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Mass Entertainment Before Mass Entertainment

Most theorists of mass entertainment restrict the phenomenon to the machine age. This essay argues that mass entertainment is more cogently defined in relation to the audience for whom it is intended rather than to the technologies for its production and distribution. To prove the point, the essay uses such key modern commentary on mass entertainment as Walter Benjamin’s “Work of Art” essay, Horkheimer and Adorno’s “Culture Industry” essay, and Noël Carroll’s book on A Philosophy of Mass Art to illuminate a Renaissance English city comedy, The Roaring Girl. At the same time, The Roaring Girl helps the essay critique the bias toward reductive totalization in these and other modern accounts of the mass audience.