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The use of the same term “popular culture” to refer to very different concepts has caused significant confusion in academic discussions in recent years. Sophisticated scholarship from a number of disciplines defines “popular culture” in at least three ways: (1) through an engagement in oppositional politics with mainstream groups, (2) as a simple majority of the population below the level of gentry, and (3) as participants in the traditional festive practices of an increasingly beleaguered “merrie England.” Proponents of cultural studies have powerfully argued the first of these concepts of popular culture. Stuart Hall, for example, has described the popular as the culture of an oppressed population engaged in perpetual struggle with a dominant culture or “power bloc” (1992: 238), while John Fiske has argued that “popular culture is formed always in reaction to, and never as part of, the forces of domination” (1989: 43–7). Drawing on Bahktin's theory of carnival, Michael Bristol has ably applied this essentially political model to Shakespeare's plays to explore the purposeful resistance by a plebeian culture to “any tendency to absolutize authority” (1985: 213). Similarly, Annabel Patterson links festival practices to popular protest to identify “an intense political skepticism” followed by “a mature radicalism” in Shakespeare's deepening social vision (1989: 10).
Recent studies by social historians, on the other hand, tend to define “popular” in terms of a larger “populace.” In his anthology of essays Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England, Barry Reay combines the middling sort with lower status groups to define “popular” as composing 90 or 95 percent of the population (1985a: 1), while in Peter Burke's essay, “popular” comes to mean “ordinary”: “the unlearned, the non-elite, the people who had not been to grammar school or university” (1985: 31). By referring to a majority or mainstream group, this concept of “popular” naturally discovers more continuities than conflicts. As part of a larger critique, Tim Harris's introduction to Popular Culture in England (1995) stresses the degree of interaction or cooperation between a large populace composed of diverse groups and an elite social fraction. Scholars of the Reformation also use this concept of “popular” to stress continuities more than divisions (Collinson 1996b; Byford 1998: 44). Tessa Watt's influential study Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–1640 counters confrontational models by stressing “consensual values, shared at many levels of society” expressed in inexpensive printed texts (1991: 3, 325). Watt points to the presence of “a core of good householders” to argue against Keith Wrightson and David Levine's claim that a militant Protestantism “‘inserted a cultural wedge’ in the village of Terling, where ‘godly parish notables led the attack on a popular culture of communal dancings, alehouse sociability, and the like’” (1991: 324–5).
As is apparent from Watt's quotation, Wrightson and Levine use the term “popular culture” in this third sense, to refer to festive practices – dancing (whether morris dancing or dancing around maypoles), alehouse socialibility and also church ales, amateur theatrics of various kinds involving hobby-horses, May games and processions, Yuletide celebrations, and other entertainments that represented, for the citizens of Terling, “the traditional popular culture of their forefathers” (1979: 181). In a process of social differentiation largely due to inflation and a rapidly increasing population, the “better sort” of Terling owed “their social identity to their withdrawal from and hostility to a popular culture that was slowly being transformed into a culture of poverty” (182). The contrast between their conclusions and Watt's may be attributed in part to a difference in perspective. A householder may well experience consensus in the same town where a morris dancer experiences opposition. Moreover, as shown by a recent anthology edited by Patrick Collinson and John Craig (1998), the diversity of the experience of the Reformation in English towns does not support any single model, whether an oppositional top-down suppression of popular culture by the godly or a consensual model based on community agreement. Sometimes slower, sometimes quite rapid; sometimes imposed from above; sometimes as a groundswell from beneath: the specifics of the movement of reform varied substantially among English cities. Yet however variant the specific dynamics, few historians would argue that from the early sixteenth through the early seventeenth centuries, a festive popular culture was becoming much less “popular” or widespread within the population. In fact, the significant social transformations of the early modern period were often expressed and in part experienced in terms of changes in attitudes towards a festive popular culture. In spite of, or more likely because of, their decline in status and frequency from the early sixteenth through the early seventeenth centuries, the traditional rituals of this popular culture, defined in this third sense, attained a heightened cultural significance as a social sign.
