BOOK REVIEWS
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not emerged is any single work that attempts to address the full range of popular
cultural and literary forms available to Shakespeare, and the impact they had on
him” (4). Therefore, they intend Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture
to fill this gap in scholarly inquiry.
The roster of chapter-length essays in Shakespeare and Elizabethan
Popular Culture includes: Helen Cooper’s “Shakespeare and the Mystery
Plays,” Leah S. Marcus’s “Shakespeare and Popular Festivity,” Alex Davis’s
“Shakespeare’s Clowns,” Helen Moore’s “Shakespeare and Popular Romance,”
David Margolies “Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Fiction,” Diane
Purkiss’s “Shakespeare, Ghosts and Popular Folklore,” Neil Rhodes’s
“Shakespeare’s Sayings,” Stuart Gillespie’s “Shakespeare and Popular Song,”
and Bruce R. Smith’s “Shakespeare’s Residuals: The Circulation of Ballads in
Cultural Memory.” Each of these smoothly written and highly accessible pieces
offers students, critics, and readers alike broad, yet specific insights into the
subjects they treat individually and collectively. Many also include a
complement of black-and-white illustration reproductions from the early modem
period. “Endnotes” and a “Select Bibliography” aid further, more in-depth
study, while an adequate, though not extensive, “Index” rounds out this
gorgeously produced volume.
Meanwhile, Robert Shaughnessy, editor of The Cambridge Companion to
Shakespeare and Popular Culture, reveals that, recently, “the study of the past
and present relationships between Shakespeare and popular culture has been
transformed: from an occasional, ephemeral, and anecdotal field of research,
which, if registered at all, was generally considered peripheral to the core
concerns of scholarship and pedagogy,” into “one which is making an
increasingly significant contribution to our understanding of how Shakespeare’s
works came into being, and of how and why they continue to exercise the
imaginations of readers, theatergoers, viewers, and scholars worldwide” (1).
Furthermore, current ongoing “research and pedagogy in the field of
Shakespeare and popular culture is concerned with the Shakespearean theatre
and drama’s immersion within the festivities and folk customs, entertainment
industries, and traditions of playing of its own time,” as well as “in the
reinvention, adaptation, citation, and appropriation of the plays (and, to a lesser
extent, the poems), and the myths and histories that circulate around them,
across a wide range of media in subsequent periods and cultures” (1).
Shaughnessy, in some respects both echoing and expanding upon Gillespie and
Rhodes, later comments that the notion of the “‘popular’ is itself hardly a
singular or uncontested term or frame of reference: seen from some angles, it
denotes community, shared values, democratic participation, accessibility, and
fun;” while “from others, the mass-produced commodity, the lowest common
denominator, the reductive or the simplified, or the shoddy, the coarse, and the
meretricious” (2). Thus, in circumstances in which “the transmission and
appropriation of Shakespeare are at stake, considerations of taste and aesthetic