Renaissance Forum: Volume 2, Number 2, Autumn 1997: Nick Cox

David L. Smith, Richard Strier and David Bevington. Eds. 1995. The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576-1649. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 288 pp. ISBN 0-521-44126-9. Ł37.50 / $54.95.

Since the onset of the most recent historicist turn in Renaissance literary studies, in the early nineteen eighties, there has been a vigorous and often productive dialogue between practitioners working within the fields of literary and historical analysis. Whilst it would be wrong to suggest that this signals the onset of a process which will result in the dismantling of all disciplinary boundaries between the subjects, it seems that some form of convergence of interest and of methodology is occurring within early modern studies.
It is within this context that The Theatrical City should be seen and as a model of interdisciplinary collaboration it is an impressive and stimulating example. In their introduction the editors provide some insights into the theoretical bases of both the collection and the pedagogical project out of which it was developed. They explain that the concept of interdisciplinarity which informs the collection is one of 'disciplinary difference'. Each contributor was asked to write 'within her or his discipline, whatever she or he took that to mean' on a text (broadly defined) and then to exchange drafts with a co-author, from the other discipline, working on the same text (2). The title of the collection provides the co-ordinates of a broad conceptual framework within which each of the contributions is written. The 'city' with which each essay engages is London and the question of theatricality is raised not only by the temporal range covered by the volume (from the point of emergence to the moment of closure of the public theatres) but also by the tropes and strategies deployed in the texts under discussion, all of which - the editors suggest - testify 'to the existence of a theatrical culture of conscious dramatisation' (15) in the capital throughout this period.
I will return to some of the important implications raised but, unfortunately, not systematically explored in the editors' introduction later. First however it is important to stress that the product of The Theatrical City is an outstanding contribution to early modern studies which includes examples of some of the very best work currently being undertaken in both disciplines. Despite the editors' suggestion that the term 'theatrical' is used 'in a fairly plastic sense, covering popular as well as elite theatre and even "dramatic" spectacles such as the execution of Charles I' (1), the backbone of the book is provided by readings of relatively conventionally defined theatrical texts. There are some theoretically rigorous, historically sensitive and sophisticated analyses by literature specialists like Louis Montrose, Leah Marcus and Martin Butler, alongside readings by historians which are frequently fresh and instructive. To that extent, the structure of paired essays, around which the text is organised, is undoubtedly successful. There is space here to give none of them the detailed discussion they deserve, nonetheless it is appropriate to mention some of the ways in which this collection provides protocols for historicising these texts without becoming reductive.
One of the most compelling instances of this is the brilliantly nuanced discussion of the 'complex mixture of affection, indulgence, condescension and ridicule' (84) with which the Shakespearean text treats the artisanal festive culture provided by Louis Montrose in his essay on A Midsummer Night's Dream: 'A Kingdom of Shadows'. Montrose's essay, like the self-reflexively revisionist account of Bartholomew Fair given by Leah Marcus, exemplifies the sophisticated historicism which is characteristic of much of the work in the collection. Both essays are concerned to demonstrate the complex and overdetermined relation between the theatres and what Marcus calls 'the pungent mire' (181) of the carnivalesque culture of fair or street drama, from which they were only very precariously differentiated.
From the historian's side, as it were, there are some fine and incisive analyses such as Patrick Collinson's fluent and witty essay which suggests, in a vertiginously postmodern gesture, that Puritanism may have been a fictive product of theatrical performance prior to its installation as a mode of religious and socio-economic subjectivity in the world off-stage. Elsewhere, in an essay on 'The Artisanal World' of The Shoemaker's Holiday, Paul A. Seavers provides a subtle and persuasive blend of historical scholarship and careful textual analysis. Locating the play in the context of the disastrous Tudor fin de sičcle, performed at the end of a decade of war, dearth and plague amidst a gathering aura of corruption and conflict at court, Seaver suggests that the play's fantastic plot motif of meteoric social advancement 'does little to hide or deny the tensions of urban life'. Rather the play 'dramatises these tensions' (95) and apprentice disorders, guild rivalries and the sublimated conflict between artisans and aristocrats are never far from the surface of the text. Bevington's essay (with which this is paired) is equally meticulous in its historicisation and picks up similar dynamics but inserts the text into the straight-jacket of a subversion containment dialectic that rather deadens the tensions opened up in the text by Seaver's analysis.
Apart from The Fawn, a text given theoretically sophisticated and historically informed examination by Frank Wigham and Linda Levy Peck, the other play text discussed is Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts, which is examined in essays by David Lindley and Martin Butler, both of whom situate it within an ideological conflict among the elites of Caroline England between a paternalistic traditionalism and the aggressive pursuit of wealth and power.
