13
London

Ian Munro

When we say that we know a city, what is it that we know? Late in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the reader (who is, in another sense, the Renaissance traveler Marco Polo (1254–1324), or perhaps the emperor Kublai Khan (1215–1294), who hears Polo’s descriptions of the cities of his vast empire) reaches Eudoxia, a city of “winding alleys, steps, dead ends, hovels,” which is notable for containing a beautiful carpet “in which you can observe the city’s true form” ([1972] 1979, 76). Although the carpet resembles the city in no obvious way, a close perusal of its lines and “symmetrical motives” makes the connection clear:

But if you pause and examine it carefully, you become convinced that all the things contained in the city are included in the design, arranged according to their true relationship, which escapes your eye distracted by the bustle, the throngs, the shoving. All of Eudoxia’s confusion, the mules’ braying, the lampblack stains, the fish smell is what is evident in the incomplete perspective you grasp: but the carpet proves that there is a point from which the city shows its true proportions, the geometrical scheme implicit in its every, tiniest detail. (76)

Thus those who are lost in the city consult the carpet to discover their destinations, and each citizen “compares the carpet’s immobile order with his own image of the city,” in search of “an answer, the story of his life, the twists of fate” (76). Asked about “the mysterious bond between two objects so dissimilar as the carpet and the city,” an oracle replied that one object “has the form the gods gave the starry sky,” while the other is an “approximate reflection, like every human creation” (76). While it was assumed that “the carpet’s harmonious pattern was of divine origin,” the story concludes, the opposite deduction is also possible: “that the true map of the universe is the city of Eudoxia, just as it is, a stain that spreads out shapelessly, with crooked streets, houses that crumble one upon the other amid clouds of dust, fires, screams in the darkness” (77).

The subject of this chapter is the epistemologies of early modern London, how critics over the past generation have approached the topic of the city, and where this critical discourse might move (or might be moving) now. I began with Calvino’s parable because it offers a complex, perhaps cautionary, tale about how urban representation and urban knowledge work. The carpet – a textile artifact that recalls the etymology of text, at once narratival in its threads and “motives,” and spatial in its geometries and patterns – substitutes for Eudoxia itself because it is more useful, more orderly, and more legible. The implications of this substitution extend to Polo’s description of Eudoxia, itself a tightly woven, harmonious, and elegant representation of “a stain that spreads out shapelessly.” Not only does this report necessarily replace the real city for Kublai Khan, but by this point in the book we (and the emperor) have long known that all of Polo’s cities are only imaginary: rather than providing Kublai Khan with detailed knowledge of his imperial possessions, Polo invents places that describe different aspects of his own, unrecoverable city, Venice. The carpet‐city is thus at least doubly virtual, a representation of a representation.

It seems appropriate that Renaissance Venice would stand as a kind of origin point for these urban virtualities, given its modern status as less a city than a unified work of art. “Venice, more than any other place, bears witness to the existence, from the sixteenth century on, of a unitary code or common language of the city,” Henri Lefebvre declares in The Production of Space, through which “everyday life and its functions are coextensive with, and utterly transformed by, a theatricality as sophisticated as it is unsought, a sort of involuntary mise‐en‐scène” (Lefebvre [1974] 1991, 73–74). For Lefebvre space is a social production, something that has meaning because of how it is practiced, and it is mainly through the work of Lefebvre, directly or indirectly, that we have come to understand the experience of space, especially urban space, in terms of the social practices and relations that constitute it. In Lefebvre’s model, Venice is a kind of relic, an improbable remnant of a common socio‐spatial legibility destroyed by capitalism; by venerating it in these terms, he creates a crucial foil for his critique of modern urban experience, which lacks this animating theatricality. In Venice alone, by virtue of its architectural unity, it is still possible to imagine a world in which social practices, “everyday life and its functions,” are lucid and coherent, as if they are performed upon an urban stage. One might say that Eudoxia’s carpet creates such a theatricality for a city whose shapelessness cannot create it for itself, inscribing an urban code that renders it legible, mappable, and meaningful – although it is important to note that in this comparison the scene of the mise‐en‐scène is reversed. Instead of holding the carpet in their mind while they walk the streets of the city, the inhabitants of Eudoxia conjure up their image of the real city while they contemplate the carpet, indoors: what the artifact provides is thus not an urban theatricality but a theatrical city, necessarily experienced at a remove from the real thing.

