Something Rotten!: A Musical That Blurs the Boundaries Between High and Low Culture
Written by John O’Farrell and Karey Kirkpatrick, with music and lyrics by Karey and Wayne Kirkpatrick, the 2015 musical Something Rotten! plays with the boundaries around high and popular culture (Music Theatre International, n.d.). To do so O’Farrell and the Kirkpatricks compare musicals and straight plays by creating a show about playwrights, and by employing musicals and plays within the plot of Something Rotten!. Plays tell a story through dialog, and can be examples of high culture, something considered serious and significant, and often consumed by elites. On the other hand, musicals employ song and dance, and as a result, embody low or popular culture, which is often defined in opposition to high culture, as it is accessible to, and consumed by, the masses. John Storey, Michael Schudson, and Susan Sontag’s discussions of hierarchies of taste, popular culture, and camp help to create a framework for understanding how Something Rotten! creates a hybrid between high and low culture that pushes the viewer to question the dichotomy between the two.
The plot of Something Rotten! highlights the tension between popular and high cultures through the juxtaposition of its main characters, playwright brothers Nick and Nigel Bottom and the Bard, William Shakespeare. Something Rotten! takes place in 1595 London, as the Bottom brothers continuously get outshined by Shakespeare. In their quest to succeed as playwrights, the Bottom brothers find a soothsayer who predicts that in the future plays will include singing, dancing, and acting all at the same time. They ask what Shakespeare’s next hit will be and the soothsayer misreads Hamlet as Omelette. Armed with this knowledge, Nick and Nigel proceed to write the world’s first musical, Omelette: The Musical. In Omelette the brothers tell a broken story of Hamlet, as the soothsayer has misfed them some plot points (Fandom, 2022). Even though the brothers compete against Shakespeare, the characters themselves, and many other references in Something Rotten!, are based on Shakespeare. By positioning Shakespeare as an equal, but foil character to the Bottom brothers, the playwrights of Something Rotten! exaggerate the difference between high culture Shakespearean plays and other popular culture playwrights’ shows.
By challenging the viewer to ask how other playwrights, specifically the Bottom brothers, can gain success if Shakespeare dominates, Something Rotten! questions the formation of cultural hierarchies. In his essay “The New Validation of Popular Culture: Sense and Sentimentality in Academia,” sociologist Michael Schudson (1987) untangles how universities created a canon of authors like Shakespeare. By assigning the same texts over and over, universities place an implicit value on them, and create a hierarchy of taste. This places works like Shakespeares’ on a pedestal, as high culture, and it leaves everything else as low culture (Schudson, 1987, p. 530). In recent decades, universities have included more books in their curriculums, but Schudson (1987) questions whether other literature will (and should) ever have as much place and weight as classic literature like Shakespeare (p. 530). A similar tension continues in the theater world, as Shakespearean actors and productions have become, and remain for many people, the “epitome of high culture” (Storey, 2009, p. 7). Elites see books and plays not at the level of Shakespeare’s as inferior. In his essay “Cultural Theory and Popular Culture,” cultural studies scholar John Storey (2009) states that “popular culture carries within its definitional field connotations of inferiority; a second-best culture for those unable to understand, let alone appreciate, real culture” (p. 8). According to Storey (2009), popular culture is high culture’s leftovers, and in comparison to high culture plays, musicals fall into the popular culture category. By making Shakespeare a character in a musical, as well as continuously referencing his work, Something Rotten! asks the viewer to consider whether a society can simultaneously value both high culture and low culture, or whether someone like Shakespeare is inherently more valuable (Schudson, 1987, 530).
Something Rotten! gives the audience a front row seat as high culture intertwines with popular culture in a satirical and fun manner. In doing so the musical uses the idea of camp to question the value put on certain forms of theater. In her essay “Notes on Camp,” writer Susan Sontag (1964) discusses how “the whole point of camp is to dethrone the serious,” and camp should be playful and fun (p. 10). She explains how people who focus so much on high culture and being formal, deny themselves pleasure. Something Rotten! is campy, as it makes fun of the ideas that high culture is unattainable and that popular culture is for the uneducated. By creating characters, such as Nick Bottom, and creating a play called Omelette, the writers of Something Rotten! assume that the viewer is knowledgeable about Shakespeare. They create this middle ground by targeting an intended audience who both understands Shakespeare and enjoys musicals. This comedic combination of cultures enables the audience to not take these prescribed cultural hierarchies so seriously. Instead Sontag (1964) contends that one can gain a lot by enjoying different types of culture, saying “high culture has no monopoly upon refinement,” and that there can be “a good taste of bad taste” (p. 13). Sontag (1964) explains how one can find pleasure in objects that are considered low cultured, and even campy and raunchy, like Something Rotten!.
The writers of Something Rotten! made a musical about the popularity of Shakespeare, and therefore use popular culture to discuss a high culture person. The musical’s hybridity between high culture and popular culture makes high culture more accessible to the masses. Bridging the gaps between these two cultures can be done in a lighthearted manner, and musicals like Something Rotten! reveal that people can be playful and still complete the work of blurring these boundaries.
Works Cited
Schudson, M. (1987). The New Validation Of Popular Culture. University of Georgia Press. 495-503.
Something Rotten! (2021, May 10). Music Theatre International. https://www.mtishows.com/something-rotten
Something Rotten!: The plot. (n.d.). Something Rotten! Wiki. Retrieved November 13, 2022, from https://somethingrotten.fandom.com/wiki/Something_Rotten!:_The_Plot
Sontag, S. (1964). Notes On Camp, 1-13.
Storey, J. (2009). What is popular culture? Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, 1-16.
Lauren, I really enjoyed reading your analysis of Something Rotten! as a musical that is an experiment between high and low culture. I was particularly interested in your discussion about Schudson and the hierarchies of taste. Schudson explains that universities form a hierarchy of taste by creating a canon of texts in which they assign immense value to. Shakespeare’s plays are often part of these literary canons and have also become regarded as high culture in the theater world. Something Rotten! transforms Shakespeare, an element of high culture, into a satirical and playful musical intended for a mass audience, an element of low culture. Thus, this play creatively challenges the binaries of high and low culture through weaving high and low together as a hybrid.
ReplyDeleteIn your piece, you write about how Something Rotten! is campy as it is playful, satirical, comedic, and dethrones the serious. Thus, in this hybrid between high and low culture, the playwrights’ goal was to shift the intended audience of a Shakespeare play in order to make it more digestible for an everyday mass audience. This point reminded me of scholar John Storey’s (2009) definition of high culture. In defining high culture he writes, “Being difficult ensures its exclusive status as high culture. Its very difficulty literally excludes; it guarantees the exclusivity of its audience” (p. 6). By transforming Shakespeare, a high culture play that is difficult and has an exclusive audience, into the comedic musical Something Rotten!, the playwrights were able to make Shakespeare more accessible for consumption by a mass audience. Something Rotten! successfully blurs the boundaries between high and low culture through comedy and satire and broadens the audience for Shakespeare. Overall, I really loved reading your piece on Something Rotten! Amazing job!
--Sophie Barkan