Culture, Class, and Colonialism: the Struggle for an English National Theatre, 1879-1913

On 23 April 1913 a proposal for a state-endowed National Theatre in London 'for the performance of the plays of Shakespeare and other dramas of recognized merit' was introduced before the British House of Commons. ¹ In his opening remarks, House speaker H.J. Mackinder emphasized the social ends such a cultural institution might serve. Noting the 'enormous influence of our poet in Germany, and the reality of the homage which will be paid to this nation as the nation of Shakespeare [in the upcoming tercentenary celebrations]', he suggested that a National Theatre might promote 'the purposes of peace in the world'. ² On the home front, he continued, it would remind English citizens of the bonds of national identity: 'a common history' expressed in 'a common literature'. ³ Finally, at the level of empire a National Theatre would reinforce the sense of racial identity between the colonies and their parent nation, and secure a language 'in danger of breaking into dialects'. ⁴ In substance, Mackinder's endorsement linked the 'universal' claims of high culture with the broad politicaland social need to promote national and imperial unity. By helping to consolidate and preserve England's national and racial identity at home and in the colonies, he reasoned, the theatre would help to alleviate the contemporary climate of political anxiety: about deteriorating relations with major European powers, about class unrest, and about the increasingly precarious state of the empire. ⁵

Parliamentary debate about the proposed National Theatre represented the culmination of more than thirty years' worth of agitation on the part of theatre critics, managers, and actors. ⁶ Following an abortive start in 1879, when Matthew Arnold expounded on the desirability of a state-endowed theatre in the Nineteenth Century, interest in a National Theatre revived in the years between 1901 and 1904 as a means to bolster England's international profile. In 1905 a Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre Committee (SMNTC) was established to raise funds, and by 1907-8 an organizational plan, Schemes and Estimates for a National Theatre, was published. Working in support of this scheme, which included a building plan, business plan, and proposed repertory, were a cross-section of London's fashionable society, who set about organizing fundraising activities, including a Shakespeare pageant and a Shakespeare Ball. ⁷ In 1908, the project found its first major patron when Sir Carl Meyer donated £70,000; five years later, the SMTC had amassed over £100,000 for the project. ⁸ In 1913 Parliament was thus called upon not to underwrite the entire enterprise but rather to 'crown the efforts of a movement privately initiated'. ⁹ Despite the fact that the timing seemed auspicious (Shakespeare's tercentenary was only three years away), however, the proposal was defeated by a narrow margin. Still optimistic, the SMNTC purchased a building site, but by the following year, war erupted and plans for a National Theatre were set aside. It was more than sixty years before a building for a National Theatre was finally erected in London.

In what follows I will consider why this movement, which seemed so in tune with the political and cultural tenor of its time, ended in failure. The struggle to establish a National Theatre in the years between 1879 and 1913 followed an intensive period of what Stefan Collini has described as the 'nationalization of English culture'. ¹⁰ During this time, the nation's cultural inheritance was enshrined in institutions suchas the National Portrait Gallery (1856), and in large-scale scholarly efforts like the Oxford English Dictionary (1857) and Dictionary of National Biography (1882). Such monuments helped not only to define a uniquely British character, Collini suggests, but also to buttress England's position as a global power, underwriting its claims to economic dominance and imperial leadership by placing before the public artifacts of its glorious past. ¹¹ Moreover, as Gertrude Prescott Nuding makes clear in her discussion of Parliamentary debate about the proposed British Portrait Gallery, such initiatives self-consciously blurred the distinction between broad aesthetic and imperial concerns. During the House of Commons Debates that established...