Pleasing Everyone

New from Jeffrey Knapp:

9780190634063Pleasing Everyone: Mass Entertainment in Renaissance London and Golden-Age Hollywood

Oxford University Press 2017

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.

Jeffrey Knapp is the Eggers Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and a long-term member of the Representations editorial board. 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). His essay “Throw That Junk! The Art of the Movie in Citizen Kane, included in Pleasing Everyone, first appeared in Representations 122 (Spring 2013)