Pleasing Everyone

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).

• Introduction Part 1: The Individual and the Mass1. Which Moll? 2. The Real John Doe Part 2: Show Business3. I Must Be Idle 4. One Step Ahead of My Shadow Part 3: Junk and Art5. Mocked With Art 6. Throw That Junk Epilogue: The Author of Mass Entertainment Coda: A Second Look Notes Works Cited

Jeffrey Knapp's Pleasing Everyone: Mass Entertainment in Renaissance London and Golden-Age Hollywood persuasively argues that the size of theatre audiences and the popularity of printed playbooks mean that Renaissance drama should be classed as mass entertainment...Knapp avoids the trap of making generalizations about two very different time periods, carefully historicizing his analysis of plays and film alike. The comparison between Renaissance drama and goldenage Hollywood forces us to re-evaluate modern attitudes to popular entertainment and mass media. For the early modern scholar, Knapp's monogram offers a welcome reminder that Renaissance drama was not only popular but often populist.