Popular culture in historical times

[alice]

Dammit, this should have gone into the "Conlangery" forum.

This is a good subject for making your conworlds seem more alive. Consider the following remark, which one might use to assert one's presumed sociocultural superiority over another:

Why do you X Y? That is so lame! Anyone with any credibility X's Z! Everybody knows that!

A contemporary example has X = "listen to", Y = a popular musical artist, Z = a less popular but more 'credible' musical artist.

What would have been an equivalent in (for example) Roman imperial times, the Middle Ages, Elizabethan London, or Georgian London when consumerism had started to become common among the middle classes? I imagine one Roman one might have X = "follow, support" and Y and Z = two of the chariot-racing teams, where the relative successes of Y and Z have particular and possibly very sensitive connotations.

Or, in shorter form: what would be typical popular-cultural reference points?

[zompist]

I think pop culture is the offspring of printing and broadcasting. That isn't to say that there wasn't popular art, but the logistics weren't great for supporting the sort of fandom and snobbery you're describing. It's hard to say that everybody should see X when X is limited to certain playhouses or taverns or whatever.

You can find it, of course, in elite art (and elite art is pretty much all we have from all premodern cultures). Making fun of other people's tastes is an ancient pastime.

And of course there could be regional prejudices. One of the few jokes in the New Testament is Nathanael's reaction when his friends tell him the Messiah has been found in Nazareth: "Can anything good come from Nazareth?"

[fusijui]

"No popular culture before you have a populace," to very slightly rephrase something I was told as a child.

[sasasha]

A response re Elizabethan London off the top of my head that could no doubt be better researched...

I’m pretty sure there were rivalries between theatre troupes, though not sure about partisan loyalty to one or another.

From the POV of zomp’s metric, they had a pretty large reach ‒ in some theatres they played to hundreds at a time, both rich and poor, and played frequently. You could get through quite a bit of London at that rate.

Thinking about pastimes mentioned in Shakespeare plays and contemporary madrigals, normal(-ish) folk seemed to play outdoor strategy games such as (the big version of) nine men’s morris, and barley-break ‒ which became a euphemism along the lines of rolling in the hay. Aristocrats and royals, on the other hand, played games that required specialist premises (which weren’t just a field that you could modify quickly with a spade) e.g. tennis; by the time of James I London had 14 tennis courts (rather different from that of lawn tennis) and tennis comes up a surprising amount in the history of the era as there was what arguably amounts to a craze for it amongst the nobility. There’s also the apocryphal story about Sir Francis Drake being interrupted during his game of lawn bowls by the sightings of the Armada, and declaring there was time to finish the game and still beat the Spaniards.

So there’s a bit of an obvious split with noble sporting culture = games with specialised courts and lawns, common sporting culture = games in muddy fields. And theatre was for everyone ‒ but what kind of theatre?

Shakespeare plays were sometimes ridiculed by contemporaries for not containing a lot of Latin. Of course that’s one reason they became so popular ‒ but you can imagine partisan lines being drawn around such factors.

I think fashion was another highly significant cultural battleground.

And then there’s religion! I reckon partisan attitudes to religion (that permeated all levels of society, many cultural spheres e.g. music, and produced staunch factions) were the Elizabethans’ best answer to modern pop-culture.