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Our head is stuffed full of recollections on the subject of the Drama, some of older, some of later date, but all treasured up with more or less fondness; we, in short, love it, and what we love, we can talk of for ever. . . But, as happens in some of these instances, we love it best at a distance. We like to be an hundred miles off from the Acted Drama in London, and to get a friend (who may be depended on) to give an account of it for us; which we read, at our leisure, under the shade of a clump of lime-trees. (18: 343-4)
His words here reflect the extraordinary transformation of the status of the theater in the Romantic period. Both drama journalism and theatrical performance assumed unprecedented importance in early nineteenth century Britain. From being a sphere tainted by the frequent suggestion of immorality, the stage became more and more an object of general fascination for those in all walks of life. And with that general fascination came a theorizing of the role of the theater in public life which went far beyond the issue of morality. The theater, for Hazlitt, is a crucial component of the national culture because it supplies a common ground, a shared set of experiences, which can foster discussion amongst all subjects. The newspaper reviewer, or someone "who may be depended on," is then a vital mediator in the constitution of an imaginary public sphere connecting people in the farthest flung corners of the nation. The Examiner of January 5, 1817 provides an ideal-typical account of this process in which the theater functions as a civilizing agent impelling people towards "polite conversation":
The merits of a new play, or of a new actor, are always among the first topics of polite conversation. One way in which public exhibitions contribute to refine and humanise mankind, is by supplying them with ideas and subjects of conversation and interest in common. The progress of civilization is in proportion to the number of common-places in society. For instance, if we meet with a stranger at an inn or in a stage-coach, who knows nothing but his own affairs - his shop, his customers, his farm, his pigs, his poultry - we can carry on no conversation with him on these local and personal matters: the only way is to let him have all the talk to himself. But if he has fortunately ever seen Mr. Liston act, this is an immediate topic of mutual conversation, and we agree together the rest of the evening in discussing the merits of that inimitable actor, with the same satisfaction as in talking over the affairs of the most intimate friend. (Archer and Lowe 135)
Civilization advances in strict accord with the number of "common-places" available to the populace. The theater itself functions as one such "common-place," a topic about which anyone may converse with anyone at any time. The only condition for entry into this public sphere is a passing knowledge of Mr. Liston's acting. But the reference to "common-places," places which exist in opposition to the "local and personal," should alert us to the fact that "polite conversation" carries all before it, flattens all distinctions arising from an individual's geographical location, class position, or form of labor. The urban Hazlitt knows nothing and wants to know nothing about the rural stranger's shop, farm, or customers. For him the only real "common-place" is the one deriving from the metropolitan center, the one deriving from the acknowledged seat of civilization. There is no doubt here that civilization, in the form of discussion on a subject about which the participants are presumed to have equal knowledge, radiates outwards from the city to the country, from the center to the periphery.
The chief aim of Hazlitt's writing on the theater is thus the discursive construction of a space where "polite conversation" can occur among the nation's various individuals. This "polite conversation" was intended to stand in marked contrast to the "petulant cockneyism and vulgar slang" Hazlitt witnessed in his occasional visits to London's minor theaters. He tried to transform the facile and obsequious "puffing" of theater journalism by importing into it the well-mannered language of aesthetic criticism. By this means he sought to exonerate performances from the charge of being mere whimsical diversions, and to establish them as genuine artistic achievements. But the discursive construction of the theater as a space for polite discussion also entailed the creation of a tradition of British acting, a star system of the past and present, which allowed performances to be discussed within a framework recognized by all. This invention of a tradition was the indispensable condition for any conversation about the theater because it bound discussants not to a rigid and inflexible evaluative hierarchy, but to a certain logic which permitted disagreement within pre-established parameters. Individuals may dispute the inclusion of a particular actor in the tradition but they never doubt the existence of the tradition, which means in practice that even their disputes have the effect of binding them to one another. According to Raymond Williams, tradition, or rather the belief in tradition, generally works in tandem with the dominant hegemony, legitimizing its rule (Williams 115-20). But in the case of an emergent tradition this does not always happen, especially when, as here, the tradition is constructed as a means of mobilizing a nationalist sentiment at variance with the ideology of the ruling fraction. Thus, Hazlitt's dramatic reviewing is especially interesting because of the way in which it participates in a general heightening of national consciousness in this period through its potent mixture of an explicitly English tradition with the liberal promise of the potential for free discussion.
