The Modern Stage of Capitalism: The Drama of Markets and Money (1870-1930)

Abstract

The Modern Stage of Capitalism tells the story of why and how modern drama captured the spirit of capitalism in all its contradictions. Although the bourgeois novel has long been considered the definitive genre of capital, at the end of the nineteenth century, Western theatre was in the perfect position to explore the ambiguous impact of capitalist culture. It was at the zenith of the economic hierarchy of the arts and at the nadir of the aesthetic hierarchy. Even with the serious drama of the day, modern theatre could not entirely purge itself of the tarnish of commerce. This enmeshment in commerce and the market economy generated a wealth of formal innovations and a wide range of responses to capitalist culture that went beyond moral outrage. Dramatists from Ibsen and Shaw to Brecht and O’Neill were neither apologists for, nor mere detractors of capitalism; they explored the bonds and clashes between religious values and secular economic virtues, drawing parallels between the institution of theatre and the brave new world of capitalist modernity. Besides dramatic texts, this interdisciplinary project relies on archival research of theatre productions, socio-economic theories that the playwrights responded to (Smith, Marx, Weber, Morris, Taylor), and critical theory that examines the relationship between economics and literary studies (Bourdieu, Jameson, Moretti). The present study takes modern theatre as a case study to show that products of culture engage with capitalism in a network of both promotional and antagonistic relations. The modern stage became a testing ground for the ideas of capitalist culture including the work ethic, competition, and the accumulation of capital.