ABSTRACT
Early modern festivals foreground issues central to the study of popular culture. They raise the important questions to do with audience, participation and agency which in themselves define what constitutes popular culture in this period. The distinction between popular and elite culture is not a simple matter to resolve; as Matthew Dimmock and Andrew Hadfield have argued, ‘popular culture is a complex phenomenon … What might seem popular may really be elite and what appears to be elite may really be popular.’ 1 I discuss below a couple of ‘case studies’ which bear out their view and which demonstrate the characteristic interplay between what one might call ‘top–down’ and ‘bottom–up’ elements of festive culture. Indeed, these instances bring into question the very nature of the genre: what was an early modern festival? Who produced it and who consumed it? Whose interests did it serve? As we will see in more detail below, crucial questions about participation and spectatorship as well as issues to do with passivity versus active involvement are involved in the analysis of popular festive culture. It is worth pointing out from the outset that the focus here is not on festivity as a mode within, for example, drama (à la C.L. Barber) but on actual instances of early modern festive culture. 2 This chapter therefore draws on tangible and material as well as textual evidence. In the two examples I have chosen to illustrate this topic, we will see how popular engagement with forms of festivity played out in practice.
