion, created by self-interest and self-love."

Furthermore, Rousseau dismisses any relevance of great classical works, denouncing Sophocles by saying the plays have no relevance over us and that they affects us much less than we have previously believed. Instead of looking at our lives as they exist, we look to others in order to "transport ourselves beyond ourselves" and that is corrupting our inherent goodness provided at birth.

The use of women in theater is disturbing for Rosseau as they especially are designed by nature for modest roles not becoming of an actress. "The new society is not in fact too be encouraged to evolve its own morality but to revert to an earlier one, to the paradisal time when men were hardy and virtuous, women housebound and obedient, young girls chaste and innocent. In such a reversion, the theater--with all it symbolizes of the hatefulness of society, its hypocrisies, its rancid politeness, its heartless masqueradings--has no place at all."

Eighteenth century

Early America

In 1778, just two years after declaring the United States as a nation, a law was passed to abolish theater, gambling, horse racing, and cockfighting—all on the grounds of their sinful nature. This pushes theatrical practices into American universities where it is also met with hostility, particularly from that of Timothy Dwight IV of Yale University and John Witherspoon of Princeton College. The latter, with his work Serious Inquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Stage outlines similar arguments to his predecessors with the addition of the accusation that theater is too truthful to life and is therefore considered an improper method of instruction. "Now are not the great majority of characters in real life bad? Must not the greatest part of those represented on the stage be bad? And therefore, must not the strong impression which they make upon the spectators be hurtful in the same proportion?" he writes.

William Wilberforce

From A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians... Contrasted with Real Christianity (1797): "For Wilberforce the theater is a place haunted by debauchees bent on gratifying their appetites, from which modesty and regularity have retreated, 'while riots and lewdness' are invited to the spot' where God's name is profaned, and the only lessons to be learned are those Christians should shun like the pains of hell."

Nineteenth century

"From our present point of vantage in time, nineteenth-century attacks on theater frequently have the air of a psychomachia: the artistic conscience, struggling against the grossness of the physical stage, striving to free itself from the despotism of the actors, resembles the spirit warring against the flesh, the soul wrestling with the body, or the virtues launching their assault on the vices. But the persistence of the struggle seems to suggest that it is more than a temporary skirmish: it reflects an abiding tension in our natures as social beings."

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (1814)

An odd source for anti-theatricalism can been seen in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park with the disapproval of Sir Thomas Bertram for his children's amateur play productions that he vehemently argues against with statements such as "unsafe amusements" and "noisy pleasures" that will "offend his ideas of decorum."

Becky Sharp in William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair

In Vanity Fair, Sharp, an exceptionally gifted ingenue for her skills with mimicry is looked upon with much suspicion. Her talents lend themselves to "a calculated deceptiveness" and "systematic concealment of her true intentions" that is unbecoming of any British woman.

Encyclopedie théologique (1847)

"The excommunication pronounced against comedians, actors, actresses tragic or comic, is of the greatest and most respectable antiquity... it forms part of the general discipline of the French Church... This Church allows them neither the sacraments nor burial; it refuses them its suffrages and its prayers, not only as infamous persons and public sinners, but as excommunicated persons... One must deal with the comedians as with public sinners, remove them from participation with holy things while they belong to the theater, admit when they leave it."

Auguste Comte and positivism

Utopian writer Comte does not allow the theater in his idealist society. It is a "concession to our weakness, a symptom of our irrationality, a kind of placebo of the spirit with which the good society will be able to dispense" and also a kind of spilt religion, "something to be replaced by a rational apparatus of public worship."

Romanticism closet drama, and Charles Lamb

Romanticism veers from the course of thought set by Plato that plays are about action preferring instead to look inward for an "absolute sincerity which speaks directly from the soul, a pure expressiveness that knows nothing of the presence of others." For writers such as Charles Lamb, this leads to verbose claims that even writers as theater-worthy as Shakespeare have no place onstage, for the fault of the theater is a focus on the surface of things that crushes the delicacy of the written word in favor of "harsh lights, violent gestures, and braying voices." In his essay "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation", he states that "all those delicacies which are so delightful in the reading...are sullied and turned from their very nature."

This kind of thinking contributes to the creation of closet drama that can be seen as "a refusal to bow to the realities of theaters and actors, in the name of a freedom which is self-pampering and illusory."

Further reading

• Davidson, C. (January 1997). The Medieval Stage and the Antitheatrical Prejudice. Parergon. Vol. 14, No. 2: 1-14.
• Dennis, N. (March 2008). The Illegitimate Theater. [Review of Against Theatre: Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage]. Theatre Journal. Vol. 60, No. 1: 168-9.
• Hawkes, D. (1999). Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in the Antitheatrical Controversy. SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900. Vol. 39, No. 2: 255-73.
• Stern, R. F. (1998). Moving Parts and Speaking Parts: Situating Victorian Antitheatricality. ELH. Vol. 65, No. 2: 423-49.
• Williams, K. (Fall 2001). Anti-theatricality and the Limits of Naturalism. Modern Drama. Vol. 44, No. 3: 284-99.