[Eva]

Pop culture is a phenomon of the 20th century. It didn't exist in Shakespeare's time. Pop culture arose to fill the vacuum left by the increasing lack of art and increased amounts of free time. It was a kind of self perpetuating thing, capitalism and the industrial age at first filled all the time that would have been dedicated to the arts, then those same elements created more free time that people were unable to fill with the arts.

[Borges]

The Elizabethan theater is really the birthplace of pop culture. Secular entertainment if you will. Dickens was most definitely pop culture. Read by everyone from the washerwoman to Queen Victoria. Cinema is the closest 20th century correlative to the 19th century novel (which very few at the time thought was Art...the definition of which always changes anyway).