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Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture
Edited by Stuart Gillespie and Neil Rhodes
Thomson
£50
Dateline: 10th October, 2006
Exactly why scholars have been so slow to investigate this aspect of
Shakespeare's work is something of a mystery, particularly so since
the earliest blending of elite and popular cultures took place during
his lifetime. The fact that this book follows hard on the heels of Mary
Ellen Lamb's The Popular Culture of Shakespeare,
Spenser and Jonson suggests that academia is making up for lost
time. Although Gillespie and Rhodes are the first to admit that the
dividing line between popular and élite, oral and literate cultures
can be hard to draw, their collection of nine essays sheds new light
on some familiar Shakespearean scenes.
In Shakespeare and the Mystery Plays Helen Cooper reminds us
that older theatre-goers at the Globe and other London theatres would
have had an opportunity to see one of these survivals from the pre-Reformation
era. Shakespeare himself lived within easy travelling distance of Coventry,
where the mystery plays were performed until the playwright was in his
mid-teens. Audiences familiar with God becoming "invisible"
to Adam and Eve after the Fall, the black humour of the men nailing
Christ to the cross and Lucifer seating himself in God's throne may
have approached A Midsummer Night's Dream, Titus Andronicus
and Richard II with a mindset quite different to that of their
21st counterparts.
Leah S Marcus' Shakespeare and Popular Festivity looks beyond
the obvious references to Maying, Midsummer and Twelfth Night to the
anarchic violence associated with holiday liberty - memorably evoked
by the Duke of York's description of Jack Cade as a frenzied morris
dancer - that erupts in several plays. The ritual humiliation of Falstaff
in The Merry Wives of Windsor is interpreted by Marcus as a "skimmington"
during which the fat knight is dunked in the river, dressed as a woman
and crowned with the cuckold's horns.
In Shakespeare's Clowns Alex Davis suggests that distinction
between the lower-class "clown", whose humour was usually
inadvertent (Dogberry, Bottom), and the professional "witty fool"
(Touchstone, Feste), would have been far from clear-cut to an early
modern audience. He points out that the jest-book The Hundred Merry
Tales, regarded by Beatrice (and others) as the dregs of yokel humour,
was read aloud to Queen Elizabeth at her request as she lay dying.
So much ink has been spilled over Shakespeare's use of Holinshead,
Ovid and other "mainstream" authors it makes a refreshing
change to read two essays dealing with less exalted literary sources.
Helen Moore's Shakespeare and Popular Romance examines some of
the medieval romances - formerly aimed at an élite readership
- that were made available in cheap printed editions during the Elizabethan
period. In Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Fiction David
Margolies looks at the "pulpier" end of the market, the early
modern equivalent of fantasy/science fiction. He contends that a relatively
obscure work by Richard Johnson, The History of Tom a Lincoln, the
Red-Rose Knight, may have influenced Hamlet and, to a much
greater extent, Cymbeline.
One of the most interesting essays in the book is Diane Purkiss' Shakespeare,
Ghosts and Popular Folklore, in which she takes issue with Stephen
Greenblatt's Hamlet in Purgatory. She rejects Greenblatt's theory
that stage ghosts were used "as a medium for the representation
of theological debating points", and points out that vengeful ghosts
were a common feature in ballads and folk-tales long after the Protestant
church abolished Purgatory.
Neil Rhodes' Shakespeare's Sayings takes a look at those little
nuggets of homely wisdom made memorable by rhyme and/or alliteration.
Hamlet has been jokingly described as a collection of quotations,
so it's rather amusing to learn that in the Q1 version of the play Corambis
(Polonius) regales his son with a string of homilies printed within
quotation marks!
In Shakespeare and Popular Song Stuart Gillespie examines the
many snatches of song that appear throughout the plays and how reveals
how cleverly they are worked into the narrative, particularly in Twelfth
Night, Hamlet and Othello.
The final essay, Bruce R Smith's Shakespeare's Residuals, is
devoted to the early modern equivalent of film and TV tie-ins - ballads
inspired by Titus Andronicus, The Taming of the Shrew,
The Merchant of Venice and King Lear, all of which were
once thought to be sources of Shakespeare's plays. A delightful illustration
from Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765)
shows a picturesque landscape in which a young ballad singer performs
for an audience of one - Shakespeare, who listens intently, quill in
hand, poised to immortalize her words for posterity!
Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture is a highly readable,
jargon-free introduction to a previously neglected topic. However, I
was surprised to find in the introduction a reference to "the ancient
'green man' tradition". The Green Man is in fact a classic example
of "fakelore" and can be traced back no further than 1939,
when Lady Raglan's fanciful essay on the subject was published in the
journal Folklore. This old chestnut has been thoroughly roasted
by Kathleen Basford, Ronald Hutton and others but seems to have acquired
a life of its own. This minor quibble apart, the book is an excellent
addition to the Arden Critical Companion series. These fascinating essays
(and their well-chosen illustrations) will be of interest to students
and theatre-goers alike.
J.D. Atkinson
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