As modern critics of early modern London, artifacts are all we have to contemplate, as we attempt to find our way through our unrecoverable city, and we therefore tend to read from available signifiers to unavailable signifieds, to ground an overarching and coherent picture of urban experience in the objects, especially the representations, that have survived. These representations – the early modern period’s extraordinary efflorescence of urban plays, masques, pageants, histories, satires, poems, ballads, epigrams, maps, engravings, diagrams, panoramas, and so on – seem an almost‐inexhaustible archive of urban knowledge, a principal reason London emerged as a preeminent focus of early modern historicism over the past quarter century. While it is perhaps wrong to generalize about such an extensive and varied body of critical work, it would be fair to say that the dominant approach has been to construct early modern London as an urban space engaged in an ongoing process of making new sense of itself. In his seminal Literature and Culture in Early Modern London, Lawrence Manley characterized urban writing in the period as responding to political and social anxieties about London’s population growth, its expansion and densification, the rise of new economic systems, and increasingly fluid social hierarchies; by establishing “fictions of settlement,” urban representation provided a dialectical space in which the relationship between past, present, and future Londons could be articulated and new understandings of the mutable city might be framed (Manley 1995, 125–167). Within the critical tradition exemplified by Manley’s work (see also Orlin 2000, Smith, Strier, and Bevington 1995, and Dillon 2000), representations act as urban travelers, exploring and mapping the terrain of a city that economic and demographic forces have rendered illegible. Such a critical perspective is especially predicated on one extraordinary traveler: John Stow’s 1598 Survey of London (Stow [1598] 1908), which catalogues the city by ward, street, and building, detailing the historical events and civic practices of each location. It is from Stow that we most vividly derive our sense of early modern London’s loss of spatial coherence and meaning – as the Survey extensively chronicles the infilling of properties, the degradation of former monastic areas, the spread of suburban development, the loss of open spaces, the decline of public ritual, the crowding of streets, and so on – as well as our sense that a work like the Survey might seek to rectify these changes. As Andrew Gordon has argued, by leading “the reader on a tour of each ward … designed to foster a textual experience of urban community,” Stow’s Survey “proposes itself as complementary to the experience of inhabiting London” (2013, 112, 115). As with Eudoxia’s carpet, however, the complement becomes the replacement: “Stow’s text comes to substitute for the city,” Gordon observes, “stand[ing] in place of the phenomenological experience of space itself” (118, 153).

As modern critics use early modern representations to ascertain what “everyday life and its functions” looked like for early modern London, the space of the city is often expressly fashioned in Lefebvrian terms, as a kind of theater in which social relations are made manifest. When the specific subject of analysis is the early modern theater itself, this tendency is reinforced, so that the act of representation constitutes an active theatricalization of urban space, inscribing legible meaning onto its increasingly illegible body. “The theater helped to make sense of city life,” Jean Howard asserts in Theater of a City, a work that might be taken as paradigmatic of recent criticism of urban theater in the period: “In invoking the places of the city and filling them with action, the plays … construct the city and make it intelligible” (2007, 12, 23). In describing London as a “theater of a city,” a phrase that evokes Lefebvre’s “involuntary mise en scène,” Howard uses a particular idea of theatrical space to define urban space, and vice versa. City and theater are mutually framed as rational spaces of knowledge: to know the city is to know its dense network of social practices, as represented by the theater in legible terms; the work of the theater, in complementary fashion, is defined as representing the urban reality that surrounds it with clarity. Yet theatricality and representation are not coextensive terms: “the theatrical medium,” as Samuel Weber has argued, cannot be reduced to “a means of meaningful representation” (2004, x). What makes theatrical experience something more, or something other, than an epistemological space is the process of representation itself: “signifying always leaves something out and something over,” Weber continues, “an excess that is also a deficit, or, as Derrida has formulated it, a ‘remainder’ … It is the irreducibility of this remainder that, ultimately, renders language theatrical and theatricality significant” (x). In one sense, this theatrical remainder might be linked to the mechanical apparatus of staging, the physical medium whereby representation takes place; in another sense, it might be linked to those phenomena that elude or exceed the space of representation.

Calvino’s parable tells us what this remainder might look like in an urban context: “winding alleys, steps, dead ends, hovels … the bustle, the throngs, the shoving … the mules’ braying, the lampblack stains, the fish smell.” Such chaotic, mobile elements, and “all of Eudoxia’s confusion,” are deemed insignificant to the city’s meaning because they cannot be made legible within the representational fictions of the carpet (for critical works attentive to such non‐legible urban elements, see especially Newman 2007, Harris 2008, and Stanev 2014). Moreover, it is only in relation to the “geometrical scheme” of the carpet that Eudoxia is merely “a stain that spreads out shapelessly.” Describing the panoramic view of New York City from the top of the World Trade Center as a “fiction of knowledge,” Michel de Certeau remarks, “It transforms the bewitching world by which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before one’s eyes” ([1980] 1984, 92). He then contrasts this “immense texturology … a representation, an optical artifact” to the ambulatory practices of the city’s inhabitants: “The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other … A migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city” (93). This urban writing, “the bustle, the throngs, the shoving,” is knowledge of a different order than representation: it is not useful knowledge, and through its lack of utility it eludes capture by representational strategies.

