Pleasing Everyone: Mass Entertainment in Renaissance London and Golden-Age Hollywood - Hardcover

Knapp, Jeffrey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0190634065 ISBN 13: 9780190634063

Publisher: OUP USA, 2017

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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).

Edition details

• Publisher: OUP USA
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0190634065
• ISBN 13: 9780190634063
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 312