Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
Late Tudor London comes alive when Stephen Greenblatt's acclaimed biography of William Shakespeare, shadowing its subject, takes to the streets. “The unprecedented concentration of bodies jostling … crossing and recrossing the great bridge, pressing into taverns and theaters and churches,” Greenblatt suggests, is a “key to the whole spectacle” of crowds in the playwright's histories and tragedies. To be sure, his little excursions in London left their mark on his scripts, yet he scrupulously sifted his literary sources from which he drew characters and crises onto the stage. He prowled around Plutarch and read Stow and Hollinshed on the wars of succession he chronicled. Nonetheless, “the sight of all those people—along with the noise, the smell of their breath, and their rowdiness and potential for violence—seems,” Greenblatt says, “to have been Shakespeare's first and most enduring impression of the city” in the 1580s and to have been the inspiration for the “greasy aprons” and “gross diets” of “tag-rag people” or rabble in his plays. There, onstage, the glory that was Rome and the grit of fifteenth-century England were “suffused less with the otherness of the past than with the familiar coordinates of Shakespeare's own present.” And familiarity bred contempt for “the sweaty multitude.” “All those people” were terribly, dangerously unpredictable or, as with Jack Cade's crowd in the second part of Henry VI, just plain dangerous. Cade stirred his prole followers to kill the city's more cultured citizens. Sinisterly self-interested tribunes—or so they may have seemed to some playgoers—swayed the crowd in Coriolanus against the play's protagonist, Rome's most noble soldier. And commoners could be “lightly blown to and fro.”
1. Greenblatt, Stephen, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 2004), 169–70Google Scholar. For aprons and diets, The Tragedy of Anthony and Cleopatra, ed. Michael, Neill (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 5.2.210–12Google Scholar; for tag-rag people, Julius Caesar, ed. David, Daniell (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1998), 1.2.257Google Scholar; for “lightly blown,” Henry VI, Part Two, ed. Roger, Warren (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 4.8.55–56Google Scholar (killing the cultured at 4.2.96–101; Cade, also known as the captain of Kent, died as a prisoner in July, 1450, a few months after the stirs of that year started in the southeast). For the tribunes in republican Rome, , see The Tragedy of Coriolanus, ed. Louis, Wright and Virginia La, Mar (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962), 2.3.164–290Google Scholar. References to acts, scenes, and lines from these editions of the plays are given parenthetically in the text. For contempt for the “sweaty multitudes” at the theater, see Duncan-Jones, Katherine, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from his Life (London: Arden, 2001), 60 and 116.Google Scholar
2. Stirling, Brents, The Populace in Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 99 (sensed unconsciously), 120 (climate of apprehension), 151 (excesses of leveling), and 175 (tragic thoroughness).Google Scholar
3. Kermode, Frank, Shakespeare's Language (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2000), 244Google Scholar and, mentioning “daunting ambiguities,” 254. For reformers' ambivalence into the 1580s, consult Kaufman, , Thinking of the Laity in Late Tudor England (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 103–65.Google Scholar
4. Among others, Jagendorf, Zvi, “Coriolanus: Body Politic and Private Parts,” reprinted from Shakespearean Quarterly 41 (1990)Google Scholar, in Coriolanus: Critical Essays, ed. David, Wheeler (New York: Garland, 1995), 239Google Scholar, for “despised carnality”; Munro, Ian, “The City and Its Double: Plague Time in Early Modern England,” English Literary Renaissance 30 (2000): 254–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Stirling, , Populace, 97–150.Google Scholar
5. Gilby, , A Pleasaunt Dialogue conteining a large discourse betweene a souldier of Barwick and an English chaplain (London: [R. Schilders], 1581), C3v.Google Scholar
6. Greenham, , “A Sweet Comfort for an afflicted conscience,” in The Workes of the reverend and faithful servant of Jesus Christ, M. Richard Greenham, ed. Henry, Holland (London: William Welby, 1612), 104Google Scholar. For Greenham's long ministry in Cambridgeshire, see Parker, Kevin L. and Carlson, Eric J., Practical Divinity: The Works and Life of Reverend Richard Greenham (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 1998)Google Scholar. For the prospects for worthy grave men in religious service, see instructions “for the better ordering and direction of ecclesiastical government” in Doctor Williams's Library, Morrice MSS B.1.276 and C.338–39 (hereafter, DWL).