However, if the purpose of Hazlitt's theater writing was the discursive construction of an ideal public sphere with the stage as its locus, the net effect was something quite different. Through the aesthetic redefinition of plays and play-going, and by making the theater an object of national interest, Hazlitt was part of the transformation of a leisure pursuit into an activity which was meant to be nothing other than antithetical to leisure. To consider a performed play as an art form meant, to Hazlitt's way of thinking, to require certain norms of behavior in an audience, norms which were certainly not taken for granted by a theater-going population familiar with such unruly outbursts as the protracted O. P. Riots in Covent Garden in 1809. As gradually lowering prices allowed a greater cross-section of the community to attend plays in the latter part of the eighteenth century, as theater-going came increasingly to be seen as an activity which could not be moralized out of existence, so standards of behavior became a pressing issue. Hazlitt's theater writing can thus most fruitfully be viewed within the general context of the "bourgeoisification" of the stage in the nineteenth century. By beginning, or building upon, the construction of dichotomies between legitimate and illegitimate theater, between "art" and mere "leisure," between proper and improper audience behavior, Hazlitt's drama criticism participated in the remaking of a sector of the consumer economy precisely by appealing to a relatively learned class, the middle-class, in terms which were explicitly antithetical to conventional consumer taste. Thus, theater was a space not of pleasurable escapism but of aesthetic refinement, and this required vigorous arguments against either diffident or unruly audiences, and against spectators who saw the principal purpose of the theater as the possibility of displaying themselves to the greatest effect. Yet in spite of fulminating against the condescending elitism of certain fashion-conscious audiences, especially aristocratic opera audiences, Hazlitt was instrumental in making theater-going a leisure pursuit which increasingly conferred social status on spectators, especially spectators who exhibited appropriate behavior and a certain kind of critical discernment.
Eighteenth century theater reviewers rated actors and performances according to fairly inflexible standards of taste. They considered, for instance, the musicality of an actor's voice, the expressiveness of a face, the gracefulness of a deportment, according to an already established, though largely unexpressed, scale. This connoisseurial disposition meant that the actor was viewed as no more than a fairly anonymous part of the performance, which was itself no more than a purchased commodity. In contrast, Hazlitt's theater reviewing supplies an elaborate language drawn from the emerging Romantic theory of art to explain the experience of viewing stage productions, an experience clearly meant to transcend the view, implied by connoisseurship, of theater as mere commodity. His reminiscences on the occasion of John Kemble's death in 1817 provide a good example of the way in which Hazlitt adopted the language of contemporary aesthetic theory. Kemble's manner "had always something dry, hard, and pedantic in it" whereas his rival Edmund Kean was an actor whose "life and spirit," with "dazzling rapidity of motion," "fill[ed] the stage, and burn[ed] in every part of it" (Archer and Lowe 128). But this stiff formality only meant in the end that Kemble was more suited to some parts than others, parts which called for intensity, but an intensity of sentiment rather than passion:
If [Kemble] had not the unexpected bursts of nature and genius he had all the regularity of art; if he did not display the tumult and conflict of opposite passions in the soul, he gave the deepest and most permanent interest to the uninterrupted progress of individual feeling; and in embodying a high idea of certain characters, which belong rather to sentiment than passion, to energy of will, than to loftiness or to originality of imagination, he was the most excellent actor of his time. (Archer and Lowe 129-30)
The notion that an actor might be more suitable for one part than another was already a departure from eighteenth century drama criticism. But Hazlitt goes further. As the unmentioned possessor of all the qualities in which Kemble is deficient, Edmund Kean displays "unexpected bursts of nature and genius," "the tumult and conflict of opposite passions in the soul," and an "originality of imagination." He is the Romantic genius next to Kemble's mere mortal. However, Hazlitt even credits Kean with the capacity to provide a unique interpretation of a part, an interpretation hitherto unknown to any critic. This may seem a minor point when one thinks of the hyperbole bestowed upon actors' efforts these days, but Hazlitt's sentiments are striking when one considers the connoisseurial inclinations of most drama reviewing of the time. To say that Kean had produced a "new reading" (his italics) of Hamlet is to go beyond the realization that there can be more than one style of acting; it is to propose that a single character may be subject to various interpretations (Archer and Lowe 13). Nothing could be further from the inflexible standards of taste implicit in eighteenth century theater criticism.
