The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London: The City and Its Double (review)

Ian Munro's clever and informative account of London in the early modern period takes as its focus the dual nature of the growing metropolis — the city and its people — and argues that the two are inseparable but, surprisingly, finally amount to "nothing." To reach this conclusion, the book explores the complexity of both city and people as represented by the figure of the crowd: "the crowd operated as the visible manifestation of an increasingly incomprehensible city . . . [and as] a powerfully contradictory presence" (1). Drawing upon the prior work of Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, Stephen Greenblatt, Steven Mullaney, and Gail Kern Paster, among others, Munro develops a case for the "illegibility of the crowd, its resistance to being read" (10). Such resistance, Munro maintains, makes the crowd dangerous, both to the state and to itself by virtue of its internal festering and plague-like feeding upon itself.

In chapters 1 and 2 the author sets out the historical background for his study, providing compelling evidence of officials' efforts to contain the growing population of London as well as the growing instability fostered by increased numbers. He argues in the first chapter that the theater was the place where crowds both appeared and were staged, making the role of the playhouse significant in manifesting the symbolic force of London's multitude. The second chapter describes in lively terms the civic pageantry that depended upon the urban crowd for its celebratory quality. Unlike former critics of the Lord Mayor's annual show, however, Munro contends that contemporary accounts of the show reveal a disordered mass, not a unified and accommodating populace.

Chapter 3 lays out the figure of the London crowd as it appears in Shakespeare's Second Tetralogy and Henry VIII. Here Munro seeks to explore the degrees of containment and danger associated with the London population as it provides the backdrop to royal power. Finding the Second Tetralogy marking the city as camera regis, or "monarch's chamber," Munro argues that this set of plays traces a movement from unruly crowds in Richard II and 1 Henry IV to a virtually absent crowd in 2 Henry IV and, finally, to a contained and unified crowd welcoming the triumphant king to London in Henry V. What he also notes, however, is the theatrical effect of the figure of a contained and unified crowd upon the play's urban audience, an effect that produces tension, as the scene receives short shrift only in the Chorus's narrative and as comparisons with Elizabeth's nonmilitary leadership inevitably arise. In the latter half of the chapter Munro claims that Henry VIII reverses the figure of the crowd from one which had been surrounded by the court to one that itself surrounds the "private and protected domains of court theatrics" (92). In the two instances where citizens appear (Anne's coronation procession and Elizabeth's christening procession), Munro alleges that the crowd emerges, not as subversive, but as excessive, "as something more than a setting for the public display of power in early modern England" (103).

In chapter 4 Munro, attempting to clarify the excessiveness he attributes to the crowd, employs the idea of a rhizomatic system (borrowed from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari) to describe "the crowded city [as] both inarticulate and disarticulated, distracted, dismembered — if a body at all, a body without organs" (141). To support this claim he draws upon accounts (both literary and nonliterary) of violent crowds engaged in acts of dismemberment. Such a crowd, Munro asserts, "always bodes" (141).

Chapter 5 addresses this boding through the "prodigious" crowd that is itself a sign or omen in both Julius Caesar and Sejanus. In the former play prodigies herald the assassination of Caesar, while in Sejanus, the "imminent demise of Sejanus . . . causes Rome suddenly to become...