Spectacular Feasts: Herbert Beerbohm Tree and the Mise-en-Scene of Consumption

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, University of Washington, 1995.

By David V. Schulz

The dominant cultural practice of the upper bourgeoisie Edwardian England (1895-1917) was what Thorstein Veblen has called conspicuous consumption, a status-conscious display of goods and their public expenditure. This dissertation demonstrates how the production style of English actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree embodied the mechanisms of conspicuous consumption as defined by Veblen.

Tree, producing lavish productions of Shakespeare, historical melodramas, and high society dramas for English bourgeois audiences at the turn of the century, filled his stage with scenery, props, and supernumeraries that together testified to his wealth as a producer and his ability to consume. This study investigates Tree’s stage mises-en-scène as apparati of spectacular consumption, as conglomerations of signs and sign systems signifying wealth and status. From there, the study broadens to investigate other mises-en-scène of consumption surrounding the stage mises-en-scène. These spaces include the ornate architecture of H Majesty’s Theatre, the neighboring West End Department stores, and the enveloping Edwardian metropolis of London. Like the stage spectacles these other spaces were designed for the spectacular display of goods.

The structure of the study is as follows. Chapters 1 and 2 examine the 1906 historical melodrama Nero by Stephen Phillips to reveal in particular the commodity-based mechanisms of Tree’s production style. In addition, the chapters describe the subject of representation—not only the Emperor Nero, but also the celebrity persona of Tree—and how the subject the play carefully constructs (in both cases, the Imperial gentleman) is dramatically set against contemporary anxieties that threatened its consolidation: New Women, urbanization, and colonial and civil unrest.

Chapter 3 moves through various spaces of consumption, analyzed as Edwardian spectacular topographies, to explore how they, in addition to the stage representation, operated within the signifying modality of consumption. These spaces include the city of London, the Edwardian audience, Harrod’s Department store and H Majesty’s Theatre, the principal focus of the chapter. Finally, Chapter 4 examines Tree’s Shakespeare Festivals from 1905 to 1913 along with their rival festivals in Stratford-on-Avon as projects to revise the English national identity and their attempts to be subsequently institutionalized as the National Theater of England.

Throughout, this study uses tools borrowed from semiotics, commodity theory, and critical theories of the subject. Moreover, this study approaches the spectacular subjects spatially, not only as spaces to be described, but as a discursive fields to move through. Both theoretically and historically it examines its subject, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who is spatially and spectacularly configured.