Why we can' t compete with the Elizabethans!
This next bit of info is from an article in a business journal, and the results aren't great, the basic premise they share with us is one that we are in trouble, and will need all the help that we can get in the future. They also contend that one of the only times that theater was able to finance itself outside of having a wealthy audience base, was during a short period in the early 1600's.
First, the Elizabethan case offers little basis for the hope that professional live theater will be able to prosper in small communities in the foreseeable future without some sort of subsidy. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, several circumstances conspired to make it possible for the theater to finance itself. Real wages seem to have been unusually low--a considerable financial advantage to a labor-intensive activity such as the theater. Several economic classes, particularly the gentry, were attracted to London where they sought entertainment (see Fisher) and, apparently, the wealth of this class was rising,2 making it easier for its members to purchase the more expensive tickets which even in the public theaters must have been important for the prosperity of the company. One may surmise that the large number of transients who visited London on business, for education at the Inns of the Court, or simply for a change from rural life, as well as the unusual interest in the arts and the hunger for entertainment that characterized the Renaissance also contributed to the size of the audience. Even then theater had to compete with cock fighting, boxing and other popular entertainments but these did not have the conven- ience and perhaps not the attraction of today's mass media. Low real wages may also have helped to attract audiences by permitting admission fees low in comparison with other prices and by generating a substitution effect favoring time-intensive activities such as theater attendance. These conditions (aside, perhaps, from the prosperity of the middle classes) are unlikely to be replicated. Oates and Baumol
The Conclusions:
*Certainly, with today's real wages differing by an order of magnitude from those of 1600, the financing of theatrical activity can be expected to remain correspondingly more difficult (compare, for example, the 30 with the 2 week breakeven runs for the two periods). From the fact that, despite all these favorable circumstances, the Elizabethan theater was a highly risky business, one can infer how much more difficult it would be for a self- financed professional theater to survive in a small community today.
*A second conslusion that can be drawn from our study is that economic prosperity does not automatically bring with it all the things that are usually taken to contribute to the "quality of life", and if it is accompanied by rising real incomes for all economic classes, it may be a positive detriment to such activities.