I

In previous work, I have used de Certeau’s idea of the migrational city to talk about the urban crowd, and crowdedness in general, as a kind of urban meaning without place in early modern London (Munro 2005). In what follows, I want to talk about the city in motion in a somewhat different way, to explore some of the implications of a mobile theatricality – a concept that might make phrases like “theater of a city” take on different significances. In this exploration, my theoretical model is mostly drawn from A Thousand Plateaus ([1980] 1987), by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari – in particular, their tracing of a “nomadology” that stands in opposition to static epistemologies. Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology begins with an anthropological fable, in which they imagine nomadic, itinerant collectives of herders and warriors whose way of life stands in direct opposition to the stratified social apparatus of the state or polis. Encountering the nomadic collective, the state seeks not only to neutralize its threat but also to capture it, to capitalize on its martial power. Yet once captured, the nomadic extends beyond its initial martial domain, becoming a kind of viral or rhizomatic ordering system working within the space of the polis yet remaining other to it. These rival ordering systems are especially understood in spatial terms, which Deleuze and Guattari illustrate through an opposition between two board games, chess and Go. Chess pieces are ranked, have intrinsic properties, and interact according to established rules on a bounded, checkered board. Go pieces, on the other hand, are interchangeable discs that only acquire meaning positionally, as they are placed on a theoretically infinite board. The space of chess is thus striated, like the ideal, abstract space of the polis, with its streets, enclosures, and property lines, while the space of Go is smooth, like the unmarked nomadic space of the wilderness or desert. “Chess codes and decodes space,” Deleuze and Guattari argue, “whereas Go proceeds altogether differently, territorializing or deterritorializing it” (353). Deleuze and Guattari declare, “What interests us in operations of striation and smoothing are precisely the passages or combinations: how the forces at work within space continually striate it, and how in the course of its striation it develops other forces and emits new smooth spaces” (500). Urban space illustrates these interacting forces vividly: on the one hand, “the city is striated space par excellence … the force of striation that reimparts smooth space, puts it back into operation everywhere”; on the other hand, in terms that parallel de Certeau’s city of walkers, “it is possible to live smooth even in the cities, to be an urban nomad,” and “even the most striated city gives rise to smooth spaces” (481, 482, 500).

A similar interaction of striating and smoothing forces informs the space of the theater, in terms of both how it is structured and how it engages with the world. We can conceive of theatrical space as congruent with chess, as a striated, bounded space whose principal concern is mimetic representation; in particular, the apparatus of the stage seems inescapably striating, with walls, pillars, galleries, traps, and doors reinforcing an emplaced and customary semiology of scenery, lighting, sound, costume, gesture, figurenposition, posture, and so on. Such a rational, semiotic theater is the kind of theater imagined by Howard and other critics, which in its engagements with London effects a reterritorialization of the city’s smoothed spaces by staging them in a way that inscribes legible meaning on them – an expressly political theater, a theater of the polis. But we can also conceive of theatrical space as congruent with Go and the nomadic. In a reading of Plato’s discussion of theater in The Laws, Weber argues, “Theatricality demonstrates its subversive power when it forsakes the confines of the theatron [the place of seeing] and begins to wander: when, in short, it separates itself from theater. For in so doing it begins to escape control by the prevailing rules of representation, whether aesthetic, social, or political” (2004, 37). This separation of theatricality from its proper place is a central concern of the early modern antitheatrical discourse, which pervasively imagines a theater that will not stay where it belongs. “What voice is heard in our streets?” asks the author of This World’s Folly: “Not but the squeaking out of those … obscene and light jigs … sucked from the poisonous dugs of sin‐swelled theatres” (I. H. 1615, sig. B1v). In such accounts, the theater is set loose from its mooring, moving into the space of the city, deterritorializing it, smoothing the striated space of the polis. And instead of seeing the playhouse as a rational, mimetic space of representation, antitheatrical writers imagine it as an unbounded, wandering space of transforming interaction in which audience members “set open their eares & eies to suck vp variety of abhominations, bewitching their minds with extrauagant thoughts” (I. H. 1615, sig. B1v). Theater that is “extra[v]agant” – from the Latin vagari, to wander – is spatially and semiotically out of bounds, both vagabond and excessively vague. In effect, the antitheatricalists label as satanic or perverse the nomadic theatricality that cannot be accommodated within, or captured by, the political epistemologies of representation (Reynolds 1997).