The importance Hazlitt attached to the "sympathy" of an actor's portrayal of a character was another departure from eighteenth century theatre criticism. The actor, like great artists such as Shakespeare, should ideally be able to "[throw] his imagination out of himself, and [make] every word appear to proceed from the very mouth of the person whose name it bears" (Archer and Lowe 9): "Our highest conception of an actor is, that he shall assume the character once for all, and be it throughout, and trust to this conscious sympathy for the effect produced" (Archer and Lowe 8-9). Once again referring to Edmund Kean, Hazlitt concedes that even he fails in the attempt "entirely to forget himself, to be identified with the character." But he leaves open the possibility that an actor may achieve such a distinction. Hazlitt's point is thus that acting should be judged in the same terms, and using the same terminology, as already established art forms such as poetry and painting. Indeed, it may even be understood to possess certain advantages over those forms:
[W]hereas in the other arts of painting and poetry, the standard works of genius, being permanent and accumulating, for awhile provoke emulation, but, in the end, overlay future efforts, and transmit only their defects to those that come after; the exertions of the greatest actor die with him, leaving to his successors only the admiration of his name, and the aspiration after imaginary excellence . . . . (Archer and Lowe 137-8)
Unlike "books and pictures," theatrical performances do not "remain like fixtures in the public mind;" they leave behind no inhibiting trace of their genius. Acting is more an art resembling nature than one resembling "the productions of the human intellect," but it is an art nonetheless. Only half a century earlier Goldsmith had described plays as nothing more than "our lightest pleasures," but Hazlitt's drama reviews elevate performance to the status of genuine art by borrowing from the Romantic critical vocabulary of sympathy, imagination, and genius.
But in arguing for the recognition of performance as art, Hazlitt was forced to take into account the contrary impulse to the desire for a sympathetic, once-in-a-lifetime, depiction of character: the allure of the star actor. The use of the word "star" to denote a celebrity became current in the early nineteenth century, at the same time that a rudimentary star system in the theater began to take root. To Hazlitt, stardom altered an audience's expectations of a play, and this was particularly problematic when the play was Shakespearean. In 1815, he argued that, though they prefer performing Shakespeare because "he enables them to show themselves off," actors almost never do justice to the characters they attempt to portray. The result is that the jaundiced spectator attends productions of Shakespeare only for the purpose of viewing the star actor:
[I]n going to see the plays of Shakespeare, it would be ridiculous to suppose that anyone ever went to see Hamlet or Othello represented by Kean or Kemble; we go to see Kean or Kemble in Hamlet or Othello. (Archer and Lowe 51)
At this point in time, long before he made explicit reference to the problem of stars on the English stage, Hazlitt was less vexed by the celebrity status of certain actors but was more aware of the precise effects of their increased popularity. If one attended productions of Hamlet and Othello purely in order to witness the performance of Kean or Kemble, then the possibility that an actor could "forget himself" in the portrayal of a character seemed remote. Stars were thus hardly conducive to a theater of sympathetic depictions; nor were they likely to engender "new reading[s]," Kean's rare achievements notwithstanding.
