Sociology and Soundscape: Herbert Beerbohm Tree's 1908 Merchant of Venice

Herbert Beerbohm Tree's production of The Merchant of Venice, which premiered at His Majesty's Theatre on 4 April 1908, although censured in its own time and after for its histrionic and scenic excess, reveals itself a century later as a daring and inventive exercise in political Shakespeare, a well-meaning, if ill-fated, attempt to influence public opinion at a time of acute Jewish-Christian hostility.¹ The boldness of Tree's initiative was matched by the modernity of his production strategy, which drew its inspiration from the fledgling discipline of sociology, supported not only by eye-catching visual effects but also by an aesthetic appeal to the nascent acoustic culture associated with the phonograph, the telegraph, and the telephone.² To properly appreciate the originality of Tree's venture, it is essential to recognize the societal issues that led him to challenge British anti-Semitism, and to understand the imperatives of the sonic revolution that informed his use of soundscape in this radical enterprise. Tree's detailed promptbook along with abundant eyewitness testimony offer almost as informative an account as one could wish of his reformist project in both process and performance.³

Tree and British Anti-Semitism

Tree was acutely sensitive to the temper of his time. Leading intellectual, artistic, and political figures flocked to His Majesty's and graced Tree's after-theater dinners in the dining room above the auditorium. He liked to think of himself as a civilized man and the practitioner of a progressive art: theater, he stressed in speeches and essays, was a powerful instrument of public education.⁴ It is not surprising, then, that the anti-Semitism that gripped London in the first decade of the new century should have concerned him profoundly. Between 1880 and 1906, as a consequence of the Russian pogroms, approximately one fifth of the entire Jewish population of Russia, which then numbered five-and-a-quarter million, sought refuge in Western Europe.⁵ London was a major transfer point, and in 1905 alone some "871 boats, containing 47,831 passengers, were met at the docks."⁶ Although most of these displaced people moved on to the United States, sufficient numbers remained to destabilize London's East End ghetto and to raise the profile of the Jewish population throughout the country.

The result was an increase of anti-Semitic sentiment, which even at the best of times was never far from the surface in Britain.⁷ To scan contemporary journalism is to find Britain's Jews vilified as the personification of capitalism and materialism, and held responsible for a housing shortage, for industrial sabotage, for financial conspiracy, for disease and immorality, and, most damning of all, for their failure to assimilate into invisibility. On the latter point, an irate writer in the East London Advertiser spoke the mind of many: "People of any other nation, after being in England for a short time, assimilate themselves with the native race and by and by lose nearly all their foreign trace. But the Jews never do. A Jew is always a Jew."⁸ The passing of the Aliens Act in 1905—the first peacetime legislation to specifically restrict the immigration of "undesirable aliens"—failed to ease public anxiety. W. Evans-Gordon, a member of Parliament, in a letter to The Times published on 22 June 1906, called for a total ban on the immigration of working-class Jews.⁹ The Bishop of Stepney, in a classic example of unconscious irony, suggested that Jews might be made somewhat more acceptable, if not less visible, through conversion. Conceding that they were "not a very popular people," he nevertheless advocated an "attempt . . . to dispel the prejudice of foreign Jews against Christianity by open-air preaching and by visiting."¹⁰ Other soi-disant liberals backed Zionism of one form or another; an independent Jewish homeland was widely favored, provided its location was sufficiently...