Did Men Of Taste And Civilization Save The Stage? Theater-Going In Rotterdam, 1860—1916. A Statistical Analysis of Ticket Sales

The subject of this article is the question of improved quality in the Dutch theater, roughly in the period 1860—1914. In essence it will statistically test the dominant historiographical narrative, which treats the era from 1875—1914 as a period of recovery of the stage after a decline which set in after about 1815 and which claims a related charge in social class base. Using the immense theater archives of the city of Rotterdam, we will try to find an answer to the question: what, actually, can be maintained of the success story told by Dutch theater historians from about 1875 to the present day? To answer this question, the ticket sales data, plus data about the repertoire and the performers will be used to perform time series analyses. We used comparable methods in an earlier article, to statistically test (and reject) the hypothesis of a decline of the theater in the first half of the nineteenth century. 2 Though our research is involved with one city in a country not particularly known, in the nineteenth century, for its important theater culture, we think that our approach has relevance, not only by way of the roughly comparable discussions about the state of the theater in Europe at that time, but also with respect to method. The social contours of theater can be much more precisely probed, at a crucial juncture in social-cultural history.