Stow’s Survey of London provides what I will suggest is a complementary example of smoothing and striating forces at work in the streets of London, as well as in the Survey itself. In his perambulation of Cheap Ward (see Figure 13.1), Stow lingers on the monuments spaced along the high street, the heart of the city, working east to west from the Great Conduit to the entry to Saint Paul’s Cathedral.1 He spends considerable time on the Cross in West Cheap, one of the nine crosses erected by Edward I in 1290 to mark the funeral progress of his wife, Eleanor. The Cheapside cross is exemplary of the “involuntary mise‐en‐scène” that Lefebvre associates with monuments and the Renaissance city in general, where all aspects of spatial experience – space as perceived, conceived, and lived – are woven, carpet‐like, into a single iconic, coherent form ([1974] 1991, 220–223). As a physical monument, the cross is central to one’s understanding of the space of the city, a permanent marker through which one’s mental map of the city is organized; as a kind of sacred space, the cross ratifies one’s understanding of the relationship between this world and the next. Cheapside was the central ritual thoroughfare of early modern London as well as the commercial heart of the city, and the presence of Cheapside Cross serves as a constant reminder of that intermittent yet persistent sacralization of the street – especially in the context of royal entries to the city, which often occasioned the refurbishing and embellishing of the cross, as Stow details at some length. To describe this urban space as striated, therefore, is to acknowledge not only its dense imbrication of complementary civic codes, but also the effect it has on the rest of the city.

Sketch map of Cheapside, London.

Figure 13.1 Cheapside, London.

Source: Agas, Radulph, 1540?–1621.2

Yet after detailing the civic care of the cross over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Stow continues by describing the smoothing of this striated space, the violent unraveling of the urban texturology:

Since the which time, the said crosse hauing beene presented by diuers Iuries … to stand in the high way to the let of cariages (as they alledged) but could not haue it remoued, it followed that in the yeare 1581. the 21. of Iune, in the night, the lowest Images round about the said crosse (being of Christ his resurrection, of the virgin Mary, king Ed. the confessor, and such like) were broken, and defaced … the image of the blessed virgin, at that time robbed of her son, and her armes broken, by which she staid him on her knees: her whole body also was haled with ropes, and left likely to fall: but in the year 1595. was againe fastned and repaired, and in the yeare next following, a new misshapen son, as borne out of time, all naked was laid in her armes, the other images remayning broke as afore. ([1598] 1908, 1.266)

What is especially interesting about this account is that Stow seems to attribute the illegal defacing of the cross not to iconoclastic fervor but to economic pressures. The subsequent history of Cheapside Cross would suggest otherwise; as David Cressy reports, Puritan opponents of the cross described it “as Baal’s image or as Dagon, the filthy god of the Philistines,” and “denounced [it] as an idol in the midst of the city” (2000, 240). But although Stow’s account includes iconoclastic details, the force of his complaint rests with the illegitimate needs of commercial traffic and a base desire to make the street only a street: the desecration “followed” the various wardmote inquests, with a strong implication of causality. The point for Stow is thus less about religious change than urban change, the ongoing transformation of the spaces of London under the pressures of population and commerce. Rather than a monument that orders the representational space of the city, helping to unify its social meanings, the cross has become an obstruction to the desacralized space of a city abstractly devoted to carriages, to passage and mobility, to efficiency.

Yet for Stow the broken statue, the degraded icon, has accrued rather than lost meaning: by being thus maimed by the values of the marketplace, it shows the disjointed, illegible, cart‐ridden city that London has become. The denial of sacral power that the defacement and the half‐hearted repair demonstrate has paradoxically increased its power, at least for those who will choose to see. In this manner, we might understand Stow’s explicit connection of the cross to royal entries, which appropriate the imagery of Christ’s symbolic marriage to Jerusalem (Manley 1995, 241), as tacitly suggesting a different kind of theatrical scene, in which the suffering body of the cross – and the body on the cross – is displayed to an indifferent or misunderstanding urban world. Through Stow’s description, the space of Cheapside Cross becomes congruent to the Corpus Christi play – in particular, the moment of the ecce homo, “behold the man,” when Pilate presents a stripped and beaten Jesus (c. 4 BCE–33) to the gathered population of Jerusalem, who cry out for his crucifixion. In spatial and symbolic terms the ecce homo counterpoints the entry of Christ to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, an entry scene which unifies the space of the city as a perfectly legible frame for the messianic advent of its king; in Stow’s London, by contrast, the ecce homo shows the city’s order to be merely superficial, its fictiveness demonstrated by its inability to provide an appropriate frame for the brutalized divinity.

