Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson
by Mary Ellen Lamb · 2004
Genre: Essays
Rating: 4.2/5
A rigorous, unsentimental study of how early modern writers invented “popular culture” as much as they reflected it. Mary Ellen Lamb makes Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson look newly entangled with class, performance, and power.
Mary Ellen Lamb turns early modern “popular culture” into a serious argument about power, performance, and literary invention.
This is a smart, necessary book for anyone who still thinks Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson can be read apart from the cultural mess that produced them. Lamb is at her best when she shows that “the popular” is not a stable folk archive but a contested field shaped from above and below, and that insight gives the book real critical bite. It is more rewarding as an argument than as an easy read, but it earns the difficulty.
Lamb’s central move is deceptively simple: instead of treating popular culture as something that merely trickles up from the streets into elite literature, she tracks how courtly and aristocratic writers actively manufactured, reframed, and circulated versions of it. That reversal matters. Fairies, old wives, hobbyhorses, women storytellers, masque traditions, and other supposedly “folk” materials are shown as mobile signs, not innocent survivals, and the book is strongest when it follows those signs across social strata. What emerges is a circular model of cultural formation, one in which class aspiration, performance, and literary prestige keep rewriting one another.
Her readings of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson are persuasive because they refuse to isolate textual detail from the social conditions of its making. Lamb understands that an invocation of rustic custom is never just decorative, and that a court entertainment can be just as politically charged as a ballad or an alehouse tale. The book’s historical intelligence is excellent. It draws on cultural studies without flattening the past into theory-speak, and it takes seriously the instability of “popular” as a category long before that became fashionable in literary criticism. This is scholarship that knows how to look twice at a familiar scene.
What I admire most is the book’s attention to mediation. Lamb is interested in who gets to represent “the people,” for what audience, and with what ideological payoff, and that question gives the whole study real traction. She is also unusually good on reciprocity: the elite do not simply exploit popular forms, they are changed by them, while those forms are themselves altered by elite use. That is a subtle claim, and she argues it with enough historical range to make it feel earned rather than schematic. The result is a book that reads Renaissance literature as a live struggle over symbols rather than a museum of isolated masterpieces.
The reservation is that Lamb’s framework can sometimes feel more compelling than the individual chapters’ textures. Because the book is so committed to demonstrating circulation and recuperation, some of the literary close readings can become a bit programmatic, as if every motif must ultimately confirm the same model of exchange. That is not a fatal flaw, but it does limit surprise; the argument occasionally outpaces the pleasures of textual discovery. Readers looking for the kind of dazzling, line-by-line interpretive voltage you get from the very best essay collections may want more variation in method and tone than Lamb consistently offers here.
Even so, this is an important corrective to the lazy idea that popular culture is a lightweight add-on to “real” literature. Lamb shows that the supposedly low materials of early modern England were already entangled with power, class performance, and authorship, and that Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson were never just borrowing from the people but participating in a far more complicated cultural relay. The book’s intelligence lies in making that relay visible. It is not flashy. It is not trying to be. But it has the clean force of a thesis that changes the shape of the conversation.
Key Takeaways
- Cultural circulation
- Class performance
- Literary mediation
Summary
- Lamb argues that “popular culture” in early modern England was not a pure bottom-up inheritance but a contested field shaped by elite and aspirant writers.
- The book recontextualizes Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson through fairies, old wives, hobbyhorses, masques, and other mobile cultural signs.
- Its strongest contribution is the circular model of cultural formation, where popular forms and elite representations continually remake each other.
- The scholarship is historically alert and genre-literate, with a sharp eye for performance, class, and mediation.
- Lamb is especially effective at showing that references to the “folk” are never neutral; they carry ideological and political work.
- The prose is clear and disciplined, but the book’s framework sometimes becomes more compelling than the local texture of the readings.
- A few chapters can feel method-driven, as if the same theoretical point is being demonstrated in slightly different costumes.
- Overall, this is a serious and rewarding work of criticism that advances the conversation rather than merely joining it.
Chapter Guide
- Chapter 1: Framing Popular Culture from Above
- Introduces Lamb’s central move: reading Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson as producers of popular culture, not just consumers of elite tradition. The opening sets up class, audience, and the politics of literary circulation.
- Chapter 2: Urban Middling Worlds and Social Narrative
- Tracks how texts imagine the aspirations, anxieties, and self-fashioning of urban middling groups. Lamb uses these narratives to show popular culture as a contested social language rather than a fixed lowbrow category.
- Chapter 3: Shakespeare’s Comic Publics
- Focuses on Shakespeare’s comedies and their dense traffic with festive custom, rumor, and street-level performance. The analysis shows how popular forms are transformed into theatrical intelligence.
- Chapter 4: Fairies, Magic, and the Politics of Wonder
- Reads fairy lore and enchantment as cultural materials shaped by class, authority, and desire. Lamb is especially attentive to how wonder can naturalize hierarchy even while seeming playful.
- Chapter 5: Spenser and the Work of Romance
- Examines Spenser’s use of romance, allegory, and popular narrative patterns in The Faerie Queene. The chapter links poetic grandeur to inherited story-worlds that were already circulating widely.
Read the full review at https://reviewerinsight.com/book/6a07d6ab3a7c4490b7d70e2c/popular-culture-of-shakespeare-spenser-and-jonson