Patronage

What is patronage?

Patronage is the support given to individuals or organisations, usually in the form of money or influence. It operates in all spheres of life, from scientific discovery to sporting events, and it is important because the tastes and ideologies of the patron inform the work of projects they support. Traditionally, a patron is a benefactor, or a sponsor, someone who can offer protection as well as financial support because of their superior social status. I’m interested in pushing the limits of the terms patronage and ‘patron’, and extending them to a broader range of supporters.

According to Wikipedia: Patronage is the support, encouragement, privilege, or financial aid that an organisation or individual bestows to another. In the history of art, arts patronage refers to the support that kings, popes, and the wealthy have provided to artists such as musicians, painters, and sculptors.

This was the model for a lot of artistic production, particularly in the visual arts, for most of history. The patron of Renaissance art is often credited with driving its creation. A mark of painter Titian’s high artistic reputation was that Philip II, his patron, told him he could paint what he wanted, he could decide the terms of his own art, rather than painting what Philip told him to paint. This was rare, it hardly ever happened. Patrons essentially controlled artistic production because patrons have more social power than artists. As Wikipedia says, patronage comes from ‘king’s, popes, and the wealthy’.

Does patronage have to be support received from someone with high status and a lot of money?

Yes and no. I answer this question by looking at the changes to arts-based, specifically theatrical, patronage systems which occurred in Elizabethan England.

In 1572, the Vagabonds Act stated that any group of players or performers wanting to perform in public were legally required to have a patron, and that patron had to be a member of the nobility. In other words, the right to make money from public audiences was controlled by the ruling elite.

The Vagabonds Act suggests that the ruling elite were not the only ones watching the plays. Making a law to get more control over public performances is surely a sign that public performances are, if not getting out of control, definitely growing.

This idea is supported by historical evidence. Nine new performance venues are recorded in London between 1575 and 1578, as the Crown changed its approach to the performing arts. The rise in the number of performance venues indicates that an increasing number of people, not just ‘kings, popes and the wealthy’, were paying to attend performances in purpose-built open-air amphitheatres, as well as inn-yards and reclaimed spaces within ex-monastic houses.

In Elizabethan England, when acting companies performed privately at court, they were paid £10, the same as a good day’s takings in a playhouse. But they only performed at court a handful of times, in contrast to performing in public throughout the year (except when theatres were closed to prevent the spread of plague within the City…sound familiar?). Acting companies needed to keep producing plays that would have been well received by noble and aristocratic audiences; they needed their support in order to legally exist. However, they also needed to make sure their plays found favour with the tastes and views of their ticket-buying public audiences, especially as the vast majority of their income came from public playing.

So are ticket-buying audiences patrons?

I would say yes. They are agents within a process of artistic production who provide money and support in return for consuming the art. Traditionally, however, audience members are not seen as patrons, partly because there is no formal way of recognising their support. Generally, the support a patron gives only counts as patronage if it is acknowledged in some public way by the artist/organisation.

A modern-day example is the Supporting Wall in the foyer of Shakespeare’s Globe, which is engraved with the names and signatures of major donors. The royal and aristocratic patrons of early modern acting companies were acknowledged by the public appearances of their name on playbills (the single sheets that advertised performances) and the title-pages of printed playbooks. But there was no system for formally recognising the support received from members of the public.

What happens when one artistic product has to satisfy the tastes and ideologies of more than one patron?

It makes the art get more interesting. I think it’s the reason why drama developed so much in Elizabethan England. Playwrights were writing with the tastes and interests of many different social groups in mind.

A clear example is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is often thought to have been written for a private performance of the nobility as part of the wedding celebrations for George Carey’s granddaughter. Carey, at the time, was the named patron of Shakespeare’s company. Dream’s Athenians and wood-wandering lovers are inspired by plays by John Lyly, written specifically for performance before the Queen (although, both performed in commercial venues and printed, they were also available in wider, more public spheres). The other parts of Dream, by contrast, come from folklore and popular culture. The fairies are derived from oral stories associated with lower-status groups and Bottom’s donkey-head recalls the hobby-horse, a figure used by Morris dance troupes. So Dream combines figures, themes and motifs from both ends of the social spectrum, suggesting that Shakespeare’s company were not just trying to appeal to members of the aristocracy. There’s also no hard evidence that Dream was performed at the private wedding.

What about patronage now?

The state is still very much involved in the patronage of the arts, if anything, more so now than in Shakespeare’s time. Present-day state patronage takes the form of public funding, which impacts profoundly on artistic production in the UK. The Arts Council of England’s mission statement, ‘Our National Portfolio, 2018-2022: Diversity Narrative’, aims to create mainstream art that can ‘represent and speak to our diverse, contemporary society’. Shakespeare is inescapably bound up with the mainstream. Arts organisations that produce Shakespeare are allocated a disproportionate amount of the funding. The total funding received by the National Theatre alone (c. £67 million) is more than the total funding received by all theatre organisations outside London and the South East (c. £65 million). The outreach of the National Theatre extends well beyond its local audience, but the patronage it receives as public funding is arguably limiting artistic production in the rest of the UK, meaning that our arts are not truly representative of our society.

Theatres also rely on the support of private donors. These portions of theatre audiences tend to be white, middle class, and relatively affluent. Is their patronage helping to perpetuate the supremacy of whiteness in our theatre even as it supports the work of the theatre? Is our theatre reproducing a system of patronage by which patrons are exclusively ‘the wealthy’?

At the time of writing, theatres are closed because the UK is in a national lockdown, preventing the spread of COVID-19. Theatres will need all our patronage if they are to survive the pandemic. We don’t all have to support theatres with large and regular donations. By being present in audiences, we can be patrons, and hope that our tastes and views influence what gets produced.

Romola Nuttall is a Research Associate in the Department of English at King’s College London.

19 March 2021.