Let me find another example which can't be confused with Shakespeare. The Beatles wrote music to be enjoyed by the masses, popular music if you will in much the same way Vanilla Ice did. I do assign one more value over the other simply for longevity of the it's presence in and impact on western culture. I will let you guess which one. There's a good reason I can assume which you will guess.
I hardly fault pulp (I tried) for aiming at culture. I am simply rating its aim and potency. What is PHP influencing? How are PHP developers going to advance programming? In 50 years will we be using it? Will there be 30 newer programming langauages that picked up the choice bits from PHP?
It probably doesn't matter and definitely not for programmers today but in conversations evaluating the success or failure of languages these topics will be prime.
Shakespeare's understanding (and manipulation) of the human condition is self-aware, with a wink and a nod.
Pulp, on the other hand, is typified by "Pregnant by the Millionaire." (A real book.) The author may have a certain level of self-loathing (doubt it), but these books are straight for all it's worth.
'Pulp' refers to popularity, not literary merit.
Indeed, imagine a world in which English classes started with bawdy, violence filled plays written to entertain a mostly drunken and illiterate rabble. Then for the second unit, you could maybe read a serializations designed to sell magazines, whose author was paid by the word. Perhaps by the end of the year, you'd be ready for pop-lit writers who had to retcon their stories due to marketing considerations.
Ugh, what a pitiful and impoverished English curriculum it would be if transient crowd-pleasing drek like Shakespeare, Dickens, and Doyle were studied as literature.