STATE OF CRITICISM
73
drawn between entertainment and art closes the door before you can
begin, because if all television programs and all movies and all
popular culture objects are entertainment by definition, then we
have no critical task before us. And yet Alfred Harbage was engaged
in a form of popular culture study when he analyzed Shakespeare.
The essence of his scholarship in fact was to put Shakespeare back
into the specific commercial and sociological context in which those
plays were made, plays that appealed to a kind of consensus audience
and that had to obey the rules that Mr. Gilman observes are the rules
that popular culture always has to obey. The basic structure of his
plays, the genres they inherit, the languages they use, the actors they
use-all of these were designed to be forms of popular entertainment,
and the audience that was laying out the money knew very well what
it was buying. What I want to suggest is that the whole distinction
between high and popular culture is a modernist invention. It's the
invention of an academy that has been taught to think of art as
somehow inaccessible to ordinary people and as somehow the special
preserve of professors, and to think of any work that is automatically
accessible as falling into the category of popular art. It seems to me
that the real issue is that criticism is always necessary. There are good
and bad objects, good and bad texts. Maybe a much larger propor–
tion of bad texts or imperfect texts will be written or composed by a
system like our television system, but we will never know that until
we actually subject those stories to the kind of criticism that we are
used to subjecting other forms of drama and narrative to.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: I want to make one small point. I hate to disagree
with so impassioned a statement of a position. But it seems to me
that there's a certain disregard for history in trying to compare the
Shakespearean theater with television. Common sense balks at this
identification, but if common sense is not sufficient to make a
distinction between these two phenomena, then I must make a few
other observations. Is there no distinction, let's say, between John
Donne and "Charlie's Angels"? I'm not aware that there were any
Nielsen ratings, either for Shakespeare or the Elizabethan theater.
Also-I think Dick made this point-you had a real folk theater at
the time and a culture in which a folk art and a folk theater were
possible. A genuine folk theater may not be impossible now, but it
is very unlikely, and I think there are very few instances of it.
If
you
ever talk to anybody who's written television plays or has worked in
a television studio, he will explain what the difference is between the
solitary act of writing a novel when Keith Botsford writes one or Saul
