The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 14.0489  Friday, 14 March 2003

From:           Sean Lawrence <
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Date:           Thursday, 13 Mar 2003 12:44:02 -0400
Subject: 14.0474 Re: Shaw on Actors' Accents
Comment:        Re: SHK 14.0474 Re: Shaw on Actors' Accents

David Evett notes that

>Doing *King Lear* for American audiences in upper-class British accents
>is reassuring: it confirms the expectation that the production is a
>piece of High Culture, to be uncritically admired as such, and certainly
>not to be connected in any immediate way with the actual lives of the
>members of the audience.

I'm not sure that this is necessarily true.  After all, it is high
culture which attracts criticism and critical interest, whereas the
westerns to which David also alludes tend to be most easily dismissed as
products of a genre.  Markers of high culture might be seen as a message
that what follows has importance, and that the audience should therefore
pay attention.

Yours,
Sean.

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