Stow’s staging of the Cheapside cross thus involves a complex, fugitive theatricality, through which the spatial and symbolic effects of the Corpus Christi play – a kind of theater no longer admissible under the dispensations of London’s civic ritual‐year – produces multiple deterritorializations and reterritorializations of the space of London. The initial defacing deterritorializes the cross by displacing its function as anchor of urban meaning, rendering its former significances illegible. Stow’s recollection of the sacred urban functions of the cross in a sense reterritorializes it, but only in the context of the memorial city; as with Lefebvre’s idolizing of Venice, Stow’s civic nostalgia serves his critique of modern urban experience. In the context of present‐day, desacralized London, the contrast between what the cross was and what it has been made into effects a further deterritorializing of the rationalized space of the commercial street, drawing attention to this remainder, this urban excess and deficit, that can no longer be articulated. It is precisely because the cross no longer signifies that it stands as the appropriate symbol for the London in which it exists. And it is precisely because this kind of theater no longer participates in the spatial textures of Stow’s London that it has the power that it does. In effect, the displacement of religious civic drama in the sixteenth century transforms it from a political theater to a nomadic theater, out of time and place – its invocation no longer striates the space of the city but rather smoothes it.

II

In the final section of this chapter I want to explore these issues in the context of Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614), which in some ways has been lurking underneath my discussion all along. The play’s urban representations, I will argue, are a hybrid of political and nomadic energies, a combination of smooth and striated spaces that perpetually deterritorialize and reterritorialize each other. Bartholomew Fair is the most extensive attempt by any dramatist in the period to model urban space in a comprehensive fashion. With over 30 speaking roles and an incredibly complicated plot, the play seems an attempt to model the full complexity of urban life – albeit in a tightly choreographed form, so that the swirling movements of actors across the stage is less chaos than dance, busy but legible. In this sense, we might indeed understand the project of the play as seeking to articulate London, in both senses of the word: dividing it and linking it, and allowing it to speak. On the other hand, the play also includes the vapors scene, an irrational scene of anti‐linguistic chaos – almost a kind of Bacchic frenzy – and the profoundly disturbing figure of Trouble‐all, the madman who wanders the precincts of the fair in search of the authority of a judge. Such urban manifestations operate as a kind of countervailing energy in the play, troubling the lucidity of its apparent intentions.

In recent criticism Bartholomew Fair is increasingly positioned as the acme of Jonson’s theatrical vision and theatrical control. In perhaps the strongest version of this line of argument, James Mardock calls the play “the culmination and fullest expression of Jonson’s career‐long concern with space and place,” and suggests that it “allowed Jonson to articulate his ideal of authorship, and indeed of selfhood … It depends, more than any other play in Jonson’s canon, on the space of the playhouse, on the power of theater to control urban space, to establish Jonson as the privileged interpreter of London” (2008, 97). Jonson’s approach in Bartholomew Fair is radically different from his previous two city comedies, Epicoene and The Alchemist, which take place entirely in private houses; by imagining the movement of a series of urban dwellers through the public spaces of the Fair, Bartholomew Fair seems to return to the model of his earlier city comedies and comical satires, where urban space is a matrix of social encounters, the scene for a series of contests through which the witty and improvisatory demonstrate their superiority to the foolish and rigid. From this perspective, the play presents itself as a space of knowledge, in which competent observers like Winwife and Quarlous can read the “five acts” (3.2.2) of the fair fluently, and thus the space of the urban fair is made into a theater – specifically, theater as theatron, place of seeing, a frame also available to discerning spectators, who (as the contract that prefaces the play states) are invited to judge the urban scene presented before them (Brown 2012).

