While it is true to say that much work has been produced on Shakespeare’s delineation of the mob in a number of his plays, in this study Wiegandt points out, and he is right in this observation, very little has been produced on the crowd as something other than the mob, as something singularly collective rather than as something both collective and dangerous. This is Wiegandt’s starting point in this study: that Shakespeare regarded man as an essentially collective being and that this collective took on many and various forms. As such, the author sets himself up against what he perceives as a dominant critical tendency to regard Shakespeare as the great poet of individuality and rejects “the epistemological stranglehold of models of Western individual subjectivity which have claimed Shakespeare for their own prized representative” (2). Whether Wiegandt succeeds in this ambitious project — that emphasis on crowd and rumor make individuality disappear — is arguable, but it is the case that a prioritization of the collective and one of its major characteristics, rumor, goes some way to untangling the threads of this dominant critical trend.

A mark of Wiegandt’s seriousness is his insistence that he can only realistically analyze history plays and tragedies, as other genres tend to give rise to masses rather than crowds. This reassures the reader that it is the very complexity of the collective that is being critiqued, that the “many-headed monster” (15) is the focus, rather than any one-dimensional mob. Three plays are analyzed within the context of the crowd — 2 Henry VI, Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus — and three within that of rumor — Richard III, 2 Henry VI, and Othello — each providing a convincing aspect to a cumulative critical architecture. That the plays chosen for analysis are not particularly ambitious, while true, would perhaps be an unfair argument to make, given that any consideration of crowd in Shakespeare must necessarily look at, say 2 Henry VI and of rumor, Othello. However, this does indeed, despite what the author says, give rise to fairly conventional readings of the plays considered, though portraying Falstaff as the embodiment of rumor is a highly perceptive (though again not wholly original) idea.

The methodology employed by Wiegandt is an interesting one and, I would say, has advantages and disadvantages. Essentially, we are presented with four theories of the crowd: that of Freud, Canetti, Smelser, and Hardt and Negri. Missing from the list is perhaps Weber’s work on charisma, though in Wiegandt’s defense he does wish to consider in depth leaderless collectives. The three plays are then read in the context of these four theories of the crowd, each play considered in the light of how it negotiates the theories (among other things). This process is then repeated later in the book with regard to rumor and rumor theory. This produces interesting readings of six Shakespeare plays in the context of the various theories applied to them, which is a great advantage of this methodology. The disadvantage arises when desiring a more historical consideration of the nature of crowd and rumor in reality in Shakespeare’s London. Wiegandt does provide a very useful appendix that delineates precisely this, but a more integrated analysis may have been more appealing and indeed, more useful. Analyses of the plays within their historical context that would then, subsequently, give rise to considerations of their theoretical implications would certainly make the book more user friendly for undergraduates at least. That said, Wiegandt has, even so, produced the historical context and where this context should sit is a moot point.

Crowd and Rumour in Shakespeare is, despite this, an excellent addition to Ashgate’s admirable Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama series and, in its unashamed concentration on the collective, a useful and timely intervention in the field.