Yet Hazlitt was also responsible for the invention of a tradition of British acting which entailed the regular trumpeting of the stars of past and present as a way of reinforcing in the reader/spectator a sense of common heritage. Indeed, if one aspect of the promotion of performance as art involves the denial that stardom best serves the interests of the theater, another requires the transformation of actors into stars in order to validate the claim that the stage can serve as a common topic of discussion for people all over the nation. For instance, in 1817, Hazlitt maintained that there was "no class of society whom so many persons regard with affection as actors": "We greet them on the stage; we like to meet them in the streets; they almost always recall to us pleasant associations; and we feel our gratitude excited, without the uneasiness of a sense of obligation" (Archer and Lowe 136). Meeting star performers on the streets, we feel no uneasy social obligation, no necessity to be deferential, even though we admire their talents. Hazlitt defines the attraction of stars as a potent combination of the everyday and the extraordinary, a combination which makes them ideal agents through which to focus public fascination in such a way as to induce discussion.
"Polite conversation" on the subject of the stage and its stars provides an alternative to the national predilection for abstraction. In 1820, Hazlitt lamented the lack of any native talent in "the more legitimate and higher productions of the modern drama" (18: 304). The French Revolution has turned the English into "a nation of politicians and newsmongers" with interests the very opposite of those required for the development of dramatic art:
[O]ur inquiries in the streets are no less than after the health of Europe; and in men's faces, we may see strange matters written, - the rise of stocks, the loss of battles, the fall of kingdoms, and the death of kings. The Muse, meanwhile, droops in bye-corners of the mind, and is forced to take up with the refuse of our thoughts. Our attention has been turned, by the current of events, to the general nature of men and things; and we cannot call it heartily back to individual caprices, or head-strong passions, which are the nerves and sinews of Comedy and Tragedy. (18: 304)
"We are become public creatures," says Hazlitt, people who "sit with the newspaper, and a pair of compasses in our hand, to measure out provinces, and to dispose of thrones . . ." (18: 304). The silence is deafening; we may look in men's faces and see strange matters written, but we are unlikely to hear from those men. Hazlitt sees participation in politics as no more than vicarious, and this has resulted in a peculiarly English malaise, a general state of abstraction: "If a bias to abstraction is evidently, then, the reigning spirit of the age, dramatic poetry must be allowed to be most irreconcileable with this spirit; it is essentially individual and concrete, both in form and in power" (18: 305). Great dramatic poetry will never emerge in an age when the "bias to abstraction" is so widespread because such abstraction is a departure from concrete power struggles, a repression of conflict in favor of airy hypothesizing. Enjoyment of abstraction evidently entails willful avoidance of one's own best interests: "We are not so solicitous after our own success as the success of a cause. Our thoughts, feelings, distresses, are about what no way concerns us . . ." (18: 304-5). Though we may seem to have become "public creatures" because of our pre-eminent concern with politics, there has not emerged in society a public sphere conducive to inclusive political discussion among all subjects: we like to talk about nations and abstract principles, but we do so, according to Hazlitt, in a public vacuum. Politics has become divorced from our daily existence as individuals. Discussion of dramatic performance thus springs forth as a timely antidote to the national fascination with abstraction. Instead of the dispersal of interests implicit in Hazlitt's definition of abstraction, "polite conversation" about the theater and its tradition of stars unifies the English public around a concrete topic, especially in urban centers:
The stage at once gives a body to our thoughts, and refinement and expansion to our sensible impressions. It has not the pride and remoteness of abstract science: it has not the petty egotism of vulgar life. It is particularly wanted in great cities (where it of course flourishes most) to take off from the dissatisfaction and ennui, that creep over our own pursuits from the indifference or contempt thrown upon them by others; and at the same time to reconcile our numberless discordant incommensurable feelings and interests together, by giving us an immediate and common topic to engage our attention, and to rally us round the standard of our common humanity. (18: 273)
As an alternative to the romantic ennui of modern city life, Hazlitt offers public discussion of the stage as a means of reconnecting with one's fellows. It is important to remember that this is not an apolitical alternative. "Polite conversation" may seem itself a kind of transcendence in which the messy political world is left behind in favor of the ideal realm of the theater. However, by promoting performance as art in the interests of facilitating public discussion, Hazlitt had a very specific political goal in mind: the production of a liberal national consciousness and sense of unity.
