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, Jeffrey Knapp opens our eyes to the uncanny resemblance between Renaissance drama and the incontrovertibly mass medium of Golden-Age Hollywood cinema.

• Introduction


• Part 1: The Individual and the Mass


• 1. Which Moll?


• 2. The Real John Doe


• Part 2: Show Business


• 3. I Must Be Idle


• 4. One Step Ahead of My Shadow


• Part 3: Junk and Art


• 5. Mocked With Art


• 6. Throw That Junk


• Epilogue: The Author of Mass Entertainment


• Coda: A Second Look


• Notes


• Works Cited

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).