London in Early Modern English Drama: Representing the Built Environment

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London in Early Modern English Drama Representing the Built Environment

Darryll Grantley

London in Early Modern English Drama

Also by Darryll Grantley ENGLISH DRAMATIC INTERLUDES 1300–1580: A Reference Guide WIT’S PILGRIMAGE: Drama and the Social Impact of Education in Early Modern England THE BODY IN LATE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE (co-edited with Nina Taunton) CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE AND ENGLISH RENAISSANCE CULTURE (co-edited with Peter Roberts)

London in Early Modern English Drama Representing the Built Environment Darryll Grantley

© Darryll Grantley 2008 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identiﬁed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 9780230554290 hardback ISBN-10: 0230554296 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Grantley, Darryll. London in early modern English drama:representing the built environment/Darryll Grantley. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0230554296 (alk. paper) 1. English drama“Early modern and Elizabethan, 15001600“History and criticism. 2. London (England)“In literature. 3. English drama“17th century“History and criticism. 4. City and town life in literature. 5. English drama“England“London“History and criticism. I. Title. PR658.L58G73 2008 822.3 093584212“dc22 2007052955 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For James and Louis

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Contents

Acknowledgements

viii

Map of Early Modern London

x

1 Introduction

1

2 The Pre–commercial Theatre Interlude Drama

25

3 Late Elizabethan Drama

51

4 Jacobean Drama

91

5 Caroline Drama

141

6 Conclusion

186

Notes

195

Bibliography

211

Index

222

vii

Acknowledgements I am indebted to the following for constructive criticism, for helpful suggestions and information, for pointing me in appropriate directions or for identifying useful material: Christopher Baugh, Peter Brown, Andrew Butcher, Janette Dillon, Peter Happé, John Jowett, Kathleen McLuskie, David Mills, Nina Taunton and Greg Walker, though none is responsible for any errors or weaknesses there might be. My partner, Andrew Pitcairn-Hill, gave me the benefit of his cartographic expertise in the map of London that he produced. I have profited from discussion of papers I presented on aspects of the material in this book at research seminars in the Centre for Medieval and Tudor Studies and the School of Drama, Film and Visual Arts at the University of Kent, at the Medieval English Theatre conference and at the Shakespeare Institute. I am very grateful to my colleagues, Paul Allain and Nicola Shaughnessy, for their efforts in securing research leave for me. Paula Kennedy and Christabel Scaife at Palgrave Macmillan have been very helpful and a pleasure to work with. Finally, the valuable comments of Palgrave Macmillan’s anonymous reader helped to improve the product considerably.

viii


Hoxton

Shoreditch

tR

ee Fl

Tottenham Court

Mile End

r

ive

Spitalfields

23

09 01

40

Gray's Inn Fields

33

Whitechapel

08

37

32

21

13

31

19 07

06

05

42

10

12 41

29

17

03 14 11 38

20

River Thames

27

39

25 28

The Tower of London

02

30

Pall

Ma

ll

hit eh all

26

London

Southwark

Bridge

Bankside

W

x

36

ap pi ng

Tyburn

Hyde Park

16

15

24

Holborn

Paddington

04

43

34

18

W

Marylebone

35 22 Westminster Hall

Tothill Fields

Westm in

ster

13 Places of interest

N

Extent of built up area c.1550 0 Scale

Map 1 Map of Early Modern London

1/2 mile 1/2 km.


Islington


Key to map of early modern London 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Bartholomew Fair Billingsgate Birchin Lane Bishopsgate Blackfriars Bridewell Canning/Canwick (now Cannon) Street Cheapside Clerkenwell Cornhill Eastcheap Exchange, The New Exchange, The Old Fleet Street Gracious (now Gracechurch) Street Guildhall, The Houndsditch Leadenhall Lincoln’s Inn Fields Lombard Street London Stone Ludgate Marshalsea Moorfields Newgate Old Fish Street Paris Garden Puddle Dock/Wharf Queenhithe Ram Alley St Katherine’s Hospital St Martin in the Fields Ward St Paul’s Shoe Lane Smithfield Sparagus Garden Strand, The Temple Bar Tower Hill Trig Stairs Turnbull (now Turnmill) Street Watling Street Whitefriars Wood Street

xi


1 Introduction

A notable aspect of the sixteenth-century revolution in English theatrical culture is the rapidly increasing dominance, from the last quarter of the century onwards, of London. With the advent of the commercial playhouses, theatre in the early modern period – previously of largely provincial provenance – became an overwhelmingly metropolitan phenomenon, generated in and focusing increasingly on London rather than the provincial towns and noble households that had been the home of most of the nation’s dramatic output up to this point. There was by no means a total disappearance of provincial theatre. Town troupes continued to exist throughout the country, and itinerant companies continued to play in household and other contexts, but the centre of gravity substantially shifted in a way that would permanently change the focus and ethos of drama. These developments inevitably brought about a change in its subject matter and preoccupations, which showed an increasing awareness from the late sixteenth century onwards of the new commercial theatre’s own urban location and the urban audience that had become its principal constituency. This investigation will be into the various ways in which that fact impacted on the representation and perceptions of the metropolis in the theatre, how this evolved over time, what factors determined this evolution, and how this representation in turn reflected the changing culture of the period. There has been mounting interest over the last decade or so in London as a topic of historical and cultural study. This is evidenced by a number of recent histories of the city which includes Roy Porter’s London: A Social History (1994), Francis Sheppard’s London: A Social History (1998), Michael Hebbert’s London: More by Fortune than Design (1998), Stephen Inwood’s A History of London (1998) and most recently Peter Ackroyd’s more popular London: The Biography (2000). This has 1

2


been accompanied by a growing focus on the geographical dimensions of literature and culture, explored for instance in John Gillies’s Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (1994), which looks at connections between early modern geography and theatre, Garrett Sullivan’s The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage (1998), The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture 1550–1850 edited by Gerald Maclean, Donna Landry and Joseph Ward (1999) and Literature, Mapping and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain edited by Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein (2001). An important crop of studies deals with the representation of London in literature and culture, such as Imagining Early Modern London: Perceptions and Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype 1598–1720 edited by Julia Merritt (2001). Janette Dillon’s Theatre, Court and City 1596– 1610: Drama and the Social Space in London (2000), as its title suggests, examines the literary and theatrical representation of social spaces in the capital, while a collection of essays edited by Dieter Mehl, Angela Stock and Anne-Julia Zwierlein, Plotting Early Modern London (2004), looks at Jacobean City comedy from a geographical perspective. Other studies focus on the economic and social relations within the City of London, such as Douglas Bruster’s Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (1992) and Jean-Christophe Agnew’s Worlds Apart: Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought 1550–1750 (1986) especially in relation to the genre of City comedy. The impact of the metropolis on literature and culture is considered in a collection of essays edited by David Smith, Richard Strier and David Bevington The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London 1576–1649 (1995) and by Lawrence Manley in Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (1995). London as a site of drama is part of the subject of several of these, but it has also in recent years come under specific scrutiny in different ways in such work as Steven Mullaney’s The Place of the Stage: License, Play and Power in Renaissance England (1988) and Anne Lancashire’s London Civic Theatre: City Drama and Pageantry from Roman Times to 1558 (2002). The present study will take a somewhat different and complementary line of approach to the foregoing work. Attention will be given to the growing and changing consciousness of the built environment and the particular modes of living and self-definition that attach to it. The focus will be on how geographical localities in the capital are talked about in the drama, on how they function as settings for narratives and on how the incorporation of local geography becomes part of the theatre’s range of staging conventions. Settings have the immediate function of giving a locality to dramatic action, ‘a local habitation’, but they

Introduction

3

frequently have a significance and capacity to create meaning beyond this. They enable characters to be placed in a relationship with the locality that defines their identity and role, and their connection to the urban spaces shared by the audience contributes to shaping that audience’s response to them. It might, for instance, be asked how far characters are constructed specifically to contribute to the realization of the spaces they inhabit, especially in plays that set out to represent the latter, or how the relationship between space and character can also make a contribution to the complexity of characters. A look at Ben Jonson’s revision of Every Man in his Humour can give some idea of the effect of local setting of the drama. The original staged at the Curtain in 1598 was the version in the quarto printing of 1601 while the revision printed in folio in 1616 transferred the action to London. Jonson introduces a strong element of geographical specificity into the revised play beyond that present in the earlier version, and this is used in the social and moral frame of reference of the characters, in all instances reliance being placed on the assumed familiarity of the London audience with the local geography and its social dimensions. When the country gull Stephen defends his taking up hawking, he claims that he wants to embrace an activity that will enhance his gentle status and adds a local frame of reference, ‘Because I dwell in Hogsden, I shall keep company with none but the archers of Finsbury? Or the citizens, that come a ducking to Islington ponds?’ (1.1.47–9). He describes his wealth in terms of his possessing £1000 per annum and adds ‘Middlesex land’ (1.1.92), a reference to territory close to London and thus with likely meaning for the audience. Familiarity with the local environment is so taken for granted as even to be the basis on which comic allusion works. Wellbred’s letter to his friend Edward Knowell is sent from the Old Jewry, and in it, referring to the fact that he has not had a visit from Edward in a long time, asks if he thinks that all who live there are Jews (1.1.153) and makes a punning joke about the different locations in which they live: ‘Do not conceive that antipathy between us and Hogsden; as was between Jews and hogs-flesh’ (1.1.155–7). Wellbred writes from a known inn of the time, the Windmill in Old Jewry, and Old Knowell who has intercepted and read the letter comments, ‘From the Bordello it might come as well; / The Spittle: or Pict-hatch’ (1.1.173–4) referring respectively to a hospital for venereal diseases and a haunt of prostitutes in Turnbull (now Turnmill) Street near Clerkenwell Green. Localization of reference also extends to recognizable London types, and at a later stage of the intrigue which has the younger men pitted against the older generation, Wellbred suggests that if they let the older

4


men outwit them, they might as well spend the rest of their days as porters in Thames Street and Custom House Quay, their rivalry instead being with the carmen, with whom the porters traditionally competed in the transport of goods (3.1.230–2). In the earlier version of the play, the observation of the equivalent character (Prospero) is merely that if defeated the younger generation should ‘lie and starve in some miserable spital’ (2.3.212). The closer geographical reference brings a whole range of additional experiential knowledge into play allowing the audience a more intimate basis for their apprehension, especially satirical, of the figures in the narrative. However, it is not only where it might aid in the social and other referents of the play that geographical specificity is introduced into the later version. Jonson appears eager to flesh out the familiar topography of London in order to strengthen the embedding of the narrative in a localized section of the City landscape. There are several instances where the localities in which characters live, transact business or generally find themselves in the course of their activities are identified, so that it is possible to map the action on to the local topography, in which respect the folio contrasts markedly with the quarto that is far less geographically specific. The merchant Kiteley is identified as living in the Old Jewry (1.1.139), he arranges to meet a customer at the Exchange (2.1.10) and it is revealed that he had a foundling, Thomas Cash, reared at Christ’s Hospital, an orphanage in Newgate Street (2.1.16). Old Knowell calls on Justice Clement in Coleman Street (3.1.214) and Cob is a waterbearer who ‘dwells by the wall’ (4.4.43–4). The details furnished about the places where Bobadill walks, ‘divers skirts i’ the town, as Turnbull, Whitechapel, Shoreditch, which were then my quarters, and since upon the Exchange, at my lodging, and at my ordinary’ (4.5.41–4), represent a considerable expansion on the information in the quarto version. In some instances, the associations that members of the London audience would have with specific places are utilized. Brainworm procures an old coat in Houndsditch – where dubious clothes dealers plied their trade (3.2.235). When Formal solicits military anecdotes from Brainworm, whom he takes to be a soldier, he refers to both histories and the military manoeuvres at Mile End (4.5.67) whereas the earlier version only mentions the ‘Roman histories’. Wellbred asks Brainworm to get his young master to meet him at the Tower (4.6.57–8) a place that the audience would have been aware of as a place where private marriages could be held without banns, since it was a ‘liberty’ and outside parish boundaries. In the earlier version the equivalent location is the unspecific ‘Friary’ (4.3.56).

Introduction

5

The geo-cultural phenomenon emerging here, developed more widely in Jacobean drama, is the relationship between territorialized activities and milieus as identified by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Territorial activities include ‘profession, trade and specialty’ (1987, p. 359) while milieu encompasses ‘ “surroundings”, “medium” (as in chemistry) and “middle”. In the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, “milieu” should be read as a technical term combining all three meanings’ (1987, p. xvii). Thus the spatial dimensions of London often have particular cultural identity as well. The territorial complexity of the metropolis is expressed in terms of cultural, moral and social diversity, all of which are able to be grist to the theatrical mill. While London is rarely overtly a subject of the drama, by means of the range of characterizations offered by its localities, their potential for theatrical exploitation, and the dynamism present in them, the city frequently inserts itself into the drama as a player more than as merely the setting of dramatic narratives. Jonson did not himself comment on the reasons for the relocation. At the most personal level, it allowed him to assert greater proprietorship over his material through authorial intervention in the foreign narrative by repositioning its dramatic action in the geographical environment that was his through experience as a Londoner. It is also possible that he wanted to point up the satirical targets, though much of the enhanced geographical detail is incidental to the satiric purposes of the play. It certainly involves a shift in focus towards more detailed social texturing of the action.1 The audience’s knowledge of their environment can be enlisted in the construction of characters and in judgements about them. In a later play, Bartholomew Fair (1614), Jonson makes one of his own characters, Littlewit, transfer the narrative of a puppet version of ‘Hero and Leander’ from the Hellespont to London to make it ‘a little easy and modern for the times’ (5.3.120–21). ‘Modern’ more than ‘easy’ is perhaps a clue to what Jonson was trying to do. By means of the convention of anatopism, remote locations – in terms of geography, period or myth – were readily understood to represent English society in general, and even specifically London so that it was not strictly necessary to locate action there. But by making selected elements of London the frame of reference, a level of recognitive comic response can be brought into play, as well as a host of other associations. Anatopical representation is clearly sometimes considered insufficient. Thomas Dekker’s The Honest Whore (Fortune, 1604) is nominally set in Milan but the only clear geographical referents in the play are to known London locations transposed to the vaguer Italian context, Bedlam and Bridewell, with a scene set in each.2

6


Through these importations, Dekker uses a form of shorthand reposing on understood audience response to the actual locations. Jonson was not only, however, exploiting the audience’s experiential knowledge of the relocated setting for the purposes of pointing up the play’s satirical targets, but making available to them a different form of engagement with the play they were watching. What it offers them is less the idea of a larger city environment than a fictive ‘neighbourhood’ somewhat in terms of Pierre Mayol’s conception of such an environment, as an ‘area of public space in general (anonymous, for everyone) in which little by little a private, particularized space insinuates itself as a result of the practical, everyday use of this space’ (De Certeau et al., 1998, p. 9). In the drama, this ‘use’ is imaginative and mediated by both the settings of dramatic narratives and the allusion to localities on the part of characters, which at the same time draws on the understood familiarity of audiences with these localities and further develops that familiarity or even re-conceives the spaces. With the rapid growth of London from the early sixteenth century, an urban self-consciousness was emerging that would increasingly be reflected and even promoted by the new commercial theatre established there. The detail with which the shift of location into spaces familiar to the audience is done results in settings not simply being a convenient context for the dramatic action, but much more of an element of the narrative in its own right. The audience is led around a familiar topography that has immediate associations for its members, both as part of a collective understanding of the meaning of its places and (in many cases) through further individual experience. But in the case of figures in the drama, the relationship between subjects and their environment goes further than the relationship between inhabitants and their ‘neighbourhood’ as elaborated by Mayol. As the characters of the drama are fictional creations, there is room for much more imaginative interplay between their identities and the urban milieu they populate. They are often identified in a morally or socially defining way as connected to specific areas of London, or having a control over their environment, or are described in metaphorical language drawn from the city landscape. But this works both ways, as the city is implicitly delineated by such a process of associations as well, and a form of moralized geography is thus maintained by it. The allusive use of London’s geography is very extensive and just a few examples suffice to illustrate it. In 2 Henry IV, Mistress Quickly says of Falstaff, ‘A [he] comes continuantly to Pie Corner – saving your manhoods – to buy a saddle’ (2.1.26–7) making a sexual pun on the fact that this as a place both where horses were sold and prostitutes

Introduction

7

traded. A variation on this is the association of certain characters with particular locations. In Jonson’s The Alchemist during a quarrel Subtle calls Face a ‘translated suburb-captain’ (1.1.19) referring to his past as a bawd, and Face responds by pointing out that when he first met Subtle he was destitute and hungrily hanging about the cheap food stalls at Pie Corner (1.1.25–7). Subtle retorts that had it not been for his intervention, Face would have remained in low underground places like ‘an alehouse darker than deaf John’s’ (1.1.85) – clearly a known contemporary tavern, and cited to draw on audience consciousness of its reputation. In other ways, the metaphorical use of London places is more neutral in its implications. For instance, in Dekker’s The Shoemakers’ Holiday a character demonstrates certainty in a rhetorical question making reference to familiar London landmarks, ‘Am I sure that Paules steeple is a handful higher then London stone or that the Pissing-Conduit leaks nothing but pure Mother Bunch [water]?’ (4.4.110–12). The use of geographical reference here is one of the ways in which the theatre implicitly gives recognition to the city’s inhabitants as the prime constituency for its products. From the last quarter of the sixteenth century onwards the theatre was, for the first time on a regular basis, locating its dramatic narratives in the geographical spaces with which the audience was familiar from their everyday lives. It thus offered the audiences imaginative ownership of the terrain on which the theatrical narratives were being played out, but in the process would also have affected and helped shape their perceptions of their actual habitat. The extant early modern plays give some indication of the springing to prominence of London as a setting with the advent of the commercial theatre. After only a sprinkling of surviving early plays locating dramatic narratives there, 8 of 43 Elizabethan comedies are set in London, 10 of 16 histories, and 3 of 18 tragedies. There are also 42 further plays of other genres, 6 of which have some direct London interest. This makes a total of 21 plays with London settings and a 119 set elsewhere. After the Elizabethan period, it is only comedies that are set in London; among Jacobean comedies 40 of 84 are set there, and 44 of 98 Caroline comedies. Looking at extant plays is a crude measure and is made even more so by the fact that many plays are really only nominally set in London and have very little real representation of the city, their narrative being mostly or entirely in indoor locations or undefined outdoor ones. Nonetheless, it is clear that London becomes a recurrent setting for comic drama, and this in the face of a fascination being shown by commercial playwrights for exotic places and foreign narratives.3

8


Aside from settings, the frequency of allusions in the speech of dramatic characters (in both the plays set in London and those set elsewhere) to areas, streets and other locations in London across the range of drama from the pre-commercial era to the end of the Caroline period provides a broad if, again, crude picture of the geographical outline of the metropolis it presents. Much of it functions purely to fill out topographical details of narrative, but there is also a considerable amount of metaphorical use of location that is part of the more literary conceptions of the city also present in the drama, and at times both purposes are served. In the case of the narratively functional references, as might be expected, the largest volume of these are to significant places in and around the City. When the occurrence of reference to localities in speeches is noted, ignoring subsequent references to the same places in the same plays, it is clear that the representation of London hangs largely on a selected range of localities. Cheapside is the most recurrently mentioned, in upwards of 45 plays throughout the period, followed by Holborn in over 20 plays, and then in descending order, Billingsgate, the Strand, Ludgate and Blackfriars (15 to 20 plays), Fleet Street, Shoreditch and Cornhill (11 to 14 plays), Eastcheap, Poultry, (Old) Fish Street, Queenhithe, Thames Street, Aldgate and Lombard Street (eight or nine plays), Bishopsgate, Bow, Gracious (now Gracechurch) Street, Lambeth, Southwark, Wood Street, Long Lane, Clerkenwell, Marylebone, Bread Street and Puddle Dock (five to seven plays).4 Many further localities have more limited representation, occurring in four plays or fewer. The importance of traffic, both social and commercial, is indicated by the fact that strongly represented above are the main thoroughfares both within and leading to the City. Cheapside, Poultry, Lombard Street and Cornhill are continuations and forks of the same central thoroughfare – and other significant ones in the City are Aldgate, Ludgate, Bishopsgate, Gracechurch Street, Thames Street, Bread Street and Wood Street. Holborn, Fleet Street and Long Lane provide land access to the City from the west, while Billingsgate, Queenhithe and Puddle Dock furnish access from the river. Several such thoroughfares maintain their presence throughout the period, especially Cheapside, Holborn and Thames Street, while Old Fish Street, Eastcheap and Ludgate are not mentioned in Caroline drama. Some thoroughfares also give their names to residential districts, but the only other residential area within the City to receive recurrent mention is Blackfriars, known as a wealthy area and also one populated by Puritans, while outside of it the Strand is referred to in terms of being a fashionable locality in Jacobean and Caroline drama. Otherwise, more attention in allusions is given to selected

Introduction

9

suburban areas such as Bow, Southwark, Clerkenwell and Marylebone, frequently with particular associations attached. A similar selectivity is shown in the surrounding towns and villages outside of London that are either ‘outleaps’ or otherwise have significance for Londoners. In allusions Islington is the most popular, occurring in over 20 plays, followed by Brentford, Highgate and Hogsdon at around a dozen each, and then Paddington, Romford and Fulham (six to eight plays). The recurrent mention in the drama of certain localities in the City can be ascribed to their topographical prominence, so that they form natural conversational points of reference. Most prominent among these are Charing Cross and the Thames referred to in around 20 plays, with mentions of the Conduit in Cheapside and the Guildhall in around 15 to 19 plays. Aside from these, the most important secular landmarks are the Barber Surgeons’ Hall, Leadenhall and Baynard’s Castle (six to nine plays). The most alluded to churches are St Mary le-Bow in around a dozen plays, St Antholin’s in Watling Street (because of its bell), St Giles in the Fields and St Martin’s-le-Grand (seven or eight plays). Other types of locality owe their prominence in allusion to their being places of social gathering, of which the most important is the Exchange (the old, the new or undetermined) in over 40 plays. This is followed by open spaces and gardens, such as Moorfields, Hyde Park and Paris Garden (11 to 15 plays) and the Spring Garden and St George’s Fields (six to eight plays). The Paris Garden (which had a dubious reputation) is represented throughout the period, while Moorfields drops out of later plays and Hyde Park gains more prominence in the later drama. Certain taverns enjoy more attention than others, including the Mitre in Bread Street in around ten plays, followed by The Bear at the bridge foot in Southwark, the Pimlico in Hoxton, The Devil in Fleet Street, the Mermaid in Bread Street and the Three Cranes (five to seven plays). Some of these, such as the Devil and the Mermaid, were favoured by the playwrights for their own use. The tendency to a ‘literary’ representation of London in the drama is evident in the repeated reference to types of locality with specific associations. Some of these are essential to the types of narrative they accommodate, such as the historical sites of Westminster Abbey and Westminster Palace that occur in several history plays. Others, however, are special types of place that carry a defined field of meaning, the most prominent examples of which are prisons. Newgate is the most ubiquitous and enduring of these (from the early Tudor to the Caroline period), being referred to in around 30 plays and this is followed by the Counter (a name that refers to two debtors’ prisons, the Poultry

10


and the Bread Street – later Wood Street institutions) in a little over 20. However, when references to the Hole (a part of the Counter) are included then the tally of citings of these institutions in the drama equals that of Newgate. The prison for prostitutes, Bridewell, is alluded to in just under 20 plays, while the Fleet and Marshalsea are in around ten each and several others receive mention in fewer than four plays. The relative frequency of reference to prisons – often in a humorous light – is a possible indicator of social anxiety especially in relation to the life of the metropolis. So too are the references to places of execution, such as Tyburn in over 20 plays and the more geographically remote St Thomas-a-Waterings in around six, or courts of which the most prominent is the Arches mentioned in six plays. Mentions of hospitals and places of refuge for the mentally and materially destitute also contribute to this, such as Bedlam and St Katherine’s hospital (15 to 18 plays) or Christ’s Hospital (six plays). Social deviance is a natural preoccupation of the drama and another signifier of it is reference to vicinities in the capital of dubious reputation.5 Sexuality is clearly a potent dimension of this, indicated in more general terms by the frequency with which places like the stews, the suburbs or recognized places of sexual resort outside London occur in allusive speech. The most prominent are the areas associated with prostitution, Turnbull Street and Pict-Hatch (17 and 11 plays respectively), while St Pancras, a place known for dubious marriages, occurs in 12 plays. Westminster comes next, in just over ten plays, a neighbourhood that had become notorious for criminality as it housed a sanctuary. Other disreputable areas, cropping up in around six to nine plays each, include Wapping (which also had a gallows), Whitefriars, Ram Alley, Fleet Ditch and more remotely, Gad’s Hill. Further locations occurring with some regularity in allusion are those connected with particular types of activity or where certain commodities are sold. Westminster Hall, where legal transactions were done, is the most prominent of these, occurring in over 20 plays and persistently so over the period, its business being of natural theatrical interest. Other places of commodity provision occur less frequently such as the Stillyard where merchants operated, St Paul’s Churchyard that was home to booksellers and other business (eight or nine plays), Pie Corner (seven plays) and Birchin Lane and Houndsditch, known for the sale of clothing (four or five plays). Some locations are known for certain activities and are used because of these associations, either contributing to the occurrence of urban geography in metaphor or being more concretely

Introduction

11

employed in the geographical and social embedding of dramatic narratives. Finsbury, a practice ground of archers and City train bands, occurs in just under 20 plays, while Mile End, where City militias exercised is mentioned in 17, and Bunhill, another archery ground in five. Bankside for its range of activities and St Bartholomew, principally for the fair, are referred to in around 17 plays and the Artillery Ground and Tiltyard in eight or nine. The Inns of Court, known not only as a place of legal training but as a source of sophisticated playgoers, are mentioned in upwards of 14 plays and four of London’s theatres, the Red Bull, Fortune, Globe and Cockpit are alluded to in five to seven plays each, with other theatres occurring less often in reference. Several places have a mixed significance, functioning in different ways in allusions. Most prominent among these is St Paul’s, a general meeting place, one where legal and other business was done, and one deemed dangerous for the unwary, occurs very persistently across the whole period in nearly 70 plays, sometimes having Paul’s Walk specified. The Tower, featuring because of its historical and contemporary roles as a prison, palace and fortress, architectural landmark and Liberty, is in around 26 plays while Tower Hill, an historical place of execution and topographically prominent locality, is in a further nine. Other historical locations with different contemporary roles include the Temple (22 plays), Smithfield (13 plays) Savoy Palace (nine plays) and Tuttle (now Tothill) Fields (seven plays). Some locations, such as Cuckold’s Haven and Cold Harbour (seven or eight plays) tend to be used in allusion for the suggestive power of their names rather than anything else. There is some interplay between the process of anchoring dramatic narrative in the London environment known by its audience through experience, and the invitation the drama extends to that audience to configure their conceptual world through a metaphorical apprehension of features of their city. In the selection of specific types of location – essentially a combination of places of major areas of traffic and those with particular metaphoric or associative potency – playwrights fashion a city that primarily serves theatrical convenience, but this works alongside and is complementary to the ways in which the city dweller occupies urban space. As Mayol has remarked, ‘The city, in the strongest sense, is “poeticized” by the subject: the subject has refabricated it for his or her own use by undoing the constraints of the urban apparatus and, as a consumer of space, imposes his own law on the external order of the city’ (De Certeau et al., 1998, p. 13). The work of the playwrights constructing London theatrically contributes to the process by which its inhabitants

12


that are members of their audience occupy the city imaginatively and impose a conceptual order upon it. The appropriation by the theatre for its audience of London as a geographical entity in the drama shifts significantly over time. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a period of substantial growth for London, in which its population more than quadrupled and what had been an urban centre of moderate size became not only England’s largest city by far, but would be by the mid-eighteenth century Europe’s largest metropolis and the fourth largest in the world (Beier and Finlay, 1986, p. 1). The largest jump in population size appears to have occurred between 1550 and 1650.6 The representation of London as an entity or as a collection of spaces undergoes substantial changes according to the political, demographic and cultural shifts of the period, and also the changing nature of the drama itself. The period focus of this discussion – earlier and later Tudor, Stuart and Caroline – broadly reflects the shifts in the ways in which London is presented in the drama. The pre–commercial era drama offers largely a geography that is allegorized, and in which its audience’s imaginative involvement with the few places that represent the city (usually iconic of corruption) is disavowed rather than embraced. With the advent of the London-based commercial theatre, though there is some persistence of the representation of the city in terms of vice, there is also a pride in its power and a considerable positive interest in the reality of the material environment. The Jacobean drama’s inhabiting of London’s spaces becomes more comprehensive and is accompanied by a particular urban selfconsciousness that is produced by this environment. Caroline drama, with its interest in ‘place realism’ both celebrates material growth and shifts the emphasis of its ownership to a more restricted social group, with urban space being theatricalized, and characters in the drama occupying their world both as denizens of a metropolis and as performers. Pertinent to the representation of London are the considerable advances in geographical and cartographic knowledge in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, constituting the emergence of what is known as the ‘new geography’ the advent of which is described by Garrett Sullivan in the following terms: This moment is understood as marking the turning point from an imprecise and religious or mythopoetic geography to an accurate and scientific one – from, for example, the medieval map centred on the sacred site of Jerusalem to the famous cartographic projection

Introduction

13

associated with the atlas-maker Gerard Mercator, which allows for the representation of space as homogeneous and uniformly divisible. Characterised by the proliferation of increasingly precise representations of the world (with Ortelius’s atlas being a prime example), the new geography was made possible by a number of historical phenomena, such as improved mapping technologies; the growing desire and need for accurate geographic information, and the everwidening distribution of printed geographical materials, including maps and atlases. (2004, p. 232) These developments are reflected in the interest of dramatists in setting the action in the real spaces of London. The shift from the moralized geography of the earlier religious drama to the much greater tangibility of topography in the secular plays of the commercial theatre represents a change in the way urban space is recognized and used. This transition was not absolute, however, and there is some residual presence of mythic or quasi-mythic associations of place even where the locations used as settings or allusively incorporated into the drama are drawn from the immediate world of the audience, and known to them through firsthand or at least second-hand experience. Edward Soja has pointed to two contrasting ways of viewing geographical space: The ‘illusion of opaqueness’ reifies space, inducing a myopia that sees only a superficial materiality, concretized forms susceptible to little else but measurement and phenomenal description: fixed, dead and undialectical: the Cartesian cartography of spatial science. Alternatively, the ‘illusion of transparency’ dematerializes space into pure ideation and representation, an intuitive way of thinking that equally prevents us from seeing the social construction of affective geographies, the concretization of social relations embedded in spatiality, an interpretation of space as a ‘concrete abstraction’, a social hieroglyphic similar to Marx’s conceptualization of the commodity form. (1989, p. 7) In viewing the dramatic realization of London on the early modern stage, it is possible to be fully aware of the material dimensions of the urban geography that the dramatic narratives inhabit – indeed, this awareness is often germane to a full understanding of those narratives – while at the same time retaining a consciousness of the ‘concretization

14


of social relations embedded in spatiality’. The combination of the visual and social nature of theatre in some senses requires both, especially where the drama re-presents the spatial world of the audience in its settings. Complementing the impulse provided by the advances in geographical thinking is the interest in London manifested by its inhabitants, suggesting a growth in self-conscious appreciation of their place of residence. This developed over a considerable period and involved a wide social spectrum. Mary-Rose McLaren has documented the fifteenthcentury chronicles of London which, she notes, represented, ‘the first attempt made by ordinary people – merchants, scriveners, craftsmen – to write their own history. They did so by writing what are known as the “London chronicles” ’ (2002, p. 3). At the end of the following century, another major work of chronicling the city’s history and laying out its geography was to be John Stow’s monumental Survey of London that first appeared in 1598.7 In the middle of the following century, James Howell produced his Londinopolis, An Historicall Discourse or Perlustration of the City of London (including the suburbs and Westminster) which gave a detailed account, as Stow had, of the metropolis ward by ward. If, at one end of the representational spectrum the city is the habitat of dramatic characters placed in the world of the audiences, at the other it is reified in the drama as an entity that can be held up to view in various ways: a focus of architectural admiration, an object of nationalist pride, an avatar of corruption or an exemplification of great wealth. There are problems in trying to get to grips with the way in which drama represents a larger spatial entity such as a metropolis, especially when it is increasingly the setting for theatrical action. Dramatic action is usually located in much more particularized spaces, private or public. As the built environment of London is rarely an overt topic of the drama, glimpses of it have to be gleaned from individual scenes, characters or narrative situations.8 Though the materiality of London in the drama will constitute the principal focus of this study, attention will also be given to the ways in which the plays manifest an awareness of metropolitan life as peculiar and distinct to a unique set of geographical circumstances, often directly related to the various material features of the city. Consideration will not be confined to the walled City because, though this area and its social, political and economic make-up was fully understood in the period to have a particular identity, it is also clear that from early on London was being conceived of in more metropolitan terms, extending to Westminster and the transpontine suburbs.9 This

Introduction

15

is illustrated in the remit of the tour of London envisaged by the Vice Iniquity in Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass (Globe/Blackfriars, 1616) for the devil Pug who is proposing to spend some time on earth:

We will survey the suburbs, and make forth our sallies Down Petticoat Lane and up the Smock Alleys, To Shoreditch, Whitechapel, and so to Saint Kather’n’s, To drink with the Dutch there, and take forth their patterns. From thence we will put in at Custom House Quay there, And see how the factors and prentices play there False with their masters, and geld many a full pack, To spend it in pies, at the Dagger and the Woolsack. Nay, boy, I will bring thee to the bawds and the roisters At Billingsgate, feasting with claret wine and oysters, From thence shoot the bridge, child, to the Cranes i’ the Vintry, And see there the gimlets, how they make their entry! Or, if thou hadst rather, to the Strand down to fall, ’Gainst the lawyers come dabbled from Westminster Hall, And mark how they cling with their clients together, Like ivy to oak, so velvet to leather. (1.1.59–75)

Though the passage offers a satirical picture of the variety of vicious practices in London, what also emerges is both an idea of its localized ethnic, professional and social diversity and the fact that it encompasses much more than the walled city. By the mid-sixteenth century London had spread considerably beyond the old walled city in various directions. Apart from the Bankside suburbs across the Thames, fingers of development spread out eastwards along the river towards Whitechapel, towards Shoreditch and westwards in a ribbon development that linked it with Westminster. A more substantial sector of development to the north and west of the old city extended beyond the Fleet river, almost towards Gray’s Inn Fields. The geographical extent of the unitary metropolis is equally suggested by Michael Drayton in his 1612 poem ‘Poly-Olbion’ talking of the Thames that ‘on by London leads, which like a Crescent lies’ (Song 17.97) clearly referring to the bend in the river that has Westminster at one extremity and the Tower of London at the other. Another spurt of development in the seventeenth century between the

16


old city and Westminster, as well as to the east, south and north of Westminster including Pall Mall, Holborn and Covent Garden, not only significantly enlarged the metropolis but consolidated the connection between the two centres.10 It is also clear from manifold references in the drama to the various close-lying neighbouring villages such as Mile End, Islington, Hoxton, Brentford and Chelsea, some of which were in comfortable walking distance, that the broader mental habitation and geographical frame of reference of the denizens of London, whether they were resident in the square mile or not, extended widely beyond the walled city. One effect of the theatrical realization of London – the creation of narrative settings identifiable as known locations – is to endow dramatic narratives with a sense of materiality. However, the theatre also offers opinionated conceptions of the capital in verbal allusion or description contained in dramatic dialogue that reveals some selfconsciousness in the drama about the nature of the city that it inhabits. Verbal accounts are not usually governed by immediate dramaturgical exigencies and so may more readily afford a conceptual representation of the city. Lawrence Manley, in talking of the leading geographical descriptive works of the Tudor-Stuart age, and specifically their attribution of a feminine persona to London, remarks that they set up a transhistorical identity which absorbed and suppressed the spatial divisions and discontinuities that manifested the city’s true historical dynamism . In the reading of Tudor-Stuart London’s landscape, personification counteracted the inherently spatial bias of topography, together with its potentially disturbing emphasis on sharply / divided or discontinuous political domains. (1988, pp. 349–50) In the drama, both forms of representation may be present, sometimes alongside each other. The reductive abstracting/idealizing representations are more readily able to offer reflections on the metropolis as a concept, and can thus be put to work to a variety of ideological ends, while settings can provide an immediate recognitive experience to audiences. Yet another source of perspectives is to be found in the metonymic aspects of the metropolis or its inhabitants that crop up from time to time, such as the lord mayor who is able not only to give voice to qualities with which the playwrights wish to endow the capital, but possibly also to embody aspects of them.

Introduction

17

The division of this discussion into periods from early Tudor to Caroline means that there is less emphasis than there might have been on the particular approaches of individual playwrights to the representation of London. Writers differ markedly in the extent to which they incorporate the material fabric of the metropolis into their plays, the work of some such as Heywood, Dekker, Middleton, Jonson, Brome and Nabbes being steeped in it, while others take a more distant view of the geography of their dramatic narratives, and there is some variation as well in underlying attitudes to London that might have been more clearly brought out by a differently structured view of the material. However, the shifts evident in both the nature of the city itself and attitudes to it in the drama over the century and a half under consideration make a sequential or chronological division of focus more appropriate than either a generic or a writer-based approach. Theatre is unique among the written forms of art in requiring not only the employment of a range of people to bring its products to realization, but also the simultaneous presence of substantial numbers of its customer base. This imposes the necessity for it to be closely responsive to the requirements of its clientele and endows it with a certain immediacy as a dynamic cultural practice. The history of dramatic forms in the sixteenth century and earlier also establishes the drama’s role in communal ritual, both social and religious, the most striking example of drama as a social ritual being perhaps the Corpus Christi cycles found in several provincial towns. A number of studies on urban history recognize the contribution of communal drama to the cohesion and sense of community identity in English towns in the sixteenth century.11 This is, of course, avowedly community drama, whereas the commercial theatre might be argued to have other imperatives. However, it too provided something of a ritual function in society, helping to underline social cohesion while conversely insisting upon the divisions of rank. Quite aside from the perspectives of the drama itself, the theatre did this by bringing a diverse range of members of society together in the same building and with a common purpose, probably the only institution to do so other than the Church, and its spatial arrangement of ranks echoed that of the society of which they were a part.12 In a society where visual signifiers were an increasingly important part of social identity – particularly in London – the theatre provided opportunities for a public parade of status, wealth and other qualities.13 Taking the content of plays into account alongside the theatre as a meeting place, it also constituted part of the collective intellectual life of the society. Martin Butler has, for instance, made the argument that the private theatres, especially in the

18


Caroline period, functioned as forums of political debate for the gentry (1984, pp. 135–40). Drama as a popular medium is an appropriate place to gauge social perceptions of the environment in which its original audiences lived since its allusions to it call upon audience expectations of that environment, even if theatrical representations of London are unlikely to involve unadulterated realism. The establishment of a commercial theatre housed in permanent buildings is closely linked to the rapid centralization of English culture in the sixteenth century and the beginnings of London’s path towards becoming the world’s largest metropolis for over two centuries. The theatre certainly required the market for its products that only a large and concentrated population could provide. As members of the working population would have attended the theatre only rarely, work time usually having to be sacrificed to attend the performances, all scheduled in the daytime in the public theatres, the need to fill seats required a shifting audience membership drawn from a large pool of the ordinary population. Added to this, the concentration of a sizeable section of the leisured elite in London with the time and means to exploit the entertainment on offer further enhanced the conditions for a successful theatre industry to survive. Lawrence Manley has remarked of London in the mid-sixteenth century: The quest for patronage, education and marriage drew swarms of aspiring courtiers to London and Westminster; by 1560 half of England’s peers owned London houses, many of them on the sites of pre–Reformation episcopal palaces along the Strand between the City and Westminster. Their presence transformed London into a centre of conspicuous consumption, an emporium for the specialized luxury goods imported by the city’s merchants and manufactured by its craftsmen. (1986, p. 7) In fact, the theatre might be seen to constitute, along with other luxury trades, part of the diversity of culture and consumer provision made available by a large city. That communal entertainment of a commercial nature was available on a daily basis, and not simply as part of the festive year, was in itself a remarkable development in the experience of metropolitan living. The theatre was thus incorporated into the rituals of sophisticated urban life, and in An Apology for Actors of 1612 Thomas Heywood points out the contribution of the theatre to the status of London as a great metropolis:

Introduction

19

Now if you aske me why were not the Theaters as gorgeously built in all other Cities of Italy as Rome? And why are not Play-houses maintained as well in other Cities of England, as London? my answere is: it is not meet euery meane Esquire should carry the part belonging to one of the Nobility, or for a Noble-man to vsurpe the estate of a Prince. Rome was a Metropolis a place whither all the nations knowne under the Sunne, resorted: so is London, and being to receiue all Estates, all Princes, all Nations, therefore to affoord them all choyce of pastimes, sports, and recreations. (fol. C2r) For all these reasons, the commercial theatre can be viewed as naturally rooted in the culture and social structure of the metropolis, just as all the other manifestations of theatrical culture were in and of their own specific generating contexts: folk drama in rural community life, the urban cycles in the life of provincial towns, the dramatic festivities of academic and other communities or the hall drama of country houses. This study will trace the presence of London in various ways – as subject, as setting and in terms of the emerging consciousness of metropolitan life – in the drama of the early period from before the theatre had any particular association with the capital to the middle of the seventeenth century by which time it had an established place in London’s cultural life. In the course of this, it will become apparent that the city is initially seen very much from the outside in those plays from the earlier period of drama (pre-1570s) that take any account of it at all. Prior to the 1570s, London does not yet occupy a prominent enough place within English culture for it to figure significantly in the largely provincial theatrical culture. This situation changes with the rapid growth of the city in the sixteenth century and with the establishment of the permanent theatres in London. It fairly rapidly enters the drama as a setting, some early commercial theatre plays even including its name in their titles for the first time. Notable also in the 1590s is the way in which the representation of the capital contributes to the nationalist discourse of the post-Armada years, as well as being part of the emerging interest in historiography at this time. It is the Jacobean period, however, that sees the capital come into its own in the drama, with issues that are largely specific to metropolitan life becoming a focus of the drama, and the emergence of ‘City’ comedies.14 It is in this period that a greater sophistication and relativism begins to emerge in the portrayal and discussion of sexual and social morality in the drama, something that can be directly related to its metropolitan contexts and

20


concerns. Whereas in this period London becomes a natural setting for the comic drama at least, it is the elite coterie theatres of the Caroline period that introduce a new self-consciousness about urban identity. The subject of topography is at the centre of this discussion. Either in terms of settings or of allusion, the consciousness of the physical geography of London is only ever partially present in plays, and invoked for particular purposes. The late sixteenth century saw the emergence of a sense of place in the drama – recognizable to its audiences through their own experience rather than being mythic, foreign or historical landscapes – in both the frame of narrative reference of plays and the setting of dramatic action. Though representation of familiar locality appeared just before the advent of the established commercial theatre – in terms of the extant drama already evident in the mid-century interlude Jack Juggler – it unsurprisingly really coincided with the non-civic theatre’s shift from an itinerant to a largely static situation. Of all the dimensions of its spectators’ experience on which the drama draws, it is the geographical one that is most fully shared by the diverse sectors of audience. Members of London audiences might be varied in terms of rank, class, gender, age, economic status and education but, though they may reside in different parts of the metropolis, the vast majority of them share a relatively close knowledge of their material environment. By the seventeenth century, London was not so large as to preclude quite an intimate awareness of its various parts and features on the part of those making up theatre audiences, something that could be presumed and used by playwrights in a variety of ways in their work. There is, however, considerable divergence in the extent to which early modern drama incorporates a sense of familiar place in its narratives. Most tragedies, aside from the handful of Elizabethan and Jacobean domestic and bourgeois examples of the genre, are set in foreign, often historical locations. So too are several comedies though in these, to a greater extent than in tragedy, foreign cities can often be used to represent the society of London, or aspects of it. The use or otherwise of London as a setting of plays has much to do with the ways in which genres invite responses to the dramatized material. The relative grandiosity of tone in heroic tragedy, or the grotesqueness and exoticism of revenge tragedy require locations that are remote from the everyday realities of a local environment, as might the demands of classical or romantic comedy. In those plays that do engage with the capital there is substantial variation in the detail with which this is done, again frequently related to the specific agendas of the plays themselves. While

Introduction

21

some plays set in London make very little reference to the geographical specificities of the city and name few, if any, locations, others are deeply immersed in its topography. In the case of the few domestic tragedies set in London, the sensationalism and horror of the events they dramatize is intensified by their local setting and the familiarity of the locations in which they take place. In comedy, where specificity about familiar geography is used more widely, this is employed for a range of purposes. It might include the use in intrigue of local knowledge (often with implications for the characters that possess it), the incorporation of particular features of social life such as shops, and enlisting the audience’s own experience of aspects of the local environment for a variety of purposes including the satirizing of particular social types. Perhaps the most consistently tangible sense of urban space comes in the Caroline theatre, though here too there is variation in the degree and manner in which this drama bring the details of the urban geography into play. Dramatic narratives take place in physical space, and when that stage space reconstitutes urban localities familiar to the audience through experience, the constraints of realism obviously come into force, the spaces represented on stage possessing a reality that would inevitably interfere with any more imaginative project associated with them. On the other hand, the fact that plays are forced to condense narratives and be selective about detail conduces to the exploitation of popular conceptions (which can be fanciful) attaching to particular places to provide a useful shorthand means of creating narrative meaning. In these cases it is not simply material recognition that is at issue, but understanding of what social and cultural meanings are inscribed in them. Hence one finds the recurrence, in both setting and allusion, of certain types of such places as taverns, brothels and parks. Cultural change over the period is to a significant extent indicated by shifts in the presence of different types of public space in plays (as opposed to private, domestic ones). Henri Lefebvre has remarked on the notion of space in the theatre: By means of such theatrical interplay bodies are able to pass from a ‘real’, immediately experienced space (the pit, the stage) to a perceived space – a third space which is no longer either scenic or public. At once fictitious and real, this third space is classical theatrical space. To the question of whether such space is a representation of space or a representational space, the answer must be neither – and both. Theatrical space certainly implies a representation of space – scenic

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space – corresponding to a particular conception of space (that of the classical drama, say – or the Elizabethan, or the Italian). The representational space, mediated yet directly experienced, which infuses the work and the moment, is established as such through the dramatic action itself. (1991, p. 188) There is arguably a distinction to be made between space that is entirely conceptual, the apprehension of which resides wholly in its theatrical mediation or through a combination of that and other forms of literary mediation, and geographical space that is both theatrically mediated and familiar through experience. The ‘representational space’ is thus experienced directly by the audience in two senses – as real space in the theatre and as real space of remembered experience. Plays also differ widely with regard to how much detailed consciousness they reveal of the urban world that is their home, and the degree of reflection on it that they include is likely to be governed by the topic of the drama and approach of the writers. There is a strong tendency in especially the Elizabethan plays for the conception of London to remain largely a literary one serving discursive purposes rather than seeking to relate closely to social and material reality. It is mainly in the Jacobean period that there is any substantial move towards a specificity that goes beyond mere literary convenience, evoking details of London streets and other localities as part of narratives that assume a high degree of audience familiarity with those places. Aside from the circumstantial determinants of its theatrical realization, the nature of geographical space as represented in the drama is also pertinent. The more abstract species of early religious and homiletic drama usually has no defined geographical space as setting, though it can contain allusions to named places. Though later drama is much less inclined to eschew localization, some of it takes little account of geographical specificity and locates its narrative action in unnamed or vaguely defined places. Where there is identified geographical space in either the setting or verbal discourse of plays, this can be described in terms of being iconic, moralized or familiar/realistic. ‘Iconic’ space is that which is known culturally, but not through the direct experience of at least the generality of the audience – mythic, historical or foreign locations, the use of which gives a particular charge to the narratives that they accommodate. By contrast, familiar or realistic locations depend on direct audience experience of their real referents outside the theatre for their significance and effectiveness. There is also the possibility of implicit cross-reference between

Introduction

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these two forms of landscape. In early scriptural drama this involves the biblical world of the urban cycles reflecting the contemporary world of the audience, and vice-versa, as part of a cyclical, non-linear conception of providential history. A similar principle can be found in the convention of anatopism in the later commercial theatre by which aspects of English society are signified in drama set in foreign places. Yet another mode of representation of geographical locality is what might be termed ‘moralized landscape’, the attachment of moral qualities to particular spaces. In the place and scaffold staging of early religious theatre this moralized landscape is very clear, but it is also present in other forms of early theatre and in the later commercial theatre as well in which theatrical convention and the tendency of playwrights to follow certain formulae of writing has an effect. As has been indicated, certain locations crop up more than others as they become dramatic (and other) bywords for particular types of activity or other associations. The representation of London in the early modern theatre is thus far from wholly determined by the nature of the city itself, and is to a considerable extent a product of the signifying functions that the capital and its component localities serve in the drama. An important feature with which the present study will concern itself is the way that this representation effectively involves an interaction and even merger between the geographical and the symbolic or discursive senses of the term ‘topos’, and provides a series of cognitive maps to the cultural, social and philosophical situations and changes in the period as well as responding to the material facts of the emergence of a metropolitan society.15 Naturally, representations of contemporary society are governed by theatrical convention, and are not directly mimetic. The reading of the social values implicit in a theatre that was strongly conventiongoverned and attempted little by way of naturalistic representation certainly demands an awareness of that fact. However, the conventions themselves needed to be responsive to the demands of the clientele of the theatres and would, in either direct or oblique ways, embody the values of the most powerful elements in its client base. Kathleen McLuskie has referred to representational conventions in the theatre as, ‘the narrative, poetic and theatrical strategies which position the audience to understand their events from a particular point of view’ (1985, p. 92). The values underlying the conventions themselves thus form part of a changing Weltanschauung emerging from the profound and rapid social, political and economic transformations that took place in century and a half under consideration. However, the theatre being an

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increasingly powerful public medium, it is itself partly instrumental in creating that worldview, and the fact of its having been established in London in the last quarter of the sixteenth century is a major part of this. Some clarification about nomenclature should be made at this point. A problem about the use of the term ‘city’ to refer to London is that the old square mile of the walled town that currently constitutes the financial centre is conventionally referred to as ‘the City’. It thus has a very specific meaning. Since it will be necessary to keep this distinction, given that different parts of London retained distinct social characters, the following convention will be adopted. Where the district of the old square mile is being referred to, the word will be capitalized, as above, while otherwise it will be in lower case. Since, as has been pointed out above, the closely adjacent but administratively distinct cities of London and Westminster were perceived collectively as the capital, effectively constituting a single conurbation, ‘London’ will throughout be understood as encompassing both cities. The consideration of this conurbation will also include Southwark which, it is worth noting, Stow included along with Westminster in his survey. If nothing else did, the siting of the theatres themselves effectively extended the idea of the unified metropolis to cover both Southwark and north of the City, and at least some of the people it brought there would otherwise be unlikely to have included these places in their experience of the capital.

2 The Pre–commercial Theatre Interlude Drama

A number of factors operate in the representation of London in the interlude drama, one important material determinant being that this is a largely itinerant theatre that is not normally London-based. Though some interludes were, of course, produced for the court or other patrons in the metropolis, the overwhelming majority were essentially not a part of the cultural life of the capital. Even the royally patronized troupes spent much of their time touring in the provinces, and many of the companies under provincial noble patronage never came to London.1 There is, however, a dearth of available information on the auspices and specific geographical provenance of many plays. This makes it extremely difficult to establish any reliable relationship between the places of origin and performance of particular plays and the ways in which London is represented in the drama of the period. Settings are of self-evident importance when it comes to any discussion of the representation of place and, before moving on to a discussion of the representation of London in pre–commercial era drama, a word should be said about settings in this theatre in general terms. Though the interludes were mostly allegorical and non-scenic, with little or no need for clearly defined geographical space, there were also strands of theatrical practice that did have scenic dimensions: scriptural and saint plays with both pageant wagon and place and scaffold staging. There are, for instance, scenic elements in the great scriptural cycles to denote both otherworldly and earthly places such as the throne of heaven and the spatially distinct locations of the creation plays, the ark in the Noah plays, the altar in the Christ in the Temple plays, the tables in the Simon the Leper and last supper plays, and the tombs in the Lazarus and Resurrection sequences. The Digby play The Conversion of St Paul (first quarter of the sixteenth century) is likely to 25

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have had either pageant wagons or scaffolds representing Jerusalem and Damascus. But here, as in the interludes and hagiographical plays with place-and-scaffold staging, the places depicted are rarely identifiable geographical locations and, as represented by individual scaffolds, function more than anything else to structure the moral narratives. The Digby Mary Magdalen (late fifteenth/early sixteenth century) has scaffolds for the Castle of Magdalen, Marcyll (Marseilles) and Jerusalem, though none of these shows any indication of visual specificity and the scaffolds are likely to have doubled, reducing the potential for individualization. Most non-cycle and early secular plays are not set in named localities, and in the case of the few that are, there is little to suggest anything more than the most functional elements of set, where it is present at all. Though Richard Edwards’s Damon and Pithias (1564–1567) is set in Syracuse and the action of Thomas Inglelend’s court play for boys, The Disobedient Child (1559–1569), is located nominally in a house in London, neither has any visual indication of set. The anonymous Terence in English (1516–1533) is set in Athens and the only scenic element is the house outside which the action occurs, possibly visually characterized. John Pickering’s Horestes (printed 1567) has the city wall and gates of Mycœne, while Jocasta, a 1566 Gray’s Inn play by George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmershe is set in Thebes, featuring two gates of the city and Jocasta’s palace, possibly with some identifying features. Two other Gray’s Inn plays have named settings, Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566) in a street in Ferrara between two of the characters’ houses and John Jefferes’s The Bugbears (1563–1566) in Florence in front of three houses. Represented places in the scriptural and hagiographical drama provide a basic structural frame for the narrative, and also function in terms of moral or mythic iconicity. In the secular drama, named localities are at best a theatrical frame on which to arrange stage action. A secular sense of place emerges only slowly and sporadically in sixteenth-century drama (mostly in academic auspices) before the advent of the commercial theatre. Plays of foreign or classical source more often than not have their narratives set in identified locations. By contrast, very few of the English plays from the period before the last quarter of the century that are not specifically based on classical or Continental models have any sort of defined geographical setting. Locations are occasionally loosely identified usually by the protagonists, who are mentioned as men of particular places such as Rome (in Fulgens and Lucres), London (in The Disobedient Child) or more loosely Persia (in Thomas Preston’s Cambises). In these instances little or nothing is made of the location. In a very

The Pre–commercial Theatre Interlude Drama 27

small number of other cases, where the play is set is somewhat clearer from reference to places in which certain of the actions take place, and the vague suggestions of setting in these indicate London. In Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (1552–1554), the reference to St Paul’s steeple (786) suggests that it is set in or near London, allusions in John Heywood’s John John the Husband (1520–1533) to St Paul’s (153) and Thames Street (114), and several specific references to London locations in Hick Scorner may indicate London settings too but in none of these cases does a particular setting crystallize. Curiously, the only extant play to be set with any degree of detail or specificity in a place within the realm is set in London. This is Jack Juggler (1553–1558), which will be discussed at greater length below, as will the Hick Scorner allusions. Overwhelmingly the picture that emerges of the capital in the drama of this period is not from plays actually being set there, but from references to or discussions of the city in the mouths of dramatic characters. Something else that affected the presence of London as both a location and a topic in the interludes was the set of socio-culturally determined conventions of representation that governed them. London appears most often in the early drama not principally as a real location in which narratives are set, but rather more as a range of points of reference, the place names cited having a particular charge. In the largely provincial drama, the capital has as much a mythic as a real identity. Its representation should therefore be considered in terms of the ways that place names are used in plays in the period, which might be described as a convention of moralized geographical place. The naming of places by characters in the early drama, where it is not essential to the narrative, goes beyond simple geographical identification and is frequently a way of placing the character making the references, or on whose behalf the references are made, in moral or social ways. Given this practice, it is useful to start by examining in more general terms the implications of reference to geographical places in the interludes, as a considerable degree of consistency can be discerned. This has relevance to the way in which London and London locations are referred to, a consideration of which will follow. In the Corpus Christi cycles and certain other related drama such as saint plays, the tyrant figures that populate them frequently lay claim to sovereignty over a string of places, the names of which they go on to recite. This is a conventional and recurrent device that identifies these figures as enmeshed in the world and the pursuit of worldly power. It is a remarkably consistent phenomenon that non-biblical place names

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in the drama are cited with far greater frequency by such figures, particularly where such citations are incidental to the narrative. Fascination with place names might partly be ascribed to the fact there was increased geographical awareness and interest through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, prompted by global exploration and evidenced by contemporary developments in mapmaking. However, the persistent alliterativeness that characterizes most such lists of place names suggests less an idea of real geography than the signalling of worldly knowledge by means of this sort of verbal formula. It reflects much more the imaginative notions of ‘old’ geographical ideas rather than the more sophisticated practice of the ‘new’ geography that was emerging at this time.2 In the Towneley Herod play (no. 16) the Nuncius sets out the range of Herod’s subject territories: Tuskane and Turky, All Inde and Italy, Cecyll and Surry Drede hym and dowtys. From Paradyse to Padwa To Mownt Flascon From Egyp to Mantua Vnto Kemptowne, From Sarceny to Susa To Grece it abowne, Both Normondy and Norwa Lowtys to his crowne (62–73) The Herod of the Digby Mary Magdalen claims to be, besides being King of Jerusalem, ‘Lord of Alapye, Assye, and Tyr, / Of Abyron, Beraby, and Bedlem’ (158–9). In the morality and interlude drama, this listing of places as a demonstration of power is exemplified in a very early play The Castle of Perseverance (1382–1425) by the figure of Mundus who has an extensive alliterative list of places over which he holds sway (170–8), and in The World and the Child (1500–1522) by the humanity figure of Manhood who names the string of countries he claims to have conquered as a knight (245–8). If the naming by tyrants and similar characters of places they claim to rule is one form of worldliness, another is a similar listing of places by other sorts of Vice and worldly figures to indicate their being steeped in


the ways of the world, usually with an implication of corruption. The leader of the corrupt Jews in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament (latter half of the fifteenth century), Aristorius, gives an account of his financial might by naming all the places in which he trades: In In In In In In In In In In In

Gene and in Jenyse and in Genewaye, Surrey and in Saby and in Salern will I sell; Antiyoche and in Almayn moch ys my myght, Braban and in Brytayn I am full bold, Calabre and in Coleyn þer rynge I full right, Dordrede and in Denmark be þe clyffys cold; Alysander I haue abundaw[n]se in the wyde world. France and in Farre fresshe be my flower[ys]’ Gyldre and Galys haue I bowght and sold, Hamborowhe and in Holond moch merchantdyse is owrys; Jerusalem and in Jherico among the Jewes jentle (95–105)

He goes on for a further eleven lines listing the places in which his trade gives him power. The passage is far from essential to the narrative, its real function appearing to be to construct an image of Aristorius as a man driven by worldly pursuits, and whose (dangerous) power is derived from these activities. In Hick Scorner (1513–1516), the eponymous central character lists the countries in which he has travelled: Sir, I have been in many a country, As in France, Ireland and Spain, Portingale, Seville, also in Almain, Friesland, Flanders and in Bourgogne, Calabre, Pouille and Arragogne, Brittany, Biscay and also in Gascogne, Naples, Greece and in mids of Scotland, At Cape Saint Vincent and the new found island. I have been in Gene and in Cowe, Also in the land of rumbelow, Three mile out of hell, At Rhodes, Constantine and in Babyland, In Cornwall and in Northumberland, Where men seethe rushes in gruel.

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Yea, sir, in Chaldee, Tartare and Inde, And in the land of women, that few men doth find, In all these countries have I be. (308–24) Here, what is being emphasized is secular experience, establishing a very knowing character firmly attached to the material world. Similarly, the Taverner in Mary Magdalen names his wines from various regions (476–80) in what is part of a cornucopia of worldly pleasure and experience being offered by the Vices to Mary. This general sense of a preoccupation with the treasures of the earth is also contributed to by the World’s list of metals and planets (313–22) and the Flesh’s list of herbs and spices (339–43). Such an idea is clearly also in the mind of Severity, a moral character in Fulwell’s Like Will to Like (1562–1568) who comments on first meeting the roguish Nichol Newfangle, ‘That you have been a travailer of the cuntrie, / And such as doo travaile doo heare of things doon, / As wel in the cuntrie, as in the citie of London’ (1077–9). The Palmer in John Heywood’s Four PP (1520–1528) lines 13–50 boastfully gives an account of the places he has visited on pilgrimage, thereby unwittingly revealing himself to be the sort of worldly pilgrim who – rather like the Wife of Bath – goes on pilgrimages more for the excitements of travel than the spiritual purposes for which they were intended. Equally boastful is Sedition in Bale’s King John (1538), but his catalogue (in 214–17) of the places he has visited as the Pope’s ambassador is not so much used as an inadvertent betraying of vicious ways, but rather actively to spell out the danger of the Popish poison he is spreading through the world. Bale here subtly draws on the convention associated with tyrants and similar figures to underline the pernicious nature of this character. The Pedlar in The Pedlar’s Prophecy (anon., 1561–1563) is a complex figure who operates as something of a confidence trickster as well as a mouthpiece for justified satire, displaying his worldliness and dubiously sophisticated ways by listing the places in the world he has travelled (87–98 and elsewhere). A philosophical idea relevant here is that of ‘mala curiositas’ or the disposition towards being overly enmeshed in the secular through a thirst for knowledge of the secular world. This represented the converse of a religious detachment from the world, and was a tendency identified as spiritually dangerous by various of the Church Fathers including St Augustine and St Bernard of Clairvaux.3 By the sixteenth century, with the advent of humanism,


extended travel and an interest in the exploration of the natural world, the idea was on the wane but was still present in some respects and can certainly be seen to be informing these dramatic representations. Worldly temptations are thus also expressed by this convention of place listing. In David Lindsay’s Satire of the Three Estates (1540) – produced in Cupar and Edinburgh – Deceit’s catalogue of places (906–11) over which he is offered dominion is part of the secular blandishments used by the Vices in their temptation of the king. The alliterative formula pays no attention to geographical realities in its juxtaposition of Scottish and more remote places: Spittalfields (in Perthshire) and Spain, Rutherglen and Rome (though Scottish places, especially in the eastern part of the country, predominate).4 Basing his dramatic version of events on both scriptural account and this dramatic tradition, John Bale in The Temptation of Our Lord (1538) has Satan offering Christ dominion over a range of alliteratively listed regions that cover the known world at the time (271–4), and Satan makes a similar listing in the Ludus Coventriae Temptation play (23: 157–75). In Like Will to Like, which for much of its length is populated entirely by vicious figures, familiarity and unfamiliarity with places is used in the tricking of reprobates into deeper lives of sin. Ralph Roister and Tom Tosspot are each offered the potential patrimony of St Thomas-a-Waterings and Tyburn Hill as a reward for proving themselves as thorough knaves (380–4), not realizing the implications of being offered these gallows locations. The greater sophistication in evil of the Devil’s agent, the Vice Nichol Newfangle, rests partly in his concealing the awareness of this fact, and the use of place reference to signal embrace of the world is here skilfully given an ironic twist. In the early morality Mankind (1465–1470), in which only the references of the Vices locate the play in England at all, the naming of local places works in two ways. The mention by the Vices in lines 505–515 of several local men and their places of residence suggests not only that Mischief, Nowadays, Newguise and Nought work in and on the everyday world of the audience, but that they are a familiar part of it and are defined by it. Mercy, their spiritual foe and contender for the soul of Mankind, remains completely detached from it, occupying instead a world of spirit and scripture. The various Vice figures in John Skelton’s Magnificence (1520–1522) demonstrate their worldliness partly through abundant reference to places in England, including Alnwick (1121), Cockermouth (1061), Doncaster (293), Stroud and Kent (981), Tyne and Trent (980), Woodstock (1211), Half Street in Cheapside (2264), as well as the inevitable allusion to places of execution such as Tower Hill (2141)

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and Tyburn (423, 909). In John Heywood’s Play of the Weather (1527– 1533) the ‘Vice’ Merry Report fulfils a role of agency rather than moral subversion, but he is nonetheless mischievous and has all the comic pragmatism of the conventional Vice figures. Rather like the eponymous central figure of Hick Scorner, he bases his self-ascribed ‘authoryte’ on his knowledge of the world, illustrated by his alliterative naming of the large number of places he claims to have visited (198–211). In this completely secular play there are inklings of a different, humanist approach to knowledge of the world. This goes against the theological contemptus mundi idea which, despite the basically humanist orientation of many of the religious moralities and interludes, provides in them a convenient convention of making Vices emphasize their secularity by a demonstrated familiarity with the world and its places. In an early morality, Wisdom, Who is Christ (1460–1470), the facets of the Soul go so far as to lose some of their abstract nature when they report becoming involved in the dubious life of London. Indeed, the tendency of the virtuous figures in these plays to remain entirely on a detached plane of abstraction, in contrast to the entanglements with the geographical and material world on the part of the Vices, allows the allegorical mode of the drama to erect an appropriate formal corollary to the ideas presented in the texts. Something of a contradiction and challenge to this model is found in Rastell’s secularly didactic play The Four Elements (1517–1518), which exemplifies a fully humanist embrace of the physical world. It has the morally positive figure of Experience giving a geography lesson to Studious Desire that includes a list of countries in the known world, though here the order of listing is not arranged alliteratively and is geographically coherent. A real appreciation of material knowledge of the world is developed that does not perceive it as posing any moral threat. On the contrary, it is presented as something that strengthens the mind and soul against the moral pitfalls present in a life of idleness. As with allegory, the historical placing of figures can also contribute to ways in which moral contrasts between them are constructed. In certain plays based on biblical narrative the virtuous figures remain entirely within the scriptural world, while the vicious ones – especially when they are allegorical elements in what otherwise purports to be scriptural drama – betray their involvement with the contemporary world of the audience through their reference to place names. Thus in John the Evangelist (1520–1557) only the Vices Evil Counsel and Idleness cite the English places in which they have lived or that they have visited, whereas the other figures remain in the context of the biblical story. While all the other characters in Thomas Garter’s Virtuous and


Godly Susanna (1578) are squarely in the scriptural world, the Vice, IllReport, has a lengthy nonsense speech in which he mentions a string of English towns, counties and other places, such as Dover, Kent, Norwich, Shooter’s Hill and Romney (461–85). He also gives a riddling identification of his own name with reference to the towns of Ilford, Reading and Portsmouth (518–19). In another play with a biblical setting, Godly Queen Hester (anon., 1525–1529), the Vice Ambition reveals not only his mental situation in an English location, but a very contemporary preoccupation in his remark, ‘Wherefore, yf warre should chaunce, eyther wyth Scotland or Fraunce’ (478–9). The two Vices, Iniquity and Partiality, of King Darius (anon., pub. 1565) are similarly the only two figures to break through the scriptural setting of the play with references to a range of places in the modern world including the English locations Buckingham (p. 45), Newgate (p. 69), Peterborough (p. 50) and Southampton (p. 67). In some otherwise unlocalized secular plays too, the vicious characters are the ones who reveal themselves to be embedded in the real world of England through their allusions, while the virtuous figures remain divorced from a direct engagement with the world and maintain their abstract natures more completely. It is the Vice figures, Pride and Riot in Youth (anon., 1513–1514), who demonstrate a familiarity with English locations, while Youth only bandies place names when he is under the influence of the Vices (603–4, 715) and in William Wager’s Enough Is as Good as a Feast (1559–1570) the Vice Covetous’s nonsense speech at lines 305–52 includes references to Blackheath, Tyburn, Warwick, Peterborough, St Paul’s and Kingston. The only character in Francis Merbury’s Marriage of Wit and Wisdom (1571–1579) to refer to geographical places is the Vice Idleness, apart from a couple of references by the low-life sailors, Snatch and Catch. In Henry Medwall’s Nature (1530–1534), it is solely the Vices – Bodily Lust, Pride and Envy – who allude to such locations, mostly in London. The geographical preoccupations of dramatic figures equally affect the representation of social rank. In the cycle and saints drama the most significant worldly figures are the powerful tyrants, as such naturally placed in high social positions, and it is they (as demonstrated above) who are steeped in the material world and base their claims to power on their domination of it. In the interludes, by contrast, it is mostly figures at the lower end of the social spectrum who reveal worldliness in the sense of geographical awareness and knowledge. Whereas the scriptural and hagiographical drama drew on established narratives, the interlude drama mostly constructs its own narratives and peoples them (increasingly as the sixteenth century wears on) with figures modelled on contemporary social life. Its representation of distinctions of rank

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and social position is thus affected by the idea of immersion in the everyday world. Contrasts between those characters who, through their references to specific places, are fixed in the real world of England, and those who remain detached from it, are used to make differentiations between characters not only morally but socially. Of course, there is always an implicit suggestion that moral elevation – or its converse – is coterminous with social ranking. It is certainly not to say that this is always the case in the interludes: virtuous figures of low rank abound, and there are vicious characters from the upper echelons of society. However, the Vices never give any indication of coming from any other than the servant class, and the fall into sin of more socially elevated figures is made all the more pointed by the implicit expectation that they will follow a moral code consonant with their social position. In the secular plays, and particularly those set in a classical milieu, the distance of elevated figures from the mire of everyday life is often expressed by making them entirely classical in their frame of reference, while those of a lower social order betray a local Englishness through their repeated reference to place names. Classicism thus becomes something of a secular analogue to the withdrawal from the everyday world advocated by the religious contemptus mundi idea, while its converse in the secular Vices operates in much the same way as it does in those who populate religiously orientated interludes. Though the lower-ranked figures in these secular plays often make reference to a range of locations throughout the world, English place names figure prominently in their dialogue, frequently in a way that is completely anachronistic, and are clearly a means of ‘placing’ the characters morally, socially or both. Though Damon and Pithias is set in classical Syracuse, a low-ranked servant figure called Jack makes references to London, York (1333) and Croydon (1285). Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres (c. 1497), set in classical Rome, has the servant characters A and B refer to Scotland (2.811), Kent (1.1110), York (1.846) and the Court of Common Pleas in Westminster (1.805). Though the patrician heroine Lucres also once refers to England and Wales (2.393), it is only in the context of asking about the provenance of foreign dancers, whose exoticism is being stressed. Apius and Virginia (1559–1567), also set among patrician Romans, has the Vice Haphazard refer to Hackney (863) and Sandwich (442), while a comic servant figure called Mansipulus underlines his bumpkin identity by citing utterly English and rural sounding places: Bridgemeadow and ‘Benol’s Lease’ (628), ‘Hodge’s half acre’ and ‘Gaffer Miller’s stile’ (623). In Misogonus (1564–1577), set in Laurentium in Italy and concerning an elite family, it is the lower class rustics Codrus, Alison and Madge,


or the Vice Cacurgus who mention English places like London (3.1.37), Walsingham (3.1.150), St Paul’s (3.2.3) and Cambridge (3.2.145) as well as other possibly fictitious local places such as ‘Baul’s Bush’ (4.1.133) and ‘Piper’s Hill’ (4.1.136) which, along with their mode of speech, help to root them in the world of the English peasantry. In Thersites (1537) the contrast between the boasting claims of the eponymous miles gloriosus anti-hero and his manifest cowardice is underscored by fact that despite the nominally classical setting of the play he and his mother identify themselves with the everyday rural world of England through a series of place references. Thersites declares his intention to stalk the streets of London (160) and in his general conversation mentions several English towns such as Cumnor (660), Newmarket Heath (794), Sudeley (669) and Tewkesbury (667). His mother’s protracted recitation of an alliterative charm in lines 697– 754 is also peppered with place references such as Birmingham, Buckingham, Chertsey, Comberton, Hinksey, Tavistock and Thruxton. The displacement of these two figures from the play’s otherwise classical frame of reference contributes considerably both to the comic nature of their conception and to the undermining of Thersites’s ludicrous pretensions which are not only military but, by implication, social as well. Englishness here represents a homespun, rural, lower-class world in which notions of honour and heroism are comically out of place. In another secular play, John Phillip’s Patient and Meek Grissill (1558–1561), where the setting is not classical but foreign romance, the familiarity of the Vice with English places revealed in his opening nonsense speech has something of a moral rather than social reference, since it helps to mark Politic Persuasion out as a Vice figure and to distinguish him from the rest of the characters in the play. The allegorical approach to geography evident from the use in early drama of place names also determined the way that this drama represented London. This was further added to by London’s symbolic function as a metropolis; it was more than just another place of importance. Not only its rapidly increasing size but also its position as the capital had an impact on its representation because of the fact that this endowed it with a centrality in the realm while paradoxically also ensuring, from early on, its detachment from the rest of the country.5 Both these factors loom large in drama that views the city largely from the outside, since the overwhelming majority of extant plays, and indeed of dramatic production generally in the period, was provincial. There is not yet the strong and determining London constituency for theatre that the commercial theatre would provide, but rather the more disparate customer groups

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provided by the court and the livery companies.6 This may account for the fact that there are no celebrations of London in the extant drama before the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Also, as pointed out above, what theatrical representation there is of the city exists overwhelmingly in verbal discussion in the mouths of characters, so that it remains very much a place conceived of discursively rather than having any more material presence in the drama. It is to be expected that, as the nation’s capital, London would enjoy a measure of presence, if not prominence, in plays that discuss problems or ills that have befallen the realm in general. However, though its position and size do mark it off in many ways for theatrical attention, its status at the head of the nation’s affairs is scarcely recognized. The realm as a whole is occasionally personified in plays – Widow England in Bale’s King John and the eponymous figures in Albion Knight (anon., 1537–1566) and Respublica (anon., 1553) – but there are no such personifications of London, even in the civic pageantry of its own mayoral processions.7 In the handful of pre-commercial era plays that examine political problems in the nation, London figures little, either as identifiably a setting or in reference, one small exception being a passing reference in King John in which Bale includes the granting of privileges to London in the list of John’s good deeds as king: The cytie of London through hys mere graunt and premye Was first privyleged to have both mayer and shryve, Where before hys tyme it had but baylyves onlye. In hys dayes the brydge the cytiezens ded contryve. (2214–17) Other plays that look at England are Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Inner Temple play Gorboduc (1562) and Skelton’s Magnificence. The former offers a view of a remote, semi-mythical Britain with a reference to the Humber being the only clearly identifiable geographical allusion, and London not featuring at all. In Skelton’s play, there are a few references to London locations and where they exist they are usually either metaphorical or to underscore the corrupt worldliness of the Vices. Though the play does have likely political resonances, the very abstract nature of its presentation of the issues surrounding rule and kingship discourage any further geographical localization of the action. Even though London’s status as the nation’s capital is thus hardly acknowledged in the drama of this time, paradoxically its centrality does enable it to be used as a sort of exaggerated microcosm of the country’s


ills. Its conceptualization and representation in early modern culture and writing also needs to be viewed in relation to the ways in which the emerging urban metropolis in sixteenth-century Europe took upon itself symbolic functions within culture. Henri Lefebvre has remarked that the city establishes a fixed centre by coming to constitute a hub, a privileged focal point, surrounded by peripheral areas which bear its stamp. From this moment on, the vastness of pre-existing space appears to come under the thrall of a divine order. At the same time the town seems to gather in everything which surrounds it, including the natural and divine, and the earth’s good and evil forces. As the image of the universe (imago mundi), urban space is reflected in the rural space that it possesses and indeed in a sense contains. Over and above its economic, religious and political content, therefore, this relationship already embodies an element of symbolism, of imageand-reflection: the town perceives itself in its double, in its repercussions or echo. (1991, p. 235) He continues ‘Only in the sixteenth century, after the rise of the medieval town (founded on commerce, and no longer agrarian in character) and after the establishment of “urban systems” in Italy, Flanders, England, France, Spanish America and elsewhere, did the town emerge as a unified entity – and as a subject.’ (1991, p. 271). Another theorist of urban space, Michel de Certeau, has added that the ‘city’ is defined by the possibility of a threefold operation that includes the creation of a universal and anonymous subject which is the city itself: it gradually becomes possible to attribute to it, as to its political model, Hobbes’ State, all the functions and predicates that were previously scattered and assigned to many different real subjects – groups, associations or individuals. ‘The city’ like a proper name, thus provides a way of conceiving and constructing space as the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties. (1984, p. 94) London’s status as a subject in the pre-commercial drama is less about its everyday material reality, but rather involves the clustering of a range of theatrically titillating ascriptions. In some ways the notion of the centralizing type of space that the metropolis constitutes does emerge

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in this drama’s representation of London, though in a more limited way than the process outlined in Lefebvre’s and de Certeau’s analyses. This might be ascribed to the fact that the drama at this point presented an overwhelmingly external view of the city rather than involving any sense it had of itself. In the sixteenth-century interlude, the city is a place of risk and danger because it is associated with both moral temptations and economic exploitation. London – as composed of a range of specific locations – occupies a symbolic role in several plays, and in some cases this is something that arises out of its prominent position in the life of the nation; its places and institutions are better known and can be used metonymically. In what was a drama of moral example, it provided a monitory paradigm of social breakdown to the rest of the realm experiencing at various points in the sixteenth-century urban crisis and periodic turbulence. On the other hand, there was a built-in containment in this paradigm that might have provided elements of consolation to the audiences of the plays outside of the capital. Arguably, London became this focus of anxiety also because it was a place in which controls were perceived as more difficult to exercise, and where individuals were less easy to place and police than in the defined communities of the countryside and small towns. The fact of its rapid growth through the century, and the resultantly diverse population, contributed to this. The defensive remarks in John Howe’s tract, ‘Familiar and Frendely Discourse Dialogue Wise’ of 1582, articulate something of this attitude: All wounded souldiers comme to London to be cured of their diseases. All serving men whose Lords and Maisters are dead resort to London to prouide them Maisters. All maisterless men whose maisters have cast them offe for somme offence or other comme to London to seke service. all other yonge lustye youths which spend Michaelmas rent in Midsomer moone, which retain into their Service more [than] their lyvyngs will maintaine, that in the end them selves are ether in prisonne for debte, or kylde in some brablynge fraie or hange for some felonye, Then there is no remedye but al theire servants and young buckler bearers come to London to seke service. There is allso a number of other ydel people, as lustie rogues and common beggars, whose profession is neyther to be a souldier nor a servingman, hearinge of the great lyberalletie of London cometh hither to seke reliefe. These are the caterpillars of the common wealthe, these and the rest, being forreine and not


domesticall, ar the people which overchardge London, and these ar those that cause the cyttie to be so evill reported. (Tawney and Power, 1924, p. 438) If immigrants from elsewhere within the realm were contributing to the diversity of London’s population, so was its increasing cosmopolitanism, one of the features making it seem a place apart from the rest of the country. In The Pedlar’s Prophecy, the pedlar fulminates against the invasion of foreigners in the realm, alleging that three quarters of the inhabitants of London are aliens (889), pushing up property prices and displacing native Englishmen. This is the most pointed association of foreigners with the capital in the early drama, but the presence of significant numbers of Continental religious asylum seekers in especially London’s population in the sixteenth century gives the issue an enduring relevance to the theatrical representation of the city in this and the following century. There were, of course, immigrant communities elsewhere in the country, especially Kent and East Anglia, but in theatrical representations it is especially the capital with which foreigners are identified, something that may be indicative of its role as a geographical focus of anxiety. In The Pedlar’s Prophecy it is clear that at this stage the anxiety is largely an economic one, and this is true too of plays that do not specifically identify the phenomenon with London. In Enough Is as Good as a Feast the complaint is expressed that the foreign influx has made houses scarce and in George Wapull’s The Tide Tarrieth No Man (printed 1576) it is aliens who are prepared to pay the most for leases, pricing Englishmen out of the competition.8 However, a couple of plays – Like Will to Like and Wealth and Health (anon., 1553–1555) – also contain caricatures of drunken Flemings, contributing another dimension to a representation of foreigners that shifts and becomes inflected as time goes on by the particular preoccupations and circumstances to which the drama is responding. An increasing concern about both the moral and economic effects of a growing culture of display was particularly focused on London, where the presence of the court acted as a magnet for those with aspirations. In the capital there was less room for local family status to play a role in establishing one’s place in the social hierarchy, and an outward show of wealth became concomitantly more important, or at least was perceived as such by some aspirants. In the interludes this tendency towards display was presented principally in terms of extravagant dress, something that lends itself readily to dramatization. Because the satire of sartorial extravagance tends to refer to court aspiration, it implicitly but

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decisively understands this to be associated with London, though the geographical association is rarely made explicit and thus the issue will be noted here rather than fully pursued. Other areas of social concern are, however, much more squarely attached to the representation of the capital in early drama. The possibilities for the moral corruption of youth constitute one of these, and sharp legal practice is another. Both seem to be recurrent sources of anxiety in the interludes, and they colour the way the capital is represented. Given the allegorical mode of English interlude drama, it is not difficult to see how London comes to be drawn into a morally symbolic role within it. The abstract nature of its approach meant that even less attention was paid to the materiality of the world it represented than in plays with inherited narratives (where it was limited enough), and thus where London registers at all within it as a locality, it is necessarily in terms of moralized space. Audiences are not invited or assumed to be part of the urban terrain, which is presented rather as belonging to the Vices whose familiarity with the territory is an important dimension of their moral complexion. The alterity of the capital as a represented location helped to make it invariably negative in connotation and in several plays vice, legal corruption, oppressiveness and crime are represented as being at their worst in the city.9 Hick Scorner echoes the sort of allegorical description found elsewhere in complaint literature of the departure of virtues from the realm and the arrival of vices, both in ships (326–80). Hick Scorner’s own ship is of London, and is called the ‘Envy’ (383–5). In The World and the Child, the Vice Folly remarks, By my faythe, in Englonde haue I dwelled yore, And all myne auncetters me before; But, syr, in London is my chefe dwellynge. (567–9) Having made money by legal sharp practice, Folly then relates how he spends his gains in London’s dubious places of entertainment: By my feyth, syr, into London I ran To the tauernes to drynke the wyne; And than to the innes I toke the waye. And there I was not welcome to the osteler, But I was welcome to the fayre tapester, And to all the housholde I was ryght dere (583–8)


And In feythe, syr, ouer London brydge I ran, And the streyght waye to the stewes I came, (591–2) He reveals an easy familiarity with London places and its pleasures: In Estchepe for to dyne, And than we wyll with Lombardes at passage playe, And at the Pope’s Heed swete wyne assaye. (671–3) Manhood later states, ‘Folye wyll me lede to London to lerne reuell’ (702). In Medwall’s Nature, the fact that Bodily Lust’s pursuit of whores – in company with Man – clearly takes place in London is evidenced by his references to St Paul’s and Cheapside (2.278–9) and Skelton refers to the brothels of Half Street in Southwark in Magnificence (2264). In John the Evangelist, the Vice Evil Counsel (found in an otherwise biblical setting) claims to have dwelt in London and hopes to return there to ‘live merrily’ (378–83). In Wisdom, Who is Christ, there is a similar shift from a setting that is in token biblical – in that the Five Wits who appear early in the play are the ‘doughters of Jerusalem’ (165) – to a frame of reference that is more contemporary and geographical after the Soul falls prey to the temptations of Satan. The corruption of the three faculties of the Soul – Mind, Will and Understanding – is signalled by their resolution to go to London to pursue various forms of wrongdoing, Will inclining to the fleshpots of the city: ‘Wen I com lat to þe cyte / I walke all lanys and weys to myn affynyte; / And I spede not þer, to þe stews I resort.’ (798–800). In Wager’s The Longer Thou Livest, the More Fool Thou Art (1559–1568), the vanity of the reprobate central figure Moros is underlined by his familiarity with the eating and drinking pleasures to be had in particular areas of London: In Saint Nicholas’ shambles there is enough, Or in Eascheape or at Saint Katherine’s; There be good puddings at the sign of the plow, You never did eat better sauserlings. (251–4)

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The representation of London in terms of its ready provision of the pleasures of taverns and brothels does, in fact, reflect something of the reality of the city by comparison with smaller centres. Early modern London had, as it grew rapidly, a generous and increasing availability of places of resort for eating and drinking. This was due to the particular demographic conditions that prevailed there; Sara Pennell has observed, High concentrations of individuals living in lodgings, singly or in fluid, often non-familial groups, and the presence of that prototypical ‘consuming’ population, domestic servants, often in search of food on their free days or to spend their board wages, made extra-domestic victualling inevitable. (2000, p. 230) The term ‘stews’ used repeatedly in the plays, always meaning the area of brothels in Southwark, provided a geographical dimension to reference to prostitution and helped to underscore awareness of the association of this phenomenon with the capital and its suburbs. James Sharpe has noted, ‘it is evident that prostitution was an established part of at least London life by 1550’ (1997, p. 46) and he goes on to remark, ‘organized prostitution was rare, at least outside the capital’ (p. 48). Though there are a few instances to be found of organized prostitution outside of London, it was the London stews that became the byword for this practice. If London stands for easy access to indulgence and the pleasures of vicious living, it also represents the material dangers to the unwary posed by figures of wily sophistication engaged in sharp practice. The metonymy of place in the use of Westminster Hall to stand for the legal profession in the satire of legal abuses also helps to focus upon the London conurbation as a place of corruption, and particularly a place of danger for innocent provincials.10 Westminster Hall is mentioned in a large number of interludes, frequently in the context of satire of the legal profession.11 In The World and the Child, Folly reveals, in Holborne I was forthe brought, And with the courtyers I am betaught. To Westmynster I vsed to wende For I am a seruaunt of the lawe. Couetous is myne owne felowe;


We twayne plede for the kynge, And poore men that come from vplande, We wyll take theyr mater in hande; Be it ryght or be it wronge, Theyr thryft with vs shall wende. (571–3, 575–81) A similar confession is made by Imagination in Hick Scorner: In Westminster Hall every term I am; To me is kin many a great gentleman; I am known in every country, And I were dead the lawyers’ thrift were lost, For this will I do if men would do cost: Prove right wrong, and al by reason, And make men leese both house and land. (217–23) He goes on to list further corrupt legal practices. One of the corrupted faculties of the Soul in Wisdom, Understanding, resolves to go and make his fortune by dishonest practice of the law, and one of his first actions is to usher in dancers who represent the Quest of Holborn (717–34). He then resolves to go to the courts of Westminster, while his companion Will claims he will be at the enclosure in front of St Paul’s, followed by a multitude (793–5), since this is where lawyers met their clients. Later Understanding reveals familiarity with the courts of Marshalsea and the Admiralty, by implication associating them with corruption (853–4). Prominent among the place names on the lips of the early drama’s Vice figure are, perhaps understandably, places of punishment such as prisons and gallows. This is an effective shorthand way of establishing the milieu of the Vice characters as criminal, and reminding the audiences of the ultimate earthly penalties for wrongdoing. These could include places like the gallows at St Thomas-a-Waterings, in Surrey, but generally the locations mentioned are within or more closely adjacent to London, and most commonly mentioned are the Counters, Newgate, King’s Bench, Marshalsea and Tyburn.12 The reason for this is probably that the London prisons and gallows are the best known, but the shorthand effect – as in the case with Westminster Hall – means that there

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is, by association, an imaginative centring of criminality in London. In Youth, Riot claims, The Mayor of London sent for me Forth of Newgate for to come For to preach at Tyburn. (253–5) The qualities of being streetwise and knowing the ways of the world are important in Like Will to Like in which one of the Vice figures, Nicol Newfangle, has travelled in the country as well as being a denizen of the City of London (1079). The riotous and vicious behaviour of youthful characters is also represented in Hick Scorner. Though there are references to the realm as a whole, most allusions are to London locations, principally those associated with law enforcement. Criminality in the city is lavishly described, and the Vice Imagination at one point details the murderous and thieving exploits of himself and his companions: And I would that we had God’s curse, If we somewhere do not get a purse. Every man bear his dagger naked in his hand, And if we meet a true man, make him stand, Or else that he bear a stripe. If that he struggle and make any work, Lightly strike him to the heart, And throw him into Thames quite. (411–18) Later in the play, in possibly the most detailed geographical reference in the drama before the 1570s, another Vice Free Will describes how Imagination goes on the prowl to steal money: Sirs, he walked through Holborn Three hours after the sun was down, And walked up toward Saint Giles-in-the-Field. He hoved still and there beheld; But there he could not speed of his prey, And straight to Ludgate he took his way. (663–8)


Here the Vice’s intimate knowledge of the London streets appears as much a way of defining him as his actual criminal pursuits – this is ‘mala curiositas’ taken to a further level. That London is also very accommodating to the criminal is suggested by Free Will’s description of the sanctuary in Westminster: But yet we have a sure canel at Westminster; A thousand ships of thieves therein may ride sure, For if they may have anchor-hold and great spending, They may live as merry as any king. (842–5) The play also has a plethora of references to principally London prisons and gallows, the greatest number to be found among the extant early plays.13 The riotous and criminal ways of youth are an issue in these and several other interludes, London providing a context in which there are plenty of opportunities in the form of stews, taverns and bad company, but principally perhaps the perceptions of the absence of an evident, cohesive community to police social morality. This is consistent with contemporary perceptions of disorder in Tudor London where most complaints about the phenomenon, according to Stephen Rappaport, ‘concerned the behaviour of unruly young men, chiefly the antics and brawling of apprentices, youths in their late teens and early twenties, and journeymen, most of whom were not much older’ (1989, p. 8). These perceptions may have arisen from the relative lack of formal ritual structures in England in which such behaviour could be accommodated. Rappaport continues, Unlike the continent where youths figured prominently in abbeys of misrule and other rituals of status reversal there is little evidence that in sixteenth-century London the disorderly behaviour of young men was initiated by organized youth groups, occurred within a framework of ritual, or was functional in the sense elucidated by N. Z. Davis in her study of festive customs and organization in early modern France this was true especially after the Reformation, for many of the feast days which provided occasions for festivals and carnivals and thus for misrule were no longer celebrated in Protestant England. (1989, p. 9)

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However, the notion of a disposition to disorder and instability in London in the period has been challenged by other historians.14 Though there is no clear evidence that there was more disorder in London than other major European cities, what we have to deal with in the drama is less perhaps the reality of social life and conditions in the capital, and more the way the city is represented in the popular (and possibly provincial) imagination, and in emerging theatrical convention. The egregious size of the city was likely to have been a factor in how it was perceived as lacking sufficient control over vice and wrongdoing. In a period in which official structures of policing were far from comprehensive, the regulating effects of small communities on the individual behaviour of their members should not be underestimated. In a rapidly growing metropolis like London, in which diversity was much more the norm than elsewhere, the power of the community to compel moral conformity would have been seen as much weaker. In the surviving drama of the pre–commercial theatre era that either includes any substantial reference to or discussion of London, the only one that is fully set in the metropolis (and specifically the City) is Jack Juggler (1553–1558), a secular, neoclassical piece dating from the mid1550s and played by boys. An adaptation of Plautus’s Amphitruo, it is significant as the earliest extant play with a setting that is clearly identified as London, and in fact also the only one in the pre–commercial theatre era to have any specifically localized English setting at all. It constitutes a shift in the use of setting by comparison with earlier drama. In the hagiographical and scriptural cycle plays the biblical locations are less a matter of material geography than part of a mythic narrative in which the places identified have something of a devotional charge – the garden of Eden, the Old Testament landscapes, the powerfully significant places associated with the Nativity and Crucifixion, and further otherworldly settings such as Hell in the Harrowing plays or the seat of judgement in the Doomsday plays. The characters and dramatic action inhabiting these settings operate complementarily either as objects of devotional attention or as part of the instructive project of this drama, and the settings form an integral part of its particular conceptual approach. In the more fully allegorical drama, as already argued, there is very little indication of setting and where any does exist it is very notional as the emphasis is heavily on the operation of moral conflicts as embodied in the dramatic characters.15 Even in the neoclassical drama, or that with foreign settings – mostly produced under educational auspices – the setting has much more of a conceptual than a geographical reality since, as has been


argued above, the association of figures with either a classical or a more local English world is infused with social implications that also have a moral tinge. Where the dramatic action is set in an environment both clearly geographically material and familiar to the audience, the nature of the drama necessarily changes. Apart from the recognitive pleasure afforded to the audience, there will be an inevitable interference with the more conceptual agendas of any theatrical action set in a frame of reference that naturally possesses a complex host of meanings for that audience. The difference between the references to places in London found in such plays as Wisdom and Hick Scorner on the one hand, and Jack Juggler on the other, is that in the latter play there is an nascent sense of a realized locality which is neutral or at least diverse, while in the former plays the references are still entirely to a type of moralized space. The movement towards psychological realism is both signalled by and significantly contributed to by such a setting, and London is the first place – at least in the extant body of early theatre – to constitute this sort of setting. The play opens with an address to the audience by the Vice in which – referring to the master of the household around which the narrative turns – he remarks, ‘You all know well Maister Boungrace, / The gentilman that dwellith her in this place’ (112–13). ‘This place’ is London since Bongrace is a Londoner, and it also indicates it is a play conceived for performance in London. Though it has been suggested that it was for court production, the audaciously familiar reference to the audience as ‘these folkes’ (739, 777) and a joke about the strong smell of the audience (‘Many here smell strong but none so ranke as he’, 866) make it more likely, however, that it was for a citizen clientele.16 Though there is some sense of the audience’s being invited imaginatively into the terrain of dramatic action through the evocation of the urban environment that they inhabit, it is a morally questionable rather than positive or neutral territory, drawing on a theatrically conventional representation of London. The attempts of the main character Jenkin Careaway to create an impression of his familiarity and interaction with his environment begins to realize imaginatively the real terrain of the city, involving something of the sense of ‘neighbourhood’ as proposed by Pierre Mayol. The action takes place in a single location – a London street – outside the home of Master Bongrace, a citizen who does appear towards the end of the play, but whose life is glimpsed mostly through the reports of Careaway, his servant. It is revealed that Careaway accompanied his master to tennis in the morning (503), and

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while Bongrace was later lunching with a gentleman, played dice outside his gate (504–5). Bongrace proceeds to the home of the friends with whom he is going to dine and sends Careaway home to fetch his wife to join them, but on the way the page gets distracted by a fencing game in which he takes part. Arriving very late to fetch his mistress, he proposes to placate her by saying that he had remained longer with his master in order to act as a spy for her to see that no untoward activity took place, as Bongrace was consorting with ‘Gorges dames of the corte and galaunts also, / With doctours, and other rufflers mo’ (268–9). Though this is a slander, underlying it are implied possibilities of a wide and varied (possibly dubious) social life in London, while the various entertainments on offer further contribute to the picture painted in the play of a city full of diversions and activity. The central comic episode involves a trick by the Vice Jack Juggler, who manages to usurp Jenkin Careaway’s identity through disguise, imitation of behaviour and intimate knowledge of his life, and even at the end persuade him that Juggler is in fact Careaway. The fundamental issue on which the play turns is trickery and deception, by which – as the Epilogue expresses it – innocents are made ‘To belive and saye the moune is made of a grene chese, / Or ells have gret harme, and percace their life lese’ (1005–6), with negative implications for the doctrine of transubstantiation. Its purpose is essentially to illustrate that idea, but it is appropriate that this story should be set in London, a city of migrants from all over the realm and elsewhere, and the only population centre in the realm big enough to allow easy anonymity. It is in London also that the Vice Imagination in Hick Scorner is able to benefit from such anonymity; after stealing some money, ‘He was lodged at Newgate at the Swan, / And every man took him for a gentleman’ (681–2). In a city in which one cannot be certain of the identity of others, it is all the more conceivable that one’s own identity could be at risk. The episode also illustrates another aspect of the popular representation of London, especially in plays that present the metropolis from the outside as a cony-catching world, in which criminality is endemic and it is necessary constantly to be on one’s guard. The tricking of Careaway is all the more piquant because he promotes the image of himself as a streetwise wide boy at the heart of this side of life. He attempts to trick both his master and his mistress, and his delinquency also takes a more material form. He snatches an apple from a costermonger and when she attacks him he casts down her basket and steals even more, making off and escaping with help of his geographical knowledge as he goes on his way ‘By another lane as fast as he maye’ (157). He loses all his money at dice


game played by boys ‘at a corner by a shoop’s stall’ (158), but this is money he has come by dishonestly, ‘Wel and truely pycked before out of another man’s porse’ (551) as the Vice Jack Juggler explains, ‘For he hath noo mony but what he doth stell’ (168). Another aspect of characterization in the play that has some bearing on the view presented of London and its citizens is the representation of Dame Coy, the wife of Bongrace. She is a strong and even ferocious woman, feared by Careaway, and is presented as having some social independence with the implication that it goes further than this, as Careaway resolves to deceive her by claiming: And by the way whome should I mete But that most honest gentilman in the stret Which the last wike was with you here And made you a banket, and bouncing cheare! (272–5) Later when she thinks her husband has failed to send for her to come out to dinner she complains, But if he have thus unkindlye servyde mee, I wol not forget it this monethis three; And if I weste the fault were in him, I praie God I be dede But he should have such a Kyrie ere he went too bede, As he never had before in all his lyfe Nor any man ells have had of his wife! I wolde rate him and shake him after such a sorte As sholde be to him a corrasive full lytle to his cumforte! (650–7) Though there is a sprinkling of other assertive women in early drama, Dame Coy is a forerunner of a tradition in both Elizabethan and Jacobean commercial theatre that represents London citizen wives as outspoken, independent and even having a degree of sexual freedom. The integration of geography into characterization is very evident in the play, in which most of the action is offstage and narrated, since all the specified geographical locations are attached to particular individuals. It is also significant in inflecting the basic moralized geography at the heart of its representation of London with certain material and

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social realities and the evocation of urban space recognizable to its audiences. There is a multi-layered demarcation of different spaces within the broader urban compass, the business and elevated spaces occupied by Bongrace, the domestic space of Mistress Bongrace and her maid and the unregulated/transgressive space in which Careaway roams, that exemplifies most strongly the older moral associations with the capital. Though the general tenor of Jack Juggler means that London tends to retain something of the conceptual nature it has in earlier drama, as a place inherently and axiomatically corrupt, the play does exemplify an incipient complexity in the representation of the city that would later characterize the drama of the capital’s commercial theatre industry. It should not be assumed that the representation London receives in the drama of this period necessarily reflects accurately attitudes within the nation to the capital which are, in any case, likely to have been diverse. In a situation where interludes – other than those drawn from foreign or classical sources – tend to have settings that are indeterminate, and where the focus is on representing vice and corruption, the picture drawn of the capital naturally becomes somewhat skewed. Until a substantial number of plays begin properly to be set in London, rather than merely for the purpose of reference to known places of dubious repute, the possibility of depicting the city in all its variety is limited. However, the early representations are nonetheless valuable in providing a starting point for the consideration of the capital’s presence in the drama, particularly since it concerns a period before the beginning of London’s dominance in the theatre from the mid-1570s onwards.

3 Late Elizabethan Drama

A predictably important development for the representation of London in English drama was the establishment of the first permanent and dedicated theatre buildings in the peripheries of the capital in the mid1570s. The advent of the London-based commercial theatre meant that drama would fairly rapidly come to be orientated towards an urban audience, and increasingly reflect its social experience and attitudes, in a period in which that experience was in a process of change and development. Several Elizabethan playwrights came from the provinces and settled in the London conurbation, including Thomas Campion, Michael Drayton, George Ferrers, George Gascoigne, Stephen Gosson, Robert Greene, Richard Hathway, William Haughton, John Lyly, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, Henry Porter and William Shakespeare. Others were born and raised in London, such as John and Jasper Heywood, Ben Jonson, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Lodge, Anthony Munday and George Peele. Whether immigrants to the metropolis (as a large percentage of London’s population were) or native to it, these writers would all have been exposed to a dynamic and evolving urban culture that was becoming ever more self-aware as time went on. They and the performers of their plays would also have contributed to the development of the cultural perceptions of their increasingly sophisticated urban audience. Of the plays for which there are records of the first production, those that manifest a clear interest in London are produced principally by the Chamberlain’s, Admiral’s and Queen’s Men all in the popular amphitheatre houses, especially the Rose and the Globe, but also in the Curtain, the Hope and the Bull Inn. These venues are consistent with the resolutely populist representation of the city in the drama of the first two decades of the London commercial theatre, with its strong promotion of citizen values. 51

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Addressing the urban audience Plays begin to be aimed at the urban audience in particular from the last quarter of the century and start to gain some geographical specificity at this time. Where London’s place names are mentioned in the interlude plays that pre-date the advent of the commercial theatre, it is generally less in the interest of locating action specifically than in bringing particular associations into play, hence the regular occurrence of names like Newgate, Tyburn and Westminster Hall. Now, however, playwrights producing material for the commercial theatre increasingly use London as a setting, though Shakespeare and Marlowe are notable and curious exceptions to this tendency. In the case of their history plays – Shakespeare’s two tetralogies, King John, Henry VIII and Marlowe’s Edward II – both playwrights are obliged by the historical material to make some use of London as a setting.1 Otherwise, Marlowe sets all his plays abroad or classically, Shakespeare doing the same but additionally locating action in provincial England. Many other playwrights, however, not only began to set their plays in London but also to write about it, several even including the city’s name in their title, namely Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London (c. 1581) and The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London (1588–1590), Greene’s and Lodge’s A Looking Glass for London and England (1588), Thomas Heywood’s The Four Prentices of London (Rose, 1594) and A Larum for London (anon., Rose, 1599). Others include places in or adjacent to London in their titles, such as The Fair Maid of the Exchange (anon., 1598), Day’s The Blind Beggar of Bednall Green (Rose, 1600) and Grim the Collier of Croydon (anon., 1600). A significant minority – a little under 30 of the 150 non-closet plays still extant from the period 1580 to 1603 – are partly or wholly set in London, albeit sometimes the court. This discussion will not take account of all plays with a London setting, however, but be confined to those in which the city or aspects of it enter into the subject matter of the drama as a point of focus, or where the geography of the metropolis has a material part to play in the narratives. The setting of plays in London is, in any case, not something that is very clear-cut, since foreign urban settings are often or even usually anatopically merely a disguised reference to London or broadly English life and society. The earlier examples of the plays whose titles suggest a focus on London clearly owe a great deal to the allegorical moral play tradition and the attitudes that this type of drama characteristically manifests towards the metropolis. Some of these plays are overtly addressed to

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Londoners, while not actually representing them directly or even being set in the city, and they are either part of or strongly influenced by the modes of representing London found in the allegorical drama. A Looking Glass for London and England is a moral play set in Nineveh using the biblical story of Jonah and the whale to address various social ills, including the oppression of the poor, excess in attire, flattery and usury. A series of comments is addressed by the biblical figure of Hosea directly to London (rather than the realm in general) throughout the play, with monitory exhortations pointing to parallels with its own vices. In the last lines Jonah himself urges Londoners to see their own sins reflected in those of the Ninevites.2 London awake, for feare the Lord do frowne, I set a looking Glasse before thine eyes. O turne, O turne, with weeping to the Lord, And thinke the praiers and vertues of thy Queene, Defers the plague which otherwise would fall. Repent O London, least for thine offence, Thy shepheard faile, whom mightie God preserue (fol. I4v, 20–6) Though this tends obliquely to continue the interlude drama’s moralized representation of London as a ‘sinful’ city, it does so with a view to its reformation rather than simply viewing it from the outside as is usually the case in the interludes. London only slowly emerges from the negative representation that it receives in interlude drama, but here the morality play view of London as a symbol of sin is reflected differently. Though the notion of its moral errancy persists, the metropolis functions not so much as an exemplar of irredeemable turpitude, its moral failings rather being of concern as posing a danger to its own welfare. The apostrophe to London in this speech implies a conception of the city as having a mind and life of its own, and whose importance as an entity is such that the security of the realm as a whole may depend on it. Another such monitory drama aimed at Londoners is the anonymous A Larum for London, or the Siedge of Antwerpe (Globe, 1599), based on George Gascoigne’s pamphlet The Siege of Antwerp of 1576. A Spanish brigand attacking Antwerp talks about the citizens of that city, with the implications for Londoners having been made evident in the title of the play:

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I, but they are remisse and negligent, Their bodies vs’d to soft effeminate silkes, And their nice mindes set all on dalliance (47–9) One problem here is the pernicious effect of wealth, and a further description of the physical city itself by the same speaker suggests, by clear analogy, the magnificence of the fast-growing capital: What patient eye can looke vpon yond Turrets, And see the beauty of that flower of Europe And in’t [sic – not?] be rauisht with the sight of her? O she is as amorous as the wanton ayre, And must be Courted: from het [sic] nostrils comes A breath, as sweete as the Arabian spice. Her garments are imbrodered with pure golde; An euery part so rich and sumptuous, As Indias not to be compar’d to her (74–82) Robert Wilson goes further in making London a metaphorical place of corruption in The Three Ladies of London (1584). Like the Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, this is very much in the mould of the allegorical interlude drama, and blends something of that genre’s conceptual representation of London with some contemporary realities of the rapidly developing city. There is a clear awareness present of the economic opportunities offered by the capital’s increasing wealth and power and the abuses made possible by these, as the narrative concerns various migrants from the provinces seeking to enter the service of the three ladies of London, who are called Love, Fame and Conscience. Dissimulation, a farmer, migrates to London ‘to get entertainment’ (58) and Simplicity, a miller, in pursuit of ‘preferment’ (61). A third character, a ruffian called Fraud, comes from Gravesend, but had before ending up in the capital been to Ware in Hertfordshire (91). A further two, Simony and Usury, also move to London to ‘get entertainment’ from the three ladies (142–3). Having been rejected by them they approach Lady Lucre, granddaughter of Lady Lucre of Venice, but who came to England because, ‘She had in England a daughter, which her farre did excell: / And that England was such a place for Lucar to bide’ (284–5). Simony was also born in Italy – in Rome – but was attracted to England


by the talk of wealthy English merchants (296–304). Dissimulation is approached by Artifex, an artificer who has been ruined by imports, but he denies him any help. However, a lawyer seeking to be employed by Lady Lucre is welcomed, on condition he can ‘make an ill matter seeme good, and firmable indeede’ (508). Other social abuses are also referred to. A scholar, Sincerity, who has come from Oxford but who had previously studied also at Cambridge, comes to seek aid from Lady Conscience, but she and her sisters have been reduced to poverty by Lady Lucre. Through the agency of Simplicity, he then approaches Lady Lucre but remains empty-handed as all she gives him is the living of St Nihil. He is also offered a place by Nicholas Nemo, but perceives his insubstantiality as well, these instances possibly representing the false lure of London for the provincial migrant.3 The significant tendency in The Three Ladies of London to adopt the allegorical drama’s emblematizing of London in terms of vice and corruption is evident in some elements of localization in the play. When the Vices are finally legally brought to book, the Judge asks about them and the officer Diligence reports that Fraud was seen in the streets walking in a citizen’s gown, Usury was at the Exchange and Simony was seen at Paul’s (recalling something of the use of locations of the City in Hick Scorner). Also, the list of guests at the marriage of Lady Lucre to Dissimulation is reminiscent of the list of vices in England in Youth. But there is also a sense that London, rather than being seen as endemically evil, has been taken over by vice, as has effectively the whole realm. The vicious figures come from outside, which possibly articulates a source of anxiety for Londoners. An idealized time before the capital and the realm at large were thus invaded by vice is suggested by Usury’s taunt when he bests Hospitality: ‘Why, who had al the praise in London or England, but M. Hospitalitie’ (1026), and when he is killed, Hospitality calls out: ‘Farewell Lady Conscience, you shall haue Hospitalitie in London nor England no more’ (1059–60). London is in this play more microcosmically representative of the realm than a place apart from the rest of it, though the play does have a positive representation of a countryman in the person of Simplicity. A shift is discernible here from a more generalized representation of London in terms of corruption and vice to one in which specifically economic preoccupations prevail, arguably offering its London audiences a more concrete reflection of their lives and material concerns. Such named locations as the Exchange and St Paul’s may partly function as places symbolically representing trade and the law, but they can no longer be purely ‘moralized’ in the way they had been in earlier drama,

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used simply to stand for forms of moral transgression. This is because these are places that fall within the lived experience of the audiences for which the play is written; they constitute what Lefebvre termed ‘representational space’: ‘space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of “inhabitants” and “users” ’ (1991, p. 39). Whatever vicious activity is being discoursed upon by the play here is not inherent in the urban spaces, but instead their non-essential attachment to them is what is presented as problematic.

Realizing the urban topography The greater geographical specificity of the setting of drama in the late sixteenth century meant that there was a growing inclination on the part of several playwrights to place the narratives of several of those plays set in London in very clearly identified localities, and to make use of the ways in which these would have meaning to their audiences. To some extent this was part of a greater place realism resulting from the drama’s shift away from an allegorical to a realist mode, but there was more to the advent of local settings than this, which had to do with the conditions of production. The commercial playwrights were writing not for itinerant troupes of players playing to audiences across the country, but companies performing to audiences drawn from a single broad and known locality that could, when the setting of plays was London, be relied upon to understand the various implications that might arise from place references or the siting of dramatic action. Potential opens up here for a shift in and diversification of the emphasis of the theatrical interest. In drama that is unlocalized, or in which the settings are scriptural, classical or foreign, the interest – at least ostensibly – lies principally with the ideas with which it is manifestly concerned. Of course it is not always as simple as this. Scriptural or otherwise alien settings might be reconceived with more local referents in conception or production and foreign cities in the drama are often anatopical versions of London. However, the fact that for the first time dramatic narratives were increasingly being played out in a geography familiar to the theatre’s audiences gave those audiences material referents that enhanced their engagement with and facilitated their assessment of the characters of plays. A possible problem is that where clearly familiar localities are overtly brought into the dramatic narrative, the potentially strong associations that these have for members of the audience can displace attention from moral or other ideas underlying the drama towards an embrace of the more haphazard materialities of the narratives. On the one hand this helps to


fulfil some of the demands of realism, and can contribute to a greater density of characterization and other narrative detail. On the other, the imaginative interventions it makes possible through the vagaries of individual audience members’ experiences of London’s spaces subtly reduce the playwrights’ control over the significations of their material by rendering the dramatic narratives more indiscriminately polysemic in a way that is not measurable as it depends on ephemeral audience response. However, the use made by playwrights of their audiences’ geographical familiarity can conversely also help them to a greater depth of expressly communicated ideas as well. For instance, associations of particular activities or types of character with specific named places enrich the meanings created by the plays, the use of identifiable localities offers the audiences enhanced intimacy with the narrative material and at times knowledge or ignorance displayed by characters of London’s various localities can be used to define them or elaborate the plots. The sheer size of the metropolis and wide range of vicinities it encompassed made it an abundant source for both settings and allusive reference. The associations and signifying potential of geographical places, in cultural, moral or other terms, is enhanced by the fact that in this period pre-dating theatrical scenery, any concreteness in the topographical grounding of narratives was achieved verbally and referentially rather than by any major scenic realization of place on the stage. It is mainly in comedy that there is any specific topographical detail, and it is comedies that tend to be set in the national or local environments readily identifiable to London audiences. However, one tragic genre that emerged at this time – domestic tragedy with a bourgeois setting, including plays such as Arden of Faversham (anon., 1591), Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (Rose, 1603) Robert Yarington’s Two Lamentable Tragedies (c. 1594) and the later The Yorkshire Tragedy (anon., Globe, c. 1606) – was in varying degrees more embedded in the geography of England, particularly when based on recent chronicled events. Apart from being noteworthy for a deviation from the conventional rank of figures inhabiting tragic narratives, this genre suggests strong audience interest in the contemporary home environment. One of the plays with the greatest interest for the representation of London’s geography is A Warning for Fair Women (anon., Curtain, c. 1589), which includes details of the ordinary life of a City businessman, George Sanders, who becomes a victim of murder. A fascination with the localness of the events is evident in the piece, and the allegorical figure of Tragedy, introducing the play, comments,

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‘My scene is London, native and your own / I sigh to think my subject too well known’ (1.86–7). Local points of reference are a very important part of the narrative of the play, both in the unfolding of the tragedy and in the sense that the playwright attempts to create of the everyday normality of Sanders’s life in London. At one point his wife and son are shown awaiting his return from the Exchange after business there (1.292), he later visits a merchant’s warehouse in Cornhill and then goes on to the Exchange, and in the afternoon to court, after which he proceeds to the Lion Quay to catch a boat to Greenwich (2.278–92). Before this he dines with a friend in Lombard Street (2.115). There is little real characterization of Sanders and it is here that geography plays an important part, as it is principally in this detailed rooting of the character in a landscape local to the audiences that forges their familiarity and therefore sympathy with the murder victim. Sanders is murdered by George Browne, who has fallen in love with his victim’s wife. At the outset of the play the murderer, who has been living in Dublin, wishing to pursue his amorous quest of Anne Sanders initially enquires about the whereabouts of their home from an intermediary, Anne Drury, and is shown as manifesting some confusion as to the very specifically designated location: Browne: But where’s her house? Drury: Against St. Dunstan’s Church Browne: St Dunstan’s in Fleet street? Drury: No, near Billingsgate, St. Dunstans in the East. That’s in the West. (1.273–5) This little exchange depends on detailed local knowledge on the part of the audience for its full effect, and is possibly also there to underscore the murderer Browne’s status as an outsider to the city. Later in the play it is revealed that his brother has also committed murder, in York, and Browne muses, ‘Then see I wel, Englands two greatest townes / Both fild with murders done by both the Brownes’ (2.1405–6). As narrated in the contemporary accounts on which the play is based, the murder takes place near Shooter’s Hill, and many other locations in the area are mentioned: Blackheath, Woolwich and Greenwich Park, all within close enough proximity to London to be familiar to its citizens, at least by reputation. Shooter’s Hill, like Gad’s Hill was well known to Londoners as a haunt of criminals, and the names of both locations came to be a form of shorthand for this sort of activity.4


Even more geographically detailed as a local murder play is Yarington’s Two Lamentable Tragedies that dramatizes the murder of Robert Beech, a chandler of Thames Street, by Thomas Merry his neighbour and a tavern keeper, with the motive of robbery. Merry goes on to compound his crime by subsequently also killing Beech’s young assistant to prevent him from revealing who committed the murder. Another completely independent strand of narrative concerns the murder by an uncle of his nephew and ward, also for motives of gain, this story being set in Italy. The two narratives are structurally counterpointed with episodes of each alternating with the other, the only thematic link being that the tragedies are bourgeois and domestic, and the murders are committed by people who were known to and trusted by the victims, thus heightening their poignancy and horror. The grounding of the action of the English narrative in a London landscape recognizable to its audience gives the action an added immediacy and impact – and this strand of the play is provided with markedly more geographical detail than that set in Italy, allowing the audience imaginatively to move about the terrain of the action. Merry’s tavern, the ‘Bull’, where the first murder is committed, is in Thames Street while the residence and shop of Beech is situated around the corner in Lambeth (‘Lambert’) Hill. There is some emphasis at the outset on the warmth of their neighbourly relations and Beech particularly values Merry for his honesty and good reputation. His reliability and solidity as an Englishman (perhaps here obliquely calling on nationalist sentiment) even extends to the beer he produces, when another unnamed neighbour with whom Beech comes to drink at Merry’s establishment comments, I had rather drinke Such beare as this as any Gascoine wine: But tis our English manner to affect Strange things, and price them at a greater rate, Then home-bred things of better consequence. (fol. A4r) The fact of Merry’s established trustworthiness as a local man both delays the discovery of his culpability and points up the incomprehensibility and egregious horror of the deed. When he is ultimately apprehended for the crime, the Constable comments, ‘Who would have thought of all the men alive / That Thomas Merry would haue done this deede / So full of ruth and monstrous wickednesse!’, to which a waterman adds,

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‘Of all the men that liue in London walles, / I would have thought that Merry had bin free’ (fol. I1v). The detailed specification of London’s geography plays its part in the narrative of the aftermath of the murder. When Williams, Merry’s servant, returns to discover that his master has committed the crime, he flees from Merry’s house in fear of his life and goes to the ‘Three Cranes’ in Thames Street, an actual inn at the time (fol. C1r). Later while Williams is returning from hearing a sermon at Paul’s Cross (probably a detail included to contribute to an implicit moral profile of him) he is met by Merry in the street, who unsuccessfully tries to persuade him to return home (fol. G4r). After he has committed the murder, Merry proceeds to dismember the body of his victim, dumping the trunk in Paris Garden ditch where it is found by someone walking his dog (fols. G2r-v). The head and legs are put in a bag and dumped on Baynard’s Castle stairs where they are later discovered by two watermen (fol. F4v). Not only does the distance between these localities underline the fact of the dismemberment, but both places involve associations that intensify responses to the murder. That Paris Garden ditch is a sewer emphasizes the foulness of the deed, while the riverside location of Baynard Castle steps possibly subliminally suggests guilt in that the river was, in the drama, more often used for flight and departure than anything else. Aside from the specificity about locality, there is a clear sense in the play of the local community, both in the dramatization of the impact that the crimes have on neighbours and operatives in the vicinity, and their involvement in the solving of them. When Beech’s boy is found fatally wounded and the missing Beech’s own murder is also suspected, the neighbours resolve to search local sinks, gutters and corners and to ask the Thames watermen to keep an eye out for a body (fol. D3r). The hammer used as a murder weapon is recognized as belonging to a local cutler, who is then temporarily arrested when he cannot remember to whom he had lent it (fol. G1v). In the end it is the ultimate revelation of the murder by Merry’s servant Williams, after having been prompted by a neighbour, which brings about the punishment of the criminal. The strong evocation of community life here tied to familiar geographical markers seems clearly one way the playwright seeks to enhance the poignancy of the narrative to his audience. In a comedy dating from the end of the century, Englishmen for my Money (Rose, 1598) by William Haughton, the action is localized within a specific area of London, various characters identifying where they are, and several locations are named, including Tower Hill (commented on for its sweet air) St Paul’s, Cornhill, Cannon (‘Canning’) Street,


Fenchurch Street and Bucklersbury, while at different points both the Exchange Bell and Bow Bells sound. There is some detail in the reference to landmarks and features in the City, such as the Tower, a maypole in Shoreditch, the four spouts of Leadenhall Street, the London stone, the Cheapside cross and the Blue Boar in Spitalfields. For its full effectiveness, the narrative makes a call on the audience’s knowledge of the streets and features of the City, such as when the clown figure Frisco makes a mocking comparison between a Dutch character and ‘the signe of the Mouth without Bishops gate, aping and a great Face, and a great Head, and no Body’ (2108–10). The geographical allusions are functional as it is through the differing degrees to which characters share the London habitation of the spectators that the play invites sympathy or disapproval with them. One instance is the comic and nationalist capital made of the confusion of the three foreign suitors, Alvaro, Delion and Vandalle when they get lost in London streets on their way to the home of the three young women whose hands they are seeking in marriage. They are led astray by Frisco and cannot find their way to the Crutched Friars. This allows their English rivals a tactical advantage through their automatic knowledge (and, by implication, natural ownership of the terrain) enabling the Englishmen to claim the women first (1600–1705). These plays include, as a principal or subsidiary focus of their narratives, threats to the social fabric of London and the impact of these is enhanced by the evocation of the texture of London life through the built environment, which provides material reference points common to the experience of the play characters and the audiences. To the audiences are made available imaginatively and theatrically elements of ‘neighbourhood’ parallel to those they would acquire as part of their habituation to the material fabric of London; in Pierre Mayol’s words, ‘the processes of recognition – of identification – that are created thanks to proximity, to concrete coexistence in the same urban territory: all these “practical” elements offer themselves for use as vast fields of exploration with a view to understanding a little better the great unknown that is everyday life’ (De Certeau et al., 1998, p. 9). The importance of local loyalty is underlined by the narratives, as in the more monitory plays discussed above, and the threats to the welfare of Londoners are posed by outsiders in whom knowledge of the built environment is undesirable, George Browne in A Warning for Fair Women, and somewhat less tangibly the foreign suitors in Englishmen for my Money.5 While in Two Lamentable Tragedies the murderer is a Londoner, much is made of the inexplicability of the perpetration of the crime by one who is so strongly part of the local community. The issue of outsiders to London would

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become even stronger in the nationalist plays that were a prominent part of the theatrical fare in the 1590s.

England’s capital and nationalism The rapid growth of London through the sixteenth century and its ever-increasing wealth gave rise to a certain self-conscious national pride in its power and magnificence. As the late sixteenth century was also a period of intensifying nationalist feeling, in the build-up to and especially following the Armada threat of the late 1580s, it is perhaps unsurprising that the representation of the capital in the theatre at this time began to be incorporated into the nationalist discourses that also found their way into the drama. A rash of plays that appeared in the last quarter of the sixteenth century articulate national anxieties with a specific address to a London audience, and reveal an evolving role for the capital in the dramatic discourse of national identity.6 In these plays it is perhaps less topographical detail that is of moment than a heightened awareness of the status of the metropolis in the realm. London’s growth and increasing power have by this point in the sixteenth century promoted its self-conscious awareness of its dominance over other regions of the realm, which then allows for its elevation as an icon of power in a broader discourse of nationalism on an international plane. But the drama nevertheless continues some realization of the spaces that are familiar to the lived experience of its audiences, and there is some negotiation between the two through which the theatre’s clientele is imaginatively accorded a flattering role in the nationalist endeavour. The City comes to represent the nation and is a focus of patriotic sentiment in Thomas Heywood’s The Four Prentices of London. The dispossessed Earl of Boulogne lives in London as a citizen and has made his four sons apprentices to different trades: Godfrey a mercer, Guy a goldsmith, Charles a haberdasher, and Eustace a grocer. Godfrey remarks, ‘I praise the Citty which made Princes Trades-men’ (67), and goes on to assert that it is a good thing for noblemen to have a trade with which to support themselves, a position supported by all but the restive youngest brother. This may suggest something about the possible target audience of the play, but a general sense of nationalist feeling is principally the thrust of the narrative.7 Though the play is largely not set in London, the streets of the city are strongly present in allusions in which geographical details help to forge the bond between local pride and nationalism. When the father of the four boys summons them to


go on a crusade, Godfrey responds, ‘Let’s try what London Prentices can do’ (226). The boys get shipwrecked but all end up gaining distinction of rank or military prowess in different contexts. Before a battle later on in which Eustace is to lead his men, he exclaims, oh that I had with mee As many good lads, honest Prentises, From Eastcheape, Canwicke-streete, and London-stone, To end this battell (777–9) His brother Charles (who leads a band of outlaws) also remarks, ‘Oh for some Cheape-side boyes for Charles to lead: / They would sticke to it, where these Out-lawes faile’ (782–3). In A Larum for London the warnings about the threat of the Spaniards are based on the pride and wealth of the citizens of Antwerp – very clearly standing anatopically for those of London – which makes them both target and defenceless against attack. The point is made with more direct reference to London in Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, in which Diligence warns the lords and ladies: Prepare ye to withstand a stratagem, Such as this Land nor London euer knew The Spanish forces Lordings are prepar’d, In brauerie and boast, beyond all boundes T’inuade, to win, to conquer all this land. They chieflie aime at Londons stately pompe, At Londons pleasure, wealth and pollicy Intending to dispoile her of them all (1251–8) Before the battle that ensues between the English and the Spaniards the nationalist parleying has a special focus on London: Fealty [the English herald]: With Londons Pompe Castile cannot compare (1641) Shealty [the Spanish herald]: Three Caualieros Castillianos here, Without Compeeres in compasse of this world: Are come to conquer, as ful wel they shal

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This mool-hill Isle, that litle England hight, With London that proud paltrie market towne (1657–61) Policy, one of the three lords of London and a suitor to Lady Lucre advises (by way of countering the Spanish threat) that a show of bravado and insouciance be mounted by the city: Lord Pomp, let nothing that’s magnificall, Or that may tend to Londons graceful state Be vnperfourm’d, as showes and solemn feastes, Watches in armour, triumphes, Cresset-lightes, Bonefiers, belles, and peales of ordinance. And pleasure, see that plaies be published, Mai-games and maskes, with mirth and minstrelsie, Pageants and school-feastes, beares, and puppit plaies. My selfe wil muster vpon Mile-end greene, As though we saw, and fear’d not to be seene Which wil their spies in such a wonder set, To see vs recke so litle such a foe, Whom all the world admires, saue onely we (1319–31) Here the very self-display of London becomes a matter of nationalist endeavour, and prominent in this is the capital’s capacity to exhibit its entertainment industry ostentatiously, including the theatre itself. Thus an aspect of the culture that was on the way to becoming a major defining feature of the metropolis is, reflexively and self-consciously, touted in this play as also having a patriotic value. There is also some focus on the well-being of the city itself. Nicholas Nemo encounters three lords of Lincoln coming to pay suit to the Ladies and tells them that the ladies are bound to the Lords of London (2082–99). Lincolnshire was a county with Catholic sympathies, but this may refer also to the proverb (see p. 201, note 28). The London lords argue that London’s Lucre may not be separated from London’s Pomp, Conscience from London’s Pleasure, nor London’s Policy from London’s Love (2129– 48). The wedding of the Lords and Ladies follows, with pageantry that echoes that of a royal entry, a wench singing, ‘If London list to looks, the streets were nere so cleene, / Except it was when best it might, in


welcome of our Queene’ (2217–18). At this point the Vices Fraud and Dissimulation are still at large, however, losing themselves in the crowd. They are apprehended but escape, Dissimulation unbinding Fraud though Simplicity thinks he has burned them, an opinion of which he is not disabused by the others though Pleasure is aware of the flight of the Vices, and this evasion is curiously glossed over as the play ends. This incident sits oddly with the idealizing pageantry but may allow the gap between the formal celebratory vision being offered here and the realities of life in London as actually experienced by the audience to be bridged.8 As a prize, London in conceived in terms of very specific qualities – pomp and wealth that bespeak power – and the plays move towards a theatrical rendering of the city in relation to these. This roughly coincides with the beginnings of the representation of London in its own civic pageantry in eulogistic terms, specifically in George Peele’s pageant for the installation of Sir Woolstone Dixie of the Skinners’ Company as lord mayor on the 29th October 1585. The ‘device’ or text of the show also includes the following speech of eulogy to the city as thus allegorized: Loe lovely London riche and fortunate, Famed through the Worlde for peace and happinesse: Is heer advaunc’t and set in Highest seat, Beawtified throughly as her state requires. First, over her a Princely Trophey standes, Of beaten gold: a riche and Royall Armes: Wher-too this London ever more bequeathes, Service of Honour and of Loyaltie, Her props are well advised Majestrates, That carefully attend her person still. The honest Franklin and the Husband-man. Layes downe his sackes of Corne at Londons feet, And bringes such presents as the Countrie yeeldes. (9–21)9 The growing national awareness in the sixteenth century went hand in hand with a burgeoning interest in historiography. The late sixteenth century saw a burgeoning of historical and quasi-historical writing that included Robert Fabyan’s Chronicle (1516), Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia (1534), John Stow’s A Summarie of English Chronicles (1565),

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Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancaster and York (1548) and Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577).10 There was also geographical or ‘chorographical’ writing, and historical geography, most notably William Lambarde’s Perambulation of Kent (1574), William Camden’s Britannia (1586) and John Norden’s Speculum Britanniae, the First Parte: An Historicall and Chorographical Description of Middlesex (1593). An interest in the geography and history of the capital came together in the publication of Stow’s Survey of London in 1598 that, as F. Smith Fussner has pointed out, was a ‘definitive work of local history’ (1962, p. 212).11 A large number of history plays appeared during the last two decades of the century including all of Shakespeare’s English histories, Marlowe’s Edward II and a range of others. The history or chronicle play was a prominent feature of the repertoires of playing companies, and even possibly the dominant dramatic genre of the period.12 This is all the more striking given that drama prior to the commercial theatre had, by contrast, largely been ahistorical (the interludes), conceptual history based in scriptural rather than national agendas (the cycle plays) or a minority strand of plays based on classical or Continental models or narratives. Several of the history plays with a strong London interest from this period dramatize civil conflict and give evidence of a civic pride that is related to the nationalist discourse in a slightly different way from those plays that exercise anxieties about invasion from abroad, since it is not foreign threat that is at issue here, but rather domestic rebellion.13 A relative silence on the part of the drama on one aspect of civil violence should be noted at the outset. It is curious that, apart from Sir Thomas More, these plays overwhelmingly portray the threat to the capital as coming from without, rather than proceeding from social tensions and conflicts within the city itself (and even in Sir Thomas More the problem is caused by the presence of resident foreigners). This rather tends to gloss over the fact that there was considerable potential for disorder within the urban population, and this did give rise to riots from time to time, especially in the 1590s.14 Probably the most interesting of the plays to dramatize civil conflict within the realm from the point of view of the representation of London is Thomas Heywood’s 1 Edward IV (c. 1599) in which the domestic rather than foreign nature of the threat does not diminish the fact that the play is articulating an underlying uncertainty about national security, while at the same time it places solidly in the foreground the interests and concerns of London itself. Echoing the anxieties about London present in the plays dealing with the threats of foreign invasion (as A Larum for London and Three Lords


and Three Ladies of London discussed above), the play clearly spells out the metropolis’s vulnerability because of its perceived wealth. It presents imagined provincial perspectives on the city that might have been the stuff of the nightmares of a citizenry in the 1590s, fully experienced in the turmoil caused by bad harvests and discontent among the poor. The Kentish rebels in the play attempt to capture the capital and aspire to enjoy the wealth and status of both its geographic poles, their leader Falconbridge declaring, We’ll shoe our neighing coursers with no worse Than the purest silver that is sold in Cheap. At Leadenhall we’ll sell pearls by the peck, As now the mealmen use to sell their meal In Westminster, we’ll keep a solemn court, And build it bigger to receive our men (2.51–60) One of his followers, Spicing, joins in the anticipation of the plunder of the capital: You know Cheapside? There are the mercers’ shops, Where we will measure velvet by our pikes, And silks and satins by the street’s whole breadth! We’ll take the tankards from the conduit cocks, To fill with Hippocras and drink carouse! Where chains of gold and plate shall be as plenty As wooden dishes in the weald of Kent! (2.66–72) Smoke, another of the rebels, looks at London with equal avidity: Look, lads; for from this hill ye may discern The lovely town which we are marching to. That same is London, lads, ye look upon. Range all arow, my hearts, and stand at gaze, As do the herds of deer at some strange sight; Or as a troop of hungry travellers, That fix their eyes upon a furnished feast. (2.76–82)

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And a third, Chub, adds, No sooner in London will we be, But the bakers for you, the brewers for me. Birchin Lane shall suit us, the Costermongers fruit us, The poulters send us in fowl, And butchers meat, without control; And ever when we sup or dine, The vintners freely bring us in wine. If anybody ask who shall pay, Cut off his head, and send him away. (2.89–97) In this play by a London-born playwright events are seen squarely from the perspective of Londoners, and the rebels aspiring to the plunder of the city’s wealth target the localities that accommodate its economic life. Their speeches abound in geographical reference and attach the economic importance of London, as perceived in the realm at large, to the familiar habitat of the London audience. As a Londoner’s perception of outsiders viewing London, it underscores the notion that its very wealth constitutes a prime danger to the city’s safety. It also offers a very London-centred view of the rebels, whose unrealistic view of the capital’s commodities betrays their ignorance and disorderedness. This is also underlined by associating the rebels with a part of the conurbation that encapsulated for Londoners the idea of diminished control, lying outside the judicial and economic remit of the City’s authorities as well as being a byword for moral laxity, the insurgents being described by an apprentice as those desperate, idle, swaggering mates That haunt the suburbs, in the time of peace, And raise up ale-house brawls in the streete (5.37–9)15 Heywood also reprises the heroic representation of London tradesmen that he had created eight years earlier in The Four Prentices of London, representing them as successfully (and before the king can get reinforcements to them) resisting the Kentish rebels making an onslaught on the city.16 The Second Apprentice robustly proclaims London’s resistance to


them in terms that also underscore both the integrity of the citizens and their traditional rights: We have no tricks nor policies of war, But by the ancient custom of our fathers We’ll soundly lay it on, take’t off that will. And, London prentices, be ruled by me: Die ere ye lose fair London’s liberty (5.21–5) But the speech equally has the effect of providing the London citizens’ loyalty to the crown with a historical pedigree. This is echoed by the lord mayor when, in declaring his defiance towards the rebels, he makes a parallel between himself and William Walworth, the mayor of London who stabbed Wat Tyler to death during his rebellion against Richard II, ‘Think that in Richard’s time, even such a rebel / Was then by Walworth, the Lord Mayor of London, / Stabb’d dead in Smithfield’ (5.6–8). Heywood constructs the mayor’s authority in the play as almost on a par with that of the king. It is he rather than the monarch who leads the defence against the rebels, and he ascribes this victory to London itself: How great an honour have you gained to-day? And how much is this city famed for ever, That twice, without the help either of king Or any but of God and our own selves, We have prevailed against our country’s foes? (9.182–6) The king is obliged to make excuses to the mayor, ‘we assure you on our royal word, / So soon as we had gathered us a power / We dallied not, but made all haste we could’ (9.205–7). The authoritative presence of the mayor (and his aldermen) is also signalled by the visual splendour that echoes civic pageantry, as the direction for his first entry is, ‘Enter the Lord Mayor, Master Shore, and Master Josselyn, in their velvet coats and gorgets, and leading staves’ (3.opening s.d.), with subsequent directions for entry suggesting further ceremony. Early in the narrative a threat to the traditional structures of order and authority is posed by the declared intention of the rebel leader Falconbridge to ride, ‘in triumph thorough Cheap to Paul’s. / The Mint is ours, Cheap, Lombard Street our own’

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(9.19–20). Falconbridge is here seeking to appropriate the traditional ceremonial route of London, but any promise of order present in the idea of a procession is subverted by the plunder implied in the second line. He has earlier threatened to get his followers to insult the mayor (an embodiment of London’s government) in Cheapside and usurp his position, ‘There’s not the poorest rascal in my camp, / But if he chance to meet thee in Cheapside, / Upon thy footcloth he shall make thee light, / And hold his stirrup while he mount thy horse’ (4.52–5). Later in this rather rambling play, the less than flattering representation of the king is continued in the story of his sexual pursuit of a citizen’s wife, Jane Shore, and in this the City’s topography is used effectively to deceremonialize him. Appearing in disguise in quest of her, he describes his arrival at Lion Quay and he finds himself in Lombard Street by the Pelican (17.24–8). The king here is present in the streets of London not in pomp but skulking like a rather dubious private citizen. A play that dramatizes the Tyler rebellion, including the stabbing incident, is Jack Straw (anon., c. 1591), in which the rebels’ attack on the crown is again graphically connected with the assault on the material and administrative fabric of the capital. The lord mayor reports that the rebels are ‘Burning vp Bookes and matters of records / Defacing houses of hostilltie / Saint Iones in Smithfield, the Sauoy and such like’ (651–3). Though the issue of the metropolis’s wealth as attracting the envious eyes of its enemies is not as decisively emphasized here as in Heywood’s play, it is implied in Jack Straw’s refusal to be satisfied with the king’s offer of clemency and assurance of liberty, declaring, ‘I came for spoile and spoile Ile haue’ (757). The economic power of London and its loyalty to the crown are, however, intertwined in the play’s representation of the capital’s place in history, the mayor promising the king, ‘London will giue you power and armes’ (973) and later affirming: Your Maiestie and all your Royall Pieres Shall finde your London suche a store house still, As not alone you shall commaund our wealth, But loyall harts the treasure of a Prince Shall growe like graines sowne in a fertill soyle’ (1192–6) After the quelling of the rebellion the mayor is knighted and a bloody dagger is incorporated into the City’s coat of arms to commemorate Walworth’s stabbing of Wat Tyler (1183).


Shakespeare dramatizes another rebellion with an impact on London in 2 Henry VI (1590/1591), in which the rebels led by Jack Cade also show a clear awareness of the value of the prize that the capital itself constitutes. Like Falconbridge in Heywood’s play, Cade announces his intention to appropriate the ceremony of the City, declaring that ‘we will have the Mayor’s sword borne before us’ (4.3.12–13). In his account of the progress of the rebellion, the Second Messenger identifies the threat to the safety and interests of London and the court (and therefore the nation) as co-extensive: Jack Cade hath almost gotten London Bridge; The citizens fly and forsake their houses; The rascal people thirsting after prey, Join with the traitor, and they jointly swear To spoil the city and your royal court (4.4.48–52) When part of the city has been captured, Cade’s triumphalist exultation betrays a similar sense of London as a consumer cornucopia to that found in 1 Edward IV. The rebel leader, as the self-styled ‘Lord Mortimer’ proclaims, ‘Now is Mortimer lord of this city. And here, sitting upon London Stone, I charge and command, that of the city’s cost the Pissing Conduit run nothing but claret wine this first year of our reign’ (4.6.1–4). A little later, in a sexual and economic pun on the spoil of the city, a rebel asks Cade, ‘My lord, when shall we go to Cheapside and take up commodities upon our bills?’ (4.7.118–19). In these plays there is strong implicit sense of natural hierarchy that places the city in a dominant position over the countryside, in terms that are described by Lefebvre: The town has a two-sided relationship with the country first as an entity which draws off the surplus product of rural society, and secondly as an entity endowed with the administrative and military capacity to supply protection . Thus the town – urban space – has a symbiotic relationship with that rural space over which (if often with much difficulty) it holds sway. (1991, 234–5) The incursions of rebels from the countryside are thus a violation of the natural order, something that is evidenced in their lack of an understanding of the meaning of its civic ceremonies. London’s ceremonially

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and symbolically reinforced role as the embodiment of order in the realm is only one of the things threatened by the rebels, the details of spoliation that the plays offer also making a much more material call on the fears of its London audiences. Another play concerned with turbulence in the realm is the anonymous Famous Victories of Henry V (Bull Inn, c. 1586) dealing with the early life of the monarch, on which Shakespeare possibly drew, especially for his portrayal of the early life of the delinquent prince in 1 Henry IV (discussed below). In The Famous Victories the Eastcheap narrative of the prince’s transgressive youth in the roistering London low-life society is given much greater prominence than in Shakespeare’s play, and there is more geographical detail as well. An instance of this occurs early in the play when the citizens John Cobler, Robin Pewterer and Lawrence Costermonger anchor themselves immediately in the geography of London at their first entry, mounting a watch at Pudding Lane end and Billingsgate Ward (2.4–5), and they later apprehend a thief to take him to Newgate. This is part of a dramatization of the imposition and maintenance of order by the London citizens and civic authorities in the face of the criminal activities of the reprobate heir to the throne and his companions. The misdemeanours of the prince are reported before he makes an appearance (2.12–16), so the audience has no direct or positive acquaintance with him at first, and this play maintains much less of a balance of sympathy for him than Shakespeare’s version of the story. Here there is no indication of future reform such as that which Shakespeare provides in 1 Henry IV (1.2). The emphasis – at least in the early part of the play – is instead on the efforts of the London authorities to constrain the prince and maintain civic order, and an account is given of the prince’s confinement in the Counters for brawling in a tavern (2.96–112). When the king demands of the mayor and sheriff why his son has been incarcerated, the mayor’s explanation satisfies him so completely that he decides in favour of the City officials in the matter and castigates his son for his behaviour. What follows is the trial of one of the prince’s companions, the thief, and when the judge refuses the prince’s demand that the man be released, the prince boxes him on the ear and releases the thief (4.1–92). In response the Lord Chief Justice has the prince confined to the Fleet, and the thief rearrested and returned to Newgate. There is a clear implication in this play of both the independence and gravity of the London civic authorities in going about their administrative duties, and of the patriotic nature of their actions in doing so. The king remarks of the judge who imprisons the prince, ‘now truly that man is more fitter to rule the Realme than I,


for by no meanes could I rule my sonne, and he by one word hath caused him to be ruled’ (6.79–81). This is another play that celebrates the virtue of the citizenry with an implied contrast to royalty, as in 1 Edward IV where the stolid virtues of a loyal citizen, Matthew Shore, are emphasized in the lengthy episode in which his wife is seduced and subsequently abandoned by the lascivious King Edward.17 Shakespeare’s treatment of the same material has a rather different inflection with respect to the representation of London and its citizens. Though he only uses London as a setting when his material obliges him to, in his history plays, the Eastcheap scenes in 1 and 2 Henry IV (both c. 1597) do provide an ‘on the ground’ comic representation of London life in plays in which the focus is otherwise on national politics relatively detached from a sense of locality. As in a number of other romance or history plays of this period, there is an intermixing of citizenry and aristocracy and they might be exploiting a sense of fascination for London citizens in seeing a prince shown moving familiarly among them.18 However, here the contrast between the citizen class, represented by tavern life, low-level criminality and prostitutes, and the elite stratum of royalty and courtiers is hardly complimentary to the former. Prince Harry very early on announces in a soliloquy his intention to use his roistering life in the London underground as a foil for his later virtue (1: 1.2.183–205). His principal activity in this milieu involves the Gad’s Hill episode, and the disparity between the heroism manifest in the main plot and the combination of threatened criminal violence and cowardice on the part of the Eastcheap companions is very apparent. Falstaff is pointedly an anti-hero in this respect, a manifest antithesis to the citizen-heroes found elsewhere in the drama of this period. On the battlefield his admission of cowardice comes with a contrast between his success in his own urban space – triumphing in not paying his tavern bills – with his present incapacity in the conflict, ‘Though I could scape shot-free at London, I fear the shot here; here’s no scoring but upon the pate’ (1.5.3.30–1). In fact, the only rather oblique suggestion of the heroism of London comes from Justice Shallow, a foolish provincial nostalgic for his own time in the city as a young man, ‘I’ll drink to Master Bardolph and to all the cabileros about London’, provoking the wistful response from his servant, Davy, ‘I hope to see London once ere I die’ (2.5.3.57–9).19 There is less of a policing presence of the civic authorities in 2 Henry IV than in The Famous Victories as well – confined to a raid on the tavern in search of Falstaff at the end of the second act. Shakespeare does not give London any of the prominence in the maintenance of national stability or support of the crown that several other

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history plays do. This tendency is seen, too, in 1 Henry VI, in which the lord mayor’s hand-wringing appeal to the king at the start of the disorder that would become the Wars of the Roses suggests dependency, disempowerment and a very parochial concern with his city’s material and commercial well-being: O, my good lords, and virtuous Henry, Pity the city of London, pity us; The Bishop [of Winchester’s] and Duke of Gloucester’s men, Forbidden late to carry any weapon, Have filled their pockets full of pebble stones, And, banding themselves in contrary parts, Do pelt so fast at one another’s pate That many have their giddy brains knock’d out. Our windows are broke down every street, And we for fear compell’d to shut our shops. (3.1.78–87) However, Shakespeare also gives a somewhat different representation of the London citizenry in Richard III (Pembroke’s, 1592/1593), in which the capital has a significant presence. The historical narrative of the play obviously requires some locations to be mentioned, most particularly those that provide settings such as Westminster Hall where Richard’s coronation takes place and the Tower where several of his victims are confined and murdered, but several others are referred to in dialogue, such as Holborn, Baynard’s Castle, the Guildhall and St Paul’s. This evocation of London’s geography perhaps complements the insistent occurrence in the narrative of the citizenry and civic administration, despite their not being directly active players in the process. To some extent the London citizens synecdochically represent the people of the realm in general in respect of how they will react to the events unfolding in the royal house. In Act 2 Scene 3 three citizens discuss King Edward’s death and have forebodings about the future, the lord mayor comes with a ceremonial train to greet the young Prince Edward at the start of Act 3 Scene 1, Richard and Buckingham woo the mayor in Act 3 Scene 5 and at the start of Act 3 Scene 7, Richard asks, ‘What say the citizens?’ In a play in which so much of the focus is concentrated on the intense conflict within the royal family, the presence of citizens or their representatives at certain points is one of the more obvious ways that the implications of the struggle are broadened out to the realm at large.


However, there is some emphasis on the importance of the stance of the City of London in particular; Richard comments at one point, ‘I do suspect I have done some offence / That seems disgracious in the City’s eye’ (3.7.110–11). But the play differs somewhat from other drama of the period in representing a divergence between the mayor and the citizens, despite the fact that he claims to speak on behalf of them in encouraging Richard to take the crown (3.7.200). The mayor maintains cordial relations with the usurper, and reference is also made to a sycophantic sermon in support of Richard preached by the mayor’s brother, Dr Shaw at St Paul’s Cross (3.5.102). The citizens are, by contrast, represented as less than enthusiastic; some of the audience may have known Edward Hall’s account (actually written by Thomas More) of the Shaw sermon that reports the mute response of the citizenry to it.20 Subsequently in the play Buckingham relates his own address to the people, similarly met with silence despite enthusiastic calls from his planted supporters in the throng (3.7.24–41).21 There is a clear distancing of the citizens from their own civic representative here in respect of their attitude to Richard, they being represented as not susceptible to Richard’s and his henchmen’s skills of manipulation. A play that can at most very loosely be considered a ‘history’ play, and only because it deals – extremely fancifully – with the coming to office of an historical lord mayor of London, is Thomas Dekker’s comedy The Shoemaker’s Holiday (Rose, 1599), the two principal narrative strands of which are both significant in the representation of London. The first involves the love between Rowland Lacey, cousin to the Earl of Lincoln, and Rose Otley, daughter of Sir Roger Otley, the lord mayor. Both Lincoln and Otley oppose the match, Lincoln on the grounds of Rose’s less elevated birth, but the king at the end of the play permits and confirms their marriage. This royal legitimation of a cross-class match contributes to the celebration in the play of the importance of the office of lord mayor, as well as being indirectly a compliment to the citizenry. Apart from the connection of different social ranks here, there is also implicitly a linking of the two geographical poles of the London conurbation: Westminster represented by the courtier class and the City by the citizenry. The second strand, which makes up the more festive dimension of the play, is also the historical element and concerns the accession of the shoemaker, Simon Eyre, to the mayoralty of London. This is again a celebration of the citizen class as Eyre repeatedly trumpets his profession as ‘the gentle craft’ (‘Prince I am none, yet am I nobly born, as being the sole son of a shoemaker’ 2.3.46–7). Eyre in the final act has an easy relationship with the king, who is amused by

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his madcap nature. In this relationship, the highly idealized picture of cross-class social harmony is made possible by the implicit significance of London as a basis of social and economic power, and the sanction of certain types of social mobility within this metropolitan environment is what creates a certain parallel between the Lacey–Otley match and the elevation of Eyre.22 The greater social fluidity afforded by the metropolis (at least as dramatized) is also partly manifested in the opportunities for anonymity that it permits, exemplified by the fact that Rowland Lacey becomes, for a while, in disguise a shoemaker working for Eyre. This is again something that implicitly flatters the citizenry and is reminiscent of the embracing of trades by the nobleman’s sons in The Four Prentices of London. A celebration of the history and material fabric of London is also woven into the play, in the references to its topography and cultural calendar such as the inauguration of the Leadenhall building, the reasons for the naming of which are given (5.5.130–4), the king’s granting the right to hold a market there two days a week (5.5.160–2) and Eyre’s establishment of a feast for the apprentices of London on Shrove Tuesday as a result of a promise made years earlier (5.5.175–88). The idealized picture of social harmony and especially of that between Westminster and the City takes place against the backdrop of wars with France, something in which various of the characters in the play are involved, and in a gesture to broader national sentiment the king remarks, ‘Before one summer more pass o’er my head / France shall repent England was injured’ (5.5.142–3). Dekker’s play is one of a number in the period to bring into prominence the role of the lord mayor of London (others including The Play of Sir Thomas More, 1 Edward IV, The Famous Victories of Henry V and Jack Straw). The mayor, as the first citizen, embodies the city and is repeatedly associated with its built environment, either in respect of defending it or being involved in additions to it.23 A play that brings, instead, the mayoress into the focus of sympathy of London audiences is Peele’s Edward I (c. 1590–1591), the principal narrative strand of which concerns an incident involving the king’s Spanish wife, Queen Elinor, and the mayoress of London. The play brings together the patriotic role of London as against the foreign threat and, more obliquely, the relationship between crown and City. Edward’s queen, Elinor, is the daughter of the Spanish king and much is made in the play of her pride and haughtiness, a quality particularly associated with her nationality and something her own daughter, Joan, warns her against by contrasting it with the temperament of the native English, ‘The people of this land are men of warre, / The women courteous, milde, and debonaire’ (1.247–8).


The king himself is aggrieved by this attitude and comments, ‘Sweete Queene how much I pittie the effects, / This Spanish pride grees not with Englands prince’ (10.1625–6). Early in the play the mayoress of London is noticed by the queen coming from church accompanied by music. When asked, the mayoress identifies herself and reveals that she has also just given birth to a son, but after the queen’s departure she expresses her apprehension because she is aware of Elinor’s pride. This proves justified when later the queen seeks to purge her melancholy by summoning the mayoress and killing her by having her bound to a chair and having a serpent applied to her breast. The mayoress, whose final words describe the queen as ‘the scourge of England’ and call on her own husband, ‘sweete John Bearmber Maior of London’, is constructed as a paragon of native virtue. When, at a later point, thunder and lightning terrify Elinor, her daughter interprets it as divine anger at her deeds, responding to the outrage of London: Your blaspheming and other wicked deeds Hath caused our God to terrifie your thoughts, And call to minde your sinfull fact committed Against the Maris here of lovely London, And better Maris London never bread, So full of ruth and pitty to the poore, Her have you made awaie, that London cries For vengeance on your head. (18.2182–9) The mayoress episode seems a clear attempt to inject some London interest into the play, particularly given that the narrative is set outside of the capital, principally in Wales.24 If the foreignness of the queen here is a significant element of her demonization, more generally in the drama at this time the representation of foreigners domiciled in London becomes affected by the anxiety and nationalist discourse of the period. There is to some extent a continuation of the idea, found in earlier interludes, that the problem is primarily an economic one, but at this time of national uncertainty and foreign threat, it is deepened in some plays to include rather more sinister dimensions. In Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London an Italian merchant in London, Mercador, advises Lady Lucre – herself of Italian extraction – to let her property to foreigners rather than English people:

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Madona me tll ye vat you shal doe, let dem to a straunger dat are content To dwell in a little roome, and to pay muche rent: For you know da french mans and fleminges in dis countrey be many, So dat they make shift to dwell ten houses in one very gladly: And be content a for pay fiftie or three score pound a yeare, For dat whiche da English man say twenty marke is to deare (876–82) Lucre replies that she has infinite numbers of such tenants ‘in London’ and, ‘Beside in Bristow, Northampton, Norwich, Westchester, Caunterbury,/ Douer, Sandwich, Rie, Porchmouth, Plimmoth, and many moe’ (885–6). In Englishmen for my Money the narrative concerns a Portuguese usurer – possibly with implications of Jewishness – resident in the Crutched Friars, who has made a fortune by extorting money from English gentlemen through dubious financial practices. An extended scene takes place in the Exchange (393–702) in which not only is business talked but characters meet each other on a partly social basis. This is where the usurer, Pisaro, is shown at his most powerful and the sense of a foreign occupation of an English institution is palpable here. He resolves to marry off his daughters, but chooses for them three foreigners, a Frenchman, an Italian and a Dutchman, and rejects the three Englishmen who are the girls’ preferences.25 Three Lords and Three Ladies of London has Simony rallying Usury (like other Vices, being construed as a foreigner resident in a dangerously cosmopolitan London) to treachery against the English state in the expectation of the impending Spanish onslaught, and appeals to the Vices’ foreign identities and allegiances: Tis not our natiue countrie, thou knowest, I Simony am a Roman, Dissimulation a Mongrel, half an Italian, halfe a Dutchman: Fraud so too, halfe French, and halfe Scottish: and thy parentes were both Iewes, though thou wert borne in London, and here Vsury thou are cried out against by the preachers: ioine with vs man to better thy state, for in Spain preaching toucheth vs not. (1439–44) Another play to examine the issue of foreigners in London is The Play of Sir Thomas More (1593–5?), probably by Anthony Munday in collaboration with others. Its subject is the ‘Evil May Day’ riots of 1517, though


at the time of its writing there was again considerable tension focusing on the presence of aliens in the capital, and even the threat of riots in 1593 (Archer, 1991, p. 8).26 Its focus is principally biographical but it is particularly More’s relationship with London that occupies the first half and is the basis of the attitudes to him that it invites. Remarkably, the play initially promotes nationalist sentiment through the antiforeigner feelings that it begins by dramatizing, and subsequently shifts the moral perspective somewhat to show the dangerous consequences of that sentiment to the stability and well-being of the metropolis. It starts with an illustration of the way in which foreigners living in London, and enjoying special protection and privileges there, abuse the rights of common Englishmen. Drawing on events described in Holinshed’s Chronicles the first scene of the play depicts two London-based Lombards, De Gard and Caveler, respectively, attempting to abduct Doll Williamson, the wife of a carpenter, and then expropriating two doves from Williamson himself, who protests that he has just bought and paid for them himself in Cheapside. These and other abuses cause outrage among the native citizens, who are represented as constituting a united and mutually supportive community, and the sense of an attack on London is made more pointed in De Gard’s boast that he could carry off the lord mayor’s wife with impunity (1.1.46–9). Later the Earls of Shrewsbury and Surrey discuss the discontent of the citizens at the hospitality offered by the king to foreigners in England and Shrewsbury cites another abuse by De Gard, this time against a goldsmith, Sherwin, by stealing his wife, expropriating nearly £400 worth of plate, and having him arrested for not paying the Lombard for the upkeep of the wife (1.3.1–24). Another participant in the same conversation, Sir Thomas Palmer, then quotes De Gard’s earlier boast that if he had enticed away the lord mayor’s wife he would keep her despite what any Englishman could do (1.3.36–7), implicitly setting up the aliens in an inimical relationship with the urban community as a whole who represent the citizens of the entire realm. These elite conversationalists are provoked to comment about the situation because a bill of grievances (reproduced in the play verbatim from Holinshed) has just been read out at the annual Easter week sermons at the open pulpit of Spital Cross at St Mary of the Hospital on the east side of Bishopsgate (now Spital Square). A messenger then enters to report disturbances in the City, including a threat to the lord mayor, which have broken out after the reading of the bill. What is dramatized of the insurrection is carefully localized in the streets of the City, allowing the audiences closer identification with the insurgents.27

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The incipient insurrection is checked by Thomas More who reasons with the protestors, persuading them to lay down their weapons and disband. It is at this point that the play shifts from exploiting the potential for fuelling nationalist sentiment by the representation of the misconduct of foreigners, to dealing with the threat of disorder to London. The principal subject of the piece is, of course, More himself, and an important way in which it presents a positive portrait of him is in depicting his relations with the City. In the latter part of the play More’s opposition to the king’s break with Rome is dramatized, and it is remarkable that in this period a Catholic hero should be featured positively in conflict with a king instituting the Reformation. What makes this possible is that he is constructed as a solidly London hero, the first half of the play being given over to this focus. The lord mayor commends More’s actions in dealing with the riots in the following terms: Master Shrieve More, you have preserved the city From a most dangerous fierce commotion, For if this limb of riot here in St Martin’s Had joined with other branches of the city That did begin to kindle, ’twould have bred Great rage, that rage much murder would have fed. (2.3.189–94) More responds to the above that his concern was for, ‘My country’s love, and next the city’s care’ (2.3.198). When More is knighted for his actions, the mayor remarks, ‘His majesty hath honoured much the city / In this his princely choice’ (2.3.230–1). The extent to which the question of the protection of the city against insurrection and disorder has replaced the anti-foreigner nationalist thrust of the play at this stage is also underlined by the pun made on his name by Lincoln, one of the rebels, shortly before his execution, ‘This the old proverb now complete doth make, / That Lincoln should be hanged for London’s sake’ (2.4.45–6), recalling a proverb referring to the ascendancy of London over the city of Lincoln.28 In a curiously constructed sentence another of the rioters, Doll Williamson, spells out graphically the threat to the economic infrastructure of London posed by the riots, stating that if More had not put a stop to them, ‘We would first have locked up in Leaden Hall / And there been burned to ashes with the roof’ (2.4.95–6). The threat to life is placed alongside and on a par with that to an identified commonly owned building housing important trading activities in the city.


