'Social things': the production of popular culture in the reception of Robert Greene's 'Pandosto.'

sport, / Yet you your selves become no currish creatures" (9). The link back to Lyly seals the familiar associations between books and lapdogs, between pleasure-reading and women's leisure and desire. Wall (note 47) also reads this passage as creating a "market of salacious buyers and sellers" for the commodified book (205). It is also possible that the relationship between Rowland's frame and dedication evinces resistance to women entering bookshops during this period.

52 Like the many works written around Greene's death. Greenes Ghost Haunting Coniecatchers appropriates Greene's soul, or at least his name. It is no accident that this book replaces the copy of Greene's Conny-catching that the Tis Merrie apprentice lacks: Rowlands was engaging in cross-marketing of a In the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean years, increasing literacy and a growing publishing industry stimulated expansion of the popular literary audience; that is, of the diverse group of non-elite men and women who read print for pleasure.(1) The period's unprecedented output of new prose fiction titles offers critical access to that growing audience, but most twentieth-century criticism of early modern prose fiction has considered the popular audience only in order to cordon it off from an elite literary audience.(2) According to the dominant binary model of the genre, the elite Sidney circle inspired a few artful masterpieces (The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, and now The Countess of Montgomeries Urania), while the burgeoning popular audience triggered a new business of hack writing.(3) When we follow Roger Chartier's example in discarding that "simple opposition of populaire versus savant," we can recognize instead that the early modern effort to marginalize popular print culture responded to this rapid diversification in the reading audience.(4) The category we now recognize as 'popular culture' was constituted socially, as a reclassification of early print forms that had originated within a "collective culture ... from which the dominant classes or the various elites only slowly distanced themselves."(5) Early modern print fiction, in particular, had circulated among other socially diverse cultural practices; like other such practices, fiction consumption was increasingly linked to social differentiation. As early modern England became a print-reading culture in which readers, authors, and texts proliferated, the socially and culturally elite found the need for a boundary between elite and popular cultures more acute than ever before. The growing collection of cultural commodities that we now call early modern print fiction was repositioned by a discourse that sought to distinguish elite from popular culture, and that discourse has delimited our understanding of early fiction ever since.

Modern critical dismissals of early modern fiction have typically been justified in aesthetic terms, which nonetheless betray a deeply social discomfort in their regular invocations of contemporary cultural prejudices. Consider, for example, this opening comment on the "Sources of the Play" in the Yale edition of The Winter's Tale:

The Winter's Tale is an excellent example of a novel turned into a play. That practice was common in Elizabethan times as in recent years; but with this difference, that the drama in Shakespeare's time was usually an improvement on the novel and in our own day is usually a popularized degradation of the original.(6)

This passage's proliferation of aesthetic judgments, in which the hierarchy of the genres repeatedly reverses itself, ultimately reveals itself as an unchanging prejudice against any form of "popularized degradation." The passage plays Elizabethan and modern popular texts off against one another, to mutual disadvantage. Its preference for Shakespearean drama over Elizabethan fiction is inseparable from its rejection of popular culture in any period.

Such social-cum-aesthetic judgments are ideologies of distinction, as Pierre Bourdieu calls the process by which the selective criticism of one group's cultural forms serves to define, normalize, buttress or even create the tastes of another group.(7) Critical dismissal of early modern prose fiction--in the seventeenth century as in the twentieth--reinforces those readers' predilections for elite cultural forms by devaluing more widely accessible forms of cultural capital. This dynamic of distinction has been at work throughout the critical history of prose fiction; the judgments of modern fiction criticism have devalued early modern popular fiction precisely because they have inherited a class-driven impulse to do so. The centuries-long attack on the romance, which would lead critics eventually to articulate the theory of the novel, arose from the desire of elite audiences to devalue the leisure-reading habits of newly literate, and thus disturbingly mobile, lower classes. At the same time, the exaggerated appetite for antifictional remarks betrays the early modern elite's considerable familiarity with, and interest in, the non-exclusive pleasures of the romance.

Among twentieth-century critics, too, nostalgic fascination with the romance has been bound up with universal disdain for popular readers. Writing soon after Pierce, Muriel St. Clare Byrne gave a patronizing summary of popular literature's role within Elizabethan Life in Town and Country: