Renaissance Forum: Volume 3, Number 1, Spring 1998: Dermot Cavanagh

Lawrence Manley. 1995. Literature and Culture in Early Modern London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. xvi + 603 pp. ISBN 0-521-46161-8. Ł40.00.

As its title, and length, suggests, Lawrence Manley's study is of unusual range and ambition and succeeds in making a major contribution to our understanding of early modern London: 'the largest and most widely experienced human creation in Britain' (1). His work also contests a number of dominant assumptions and practices in contemporary historical and literary scholarship.
Manley's argument is that the solvent effect of urbanisation on the broader social and economic order has been under-estimated in recent analyses of the internal stability of the capital's social structure. Similarly, in contrast to a critical culture which emphasises the particularity of the historical moment and stresses the significance of marginal phenomena, this study develops a defiantly grand narrative concerning the growing centralisation of authority. London is defined as the economic catalyst for the transition from feudalism to capitalism, a development administered and arbitrated by its key social institutions. The extraordinary outpouring of cultural forms that issued from Reformation to Revolutionary London is interpreted as an expression of and reflection upon this momentous change. The book's presiding theme is the relationship between literary texts -- broadly interpreted to include canonical works such as Utopia, Paradise Lost, The Faerie Queene, Shakespearean and Jonsonian comedy, as well as a profusion of ballads, civic pageants, pamphlets, topographies, histories, epics, satires -- and urbanisation. It considers how cultural forms embodied and investigated the new 'mentalities of settlement' associated with an urban environment and the struggles which accompanied the new mobility of markets, classes and individuals.
Manley's conceptual categories are broadly Marxist: Perry Anderson's understanding of the absolutist state underpins his interpretation of political processes and Robert Brenner's analysis of rural capitalism, the growth of urban commerce and the consequent rise of a new merchant class are integral to his conception of historical change. The influence of Fredric Jameson's understanding of narrative as a symbolic language which can reconcile as well as explore social tensions is also pervasive. London provided unique opportunities to reflect on both the emancipation offered by new social and economic forces as well as inviting more critical responses to their limitations. His study conceives of Elizabethan and Jacobean London as characterised by a 'neofeudal' synthesis in which new types of commercial production, public association, and political ideas are at work in a society still dominated by a feudal aristocracy and its late-medieval conceptions of social obligation. Such divisions led to a running conflict over appropriate ideas of order and of reform; Manley reads cultural material, primarily, as participating in this crucial political debate. In his concluding sections, English society is depicted as definitively aligned with bourgeois practises and ethics in the seventeenth century. London is viewed as integral to this historical movement, and its difficult, often disruptive progress is expressed in its cultural productions.
These premises -- which are elaborated with a sophistication belied by rapid summary -- inform an interpretative approach of great explanatory power. This is brought to bear on a wealth of literary material, understood as a 'creative elaboration of consciousness' which London elicited and helped to shape. In particular, the study is strikingly aware of the structural contradictions involved in cultural responses to social transition. The dialectical structure of Utopia is read, for example, as embodying the tensions produced by the emergence of alternative modes of public service; More is perceived as a 'conflicted citizen', caught between loyalties to the burgeoning civic ethos of London, and a feudal attachment to the crown. Book I is everywhere alert to the oppressive domination of a part of the community over the whole and yet the image of equal, reciprocal distribution at the heart of Utopian society, in Book II, can be achieved only by denying its practical realisation in the centralisation of authority. Such a resourceful awareness of the ambivalence which can inform literary genres is also present in his interpretation of the broader tradition of Tudor social complaint. In these, a feudal outlook is transformed in the circumstances of its application. The call in such texts for radical reform depends precisely on the radical concentration of power which only London could accommodate. Similarly, the basic social distinctions intrinsic to the new urban environment -- distinctions between wealth and dearth, city and country, power and powerlessness -- are reinforced as inevitable social facts in the very moment of being deplored.