By the eighth scene, the action has moved outside of London to nearby Chelsea, but More continues his involvement with London at a fundamental level when a ruffian named Falkner is brought before him accused of starting an affray in Paternoster Row that the Sheriff describes as having been caused when the street became clogged with traffic. Like some Vice figures in the interludes, both Falkner’s attractive, witty feistiness and his crudity are firmly linked to the geographical locality that he inhabits, present in his metaphorical references. He says on his entry that ‘’Sblood, if all the dogs in Paris Garden hung at my tail, I’d shake them off with this ’ (3.1.48–9). Later he punningly remarks after having been forced to lose his ‘locks’ by having a haircut, ‘And all the locks were on again, all the goldsmiths in Cheapside should not pick them open’ (3.1.243–4) and ‘More had been better a’ scoured Moorditch than a’ notched me thus’ (3.1.253–4), the latter reference being to an open sewer in Moorfields that presented the local authorities with a recurrent sanitation problem. The subsequent receiving of the lord mayor in state by More moves his relationship with London back on to a more elevated plane. He gives orders for the rich entertainment of the mayor and a bit of flattery of the citizens in general is slipped in when he cites as the reason for the lavishness of his hospitality, ‘For of all people that the earth affords / The Londoners fare richest at their boards’ (3.2.21–2). The mayor’s response exemplifies the way in which the play seeks to enhance More’s reputation – especially with its London audience – by emphasizing his close ties with the metropolis, ‘My lord, you set a gloss on London’s fame, / And make it happy ever in your name’ (3.2.100–1). The king is always physically absent from the stage, which places all the more emphasis on More whose heroic status derives from his maintenance of order in and protection of London. In several of these historical dramas a clear sense emerges of London’s distinctness, a source of both pride and anxiety. It is seen as the jewel of the realm, its status as a city of world renown being a substantial national asset. These plays determinedly present the City as strongly loyal to the crown in domestic conflicts and, because of its strength and wealth, able to lend substantial support to the stability and security of the realm. However, there is in all this some nervousness apparent about the vulnerability of the metropolis as well, particularly because of its wealth and the envy and greed this can inspire in outsiders from both outside and within the country. The substantial urban poverty experienced by many of its inhabitants is ignored and London is presented as a place in which even the life of ordinary citizens is richer than elsewhere.

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Alongside this, we see the emergence of the representation of London citizens in drama as feisty and independent minded, exemplified among other means by the assertive way in which the lowly born relate to their social superiors. There is clearly an element of flattering the audience in this, but as this is popular drama with a broad base of consumption it can be viewed as both indicative of and contributing to a particularly metropolitan self-perception on the part of Londoners.

Defining metropolitan life It is clear that the developing phenomenon of metropolitan life afforded, at least in theatrical representations of London’s inhabitants, some interesting opportunities for personal self-promotion and economic or social advancement. There had been some implicit recognition in the earlier moral drama’s representation of the capital that sharp wits were needed to negotiate life within it but this was presented – in plays such as Wisdom Who is Christ, The World and the Child and Hick Scorner – in a consistently negative light, either in terms of the dangers faced by the unwary or the opportunities perceived by the unscrupulous for dishonest gain in the teeming and apparently poorly policed life of the metropolis. This sort of portrayal of a wily rascality in Londoners is never entirely lost and is, for instance, sharply represented in the following century in Jonson’s The Alchemist. However, in the secular drama of the late Elizabethan period, a note of celebration of the intellectual vivacity of the urbanite begins to creep in (and is certainly not absent from Jonson’s later play either). This is complemented by a tendency to represent rusticity in terms of naïveté and foolishness, which emerges in the drama effectively at this point for the first time to any real extent. Rustics have, of course, been present in plays before this time with comic exploitation of their regional modes of speech, for instance. However, the contrast in the earlier drama had been between their demeaned social status and that of the socially more elevated characters with which they were juxtaposed, so that the distinction had been one of rank rather than geographical provenance, as the elite figures were usually as much rurally based as the rustics.29 Now, however, the distinction was being defined as squarely between countrymen and city dwellers. It is the actual experience of life in the capital that feeds the sophistication of Londoners and the lack of that experience directly shapes the nature of rustics. In 1 Edward IV a countryman from Tamworth, Hobs, sees the lord mayor in his mayoral gown and takes him for the king


on the basis of a dramatic representation he has once seen, done by itinerant players: What’s he in the long beard and the red petticoat? Before God, I misdoubt, Ned, that is the King. I know it by my Lord what-yecall’s players . Ever when they play an enterlout or a commodity at Tamworth, the king always is in a long beard and a red gown like him; therefore I ’spect him to be the King. (23.43–9) This both suggests the visual magnificence of the lord mayor and flatters the relative knowingness of the urban theatre audience by implied comparison with country audiences. As Janette Dillon points out, interludes help ordinary people form their images of the monarch (2000, pp. 43–4), arguably normally the only source for country people who do not enjoy the benefit of having their awareness fed by the ceremonial display of power on the scale available in London. In late sixteenth-century drama there is an emergent suggestion of a distinct culture in London, partly a product of the drama’s flattery of its audience and complementing the celebration of London and Londoners that forms part of its nationalist discourse. A sense was beginning to develop of a specifically urban type of sophistication, which also to a large extent had to do with perceptions of the availability in town of more varied and richer material and consumer opportunities, even though this was often presented satirically. In The Three Ladies of London reference is made to a contemporary social and economic reality, the growth of luxury trades and imports particularly associated with the developing consumption culture of the elite of London. Lady Lucre advises the Italian merchant Mercadorus to buy staple English commodities such as grains and other agricultural produce, in exchange for inessential foreign luxury wares: And for these good commodities, trifles to Englande thou must bryng As Bugles to make bables, coloured bones, glasse, beades, to make bracelettes withall: For euery day Gentlewomen of England doe aske for suche trifles from stall to stall. And you must bryng more, as Amber, Ieat, Corall, Christall and euery such bable That is slight, prettie and pleasant, they care not to haue it profitable. (411–19)

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In lines 1225–30 of The Fair Maid of the Exchange there is an account of the variety of cloths available at the Exchange, evoking the consumer culture developing in London. A little before this, a gentleman from out of town remarks of the recently built Exchange (England’s first shopping mall): Sure, this is a beauteous gallant walke; Were my continuall residence in London I should make much vse of such a pleasure (1211–12) A few lines further on the fair maid herself displays her large variety of wares: My shop you meane sir, there you may haue choice Of Lawnes, or Cambricks, Ruffes well wrought, Shirts, Fine falling bands of the Italian cut-worke, Ruffes for your hands, wast-cotes wrought with silke, Night-caps of gold, or such like wearing linnen, Fit for the Chap-man of what ere degree. (1225–30) Most of the theatrical realization of London consumer culture is to be found in the Jacobean and later drama, but there are some early indications of it in Jonson’s Every Man out of his Humour (Globe, 1599). The naïve simplicity of the countryman is exemplified in the excitement of a bumpkin, Sogliardo, who is intent on moving to London and questions his nephew about clockwork devices that he hopes to see when he arrives there, ‘They say, there’s a new Motion of the city of Nineueh, with IONAS, and the whale, to be seene at Fleetbridge? you can tell, cousin?’ (2.3.146–8). The capital’s consumerism also involves expense and the nephew Fungoso, who is a student in London but is kept short of money by his yeoman father, later complains bitterly that he cannot maintain his gentry status without dressing the part, ‘Is any man term’d a gentleman that is not alwayes i’ the fashion?’ (4.1.13–14). Further on there is a description by a self-consciously fashionable courtier, Fastidious Brisk, of a duel in which his stress is on the clothing and jewellery he wore, including pearls that had cost him £3 at the Exchange (4.6.72–118). These intimations about the abundance of London as a market reflected something of a reality, the city providing


a wide range of luxury goods, many imported, not only to the gentry and aristocracy but to satisfy growing demand among the middling and upper sectors of the non-gentry population, especially at the end of the century. There were various factors that contributed to London’s development as a centre of consumption: the centralization of government at Westminster, the fact that many law cases were also heard there rather than in provincial courts, the presence of the Inns of Court as a major education institution for the more privileged, the increasing role of London as the nation’s financial centre and the phenomenon of a flow of gentry population to the capital, either on a temporary or a permanent basis, for a variety of reasons.30 All of these brought people of substantial means to London, with the consequence that there was a significant growth in luxury trades (including the commercial theatre) and the provision of fine commodities.31 The advice of Lady Lucre to Mercadorus in The Three Ladies of London illustrates one major source of concern in the period that arose from London’s becoming this centre of consumption: the need for the import of luxury goods and the resulting outflow of capital. The wealth of London celebrated or at least depicted in the drama effaces, however, the huge problems of poverty and squalor suffered by the city, and threats to stability posed by the considerable economic gulf between the gentry, courtier and wealthy citizen elite living alongside a majority existing in a state of sometimes desperate destitution.32 It suggests the relatively limited constituency to which the theatre was addressing itself as its target audience and the very selective picture of London offered to it in the drama. The phenomenon of a refined urban culture in the metropolis and the opportunities it offered for personal advancement through the determined acquisition of sophisticated manners becomes the subject of satire in Jonson’s play. When Sogliardo comes up to London to improve his social status and become a gallant, he is advised by a satirical jester, Carlo Buffone: First (to be an accomplisht gentleman, that is, a gentleman of the time) you must giue o’re house-keeping in the countrey, and liue altogether in the city amongst gallants; where, at your first apparance, ’twere good you turn’d foure or fiue hundred acres of your best land into two or three trunks of apparel (you may doe it without going to a coniurer) and be sure, you mixe your selfe stil, with such as flourish in the spring of the fashion, and are least popular; studie their carriage, and behauiour in all; learne to play at Primero and Passage (1.2.37–46)

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The satire here is complexly directed and, though there is some sense in which the vacuity of the urban gallant is being targeted, underlying it is a clear hierarchy subordinating the country to the town. Though Buffone’s argument that sophistication and proper gentry status are incompatible with country living is a ploy, the nature of Sogliardo’s background bears it out. The stress on consumption and expense involved in the life of gallants (apparel, the need for Sogliardo to sell land to support it) implies superior economic power in this urban type over the countryman. It is, moreover, power that is contained within the person and detached from the means of production, the land that implicitly bogs Sogliardo down. The countryman’s dependency on and subordination to the urbanite is exemplified by the requirement that Sogliardo imitate and learn the behaviour, carriage and leisure pursuits of the gallants. The material culture of consumption of the town is stressed here and contributes to the sense of an essential contrast between the nature of townsman and countryman. The passage recalls the advice given in a debate between two friends in a 1579 pamphlet, Civil and Uncivil Life, about the best way for a gentleman to live, circulating principally around where it is best for gentlemen to reside, and coming down heavily on the side of the capital. The ‘home bred’ country gentleman Vincent initially claims moral superiority for the country where he argues that life is also healthier and more hospitable. His friend Vallentine contests this and asks Vincent what sort of people his society is composed of in the country. When told that it is yeomen, butchers, farmers, tailors and the like, Vallentine replies that contact with these sorts will debase Vincent’s gentlemanly manners, whereas if he lived in town – in court or City – he would benefit from the presence of a critical mass of his social peers: you should euer finde company there, fit for your estate and condicion: I meane Noble and Gentlemen, (with whom if you had acquaintance) you would litle delight in this rustical conuersation, and lesse reioyce at that mirth, which (now not knowinge better) doth (as it seemeth) please you much. (fol. H.4v) Even when the idea is treated satirically, a significant feature of London is that both the amusements and forums for display it makes available help to encourage sophisticated forms of social behaviour and offer models for it. In the play Buffone continues to instruct Sogliardo:


You must endeuour to feede cleanly at your Ordinarie, sit melancholy, and picke your teeth when you cannot speake: and when you come to Playes, be humorous, looke with a good startch’t face, and ruffle your brow like a new boot; laught at nothing but your owne iests, or as the Noblemen laugh. That’s a speciall grace you must obserue. (1.2.55–61) This pre-dates but looks forward to Thomas Dekker’s equally ironic and satirical advice offered in his Gull’s Horn Book of 1609, especially in the sections 5 (‘How a yong Gallant should behaue himselfe in an Ordinary’) and 6 (‘How a Gallant should behaue himself in a Play-house’) in which he advocates the same sort of self-display, conscious performance, imitation of social superiors and contemptuous behaviour towards others. A further dimension of the self-promotion and advancement demanded by life in the metropolis is an ability to be entirely self-reliant. Sogliardo, having acquired a coat of arms by purchase, receives a lesson in comportment from Buffone: Nay, looke you sir, now you are a gentleman, you must carry a more exalted presence, change your mood, and habit, to a more austere forme, be exceeding proud, stand vpon your gentilitie, and scorne euery man. Speake nothing humbly, neuer discourse vnder a nobleman, though you ne’re saw him but riding to the Starre-chamber, it’s all one. Loue no man. Trust no man. Speake ill of no man to his face: nor well of any man behind his backe. Salute fairely on the front, and wish ’hem hang’d vpon the turne. Spread your selfe vpon his bosom publikely, whose heart you would eate in priuate. These be principles, thinke on’hem. (3.4.101–12) The image of London underlying the satirical thrust of this passage is as a jungle in which acute strategic intelligence needs to be deployed with no regard for either morality or bonds of natural affection. This is a world in which there is far less possibility of relying on the status conferred by family connections, loyalties of friendship and inherited local recognition than in the smaller communities of the provinces. The conception of social living and therefore civilization presented is one that is hard-nosed and tough: the urbanite has to rely on his own skills and resources, and possess the sharpness to be able to play social games with success if he is to survive. The theatricalization of urban life

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in this way also involves an obverse image of the countryside: if the city is without morality or natural affection, the countryside is without intelligence, an even worse failing. Sordido, the father of Sogliardo – described in the character list as ‘a wretched hob-nail’d Chuffe’ and absurdly obsessed with the weather – is an early example of country crudity in the drama. These representations are also a product of a particular comic genre focusing on specific social types, and by no means represent the whole picture of urban life. Apart from the virtuous citizens such as those in The Famous Victories of Henry V and 1 Edward IV discussed above, there were also positive models of urban self-advancement. Dekker in The Shoemaker’s Holiday depicts a world in which obstacles in cross-class relationships are resolved and the tradesmen who rise to become mayors – Sir Roger Otley and Simon Eyre – find themselves in social contact with the highest in the land. But, however idealized their view of social relations, these plays did make reference to some realities of socio-economic life in the capital and notably the mechanisms for social advancement in guild structures and urban government. Though this also obtained in other urban centres in the realm, the economic power of London as well as its geographical closeness to, and connections with the court made the opportunities for social and economic advancement it offered potentially all the more spectacular. One product of social mobility is the greater stress placed on the refinement of manners, something that was also coming pre-eminently to be associated with life in London. In Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, when Wit (a page) is questioned by Simplicity about the three lords as to whether they are citizens or courtiers, Wit responds, ‘Citizens borne and courtiers brought vp’ (462) to which Simplicity replies, Citizens borne and Courtiers brought vp, I thinke so, for they that be borne in London are halfe Courtiers before they see the Court, for finesse and manerlinesse oh passing; my maners and misbehauiour is mended halfe in halfe since I gaue over being a meal-man and came to dwell in London. (464–8) This also encompasses a sense that a greater degree of literacy could be expected in the capital, blending strategic knowingness and skill with social refinement, and in the same play Will (another page) declares that he cannot read, something to which the poor freeman of the city


with whom he is conversing reacts with surprise, ‘Not read and brought vp in London, wentst thou neuer to schole?’ (346).33 In The Fair Maid of the Exchange the sharp-witted Cripple, who is at the centre of much of the action of the play, admits that he cannot write an eloquent letter, but goes on: Yet sirra, I could conny-catch the world, Make my selfe famous for a sodaine wit, And be admirde for my dexteritie, Were I disposde. (1375–8) He explains that he has been bequeathed the writings of a witty poet of the town, whose work he could plagiarize if he wished to present himself as a wit: I could now when I am in company, At alehouse, tauerne, or an ordinarie Vpon a theame make an exptemporall ditty, (Or one at least should seeme extemporall) Out of th’aboundance of this Legacie I could doe more, for I could make enquirie Where the best witted Gallants vse to dine, Follow them to the tauerne, and there sit In the next rowme with a calues head and brimstone, And ouer-heare their talke, obserue their humors, Collect their jeasts, put them into a play, And tire them too with payment to behold What I haue filcht from them. (1397–413) Despite the satirical intent, these passages give some indication of an expectation of wit and sophistication in sectors of the social life of the metropolis – something that looks forward to the representation of elite urban society in the Caroline theatre. It also suggests the processes of imitation that help to foster the culture of urban witty society, and even implicates the theatre in this, but as a receiver of the imitated wit, rather than a source of it, reversing the flow of traffic found in other satirical representations of the phenomenon.34

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In contrast with the moral perspectives of earlier allegorical drama, the representation of London in late Elizabethan drama shows a re-objectification of the capital in terms of its power and wealth – prominent in the drama’s contribution to the nationalist discourse of the 1590s – and a self-consciousness about the metropolis becomes apparent in the interest present in the detail of its topography and history – something also evidenced outside the drama by the appearance at this time of the first edition of Stow’s survey. At this stage of the representation of London most plays generally maintain a sense of the overall urban entity, either the City or the larger conurbation, despite including topographical detail in setting or allusion, and a tendency rather to idealize the social relations within London is discernible. These trends might be seen to proceed from the same civic consciousness that informs some of the plays so strongly. This would change and be complicated in the later Jacobean city comedies, with a very different perspective emerging still later in the drama of the Caroline courtier poets. Further, what emerges from Heywood’s, Dekker’s, Jonson’s and other work is an evolving image of a London type, inflected in different directions according to social rank, but exhibiting some consistencies of attitude. This type is forged by both the opportunities and challenges of metropolitan life, and even in the satire of urban types there is an implicit understanding of the sophistication of the milieu that forges them. Rural contrasts to point up urban sophistication are also beginning to appear at this time, though the attachment of certain modes of behaviour and cultural aspiration to the geographical realities of London were to be more fully developed in its later theatrical representation.

4 Jacobean Drama

Eulogies to the City In 1604 Thomas Heywood produced one of the last plays in the Elizabethan tradition that glorified the City of London and its citizens, If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody (Part 2) With the Building of the Royall Exchange and the Famous Victory of Queen Elizabeth: Anno 1588 (Red Bull). The second section of the play is principally about the construction of a great London institution, the Royal Exchange, and the man who built it, the City merchant Sir Thomas Gresham. Gresham conceives of the project after observing with some dismay that merchants in London have to meet in the open air in Lombard Street in order to trade: I do not lik’t: nay it angers me, That such a famous city as this is, Wherein so many gallant merchants are, Haue not a place to meet in, but in this, Where euery showre of raine must trouble them. (p. 268) A nationalist pride in London is clearly manifest, especially in a discussion about the Exchange between the lord mayor Sir Thomas Ramsay and an unnamed lord: Ramsey: I think you haue not seene a goodlier frame. 2nd Lord: Not in my life; yet I haue beene in Venice, In the Realto there, called S. Marks; Tis but a bable, if compard to this. The nearest that which most resembles this, 91

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Is the great Burse in Antwerp, yet not comparable Either in height or wideness, the fair cellarage, Or goodly shops aboue. Oh, my Lord Maior, This Gresham hath much graced your city, London: His fame will long outliue him. (pp. 295–6) As in several Elizabethan plays, some pride is also shown in London citizens. At an earlier point while wandering through a portrait gallery Dr Nowell, a prominent Londoner, points out to his companions who include Gresham, the portraits of former mayors (and two women) who had erected great buildings and were benefactors to London, including Sir Richard Whittington, credited with beginning the library of the Greyfriars, and through a legacy Whittington College, almshouses, Newgate, repairing St Bartholomew’s Hospital and glazing the Guildhall (pp. 276–9). This honourable tradition is exemplified by Gresham, whose heroism reposes in his wealth. When the new king of Barbary reneges on an agreement made by Gresham with the king’s father, thus costing the merchant thirty thousand pounds, and sends him two small gifts of a dagger and slippers by way of compensation, Gresham treats them contemptuously commenting, ‘A London merchant / Thus treads on a kings present’ (p. 301). He then goes on to announce the foundation of a new college in Bishopsgate. The patriotic association between London and the crown is expressed in the lord mayor’s resolve to ‘giue her Majesty such entertainment / As may grace London, and become the state / Her highness brings along’ (p. 316) when she comes to the City to inspect Gresham’s building. The bonding of monarch and city is expressed in the topographical detail of the description of her ceremonial progress: She comes along the Strand from Somerset House, Through Temple Barre, down Fleet Street, and the Cheap, The North side of the Burse to Bishopsgate, And dines at Master Greshams, and appoints To returne on the south side, through Corne-hill (p. 316)1 She then proceeds to rename Gresham’s building the Royal Exchange, and to knight Gresham himself. The play ends with a celebration of the English navy and its exploits against the Spaniards.

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The focus on a grand edifice in a section of this play constitutes a tacit recognition that a significant degree of the authority of the city lies in the splendour of the buildings that encapsulate and blazon forth its power, akin to Lefebvre’s notion of ‘abstract space’: The dominant form of space, that of the centres of wealth and power, endeavours to mould the spaces it dominates (i.e. peripheral spaces), and seeks, often by violent means, to reduce the obstacles and resistance it encounters there. Differences, for their part, are forced into the symbolic forms of an art that is itself abstract . Capitalism and neocapitalism have produced abstract space, which includes the ‘world of commodities’, its ‘logic’ and its worldwide strategies, as well as the power of money and that of the political state. (1991, pp. 49–53) In the play the architectural authority of the building emblematizes the power of the City through wealth and this is, in turn, connected to the symbolically realized power of the state through the ceremonial presence of the queen, who progresses through significant parts of the City. This echoes the inauguration of the Leadenhall building in The Shoemaker’s Holiday, in which there is a similar confluence of mercantile, civic and royal power. Probably written in the same year as Heywood’s play is Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me You Know Me (Fortune, c. 1604), which also gives some prominence to London in a way reminiscent of Elizabethan drama. It presents a chronologically confused narrative about Henry VIII, some of his queens, Cardinal Wolsey and the religious politics of the period. While it stops short of representing the capital as emblematic of national power and pride, London is very much at the centre of things, with Londoners as canny and informed. Will Summers, who has a prominent role as a commentator and critic of those surrounding the king, arrives at court, telling the king he has come to hear what news there is: Will: Marrie I rise early, and ride post to London, to know what newes was here at Court. King: Was that your nearest way William? Will: O I, the verie foote pathe, but yet I rid the horseway to here it, I warrant there is nere a Cundhead keeper in London, but knowes what is done in all the Courts in Cristendom. (205–11)

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When the king comments on the speed at which news of the Pope’s death has spread in London, having only come from Rome the previous Friday, Will retorts, ‘twas at Billings-gate by Satterday Morning, twas a full Moone, and it came vp in a spring tide’ (227–8), also reporting that he had heard of the visit of ambassadors to the king, ‘at a Barbars’ (231). Later when the king is awarded the title of ‘defender of the faith’, he immediately orders his attendants, ‘Goe one of you salute the Maior of London, / Bid him with Herralds and with Trumpets sound, / Proclaime our Titles through his gouernment’ (863–5). Heywood’s and (to a lesser extent) Rowley’s plays are the last in this particularly Elizabethan trope of plays exalting the City and casting its citizens in a heroic light.2 A later collaboration by the two playwrights, Fortune By Land and Sea (Red Bull, 1609), includes one of the last passages recalling this drama in praise of London. In the only scene clearly set in the city (5.1) convicted pirates are led to their execution in Wapping and curiously express some satisfaction at the prospect of being drowned in the Thames, because of the fame of the river: then fair Thames, Queen of fresh water, famous through the world, And not the least through us, whose double tides Must o’rflow our bodies, and being dead, May thy clear waves our scandals wash away, But keep our valours living. (2261–6) However, the seal had been set a few years earlier on this mode of popular, public theatre, romantic drama unabashedly celebrating London by a sharply satiric treatment of it in Francis Beaumont’s private theatre piece The Knight of the Burning Pestle (Blackfriars, 1607/8?). Its prologue starts by locating the play in very specific geographical terms, ‘Within the compass of the city-walls, / We now have brought our scene’ (Induction, 2–3), and much of the comedy depends on a clear sense of the local setting. In the list of plays suggested by the citizen protagonist in the induction, the twin focus of the satire is citizen pretensions and pride in the built fabric of London, expressed in his desire for a play on, ‘The Legend of Whittington, or The Life and Death of Sir Thomas Gresham, with the Building of the Royal Exchange or The Story of Queen Elenor, with the Rearing of London Bridge upon Wool-sacks’ (Induction, 19–22). The second of these is a clear reference to Heywood’s play, while the third recalls

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Peele’s Edward I and adds a fictional element with the building of the bridge. The concern of this drama with the construction of prestige projects in the City is then put in an even more absurd light in the Prologue’s suggestion of a play entitled The Life and Death of Fat Drake, or the Repairing of Fleet-privies (Induction, 27–8). This play employs local reference in a manner wholly contrary to the way it is used in the Elizabethan drama celebrating London. The focus of attention alternates between a play-within-a-play, ‘The London Merchant’, and the portrayal of the citizen – a grocer – and his wife in the audience who repeatedly intervene in and interfere with the performance. Satire on citizen taste occurs at both levels of the action, and in both it is dependent upon an insistence on local topographical reference. The various disparate strands that make up ‘The London Merchant’ present a supposedly romantic and heroic narrative, but this is rendered absurd both by being populated by the merchant class and by having the action set not in any remote or semi-mythical land, but in the prosaically familiar locality of Waltham Forest. This works with Byronesque comedy against the pretensions of the verse, as when Humphrey, one of the protagonists, recounts to the merchant: Your daughter rides upon a brown-bay steed, I on a sorrel, which I bought of Brian, The honest host of the Red Roaring Lion, In Waltham situate. (2.22–5) Rafe, the citizen’s apprentice, appears as a knight who takes up arms for the sake of his lady, Susan, ‘the cobbler’s maid in Milk Street’ (3.314). When asked by the Lady Pompiona to identify himself, he declares that he is ‘a hearty Englishman, / And prentice to a grocer in the Strand’ (4.69–70). Later, when he enters leading a company with drums and colours, he instructs his ensign-bearer, ‘Ancient, let your colours fly; but have great care of the butchers’ hooks at Whitechapel; they have been the death of many a fair ancient’ (5.88–90). On his final entry as moribund with an arrow through his head, having been shot while walking in Moorfields, he cries, ‘fly, fly my soul to Grocers’ Hall’ (5.328). If bathetic localness works here comically to undermine the heroic aspirations of the supposedly chivalric romance, it operates at another level as well. The grocer and especially his wife have no sense of the theatre as a public space, nor the conventions of either playgoing or dramatic

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representation. Their naïveté is underscored by their insistent immersion in their very localized urban world that even becomes, by extension, part of their domestic environment. The wife refers to her house and neighbours (Induction, 67) and later to ‘Mistress Pennistone, the draper’s wife’ (2.447–8), she relates a story about their child who got lost and nearly drowned at Puddle Wharf (2.344–7), she at one point calls for the watch at Ludgate to be summoned to intervene in the play’s action (3.92) and she asks an actor if he is one of ‘Mr Monkester’s scholars’ (1.97), referring to Richard Mulcaster, master of the Merchant Taylors’ School. Finally, she invites ‘these gentlemen’ (possibly the actors, or the immediate audience) to her house (Epilogue, 5–7). Her husband is less voluble but equally inclined towards local reference. He gives the Prologue two shillings to commission the waits of Southwark (Induction, 103–4), he and his wife talk about the ‘Great Dutchman’ and other recent spectacles in London (3.269–76), and he later recalls a drummer – little Ned of Aldgate (5.79). Just as his wife wanted the Ludgate watch called, the citizen wants Jasper, one of the characters in the play, locked up in the Arches (4.23), a court to which he erroneously assumes a prison is attached. Not only does Beaumont represent the grocer as having an unfocused mind that ranges over a variety of other London entertainments rather than concentrating on the play, but the glorification of the city is satirically associated specifically with his tastes as a citizen and implies an appetite for civic pageantry as well as old-fashioned Elizabethan theatre. He demands at the outset ‘something notably in honour of the commons of the city’, and specifically featuring someone of his own trade. At a much later point, he suddenly withdraws Rafe from the play at an advanced stage in the action in order to come out as a May Day figure to recite something ‘in honour of the city’ (Interlude 4, 14–15) while his wife also wants a morris ‘for the credit of the Strand’ (Interlude 4, 22), and Rafe duly delivers a verse in homage to London. Though this play failed in the theatre, for reasons that are inconclusive, it did signal a shift in sensibility about the way the capital was portrayed in drama. As a private theatre play, its mockery of civic pride targets a specific social group, but this also represents the end of the sort of romanticization of London found in Elizabethan popular drama and ushers in a more hard-headed form of urban self-consciousness in the drama.

Exploiting the urban topography The decline in the eulogistic treatment of London heralds a tendency for its representation in Jacobean drama to be more particularized in terms of

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locality, and a lessening of the use of either the City or the larger conurbation in its entirety as a frame of reference. The topography of the metropolis comes to serve a more functional purpose that operates in various ways. At the most basic level, this might include the bringing together of characters in such conventional localities as shops, taverns, ordinaries or parks for a relatively gratuitous display of witty conversation, sexual banter or other forms of exchange of theatrical interest. Additionally, places that are not within the lived experience of most audience members, such as law courts, prisons, brothels or dubious taverns, are introduced for their intrinsic fascination. Some of these are given geographical fixity within the landscape of London by being named, but in other instances may retain a more generic nature. At another level, when they do not have an essential role to play in the plots of plays, settings in known locations or types of location might serve other more immediate theatrical ends than the development of narratives. They might be used, in Susan Wells’s words, to ‘suggest a connection with the world as typical’ (1985, p. 17) and help establish its ‘referential power’ (ibid., p. 19) and its ability to engage the reader in terms of lived, shared experience. On yet another level, the presence of London locations both in allusions and as settings can serve a proverbial or descriptive purpose, such as in metaphorical constructions.3 In these cases the city used in this way is essentially a literary one, involving conventional reference to particular features or landmarks that have attached to them well known and traditional associations.4 The use of local geographical associations or settings to ‘place’ characters or strands of narrative morally, socially or in other senses can and does, however, also involve much more realistic conceptions of London. In Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (Hope, 1614) Leatherhead comments on the subject of past puppet shows he has seen or presented and remarks that the ‘home-born projects prove ever the best; they are so easy and familiar’ (5.1.15–16), the story of the gunpowder plot proving particularly profitable. His friend, the puppetmaster Littlewit, who relocates the story of his puppet play (combining the stories of Hero and Leander and Damon and Pythias) to Bankside, later goes on to give details of this: As, for the Hellespont, I imagine our Thames here; and then Leander I make a dyer’s son about Puddle Wharf; and Hero a wench o’ the Bankside, who going over one morning to old Fish Street, Leander spies her land at Trig Stairs, and falls in love with her. Now do I introduce Cupid, having metamorphosed himself into a drawer, and he strikes Hero in love with a pint of sherry. (5.3.121–8)

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The shift to a local setting transforms the tragedy of the original into comedy by creating comic bathos through implicit contrast with the classical story, and when the play is later presented this is strongly in evidence. It is complemented by the more ludicrous qualities of the verse with the implication that the quotidian world of London cannot effectively be associated, other than ironically, with high culture. The audience is, however, permitted a more intimate apprehension of the puppet figures through this, and a level of recognitive response is invited that is grounded in their local experience. This works in a very different way to the sort of satirical comic effects achieved in anatopical plays, such as Volpone, in which the detachment of characters from any entanglement with local associations allows for perhaps a sharper definition of the qualities targeted by the satire. Given that London was still a small enough city for its various principal localities to be reasonably familiar to most of its inhabitants, the very specific representation of the urban environment found in some plays is a potentially effective means of exploiting the audience’s own geographical experience in the signifying process of the drama. An example of this is Lording Barry’s only known play Ram Alley (Whitefriars, 1608), the geographical title of which gives some indication of the importance of setting to the narrative. It is located in a very confined area of London – the Whitefriars – surrounding the small street of the title, a place the highly dubious reputation of which would have been known to the play’s first audiences, sitting as they were in a theatre situated in the same locality. In the play Ram Alley is inhabited by people in a variety of low-life occupations and also the crooked lawyer Throat, who comically acknowledges the disrepute of the area when he asks, ‘Come you to seek a virgin in Ram Alley / So near an Inn-of-Court, and amongst cooks, / Ale-men and laundresses? Why, are you fools?’ (3.4.1284–6). The plot principally involves the machinations of Throat to win by stealth the hand of an heiress, and his being tricked into marrying a whore. Constant references to the locations in which the characters find themselves, or to which they are headed, orientate the audience precisely. At the outset the heiress Constantia Sommerfield identifies the place she has arrived at as the ‘skirts of Holborn’ (1.1.12). Examples of the specificity in the way action is located include Throat’s instruction to his servant, Dash: Dash, we must bear some brain; to Saint John’s Street Go, run, fly; and afar off enquire, If that the Lady Sommerfield be there;

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If there, know what news, and meet me straight At the Mitre door in Fleet Street. (2.4.935–9) The vivid creation of the location of the chase, albeit in dialogue, lends a dramatic immediacy to the episode, while its detailed immersion in the streets of the City adds a coarse-grained edge to it that suits the farcical nature of the action. Later when he wants to spirit away what he thinks is the heiress, he instructs, ‘Let the coach stay at Shoe Lane end: be ready. / Let the boot stand open, and when she’s in / Hurry towards Saint Giles in the field’ (3.2.1016–18). They are pursued by her supposed lover, William Small-shanks and his companions towards Fleet Bridge, until they fall into disagreement about the direction in which they have fled. Thomas Small-shanks, William’s brother, thinks that they ‘went in by the Greyhound [a tavern], and so strook / Into Bridewell’ (3.3.1085–6). Their companion, Beard, however, says, ‘I’ll pawn my fate, / She took along Shoe Lane, and so went home’ (3.3.1089–90) and William finally decides, ‘Come we will find her, or we’ll fire the suburbs: / Put up your tools; let’s first along Shoe Lane, / Then straight up Holborn’ (3.3.1094–6). Generally in the play, the limitation of the geographical remit also lends some intensity to the intrigue, the confinement of space in which it all takes place providing a parallel to the speed of the action. The place specificity not only contributes to the realism of the narrative, as it enables the audience to place the action in their familiar world, but draws on the associative meaning of the localities mentioned. Ram Alley is ingrained in Throat, the audience’s awareness of the nature of the locality intensifying their experience of the character, and he is himself aware of the implications of his address, as he says defensively, ‘And though Ram-Alley stinks with cooks and ale, / Yet say there’s many a worthy lawyer’s chamber, / Buts upon Ram-alley’ (1.4.488– 90). However he hopes, by means of a geographical displacement through the proposed advantageous marriage, to escape the sordidness of his surroundings and that ‘My coach shall now go prancing through Cheapside / And not be forc’d to hurry through the streets / For fear of sergeants’ (3.4.1412–14). However, the extent to which his hopes are dashed are revealed when William Small-shanks reveals that the woman Throat actually married was a whore (5.3.2425) whose address – Hosier Lane – a poor street in Smithfield, confirms the plight that the lawyer is in.

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Throat is one of a number of theatrical characters who are to some extent socially and morally constructed through their geographical associations and who exemplify, in the absence of significant scenic means to depict the urban environment on stage, a merging of theatrical character and topography. The Vices of the old drama are similar in principle, but the Jacobean characters have much more breadth of association and implication. Another such figure is Mistress Otter in Ben Jonson’s Epicene, or The Silent Woman (Whitefriars, 1609) a citizen’s wife who, though a very different character from Throat, is similarly constructed in that the topography and texture of London are woven into her identity. A satirical description by her husband incorporates parts of the town into her face, ‘All her teeth were made i’ the Blackfriars, both her eyebrows i’ the Strand, and her hair in Silver Street. Every part o’ the town owns a piece of her’ (4.2.88–91). She has even drawn the City into her very psyche and relates a dream she had about the Lord Mayor’s Procession, ‘I had a dream last night too of the new pageant and my Lady Mayoress, which is always very ominous to me’ (3.2.58–60), going on to explain that her dreams about the City are always followed by some misfortune or other. Mistress Otter also illustrates the way in which the metropolis is increasingly represented as permitting flexibility of intercourse between ranks and class categories, and especially affording women greater dominance over social spaces. She is a citizen whose strenuous selffashioning also gains her a foot in the London gentry world, and this is cast in geographical terms too. When she complains about her husband’s constant references to bear and bull-baiting, wishing for more refined conversation, he replies that she only came into the company of lords and ladies when he married her, only previously being seen by them at Whitsun holidays and then merely ‘out at the Banqueting House window, when Ned Whiting or George Stone [bears] were at the stake’ (3.1.46–8). Her association with the urban landscape creates ambivalence and paradox since, as a woman of wealth and aspiration she resolutely embraces fashionable locations, while her firm attachment to the City landscape places a cap on her mobility by confirming her citizen status. The moral or social definition of such characters draws heavily on their positioning within their geographical locality and this is the case with Moll Cutpurse, the transvestite heroine of Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl (Fortune, 1611). She aids the romantic hero Sebastian Wengrave, as his pretended love choice, in forcing his obstinate father to drop his opposition to his son’s original match by posing as a worse

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alternative. The playwrights have the problem of creating a character with a reputation sufficiently notorious to act as a bugbear and arouse the elder Wengrave’s alarm, but nevertheless with enough generosity of spirit disinterestedly to help the younger man in his scheme. They achieve this by giving her a reputation that associates her strongly with London’s street life, Sebastian describing her as, ‘mad Moll, or merry Moll, a creature / So strange in quality, a whole city takes / Note of her name and person’ (1.1.98–100). It is largely by embedding her in the rather louche everyday world of London that any sort of moral danger or fearsome reputation is attached to Moll in the play. When the elder Wengrave engages a character called Trapdoor to entrap her, he promises his employer that to find Moll, ‘I will sift all the taverns i’th’city, and drink half-pots with all the watermen o’th’Bankside, but if you will, sir, I’ll find her out’ (1.2.205–7). The rough and tumble world of London is realized with extensive call on the geographical awareness of the audience. Moll is not only a recurrent and physical presence in various aspects of city life, but her speech also reveals a knowing familiarity with this world and, alongside her challenge to conventional gender roles, it is this that helps to construct her image as a dangerous roisterer. Disguised, she encounters Trapdoor and claims to be from the Temple, but she also says that ‘sometime I lie about Chick Lane’ (3.1.167), a known haunt of thieves. In Act 4 she sings a song that refers to the Burse – probably the New Exchange – and St Katherine’s, known for its taverns and hostel for fallen women (4.1.102–23).5 The song also contains a punning reference to the Fleet – incorporating the meanings of both the navy and the prison. After singing it, disguised as a musician, she meets Sir Alexander Wengrave and she tells him that she teaches music ‘Right against Clifford’s Inn’ (4.1.183). She later identifies a cutpurse she has seen working at the ‘twopenny gallery at the Fortune (the theatre in which this play was staged)’ (5.1.267–70). Like many dramatic characters of dubious reputation, she has no geographical fixity, but ducks and dives through various quarters of the metropolis, her knowledge of it a major dimension of her dubious worldliness. A character who mostly occupies the subplot but who also interacts with Moll is a gallant called Laxton. In his relations with Moll he provides a strong dramatic foil to her character – her general strength contrasting with his cowardice and impotence (‘lack stone’) – the early modern London audiences’ local knowledge of the geography of London and its environs playing an important part. Presuming on the sexual availability of Moll, he makes an advance to her, proposes that they


should go out in the town and asks where she would suggest, at which she sourly offers ‘Tyburn’, the place of execution (2.1.256). Undaunted, he proposes three towns to the west and north that were common places of resort for Londoners, usually for sexual liaisons, Brainford (now Brentford), Staines or Ware (2.1.258–9). Intending instead to meet him dressed as a man and challenge him to a duel, she suggests the infamous location of Gray’s Inn Fields (2.1.275). When he arrives, he sends a coachman to Marylebone Park to find and fetch her, ‘a fit place for Moll to get in’ (3.1.3–4) implying she is a whore, as this was famous as a resort of prostitutes. This calumny on her character he is forced to recant when she gets the better of him in the duel. Her physical prowess is complemented by the commanding way she positions herself in the urban environment, while he is consistently ineffectual. When he asks the coachman taking him to Gray’s Inn if they have good horses, he replies, ‘The best in Smithfield, I warrant you, sir’ (3.1.11). As Smithfield was reputed to be a place for poor quality cattle and horses, this becomes a joke at Laxton’s expense, drawing on audience knowledge of the reality. A subsidiary narrative element involves the problems of another father, Sir Davy Dapper, a friend of the elder Wengrave, with his reprobate son, Jack Dapper. Sir Davy plans to control his son by having him arrested and imprisoned, entering a false claim for debt at the Counter. This strand is also geographically localized. Sir Davy engages a sergeant, Curtilax, who identifies his place of residence and his professional circuit as Holborn, which is ‘hereby’, that is, in the same vicinity as the men are meeting (3.3.127) and a street shortly afterwards described by Moll as a ‘wrangling street’ (3.3.177), which Trapdoor explains as being due to its being full of lawyers. There is thus a backdrop of turbulence and implied lawlessness to the action. Later in the same scene Jack Dapper is apprehended by Curtilax but Moll rescues him and the sergeant has to send his assistant down the adjoining Shoe Lane after him (3.3.216–17). The play’s insistence on the detailed geographical specificity of this episode helps to identify both Moll and Dapper as people immersed in the street life of London and endows them with an immediate air of knowingness, but this is as far as it needs to go. No particular vices need to be attached to them in order to establish their roistering qualities, thus maintaining an ambivalence in the audience’s attitude that is necessary to the outcome of the narrative. The embodiment of the City or broader metropolis in characters is also present in their relationship with their urban habitat. The geographically directional title of Eastward Ho! (Blackfriars, 1605) by Jonson, Chapman and Marston is the starting point for the construction of a narrative

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environment, in which the various parts of the material and social geography of London are decisive signifiers in a story that centres on the contrasting fortunes of two apprentices and two daughters of a Cheapside goldsmith, Touchstone. The direction in the title of the play becomes revealed as ironical as the narrative progresses, since eastward was traditionally a direction of good fortune, implicitly invoked in the reprobate apprentice Quicksilver’s repeated call ‘Eastward ho’, and countered by Touchstone’s warning to him, ‘Sir, Eastward Ho will make you go Westward Ho’ (2.1.112) that is, to Tyburn. In fact, Quicksilver and Touchstone’s daughter Gertrude both separately come to grief while heading eastwards out of London, he in an abortive attempt to make a journey to Virginia in the company of Sir Petronel Flash, a profligate who has married Gertrude and made off with her dowry, and she in a coach journey to find a non-existent castle that Flash claimed to possess in Essex. The attempts of Gertrude and Flash to leave London help to define them as characters. In a dressing scene early in the play Gertrude tries to divest herself of her City dress and embrace her new status as a lady, saying, ‘Let not my knight take me in the city-cut in any hand’ (1.2.6–7) and that she does not want to dress in London citizen style, though she can tolerate those City customs and dress associated with wealth (1.2.14–24). She rejects ‘London licket’ (1.2.15) however, associates the City with demeaned status, and wants to go to the country ‘out of the scent of Newcastle coal, and the hearing of Bow-bell’ (1.2.119–20). It is only later in the play when she and another abandoned woman, Sindefy, are comparing their fates that she by implication comes around to acknowledging the value of her London birth, even if it is with citizen status. Sindefy complains that she was brought up to London from the country and falsely promised marriage, while Gertrude admits that she was more favoured in being actually born in London ‘which is more than brought up’ (5.1.19–20) and had marriage, but is similarly forsaken. Audience contempt for Flash is invited by his rejection of London for the reason that it no longer meets his roistering requirements. He remarks with some irony that he will leave this ‘wicked town’ (2.3.1) because there’s no good action there: ‘Taverns grow dead; ordinaries are blown up; plays are at a stand; houses of hospitality at a fall; not a feather waving, nor a spur jingling anywhere’ (2.3.3–4). Quicksilver, like Gertrude, also seeks to define his status with reference to London’s social environment. He shows himself to be very concerned with his reputation in the City (1.1.31–6) and claims to have a good standing among the gallants of London (1.1.58–63). He asserts that he can refashion himself socially in London by acting audaciously; he takes


example from the theatre and peppers his speech with quotations from the plays, tellingly mostly from the popular theatres like the Rose and the Red Bull. Quicksilver is availing himself both of the possibilities for anonymity in the metropolis to forge his identity, and the opportunities afforded by an environment where community policing of status relationships is less effective than in smaller towns and villages. In this situation ‘audacity’ has distinct potential for success. His call upon the theatre may help to indicate his shallowness and the pretence but it has some basis in real social practice in the habit of young men to keep ‘commonplace books’ in which they recorded scraps of wit for future use, often culled from the plays.6 The City or aspects of it are cast in terms that suggest moral agency at various points in the play. At one level this has to do with actual social and economic practice; Touchstone says of Quicksilver’s drunkenness, ‘Well, ’tis our City’s fault, which, because we commit seldom, we commit the more sinfully’ (2.1.44–5) probably an implied comparison with the roistering of courtier gallants, with the idea that this behaviour is more natural to them than to a City apprentice. Later, when Quicksilver is talking about suretyship, he remarks, ‘Why man, ’tis the London highway to thrift; if virtue be used, ’tis but as a scrap to the net of villainy’ (2.2.22–3). Both men are also delineating their own position through their different views of their urban society. The City’s administrative structures are important in determining the contrasting directions of progress of Touchstone’s two apprentices. If Quicksilver’s trajectory takes him to the depths of these, the Counter prison, the ‘good’ apprentice, Golding, is propelled in the directly opposite direction. With improbable speed he is made an alderman and is thus rewarded by the City itself, prompting Touchstone to observe that his judgement of Golding is one that ‘the whole city conspires to second’ (4.2.49–50). He tells Golding, ‘I hope to see thee one o’ the monuments of our City, and reckoned among her worthies, to be remembered the same day with the Lady Ramsey and grave Gresham, when the famous fable of Whittington and his puss shall be forgotten’ (4.2.67–71). London constitutes an active, if rather ambivalent presence in stories of these characters, both being a moral minefield affording plenty of opportunity for errancy, but at the same time constituting a symbolic and actual force for the establishment of moral order.7 Its importance is underlined by the fact that the play is dedicated to the City (Prologue, 14) and Touchstone addresses his final words in the play to the audience as representing London, ‘Now, London, look about, / And in this moral see thy glass run out’ (5.5.192–3).8

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William (?) Rowley’s A Match at Midnight (Red Bull, 1622) has a well-detailed London setting that is used for a variety of effects. The plot involves trickery and various intrigues in the pursuit of marriage for love or profit, and London as presented in it is a highly appropriate place for these to occur. Early in the play a minor character, Captain Carvegut remarks, oh London, Thou Labyrinth that puzlest strictest search, Convenient Innes of Court, for highway Lawyers, How with rich wine, Tobacco, and sweet Wenches, We will canvase thy darke case (1.2.56–60) Central in the action is the rapacious usurer Bloodhound, a scheming manipulator in pursuit of a rich woman, presumed a widow, for monetary gain and who also intends to marry his daughter off against her will for the same purpose. As he does not actually engage in intrigue to any significant extent it is mainly through his utterances that his nature is established, and in his grounding in the frequently seamy world of London, rather in the fashion of earlier Vice figures. His control over his environment is suggested early in the play by his despatch of his son Tim on business errands to various parts of the city, including the Strand, Thieving Lane and Temple Bar, the variety of the localities being a measure of his range of activities (1.3.1–19). Location is used to position figures in the play socially and morally. The residence of the putative widow is established very specifically, ‘She that dwells in the Blacke-fryers, next to the signe of the Foole laughing at a feather’ (1.1.27–8). This is referred to again in 4.4.43–4 and the sign is very likely to have actually existed at the time. The precise pinpointing of the widow’s address may have helped to identify it as a particularly desirable location, in what was generally a wealthy area of London. The feather on the sign refers to the Puritan feather-sellers in this neighbourhood, but the fool may have implications relating to the widow’s suitors, who are foiled and made fools of by the reappearance of her supposedly dead husband. Another place that helps to define aspects of characters is the Fountain Inn in Fleet Street, an actual contemporary inn in which one scene is set. This is the haunt of Bloodhound’s drunken son, Alexander and when his more innocent brother, Tim, enters to bring him something, Alexander says of him, ‘Oh hee tramples upon the


bosome of a Taverne with that dexterity, as your Lawyers Clearkes doe to Westminster Hal upon a durty day with a paire of white silke stockings’ (2.3.26–9). The contrast between the way that the two brothers inhabit the tavern exemplifies an aspect of Mayol’s notion of ‘neighbourhood’ as involving ‘a dynamic notion requiring a progressive apprenticeship that grows with the repetition of the dweller’s body’s engagement in public space until it exercises a sort of appropriation of this space’ (De Certeau et al., 1998, pp. 10–11). Tim is unable to cope in this environment; despite his initial discomfort he is quickly made drunk and falls in love with a whore, his rapid decline from his initial respectability being further signalled by the idea that he will go on to further drinking elsewhere with his new companions, a captain suggesting, ‘Come, weele play at Barre, and to the Miter in Breadstreete, weele make a mad night on’t’ (2.3.219–20). It is, however, in the climactic action that the topography of London has its most useful part to play and in an otherwise crudely constructed plot, geography is used with some effectiveness. To escape her forced marriage to an old man, Moll and her chosen lover Ancient Young plan to run off together and her brother Alexander, who is aiding them, says to her, ‘meete this Gentleman [Young] at the Nags head corner, just against Leaden-hall. Wee lie in Lime-streete, thither he shall carry thee’ (3.2.170–3). However, the Welshman Randall, who is pursuing the same woman, is also advised by the clownish servant Sim to go and meet her ‘just at the great Crosse-way, by the Nags-head Taverne at LeadenHall’ and Randall confirms, ‘Was high, high pumpe, there as her turne into Graces streete’ (4.2.70–3) referring to the four-spouted pump at Leadenhall. Sim later promises Randall that thereafter he and Moll will be married at the Tower (outside parish boundaries and used therefore for quick marriages without banns). The audience is thus prepared for the comedy of geographical confusion when the assignations later occur in Act 4 Scene 4. Randall arrives and meets Moll at the crossroads of Cornhill, Gracechurch Street, Leadenhall Street and Bishopsgate, but she assumes he is Young as it is a particularly dark night. Noticing the watch coming up Gracious Street and, fearful of being apprehended, she proposes they separate and meet somewhere else, telling Randall to go back through Cornhill while she runs around the Exchange to St Bartholomew’s Church, via the rather circuitous route of Cateaton Street (now Gresham Street) to meet him at Bartholomew Lane end. The constable arrives saying he heard someone run down Bishopsgate, and encounters the widow’s maid coming from Aldersgate ward, having earlier been despatched by her mistress to her sempstress in Aldgate.

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The Welshman in the meantime gets confused thinking Moll has said ‘Cats street’ and is later alarmed by a ‘fire-drake’ (probably a term for the watch) at the Exchange, causing him to retreat and miss meeting up with her again. Moll instead runs into Young who is coming from Bishopsgate and sees her turning from Church Corner to the Exchange. Randall meets the widow’s maid, who has been released by the watch, and thinks she is Moll. Topography thus helps to bring about the satisfactory conclusion to the matter, but is also so minutely detailed as to allow the audience’s experiential knowledge of the actual streets effectively to provide a substitute for stage scenery, in a way that an anatopical representation could not easily do. In some instances it is evident that certain settings in plays are included precisely for the audience’s pleasure of recognition, at least by reputation, of certain localities in London, places of possibly salacious or other interest that may not have very much essential relevance to the substantive plots. Nathaniel Field’s Amends for Ladies (Whitefriars, 1611) has three narrative strands concerning a wife, a widow and a virgin, the trial of Lady Perfect’s fidelity by her husband Sir John Loveall, the pursuit of Lady Honour by her suitor Ingen, and of Lady Bright by her suitor Bold. Most of the locations are domestic but there are two public ones, a shop and a tavern, the first of which is discussed elsewhere in this chapter. Early in the play Lady Honour says that Ingen talks like ‘one of these same rambling boys that reign / In Turnbull Street’ and when he wants to know how she knows, she replies defensively, ‘Indeed, my knowledge is but speculative, / Not practic there’ (1.1.p. 421). Another character, Subtle, as if to make quite clear the associations attaching to the place, later remarks, ‘Your whore doth live / In Pickt-hatch, Turnbull Street’ (2.3.p. 441). The whole of Act 3 Scene 4 is set in a tavern in Turnbull Street, the disreputable nature of which provides much of the dramatic interest, verbal reference to other dubious or downmarket locations also helping to set the tone. Whorebang, a roaring boy, says to the drawer that he should bring wine or he will cut his head off and have it roasted at Pie Corner at Bartholomew-tide, referring to the cheap cookshops there during the time of the fair (3.4.p. 456). When Lord Feesimple, accompanying his friend Welltried, enters the tavern he is taken aback at the sight of the roaring boys and says, ‘I had as lief be at Barmuthoes’ referring to the Bermudas (also called Streights) a slang name for a part of town equally full of roughnecks (3.4.p. 457). Turnbull Street’s reputation for prostitution is the source of some comic irony when the drawer asks the roaring boys to moderate their behaviour saying, ‘Gentlemen, I beseech


you to consider where you are – Turnbull Street – a civil place: do not disturb a number of poor gentlewomen’ (3.4.p. 456). The danger and lawlessness of the place is source of fascination in a play otherwise mostly set in genteel domestic locations. When the drawer warns the roaring boys that the watch are abroad, one of them, Spillblood, replies defiantly, ‘The watch? why you rogue, are we not kings of Turnbull?’ (3.4.p. 456). The sense of danger is made more pointed by the presence of the gentry, Feesimple and Welltried, in a milieu that is clearly not their own. Mayol’s analysis of the functioning of individuals within neighbourhoods is again relevant here; he observes that to dwell appropriately in a neighbourhood and to ‘benefit from the stock of relationships it contains, it is not proper to “be noticed” ’ (De Certeau et al., 1998, p. 18). When Lord Feesimple uses the expression, ‘Damn me’ the roaring boy Tearchaps says threateningly to him, ‘Lord, use your own words, “damn me” is mine; I am known by it all the town o’er, d’ye hear?’ (3.4.pp. 459– 60). Feesimple has made the mistake of drawing attention to himself by attempting inappropriately to adopt the idiom of the locality and a fight eventually ensues. This is also an instance of territorialization as defined by Deleuze and Guattari in which ‘Critical distance is a relation based on matters of expression’ (1987, p. 352), here specifically the residing in texture of language itself and evoking the growing cultural complexity of London. There is also an element of theatricalist reflexivity when, on first encountering Welltried in the tavern, Whorebang says to him, ‘we’ll have no observers’, at which Welltried replies, ‘Why, Monsieur Whorebang? I am no play-maker’ (3.4.p. 459). Whorebang’s assumption that Welltried and Feesimple are writers coming to get material for their plays in the tavern introduces a direct relationship between the scene and the London of the audience. Particular features of London tend to crop up frequently in Jacobean drama: the River Thames, prisons, shops, taverns and ordinaries and brothels. Their significance as identified locations or features or their importance in conveying aspects of the life of London make especially the first three of these worth giving some attention to as categories of theatrical device that are drawn directly from the topographical and social landscape of London. While the same could be argued for taverns and ordinaries, or brothels, the varieties of situation in which they are present, or uses to which they are put in the drama make it more appropriate to consider them in the broader contexts of the narratives of the plays in which they occur. Taverns are quite commonplace in the plays and, though they are often used to create a particular type of backdrop

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to action, or to define characters, they are the natural place for playwrights to bring characters into contact with one another in situations that vary widely and they are also not especially a London phenomenon. Brothels are certainly more specific to the capital, but the issue of prostitution tends to be represented in the drama more broadly than the localities with which it is traditionally associated, so that where brothels are present in the plays they are, like taverns, used to serve a range of different theatrical or narrative ends. 9 As a recurrent feature present in drama set in London, the Thames is not so much a setting, for obvious reasons, but is frequently referred to in dialogue, particularly in metaphorical reference, and two plays are actually named for the cries of the river boatmen: Eastward Ho! and Westward Ho! It is natural that the river, as one of the main thoroughfares of London, should crop up repeatedly in the drama. It differs from the other transport routes, however, in that it is mostly dramatized as a means of departure, mostly escape, rather than being a point of arrival or a divide between the City and the suburban Southwark. Perhaps this is understandable since it is the most dramatic of the possible uses. This suggests the extent to which the imperatives of drama shape the representation of London. In The Alchemist, when the fraudsters are facing exposure, Face says that he will ship his accomplices off to Ratcliff (the dockside area of Stepney) to make their escape by river (4.7.125). There are several instances of such flights by water, from justice, for amatory exploits, or for love marriages.10 The sense of escape in casting off in a boat is fairly self-evident; the medium of water offers an immediate freedom through physical separation from the crowded urban built environment and its clogged thoroughfares, along with the legal and moral obligations and constraints it imposes. It is also an imaginative ‘no man’s land’ between the City and the southern suburbs. These facts, together with the river’s fluidity and mobile nature, create a sense of moral neutrality that is tellingly articulated in a scene in Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (Swan, 1613). At the start of the scene a roué, Touchwood Senior, talks of two escapes by river, his own and that of someone else: I had been taken, brother, by eight sergeants But for the honest watermen, I am bound to them, They are the most requiteful’st people living: For they get their means by gentlemen, They are still the forwardest to help gentlemen. You heard how one ’scap’d out of the Blackfriars


But a while since from two or three varlets Came into the house with all their rapiers drawn, As if they’d dance the sword-dance on the stage, With candles in their hands like chandlers’ ghosts, Whilst the poor gentleman so pursued and bandied Was by an honest pair of oars safely landed. (4.2.1–12) That one of these episodes involves a legitimate escape from villains while the other is somewhat more dubious, underlines the commercial basis of the river’s moral neutrality, adding another element to the drama’s evocation of the harsh realities of urban life. The dramatic potential of the river as used for flight is realized in that of the Yellowhammer’s daughter, Moll, from an enforced marriage. The family immediately go to two embarkation points on the river to look for her, their panic evoked in her brother’s report of the incident: My sister’s gone, let’s look at Trig stairs for her; My mother’s gone to lay the Common stairs At Puddle wharf, and at the dock below Stands my poor silly father. (4.1.289–92) The multiplicity of potential points of departure here adds to the river’s efficacy as a means of flight. In the following act her lover, Touchwood Junior, is seen arranging her escape with the watermen at an unspecified location, asking them to take her to Barn Elms, a place on the southern bank further up the Thames out of London used by lovers. He declares that he himself will take water at Paul’s Wharf and overtake them (4.2.32). In the denouement of The Roaring Girl the river is again used in the narrative to contribute to the impetus of the dramatic action in another reported escape of supposed lovers. News is brought to Sir Alexander and his companions that his son and Moll have embarked on the Thames and are headed towards the Sluice in Lambeth, where he fears they may be married, as Lambeth ‘Joins more mad matches than your six wet [Thames-side] towns’ (5.2.10). The men decide to take a boat at Blackfriars Stairs (5.2.12–13) but then a new report is brought that the couple has landed at the Tower (5.2.15), in the opposite direction, which puts Sir Alexander in a quandary. The river in these instances becomes emblematic of

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London’s dangerous permissiveness in the opportunities its geography offers for eluding parental and other control, and as such contributes to the theatrical moment. An escape involving a more complex set of implications attaching to the river, including symbolism and multiple irony, occurs in Eastward Ho! The usurer Security drinks to Quicksilver and others about to depart towards Cuckold’s Haven, unaware that his own wife is running off with Quicksilver. Security gleefully tells Bramble (whose wife he thinks it is who is being spirited away) ‘my mind runs so of Cuckold’s Haven tonight, that my head runs over with admiration’ (3.3.163–5). Later the runaways’ boats are wrecked in the Thames during a storm and each is washed up at a place the appropriateness of which invites reflection on the situation or moral standing of the wreck victims. Security (in pursuit of his wife) is wrecked at Cuckold’s Haven (4.1.1–30), his unfaithful wife, Winifred, is rescued from her shipwreck near St Katherine’s, a reformatory for fallen women (4.1.78–81), the reprobate Quicksilver is washed up at Wapping near the gallows (4.1.110–12) and the wastrel Sir Petronel Flash on the Isle of Dogs, a refuge for debtors (4.1.163–4). The evocation of moral agency in the river here belies its usual neutrality as a means of escape and implicitly recalls the Thames’s other major function as London’s principal sewer. London’s prisons also crop up regularly in the plays and, both because of their function and being locations with which most in the audiences would not have had much first hand experience, they can be considered to contribute more to a conceptual representation of the metropolis than to a realistic one. In the pre-commercial interludes prisons had a unitary purpose simply as signifiers of transgression, but this was drama that presented London as a moralized landscape; their Vice figures defined their own moral status to the audience partly through their constant references to and knowledge of London’s penal structures. However, as Michel Foucault has shown, in cultural discourse the prison normally has a broader range of significations.11 With the advent of the commercial drama, prisons both form part of the range of London settings and acquire greater diversity in their cultural meanings. In the Elizabethan commercial drama, prisons are principally of interest as instruments of social control, in plays such as The Famous Victories of Henry V, 1 Henry IV and Every Man Out of His Humour. Among the early Jacobean plays Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me You Know Me uses a prison to manifest the sort of interest in London institutions that it inherits from the Elizabethan plays, especially in an episode in which the king wanders through the streets of London in disguise (1019–1230) to ascertain how


well the security of the city is being maintained. He finds some of the watches very slack and he runs into a criminal called Black Will who is able to pass freely in the city. The king gets into an affray with Will, wounds him, and is confined to the Counter by one of the more diligent officers whom he later commends, remarking, ‘The Officers in Citties, now I see / Are like an Orchard set with seuerall Trees, / Where one must cherish one, rebuke the other’ (1255–7). He also discerns corruption both in the Counter and generally in the administration of law in London. The episode provides an anecdotal celebration of the king’s actions in defence of justice and safety in his realm with intimate reference to the geography of London, but also uses the trope of the disguised king to offer the play’s popular audience a pleasurable fantasy of a democratized monarch in their familiar streets, engaging with an institution at the very lowest end of society. In later Jacobean plays there are several references to the various prisons around London, mostly in Southwark, and a few plays have scenes set in some of them. They evoke very particular and powerful associations, and these are utilized or dealt with in the drama in various ways.12 In Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass a devil is confined to Newgate and is rescued from there by a Vice, and two scenes (1.4 and 3.6) of Middleton’s The Puritan, or The Widow of Watling Street (Paul’s, 1606) are set in the Marshalsea Prison. A comic or flippant attitude to these places is generally adopted despite, or perhaps because of, the recognized horrors of their reality. In Heywood’s The Wise Woman of Hogsdon (c. 1604) Senser, a gallant who has been recognized by a magistrate whose daughter he is pursuing, as someone he had earlier sent to the Counter for causing tumult in the streets and beating the watch, explains that he had only done this to get somewhere safe to stay, having dined out so late that the doors of his lodging and all the inns were closed (2.2.665–72). In Dekker and Webster’s Northward Ho! (Paul’s, 1605) the rakish Philip Bellamont wittily describes the Counter as ‘the house of praier and fasting’ on his exit from it (1.3.150). In a similar vein Sir Alexander Wengrave in The Roaring Girl suggests to his friend Sir Davy Dapper, distraught that he cannot control his reprobate son, that he should have him sent to the Hole in Wood Street, a dungeon prison for debtors, which he refers to as ‘Wood Street College’ (3.3.103) and he elaborates, Why, ’tis a university, who not sees? As scholars there, so here men take degrees, And follow the same studies all alike.

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Scholars learn first logic and rhetoric, So does a prisoner; with fine honey’d speech. At’s first coming in he doth persuade, beseech He may be lodged with one that is not itchy, To lie in a clean chamber, in sheets not lousy; But when he has no money, then does he try By subtle logic and quaint sophistry To make the keeper trust him. (3.3.82–92)13 In Eastward Ho!, the dissolute apprentice Quicksilver shows, like the interlude Vices, an easy familiarity with prisons in his joking comment that Petronel Flash should allow himself to be incarcerated, ‘let ’em take their choice, either the King’s Bench, or the Fleet, or which of the two Counters they like best, for, by the Lord, I like none of ’em’ (2.3.42–5). The flippant jocularity of this comment is not only in keeping with the character’s self-assurance and arrogance, but is at this point an ironic indicator of his inexperience. When both Flash and Quicksilver are actually taken to the Counter, the reality of their repentance is demonstrated by a fundamental change in their attitude to the place. The arresting officer reports that both offenders have chosen to be in worse sections of the prison than those available to them and that Quicksilver would have chosen the Hole if they had let him (5.2.39–41), so that both embrace their punishment in a spirit of actively seeking correction. This signals the beginnings of moral regeneration in the two villains, but the descent into prison is also a way in which Quicksilver’s downward progress through life is given a point of extremity that contrasts with that of his fellow apprentice, Golding, who is elevated to high civic office. Ludgate prison plays a similar role in William Rowley’s A New Wonder, A Woman Never Vexed (c. 1611) and is used in graphic illustration of the respective fall and rise of two brothers, reversing their situations from those at the start of the play. A wastrel, Stephen Foster, is housed there until rescued by his nephew and subsequently rises through a fortunate marriage, while his initially wealthy sibling, Old Foster, falls into sudden penury through the loss of his ships. He is committed to Ludgate where the abjectness of his situation is underlined by his being designated by the keeper to beg food at the prison grate for himself and other indigent prisoners.14 Prison here is less a place of punishment or correction than constituting, in Foucault’s words, ‘a ‘dark, abandoned region’ (1975, p. 235). As such it is at the extreme end of the Jacobean


drama’s principal interest in the London prisons as having an inherent dramatic potency that can be put to a range of theatrical uses, from the comic to the fear-inspiring. Early modern theatre, especially Jacobean, puts a decided focus on the market, the values and ethos of trade being discernible in many aspects of life as dramatized within it.15 The rapid development of luxury trades in London in the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, and the concomitant growth in the consumer culture of the metropolis made shops an important feature of life within it, at least for the elite. The increasing concentration of resident gentry in the capital was one factor, but the fact that provincials frequently either sent to London for goods or came in person to avail themselves of its retail facilities, added to the customer base. The repeated occurrence of London shops in plays of this period is therefore not surprising and represents the importation into the drama of an aspect of the lived experience of the audience, namely that involving the subtleties of behaviour involved in the interactions of shopkeepers and customers, which Mayol has described in the following terms: The relationship that links a customer to a shopkeeper (and vice versa) is made from the progressive insertion of an implicit discourse within the explicit words of conversation, which weaves between both partners in the purchase a network of signs, tenuous but efficient, favoring the process of recognition. (De Certeau et al., 1998, p. 20) The potential theatrical piquancy of this intimacy in the public sphere is enhanced in the drama by its being routinely sexualized with double entendre and an erotic undercurrent present in many transactions in the plays. A call on audience experience is made by what seems to be some attempt even in this largely pre-scenic theatre to achieve visual realization of shops on the stage, and the opening scene of A Chaste Maid in Cheapside has, for instance, the direction, ‘a shop being discovered’. In The Roaring Girl the subplot helps strongly to evoke the social texture of everyday London in a way that strengthens the contribution the urban geography makes to the play. The protracted first scene of the second act makes up the heart of the subplot and involves three shops apparently represented on stage, if only by the presence of the types of product sold, the direction at the start of the scene being, ‘The three shops open in a rank: the first a pothecary’s shop, the next a feathershop, the third a sempster’s shop’. The action moves back and forth

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amongst the three, and includes the discussion of commodities, sexual banter and the confluence of a range of characters from different strands of the plot, richly evoking the social and commercial traffic of the City. If in one regard shops represent an attempt at place realism in the drama, in another they are part of a more literary or theatricalized conception of London, and specifically the City, in that they tend to be used in a formulaic way invariably involving a sexual element in the relationship between the shopkeepers – usually women – and customers. In The Wise Woman of Hogsdon, Luce, a goldsmith’s daughter, who is attending to her father’s shop, expresses discomfort at being so publicly on display but concludes, ‘yet upon the traffique of our Wares, / Our provident Eyes and presence must still wayte’ (1.2.199–200) and goes on to comment, ‘I see my father is not jelous of me, / That trusts mee to the open view of all’ (1.2.202–3). Her concerns are justified when two young men, Boister and Chartley, come into the shop and both proceed to woo her, Chartley even bringing her gifts in an attempt to ‘purchase’ a favourable response from her, ‘In exchange of this kisse, see what I have brought thee from the Exchange’ (1.2.260–1). Later she remarks, ‘For the shop is daily, / Custom’d with store of Chap-men, such as come / To cheapen Love’ (4.2.1547–9). In John Cooke’s Greene’s Tu Quoque or The Cittie Gallant (Red Bull, 1611), the opening scene is set in a mercer’s shop which appears to be visually depicted, the direction being, ‘A Mercer’s shop discovered.’ A gallant, Geraldine, approaches the shop because he is attracted by Gartred, the woman working in it. When she tries to interest him in merchandise, he flatters her beauty instead, at which she remarks, ‘You rellish [seem] too much Courtier, sir’ (1.61). She later asks him, ‘What would you crave?’, he replies, ‘That which I feare you will not let me have’ (89–90) and gives her a kiss. Unlike other such situations involving women as shopkeepers, however, this ends in proper courtship and marriage. A mingling of commerce with sexuality of a less legitimate kind also occurs in the same scene, however, the two strands being intertwined. A neighbouring shopkeeper, Spendall, is brought a letter by women selling handkerchiefs, which turns out to be from his mistress arranging an assignation. A connection between trade and sexuality is often present in various ways. In Sharpham’s The Fleire (Blackfriars, 1606) when the Fleire hears that there is talk that courtiers will no longer cuckold citizens, he applauds this observing that the court will now grow rich, explaining, ‘Why then your courtier will not bestow his mony in buying the Merchants idle commodities to ly with his wife’ (2.1.246–7). In Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan (Blackfriars, 1605) Mistress Mulligrub, the


wife of a vintner, talks to the servant of a fellow tradesman in the City, Burnish the goldsmith, of whom she remarks, He comes forward in the world well, I warrant him, and his wife is a proper woman, that she is. Well, she has been as proper a woman as any in Cheap; she paints now, and yet she keeps her husband’s old customers to him still. In troth, a fine-faced wife in a wainscot carved seat is a worthy ornament to a tradesman’s shop, and an attractive. I warrant her husband shall find it in the custom of his ware, I’ll assure him. (3.3.6–10)16 In Dekker’s Westward Ho! (Paul’s, 1604) the distinction between the trafficking of sex and other commodities is blurred and the bawd Birdlime calls the tailor who makes the gown commissioned by an admirer for a City wife, Mistress Justiniano, ‘a kinde of Bawd’ (1.1.6). Birdlime herself approaches Mistress Justiniano, wife of an Italian merchant resident in London, in the guise of a vendor of cosmetics to solicit her on behalf of a lord. When Mistress Justiniano protests to her husband that she has resisted these approaches, he replies, I, prouoking resistance, tis as if you come to buy wares in the Citty, bid mony fort, your Mercer, or Gold-smith sayes, truely I cannot take it, lets his customer passe his stall, next, nay perhaps two, or three, but if he finde he is not prone to returne of himselfe, hee cals him backe, and backe, and takes his mony: so you my deere wife, (O the pollicy of women, and Tradesmen: theile bite at any thing). (1.1.168–74) It is not just the commercial dimension that has an impact on the issue of sexuality in connection with shops, but the fact that these are conventionally places of social intercourse with sexual potentialities that can be theatrically exploited. A scene in Field’s Amends for Ladies is set in Seldom’s shop, in which Lord Proudly, waiting to go on to another social call, decides to tarry a while and smoke a pipe of tobacco. The idea of the female shopkeeper as a sexual enticement that benefits trade is apparent in Seldom’s comment when he walks off as Lord Proudly starts whispering to Mistress Seldom: Thus walking off, when men talk with our wives; It shows us courteous and mannerly.

