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Shakespeare's plays were immensely popular in their own day ¿ so why do we refuse to think of them as mass entertainment? In Pleasing Everyone, Jeffrey Knapp opens our eyes to the uncanny resemblance between Renaissance drama and the incontrovertibly mass medium of Golden-Age Hollywood cinema.
About the author
Jeffrey Knapp is the Eggers Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of several books, including An Empire Nowhere: England and America from Utopia to The Tempest (1992), Shakespeare's Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (2002), and Shakespeare Only (2009).
Summary
Shakespeare's plays were immensely popular in their own day -- so why do we refuse to think of them as mass entertainment? In Pleasing Everyone, author Jeffrey Knapp opens our eyes to the uncanny resemblance between Renaissance drama and the incontrovertibly mass medium of Golden-Age Hollywood cinema. Through fascinating explorations of such famous plays as Hamlet, The Roaring Girl, and The Alchemist, and such celebrated films as Citizen Kane, The Jazz Singer, and City Lights, Knapp challenges some of our most basic assumptions about the relationship between art and mass audiences. Above all, Knapp encourages us to resist the prejudice that mass entertainment necessarily simplifies and cheapens whatever it touches. As Knapp shows, it was instead the ceaseless pressure to please everyone that helped generate the astonishing richness and complexity of Renaissance drama as well as of Hollywood film.
Additional text
In his ingeniously designed chapters on work and play, Knapp puts the Puritanism of early modern antitheatrical discourses, which argued that the commercial theater disguis ed play as work, into productive tension with the elitism of Adorno and Horkheimer, who argued that commercial cinema threatened to disguise work as play. Because the book, like it objets, balances tension with openness, even readers resisting Knapp's arguments or maintaining the assumptions he critiques, as this reader did throughout, might nevertheless be pleased - even enriched - by his virtuosic readings of these complex entertainments.
