Theatre Audiences

Abstract

Romantic theatrical audiences were generally perceived by dramatists and critics of the period as being crude and simple‐minded, but while it is true that the demands of audiences often hindered dramatic experimentation, such generalizations oversimplify the relationship between dramatists, performers and producers and the theatre‐going public in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While audiences did tend to favour spectacle over traditionally hallowed forms such as tragedy, they were by no means passive consumers of mass culture, but were active both in direct and indirect ways in shaping the kinds of plays that were performed during the period. In particular, the tastes of an increasingly large, urban, middle‐class audience contributed to the rise of genres such as melodrama that celebrated the dominant moral values of this class, and to an increasingly regulated conception of genre, since dramatic innovation was limited by what would be tolerated by audiences.