- The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London: The City and Its Double
Put broadly, Ian Munro's book deploys the concept of the crowd so as to make a pair of interventions in early modern urban studies. The Figure of the Crowd opens by tracing a dominant strand in recent work that it will then argue against—a strand that defines the story of London as one whereby "fears of social and cultural chaos" (8) were largely contained as the city grew from medieval community to bona fide metropolis. Munro takes exception to this scholarly trend—one that includes the work of Lawrence Manley, Ian Archer, and many others—instead placing emphasis on "the instability of London" and specifically on "the symbolic chaos produced by the crowd" (9). In his focus on the crowd and the symbolic disruptions it could produce, Munro also intervenes within literary studies, taking issue with work such as Steven Mullaney's The Place of the Stage (1988) and Stephen Greenblatt's Shakespearean Negotiations (1988). Such work, Munro argues, either overlooks or mischaracterizes the role of the crowd in public spectacle and in the "theatricalization" (25) of power more generally. While Mullaney's account of early modern social ceremony, for example, "effectively highlights the intended effect of public ritual" in showing how "the official theatricalization of urban space sought to produce urban legibility and urban clarity"(26), Munro remarks that Mullaney minimizes the degree to which such attempts were dependent on "the framing action of the onlookers" (26). The crowd, Munro contends, could and often did react in ways understood as unintended, uncontrollable, and chaotic, ways sure to undermine hierarchical structures.
As he defines the role of the overlooked crowd, Munro covers considerable theatrical and theoretical ground. His book should thus be of interest to a wide range of scholars, not only Shakespeareans but also those interested in the fields of English Renaissance drama, urban studies, and space theory. On the theory side, Munro analyzes early modern London and its crowds with reference to Michel de Certeau's Practice of Everyday Life (1984), Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power (1962), and Henri Lefebvre's Production of Space (1991). To explain the undoing of urban order, Munro draws most extensively on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987); in particular, he invokes the distinction that book draws between "arborescent" and "rhizomatic" spatial [End Page 106] systems (38). Whereas the former, associated with royal and patrician interests, is hierarchical, clearly arranged as a set of fixed, discrete, mappable, and locatable elements, the latter system, which Munro associates with the urban crowd, operates according to "principles of connectivity and heterogeneity, where any segment of the multiplicity can connect to any other," making urban space appear incoherent and "ungraspable" (39).
Combined with copious recourse to historical records (proclamations against urban building and subdividing, as well as accounts of the Lord Mayor's show, coronation ceremonies, and other civic pageantry), Munro uses theory to illuminate an impressive number of theatrical texts. These include works by Dekker, Middleton, Jonson, Fletcher, Marston, and Shakespeare. (Having said that, let me add a word of caution: those interested in city comedy will find only a couple of pages [48–49] of justification, sounding reasonable to this reader, of why city comedy is excluded from his study.) The most sustained engagements are with Dekker, Jonson (especially his Sejanus), and, of course, Shakespeare himself. Munro treats a number of history plays, including the second tetralogy and Henry VIII, as well as two Roman plays—Julius Caesar and Coriolanus. The readings, while often quite short, are usually also quite compelling; Munro effectively attends not only to isolated stretches of theatrical text, but to the meaning of rhetorical progressions within texts (see his reading of Henry VIII for examples of this) and to relations among texts. In this last respect, Munro's comparative account of Shakespeare's histories in chapter 3 is especially successful...