7. Reformed playgoers? True, the puritans' anti-theatrical prejudices were often articulated and have been usefully studied, as has the puritan laity's tendency to ignore sermons and pamphlet literature warning that patronizing plays was tantamount to idolatry. See, for example, Heinemann, Margot, Puritans and Theater: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Whitfield White, Paul, “Calvinists and Puritan Attitudes under the Early Stuarts,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 14 (1988): 41–55Google Scholar; O'Connell, Michael, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; and Lake, Peter and Questier, Michael, The Antichrist's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002).Google Scholar
8. For such support, Reynolds, Bryan, “‘What is the City but the People?’ Transversal Performance and Radical Politics in Shakespeare's Coriolanus and Brecht's Coriolan,” in Shakespeare without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital, ed. Reynolds, and Donald, Hedrick (London: Palgrave, 2000), 112Google Scholar; and, for “uncivility,” Shrank, Cathy, “Civility and the city in Coriolanus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 54 (2004): 414–15Google Scholar. Also see Sorge, Thomas, “The Failure of Orthodoxy in Coriolanus,” in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Howard, Jean F. and Marion, O'Connor (New York: Methuen, 1987), 235–37Google Scholar; and Hatlen, Burton, “The ‘Noble Thing’ and the ‘Boy of Tears’: Coriolanus and the Embarrassments of Identity,” English Literary Renaissance 27 (1997): 413–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9. Patterson, , Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 16–18.Google Scholar
10. Patterson, , Voice, 120–46Google Scholar; Barton, Anne, “Livy, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare's Coriolanus,” reprinted from Shakespeare Survey (1985) in Shakespeare and Politics, ed. Alexander, Catherine M. S. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 67–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hadfield, Andrew, Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics (Stratford: Arden, 2004), 14–17, 209–10, 178–81Google Scholar. For Hall's production—my favorite—see Bedford, S. K., “On Both Sides More Respect: A Very British Coriolanus,” in Coriolanus: Critical Essays, ed. David, Wheeler (New York: Garland, 1995), 339–41.Google Scholar
11. Leinwand, Theodore B., “Shakespeare and the Middling Sort,” The Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993): 300–302CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bristol, Michael D., “Lenten Butchery: Legitimation Crisis in Coriolanus,” in Shakespeare Reproduced, 214.Google Scholar
12. Compare Thomas North's translation (1603) of Plutarch's Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus, reprinted in Shakespeare's Plutarch, ed. Skeat, Walter W. (London: MacMillan, 1875), 16–19Google Scholar. Also see Chambers, R. W., “The Expression of Ideas—Particularly Political Ideas—in the Three Pages and in Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare's Hand in the Play of Sir Thomas More, ed. Pollard, A. F. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), 168–69: “Shakespeare hated and despised the tribunes in Coriolanus with a bitterness he rarely felt towards any of his creatures.”Google Scholar
13. See Tennenhouse, Leonard, “Coriolanus: History and the Crisis of Semantic Order,” Comparative Drama 10 (1977): 333Google Scholar, for “ultimate conservative” and threat; Marcus, Leah, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 206, for narcissism.Google Scholar
14. Empson, , Essays on Shakespeare, ed. David, Pirie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 118.Google Scholar
15. Sharpe, Jim, “Social Strain and Social Dislocation, 1585–1603,” in The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade, ed. John, Guy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 200–202Google Scholar; Archer, Ian W., The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 2–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
16. Miller, Shannon, “Topicality and Subversion in William Shakespeare's Coriolanus,” Studies in English Literature 32 (1992): 287–310CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For “popular immiseration,” see Hunt, William, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Religion in an English County (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 41–63.Google Scholar
17. Marcus, , Puzzling, 203–11.Google Scholar
18. “A Plot for Reformation,” in British Library (hereafter BL), Additional MS 48066, 5v–6r.