The consistency and strength of Manley's approach lies in this sensitivity to the dialectical implications which attend both the internal reflections and the objective status of urban cultural forms. On one hand, it is part of the social agency of texts to help constitute new forms of social awareness. On the other, they have a capacity to uncover the contradictions, discontinuities and incompatibilities in the new political and economic priorities which accompany London's ascendancy. In its two lengthy central sections -- 'Fictions of Settlement' -- the book explores the fruitful interchange between civic and courtly social forms in these terms to analyse the development of a major urban literature. Assumptions concerning Spenser's lack of interest in the urban environment are overturned in tracing the accommodation The Faerie Queene achieves between the endeavours associated with a commercial citizenry and traditional aristocratic conceptions of honour, loyalty, and service. The significance Spenser attributes to the 'emergence of a Tudor capital' is also discerned in the poem's investment in a providential conception of civic glory integral to the future destiny of empire. Yet, Manley's reading is also attuned to the 'dialectically open' nature of Spenser's text, its capacity to acknowledge the conflicting forces from which this new social order arises and its permanently unstable dynamics. The ambivalent possibilities of encomiastic forms are further explored in the book's detailed account of London's civic pageantry, interpreted as charting the changing political relationships between the capital and the Crown in ways which manifest the city's vitality and accomplishments as much as the effects of royal influence.
The study then turns to engage with popular forms, especially texts which were designed for the marketplace and the new culture industries of publishing, the public theatre and popular entertainment. Here, the increase in pamphlet writing -- with its insistent parodying of 'official' discourses, especially that of the sermon -- is interpreted as 'a response to the inadequacies of traditional institutions and concepts to an urbanising world' (299). In a sensitive reading of Nashe, Greene and Dekker, the scandalous 'estatelessness' that characterised the social position of the pamphleteer is explored; such marginality also provided a unique advantage in responding to all that was challenging, anomalous, and novel in urban life. 'Pamphlet morals' are understood as attempting to establish a more inclusive and viable social ethic; in rendering 'the social order as institutionalised rivalry and strife' (374), any rigid view of the necessity for social stratification was exposed. Similarly, the claim for an unprecedented degree of moral autonomy and independence of judgement discernible in the vogue for satire and epigrams in the later sixteenth century, is also understood as furthering the emergence of a distinctively metropolitan mentality. In satire, the genre expresses the darkest suspicion of discriminating minds that society is composed of structures and functions which have no intrinsic moral basis. Proverbs and epigrams also help distinguish 'the nimble, antagonistic, aggressive wit that traditionally marked the speaker as urbane' (414). When such modes are absorbed into the theatrical genre of city comedy, their odd symbiosis with romance forms is interpreted as expressing the urban conflict between the forces of community and competition.
In his concluding section, Manley examines the dissemination of metropolitan norms and values throughout the apparently divided literary culture of the seventeenth century. The fruitful tension between courtly and popular forms is depicted as being displaced by more narrowly classicized and elitist literary idioms, dominated by the 'august style'. From Jonson onwards, a growing emphasis is placed on discrimination, an art practised by those sophisticated enough to participate in the pleasures afforded by a refined urban culture. More ingeniously, an unexpected continuity is demonstrated between such codes and their apparent opposites in puritan and republican writings which share a similar understanding of the distinctive authority of the capital. Radical writing is understood as pursuing a national transformation in the image and likeness of London, an autonomous and self-supporting community whose liberty depends on an ethic of interdependence.
Given the dimensions of Manley's project any criticism of it is bound to appear carping. If the style of the book is at times laboriously composed, it is carrying a prodigious amount of scholarship. Similarly, if the argument indulges in occasional repetitions, they are a consequence of controlling a thesis through an impressive range of divergent material.
Perhaps two critical points are of sufficient substance to qualify the book's claims. For all of its erudition the argument does rest on some simply conceived political and historical categories. 'Absolutism', for example, is a highly contentious concept and its adequacy for describing the dominant structure of early modern authority required more careful discrimination. This also applies to a range of key terms -- 'feudalism', 'bourgeois', 'capitalism' -- which function as a kind of short-hand for describing highly involved social processes. The continuing value of such categories depends upon acknowledging challenges to their utility, perhaps at the expense of Manley's elaborate treatment of cultural texts.
A more telling absence in the book is its inattentiveness to women's roles and writing and it is here that the inflexibility of Manley's interest in class-formation is in question. For all of its historical range not a single female writer appears in his study and the wealth of scholarship that has appeared in this area -- as well as the significance of urbanisation for women's history -- is unexamined. Although Manley can write brilliantly on gender in relation to the 'manliness' of Elizabethan pamphleteers, his analysis of social change is not inflected by any interest in its impact on early modern women.
Despite these strictures, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London is an outstanding achievement which makes a convincing case for urbanisation as a key category in understanding the relationships between society and culture. It will be impossible to consider many of the texts and practices Manley has analysed so ably without an awareness of his findings.

DERMOT CAVANAGH
UNIVERSITY OF NORTHUMBRIA