‘Surging Like the Sea’: Re-Thinking the Spectacle of the Crowd in Early Modern London

Many texts of early modern London are fascinated with crowds. The city’s growth and resulting crowdedness were essential to the city’s theatrical spaces, as the presence of crowds ‘turn[ed] London into a theater’. But even as it is celebrated as a symbol of civic life, evocations of the urban crowd brim with anxiety over its illegibility and unsettling of the very performance space it helps to create. This article re-assesses the London crowd as just such an essential but essentially unstable spatial and rhetorical phenomenon. Working with an array of period texts, this article reads their figuring of the urban crowd specifically in terms of Soja’s socio-spatial theory of Thirdspace and the improvisational power of urban spatial relations.