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Cambridge Companions Online Cambridge Companions Online http://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/companions/ The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Edited by Margreta De Grazia, Stanley Wells Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521886321 Online ISBN: 9781139002868 Hardback ISBN: 9780521886321 Paperback ISBN: 9780521713931 Chapter 18 - Shakespeare and popular culture pp. 269-284 Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521886321.018 Cambridge University Press 18 PAUL PRESCOTT Shakespeare and popular culture Shakespeare? Popular culture? What sense does it make to couple Shakespeare – Bard of Avon, icon of genius, highbrow extraordinaire – with ‘popular culture’? If his writings are widely valued for their complexity, timelessness and universal human truths, popular culture is for many synonymous with banality, the ephemeral and the trivial. If Shakespeare is deep and diff cult, the typical products of popu- lar culture are shallow and all too accessible. To enjoy Shakespeare, the argument might run, requires training, time and long-term investment; the consumption of popular culture, by def nition, requires little or no effort. From the perspective of these stark contrasts, ‘Shakespeare and popular cul- ture’ looks like a dead-end of incompatibility. Yet Shakespeare is everywhere in contemporary culture. His presence is not conf ned to the ‘off cial’ locations of classrooms, universities and theatres, but permeates popular mass media such as cinema, television, tabloid journalism, computer games, pop music, comics and advertisements. Shakespeare’s face sells products and is familiar to millions, many of whom may never have read or seen his work; any bald-headed, bearded man need only don a ruff and grab a quill to be instantly recognizable as ‘Shakespeare’. Someone this easily impersonated is a major celebrity. Shakespeare’s words are quoted and mis- quoted (intentionally or otherwise) to amuse, persuade and impress. Many of Shakespeare’s characters have been plucked from their plays to become free- standing cultural stereotypes of amorousness (Romeo), indecision (Hamlet) or steely ‘un-feminine’ ambition (Lady Macbeth). Shakespeare’s plots are plundered to provide storylines for f lms, science f ction and soap operas. Shakespeare scholars have increasingly sought to analyse and theorize what Douglas Lanier has called ‘Shakespop’, the presence, citation and appropria- tion of Shakespeare across a range of popular mass media. Many Shakespearians, professional or amateur, might view the study of ‘Shakespop’ with scepticism. Why write about Hamlet cigars when you could be writing about Hamlet ? Why watch A Midsummer Night’s Cream 269 DownloadedCambridge from Cambridge Collections Companions Online Online © by Cambridge IP 128.103.224.4 University on Mon Jul Press,28 15:43:09 2011 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521886321.018 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 Paul Prescott (one of many pornographic f lm adaptations) when you could, more whole- somely, re-read the play itself? Chris Offutt’s satirical Guide to Literary Terms def nes a ‘Pop Culture Essay’ as a piece ‘written by someone who prefers to shop or watch television’; prefers, that is, these lazy, consumerist pleasures to the more taxing task of serious scholarship. 1 This chapter suggests that there is far more to the study of Shakespeare and popular culture than shopping or watching television. Critics for centuries have been interested in the symbiosis between Shakespeare and popular culture, though they might not have described their interest in those terms. 2 Much depends on def nitions. Raymond Williams described ‘culture’ as ‘one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’. 3 To Elizabethans, it was a noun of process describing the tending of something, usually crops or animals, but it was also, more rarely, applicable to the process of human development. Shakespeare never used the word. Operative meanings have since proliferated to such a degree that the word risks meaning all things to all people, without meaning the same thing to any two. ‘Popular’ is not much more straightforward. 4 We might begin with a def nition of popular culture as an umbrella term for the social practices, patterns of consumption and daily experiences of the majority population of a society at any given point in time. This def ni- tion is controversial and begs many questions, but it has been selected to give the reader the widest possible sense of the applications of ‘Shakespeare and popular culture’. From this perspective, the f eld of study is vast and fertile, stretching from the early modern period to the present. At one end of the spectrum, we might seek to understand Shakespeare’s position as a playwright who drew on popular theatrical and social traditions, and whose drama is f lled with allusions to and representatives of the popular culture of his time. Alternatively, we might focus on the way in which Shakespeare is quoted, commodif ed or refashioned by popular culture in the post- modern