In The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson, I use the term “popular culture” in yet another sense, related to its use as a social sign, to refer to a simulacrum existing in early modern imaginaries created from cultural materials assembled from various lower status groups. Especially as transmitted through written works, this popular culture associated with the festive or the folk was invented or produced by elite and middling sorts as a means of coming to their own self-definition. This is not to say that festive practices, from maypole dancing to ballads to old wives' tales, did not exist among the lower sort. On the contrary, in many areas, they thrived. It was precisely their continuing appeal that rendered them especially attractive, and at times especially threatening, to the identities of higher status groups. This is also not to say that these festive practices thrived only among the low. On the contrary, they were widely shared among most social fractions. But by the late sixteenth century, such practices increasingly signified the low,1 even as they were enjoyed by other groups. To take a literary example from Shakespeare's Othello, Desdemona's choice to sing an old ballad of “Willow” shortly before her death eloquently testifies to its profound and personal meaning to her. The poignancy of her choice is deepened by her identification with her mother's maid Barbary, through a shared suffering in their mutual betrayals by the men they loved. As social movements invested such practices as signifying the low, they revealed complex relationships ranging from identification to contempt, and often a mixture of these in variable proportions.
I use the term “production” rather than “representation” to refer to a popular culture assembled of elements from such diverse groups as thieves, parents of retarded children, raped women, female caregivers, and amateur performers; for there was no group sufficiently homogeneous to “represent.” Their apparent homogeneity, or very different forms of homogeneity in different literary works, was in fact a principal effect of this production. Similarly, I break down the dominant culture into sometimes overlapping subgroups such as the humanist-educated male elite learned in Latin (Chapters 3 and 5), the middling sort forging its own nationalistic identity (Chapters 6 and 7), and the aristocracy of the Stuart court redefining itself in response to changing modes of consumption (Chapter 8). This project is, I believe, unique in its delineation of the specific techniques developed by each of these groups to define itself against and through lower status groups. These techniques of self-definition play a major role, I argue, in the culture and especially in the literature of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. To emphasize the centrality of these productions, I analyze works by three authors commonly perceived as canonical: Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson. The centrality of festive customs to texts by these authors has been thoroughly and persuasively demonstrated by a rich critical literature which explores, from a variety of approaches, the profound and often structural connections between early modern literature and the May Day celebrations, the ballads, and mimetic fools originating in what has been called a folk culture.2 I use this critical literature to consider further the ideological implications of forms of self-definition emerging from these texts.
The complexity of this process of self-representation, both for the groups and for the individuals within them, is perhaps best demonstrated by a more complicated example taken from Jonson's masque, Oberon, The Fairy Prince. Featuring Prince Henry in the title role, Jonson's Oberon, The Fairy Prince stages courtiers dancing in the court of King James in representations that work simultaneously with and against established fairylore. A song near the end of the masque urges the courtiers to show by their energetic dancing that they, like the fairies of tradition, are made of air rather weighed down by the flesh of “knottie legs, and plants of clay” that “seeke for ease, or love delay” (Jonson 1941: ll.403–4). Yet courtiers must also strive to overgo merely ordinary fairies; and so the masque invents a clownish country fairy very unlike the ethereal trooping fairies and dangerous fairy queens of ballads and folk-tales. Spurring the courtiers towards yet greater efforts in the upward leaps of the corantos and galliards of the third masque-dance, the next song warns that if they “use the smallest stay,” then the “beauties” of the audience will suspect that they “have no more worth/Then the course, and countrey Fairy,/That doth haunt the harth, or dairy” (ll.412–49). What did these fairies signify in the court of James I? Why did Jonson's masque simultaneously stage affiliation with and also distinction from traditional fairylore?
