Leonard R. N. Ashley delights readers with a collection of facts and folklore of the people of Queen Elizabeth I's era. He describes sports and pastimes, religion and superstition, cooking, life in town and country, and the rising bourgeois class. In chapters titled as "Cakes and Ale," "The Playhouse and the Bearbaiting Pit," and "Hey nonny nonny," Ashley paints an enlightening portrait of a time made memorable by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

While much has been written on Shakespeare's debt to the classical tradition, less has been said about his roots in the popular culture of his own time. This is the first book to explore the full range of his debts to Elizabethan popular culture. Topics covered include the mystery plays, festive custom, clowns, romance and popular fiction, folklore and superstition, everyday sayings, and popular songs. These essays show how Shakespeare, throughout his dramatic work, used popular culture. A final chapter, which considers ballads with Shakespearean connections in the seventeenth century, shows how popular culture immediately after his time used Shakespeare.

Engaging with histories of the book and of reading, as well as with studies of material culture, this volume explores ’popularity’ in early modern English writings. Is ’popular’ best described as a theoretical or an empirical category in this period? How can we account for the gap between modern canonicity and early modern print popularity? How might we weight the evidence of popularity from citations, serial editions, print runs, reworkings, or extant copies? Is something that sells a lot always popular, even where the readership for print is only a small proportion of the population, or does popular need to carry something of its etymological sense of the public, the people? Four initial chapters sketch out the conceptual and evidential issues, while the second part of the book consists of ten short chapters-a ’hit parade’- in which eminent scholars take a genre or a single exemplar - play, romance, sermon, or almanac, among other categories-as a means to articulate more general issues. Throughout, the aim is to unpack and interrogate assumptions about the popular, and to decentre canonical narratives about, for example, the sermons of Donne or Andrewes over Smith, or the plays of Shakespeare over Mucedorus. Revisiting Elizabethan literary culture through the lenses of popularity, this collection allows us to view the subject from an unfamiliar angle-in which almanacs are more popular than sonnets and proclamations more numerous than plays, and in which authors familiar to us are displaced by names now often forgotten.

1978 witnessed the publication of Peter Burke's groundbreaking study Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Now in its third edition this remarkable book has for thirty years set the benchmark for cultural historians with its wide ranging and imaginative exploration of early modern European popular culture. In order to celebrate this achievement, and to explore the ways in which perceptions of popular culture have changed in the intervening years a group of leading scholars are brought together in this new volume to examine Burke's thesis in relation to England. Adopting an appropriately interdisciplinary approach, the collection offers an unprecedented survey of the field of popular culture in early modern England as it currently stands, bringing together scholars at the forefront of developments in an expanding area. Taking as its starting point Burke's argument that popular culture was everyone's culture, distinguishing it from high culture, which only a restricted social group could access, it explores an intriguing variety of sources to discover whether this was in fact the case in early modern England. It further explores the meaning and significance of the term 'popular culture' when applied to the early modern period: how did people distinguish between high and low culture - could they in fact do so? Concluded by an Afterword by Peter Burke, the volume provides a vivid sense of the range and significance of early modern popular culture and the difficulties involved in defining and studying it.

The study of popular culture has come of age, and is now an area of central concern for the well-established domain of cultural studies. In a context where research in popular culture has become closely intertwined with current debates within cultural studies, this volume provides a selection of recent insights into the study of the popular from cultural studies perspectives. Dealing with issues concerning representation, cultural production and consumption or identity construction, this anthology includes chapters analysing a range of genres, from film, television, fiction, drama and print media to painting, in various contexts through a number of cultural studies-oriented theoretical and methodological orientations. The contributions here specifically focus on a wide variety of issues ranging from the ideological construction of identities in print media to the narratives of the postmodern condition in film and fiction, through investigations into youth, the dialogue between the canon and the popular in Shakespeare, and the so-called topographies of the popular in spatial and visual representation. In exploring the interface between cultural studies and popular culture through a number of significant case studies, this volume will be of interest not only within the fields of cultural studies, but also within media and communication studies, film studies, and gender studies, among others.

An edited collection examining the construction of popular culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

As suggested by the title Early Modern Communi(cati)ons, the volume demonstrates that the connections and common points of reference within early modern studies bind Elizabethan and Jacobean cultural studies and Shakespearean investigations together in an unexpected number of ways, and this diversity of ties has been used as the main theme around which the thirteen essays have been organised. While the first group of essays deals with early modern culture, presenting the socio-historical context necessary for any in-depth literary investigation, as exemplified through analyses of outstanding literary achievements from the period, the second part of the volume focuses on the oeuvre of the most famous representative of the age, William Shakespeare, with individual chapters creating a tangible continuum, moving from the cultural and literary context that informs his works, to their interpretation in present-day performances and their theoretical backgrounds. In the same way as the volume comprises writings on a diverse but still coherent range of topics, the authorial team is equally representative of diversity and continuity at the same time. The authors include several senior scholars working in the Hungarian academic community, representing all significant research centres in the field from all over the country. A number of essays have been contributed by promising young talents as well.