“It Did Not Sound Like a Professor's Speech”: George Pierce Baker and the Market for Academic Rhetoric

In November 1910, New Theatre artistic director Winthrop Ames asked his former teacher, Harvard English professor George Pierce Baker, to speak at a reception honoring the theatre's financial backers. The occasion was the start of the New Theatre's second season, and Ames was hoping to raise morale after a disappointing first year. Endowed primarily by millionaires in New York City, the New Theatre was supposed to offer a venue for staging plays free of the usual commercial pressures of Broadway productions. The contradiction at the heart of such an enterprise was manifest, particularly in the New Theatre's architecture and opulent interior design, which continually marked the “noncommercial” house as a monument to the economic power of those wealthy enough to provide for its massive and gaudy construction. Audiences complained that the two-thousand-seat auditorium had lousy acoustics; critics deemed the productions undistinguished and condemned the twenty-three Founders Boxes that ringed the orchestra as vulgar and ostentatious. Maybe an English professor, Ames thought, would have something helpful to say on the matter.