The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson (review)

In The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson, Mary Ellen Lamb breaks new ground by challenging the traditional perspective on popular culture seen from below to explore “the discursive productions of popular culture from above” (9). Her persuasive and meticulously theorized study is divided into five sections: chapter 1, “Producing popular cultures,” is an introduction to the premises and issues of the work; part 1, “Fairies, old Wives’ Tales, and Hobby- Horses: Rising to (in)visibility,” comprises chapters on each of these figures from popular culture who, Lamb asserts, are repeatedly enlisted to textualize early modern social interactions. Part 2, “William Shakespeare,” examines the appropriation of these figures in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream: breeching the binary” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor: domestic nationalism and the refuse of the realm.” Part 3, “Edmund Spenser,” investigates “vanishing fairies and dissolving courtiers” in The Faerie Queene; part 4, “Ben Jonson,” explores the use of these figures in “Oberon, The Fairy Prince (1611) and the great fairy caper” and in “The Sad Shepherd (c. 1637) and the topography of the devil’s arse.”

Lamb identifies her focus as the “creation of popular culture as a category” (11), the interested distortions of popular material in the works of canonical authors such as Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson revealing the “evolving self-narratives of social groups,” as well as their “conflicted entanglements” (4–5). Literary appropriation of figures “associated with the festive or the folk,” she explains, were “invented or produced by elite and middling sorts as a means of coming to their own self-definition” (2). “Three distinct forms of interaction” between higher and lower groups “became embodied, repeatedly and over time, in three figures: fairies, old wives, and hobby-horses” (12), in combinations that recorded the diverse kinds of interactions between status groups. Popular culture, Lamb emphasizes, was neither coherent and unified, nor half of a binary opposition of low and high culture, but rather an interpenetration (10). Likewise, “dominant culture” was not monolithic but embraced a “humanist-educated male elite,” a “nationalistic” “middling sort,” and a court aristocracy (3). Early modern subjects operated on a continuum between acceptance and rejection of popular culture as common tradition as its productions negotiated their experienced psychosocial contradictions.

In part 1, Lamb explicates the diverse and subtle functions of these “Others” in the elite project of self-definition (25). These figures, she emphasizes, never accessed the perspectives of lower-status groups but were reduced to “stereotypes signifying an imaginary popular culture” (25–26). Briefly stated, Lamb argues that fairy allusions signified a variety of transgressive acts, often involving sexual or pecuniary impropriety; wives’ tales disrupted ideologies of gender and class; and “the study of hobby-horses and amateur performativity” articulated socially linked understandings of “embodiedness” (28). Like Wendy Wall, Lamb identifies the household as the site of contact between social groups, and she observes that, paradoxically, while fairy lore derived from the stories of female servants, the aristocracy was prone to identify itself with the fairies that invoked an imaginary rural past, in compensation for a fractious social present. And for the lower sort, Lamb argues, fairy narratives could function as what James C. Scott termed “‘weapons of the weak,’” “to intervene in . . . unequal power relationships” (39; see also 33).

The superstitions of old wives’ tales, part of the childhood experiences of the elite, were contested, supplanted, and devalued by the humanist Latinate education of young gentlemen. Derogatory representations of this oral culture, Lamb argues, distanced men from the women who dominated their early years, reinforcing a binary gender system and advancing an “emerging concept of authorship” (48). If old wives’ tales were “murmured in the sheltered space” (63) of childhood, the hobby-horse was part of an amateur public spectacle but, like old wives, increasingly denigrated. Along with the traditional figures of St. George and the morris dancer, the hobby-horse came to “signify a version of merry England from which...