David L. Smith, Richard Strier, and David
Bevington eds. The Theatrical City:
Culture, Theatre and Politics in London 1576-1649.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. xiv + 288 pp. + 22 illustrations.
Lawrence Manley. Literature and Culture in
Early Modern London. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1995. xvi + 603 pp. + 19 illustrations. Review by,
Emma Smith
All Souls College, Oxford ejsmith@vax.ox.ac.uk
Smith, Emma. "Review of The Theatrical City: Culture,
Theatre and Politics in London 1576-1649 and Literature
and Culture in Early Modern London." Early
Modern Literary Studies 1.3 (1995): 14.1-7 <URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/01-3/rev_smi1.html>.
London's growing pre-eminence in early modern England
was noted by contemporary commentators with a mixture
of pride and alarm. Two recent volumes from Cambridge
University Press address the status and operation of
metropolitan self-fashioning in the post-Reformation
period, and offer their contribution to the ongoing
debate about the relationship between literature and
history.
The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and
Politics in London 1576-1649, edited by David
L. Smith, Richard Strier, and David Bevington,
examines early modern London's theatricality through
a refreshingly wide range of texts. The editors'
broad definition of the term "theatrical"
is evident in their choice of dates to enclose the
project: 1576 marks the building of the Theatre, 1649
the dramatic spectacle of the execution of Charles I.
The texts covered include five plays, by Shakespeare,
Dekker, Marston, Jonson and Massinger, John Stow's Survey
of London, Milton's Eikonoklastes
and The Root and Branch Petition. There is a wealth
of interesting historical and literary material, but
the volume is most remarkable for its negotiation of
the traditional construction of the disciplines of
history and literature. The jacket asserts that the
collection of essays "adopts a unique
interdisciplinary approach," and in their
introduction the editors describe how a collaborative
pedagogical venture in the History Department of the
University of Chicago developed into the dialogue
format of the book. The volume consists of pairs of
essays on each text, the first by an historian, the
second by a literary critic. Predicating the
possibility of true interdisciplinarity on the
recognition of disciplinary difference, each
contributor is identified as a member of a university
History or English department, and was invited to
"write within her or his discipline, whatever
she or he took that to mean" (2). The result
seems to be a rather conventional disciplinary
hierarchy in which history provides the context which
English uses to inform its literary analysis. In
effect, this proposes a historicised approach to
literary criticism, rather than a literary approach
to history. Interdisciplinarity exists, in this
volume, not as a methodological position but as a
juxtaposition between two discrete and ranked fields
of study.
To take one example: the two essays on Dekker's The
Shoemakers Holiday. In this pairing, Paul S.
Seaver discusses "The Artisanal World,"
followed by David Bevington's "Theatre as
Holiday." Seaver's footnote references to the Calender
of State Papers, Acts of the Privy
Council and to historians such as Paul Slack,
Steve Rappaport, and Wallace MacCaffrey, establish
his sense of his own discipline, as do Bevington's
(many fewer) citations of Fredson Bowers on
bibliographic matters and other literary critics on
genre and character. Seaver's essay does indeed
provide a fascinating context for Dekker's play. He
studies the economic and social conditions of fin
de siecle London, the structure of the guilds,
and the historical figure of Simon Eyre to illuminate
Dekker's representation of urban tensions and their
resolution. Eyre's rise to the mayoralty, his
relationship with his employees, and the muster which
separates Ralph from Jane, all have their
contemporary counterparts in a London weary of
increased taxation and requisitioning to support
military campaigns in Ireland and the Low Countries,
buffeted by a decade of bad harvests and civic
unrest, and ruled by an ageing and heirless queen.
Seaver appears, however, to subscribe to the view
that history offers the "truth" of the
past, whereas literature can be misleading. He
contrasts Dekker's play with the "real
life" (98) which can be accessed through the
documents he cites as his evidence. On matters such
as Firk's position as a covenanted servant, or on
Jane's entrepreneurship during her supposed
widowhood, Seaver finds the data to corroborate
Dekker's presentation. Other of the play's elements
are not susceptible to this confirmation. Of Eyre's
successful deal with the Dutch merchant, aided by
Hans' money and the borrowed aldermanic robes, Seaver
notes "such events do not happen in real
life" (93).
