And the Hi, welcome back to Conversations. I'm Bill Crystal and welcome back to

Conversations. I'm Bill Crystal and welcome back to Paul Cantor. We've had one

conversation on Shakespeare and now we're going to go from the high to the low from Shakespeare to popular culture.

You're going to correct me.

I resemble that remark.

I'm wrong to even associate popular culture with the low, right?

I think I am wrong, right? So explain.

Okay, the problem is that people identify certain media with popular culture as if

television is simply popular culture and if television is

simply popular culture and is low.

My thesis is that in every medium,

we have both the high and the low,

whether it's drama, whether it's the novel,

whether it's movies, whether it's the novel, whether it's movies, whether it's television.

And I would never question that there's a lot of low stuff on television, but I'd just say there

were a lot of low things among Shakespeare's fellow dramatists and the same with the 19th century

novel and many of these other areas of culture. What I object to is the

identification of high and low with different media as if let's say the novel was high and television was inevitably low.

I say we get the high and low in all different media, all different branches of culture.

No, that's a good corrective.

And in fact, though, you've talked about a recent golden age of television and you've even

said that if Shakespeare were alive today he might write for television?

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