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Some count it baseness; he’s a fool that does so. It is the highest point of policy, Especially when we have virtuous wives. (2.1.p. 435) Though what Lord Proudly says to Grace Seldom is not heard by the audience, it is clear from her response that it is a sexual advance, which she rejects. She later berates her husband for leaving her alone, but he replies, ‘There was no policy in that, wife; so should I lose my custom. Let them talk themselves weary, and give thee love-tokens – still I lose not by it’ (2.1.p. 437) since he declares himself confident of her chastity. As if to underline her probity, when at one point Moll Cutpurse enters the shop, in what is her only appearance in the play, unrelated to any of the strands of plot, Mistress Seldom treats her with the same contempt as she is treated by the shopkeeper in The Roaring Girl (2.1.p. 433). In The Roaring Girl, the idea that city wives, under the tolerant eyes of their husbands, use sexuality to supplement their normal trade activity and income or encouraging commercial trade is somewhat turned on its head. In this play it is the female shopkeeper Mistress Gallipot who is an attempted sexual predator with no commercial motive involved, giving her parasitical pretended lover money though he evades her attempts to get him to sleep with her. Another shopkeeper, Mistress Openwork accuses her husband of using the shop sexually to solicit her potential customers, complaining that her goods thus remain unsold – also a pun on the state of her own sexual relations with him (2.1.209–14). Though different, these two situations help attach to the City retailers a suggestion of moral laxity, at least in potential, though Mistress Openwork displaces this association to the suburbs, complaining of her husband’s putative ‘suburbian whore’ (2.1.316). Where a shop is staffed by men in Middleton’s Anything for a Quiet Life (Globe/Blackfriars, c. 1621), there is a shop scene (2.2) without any sexual undercurrent, though the shopkeeper’s wife later suspects her husband of infidelity. Availability or opportunity is another factor linking commerce to sexuality in a London represented as a cornucopia of both. In Westward Ho! the comedy turns on a set of potentially transgressive sexual encounters. Master Justiniano, convinced that his wife has been unfaithful to him, pretends to go on a journey, leaving her in London. What he actually does is disguise himself as a literacy tutor for citizens’ wives to act in this capacity as a pander for their liaisons with gallants, while his absence encourages an elderly lord to attempt to seduce


Mistress Justiniano. London life is constructed in the play as endemically making available to both genders opportunities for sexual transgression. In the case of married men, temptation to stray is offered by the availability of whores, and one substantial scene (4.1) takes place in a brothel. However, the main concern is with the threat of the cuckolding of citizens, though this never quite comes about. The sheer range of possibilities offered by London is the most significant danger. Justiniano, disguised as Master Parenthesis, points out to one City wife what lies in the world about them, ‘the Suburbes, and those without the bars, haue more priuilege than they within the freedome: what need one woman doate vpon one Man? Or one man be mad like Orlando for one woman’ (2.1.163–6). He then goes on to portray the pursuit of sex in terms of the commodity culture of London: Why should I long to eate of Bakers bread onely, when theres so much Sifting, and bolting, and grynding in euery corner of the Citty; men and women are borne, and come running into the world faster then Coaches doe into Cheap-side vppon Symon and Iudes day: and are eaten vp by Death faster, then Mutton and porridge in a terme time. (2.1.169–74) Opportunities for straying are present in the physical separation between marriage partners necessitated by business life in the capital. On being asked by his wife where he is going, the citizen Master Honeypot replies, ‘To the Custome-house, to the Change and my Ware-house, to diuers places’ (2.1.124–5). When she later asks Parenthesis what excuse she can make to her husband to get away for an assignation he has suggested at the Rhenish wine house in the Stillyard, he replies, Fewh! excuses: You must to the pawne to buy Lawne: to Saint Martins for Lace; to the Garden, to the Glasse-house; to your Gossips: to the Powlters: else take out an old ruffe, and go to your Sempsters: excuses? Why, they are more ripe then medlers at Christmas. (2.1.214–18) Justiniano himself constitutes one aspect of the climate of temptation in London. As the tutor Parenthesis he is an agent of corruption, represented as having free access to the women in whose path he places temptation. In the case of his own wife, Birdlime is another such agent attempting to bring about an adulterous liaison, and more generally

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plays a significant part in the action of the play. Facilitating the work of such figures is the depicted freedom of London women. Justiniano makes a comparison between Englishwomen and Italian wives, citing an Italian proverb, ‘if there were a bridge ouer the narrow Seas, all the women in Italy would shew their husbands a Million of light paire of heeles, and flie ouer into England’ (3.3.86–8).

Geography and the idea of the Londoner The interrelationship in the drama between social life and geography helps to create for the London audiences a sense of the uniqueness of their metropolis and its separateness from the rest of the realm. This is by no means always or even predominantly self-congratulatory, though the idea that began in a limited way to emerge in the Elizabethan drama that sharp-wittedness and sophistication in various forms are essential to survival in the metropolitan social terrain is more fully developed in the Jacobean theatre. Something of the ethos of London in much Jacobean comedy is summed up in a speech in Thomas Tomkis’s university play Albumazar (1615), based on an Italian story that Tomkis has transferred to a London setting while retaining classical names for the characters. The eponymous central character is a charlatan astrologer who gives some idea of the city in which he operates when giving counsel to a thief, Harpax: Therefore go on: follow your vertu’s lawes Your card’nall vertue, great Necessity, Wait on her close, with all occasions. Be watchfull, haue as many eyes as heauen, And eares as haruest: be resolu’d and impudent, Beleeve none, trust none: for in this Citie (As in a fought field Crowes and Carkasses) No dwellers are but Cheaters and Cheateez (1.1.75–82) Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair has, as its title might suggest, a very specific and limited geographical remit, being set entirely in and around the fair itself. As such, the broader geography of London plays little part, though there are references to a wide range of places especially early in the play. However, despite the stage keeper’s observation in the induction that there is nothing in the play authentically of Smithfield, because


the author ‘has not conversed with the Bartholomew-birds’ (10–13), the principal purpose appears to be to render the vigorous and often ribald texture of everyday life in the fair. The plot, insofar as it exists at all, is meandering and slight, the emphasis being on a mainly satirical depiction of a wide range of characters, their escapades and the rough comedy of their dialogue. Verbal cut and thrust constitutes the major impact of the play and the concern with this is at times almost self-conscious, as when one character, Knockem, urges on the pig-woman, Ursula, in one of her many exchanges, ‘Answer ’em Urs. Where’s thy Bartholomewwit now, Urs, thy Bartholomew-wit?’ (2.5.96–7). Later, Justice Overdo, a justice of the peace wandering in disguise to inform himself of the doings in the fair the better to police it, identifies its culture of verbal aggression as a sort of disease, ‘Hark, O you sons and daughters of Smithfield! And hear what malady it doth the mind: it causeth swearing, it causeth swaggering, it causeth snuffling and snarling, and now and then a hurt’ (2.6.68–71). There are several instances in Jacobean drama of the toughness of the urban world of London being conducive to resourcefulness and the honing of verbal wit, but in Bartholomew Fair dramatizing this appears to be more than usually central to the play’s raison d’être. The repartee also routinely incorporates a local geographical frame of reference, as in the insults traded by Punk Alice and Ursula – both prostitutes – who call each other respectively the ‘sow of Smithfield’ and ‘tripe of Turnbull’ (4.5.75–6). In this world of earthy realism, conventional ideas of morality also take second place to the ability to hold one’s own in debate, and the most overt if hypocritical proponent of religious morality, the Puritan preacher Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, is made a figure of exaggerated hypocrisy for whom the play invites most scorn, laughably being finally confuted in a debate with a puppet. As strategic intelligence is a survival mechanism in some plays that represent London life, here it is personal robustness. Since roguery is also endemic in London, alertness also comes into this. Master Cokes, a naïve and trusting visitor from out of town to the fair, has his purses stolen twice, as well as his cloak and hat. It has long been recognized that trickery and deception are the stock-in-trade of much Jacobean drama, in city comedy associated with London in particular. This was something of a theatrical convention dating back to the interlude tradition though somewhat modified in Elizabethan commercial drama by a tendency to present threats to the capital’s social fabric as coming from outside of itself. The return to a convention of representing London as endemically characterized by vicious ingenuity in Jacobean comedy may in some measure have

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been due to perceptions of enhanced levels of crime accompanying the rapid increase in population. It can be seen as part of a literary conception of London and the theatre’s response to a phenomenon in another popular medium, the rash of pamphlet literature on crime and rascality from the late sixteenth century to the early years of the seventeenth century. These ‘cony-catching’ pamphlets were largely anecdotal in nature and focused on confidence tricks and similar devices to obtain money by deceit, and there is in them almost a sense of admiration for the ingenuity of the perpetrators. Though the anecdotes were not exclusively centred on London, a majority were and certain locations like St Paul’s feature strongly, a recurrent theme being the gulling of innocent outsiders, usually country people, when visiting the capital. Dramatists would have been as sensitive to the possibilities of this material as they were to other sources of narrative in the period, and some were actually the authors of such pamphlets.17 As the narratives of plays set in England were overwhelmingly located in London, any ‘cony-catching’ is naturally represented as a feature of life there. This is directly facilitated by the geography of the metropolis, its dense population, the opportunities for anonymity and the ease of movement through the close juxtaposition of neighbourhood communities, allowing self re-invention and flight from policing. The range is from real criminality to the application of opportunism and cunning in less serious ways, so that a capacity for trickery becomes an acceptable part of the texture of London life as dramatized, and even a source of urban self-congratulation. Middleton’s Your Five Gallants (1607) is very much in the spirit of the cony-catching pamphlets and features five characters who collectively constitute an urban nightmare – Frippery as an unscrupulous pawnbroker, Primero as a bawd who instructs a novice whore that she needs to be competent in ‘nimming away jewels and favours from gentlemen’ (1.1.233–4), Pursenet a controller of pickpockets, Goldstone a cheat and Tailby a whore-gallant who represents concupiscence and the conscienceless exploitation of women. As gallants, they present an appearance of some substance, none is immediately identifiable as a criminal and are thus all the more able to prey upon the unwary; Goldstone remarks ‘since the world rolls on dissimulation, / I’ll be the first dissembler’ (2.1.138–9). Each of them dissembles in various ways, Primero’s even extending to his brothel, which masquerades as a music school for gentlewomen. This exemplifies the potential ambivalence and uncertainty of the capital’s localities, material corrolaries to the guile found in the urban population. The brothel is sumptuously appointed,


having ‘violet air, curious garden, quaint walks, fantastical arbours, three back doors and a coach-gate’ (1.1.123–5). The play opens showing Frippery at work as a pawnbroker ruthlessly exploiting the difficulties of financially distressed gentry. He is situated specifically in the London of 1603 – a time of plague around four years prior to the date of the play – and is shown consulting reports about which wards have been infected by plague, and only accepting goods from unaffected ones. Hence he rejects goods from St Clements, but accepts some from St Martins-in-theField (1.1.39–66), and the passage implies Frippery’s position of power in a stricken City. All the gallants are comfortably habituated to their urban environment, their familiarity evidenced by a discussion over which tavern to meet in, and after they choose the Mitre over the Mermaid, Pursenet observes, ‘There are those places where respect seems slighter; / More censure [approval] is belonging to the Mitre’ (2.1.283–4). This embedding in their milieu goes hand in hand with a swaggering self-assurance that facilitates the practice of their nefarious activities. Since the narrative involves a relentless sequence of thefts, lying, cheating and double crossings by each of them, they function almost as allegorical figures exemplifying the dangers and vices present in the capital. Two characters become the principal quarry of the gallants – though there are several others – a pretended and a real innocent: Fitsgrave a gentleman who disguises himself as a hapless scholar in order to observe them at close quarters, and a real student from the university called Bungler. Both are subjected to theft and cheating at various points, and Bungler loses at gambling with the gallants through unwittingly being cheated. The gallants also do not scruple to cheat and lie to each other, and much of the comic action involves the complications of double crossings among themselves. Their lack of moral scruple appears very much a product of the metropolitan environment that formed them; they have no real social base or frame of reference and live essentially on their wits. Goldstone encourages Fitsgrave, as ‘Bouser’ supposed just to have arrived from the university, to the breaking of social connections. Goldstone tells him when he hears that he had been renewing university friendships: Fie, that’s none of the newest fashion. I must tell you that, master Bouser: you must never take acquaintance of any a’ th’ university when you are at London; nor any of London when you are at university: you must be more forgetful i’faith. (2.3.74–8)

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The world view underlying this statement and the general comportment of the gallants may have much to do with the anxieties present in a city that was experiencing rapid growth and with a population the composition of which was constantly being altered by inward migration. Since the migrants would have come from more settled and much smaller communities, they would at once have been acutely aware of the instability of their new environment and themselves have constituted part of the problem. In this representation of London, relationships are entirely transactional. When Pursenet finds a chain that he had given a whore and which she had given to Tailby who professed love for her, he is outraged by this, and says, ‘Does my boy pick and I steal to enrich myself, to keep her, to maintain him? why this is right the sequence of the world. A lord maintains her, she maintains a knight, he maintains a whore, she maintains a captain’ (3.2.100–5). Paradoxically, while exercising anxieties about the phenomenon, the play also exemplifies the almost illicit enjoyment of urban amoralism offered by Jacobean drama, not only in the skill of manoeuvre of its miscreants but also in its frank awareness of the sometimes harsh realities of metropolitan life. One of the plays that most clearly exemplify the implicit invitation to audiences to take pleasure in the wiles of such figures is Jonson’s The Alchemist. Its satire on greed is self-consciously grounded in the more infamous aspects of the everyday traffic of London life, the prologue announcing Our scene is London, ’cause we would make known No country’s mirth is better than our own. No clime breeds better matter for your whore, Bawd, squire, impostor, many persons more, Whose manners, now called humours, feed the stage, And which have still been subject for the rage Or spleen of comic writers. (5–11) The plot is straightforward; the departure of a householder from London at a time of plague gives the opportunity for his servant, Face, to call in cronies and use the house – which thus becomes another deceptive urban space – as a base for a range of schemes to fleece gullible people. The validating principle in the play is the skilful use of one’s wits for survival and gain. Moral virtue is not particularly relevant to


this, and what counts in this world of urban realpolitik is strategic intelligence. Face and his companions get away with their trickery in the end, and succeed in profiting by it. Lovewit takes an indulgent view of his servant’s doings, remarking, ‘What device should he bring forth now? / I love a teeming wit, as I love my nourishment’ (5.1.15–16). He is only concerned that his own interests have not been compromised, and that his house and goods have not been damaged or stolen. Lovewit does not scruple to benefit from his servant’s scheme himself, gaining a wealthy young wife from it. He also uses legal right to deny the victims the goods left in his cellar, despite knowing full well that they belong to them. This self-interest is based ultimately on the relative lack of a strong, cohesive community in this representation of metropolitan life. It is true that when Lovewit returns from the country his neighbours crowd around him (in 5.1 and 2) to report the goings on in his house during his absence, but he prefers to believe his servant and dismisses them as idiots, ‘Peace, and get you hence, you changelings’ (5.2.44). Lovewit’s self-interest stands in the way of allegiance to others of his rank since ultimately the city as dramatized here is a place where only strategic success counts. Though elevated rank is at various points recognized as desirable, the only real distinction the play itself promotes is one of intelligence, between characters who are tactically successful and those who are not. Those gulled by the fraudsters include a knight, a clerk, a tobacconist and Puritan clerics, a list supplemented by the neighbours describing others ‘some as brave as lords’, ‘Ladies and gentlewomen’, ‘Citizens wives’, ‘oyster-women’, ‘gallants’, ‘Sailors’ wives’ and ‘Tobaccomen’ (5.1.2–5). The country figures operate as foils in a rather more limited way and stand somewhat apart from this maelstrom of grasping urbanites. Kestrel and his sister Dame Pliant are gentlefolk who have come to London to acquire sophistication, he ‘To learn to quarrel, and to live by his wits, / And will go down again, and die i’ the country’ (2.6.61–2) and she ‘To learn the fashion’ (2.6.38). Though slightly laughable, they lack the material greed found in the London gulls, remain thus somewhat hors de combat and thus escape being ensnared by the fraudsters’ machinations.18 The competitive nature of London life at other levels is dramatized in Greene’s Tu Quoque, in which three interrelated narrative strands integrate stories of courtship with the pursuit of both wealth and social position: the quest of two gallants for the hands in marriage of the daughters of a new City knight, the temporary inversion of fortunes and positions of a master and a servant and the ruin and recovery of

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a profligate. Social aspiration, a strong focus of the play, is markedly cast within a specifically local framework, with recognition in London being particularly striven for, sometimes within the City and sometimes extending beyond it to the broader conurbation. After being newly knighted (having purchased the title), the City shopkeeper Sir Lionel Rash, immediately resolves to shift position geographically to reflect his new situation, ‘I will give over my Citty coate, and betake my selfe to the Court jacket’ (1.133–4), also deciding to give up working personally in his shop in future and further, ‘To morrow I remoove into the Strand, / There for this quarter dwell, the next at Fulham’ (1.142–3). However, he betrays his continuing preoccupations as a citizen both by his attachment to his immediate environment and by using the popular theatre as a point of reference, ‘I will spread the Ensigne of my knighthood over the face of the Citty, which shall strike as great a terrour to my enemies, as ever Tamberlaine to the Turkes’ (1.149–51). Later he suggests to his daughter that if she marries her newly enriched suitor, Bubble, she may ‘draw him to the keeping of a Coach / For Countrey, and Carroach [a more luxurious form of carriage] for London’ (5.522–3). In another strand a gallant, Staines, has been ruined by a usurer who happens to be the uncle of his servingman Bubble, who then inherits his uncle’s fortune and the positions of the two men are reversed. When Staines is then engaged by Bubble as his servingman, one of his duties is to advise his master how to act as a gentleman, and Staines explains to him how to perform as a London gallant: you must beare things resolute, as this sir: if you be at an Ordinary, and chance to loose your money at play, you must not fret and fume, teare cardes, and fling away dice, as your ignorant gamster, or country-Gentleman does, but you must put on a calme temperate action, with a kind of carelesse smile, in contempt of Fortune, as not being able with all her engins to batter down one peece of your estate, that your means may be thought invincible; never tell your money, nor what you have wonne, nor what you have lost (7.761–70) This turns out to be part of Bubble’s undoing, as Staines resolves to recover his wealth by cheating his new master. Something that Bubble needs less prompting on is his entry into the capital’s culture of conspicuous consumption, and on his accession to wealth he wastes no time in sending his servingman to the purveyors of luxury goods to acquire the trappings of his new status:


heere Gervase, take this bag, and runne presently to the Mercers: buy me seven ells of horse flesh colour’d taffata, nine yards of yellow sattin, and eight yards of orange tawney velvet; then runne to the Tailers, the Haberdashers, the Sempsters, the Cutlers, the Perfumers, and to all trades whatsoe’r that belong to the making up of a Gentleman; and amongst the rest, let not the Barber bee forgotten (7.742–9) Staines, on the other hand, consoles himself that an advantage of his new position is being relieved of participation in this culture, observing that a servingman, ‘dares walke Watling-streete, without any feare of his Draper’ (7.686–7). The central figure of the play’s third strand, the profligate shopkeeper Spendall, is also placed within a very localized context of social judgement and estimation. Staines flatters him at one point, commenting, ‘thou are the highest spirited Citizen / That ever Guild-hall took notice of’ (11.1347–8). When earlier in the play Spendall speaks commandingly in a tavern, his companion admiringly remarks that it is a pity he has not been made a lord, at which he announces a different ambition that he prizes more highly, his particularly civic conceptions of public splendour perhaps rather satirically typifying a citizen’s obsessions: A Lord! by this Light I doe not thinke but to bee Lord Maior of London before I die, and have three Pageants carried before me, besides a Shippe and an Unicorne; prentices may pray for that time, for whensoever it happens, I will make another Shrovetuesday for them. (4.371–5) In this Red Bull play, the sort of cynicism often found in private theatre plays would have been less welcome, but the depiction of London society is fairly consistent with that found in Jonson’s or Middleton’s city comedy. The play invites a positive view of Staines despite his shameless and self-seeking tricking of Bubble, and he is rewarded in the end by being financially redeemed and marrying well, while Bubble returns to being a servingman. Sir Lionel Rash immediately drops his opposition to Staines’s match with his daughter on hearing that he has recovered his mortgage, his only consideration being a material one. When Spendall is arrested at a brothel for debt, his former friends and beneficiaries of his generosity there have no hesitation in deserting him, the bawd Sweatman telling the arresting officers, ‘Hee’s

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a meere stranger here: onely in charitie / Sometimes we have relieved him with a meale’ (13.1734–5). After he is later released through the aid of a wealthy widow, he forces himself upon her with threatened violence and his assertiveness is rewarded by her ultimate assent to marriage, which brings him fortune without any need to repent his former profligacy. This is a world in which forceful social presence, an instinct for self-advancement, and strategic skill take precedence over conventional morality. Bubble fails because, though he is generally good natured he is a classic gull and his desire for gentry makes him vulnerable. In Elizabethan drama countrymen had made their appearance in a limited way as foils to point up the sophistication of Londoners, and this convention is developed further in several Jacobean plays, both countrymen and other incomers from outside being used in this way. Middleton’s Michaelmas Term (Paul’s, 1606), a play that exemplifies much of the way in which Jacobean comedy represents London life, has a main narrative that turns principally on the attempt by a citizen draper and usurer, Quomodo, to gull Easy, a country gentleman recently come to town, out of his lands in Essex. The threat that the metropolis poses to unwary outsiders comes, however, not just in the form of usury but also the corrupt practice of the law. The induction opens with the allegorical figure of Michaelmas Term, ‘in a whitish cloak, new come out of the country, his Boy bringing his cloak after him’ and he says, ‘Lay by my conscience, give me my gown / That weed is for the country; / We must be civil now, and match our evil’ (3–5). The gown he dons is that of a lawyer and ‘Civil’ or city identity is thus from the outset associated with exploitative and dubious legal practice. This is confirmed when he comments on the enrichment of London lawyers by the industry of the country, ‘The barn is made but steward to the hall’ (14) and later a boy who is aware of the impending cheating of Easy comments on the dangers to country gulls coming to London, ‘Alas, poor birds that cannot keep the sweet country, where they fly at pleasure, but must needs come to London to have their wings clipped and are fain to go hopping home again!’ (3.2.18–20). The first setting of the play is the middle aisle of St Paul’s, yet another of London’s ambivalent spaces: a social place, but also a place of legal business, and of criminal risk, thus at the heart of what the city can both offer by way of conviviality and of its potential material threat to the unwary (as exemplified in many of the cony-catching pamphlets). His experiences in London provide Easy with a double process of learning in respect of both his comportment and his knowledge of


the world. One of his associates, the gallant Cockstone remarks of him that he is A fair, free-breasted gentleman, somewhat too open, Bad in man, worse in woman, The gentry-fault at first: he is yet fresh And wants the city powd’ring. (1.1.53–6) This ‘powd’ring’ comes partly through the availability of the right sort of social contact that the capital has to offer. When he first meets Easy, newly arrived from the country, Cockstone tells him: You seldom visit London, Master Easy; But now your father’s dead, ’tis your only course; Here’s gallants of all sizes, of all lasts; Here you may fit your foot, make choice of those Whom your affection may rejoice in. (1.1.42–6) He is also given more hard-nosed, cynical but nevertheless pertinent advice about living in London by a villain who pretends to befriend him, Shortyard, ‘You must always have a care of your reputation here in town, Master Easy; although you ride down with nothing, it skills not’ (2.1.38–40) and Shortyard later continues, Master Easy, let a man bear himself portly, the whoresons will creep to him o’ their bellies, and their wives o’ their backs; there’s a kind of bold grace expected throughout all the parts of a gentleman. Then, for your observances, a man must not so much as spit but within line and fashion. I tell you what I ha’ done: sometimes I carry my water all London over only to deliver it proudly at the Standard; and do I pass altogether unnoted think you? No, a man can no sooner peep out his head but there’s a bow bent at him out of some watchtower or other. (2.1.90–8) Easy’s education in the ways of the urban world involve his being duped into parting with his lands, only to recover them by a fortunate mistake of his deceiver, Quomodo, who remarks ruefully that ‘craft, once known, / Does teach fools wit, leaves the deceiver none’ (5.3.89–90).

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The subsidiary plot of the play involves two characters who come up to London in pursuit of social advancement. One is Andrew Gruel who has changed his name to Andrew Lethe, having forgotten his humble past, and now has aspirations to a gentle and even courtly life. The other is a country wench who becomes Lethe’s courtesan. To both, London is or is constructed as a place of infinite possibility. The girl has been enticed away from her home in Northamptonshire and her enticer, Hellgill, asks, ‘Wouldst thou, a pretty, beautiful, juicy squall, live in a poor thrummed house i’ th’ country, in such servile habiliments and may well pass for a gentlewoman i’ th’ city? (1.2.4–7). In the case of Lethe the financial basis of his life in London is not made clear, especially given that he is the son of a poor toothpuller. The imagined infinite potential in the city for the satisfaction of desires even extends to Lethe’s old mother when she comes up to London, in her wish for a young courtier, ‘there’s no woman so old but she may learn; and as an old lady delights in a young page or monkey, so there are young courtiers will be hungry upon an old woman, I warrant you’ (1.1.305–7). The fanciful perceptions of London as a territory of unlimited possibilities may be satirically treated here, but they have some real basis in its enhanced economic power and are both cause and result of the huge inward migration in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. London here offers the opportunity to assume and perform a preferred identity; Lethe is able to do this precisely because of the anonymity available in the metropolis, as two gallants who are his acquaintances observe: Salewood: But does he pass for Lethe? Rearage: ’Mongst strange eyes, That no more know him than he knows himself (1.1.155–6) The wench is able to transform herself merely through a change of apparel, and Hellgill remarks, ‘You talk of an alteration; here’s the thing itself. What base birth does not raiment make glorious? And what glorious births do not rags make infamous? Why should not a woman confess what she is now, since the finest are but deluding shadows, begot between tirewomen and tailors?’ (3.1.1–6). In the case of both aspiring characters their new identities involve a complete disavowal of their former selves and connections. This is illustrated when the parents of both come up to London to seek them; while Lethe refuses to recognize his mother (who genuinely does not recognize him because of his


changed appearance), the country wench really fails to recognize her disguised father, and both parents become servants to their children.19 Lethe consciously immerses himself in what he perceives as the social culture of London, claiming not to remember social contacts from day to day because of his busy life (1.1.173–85). A picture is created of an urban world where no relationships can be trusted, friends and helpers turn out to be betrayers, and even family bonds cannot stand up to the ferociously transactional culture of the city. After Quomodo feigns his death, his son Sim disowns his father (4.4.30–42), and Quomodo’s wife quickly marries the man he has deceived, while his henchman, Shortyard, rejoices in his apparent death (5.1.1–2). Hellgill similarly has no hesitation in betraying Lethe in order to ‘work out mine own safety’ (5.3.104). If for Lethe and courtesan the country is associated with demeaned social status, Quomodo’s acquisition of Easy’s land in Essex is for the enhancement of his status. He seeks elevation by the possession of a country estate, and in this respect he can be compared to Gertrude in Eastward Ho! in her aspirations to a castle in Essex, the usurer Sir Giles Overreach in Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts (Cockpit, c. 1621), who has removed from the City to the country having enriched himself and Sir Lionel Rich in Greene’s Tu Quoque, who intends to move to Fulham having done the same. In Michaelmas Term the difference between Lethe’s and Quomodo’s attitudes with regard to status and urban or rural life resides in their conception of London. Lethe’s new urban context is the broader metropolis, incorporating the court dimension of the capital. Gertrude, Overreach and Rich all wish to distance themselves more narrowly from the City, specifically as a centre of the trade that is the source of their wealth. Furthermore, like Sir Lionel Rich, Quomodo’s concern is less with the land itself than with the effect it will have upon his reputation in town: Now shall I be divulged a landed man Throughout the Livery [i.e. his company, the Woollen Drapers]; one points, another whispers, A third frets inwardly; let him fret and hang! Especially his envy I shall have That would be fain, yet cannot be, a knave (3.4.5–9) Another example of the use of a countryman to exemplify non-urban innocence, but in much less positive terms than in Michaelmas Term, is

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to be found in Middleton and Rowley’s A Fair Quarrel (Red Bull, 1615– 1617), the plot of which involves the ultimately frustrated attempt by a wealthy man, Russell, to marry his daughter to a rich Cornish gentleman named Chough against her wishes. Chough, who has recently come to London, has exaggeratedly unsophisticated country ways. When he meets the young woman for the first time, he proposes a wrestling match with her, and she has to point out that ‘’Tis no woman’s exercise in London, sir’ (2.2.170). He is subsequently advised by his equally foolish servant, Trimtram, that he should acquire the skills of trading insults, something that was an actual practice among London gallants, ‘Well, you must learn to roar here in London; you’ll never proceed in the reputation of gallantry else’ (2.2.212–3). Trimtram concocts a ‘history’ of the practice that, alongside obvious bawdy, is given appeal by being squarely attached to the topography of London: Chough: How long has roaring been an exercise, thinkest thou, Trimtram? Trimtram: Ever since guns came up; the first was your roaring Meg. Chough: Meg? then ’twas a woman was the first roarer? Trimtram: Ay, the fire of her touch-hole, that cost many a man’s life since that time’ and then the lions, they learnt it from the guns, living so near ’em; then it was heard to the Bankside, and the bears they began to roar; then the boys got it, and so ever since there have been a company of roaring boys. Chough: And how long will it last, thinkest thou? Trimtram: As long as the water runs under London Bridge, or watermen [ply] at Westminster stairs. (2.2.214–28) Trimtram leads Chough to a gallant who offers to teach him roaring in any of various fictional languages: ‘The names of the languages, the Sclavonian, Parthamenian, Barmeothian, Tyburnian, Wappinganian, or the modern Londonian’ (4.1.34–6). All but the first two of these make reference to London or places within it; the ‘Barmoothes’ or ‘Bermudas’ was a rough area near Covent Garden. They decide on ‘the modern assault, only the Londonian roar’ (4.1.86–7) and he proceeds to teach him a series of nonsense words, claiming that they are insults. Thereafter Chough and Trimtram practise their newly learned skills by uttering a series of supposedly vaunting but ultimately completely incomprehensible statements in the street and elsewhere, to the bemusement of the Londoners to whom they are addressed. Chough and Trimtram


can be compared to Kastril, the countryman in The Alchemist who also comes up to London to learn the ‘rhetoric of quarrelling’ that Subtle promises to teach him. Informing the aspirations of these characters is a distorted perception of the relationship of language to space. As Lefebvre has noted, ‘Every language is located in a space. Every discourse says something about a space (place or sets of places); and every discourse is emitted from a space’ (1991, p. 132). These characters are satirized for their clumsy attempts to occupy the urban space through too selfconscious an embrace of what they perceive its verbal dimensions to be, and the play flatters the audience by implying their contrastingly greater understanding of urban verbal codes as true Londoners. Mockery of these foolish countrymen goes further, however, inviting audience identification with the more guileful denizens of their own city as represented on the stage. Lefebvre’s idea of relationship of discourse to space is also present in the sense that the realities of life in the urban environment give rise to forms of language. Assertive language is a product of the challenges of metropolitan life, but the outsider status of the countrymen make them apprehend it in ridiculous and exaggerated terms because they fail to possess the sophistication that is also present in it.20 There is, at first sight, a reversal of the country–city predatory relationship in Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One (Paul’s, 1605) that has a Plautine plot of the old being outwitted by the young, and in this instance the perpetrator is a country gentleman, while the victims are corrupt and worldly wise Londoners. Witgood, the young gallant ruined by his own excesses and the wiles of his usurer uncle, Lucre, comes up to London and tricks him into restoring his mortgage through the pretended prospect of a wealthy marriage. Witgood then also manages to foist his courtesan off in marriage onto an associate and rival of his uncle, Hoard, and tricks him into paying off his debts as well. Initially the country appears to be stealing a march on the town in this narrative. On his arrival in London Witgood is greeted by his step-cousin, the townsman Sam Freedom, ‘Cousin Witgood! I rejoice in my salute: you’re most welcome to this noble city governed with the sword and the scabbard’ (that is, peacefully and with the rule of law), to which Witwood replies in an aside, ‘And the wit in the pommel’, implying a lack of intelligence (2.1.265–7). However, the more usual dichotomy between rural innocence and the perilous urban jungle is not, in the end, challenged in any substantial way. The satisfactions the play offers its audience in the trouncing of Lucre and Hoard are derived from the recognition of the urban types who are satirized, and is enhanced by the fact that they are both very worldly individuals, well practised in the less scrupulous ways

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of the City, that they are usurers, and that they are Puritans. Witgood is, in fact, a countryman in name only and shows a canny awareness of the opportunities present in the relative anonymity available in London when he presents his courtesan as a wealthy Staffordshire widow whom neither Lucre nor Hoard know by sight. Middleton is also careful to construct the background world of London. A fairly gratuitous portrait of another pair of usurers is thrown in, Harry Dampit and Gulf. Harry Dampit is a previous migrant to London who had come to town as Witgood reminds him ‘with ten shillings in thy purse’ (1.4.38–9) but is now, having become a usurer, worth ten thousand pounds. Dampit describes his initial activities, indicating the opportunities offered by London to someone with energetic self-interest and a lack of scruple, especially in exploiting countrymen in the thorny legal world: Tramplers of time, motions of Fleet Street, and visions of Holborn; here I have fees of one, there I have fees of another; my clients come about me, the fooliaminy and coxcombry of the country; I still trashed and trotted for other men’s causes. Thus was poor Harry Dampit made rich by other’ laziness, who, though they would not follow their own suits, a made ’em follow me with their purses (1.4.55–61) The cutthroat world of the metropolis is suggested by the fact that, like Lucre and Hoard, Dampit and Gulf have no loyalty to each other but seek to do each other down when they can, one observer remarking, ‘thief rails upon thief’ (4.5.151). Dampit’s servant Audrey sings a song in which she sums up the dangers of London: Let the usurer cram him, in interest that excel, There’s pits enow to damn him before he comes to hell; In Holborn some, in Fleet Street some, Where’er he come, there’s some, there’s some. (4.5.1–4) If assertiveness, deviousness and emotional detachment are all qualities coming to be seen in the drama as essential components of success in London’s urban jungle, another, the capacity for competent selfdramatization. In Sharpham’s The Fleire the eponymous main character, the disguised and exiled Duke of Florence comments on the society of the City, comparing the social life of London to a play:


The Cittie is like a Commodie, both in partes and in apparel, and your Gallants are the Actors: for hee that yesterday played the Gentleman, nowe playes the Begger; she that played the Wayting-woman, nowe playes the Queane; hee that played the married-man, nowe playes the Cuckolde; and shee that played the Ladie, nowe playes the Painter. Then for their apparell, they haue change too: for shee that wore the Petticote, now weares the Breech; hee that wore the Coxcombe, now weares the feather; the Gentleman that wore the long Sworde, now weares the short Hanger; and hee that could scarce get Veluet for his Cape, has now linde his Cloake throughout with it. (2.1.124–34) One of the several examples of the use of self-performance in Jacobean drama occurs in John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan (Blackfriars, 1605) that features a central figure who articulates Montaigne’s espousal of sexual liberty for men (but not women).21 The main plot has a gallant, Freevill, feigning his death as part of a scheme to palm his courtesan lover off on his willing friend, Malheureux. This puts Malheureux, indicted for his murder, in danger and causes distress to Freevill’s intended bride but it is competence in his ruse and not conscience for which the gallant is rewarded with success. The subplot involves the repeated tricking of a Puritan vintner, Mulligrub, by Cockledemoy described in the ‘dramatis personae’ as ‘a knavishly witty city companion’. This strand of the narrative has a parallel with the main plot in that Cockledemoy sets up a final trick whereby he is able to accuse Mulligrub of stealing his cloak, and it is only when Mulligrub is on the point of being executed that Cockledemoy reveals the truth. In Freevill Marston creates something of a prototype for the later rakes of Restoration drama, and Cockledemoy also exemplifies elements of this type. Both go unpunished and are made theatrically attractive by behaviour that would in conventional terms be viewed as morally transgressive. What is apparent here is an approval for certain qualities of deceptive ability and skill in pursuit of self-interest, which is valued over straightforward morality. Cockledemoy operated ‘for wit’s sake’ (5.3.137); he doesn’t need money and therefore his trickery is more purely an exemplification of the skills required in an urban context, skilful deception here becoming a dramatic trope. Cunning and subtlety as essential qualities for city living emerge most fully at this point, but in drama that is satirical and ultimately places a moral perspective on it. These qualities have not yet completely acquired the cachet of cultural sophistication that they would in Caroline and especially even later in Restoration

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drama, but it is notable, for instance, how many of the urban characters in especially Middleton’s and Jonson’s work have ‘wit’ as part of their names. Since this is a quality routinely associated with the urbanite in London-set drama, the display of wit is not just in the interests of enhancing the appeal of the theatrical narratives but is subtly part of the view this drama invites its London audiences to form of themselves. Even the more transgressive instances of it arguably contribute to this since the metropolis as theatrically represented promotes a re-evaluation of what constitutes transgression, illustrated in one respect by the ways in which women are permitted considerable dominance over urban spaces, and it is particularly in the plays set in the texture of London life that conventional morality tends to be sidelined in favour of what are implicitly construed as urban survival skills. There is, in many plays, a sense of London as an open marketplace for goods, something that inevitably has an effect on manners and enables individuals to fashion or refashion themselves. In Westward Ho! the bawd, Mistress Birdlime, remarks, I tell thee ther is equality inough betweene a Lady and a Citty dame, if their haire be but of a colour; name you any one thing that your cittizens wife coms short of to your Lady. They haue as pure Linnen, as choyce painting, loue greene Geese in spring, Mallard and Teale in the fall, and Woodcocke in winter. Your Cittizens wife learnes nothing but fopperies of your Ladie, but your Lady or Iustice-a-peace Madam, carries high wit from the Citty, namely, to receiue all and pay all: to awe their Husbands, to check their Husbands, to controule their husbands; nay, they haue a tricke ont to be sick for a new gowne, or a Carcanet, or a Diamond, or so. (1.1.24–34) This passage suggests the ways in which an image of London is constructed through patterns of practice and behaviour deemed specific to its particular set of geographical circumstances. The differences between citizen wives and gentry or nobility are blurred, as their geographical proximity allows each group to learn social behaviours and skills from the other and undermines the rigidity of social distinctions.22 This phenomenon grows out of the specific social and material conditions that attach to the dense conurbation of London and might be seen in terms of Guattari and Deleuze’s concepts of ‘territorializing marks’ and ‘territorializing motifs’ of which they remark, ‘These are the elements of a discrete or fuzzy aggregate; but they become consolidated,


take on consistency’ (1987, p. 363). The possibilities for territorial homogenization in urban culture has its limits in both geographical and social terms, however, and an example is provided in Tomkis’s Albumazar in which a rustic, Trincalo, a farmer in Tottenham is able to get to London from time to time and avail himself of the opportunity to go to the theatre. From there he seeks to acquire a veneer of sophistication, and he resolves to use this in his addresses to the maidservant he is wooing, ‘then will I confound her with complements drawne from the Plaies I see at the Fortune and the Red Bull, where I learne all the words I speake and vnderstand not’ (2.1.587–9). He remains a rustic, however, and the speeches he delivers to her are a preposterous mishmash of exaggerated rhetoric echoing that of the popular theatres, which she greets with scorn. The view taken in both these plays at the phenomenon of selfimprovement and aspiration is satirical, but they do give an indication of the way particular conditions in the capital make opportunities for them available. The theatrical representation of London was to change in the Caroline period, both in respect of the locations focused upon and the nature of the life lived there. One important dimension of this was that the quality of ‘wit’ associated with metropolitan life was to become less defined in terms of primarily strategic skills and the capacity to outwit, and more in terms of a self-conscious embrace of accomplishments and refinement that bespoke intellectual superiority as well as social elevation. The commercial theatre itself made some contribution to this, as is suggested by the example of Tomkis’s rustic, but this ranged alongside a host of other possibilities the capital offered. In Epicene Ben Jonson heralds the advent of this culture change in the representation of the social life of London and all the more remarkably so since the play appeared in 1609, only a few years after the last of the plays that echoed to the Elizabethan tendency to present eulogistic images of the city. The aspirations of Jonson’s characters anticipate those in James Shirley’s work and the play satirizes the self-conscious affectation of urban culture in London. At the centre is a Plautine plot involving a marriage trick played on an excessively noise-hating old man, Morose, by his nephew Dauphine. However, the principal satirical thrust of the play focuses on a range of subsidiary characters who are described as ‘A new foundation here i’ the town, of ladies that call themselves the Collegiates, an order between courtiers and country madams, that live from their husbands and give entertainment to all the Wits and Braveries o’ the time’ (1.1.72–6). It is in the town that the ‘country madams’, detached from any original contexts determining their identity can refashion themselves and the ‘college’ is

