Thomas Dekker and the Culture of Pamphleteering in Early Modern London by Anna Bayman

Author:Anna Bayman [Bayman, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, Modern, 17th Century, Literary Criticism, Renaissance
ISBN: 9781317010517
Google: 386XCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-02-17T01:26:37+00:00

1 Thomas Dekker, The Wonderfull Yeare (1603), sig. B3. Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991), esp. pp. 9-14, gives a balanced account of the difficulties of the 1590s, incorporating revisionist accounts that underplay ‘crisis’ as well as contemporary perceptions of crisis; see also Ian W. Archer, ‘The 1590s: Apotheosis or Nemesis of the Elizabethan Regime?’, in Asa Briggs and Daniel Snowman (eds), Fins de Siècle: How Centuries End, 1400-2000 (New Haven, 1996), pp. 65-97; Jim Sharpe, ‘Social Strain and Social Dislocation, 1585-1603’, in John Guy (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade, (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 192-211.

2 Dekker, The Wonderfull Yeare, sig. C3.

3 Ibid., sigs B1v, C3. This was something of a favourite motif for Dekker, who used it to remind his readers that things – including narratives – are not what they seem, as at the beginning of The Belman of London (1608).

4 Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinarie: Or the Walkes in Powles (1604), sig. A2.

5 Dekker, The Wonderfull Yeare, sig. A4v.

6 Ibid., sig. C1v.

7 Ibid., sig. C2.

8 Ibid., sig. C2v. Dekker is of course right that Venice and Antwerp were suffering as markets, and this adds to the topicality.

9 See below, Chapter 4.

10 Stowe’s Chronicle was commonly invoked as the epitome of London description, as for example in Dekker, The Wonderfull Yeare, sig. C; Dekker and Middleton, The Meeting of Gallants, sig. C2.

11 C. Phythian-Adams, ‘Ceremony and the Citizen: The Communal Year at Coventry, 1450–1550’, in P. Clark and P. Slack (eds), Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500-1700 (Toronto, 1972), pp. 57-85; A. Higgins, ‘Streets and Markets’, in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds), A New History of Early English Drama (New York, 1997), p. 78. Higgins notes that dramatic space changed later in the sixteenth century: public playhouse drama ‘succeeded’ the dramas (ceremonies, plays, pageants) of the open public spaces. We might see the pamphleteers’ reworking of the techniques exploited by these neighbourhood and urban dramas in the light of Manley’s concept of ‘behavioural urbanization’: Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 14–17. See also Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago and London, 1988), p. 14.

12 While some historians of early modern London (such as Jeremy Boulton) have emphasised the existence of distinct localities and local identities within the city, Archer, Pursuit of Stability, esp. pp. 60-61, and Steve Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge, 1989), esp. pp. 214, 384-5, explore the multiplicity of communal bonds and identities within the capital; see also Manley, Literature and Culture, pp. 4–5, and Valerie Pearl, ‘Change and Stability in Seventeenth-Century London’, London Journal 5 (1979), pp. 3–34.

13 Manley, Literature and Culture, esp. p. 351; Paul Griffiths, ‘Overlapping Circles: Imagining Criminal Communities in London, 1545-1645’, in Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington (eds), Communities in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2000), pp.

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