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Popular Culture Review
welcome refresher course about a truly impressive national leader. Skidmore
calls for Congress to rededicate the TRIH as a tribute to Roosevelt’s
accomplishments, much in the manner that the interstate system carries
President Eisenhower’s name.
The one criticism I have of Moose Crossing is directed at the publisher, not
the author. There is an annoying one-page map that jams the route of the TRIH
through the states and Ontario into an unreadable mess that made it almost
impossible to pinpoint the places Skidmore describes on his journey. How nice
it would have been to be able to easily refer to a two-page, face-to-face map
done with clarity. That aside, this book should appeal to a wide audience.
John Culver, California Polytechnic State University
Shakespeare and
Elizabethan Popular Culture
Edited by Stuart Gillespie and Neil Rhodes
Arden Shakespeare, 2006
and
The Cambridge Companion to
Shakespeare and Popular Culture
Edited by Robert Shaughnessy
Cambridge University Press, 2007
In the “Introduction” to Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture,
editors Stuart Gillespie and Neil Rhodes differentiate between “cultural products
created f o r the people,” and those that are “ / the people, which,” they write, “is
an older meaning of the term ‘popular’. Older forms of popular culture were for
the most part not specifically commercial activities, and may be understood as
the cultural expressions of the people themselves” (1). During the time of
Shakespeare, such cultural expressions took the form of “the dramatic enactment
of Bible stories, the festive rituals associated with holidays, clowning, old
romances told around a winter’s fire and other products of oral tradition such as
proverbs, ballads and songs” (1). Gillespie and Rhodes later note that
Shakespeare “has been a classic for so long that our sense of his being part of
popular culture has been largely obscured” (2). Nevertheless, their work “is
not... a book about modern popular culture and the modern media. It is about
the popular culture of the sixteenth century and the influences that shaped
Shakespeare’s drama then” (3). After commenting on the extent and diversity of
previous studies of their subject, Gillespie and Rhodes contend that “What has