Bevington's essay begins with a reminder that the
play is just that, a play. Running through an
extensive list of the issues explored in The
Shoemakers Holiday and discussed by Seaver, he
wonders how "Dekker managed to include so much
in a lucid, cheery, fast-moving, five-act
entertainment" (101). His essay takes a close
look at the play's structure and characterisation,
referring occasionally to the preceding essay for
validation, but more often to other dramatic
productions of the period to provide a specifically
theatrical context for elements such as Dekker's use
of the stage Dutchman. Ultimately, Bevington
describes the play as "utopian," and
reverts to Seaver's distinction between the stage and
the "real world" (116). It is disappointing
that neither contributor makes any kind of reference
to the reality of the early modern stage, and its
capacity to shape as well as to reflect social
categories as part of the discursive production of a
theatricalised London. It is noteworthy that neither
questions the validity of the historical context as
an interpretative tool, or suggests that that context
is itself susceptible to interpretation. The effect
of the joint disciplinary approach seems to privilege
the terrain of the historians as the knowable and
factual "real world" of the past, to which
literature adds its own frivolous decoration.
Elsewhere, the volume seems to bear out this view of
interdisciplinary study. Writing about the essays on
the Root and Branch petition, the editorial choice of
words sums up the perceived differences between the
disciplines: the historian's approach is
characterised as "external" while the
literary critic is concerned with the
"internal" (10). It would have been
interesting for the editors to have made more of the
book's pedagogical origins, for many of the issues it
raises, both self-consciously and inadvertently, are
institutional ones and have implications for practice
in research and teaching. The introduction describes
the Chicago course "London: The Theatrical
City" as an intellectually rewarding experience
combining the formal presentations with interventions
by teaching assistants and students, but this
productive vigour has not made the transition to
print. While the individual contributions to the
volume have much to offer, the overall framework
conveys a traditional and limited view of the
possibilities of interdisciplinary dialogue. The
promise of the volume's range of concerns as
indicated in its choice of period, from the building
of the first London theatre to the execution of the
king, the "royal actor," in Marvell's
explicitly theatrical terms, is not fulfilled.
Lawrence Manley's Literature and Culture in
Early Modern London exceeds the boundaries of
disciplinary difference crucial to the hermeneutics
of The Theatrical City to which he is
also a contributor. In his own book, he aims "to
tell a large and complex story by clarifying the
relations between a literature and its society"
(2). The book is, indeed, large and complex, running
to some 600 pages and moving between genres, authors
and registers to map the dynamic culture of early
modern London. Manley works within three overlapping
conceptual frameworks: the transition from feudalism
to capitalism, a concept of "behavioral
urbanization" developed from the work of Max
Weber and more recently Jan de Vries, and the
conflict between order and reform. The greatest
strength of Manley's investigation is his range of
reference. As a historian of London as a
geographical, historical, political, demographic,
economic, and cultural locus, Manley reads across the
disciplines with great confidence. He is alert to the
ways in which the literature of the emerging
metropolis both represents the expanding urban
settlement and is its instrument in a process of
urbanisation. His analysis of the popular
Tudor-Stuart genre of topography combines an
investigation of the gendered identity of the city
with an awareness of the classical and continental
antecedents of the paradigms invoked in descriptions
of London. Other chapters also offer new perspectives
in their consideration of pamphlet culture, civic
ceremonies, satire, and Jacobean city comedy.
Manley's style is episodic, stringing together
sparkling and original passages of great interest,
such as the analysis of the Ship of Fools topos in
Chapter 2, but interspersing them with denser
material which is often summarised from his extensive
secondary reading. There is something rather
indigestible about the book as a whole, and many
readers may find those parts of the work previously
published as articles more approachable in that
tighter format. Manley's vocabulary is sometimes
obscure--"theriomorphism," for example
(89)--and this adds to the intermittent sense on
reading the book of struggling to keep up with his
arguments. The length and complexity of Manley's work
attest to the difficulty of interdisciplinary
research, and certainly, the self-imposed boundaries
of The Theatrical City make for a much
more accessible read. Literature and Culture in
Early Modern London is, however, an ambitious
and important addition to the research on the
intricate interrelations between cultural production
and society in the early modern period.
