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, author Jeffrey Knapp opens our eyes to the uncanny resemblance between Renaissance drama and the incontrovertibly mass medium of Golden-Age Hollywood cinema. Through fascinating explorations of such famous plays as Hamlet, The Roaring Girl, and The Alchemist, and such celebrated films as Citizen Kane, The Jazz Singer, and City Lights, Knapp challenges some of our most basic assumptions about the relationship between art and mass audiences. Above all, Knapp encourages us to resist the prejudice that mass entertainment necessarily simplifies and cheapens whatever it touches. As Knapp shows, it was instead the ceaseless pressure to please everyone that helped generate the astonishing richness and complexity of Renaissance drama as well as of Hollywood film.

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 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