In his ingeniously designed chapters on work and play, Knapp puts the Puritanism of early modern antitheatrical discourses, which argued that the commercial theater disguis ed play as work, into productive tension with the elitism of Adorno and Horkheimer, who argued that commercial cinema threatened to disguise work as play. Because the book, like it objets, balances tension with openness, even readers resisting Knapp's arguments or maintaining the assumptions he
critiques, as this reader did throughout, might nevertheless be pleased - even enriched - by his virtuosic readings of these complex entertainments.
Jeffrey Knapp is the Eggers Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of several books, including An Empire Nowhere: England and America from Utopia to The Tempest (1992), Shakespeare's Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (2002), and Shakespeare Only (2009).