As Chapter 8 will demonstrate, the answers to these questions will take us deep within the social signifying systems of the early seventeenth century. They involve the use of dance by courtiers to increase personal charisma, and the underlying discourses of bodily control able to confer status through a virtuoso performance. They involve the coming-of-age of young Prince Henry in a court strained by tensions between King James and Queen Anne, with the consequent conflicts in filial allegiances that must be declared, negotiated, or effaced. They involve the political necessity perceived within James's court to discover, or invent, a relationship with the people of the countryside to promote an alliance against an increasingly powerful, and increasingly hostile, middling sort, while maintaining the forms of distinction on which aristocratic privilege depended. Central to the argument of this book is the relational nature of all three signifying systems – within the body, within the court, within the nation. As courtiers emulate “aery fairies,” these systems identify the court with an idealization of rural life. As courtiers distinguish themselves from the “coarse and country fairy,” these systems invoke an oppositional binary elevating the court at the expense of a debased agrarian culture. In both its idealized and debased aspects, this simulacrum that I will call a “popular culture” was as much a product of the imagination as Jonson's rustic fairy, and undoubtedly bore as tangential a relationship to the diverse beliefs and varied experiences of the people of the countryside.
Jonson's production was not his alone; it was part of a larger cultural movement that forms the central subject of this book. By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, as England became more urbanized and societal structures became more complex, a powerful field of force exerted pressure on social groups, whether newly emerging or already established, to determine modes of self-distinction inextricably linked with the legitimation of their own personal and political power. Jonson's “coarse and country fairy” serves as a prototype for the large-scale production of multiple forms of popular culture within the imaginaries of elite and middling sorts according to these self-serving agendas. Their diverse narratives of self-definition included sometimes phantasmagoric versions of a popular culture as a distorted and distorting reflecting pool through which to interpret themselves. Rendered fantastic by the desires that called them into being, early modern productions of popular culture ranged from the grotesque to the ethereal. In The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson, I undertake a study of what these often self-interested fantasies reveal about the evolving self-narratives of social groups. Their shared drive towards social distinction contributes a formative context for the productions of popular cultures by such authors as Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson. As this study will demonstrate, however, works by these authors resist as well as support these projects of distinction. Like the two contrasting species of fairy of Jonson's masque, the figures used by early modern writers often reveal simultaneous desires to affiliate as well as to dissociate from the popular cultures they produce. These highly ambivalent productions reflect conflicted entanglements rather than clear-cut relationships. As these works suggest, this push and pull, this simultaneous desire and repulsion, often operated within individual subjects as well as between social groups. The struggles for symbolic domination waged within these works locate the site of contest within individual subjectivities. Thus, as I explore how the cultural meanings generated through the production of popular cultures played a determinative role in the formation of group identities, I will also argue for an understanding of a new centrality for these productions within early modern discourses of the self.
This approach constructs a larger framework within which to revisit some now-canonical texts as productions of popular culture. As a powerful vehicle for the creation of meanings, early modern literature formed a particularly generative site for the circulation of these cultural narratives. A few examples serve to demonstrate the simultaneous affiliation and alienation within these texts to their own traditional sources. Identified in A Midsummer Night's Dream as the country prankster Robin Goodfellow, Shakespeare's Puck prevents milk from turning into butter and plays practical jokes on sexually aroused horses; yet like Jonson's dancing courtier-fairies, Shakespeare's well-spoken and deferential servant to Oberon distinguishes himself through his oppositions, rather than his similarities, to his original in the rude and hairy Robin Goodfellow. Sometimes it is the use, rather than the content, of orally circulated narratives that becomes transformed. The Merry Wives of Windsor, for example, appropriates the tale of Herne the hunter from “idle-headed eld” to discipline offenses by Falstaff against the values of the middling sort in a communal shaming performed by very bourgeois-seeming fairies. In the Red Cross Knight of his Faerie Queene, Spenser advances the cause of Protestant nationalism by incorporating and also redirecting the cultural meanings of the St. George once performed in often rowdy midsummer watches and early modern processions. In the same way, his series of fairy queens, including Gloriana herself, describe a highly ambivalent relationship with contemporary forms of narrativity performed primarily by women appropriated, and also deflected, to serve the interests of Spenser's nationalist epic.