Nevertheless, Jonson (1572–1637) seems abundantly aware of the complexity of the bond between two objects so dissimilar as the stage and the fair. The Induction concludes with the comment, “And though the Fair be not kept in the same region that some here, perhaps, would have it, yet think that therein the author hath observed a special decorum, the place being as dirty as Smithfield, and as stinking every whit” (Ind.138–141). At the start of this comment, the question of the fair’s “region” looks back to the opening of the Induction, where the Stagekeeper complains that Jonson has not represented the fair in the traditional fashion, which he presents as a problem of knowledge: “When ’t comes to the Fair once, you were e’en as good go to Virginia, for anything there is of Smithfield. He has not hit the humours – he does not know ‘em” (Ind.9–11). The implicit rebuttal is that the Stagekeeper is nostalgic for a fair that no longer exists, “the sword‐and‐buckler age of Smithfield” (Ind.104), and perhaps never did; a new mode of representation is necessary to show the fair as it is actually experienced in the present. Yet this phenomenological project is complicated by shifting the question of the fair’s “region” from the accuracy of its representations to the experience of its place of enactment. The “special decorum” changes the normal rules of theatrical representation, proposing a novel kind of connection between urban location and theatrical space. It is in this sense a deterritorialization: rather than a mimetic link between the Hope Theater and Smithfield (see Figure 13.2), via a shared semiotic code, Jonson proposes a territorial congruency – a point made stronger by the emphasis on the dirt and stink of both places, which might remind us of the unrepresentable aspects of Eudoxia: “the mules’ braying, the lampblack stains, the fish smell.”

Sketch map of Smithfield, London.

Figure 13.2 Smithfield, london.

Source: Agas, Radulph, 1540?–1621.3

On another level, one might say that the special decorum between the theater and Smithfield comes from the smoothness of both spaces. As a number of critics have noted, Jonson’s interest in Smithfield, and the specific manner in which he frames the fair, may owe something to his knowledge of Stow’s Survey, which associates Smithfield with various urban activities: theater, moral disputations, chivalric entertainments, civic rituals, trials by combat, wrestling, executions, tournaments (Chalfant 1978, 5–6). Broadly understood, these are activities of recreation and spectacle, atypical practices separate from the quotidian business of urban life and thus of greater significance. Almost all have vanished from the city, victims of the desacralization of urban space caused by the Henrician dissolution of monastic properties (1536–1541) and the concomitant infilling of open spaces with new buildings (Stow [1598] 1908, 2.29; Zucker 2011). The fair is thus a relic of an abundant festive mise‐en‐scène, counterpoised to the striating energies of urban development that have claimed most of its open, undefined territory. In Bartholomew Fair, the Puritan Zeal‐of‐the‐Land Busy declares, “The place is Smithfield, or the field of Smiths” (3.2.35), but Jonson would have known the correct derivation of the name from Stow: “Smithfield for a plain smooth ground, is called smeth and smothie” (1.80).

The smooth space of Smithfield is also reinforced by the intermittent presence of the Fair itself, an occasional marketplace made up of peddlers and performers, and of extremely limited duration. The center of the fair in Acts Two and Three is Ursula’s pig booth, a location for bodily satisfactions (eating, drinking, urination, fornication) as well as the hub of the fair’s criminal networks; Busy describes the booths of the fair as “the tents of the wicked” (1.6.64), a Biblical allusion that emphasizes the nomadic character of the fair’s peddlers. The Court of Piepowders, presided over by Adam Overdo, is an apparatus of capture for these denizens, set up in order to adjudicate commercial matters at a swifter pace than the regular courts could manage, so that justice could be served before the fair ended and its mobile inhabitants dispersed. Overdo’s investigation of the crimes, or “enormities,” of the fair is a quest for knowledge of this elusive, impenetrable location; as he puts it, “For … as we are public persons, what do we know? Nay, what can we know? We hear with other men’s ears; we see with other men’s eyes; a foolish constable or a sleepy watchman is all our information” (2.1.24–27). By abandoning the panoramic viewpoint of the court and walking the paths of the fair himself, Overdo seeks to control the fair, to make sense of it; instead, its anarchic energies possess him, causing him to repeatedly make a comic spectacle of himself. Overdo’s failures of knowledge and control have a complement in Trouble‐All, a former officer of the court driven mad after Overdo fired him, who now haunts the fair asking for Overdo’s warrant for all actions. For Trouble‐All alone, Overdo is a kind of god of the fair – the lawgiver, the overarching presence that legitimates all – but it is Trouble‐All himself, the wandering lunatic, who truly plays this role, as it is through him that the play’s romantic plotlines are resolved. Trouble‐All randomly selects Winwife instead of Quarlous to be husband to Grace Wellborn; by impersonating Trouble‐All, Quarlous lands a marriage himself with Dame Purecraft and acquires Overdo’s actual warrant, which he uses to make Grace his ward instead of Overdo’s. Any order and meaning that emerges from the play is predicated on randomness and madness.

