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From: upstill@pixar.UUCP (Steve Upstill)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc,net.movies
Subject: Re: Movies and the Middle Ages
Message-ID: <122@pixar.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 7-Oct-86 14:17:20 EDT
Article-I.D.: pixar.122
Posted: Tue Oct  7 14:17:20 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 16-Oct-86 04:43:20 EDT
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Reply-To: upstill@pixar.UUCP (Steve Upstill)
Organization: Pixar -- Marin County, California
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About the relative vulgarity of the Middle Ages vs. nowadays.  I get pretty
antsy when I hear such facile generalizations.  First of all, when comparing
culture, are you talking maximum or mean?  The point is well taken that
the Medieval audience for painting and music was firmly bourgeois.  Probably
the common folk would have loved TV if they had had it.

The immediate dismissal of modern popular culture also makes me suspicious
of lurking elitism.   Bourgeois disapproval does not mean that it really is
trash (remembering, of course, that 90% of everything is trash).  The best
example of this I can think of is that Shakespeare was considered vulgar
(i.e. of the common folk) entertainment in its time.  His plays were 
carefully constructed for popularity, and have you ever looked at the design
of the Globe Theater?  The wealthy were sealed in their boxes around the
perimeter, with the flat area around the stage an unseated free-for-all of
hecklers, vendors and general merry-makers.  How unruly!  How uncultured!

The point is not that "the people" were more sophisticated then, but that
"popular culture" was dismissed by the elite (if memory serves, Shakespeare
had no patrons, and depended on commercial success to eat) just because
it was enjoyed by people who couldn't possibly know the time of day.

Steve Upstill