The remaining essays in the collection are concerned with texts which, whilst not produced for the stage, are nonetheless revealed as the more or less self-consciously dramatic products of a profoundly theatrical culture. Of these, the opening essays of the collection, by Ian Archer and Lawrence Manley, which offer interpretations of John Stow's Survey of London, are amongst the most critically engaged with the questions of theatricality and of urban space in the collection. Both see in Stow's text a nostalgic attempt to retain a pre-reformation conception of an integrated urban community in an increasingly oligarchic and autocratic City. Whilst Archer suggests that this attachment to a partially mythologised urban past blinded Stow to the new mechanisms through which the urban socius was sustained, Manley suggests that Stow's own text, in its disclosure of 'the sharp disjunctures, sudden expansions and disruptive realignments of contemporary urban space' (52) provides a textual trace of the disruption to the ordered, hierarchical community that other parts of the text seek to recover.
The essays by David L. Smith, Richard Strier, Derek Hirst and Marshall Grossman which end the collection are concerned with texts produced in a London fissured along the faultlines of ideological tensions which were to become the defining rifts of the Civil War. In essays on the Root and Branch petition and the Grand Remonstrance Smith and Strier offer, respectively, a sustained analysis of the religious and political tensions out of which the polarities of the 1640s were precipitated and of the rhetorical strategies and discursive torsions of the texts themselves. Again the pairing is a felicitous one since Strier's avowed concern to provide 'a purely "internal" reading' (244) of these documents is buttressed, rather than negated, I would suggest, by Smith's careful contextualisation. Similarly the lucid excavation of the discursive milieu in which Milton's famous defence of regicide, Eikonoklastes, which Derek Hirst provides in his essay helps us to register the extraordinary vehemence of its attack on the 'king's book' and its royalist martyrology. Grossman's companion piece on Eikonoklastes provides a scintillating conclusion to the collection in which the execution of Charles is read as announcing the point at which the state ceased to be embodied in the figure of the king and came instead to be understood conceptually. This struggle to reduce the king from a body possessed with symbolic presence to an empty and redundant concept is played out in Milton's text, which works to dismember the vestiges of regal corporeality in the Eikon Basilike 'by inserting hostile commentary into a string of always fragmentary quotations' from that text, 'disrupting the king's style by dispersing the king's text and reinscribing it as a series of falsehoods, distortions and thefts' (272).
As I hope these comments suggest, this is a collection that breaks new ground both in terms of the readings of individual texts it offers and the unique conjunction of specialists it brings about. Yet the promise of interdisciplinary 'dialogue' which the collection makes is never as fully realised as one might have hoped. The editors, as I noted at the outset, indicate the philosophical underpinning of the project in a concept of 'disciplinary difference' and conceptualise each contribution as the product of a reading determined by the protocols of interpretation established by that discipline. However this leaves suspended a series of fundamental questions that about the status of 'texts' and 'documents' as they are constituted within the institutional and epistemological parameters of the disciplines.
Some contributors do give passing consideration to such questions; Richard Strier, for example, begins his essay by insisting that 'historical documents become richer as sources of historical insight when they are treated as texts -- that is, when they are read in a strong sense, subjected to "close reading"... rather than being merely mined for hints, clues and facts' (224). Clearly there are assumptions about the normative constraints of certain kinds of historiography implicit in these remarks, but these are left as an isolated gesture in a volume that hints at a radical realignment of literary and historical practice but never ventures beyond partial or provisional accounts of what this might involve.
This slight sensation of an opportunity missed is also felt in relation to both the concepts of theatricality and the city gestured at in the title. Certain essays, such as the two on Stow or the contributions on The Shoemaker's Holiday, engage directly with urban loci and milieus, others - such as the pieces on the representation of court culture in The Fawn - might be understood as offering an expanded conception of the city which includes the court. Again there is, however, no attempt to place the essays, with respect to the concept of the early modern city, beyond that which is merely sketched in the editors' introduction. Similarly 'theatricality', a term of profound significance in the genesis of a theoretical discourse like New Historicism, is never subjected to systematic or rigorous examination as a concept. My point, fundamentally, is that whilst the individual essays in the collection are often brilliant, they tend to operate in isolation from one another and the framework provided by the title is so tentatively and broadly defined at the outset that the reader is in danger of losing sight of it as the collection develops away from the introduction. Nonetheless these problems are at least opened up by The Theatrical City which provides a model of interdisciplinary scholarship which, one hopes, provides a precedent for further collaborative research on early modern culture.

Nick Cox
Manchester Metropolitan University