Constructing a tradition in the quintessential medium for national representation - the newspaper - had profound hegemonic effects. Hazlitt's theater criticism in the early nineteenth century, with its invocation of an English acting tradition, its regular flow of information about the latest performances, and its liberal proposal of "polite conversation" as a means of unifying the nation, is an important feature of this "vivid figure of the historically-clocked, imagined community," as Benedict Anderson describes the newspaper (Anderson 39). But it would be a mistake to assume that, just because the construction of a tradition, especially an explicitly nationalist tradition, normally serves to legitimize hegemony, Hazlitt's aims in this respect were reactionary. In fact, as Linda Colley argues, national consciousness in early nineteenth century Europe was not a trump card played by a cynically exploitative state, but a volatile and liberal ideology "tending towards greater civic exertion and wider civic rights" (Colley 104). The invocation of nationalism can therefore be a means of promoting a particular "form of sectional politics" in opposition to the elite fraction:
[T]he state's neglect of and hostility to nationalism in Britain allowed investing in the nation to be seen not just as a simple act of loyalist conformity, but also as a form of sectional politics . . . [S]ome of the most orthodox-seeming movements and trends in this period were supported by social groups mainly preoccupied with advancing and legitimizing their own socio-political status. (Colley 109)
The particular form of Hazlitt's "sectional politics," especially his cultural politics, is sometimes difficult to ascertain. But in the case of the theater, he generally promotes a liberal national consciousness in opposition to both aristocratic elitism and lower class vulgarity. "Our National Theaters," published in 1829, is a complaint against the exclusionary practices of certain English theaters and opera-houses. An effect of our preoccupation with the "idea of property," the erection of private boxes and stalls shielding the privileged from view results in the imposition of a hierarchy of distinction in the theater. Whereas previously the fortunate play-goer could be seated next to "a prince or minister of state," now the gentry are partitioned off and thus the open boxes are thrown into a "certain disrepute" because they contain only "a sort of second city-company" (Cook 155). Hazlitt's response to this intrusion of class elitism in the egalitarian realm of the theater is to remind readers of the ideally inclusive, unifying effects of this institution. Remembering that in recent days an attempt had been made "to shut out improper people from the theater," he points out that, whether it is a "chimney-sweeper" on his once a year visit or a young lady in the country dreaming of Charles Kemble, the stage functions as an exemplary site for national unity, and therefore should be protected from any wrong-headed encroachments by people jealous of their own privileges:
The stage is become part of the vital existence of this civilized country; and our circulation cannot go on well without it. . . . Our recollections of the state, of the masterpieces of wit and pathos that support it, of the proud and happy names that adorn it . . . what are they but recollections of ourselves, of our liveliest pleasures, of our youthful hopes, 'dear as the ruddy drops that visit the sad heart'? (Cook 156)
Appeals to the national spirit and the tradition of performance which forms a part of it thus oppose the obtrusive segregation of the elite fraction and the hierarchy of distinction emerging in the theater. But Hazlitt is not a radical in matters of the stage. He does not wish that the privileged would simply disappear from the audience. Their presence, and the possibility of proximity to them which existed under the previous state of affairs, is extremely important because Hazlitt's entire faith in the stage is based on its potential inclusiveness. Indeed, his writing on the theater, whether it concerns the legitimation of performance as art, the promotion of the stage as a topic of public discussion, or the construction of an English acting tradition, is very largely an attempt to produce a cultured, liberal, but non-exclusionary, audience, one which transcends class boundaries but at the same time adheres to certain norms of behavior.
