The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson

As a powerful vehicle for the creation and circulation of meanings, literature played a crucial role in the early modern production of popular culture. By analyzing appropriations of fairies, old wives, and mummers, this book explores the conflicted entanglements in the early modern period of leaving, or attempting to leave, a once-shared common culture behind. Focusing on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor, Spenser's Faerie Queene, and Jonson's Masque of Oberon, the author explores the ways in which early modern literature formed a particularly productive site of contest for deep social changes, and how these changes in turn, played a large role in shaping some of the most well-known works of the period.