Scotland and the Music Hall, 1850–1914. By Paul Maloney. Studies in Popular Culture. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003; pp. 240. $24.95 paper.

Extract

Paul Maloney's study of Victorian and Edwardian Glasgow's entertainment is part of the series Studies in Popular Culture, under the general editorship of Jeffrey Richards, and it benefits from the protocols of its social-history methodology. His approach to the halls has a welcome freedom from the constraints that dog theatre scholars whose disciplines have equipped them with subliminally insistent literary and musical criteria. Maloney is able to acknowledge the stereotypical, misogynistic, jingoist materials used by music-hall performers but still understand them as functional expressions of working-class attitudes that are counterhegemonic. In his argument, manner and style are read as signifiers before words, articulated positions, and character types. He asserts of Scottish music hall that “[a]s a popular entertainment format it did not articulate its social agenda but embodied it in its functioning and culture” (50). This is an important insight, one that not only circumvents the impasse presented to textual analysis by the bland and unrevealing songs and other materials that survive on the page, but also chimes with the latest research in the history of performance, which is beginning to emphasize the historicism of the embodied. We move toward the possibility of historical and theatrical methodologies jumping together, independently of literary judgments, and producing previously unavailable nuance and fresh insight.