In his remarks on audience conduct, Hazlitt's main concern is the need for a system of social pressure in the theater as an alternative to brute force. He always argues for the silent appreciation of a play, at least while one is in the playhouse, and for the rigorous exclusion of all practices unsuitable to the august station of the stage, practices which were very much in evidence in 1820, on the occasion of a visit to the minor theaters:
Instead of the rude, naked, undisguised expression of curiosity and wonder, of overflowing vanity and unbridled egotism, there was nothing but an exhibition of the most petulant cockneyism and vulgar slang. . . . The genius of St. George's Fields prevailed, and you felt yourself in a bridewell, or a brothel, amidst Jew-boys, pickpockets, prostitutes, and mountebanks, instead of being in the precincts of Mount Parnassus, or in the company of the Muses. The object was not to admire or to excel, but to vilify and degrade every thing. The audience did not hiss the actors . . . but they laughed, hooted at, nick-named, pelted them with oranges and witticisms, to show their unruly contempt for them and their art. . . . (18: 297)
But though Hazlitt finds the behavior at the Cobourg disagreeable he does not allow this to prejudice his opinion of the minor theaters in general. In fact, he proposes elsewhere that the poor manners of the lower-class audience derives from the improper precedent set by their social superiors. In observing that English opera-goers lack all the refinement and aesthetic understanding so common in their continental brethren, he asks, "Are the English an essentially vulgar people or not?" (18: 397). The response is unequivocal: to whatever extent ordinary people are vulgar, the responsibility can be squarely placed upon "the most vulgar fashionable audience in Europe," namely, the English opera audience, who patronize the theater only for the social capital they may thereby accrue:
[The men in the pit] are solely occupied in thinking how they themselves look, whether their coat is of the right cut, their cravat properly tied, and whether their next neighbour is good enough for them to speak to. Each opera-beau ought to have a glass-case over him to keep him within a certain precise sphere of dandy repulsiveness and self-importance. (18: 397)
In contrast to the "low" audience in the minor theaters, or even the Covent Garden audience, English opera-goers exercise a certain fastidious restraint when viewing productions. They carefully avoid touching each other and seem to say very little. But, for Hazlitt, this mode of spectating is flawed because, though it has the outward trappings of decorum, there is no evidence of aesthetic responsiveness. The main aim "is not to seem to take an interest" in the production (18:397). Through their silence this fashionable audience observes the outward form of proper opera-house behavior, but in their evident disdain for punctilious observation they betray their want of aesthetic refinement.
In the theater, such audiences display a similar contempt for the performance, but, because play-going carries little of the social esteem attached to opera-going, the fashionable spectator feels even less compulsion to conform to the dictates of good-manners, and this amounts to an ethical failing: "[W]e think good-manners is one part of ethics, and we do wish en passant that our fine gentlemen at the play would not loll on their seats, whistle, and thrust their sticks nearly in your face to show their superiority to the vulgar . . . ." (18: 379). Polite behavior is an aspect of ethical behavior, and both "low" and aristocratic audiences have a tendency to neglect ethical standards when they attend plays. However, Hazlitt vigorously opposes the recourse to brutality preferred by some theater managers as a means of policing unruly crowds. Though he complains of the opera audience's excessive concern with fashionable appearance and haughty elitism, he finally concedes that the most effective way of maintaining order in the theater and inducing reverence for the art of performance is through a system of distinction making indecorous behavior the subject of severe social sanction. The prototype for such a system can be found in France:
In France . . . decorum pervades every part of the audience, because everything is referred to manners and opinion - with us, where there is always an eye to the beadle and the treadmill, nothing but an appeal to brute force tames the natural rudeness of our characters . . . .We always aim to arrive at the agreeable through the disagreeable: the other is the right way - to banish the disagreeable by the sense of the contrary. (20: 286)
Hazlitt does not propose a system of distinction in which actual barriers are erected to isolate the genteel from the rest of the theater audience. Neither does he support the outward display of good manners where no attempt is made at aesthetic understanding or critical discernment (though it is hard to imagine how these qualities could be made manifest without some type of outward display). However, a system of social approbation and censure has the advantage of enforcing proper behavior without such disagreeable consequences as excessive brutality or fashionable superficiality. If such a system has as its organizing principle the necessity to display aesthetic refinement in the realm of "polite conversation," then, to Hazlitt, it serves a valuable purpose in simultaneously instilling a proper reverence for performance as art and in increasing the value of the theater as a cultural practice.