present, whether in advertising, mainstream cinema, rap music or on YouTube. In between the early modern ‘then’ and the post-modern ‘now’ lie myriad histories of reception and reproduction, as the popular culture of each generation – and of different countries and continents – inherits and inf ects ‘Shakespeare’. All of this now strikes most teachers and critics as worthy of study. No extreme cultural or aesthetic relativism need be implicit in this approach; to argue that the analysis of popular culture is a legitimate academic under- taking is not to neuter discrimination or value judgements, let alone argue that Mickey Mouse or Lily Allen are in some way as important or as valu- able as Measure for Measure . What explicitly underpins a popular cultural studies approach is the less controversial observation that the value and 270 DownloadedCambridge from Cambridge Collections Companions Online Online © by Cambridge IP 128.103.224.4 University on Mon Jul Press,28 15:43:09 2011 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521886321.018 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 Shakespeare and popular culture meaning of texts changes from generation to generation, from place to place and between different social groups. To observe the historical f uctua- tions of Shakespeare’s value is to be reminded of the contingency of our own readings of the texts. To focus on the reception of Shakespeare by the majority of people is not only fascinating in itself, but also applies pres- sure to the received idea that Shakespeare belongs exclusively to high or elite culture. There is a two-way relationship between popular culture and Shakespeare: popular culture shaped Shakespeare’s art, but Shakespeare’s art continues to shape popular culture. Shakespeare and early modern popular culture Scholars of early modern history and literature have used the term ‘popular culture’ to refer to very different objects of study. We might isolate three key def nitions: 1) the beliefs and social practices of the vast majority of the pop- ulation below the level of gentry; 2) a form of oppositional politics at odds with mainstream or elite ideology; 3) the participation in the traditional fes- tive practices of a pre-modern ‘Merrie England’. 5 Each of these def nitions is helpful in thinking about the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and early modern popular culture. Popular audiences Shakespeare wrote (largely) popular plays for largely popular audiences. The exact social composition of early modern England can never be known, but historians are in broad agreement that the gentry and aristocracy formed a small minority and that the common populace – a combination of the mid- dling sort and lower-status groups, all excluded by law and practice from any voice in the major affairs of the state – comprised as much as 95 per cent of the population. 6 The survival of the large open-air amphitheatres of the 1590s must have depended largely on the daily patronage of this populace. Although his non-dramatic poetry might have been aimed at a more socially exclusive readership, Shakespeare’s plays had to appeal to as many elements as possible of London’s heterogeneous population. Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabetical (1604) def nes ‘popular’ as ‘seeking the favour of the people by all means possible’; by this def nition, playwriting in early modern England was a popular art form. What was Shakespeare’s attitude to this popular audience on which much of his livelihood depended? The question has prompted much critical speculation. Shakespeare uses the word ‘popular’ (or a variant of it) eight times, half of them in Coriolanus , his great anatomy of political power and 271 DownloadedCambridge from Cambridge Collections Companions Online Online © by Cambridge IP 128.103.224.4 University on Mon Jul Press,28 15:43:09 2011 BST 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521886321.018 Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2014 Paul Prescott the pressures of popularity. Each time, ‘popular’ carries negative connota- tions: Henry IV says that his predecessor Richard II ‘enfeoffed himself to pop- ularity’ ( 2 Henry IV , 3.2.69); Hal’s errant youth is retrospectively described as ‘f ll’d up with riots, banquets, sports’, and as one incapable of shunning ‘open haunts and popularity’ (1 Henry IV , 1.1.90); conversely, Prospero’s back-story is of a man who neglected worldly ends, bettered his mind and, thus ‘o’er-priced’, became too precious for ‘all popular rate’ ( The Tempest , 1.2.92). Coriolanus’ banishment from Rome is described, by a non-partisan Volscian watchman, as the result of ‘a violent popular ignorance’ (5.2.41). This disdain for popularity seems to be reinforced by Hamlet’s sneers at the groundlings who are ‘capable of nothing but inexplicable dumbshows and noise’ (3.2.10–11). In Sonnet 111, the speaker laments: O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide, The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, That did not better for my life provide Than public means which public manners breeds.
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