Prolegomenon for a Theory of Drama Reception: Peter Brook’s Measure for Measure and the Emergent Bourgeoisie

Abstract

This is an attempt to define the audience of Peter Brook's 1979 Paris production of Measure for Measure at the Bouffes du Nord by defining its style. The production of the text in modern French translation was not vintage Brook; however, there are at least two good reasons for submitting it to closer scrutiny. First, it is a production which addresses itself to a relatively new public not popular audiences, not the intellectual left, not sectors of the traditional French bourgeoisie, but emergent and dynamic sectors of a bourgeoisie which have generally been associated with the structural mutations French society has experienced since the sixties. 1 Secondly, I wish to apply, at least in its general outlines, the premises of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of taste to the study of the relationships between styles of productions and audiences.2 Reception criticism, which has almost exclusively been applied to the novel and to poetry, is not a unified critical position. The knowledge which establishes the object of reception criticism, i.e., the role readers play in constituting a text, the kinds of readers texts apparently imply, the status of the reader's self, may be of a psychological, phenomenological, deconstructionist, or structuralist order. Bourdieu uses a struc-