MATTHEW DIMMOCK and ANDREW HADFIELD (eds), Literature and Popular Culture in Early Modern England.

Abstract

THE presence of Peter Burke’s influential Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978; rev. 1994) can be felt throughout this ostensibly more narrowly focused collection. Burke writes an approving afterword, and many of the contributors examine his notion that popular culture was everybody’s culture until a discernable rift gradually grows between the longstanding elite culture of the learned and more popular forms of expression. In the literature of Early Modern England Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie (c.1580), with its dismissals of the ‘base men with servile wits’ who wrote for the press and the ‘mongrell Tragy-comedie’ of the theatre, is an apparent landmark in this emerging division between elite and popular.1 And yet, matters were not so simple. Sidney’s own works were soon to be popularized, both in print and on stage; his great protégé, Edmund Spenser, had a predilection for jest books (6–7). The terms ‘popular’ and ‘elite’ are shown to be as problematic in the period as they remain in our own time; but, as Burke notes, ‘we cannot easily speak about the interaction of elite culture and popular culture without first making the distinction’ (210). While no new, or refined, theoretical model is proposed, this volume does present a diverse and stimulating range of essays, which taken together illustrate the complex nature of assimilations and negotiations between popular and elite cultural forms.