ABSTRACT
Shakespeare depicts crowd and rumour in richer detail than any playwright before him. Shakespeare goes beyond literary innovation and anthropological truthfulness. He relates the crowds and rumours of his plays to neighbouring issues, thereby creating a complexity that transcends sociology and psychology. The second part of Henry VI, written in 1591, can be considered a point of departure in Shakespeare's treatment of collective phenomena. The play depicts collective action in great detail, suggesting a fascination with crowd behaviour itself. The world's large economic and medical crises from panic about SARS to the recent economic breakdown are crowd phenomena often motivated by uncorroborated rumours. War reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski has described the interplay of the West's lack of knowledge and rumour-mongering with regard to the Rwanda massacres in 1994. Only a few specialist's anthropologists and experts on African culture knew the country's peculiar cultural history and could render an appropriate account of the events.
