
Pleasing Everyone
Mass Entertainment in Renaissance London and Golden-Age Hollywood
Jeffrey Knapp(Author)
Oxford University Press Inc
Published on 23. February 2017
Book
Hardback
312 pages
978-0-19-063406-3 (ISBN)
Description
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.
Reviews / Votes
Jeffrey Knapp's Pleasing Everyone: Mass Entertainment in Renaissance London and Golden-Age Hollywood persuasively argues that the size of theatre audiences and the popularity of printed playbooks mean that Renaissance drama should be classed as mass entertainment...Knapp avoids the trap of making generalizations about two very different time periods, carefully historicizing his analysis of plays and film alike. The comparison between Renaissance drama and goldenage Hollywood forces us to re-evaluate modern attitudes to popular entertainment and mass media. For the early modern scholar, Knapp's monogram offers a welcome reminder that Renaissance drama was not only popular but often populist. * Jennifer Cryar, The English Association * Knapp has written one of the most interesting books about Shakespeare and film precisely because it isn't a study of Shakespeare on film, thereby revealing some highly original insights about both forms. * Henry Turner, SEl * An important and eminently readable book whose central hypothesis needs to be taken seriously by anyone who entertains an interest in Renaissance drama or popular entertainment of whatever guise. * Bulletin of the Comedi antes * With its original critical and historiographical strategies and meticulous scholarship, Pleasing Everyone is a remarkable achievement. Knapp's acute comparative analyses of the performance cultures of Shakespeare's London and Hollywood's 'Golden Age' and sophisticated, lively readings of films and plays make this an outstandingly engaging and stimulating read."-RUSSELL JACKSON, University of Birmingham What happens when, putting our high-toned Renaissance drama next to our lowdown Hollywood cinema, we think them together? In Jeffrey Knapp's strongly argued new study, the outcome is an original-and highly usable-conception of 'mass entertainment' in which art and junk, individual and mass, author and collaboration are always inseparable in their dialectical play. For all its immortal verses, the drama proves as fully invested in the business of popular entertainment as anything that came after it; and despite its programmatic accessibility, the cinema acquires an artistic credibility that makes talk of 'authors' and 'self-reflection' necessary categories of analysis. The intricate readings that carry this argument forward are so fresh that even practiced critical hands may feel they are discovering The Winter's Tale or Citizen Kane for the first time."-D.A. MILLER, University of California, Berkeley In taking on the theater/film dyad, Knapp strikes at the heart of many of the theoretical foundations of the entire field of cinema studies itself, patiently eroding the apparent self-evidence of terms such as 'mass,' 'entertainment,' 'art,' 'modernity,' and 'technology,' by giving them a different history and by showing, through a series of tour-de-force close readings, how that history has been shaped and reflected upon by plays and films themselves. Pleasing Everyone is a game-changer, bringing to cinema and media studies a salutary shift in frame of reference that will be the source of much study and debate."-JAMES SCHAMUS, Columbia UniversityMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Illustrations
129
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 161 mm
Thickness: 21 mm
Weight
634 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-063406-3 (9780190634063)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
12/2016
1st Edition
OUP eBook
€13.49
Available for download

E-Book
12/2016
1st Edition
OUP eBook
€10.99
Available for download
Person
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).
Author
Eggers Professor of EnglishEggers Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley
Content
Introduction
Part 1: The Individual and the Mass
1. Which Moll?
2. The Real John Doe
Part 2: Show Business
3. I Must Be Idle
4. One Step Ahead of My Shadow
Part 3: Junk and Art
5. Mocked With Art
6. Throw That Junk
Epilogue: The Author of Mass Entertainment
Coda: A Second Look
Notes
Works Cited
Part 1: The Individual and the Mass
1. Which Moll?
2. The Real John Doe
Part 2: Show Business
3. I Must Be Idle
4. One Step Ahead of My Shadow
Part 3: Junk and Art
5. Mocked With Art
6. Throw That Junk
Epilogue: The Author of Mass Entertainment
Coda: A Second Look
Notes
Works Cited