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The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson
By analyzing appropriations of fairies, old wives, and mummers, this project explores the conflicted entanglements of early moderns leaving, or attempting to leave, a once-shared common culture behind.
284 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2004
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April 30, 2026
【The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson / Mary Ellen Lamb / 2006, Routledge】
A cultural studies book with rather trans-territorial scope in the title, but actually, especially in its actual monograph part after a more comprehensive account for early modern popular culture tinged with certainly cultural studies and relying a bit too much on precedent studies, but would be a must-read for those who would like to discuss childhood memory in literature without beseeching help to psychoanalysis.
Herein psychoanalysis doesn't even participate, but institutionalised Greco-roman canon which was available both in translation and secondary education was in conflict with old wives' tales from female servants, and these two were at odds in the minds of the early modern England middle-class and elites, both male and female.
Then the author presents examples of mixture of English folklore and Greco-roman classics in A Midsummer Night's Dream, hitherto we see the ambivalence of written culture presented by its Greek mythology references but also with the local, demonized sort of fairies. It would be even more of focus in Faerie Queen in which courtiers are fairies and "their ancestral houses to keep their hospitality with their neighbors [villagers included]" (p. 198., The Faerie Queene) in merry England.
Ben Jonson's masques and The Merry Wives of Windsor are also discussed, centering on the city underclass, fraud (Falstaff as a fraudster and fraud breaker), debt and purgation of popular entertainment like morris dance.
I genuinely wish this book was more economical for the mass.
A cultural studies book with rather trans-territorial scope in the title, but actually, especially in its actual monograph part after a more comprehensive account for early modern popular culture tinged with certainly cultural studies and relying a bit too much on precedent studies, but would be a must-read for those who would like to discuss childhood memory in literature without beseeching help to psychoanalysis.
Herein psychoanalysis doesn't even participate, but institutionalised Greco-roman canon which was available both in translation and secondary education was in conflict with old wives' tales from female servants, and these two were at odds in the minds of the early modern England middle-class and elites, both male and female.
Then the author presents examples of mixture of English folklore and Greco-roman classics in A Midsummer Night's Dream, hitherto we see the ambivalence of written culture presented by its Greek mythology references but also with the local, demonized sort of fairies. It would be even more of focus in Faerie Queen in which courtiers are fairies and "their ancestral houses to keep their hospitality with their neighbors [villagers included]" (p. 198., The Faerie Queene) in merry England.
Ben Jonson's masques and The Merry Wives of Windsor are also discussed, centering on the city underclass, fraud (Falstaff as a fraudster and fraud breaker), debt and purgation of popular entertainment like morris dance.
I genuinely wish this book was more economical for the mass.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review