Hamlet and Tom a Lincoln

I've recently been thinking about Shakespeare and Popular culture, both the popular culture of Shakespeare's day (the culture of the people, manifested in various ways) and though unrelated to this post the popular culture of today. In one of the chapters of Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture David Margolies suggests that Hamlet may be a bit of a remake of another well-liked revenge play of the day called Hamlet and that a book, or a work of fiction, called Tom a Lincoln by Richard Johnson may have added "new significance."(pg 125) I don't really understand, though, how a book described as "being shallow and disconnected" (Pg. 125) could add that significance. If we knew more about the original Hamlet then it would be a lot easier to say.

There are similarities between the two stories.

Pondering Definitions of Popular Culture

Last week I checked out a book from the Library called Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture and read the introduction and one of the chapters (Shakespeare's Clowns). It's a bit of a slow read, but probably the most difficult part was just wrapping my mind around the definition of popular culture they were using "cultural products created ... of the people... cultural expressions of the people themselves. [Including] the dramatic enactment of Bible stories, the festive rituals associated with holidays, clowning, old romances told around a winter's fire and other products of oral tradition such as proverbs, ballads and songs." (pg 1).

I'm more used to popular culture being in the movies we watch, the music we listen to, religion, and school, or even the dictionary.com definition "contemporary lifestyle and items that are well known and generally accepted, cultural patterns that are widespread within a population; also called pop culture." The actual meanings of these definitions are pretty similar, it just took me a while to relate them.