Discussed in detail in the chapters below, these few examples suggest the complexity of these well-known texts as discursive productions. The participation of recognized authors such as Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson foregrounds the significance of these productions. While any one of these authors provides material sufficient for an entire volume from this approach, I have chosen to include works by all three in order to demonstrate the strikingly different appropriations of figures signifying a popular culture. In this study, I focus on works by William Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor), by Edmund Spenser (episodes from The Faerie Queene), and by Ben Jonson (his masque Oberon, The Fairy Prince and his unfinished play The Sad Shepherd) to explore the diversity of the forms of entanglement encountered by often ambivalent early modern subjects. In each text, a heightened awareness of traditional material, however much it was reworked, also encodes alternative readings as stubborn reminders of what, in the creation of new social definitions, must be forgotten: the pranks of the uncouth Robin Goodfellow, the ghost tales of superstitious elders, the vigorous dance-battles of the earlier sixteenth century, ballads of fairies remembered from childhood, and through all these, a relationship to a “merrie England” that was, or was imagined to be, less complex and fragmented than the rapidly evolving society of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
This process of forgetting recorded in literary works participated in a larger process of a cultural forgetting made visible in the studies of the calendar and the ritual year by David Cressy (1989) and Ronald Hutton (1994, 1996). Tracing the elimination of most saints' days as well as the decline of traditional festivities marking the agrarian cycle, these studies foreground a forgetting that entails, paradoxically, a heightened consciousness of what must be forgotten. Duffy (1992) and other scholars have demonstrated the impossibility of obliterating the traces of Catholic rituals in Protestant England. Elizabeth Mazzola's argument for the “afterlife for abandoned symbols” (1998: 1) of the Catholic Church applies at least as well to traditional festive practices. Similarly, Linda Woodbridge argues from another perspective for the stubborn persistence of even discredited ways of thought, such as a medieval form of magical thinking whose traces “linger to structure the unconscious” (1994: 6). The mental habits of early moderns were no more susceptible to absolute change, and certainly not at the rapid rate of the social transformations from the late sixteenth through the early seventeenth centuries.
As John Barrell has pointed out, ideologies are to be discovered not only within classes, but also within individual subjects (1999: 232). Studies pertaining to early modern ways of thinking, and more specifically to ways of forgetting, move the domain of social and political transformations inward into the psyche of early modern subjects. Rather than a Freudian model, my approach to the connections between outward events and inward experiences of the self follows an insight expressed by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, that the social cannot be separated from the psychological, and the sublimation of instincts within the self cannot be considered separately from a larger strategy of cultural domination (1986: 197). For this profound connection between the social and the psychic, I draw particularly on Norbert Elias's concept of the civilizing process (1978) and Pierre Bourdieu's discussion of taste as a mode of social distinction (1984). Their theories provide ways to understand the increasingly diverse forms of self-differentiation offered to early moderns by profound economic and religious changes as unquestionably political in nature. In forging a personal, as well as a national identity, early moderns of middling and elite sorts enacted a form of cultural domination over lower status groups. It is the premise of this study that lower social fractions remained capable of their own forms of resistance and that they shaped early modern culture, to an extent not acknowledged in most studies, through the responses – the desires and fears – they elicited through their ordinary interactions with more elite subjects. Since these interactions are inevitably mediated by literate social groups, my focus remains on the subjectivity of the middling and elite early moderns by whom and for whom productions of popular culture were constructed. It is within, as well as outside, this inner domain that the great social revolutions of the period took place.
To theorize this model of the early modern subject as the site of social forces, an internalized version of Gramsci's concept of hegemony usefully moves the negotiations between cultures to a locus within divided subjects (2000; Hebdige 1988: 203–7). According to an internalized Gramscian paradigm, the early modern self becomes not merely ambivalent, but more specifically composed of what Tony Bennett calls “a mobile combination of cultural and ideological elements derived from different class locations” (1985: xv). For some early modern bourgeoisie, the c...
