The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London The City and Its Double

This book examines the cultural phenomenon of the urban crowd in the context of early modern London's population crisis. Munro explores the crowd's double function as a symbol of the city's growth and as the necessary context for the public performance of urban culture. Its central argument is that the figure of the crowd acts as a supplement to the symbolic space of the city, at once providing a tangible referent for urban meaning and threatening the legibility of that meaning through its motive force and uncontrollable energy.

Ian Munro is Associate Professor in the Department of Drama at the University of California, Irvine.

Introduction: Crowded Spaces * Imaginary Numbers: City, Crowd, Theatre * London's Mirror: Civic Ritual and the Crowd * "Shakespeare's London": The Scene of London in the Second Tetralogy and Henry VIII * Distracted Multitude: The Theatre and the Many-Headed Monster * "Rome, etc.": Sejanus, Julius Caesar, and the Prodigious City * "A kind of nothing": Plague Time in Early Modern London
Introduction: Crowded Spaces * Imaginary Numbers: City, Crowd, Theatre * London's Mirror: Civic Ritual and the Crowd * "Shakespeare's London": The Scene of London in the Second Tetralogy and Henry VIII * Distracted Multitude: The Theatre and the Many-Headed Monster * "Rome, etc.": Sejanus, Julius Caesar, and the Prodigious City * "A kind of nothing": Plague Time in Early Modern London