A similar point could be made about the two kinds of theater present in Bartholomew Fair, the theater of the puppetshow and the theater of the play that surrounds it. At first, these would seem to form an antithesis: the maladroit puppetshow, written by a plagiarizing philistine, performed by a ham‐fisted fairworker, beloved by simpletons like Cokes, is an abject foil for Jonson’s theater, which – as he emphasizes in the Induction – is something new, a modern approach to both the fair specifically and the stage in general. The puppetshow is just the opposite. “O the motions that I, Lantern Leatherhead, have given light to i’ my time, since my Master Pod died!” the puppetmaster declares: “Jerusalem was a stately thing, and so was Nineveh, and The City of Norwich, and Sodom and Gomorrah; with the rising o’ the prentices, and pulling down the bawdy houses there, upon Shrove Tuesday” (5.1.5–10). With its explicit connection to religious drama, the puppetshow would seem to be a theatrical relic, part of the superseded world of the play, poorly suited to modern times. Yet as with the relation between Overdo and Trouble‐All, a clear division between these two theatrical spaces is difficult to sustain – not least because it is through the puppetshow that Jonson both resolves the play and provides an illustration of the rational function of his own theater.

Throughout the play the puppetshow is called a “motion,” a word that carries a range of potentially relevant contemporary meanings, including political unrest, noise, irregular movement, manner of walking, bowel movement, the moving part of an apparatus; within the play the word is also associated with Busy’s facial expressions (1.3.125), Grace’s method of choosing her husband (4.3.38), and Knockem’s nonsensical “vapors” (3.2.39; on “motion,” see Shershow 1995 and Zucker 2011). The puppets themselves are called “motion[s]” (5.5.47), as well as “monuments” (5.3.2) and “monshters” (5.4.26), with the last title carrying a double sense of spectacle and abnormality. More generally, the label “motion” connects the puppetshow to the wandering, extravagant energies of the nomadic city and nomadic theater: “a city in motion” might be the mobile city of walkers imagined by de Certeau, but it could also refer to the play performed by the puppets, which localizes the myth of Hero and Leander to the contemporary space of London. After the ghost of Dionysius of Syracuse (c. 397–43 BCE) rises to stop the fighting of two other puppets, Busy leaps from the audience to denounce Dionysius as Dagon and the whole puppetshow as the work of Satan. Busy tries to start a physical fight with the motions, but the cutpurse Edgworth suggests instead that they have a disputation on the moral value of theater, to be judged by the audience. After various debating gambits fail, Busy attacks the theater for the abomination of crossdressing; Dionysius shoots back that this “old stale argument against the players … will not hold against the puppets, for we have neither male nor female amongst us. And that thou may’st see, if thou wilt, like a malicious purblind zeal as thou art!” (5.5.91–94). As the stage direction has it, “The puppet takes up his garment,” demonstrating that he is without sex; Busy, apparently stunned by the sight, says, “I am confuted, the cause hath failed me,” and begs that the show continue: “I am changed, and will become a beholder with you!” (s.d. 5.5.94, 101, 104–105).

How can we read this strange action that concludes the puppetshow, the motion that converts the antitheatricalist and catalyzes the ending of the play? There is, I would argue, a significant homology between the trope of ecce homo and the puppet’s gesture of revelation. Of course, this is not to argue that Jonson makes Dionysius into a Christ figure – although I would not be the first to note the verbal similarity between Dionysius and Dionysus, the god of theater and intoxication, or to suggest that Jonson may be making a sly joke through this conjunction (Barish 1959, 15). Rather, the ambiguous status of the puppet – like Cheapside Cross, figured as both god and idol – allows the implications of the gesture to play out through a double theatricality, political and nomadic. In a political reading of the scene, we would note that the urban spaces of Bartholomew Fair in no way resemble the transformative energies of the passion play: this is a profoundly disenchanted world, a world inherently separate from the power of religious fervor. Instead, it is a political theater of representation, interested less in the power of icons than the social and ethical issues that stand behind them. In this modern world, theater defends itself against those suspicious of its transcendent power by avoiding claims to sacral status in favor of judgment via secular representation: as the reformed Justice Overdo says, “ad aedificandum, non ad diruendum,” [for building up, not for tearing down] (5.6.108). However, if the puppet’s gesture ultimately allows the play to establish itself as a space of edification (a location for making sense of the city and the theater) by repudiating the antitheatricalist position, the actual repudiation seems to work rather as the antitheatricalists feared it might: Busy is less convinced by the arguments of Dionysius than transformed by the extravagant spectacle of the motion’s mystery. The puppet’s declaration, as it makes it gesture, “that thou may’st see, if thou wilt, like a malicious purblind zeal as thou art!” (5.5.93–94) had just that rhetoric of blindness and insight which characterizes Biblical revelation, and it positions Busy as a kind of Paul, struck down on the road to Damascus, the scales falling from his eyes. If the puppet’s gesture of revelation is dominantly a demonstration of the impotence of the theater, it can also be read as we must read the ecce homo, seeing the divinity of the maimed god.

