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Abstract
Many texts of early modern London are fascinated with crowds. The city’s growth and resulting crowdedness were essential to the city’s theatrical spaces, as the presence of crowds ‘turn[ed] London into a theater’. But even as it is celebrated as a symbol of civic life, evocations of the urban crowd brim with anxiety over its illegibility and unsettling of the very performance space it helps to create. This article re-assesses the London crowd as just such an essential but essentially unstable spatial and rhetorical phenomenon. Working with an array of period texts, this article reads their figuring of the urban crowd specifically in terms of Soja’s socio-spatial theory of Thirdspace and the improvisational power of urban spatial relations.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Drs Andrew Gordon, Tracey Hill, and Adam Zucker, and to my fellow participants in the 2019 SAA seminar, ‘London as a Theatrical Space’.
Notes
1 Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, The Roaring Girl, ed. P.A. Mulholland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 1.2.12–20. All subsequent references to the play are to this edition and will be made in-text.
2 See: ‘Orazio Busino’s Eyewitness Account of The Triumphs of Honour and Industry’, ed. and transl. K.D. Levin, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. G. Taylor and J. Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 1264–70. All subsequent references to this text are to this edition and will be made in-text.
3 K. Newman, Cultural Capitals: Early Modern London and Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 62.
4 Ibid., 69.
5 Ibid.
6 I. Munro, The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London: The Crowd and Its Double (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 5. Historians continue to debate the significance and the makeup of the urban crowd as part of the explosive growth of early modern London and attendant pressure on civic order. In recent work published in The London Journal, John Walter focuses on the role of apprentices in urban riots that marked the 1590s’ ‘crisis’. See J. Walter, ‘“A Foolish Commotion of Youth?” Crowds and the Crisis of the 1590s in London’, The London Journal, 44:1 (2019), 17–36.
7 K.J. Stage, Producing Early Modern London (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 22. Stage’s published work has investigated questions of London and space for some time; she is one of a growing number of literary critics and historians for whom the field of critical geography and the spatial theories of De Certeau and LeFebvre offer potent ways of reading and understanding early modern cities.
8 Munro, Figure, 5. As Munro notes and others have observed, many similarities exist between De Certeau’s and LeFebvre’s interest in theorising the ‘everyday’ in cultural practices and representation, especially in terms of urban space. While both articulate an important distinction and tension between the planned and officially conceived city and the unmappable, everyday practices of residents that also produce it, LeFebvre theorises a tripartite interaction instead of De Certeau’s binary. As Claire Lauer glosses, ‘a binary between material and metaphorical Space … forces one conception of space over another. This binary is one that both Lefebvre and Soja bring together through an act of “thirding” to produce a triad that includes lived space’ (57). Edward Soja’s theorising of ‘Thirdspace’, referenced in this article, derives directly from LeFebvre’s triadic — and highly dynamic — understanding of physical, social and psychic factors in the production of the urban. See: C. Lauer, ‘Constructing the Self in/as Thirdspace: New Potentials for Identity Exploration in the Composition Classroom’, Composition Studies, 37.2 (2009), 53–74.
9 The significance and complexity of civic and royal pageantry and theatrics in the period has been established and explored at length by David Bergeron, whose vast body of research has launched much subsequent critical interest, including my own. See especially: D.M. Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, 1558–1642 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1971).
10 T. Hill, Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor’s Show, 1585–1639 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 11.
11 See: A. Higgins, ‘Streets and Markets’, in J.D. Cox and D.S. Kastan (eds), A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 77–92; and G. Kipling, ‘Wonderful Spectacles: Theater and Civic Culture’, in Cox and Kastan (eds), A New History, 153–172. This type of critical assent also can be found in Bergeron.
12 Thomas Dekker, Britannia’s Honour (London, 1628), sig. B3v.
13 G.K. Paster, The Idea of the City in the Age of Shakespeare (Athens: University of Georgia Press 1985), 127–128; L. Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 214.
14 Hill, Pageantry and Power, 135.
15 Ibid., 28. Benjamin Klein echoes this interest in the physical, embodied realities of the crowded streets as a component of civic pageantry’s signification. Likewise, James Knowles scrutinises the rhetorical effect of rituals like the annual Lord Mayor’s show, including the rhetorical power of unscripted, unplanned elements. See: B. Klein, ‘“Between the bums and bellies of the multitude”: Civic Pageantry and the Problem of the Audience in Late Stuart London’, The London Journal, 17:1 (1992), 18–26; and J. Knowles, ‘The Spectacle of the Realm: Civic Consciousness, Rhetoric, and Ritual in Early Modern London’, in J.R. Mulryne, Margaret Shewring (eds), Theatre and Government under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 157–189.
16 Munro, Figure, 1.
17 Ibid.
18 E.W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996). Soja’s reinterpretation and application of Lefebvre towards the concept of ‘Thirdspace’ has been influential across disciplines since this work first appeared in the 1990s, including urban studies, ethnic studies, film studies, literary studies, and rhetoric and composition. Ian Munro cites Soja as part of his discussion of LeFebvre in The Figure of the Crowd (2005), but does not fully distinguish the nature of the ‘trialectic’ Soja formulates, versus that of LeFebvre.
19 Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys, 10–11.
20 Ibid., 11.
21 Lauer, ‘Constructing the Self in/as Thirdspace’, 57.
22 Ibid.
23 Thomas Dekker, The Magnificent Entertainment Given to King James, in Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, Volume 2. ed. F. Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 254, 258.
24 A. Stock, ‘“Something Done in Honour of the City”: Ritual, Theatre and Satire in Jacobean Civic Pageantry’, in D. Miehl, A. Stock, and A. Zwierlein (eds), Plotting Early Modern London: New Essays on Jacobean City Comedy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 135.
25 Munro, Figure, 62.
26 Lauer, ‘Constructing the Self in/as Thirdspace’, 57.
27 Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys, 2.
28 ll. 100–10. K. Levin, ed., ‘Orazio Busino Eye-Witness Account’, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds. Taylor and Lavagnino, 1266.
29 See: ‘An Account by Aleksei Ziuzin’, eds. M. Jansson and N. Rogozhin, transl. Paul Bushkovitch, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds. Taylor and Lavagnino (Oxford, 2007), 977–79. All subsequent references to this text are to this edition and will be made in-text.
30 See: Bergeron and Hill, who each detail discrepancies between different pageant-books and existing eye-witness accounts. See also: J.P. Lusardi and H. Gras, ‘Abram Booth’s eye-witness account of the 1629 Lord Mayor’s Show’, Shakespeare Bulletin, 11 (Summer 1993), 19–23.
31 Quotation from editors’ opening footnote: Jansson and Rogozhin, ‘An Account by Aleksei Ziuzin’, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds. Taylor and Lavagnino, 977.
32 Jansson and Rogozhin, ‘An Account’, 978n.
33 Munro, Figure, 63.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., 64.
36 Thomas Middleton, The Triumphs of Truth, ed. D.M. Bergeron, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, eds. Taylor and Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 963–76. All subsequent references to this text are to this edition and will be made in-text.
37 Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys, 2.
38 Stock, ‘Something Done in Honour’, 136.
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Heather C. Easterling
Heather C. Easterling is Professor of English at Gonzaga University in Spokane, WA, where she also teaches courses for the Women's and Gender Studies department. A specialist in the city-drama and theatrical culture of early modern London, she is the author of Parsing the City: Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, and Early Modern London as Language (2007), and recently co-edited for Arden Shakespeare The Taming of the Shrew: The State of Play (2021).