19. Chalmers Huffman, Clifford, “Coriolanus” in Context (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1972), 139–50, 181–82, 221–22Google Scholar. But, for the nearly inaudible contemporary revival of republicanism, see Peltonen, Markku, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 51–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
20. See Walter, John, “A ‘Rising of the People’? The Oxfordshire Rising of 1596,” Past and Present 107 (1985): 101.Google Scholar
21. Pettet, E. C., “Coriolanus and the Midlands Insurrection of 1607,” Shakespeare Survey 3 (1950): 34–42Google Scholar; and, for “intolerable strains,” consult Martin, John, “The Midlands Revolt of 1607,” in An Atlas of Rural Protest in Britain, 1548–1900, ed. Andrew, Charlesworth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 33–36.Google Scholar
22. See Wilson's, “Against the Grain: Representing the Market in Coriolanus,” The Seventeenth Century 6 (1991): 111–17Google Scholar. For “artist nerves,” see remarks culled from Georg Brandes's William Shakespeare (1895–96) and reprinted in Coriolanus, ed. David, George (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004), 272–73.Google Scholar
23. Also, in this connection, see Cefalu's, Paul “End of Absolutism and the Consensual Nature of the Early Modern State,” Renaissance Forum 4:2 (2000): 1–34Google Scholar, where the case for the play's commitment to “a state platform of both negative libertarianism and paternalist centralization” seems to me far less clear and less compelling than arguments against the playwright's involvement with “rigidified class antagonisms” and “embattled, transitional ideologies.”
24. Oxford, Queens College MS 280, 167v.
25. For “immediacy,” George, David, “Plutarch, Insurrection, and Death in Coriolanus” reprinted from Shakespeare Survey 53 (2000) in Shakespeare and Politics, ed. Alexander, Catherine M. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 124Google Scholar; for “daring analysis,” Patterson, , Voice, 143.Google Scholar
26. BL, Lansdowne MS 17, 197r.
27. Collinson, Patrick, A Mirror of Elizabethan Puritanism: The Life and Letters of Godly Master Dering (London: Friends of Dr. Williams's Library, 1964).Google Scholar
28. See Luther's letter to the laity of Leisnig, , D. Martin Luthers Werke, kritische Gesammtausgabe (Weimar: H. Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1900), 11:412.Google Scholar
29. That was what reformers read in Norton's, Thomas translation, The Institution of the Christian Religion written in Latine by John Calvin (London: Vautrollier, 1578), 356r–357r (4.3.15–4.4.2)Google Scholar. For Petrarch's formulation of the “old saw,” cited here, see his Invectiva contra quendam magni status hominem sed nullius scientie aut virtutis, ed. Pier Giorgio, Ricci (Florence: Felice le Monnier, 1949), 15.Google Scholar
30. Kaufman, , Laity, 43–47.Google Scholar
31. de Loque, Bertrand, A Treatise of the Church (London: Richard Langton, 1581), 39Google Scholar. The translator is perhaps best known as the author, with John Field, of the puritans' first Admonition to Parliament ten years before.
32. A Briefe and plaine declaration concerning the desires of all those faithfull ministers that have and do seeke for the discipline and reformation of the Churche of Englande (London: Robert Walde-gaue, 1584), 120–21.Google Scholar
33. Briefe and plaine declaration, 125–29.
34. Calvin, Institution, 228v–229r (3.7.10); Travers, Walter, An Answere to a supplicatorie epistle of G.T. for the pretended Catholiques (London: Tobie Smith, 1583), 283–85.Google Scholar
