The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London
The City and Its Double
Book
Chapter
This book is a study of the figure of the crowd in early modern London. Its context is London’s extraordinary growth in the period: metropolitan London quadrupled in size between 1500 and 1600, and one of the ...
Chapter
The advent of the crowded city, and the significance with which it was invested, is best seen in the initial attempt to eradicate it: Elizabeth’s 1580 proclamation against new building or subdividing of houses...
Chapter
Where do we find “Shakespeare’s London”? The old-fashioned possessive phrase could be interpreted in at least two ways, producing two different, though related, answers. If the expression is cognate to “Shakes...
Chapter
This chapter takes as its focus the relation between dramatic space and theatrical space as it is negotiated in two plays, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Jonson’s Sejanus his Fall. In a number of ways it continu...
Chapter
For James I’s ceremonial entry into London in 1604, seven arches were erected at prominent points in the procession through the city.2 The arches were crowned with various iconographic and allegorical figures: in...
Chapter
At the height of his alienation from the plebeians, Coriolanus expresses his popular revulsion in terms of a paradox:
I would they were barbarians, as they are, Though in Rome litter’d; not Romans,...
Chapter
In 1603, plague killed one in five Londoners in the space of a few months.2 Over thirty thousand died, and thousands more fled the city, causing London virtually to stop. Its streets were deserted, except for the...
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Vice in all its forms dominates Ben Jonson’s late comedy, The Devil is an Ass. The play opens with a minor devil, Pug, begging Satan for permission to travel to London with the morality Vice Iniquity, whom Satan ...