Dionysius’ lifting of his garment is thus less a continuation of the moral debate than a deterritorializing of it, an unexpected move that transcends the rules of the game; if the play subsequently reterritorializes the gesture by incorporating it into a new theatrical dispensation, the smooth space that it creates cannot be entirely striated. The revelation of the nothingness under the puppet’s clothing is both representative of the rationalist theater and yet still tacitly connected to the irruptive, nomadic theatricality that we find in the Passion play and in Stow’s degraded monument, gesturing towards what is absent (Levine 1994, 100–101). And if the puppet represents what is unrepresentable about the theater, its smooth body also connotes the smooth spaces of London, operating as an anti‐map of the city, an inversion of the fictive knowledges of Eudoxia’s carpet. This is the final urban discovery of the play, the endpoint of a centripetal movement from London to Fair to puppetshow to puppet – a monstrous monument, a monumental monstrosity. City in motion, city as motion: in the end, Jonson’s urban epistemology, like his urban dramaturgy, is subtended by the action of this unreadable artifact.

What to Read Next

Gordon (2013); Harris (2008); Howard (2007); Stanev (2014); Zucker (2011).

References

  1. Barish, Jonas. 1959. “Bartholomew Fair and Its Puppets.” Modern Language Quarterly, 20.1, 3–17.
  2. Brown, Andrew. 2012. “Theatre of Judgment: Space, Spectators, and the Epistemologies of Law in Bartholomew Fair.” Early Theatre, 15.2, 154–167.
  3. Calvino, Italo. [1972] 1979. Invisible Cities. Translated by William Weaver. London, Picador.
  4. Chalfant, Fran C. 1978. Ben Jonson’s London: A Jacobean Placename Dictionary. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
  5. Cressy, David. 2000. Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  6. de Certeau, Michel. [1980] 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  7. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. [1980] 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  8. Dillon, Janette. 2000. Theatre, Court, and City, 1595–1610: Drama and Social Space in London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  9. Gordon, Andrew. 2013. Writing Early Modern London: Memory, Text and Community. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
  10. H., I. 1615. This Worlds Folly: or, A Warning‐Peece discharged upon the Wickednesse thereof. London.
  11. Harris, Jonathan Gil. 2008. Untimely Matter in the Age of Shakespeare. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
  12. Howard, Jean. 2007. Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
  13. Jonson, Ben. 2009. The Alchemist and Other Plays: Volpone, or The Fox; Epicene, or The Silent Woman; The Alchemist; Bartholomew Fair. Edited by Gordon Campbell. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  14. Lefebvre, Henri. [1974] 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson‐Smith. Oxford: Blackwell.
  15. Levine, Laura. 1994. Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti‐Theatricality and Effeminization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  16. Manley, Lawrence. 1995. Literature and Culture in Early Modern London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  17. Mardock, James. 2008. Our Scene is London: Ben Jonson’s City and the Space of the Author. New York: Routledge.
  18. Munro, Ian. 2005. The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London: The City and Its Double. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
  19. Newman, Karen. 2007. Cultural Capitals: Early Modern Paris and London. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  20. Orlin, Lena Cowen, ed. 2000. Material London, ca. 1600. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
  21. Reynolds, Bryan. 1997. “The Devil’s House, ‘or Worse’: Transversal Power and Antitheatrical Discourse in Early Modern England.” Theatre Journal, 49.2, 143–169.
  22. Shershow, Scott Cutler. 1995. Puppets and “Popular Culture.” Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
  23. Smith, David L., Richard Strier, and David Bevington, eds. 1995. The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre, and Politics in London, 1576–1649. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  24. Stanev, Hristomir. 2014. Sensory Experience and the Metropolis on the Jacobean Stage (1603–1625). Aldershot: Ashgate Press.
  25. Stow, John. [1598] 1908. A Survey of London. edited by C.L. Kingsford. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  26. Weber, Samuel. 2004. Theatricality as Medium. New York: Fordham University Press.
  27. Zucker, Adam. 2011. The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Notes