In all his pronouncements about theater etiquette, Hazlitt's undeclared aim is to produce the largest, most well-behaved, and class-blind audience for legitimate, "artistic" drama. This results in the significant devaluing of most other theatrical genres, such as pantomime, which he enjoys as no more than a diversion. Of course, such a hierarchy of genres preceded Hazlitt but he cemented its distinctions through a potent mixture of aesthetic revaluation, appeals to national sentiment implicit in the claim that the finest English actors performed the most exalted works, and the promotion of standards of audience behavior. What this amounts to, with regard to the theater, is the emergence of a split between "art" and "leisure" in which only certain kinds of performance are dignified with the former title and in which the refined appreciation of those kinds of performance functions as a social investment for the spectator.
Though his essay is concerned with the social life of things rather than with the social meaning of leisure, Arjun Appadurai's reconsideration of the nature of commodity exchange supplies some illuminating insights into the necessary regulation of taste in modern consumer societies, insights which have some bearing on the work of Hazlitt. Modern capitalism requires a "fashion system" in which "what is restricted and controlled is taste in an ever-changing universe of commodities, with the illusion of complete interchangeability and unrestricted access" (Appadurai 25). Thus, though all societies have a demand for luxury goods, "only in Europe after 1800" are such goods regulated by the "free" play of the marketplace, or rather by fashion, which is defined as a "specialized knowledge . . . prerequisite for [the] 'appropriate' consumption" of luxury goods (Appadurai 38). Modern consumer societies are hence also the site of a transformation of the governing principle of valuation as regards luxury goods. Instead of a preeminent concern with the exclusivity of an object, modern consumers value its authenticity (Appadurai 44). The change in the meaning of the "copy" - from being an object which seeks to bask in a little of the glory of the original, into something which underhandedly tries to displace the original by itself becoming the "genuine" object - suggests the validity of the argument that authenticity is now the defining factor in valuation (Appadurai 45). What this means is that "art" only becomes "art in the modern sense" via the creation of criteria of authenticity which restrict the extent of "genuine" art. In this respect, luxury goods and elite leisure pursuits such as theater-going are not so very different. The luxury is "essentially a sign in a system of signs of status," and, most importantly, that system must be restricted by the dictates of fashion. Similarly, play-going and appropriate kinds of behavior in the playhouse, at least as Hazlitt attempts to redefine them, signify refinement and distinction, but only to the extent that the field of legitimate dramatic production has been restricted in advance by a wide-ranging discourse on what properly constitutes art in the theater. This is the significance, and irony, of Hazlitt's drama reviewing: in attempting to legitimize performance as an art form, to make the theater an inclusive institution, and to mobilize national sentiment as a prelude to unity through "polite conversation," he succeeded only in laying the ground rules for a theater of fragmented audiences and elitist distinctions.
Appadurai, Arjun. "Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value." The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Ed. Arjun Appadurai. 1986. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.
Colley, Linda. "Whose Nation? Class and National Consciousness in Britain 1750-1830." Past and Present 113 (1986): 97-117.
Hazlitt, William. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt. Ed. P. P. Howe. 21 vols. New York: AMS Press, 1967.
- - - . Selected Writings. Ed. and intro. Jon Cook. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991.
- - - . Hazlitt on Theatre. Eds. William Archer and Robert Lowe. Intro. William Archer. New York: Hill and Wang, 1895.
Kruger, Loren. The National Stage: Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and America. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.
Moody, Jane. "Writing for the Metropolis: Illegitimate Performances of Shakespeare in Early Nineteenth Century London." Shakespeare Survey 47 (1994): 61-69.
West, Shearer. The Image of the Actor: Verbal and Visual Representation in the Age of Garrick and Kemble. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. 1977. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986.