Guest Author - Nicola Jane Soen

English high and low culture is a strange and weird phenomenon where the lines are rigidly defined, or are they?

What is a cad and who are the stupid?! These are really ongoing questions for the study of High and Low culture! England has some of the highest culture in the world. Witty and intellectual; universities actually use some of England’s cultural writings to grade the intelligence of its Graduate students.

Take Shakespeare, his plays have been analysed and reproduced thousands of times the world over. Yet there is actually a question on whether he could actually write himself! Both Elizabeth I and Christopher Marlow are both accredited by some scholars with the possible authorship of Shakespeare works. T.S. Eliot, C.S Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Browning and Tennyson are just a handful of writers who has influenced literally millions of people the world over.

However what have the British people really thought about their culture? Well, first we have the Aristocracy, those lofty mortals who were given the education and intellect apparently, not given to poorer working class mortals. Indeed the upper classes did not in the past believe that working class people could grasp the intellectual conversation written by these famous writers let alone have the ability to read them!

In the famous film ‘My fair Lady’ where a high class cad takes a low class woman in for a bet and changes her to high class; one is shown this poignantly when the working class heroine, Eliza, is no longer accepted by her own class because they can no longer relate to who she is, in fact they do not recognise her! Without a sponsor she is not able to access the higher classes either; so she is actually redundant at both. Of course this could be seen as made for the masses; as the play is based on icon, Bernard Shaw’s play, Pygmalion; whom most working class people have never heard of.

Those people who had not the money for ‘posh’ culture had to make peace with other more base enjoyment; Football, cheesy novels or songs down the local pub. The wealthy of course visited their version of the local pub; The Club a much more debonair affair. One must keep the side up, what?!

The poor Brit may not have heard of Browning or Tennyson but then, apparently his entertainment is not of the same quality. Bottom is more his style or Only Fools and Horses. Yes the crude working Brits loved low humour, toilet humour. The upper classes did too, but they hid there giggles behind starched handkerchiefs whereas the low class Brit just rolled up openly, completely unrepentant of their so called low class behaviour!

As much as the better classes tried to ignore their lower cousins they failed. Because they eventually ended up living just around the corner from them! Now they could not ignore the sights and sounds of the lower class Brit. The lower classes also began to ape the upper classes in their behaviour, wearing the same cut of clothing, only cheaper material, and eating the same food only in different cheaper restaurants and visiting the pictures rather than the theatre.

With retro and new ideas being more heavily searched for, different fields were looked for. Now low culture has also become iconic, with artists who would not have been recognised before now being actively promoted. The trouble is, that then turns into high culture so that those who it originated from can now no longer afford to by it, until it is commercialized! Those with money hold all the aces. And money is culture according to some.

So everything does eventually come around full circle, does this mean then that high and low culture are actually really that different? Actually that really depends on both ones purse and ones preference for art work!

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