35. Workes of Greenham, 268.
36. Grindal's 1576 letter to Elizabeth is printed in Strype's, JohnHistory of the Life and Acts of the Most Reverend Father in God, Edmund Grindal (Oxford: Clarendon, 1821), 561–63.Google Scholar
37. Strype, , Grindal, 568 and 572Google Scholar. For “full persuasion,” consult Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 121, 149, for the early Elizabethan reformers' goals and compare Calvin, Institution 404v (4.11.1): “the power of the keies is nothing but the preaching of the Gospell.” For puritans and the prayerbook, Collinson, Patrick, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 366–67.Google Scholar
38. Paget, , A Verie fruitful sermon necessary to be read of all Christians concerning God's everlasting predestination, election, and reprobation (London: n.p., 1583), A8r–B6v.Google Scholar
39. BL, Lansdowne MS 23, 20r.
40. Lambeth Palace Library MS 2006, 248r.
41. Penry, , A Treatise wherein is manifestlie proved that reformation and those that sincerely favor the same are unjustly charged to be enemies unto her Majestie and the state (Edinburgh?: Robert Waldegrave, 1590), E3v–E4r and H4r.Google Scholar
42. Gilby, , A Pleasaunt Dialogue betweene a souldier of Barwicke and an English chaplaine (London: n.p., 1581), E8v–F8r.Google Scholar
43. See, for example, Gifford, George, A Briefe Discourse of certaine points of the religion which is amonge the common sort of Christians which may be termed the countrie divinitie (London: Richard Field and Felix Kingston, 1598), 27–29, 43–44.Google Scholar
44. Gifford, , Briefe Discourse, 130–31Google Scholar. Also, for the separatists, see Gifford's, Short Treatise against the Donatists of England whome we call Brownists (London: Cooke, 1590), quoted at 3–4 and 101Google Scholar; and his criticisms of their “anabaptisticall freedom,” in A Short Reply unto the last printed books of Henry Barrow and John Greenwood (London: Tobie Cooke, 1591), 18Google Scholar. For a splendid inventory and analysis of Gifford's views on lay reclamation, see Scott McGinnis, Timothy, George Gifford and the Reformation of the Common Sort (Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2004), 135–62.Google Scholar
45. Gifford, , Briefe Discourse, A3v.Google Scholar
46. Dent, , Plaine-Man's Pathe-way to Heaven (London: G. Lathum, 1637; first published in 1601), 145–46 and 224–27.Google Scholar
47. Dent, , Pathe-way, 266–69, 413–15.Google Scholar
48. Sutcliffe, Matthew, A Treatise of Ecclesiastical Discipline (London: George Bishop, 1591), 186–91.Google Scholar
49. Oxford, Bodleian, Tanner MS 79, 137r; The Works of John Whitgift, ed John, Ayre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1851), 1:446–47Google Scholar; and Oxford, Queens College MS 280, 172v. Catholic polemicists also took note of reformed religion's “factious practice[s],” suggesting “evangelicall libertie” meant near constant quarreling; Wright, Thomas, Certaine Articles or forcible reasons discovering the palpable absurdities and most notorious and intricate errors of the Protestants' religion (Antwerp: n.p., 1600), B4r.Google Scholar
50. Fenner, , Defense of the godly ministers against the slanders of Dr. Bridges (London: Richard Schilders, 1587), 70–71.Google Scholar
51. This example is drawn from the many offered by Suffolk puritan preacher Bownde, Nicholas, The Unbeleefe of St. Thomas the Apostle (Cambridge: Cantrell Legge, 1608), 60–67.Google Scholar
52. Hooker, , Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, vol. 1–4 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977–1982), 1.1.1; BL, Harleian MS 6539, 76v, for parish senates.Google Scholar
53. BL, Additional MS 28571, 193r. For bicameral arrangements, see DWL, Morrice MSS B.1.468 and C.413, but also note Fenner, Dudley, Sacra Theologia sive veritas quae est secundum pietatem (London: n.p., 1586), 105v–106r.Google Scholar
54. BL, Cotton Titus MS C VI, 19v–20v, for Howard's letter to William Cecil, discussed at some length in Kaufman, , Laity, 107–13. For Fenner, see BL, Lansdowne MS 30B, 211r.Google Scholar
