Aesthetic Tastes in Shakespeare

Shakespeare plays, like any other type of commodity, rely on the economic principles of supply and demand.  However, discussing the supply and demand of theater just isn't as easy as discussing the supply and demand of milk, corn, rice, or some other agricultural product.  While these products might be considered necessities, theater is entertainment or luxury--which means that it's driven by the more subjective element of taste.  In this post, I'm going to take a closer look at taste, and how it benefited the Shakespeare product.  I'll rely on the help of the book Marketing the Bard, by Don-John Dugas, which I referred to in my last post.


First, I wanted to share the economic basis for taste, which is a theory suggested by Pierre Bourdieu.  I'll be interpreting his theory the way I understand it, with the help of Dugas.  Bourdieu claims that their are two participants in the economy: producers and consumers.  If there are a large number of competing producers, each producer is required to be more innovative.  (A great example might be the emergence of the tablet market, started by Apple and becoming increasingly more innovative as new competitors enter.)  The consumers also compete, which results in creativity on the part of the consumers.  As Bourdieu says, "Without ever seeking to do so, [producers] constantly meet the demand for rare goods and practices made by the [consumers], and these meetings shape taste at any given historical moment."  Taste ends up depending entirely on the state of the system at the time the products are made.

Now, to Shakespeare. Dugas argues that part of what made Shakespeare great was the emerging tastes of the 1700s.  Shakespeare's plays had already been around for a while, but they were adapted in the late 17th century and appealed to a large group of people. Dugas points out three main elements of the 17th century tastes:

1. Audiences wanted a social experience. Going to a theater was "seeing who was in the playhouse and who was not, chatting with one's neighbors, picking up a whore, an perhaps paying attention to a bit of the play while waiting for the dancers."
2. Audiences wanted novelty and familiarity.  They wanted to see stories or plots that they recognized, because with so many other social distractions, they didn't want to have to pay too much attention.
3. Audiences wanted to see particular actors, not particular writers.  A simple point that makes complete sense in light of the movie industry today.  People recognized the names of individual actors but rarely knew the names of the playwrights.

The last thing I wanted to do with this post was mention one trend that came to mind as I was researching for this post.  Dugas explains that tastes in the 1700s were either "noble" or "vulgar," so the general population would trend in response to this evaluation.  If the critics determined that something was noble, the general population would then know that it was worthy of interest and would trend upward.  The system of high culture filtering down to low culture made me think of the modern fashion industry, which I understand vaguely thanks to my wife's addiction to Project Runway.  I think it's interesting that tastes formed from the top down in the time of Shakespeare, and they occur similarly in the fashion industry today.