55. Hooker, Laws, 8.6.8. Also consult Perrott, H. E. C., “Richard Hooker and the Problem of Authority in the Elizabethan Church,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 49 (1998): 56–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Collinson, Patrick, “Hooker and the Elizabethan Establishment,” in Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. Arthur Stephen, McGrade (Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval and Renaissance Studies and Texts, 1997), 177–78.Google Scholar
56. Hooker, , Laws, 1.16.5–7.Google Scholar
57. Bilson, , The Perpetual Government of Christ's Church (London: Christopher Barker, 1593), 356–59Google Scholar; For divine enhancements, see Voak, Nigel, Richard Hooker and Reformed Theology: A Study of Reason, Will, and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 97–98, 167–70, 196–216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
58. Bilson, , The True Difference betweene Christian subjection and unchristian rebellion (London: Jackson and Bolliant, 1585), A2v–A3rGoogle Scholar. For Bilson on consent, review Lake, Peter, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 129–31Google Scholar; and, for Bilson's “ranking,” see Richardson's, William article in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 5:739.Google Scholar
59. Bancroft, , Dangerous Positions and proceedings published and practiced within the island of Brytain under pretence of reformation (London: John Wolfe, 1595), 139.Google Scholar
60. Bilson, , Perpetual Government, 182 and 368.Google Scholar
61. Bilson, , True Difference, 191–92Google Scholar; Bilson, , Perpetual Government, 248.Google Scholar
62. “The Lamentable Complaint of the Commonaltie,” in A Parte of a Register (Middleburg: Richard Schilders, 1593), 206–23 and 242–43.Google Scholar
63. Perkins, , “A Treatise of the Vocations and Callings of Men,” in The Workes of the Famous and Worthey minister of Christ … William Perkins, (London: John Legatt, 1616), 1:768–76.Google Scholar
64. London, Guildhall, MS 1002A, 184v, quoting the accounts for St. Mary, Woolnoth. Thomas Cranmer had stipulated forty years earlier that churchwardens themselves “be chosen by a majority of parishioners,” Synodalia: A Collection of Articles of Religion, Canons, and Proceedings of Convocations in the Province of Canterbury, ed. Edward, Cardwell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1842), 1:122–23.Google Scholar
65. Lake, and Questier, , Lewd Hat, 584Google Scholar, and Judith, Kronenfeld, King Lear and the Naked Truth: Rethinking the Language of Religion and Resistance (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 151.Google Scholar
66. For Alan Howard's run as Coriolanus in 1977–78, see Steible, Mary, “Coriolanus”: A Guide to the Play (London: Greenwood, 2004), 132–34.Google Scholar
67. Penry, , Briefe Discovery, 47.Google Scholar
68. The term is Collinson's, Patrick, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 199–201.Google Scholar
69. Rogers, Richard, Seven Treatises (London: Thomas Man, 1610), 413Google Scholar. Elsewhere I discuss nonconformists' complaints, agreeing, as I have here, with Eamon Duffy's conclusion that “puritan attitudes to the ‘prophane multitude’ were both more complex and more positive than is often allowed”: Kaufman, , “How Socially Conservative were the Elizabethan Religious Radicals,” Albion 30 (1998): 29–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Duffy, , “The Godly and the Multitude in Stuart England,” The Seventeenth Century 1 (1986): 31–55, quoted at 37Google Scholar. For “belief formation” and the supposedly “irreligious multitude,” see Watt, Tessa, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 322–30Google Scholar; for Roger, , Kaufman, , Prayer, Despair, and Drama: Elizabethan Introspection (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 140–42.Google Scholar
70. Greenblatt, , Will, 389.Google Scholar
71. The dispute at St. Saviours (1607) is chronicled in Stow's, JohnSurvey of the Cities of London and Westminster (London: A. Churchill, 1720), 2:9–10.Google Scholar