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a truly metropolitan phenomenon in that the strict divisions of class give way to a collective sense of social superiority through a common aspiration to refinement and literary sophistication. Central in this is a salon run by Mistress Otter, described as ‘the rich china-woman that the courtiers visited so often, that gave the rare entertainment’ (1.4.26–9) and by Truewit as ‘the only authentical courtier that is not naturally bred one, in the city’ (3.2.28–9). Otter and her sea captain husband both have their pretensions, she to entertaining ‘great ladies’ (3.1.18), and he in peppering his speech with Latin. A gallant, Truewit, outlines what a fashionable London wife expects: to be a stateswoman, know all the news; what was done at Salisbury, what at the Bath, what at court, what in progress; or so she may censure poets and authors and styles, and compare ’em, Daniel with Spenser, Jonson with tother youth, and so forth; or be thought cunning in controversies, or the very knots of divinity, and often in her mouth the state of the question, and then skip to the mathematics and demonstration, and answer in religion to one, in state to another, in bawdry to a third. (2.2.113–22) The emphasis is on knowingness and being able to be in command, intellectual pretension being an important component of this. In 2.3 one of the ‘collegiates’, Sir John Daw, recites his poetry and compares himself favourably with a range of ancient writers and poets while the wit Clerimont observes ironically, ‘He must needs, living among Wits and Braveries too’ (55–4). A perennial target of Jonson’s satire is the groundless intellectual arrogance of the elite, and here it is the combination of self-assurance and shallowness of these self-defined urban sophisticates. Essential in this is the element of display, and Truewit says of Daw that he ‘pretends only to learning, buys titles, and nothing else of books in him’ (1.2.76–7). The play is so wrapped up in London life that there is little reference to the country, though one of the collegiates, Lady Haughty, talks of Morose losing friends through his ‘mere rusticity’ (3.6.85) referring to his boorish behaviour. Jonson even turns his satirical eye on the audience themselves in respect of the facile quest for urban polish. After listing the large variety of people who make up the audience – lords, knights, squires, waiting wenches, city wives, men, and ‘men, and daughters of Whitefriars’ (implying thieves and prostitutes because of the salacious reputation of the area) the prologue remarks, talking of the fare that the writer provides for them, ‘Nor is it only while


you keep your seat / Here that his feast will last, but you shall eat / A week at ord’naries on his broken meat’ (25–7), imputing to the audience the same inclination to borrow from the wit of the theatre to inform their own discourse, that is satirized in Tomkis’s rustic. Jonson’s picture of London thus becomes a world where artifice is the currency, and although he satirizes it, there is an implicit recognition that successful self-construction is a quality required by life in the metropolis, constituting the culture of the ‘town’. If he scornfully portrays the foolish and ultimately vain attempts by the ‘collegiates’ to define their social superiority through pretension to wit and learning, Jonson also retains an interest in the skills that Jacobean drama more frequently tends to characterize as necessary for life in London, strategic sharpness and the capacity for deception as essential for negotiating one’s way in its cutthroat social scene. The three genuine wits in the play are the gallants Dauphine, Clerimont and Truewit. Though the last of these is a little more proactive in his machinations than he should be, nearly wrecking Dauphine’s scheme with an overly precipitate intervention intended to be helpful, they are collectively successful because of their native skills and ability to be one jump ahead. They not only expose the folly and deceits of characters like Daw and La Foole, but are made mouthpieces for ironic and critical comment on these characters. Moral superiority is not, however, part of this – the trick they play on Morose is necessarily built on deceit – and there is no attempt to show them as particularly virtuous, but rather their superiority resides in their having an understanding of the real workings of the urban world. The most vocal of the gallants is Truewit and his counsel to Clerimont on how to impress women is a summary of the way in which successful personal identity in the metropolis is not only fluid and malleable but a matter of skilful self-construction involving strategy and knowledge. This entails availing oneself of the forums for self display afforded by London, an important thing being visibility and participation in the public life of the city, ‘come abroad where the matter is frequent, to court, to tiltings, public shows and feasts, to plays, and church sometimes: thither they come to show their new tires too, and to be seen’ (4.1.58–61). Truth and sincerity hardly come into the identity being constructed, that is entirely provisional and purchaseable in the city’s marketplace: If she love wit, give verses, though you borrow ’em of a friend, or buy ’em, to have good. If valour, talk of your sword and be frequent in the mention of quarrels, though you be staunch in fighting. If

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activity, be seen o’ your barbary often, or leaping over stools for the credit of your back. If she love good clothes or dressing, have your learned counsel about you every morning, your French tailor, barber, linener, et cetera. Let your powder, your glass and your comb be your dearest acquaintance. Take more care for the ornament of your head than the safety, and wish the commonwealth rather troubled than a hair about you. (4.1.97–108) The deceit in this self-presentation also has a geographical dimension, as Truewit continues, ‘Let cunning be above cost. Give cherries at time of year, or apricots; and say they were sent you out o’ the country, though you bought ’em in Cheapside’ (4.1.114–16). There is, of course, a strong element of satire present in the speech of even this positive figure, but also conversely a recognition of the stark realities of metropolitan life, and Truewit draws a parallel between the self-fabrication of women and the decoration of the city: The doing of it, not the manner: that must be private. Many things that seem foul i’ the doing, do please, done. A lady should indeed study her face when we think she sleeps; nor when the doors are shut should men be enquiring; all is sacred within, then. Is it for us to see their perukes put on, their false teeth, their complexion, their eyebrows, their nails? You see gilders will not work but enclosed. They must not discover how little serves with the help of art to adorn a great deal. How long did the canvas hang afore Aldgate? Were the people suffered to see the city’s Love and Charity while they were rude stone, before they were painted and burnished?23 No. No more should servants approach their mistresses, but when they are complete and finished. (1.1.110–23) Jonson is one of the Jacobean playwrights to demonstrate an acute awareness of not only the material environment of London, but its direct relationship to life lived there. However, many plays set in London make little of their location, being mostly situated in private spaces and where public locations are used, these are unspecific and not realized in any meaningful way. One such play, the anonymous The London Prodigal (Globe, 1604), though it goes so far as to include the city’s name in its title, makes little of its geography beyond a few references. Alongside Jonson, Middleton is pre-eminent among the Jacobean playwrights who


give their plays greater London interest through more active use of identified settings, or by extensive reference to London localities in dialogue. He is followed by Dekker and Heywood, while several other major writers of the time – Marston, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher and most notably Shakespeare – make relatively little of the capital in their drama. Surprisingly, perhaps, it is the private theatres – Paul’s, Whitefriars, Blackfriars and the Cockpit – that are more often the first to offer plays with a strong interest in London, while among public playhouses the Red Bull does so to the greatest extent. Apart from the fact that most plays that manifest a strong engagement with London tend to date from before 1615, there does not appear to be a great deal of change in the way in which the city is depicted over time in the Jacobean theatre. It seems true to say, however, that Jacobean drama is generally more immersed in the everyday life of London, especially the City, than Elizabethan, giving a more complex picture of the capital, less eulogistic and in which the ‘literary’ element of its representation is somewhat tempered. However, certain conventional ways of conceiving of the metropolis and its denizens emerge, some of which were to be developed further in the Caroline theatre and beyond.

5 Caroline Drama

Two principal factors contribute to the way London is represented on the Caroline stage. One is the increasing dominance of the private theatres, fed by a new breed of gentleman writers targeting a more restricted and elevated clientele. Another was the substantial development, from the early 1630s onwards, of the area between the City and Westminster, most particularly Covent Garden. The two phenomena were not unrelated, since both can be seen as connected to the substantial rise in gentry migration to the capital.1 While the emergence of new areas of gentry habitation provided material for both the drama’s topics and the siting of its narratives, the developments in the theatre were of arguably more far-reaching impact. Though one company, the King’s Men continued to put on their plays at both the Blackfriars and the Globe, the overwhelming majority of other new works originated in the private theatres, specifically the Cockpit which accounted for more plays of known auspices than all other theatres put together from 1624, and the Salisbury Court. The Fortune and the Red Bull were the only public theatres apart from the Globe, and they accounted for a small fraction of new plays.2 The emergence and dominance of courtier poets as writers for the theatre also brought about a new sense of cultural self-consciousness about social sophistication in this period, which was articulated very much in terms of urban life. The drama became preoccupied, to a greater extent than ever before, with a quality of ‘wit’. Martin Butler’s observation that Fletcher’s Caroline city comedies begin to deal more obviously with London’s leisured class and develop an interest in ‘wit’ as a social value (‘accomplishment’ or ‘breeding’) as opposed to the ‘wit’ of Middleton’s heroes, which represents their capacity to swindle (1984, p. 159), can be more broadly applied to Caroline drama. And central to the notions of ‘wit’ that were becoming prominent in the 141


theatre’s preoccupations at this time was the representation of London as the essential locus for the culture in which it flourished. It is in the work of the Caroline dramatists that wit tended to crystallize into a key asset in social intercourse and the natural preserve of the urban gentry of both sexes, in a way that would be further developed in Restoration comedy. This contributed to the evolution of a self-consciousness in a broad range of the London elite about their status as metropolitans, so that the ‘otherness’ providing a foil for their own identity was provided much less by lower social ranks than by their social equals of country provenance. This was accompanied by an increased emphasis on the country/city divide. However, reflections on the country varied considerably in the drama of the period, often according to the political ideas underlying the representations.3 What will be considered here is the use of country/city distinctions specifically to define a concept of London culture. Just as Jacobean drama had abandoned and even ridiculed the Elizabethan taste for eulogistic representations of the capital, so there is in Caroline drama not only a move away from the Jacobean theatre’s preoccupation with citizens, but even some ridicule of what is perceived as citizens’ excessive allegiance to the City. As the emphasis in the theatre’s construction of London shifts substantially to the developing West End, there is discernible an increased disdain for the City, its power structures, ceremonials and rituals. In Henry Glapthorne’s Wit in a Constable (Cockpit, 1638), the pompous and aspirational citizen, Alderman Covet is made ridiculous by his combination of self-importance and unfashionable pride in the City. Covet brings the country knight Sir Geffrey Hold-fast to a station of the watch in Ludgate and boasts, ‘This is the government the city keepes, / How doe you lik’t Sir Geffery?’ to which Sir Geffrey replies, ‘Very well, / I doe not thinke all Christendom affords / The like for formall discipline’ (fol. H2r). However, Covet’s pride is misplaced as he is then dismayed on hearing that Busy, the constable, is actually in a neighbouring tavern, the St John’s Head, drinking, instead of being on duty. The next scene is set in the tavern where Covet comes upon Busy and orders him to be taken to the Counter, but Busy responds by ordering his men to take the alderman and Sir Geffrey there instead, any vestige of Covet’s attempt to demonstrate his authority as an important official of the City disappearing in an instant (fol. H4r). In the epilogue of Jasper Mayne’s The City Match (Blackfriars, 1637) when it was played at Whitehall, the writer requests the court’s acceptance of it with something of an apologetic air about its City setting:

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But what was first a Comoedy ith’street: Cheapside brought into verse, no passage strange To any here that hath been at th’Exchange Yet he hopes none doth valew it so low As to compare it with my Lord Maiors show. (p. 73) The citizen appetite for civic ritual comes in for some mockery in Shirley’s Interregnum play Honoria and Mammon (1658) that targets satire at both a countryman, Maslin, and a citizen, Fulbank, the latter’s attachment to pageantry being made much of. Fulbank challenges Maslin to a duel (they are rival suitors to a wealthy woman, Lady Aurelia Mammon) and Maslin agrees to meet the citizen: Yes, the next day after Simon and Jude, I dare, when all your liveries go a feasting By water with your gally-foist and pot-guns, And canvas whales to Westminster. I am not Afear’d of your green Robin Hoods, that fright With fiery club your pitiful spectators, That take pains to be stifled, and adore The wolves and camels of your company: Next whom the children ride, who, innocent things, What with the giants, and the squibs, and eating Too many sugar-plums, take occasion to Perfume their pageants, which your senators Ride after in full scent. (1.1.p. 10) When Fulbank thinks of the prospect of his marriage, he imagines the celebrations: It would become the glory of my bride, To have some state and triumph at our marriage; I know the city will expect we should Accept some entertainment, perhaps pageants, And speeches, to congratulate our nuptial. He continues, going into the realms of fantasy, and using his status in the City as the basis for a wider display of power:


We will have tilting too, and feats of chivalry At court, where I’ll defend my Aurelia princess, In the gilt armour that I mustered in, And the rich saddle of my own perfuming. I’ll have my squires, my plumes, and my devices, And with my lance encounter the whole Mirror Of Knighthood, and compel the foreign princes To hang up all the tables of their mistresses, As trophies to my most victorious Mammon. (2.1.pp. 21–2) The satirical scope is also widened to include targeting the tendency for citizens to seek to enhance their status by generous endowments to public works in the City, the sort of munificence that is represented with rather more unalloyed approval in several Elizabethan and early Jacobean plays. Phantasm, Lady Mammon’s gentleman-usher, tells Fulbank, in terms a citizen would understand and admire, the extent of his mistress’s wealth by indicating the sorts of public works she might effect with it. He says she may Have high and noble ways to employ her treasures. Do things above the vulgar admiration; Surround the city with a wall of silver, Transmute dull Leaden-hall to gold, rebuild The great cathedral of St. Paul’s with porphyry, And clap so bright a spire upon’t, shall make The seaman afar off wonder what new And never-setting star heaven hath created, To make the day eternal on this island. (2.1.p. 20)

The urban fabric and social values There is evident in a number of Caroline plays a tendency towards place realism that reveals a possibly even stronger engagement with the localities of London than that of Jacobean drama, in that it testifies to an interest primarily in the places themselves rather than just in the way in which they accommodate and serve the narratives of the plays.4 Though the use of a broad range of locations including the more traditional places is quite widespread in the drama, it is notable that new

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areas and fashionable places of entertainment come in for more detailed attention. This is partly the result of the rapidly changing nature of London’s built environment, including the development of the areas between the City and Westminster, and partly the fact that particular urban localities were becoming more important in defining social, or at least economic status.5 The theatre’s embrace of such places is, if anything, a more significant use of actual locality for the purpose of allowing the audience greater imaginative occupation than ever of the geographical terrain where dramatic narratives were sited. Since these localities were relatively new to Londoners themselves, the theatre was participating in the early experience of them along with the audience, and was able imaginatively to occupy and define them. It naturalizes these spaces and makes them familiar by offering experience of them through dramatic narratives in which site-appropriate patterns of behaviour are exemplified, in terms parallel to Mayol’s conception of the personal occupation of the neighbourhood that As a result of its everyday use can be considered as the progressive privatization of public space. It is a practical device whose function is to ensure a continuity between what is the most intimate (the private space of one’s own lodging) and what is the most unknown (the totality of the city or even, by extension, the rest of the world). (1998, p. 11) Certainly, places like Hyde Park, the Sparagus Garden and Covent Garden were being conceived of on the stage as immanently constituting settings for dramatic action. Though the term ‘place realism’ can, strictly speaking, be applied to several plays before this period, it is most applicable to certain Caroline plays because of the greater attention given to the realization of locality in them. In a period before the advent of stage scenery, the representation of identifiable place could still only in very limited way be effected by visual means. Place realism is achieved by a combination of elements of visual realization, detailed verbal reference to the surroundings in which narratives are set and, as Matthew Steggle has pointed out, by ‘using “walk-on” vignettes from characters who do not interact directly with any of the named characters’ (2004, p. 111). The emergence of social or economic exclusivity in parts of the developing geography of the metropolis had an indubitable impact on the interest in locality present in the drama. Rich and poor tended to live cheek by jowl in the same areas in the City, though there had also always been certain areas of London identified as being poorer or more affluent.


However, in the drama localities tend to be represented not in terms particularly of social elevation or disadvantage but rather in association with the types of community that were to be found there, defined by religious adherence or profession. Hence an area such as the Blackfriars, though relatively wealthy, is not represented so much in terms of that fact but tends more to be associated with the Puritan feather-sellers who lived and traded there. Other areas became a byword for certain activities or moral qualities, such as the clothing sellers in Birchin Lane, horse trading in Smithfield, prostitution in Turnbull Street, or generally louche activities associated with the transpontine suburbs. With the advent of areas built specifically for the gentry, the idea that the socially mixed nature of residential areas was beginning to be thought of as something undesirable to the elite is suggested in Sir William Davenant’s First Days Entertainment at Rutland House of 1656, which has a Parisian and a Londoner in debate about the respective merits and demerits of their own and the other’s cities. The Parisian complains of the lack of architectural uniformity in the prospects of London streets: ‘Here stands one that aims to be a Palace, and, next it, another that professes to be a Hovel’ (p. 49), about the diversity of juxtaposed functions and features, ‘here a Palace, there a Wood-yard, here a Garden’, there a Brew-house (pp. 51–2) and the social mix, ‘Here dwels a Lord, there a Dyer, and between both a Duomo Comune’ (p. 52). Though Davenant’s production dates from as late as the mid-1650s, the situation described in it had begun to change by the 1630s, with the appearance of more socially and economically exclusive areas. The growth of London in the Stuart period involved an expansion of Westminster eastwards and the City westwards, creating an infill of the land between them. The desire of courtiers to have town houses resulted, despite royal opposition, in the development of Tuttle Fields, development in St James’s and building on the land between Piccadilly and Pall Mall, while the westward overspill of the City saw gentry housing being constructed in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Covent Garden, Drury Lane and Long Acre (Brett-James, 1935, p. 152). In the theatrical representation of London, these developments are reflected by a shift in the centre of gravity of the drama.6 Several dramatic narratives begin to be set in the fashionable locations favoured by the gentry, while an even greater range of such places is present in allusions in the drama – phenomena that equally indicate the greater dominance of gentry taste in the theatrical repertoire on offer in this period. Also evident is a greater geographical and even architectural self-consciousness than before, as the social implications of place of residence became more

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important. Shirley’s The Lady of Pleasure (Cockpit, 1635) has a slight story centred on two women who compete to establish themselves as meccas of fashion in town, the play satirizing the affectation of fashionable manners. One of the women, Celestina, seeks to enhance her status partly through establishing where she lives as a fashionable location to rival the court, by the sheer lavishness of her entertainment and display: Who shall control me? I live i’ the Strand, whither few ladies come To live, and purchase more than fame. I will Be hospitable then, and spare no cost That may engage all generous report To trumpet forth my bounty and my bravery, Till the court envy and remove. She aims to set up a witty salon so that ‘The horses shall be taught, with frequent waiting / Upon my gates, to stop in their career / Toward Charingcross, spite of the coachman’s fury’ and she continues, ‘my balcony / Shall be the courtier’s idol, and more gazed at / Than all the pageantry at Temple Bar, / By country clients’(1.2.p. 20). Emerging here is the phenomenon of the ‘town’, the socio-geographical space where Celestina and her competitor, Aretina Bornwell, live both physically and culturally, a place of social elevation and sophistication of manners distinguished from both court and city, and most particularly the country. Thomas Nabbes’s Covent Garden dates from 1633 (Cockpit), soon after the laying out of Covent Garden Square and has an even stronger geographical focus, adopting the name of the new fashionable area as its title. Early in the play, two countrymen, Ralph and Dobson, arrive in London and Ralph, who has visited the city previously, identifies the place they are in, noting the change that has taken place, ‘It should be COVENT-GARDEN; but ’tis much alter’d since I was here last’ (1.1.p. 7). The sense of local excitement about the new developments is further suggested when his companion remarks that the company around them is very jolly and asks, ‘Dwell they all here abouts?’ to which Ralph responds, ‘I scarce thinke they are all of one Parish, neither doe they goe to one Church. They come onely for an evening recreation to see COVENT-GARDEN’ (1.1.p. 8). Ralph hopes that they will be living in Covent Garden so that they can now and then attend the very theatre (in Drury Lane) in which Nabbes’s play was being presented (1.1.p. 8). A little later a gentleman, Artlove and a gossip Mistress Tongall discuss the new buildings there:


Artlove: Indeed they are faire ones, and their uniformity addes much to their beauty. Tongall: And how like you the Balconee’s? They set off a Ladies person well when she presents her selfe to the view of gazing passengers. Artificiall fucations are not discern’d at distance. (1.3.p. 14) This gives some impression of the broad streets and high balconies that characterized the new area. That the generous breadth of its streets was to Londoners a novel and desirable feature is suggested by the complaint of the Parisian in First Days Entertainment at Rutland House about the narrowness of the streets in the City: Sure your Ancestors contriv’d your narrow streets in the days of Wheel-barrows, before those greater Engines, Carts, were invented. Is your Climate so hot, that as you walk you need Umbrella’s of Tiles to intercept the Sun. Or are your shambles so empty, that you are afraid to take in fresh Ayr, lest it should sharpen your stomacks? Oh the goodly Landskip of old Fish-street! which, had it not had the ill luck to be crooked, was narrow enough to have been your Founders Perspective: and where the Garrets (perhaps not for want of Architecture, but through abundance of amity) are so made, that opposite Neighbours may shake hands without stirring from home. (pp. 47–8) Another play to incorporate the area’s name in its title is Richard Brome’s The Weeding of Covent Garden. It was written slightly earlier than Nabbes’s, in 1632 (Blackfriars?) when the square was being laid out and its buildings being constructed. It does not merely use the locality for a setting but deliberately capitalizes upon public interest in the new development, as is indicated by the fact that the topographical title does not relate as strongly to the narrative substance of the play as might have been expected. The title refers to the idea announced at the beginning of the play that the justice of the peace, Cockbrain, will root out vice in the new neighbourhood, though in fact the real narrative turns on the relationship of a basically kindly but contrary father, Crosswill, and his three children, as well as the marriage quest of a number of younger characters including two of Crosswill’s children.7 However, despite the fact that the ‘weeding’ is a minor element, there is considerable consciousness in the play of the area being laid out, its architectural merits and its proposed social composition. The first scene

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is set in Covent Garden Square and in the opening lines Cockbrain remarks, ‘Ay marry sir! This is something like! These appear like buildings! Here’s architecture expressed indeed! It is a most sightly situation, and fit for gentry and nobility’ (1–3), continuing, ‘It will be glorious and yond magnificent piece, the piazza, will excel that at Venice’ (5–6) and ‘The surveyor (whatever he was) has manifested himself the master of his great art. How he has wedded strength to beauty, state to uniformity, commodiousness with perspicuity! And all as it should be!’ (17–20). The promotion of Covent Garden has political undertones involving the assertion of London against the crown; both Martin Butler (1984, pp. 151–7) and Julie Sanders (1999, pp. 51–2) have argued that the enthusiastic advocacy of scheme here can be regarded as a defence of Covent Garden against royalist objections to the project.8 However, the excitement about the development is being mouthed from the point of view of an incomer to London – which a significant number of the gentry audience would have been too, and so it articulates something of their experience. Moreover, it relates to a new sector of the capital that has none of the established associations of more historic ones, and can thus be more easily imaginatively colonized. Though the purgation of vice is not a major element of the narrative, the title suggests the anxiety that the play articulates about the potential for the spoiling of the area’s respectability and desirability for the gentry. The errant niece of Crosswill, who has decamped to London and appears on a balcony looking like a Venetian courtesan, muses, Why should not we in England use that freedom That famous courtesans have in Italy? We have the art, and know the theory To allure and catch the wandering eyes of lovers; Yea, and their hearts too. But our stricter laws Forbid the public practice (1.1.217–22) The anxiety is also present in the sustained gardening metaphor. A minor character, Clotpoll, says of a mountebank who lives in Covent Garden, ‘They say he brought the first resort into this new plantation, and sowed so much seed of knavery and cozenage here, that ’tis feared ’twill never out’ (1.1.254–7). Another implicit articulation of the concern about the social make-up of Covent Garden occurs in Davenant’s The Wits (Blackfriars, 1634), when the disgruntled countryman Sir Morglay


Thwack is so infuriated at having been arrested in London as a bawd that he disavows the ‘false, inhumane Towne’ (4.2.40) and resolves to send out letters in the country ‘to dehort / The Gentry from coming hither’ (4.2.45). Among the calumnies he intends to perpetrate are claims of six-year-long Lents, contaminated wines, razed theatres, harangues by wives, and that the new plantation in Covent Garden has been peopled with German soldiers and the denizens of the Paris suburbs, thus infected with the pox (4.2.49–64).9 In the Caroline period a noticeably greater interest emerges in the drama in places of leisure other than City taverns and ordinaries than is present in Jacobean plays, to the extent that three plays both take their titles from the names of such localities and set substantial sections of their narratives there: Shirley’s Hyde Park (Cockpit, 1632), Nabbes’s Tottenham Court (1633) and Brome’s The Sparagus Garden. However, in several other plays there are references to and the setting of sizeable sections of action in these places, which went hand in hand with an evolving idea of ‘town’ life. It was, perhaps, one product of the greater influence of the courtier poets in the theatre at this time, as these places predominantly formed part of the experience of the more privileged inhabitants of the capital. In Shirley’s 1633 masque, The Triumph of Peace, there is a likely reference to the rapid appearance of new taverns in Covent Garden. In response to one character’s reaction to the appearance of a ‘spick and span new tavern’ where ‘there was none within two minutes’ another responds, ‘No such wonder, lady, taverns are quickly up. It is but hanging out a bush at a nobleman’s door, or an alderman’s gate, and ’tis made instantly’ (301–5). The frequentation of such resorts in the drama is by no means confined to courtiers or gentry, though the cultural inflections are sometimes different when citizens are involved. Throughout, however, what is revealed is a rather self-conscious aspiration to social self-definition through conspicuous consumption cast in particularly urban terms. Hyde Park was dedicated to Henry, Earl of Holland, the keeper of the park and, as the dedication informs us, named in fulfilment of a request by the earl on the opening of the park. The fact of the request and the playwright’s response to it suggests both a marked aristocratic interest in the theatre, or its potential to shape public opinion, and the extent to which elite priorities were able to influence its product. The racecourse was formed early in the reign of Charles I when Hyde Park was opened to the public in or earlier than 1637 and the park became fashionable as a social resort of the gentry (Larwood, 1872, pp. 17–20). It was frequented for the horse and footraces held there.

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Shirley sets the two middle acts of his play in the park – 3 and 4 – and seeks to create the atmosphere of the place in the coming and going of characters, offstage races and noises, allusions to the deer, to birds in the trees (with some sound accompaniment), mention of the lodge in the park (the ‘Maurice’) and the brief appearance of certain minor characters such as runners crossing the stage, a dairymaid selling milk, a jockey and a bagpiper. There are several discussions about betting and there is flirtatious social intercourse, as well as song and dance. The park setting is fairly gratuitous to the development of the plot, though it does provide a convenient context for some relevant social exchanges to take place.10 The nature of the place allows elite citizenry, gentry and aristocracy to mingle and as such helps to illustrate one social effect of the development of the metropolis. So extensive and detailed is the representation of the resort that it is clear that the central scenes are created expressly for the purpose of bringing this pleasure ground on to the stage, and allowing especially the more privileged members of the audience the enjoyment of not only recognition but perhaps even of reliving their own experience of it. These episodes also contribute to the play’s atmosphere of urbanity since the society depicted as frequenting the park is endowed with wit and sophistication, and the strong sexual undercurrent only contributes further to this. Like Shirley’s play, Tottenham Court takes its name from a pleasure resort, this one to the north of the City and Westminster, at the start of the Hampstead road, near what is now Euston station. Like Hyde Park it was thus within walking distance and very easy coaching distance of the built-up areas of the capital’s conurbation. A flavour of the social range of its frequenters, and its reputation are indicated in the play. Two courtiers, Franke and George, are seen ‘as walking to Totenham-Covrt’ (2.1.p. 116) in the early morning, to be joined later by a citizen couple, accompanied by a gallant, making their way to the same place. The geographical situation of the resort, just north of Marylebone Park, and its fashionable following are both made clear, but the narrative attaches another aspect to the place. The milkmaid, Cicely, who lives nearby remarks, ‘The Parke here have fine conveniences, or Totenham Court’s close by. ’Tis suspected that fine Citie Ladies give away fine things to Court Lords for a Countrey Banquet there’ (1.4.p. 106). She also warns a young woman, Bellamie, whom she suspects of being a prostitute not to let her find her coupling with her customers in the hedge, ‘for if I doe I have lesse mercy then Prentices at Shrovetide’ (1.4.p. 107) referring to the customary attacks by London apprentices on brothels during Shrovetide apprentice riots. The presence of prostitutes is decried by


the Marylebone park keeper’s man, who says, ‘a Cart take them. They have infected more honest Alehouses with bad names than Cakes and Creame will ever restore againe. A wench is growne a necessary appendix to two pots at Totenham-Court’ (1.6.p. 112). Acts 3 and 4 are set in a tavern in Tottenham Court not identified by name but with rooms called the Bull’s Head and Lion, and as in Hyde Park there is extensive dramatization of the social atmosphere, including music and dancing. This provides an appropriate context for the near farcical action that is in turn an integral part of the development of the plot, but as in Hyde Park much incidental detail is present, evidently there by way of providing an imaginative outing to a place known by experience to many members of the play’s audience, and by reputation to others. However, whatever recognitive elements are present, this locality primarily serves a narrative purpose and, as in all significant representations of known places, the Tottenham Court of the play has a complex relationship with the actual geographical location. The theatrical Tottenham Court is in some senses a space in its own right, defined by a particular type of activity or identification required by the dramatic narrative. Though the illicit sexuality associated with the represented locality clearly arises from the demands of theatre, the implicitly understood relationship of the theatrical to the real locality necessarily helps attach to this reputation to the latter, whether justified or not. This indicates a way in which the theatre is instrumental in forging mental maps of the social and moral geography of London through an overlaying of its narratives on the material topography of the city. In the prologue to the third play to be named after one of London’s pleasure grounds, The Sparagus Garden,11 Brome expresses some disquiet that the audience might expect more of a presence of the garden itself than is actually delivered in the play, suggesting that the playwright had perceived an appetite for a representation of such fashionable places: The title, too, may prejudice the play, It says The Sparagus Garden; if you look To feast on that, the title spoils the book. We have yet to taste of it, which he doth lay I’ th’ midst o’ th’ journey, like a bait by th’ way. (16–20) In fact, though confined to the third act, it does occupy all eleven short scenes in this lengthy section, which render the typical activities and

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social encounters that would take place there. The garden is also advertized earlier by Moneylacks, a needy knight paid to drum up support for it, who describes it as ‘a palace of pleasure, and daily resorted and filled with lords and knights and their ladies, gentlemen and gallants with their mistresses’ (2.2.103–5). However, one of the most striking impressions given in the passages set in the garden is of the exorbitant prices charged there. The first scene has the gardener and his Dutch wife (who owns the garden) talking of their prospects for enrichment but complaining that the previous takings were only twenty-four pounds, a considerable sum at the time. Another character, Samuel Touchwood, comments later, ‘The Island of two Acres here, more profitable than twice two thousand in the fens, till the drainers have done there’ (3.3.8–9). Earlier in the scene an outraged gentleman exclaims to the gardener, ‘I protest, Master Gardener, your wife is too dear. Sixteen shillings for a dish of ’sparagus, two bottles of wine and a little sugar – I wonder how you can reckon it’ (3.2.2–4). When in the fourth scene another customer, Gilbert, enquires about the cost of the fare the serving boy addresses him in French, afterwards explaining that he took him for a Frenchman, since to ask beforehand what the cost is contrary to the ‘generous English fashion’ (1–5). In scene 10 a gentleman whose female companion has been overcharged in the garden points out to the boy serving him that though the taverns he frequents overcharge too, it is not by so much and their clients continue to visit them, which will not be the case with the garden. He also remarks that a well-known prostitute is going to set up next door, which will also harm trade, but the boy’s response is summary and arrogant (8–15). In the following scene, a countryman, Hoyden is astonished by the size of the bill, ‘’Sdaggers, three pound for a few cuckoo pintles – they were no better, I think’ (20–1), at which his companions suggest that he is falling from his gentlemanly status if he thinks anything too dear for him to eat or drink (22–4). The excessive prices are thus a constant preoccupation throughout the act and are very likely to have struck a chord with members of the audience who had visited the garden. In The Weeding of Covent Garden Brome has a character list the prices of food in the tavern – hugely inflated, and therefore likely to outrage the audiences (3.1.297–302). The prices of Covent Garden taverns were so high that in 1633 various price ceilings were imposed (Larkin and Hughes, 1973–1983, Vol. 2, nos 166, 168).12 These instances reveal how the use of local settings, vividly realized, blends audience experience with that of the dramatic characters and helps give the plays an immediacy to the original audiences that is not available to subsequent ones.


Two other extant plays are named for such London ‘outleaps’, albeit in a less specific way. Thomas Jordan’s The Walks of Islington and Hogsdon (1641) refers to two localities that, like Tottenham Court, are within walking distance of the City and have inns catering to those seeking leisured time out of the metropolis. The opening direction names a specific tavern, ‘Enter as at the Saracens-head in Islington’ and the play’s opening scene is set there. The first scene of the second is set at the King’s Head tavern in Hoxton where a citizen, Trimwell, arrives in pursuit of his wife. In this comedy the element of festivity is once again enhanced by setting scenes in pleasure resorts that would have been known to the audience either through experience or reputation and it is a play that has a lot of topographical specificity in both reference and setting. As well as action being designated in the Hole of the Wood Street Counter prison, and in the adjoining Feathers Tavern, there are references to other localities such as Redcross Street, Smithfield, the Fortune Theatre Yard, Little Wood Street, Cripplegate, Turnbull Street and Cheapside. A number of other taverns are also mentioned, associated with previous exploits of the characters. The careful grounding of the narrative in the familiar landscape of the City and especially the taverns, helps to fulfil the expectations set up by the title and the setting of early scenes in festive locations. It is a farcical romp, the geographical title of which is clearly designed to appeal to the interest of audiences in seeing aspects of their environment realized on stage. The plethora of such places recognizable through their experience helps create a mimetic representation that merges and complements the more theatricalized conception of London present in such locations as prisons, which depends more on audience imagination than experience. Another play making use of such an ‘outleap’ (albeit an unnamed one) is Ben Jonson’s The New Inn (Blackfriars, 1629) that has a more than usually improbable story of a lordly family dispersed for the slightest reason and unknowingly brought together in an inn within short coaching distance of the capital, at which a jaunt has been arranged by Londoners coming out for a leisured excursion. One curious element in The New Inn is the revelation that one of the ‘ladies’ of the party is in reality the wife of a London tailor who, it is revealed, dresses his wife in clothes made for his clients and enacts a fantasy of her being a countess, taking her to places of resort outside of London in a hired coach – Romford, Croydon, Hounslow or Barnet – for sex. He has by sheer misfortune chosen this inn in Barnet that his customer is visiting as well, and all is discovered (4.3.63–73). This raises the question of

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what social groups frequent these places and with what implications. A social mix of wealthy citizens and courtiers is normally represented as unremarkable, and this is certainly the case in Tottenham Court where these categories are shown socializing together. In The Sparagus Garden the citizen’s wife, Mistress Brittleware, expresses a desire for novel experiences in anticipation of falling pregnant, including to be taken in a sedan chair (a new introduction in London) to see the great bed of Ware in Hertfordshire, also commonly a place of assignation (2.2.39–41), to see the ‘new ship’ (the Charles being built in Woolwich, and a tourist attraction in 1636), to go to the top of St Paul’s steeple when completed (construction having begun in 1631) and to see a play, specifically The Knight of the Burning Pestle that was revived by Queen Henrietta’s Men at the Cockpit in 1635–1666 (2.2.43–7), while Brittleware also recalls that his wife longed during the previous winter (1634–1635) ‘to ride on one of the dromedaries over the Thames’ (2.2.55–6). Their visit to the Sparagus Garden might equally be seen in somewhat touristic terms, rather than a regular and natural recreational pursuit as, arguably, it is to gallants and courtiers (something Brome seeks strongly to stress in the curious scene featuring three ‘Graces of the Court’, ladies accompanying courtiers that visit the garden in 3.5). However, in Mistress Brittleware’s case it is also an aspirational experience, the frequentation of such places helping to enhance her social position. Another aspiring character, Tim Hoyden the countryman newly arrived in London, is taken by the gallants who are his new ‘friends’ to the Sparagus Garden to complete his education as a gentleman (3.7).13 As Matthew Steggle has pointed out, in this period asparagus itself, recently introduced into England, was really only cultivated around London, so it was ‘only an urban food’ (2004, p. 78). The garden was thus effective at defining status not only in terms of rank, but membership of metropolitan society. The Caroline plays also continue the Jacobean drama’s practice of associating such resorts with sexual, or at least amatory activity. In Brome’s The New Academy (c. 1635), the rakish Valentine is wooing the city wife Hannah Camelion, and he proposes, When shall we walk to Totnam? or crosse o’re The water, or take Coach to Kensington Or Paddington; or to some one or other O’th’City out-leaps for an afternoon. (2.1.p. 28)


And in another Brome play A Mad Couple Well Matched (Cockpit, 1639), when the young Lady Thrivewell agrees to go with her husband’s nephew, the dissolute gallant Careless, he suggests ‘Any whither, to Islington, Newington, Padington, Kensington, or any of the City outleaps (I know t’em all) for a spurt and back againe’ (2.2.253–5). The vintner Squirrel in Nabbes’s The Bride (Cockpit, 1638) sums up the villainous Raven, as ‘some hide-bound student, that proportions his expense by his pension; and wencheth at Tottenham court for stewed prunes and cheescakes’ (2.4.p. 31) and in Brome’s The Northern Lass (Globe/Blackfriars, 1629), when the rich widow Mistress Fitchow is told that the coach of Sir Philip Luckless is waiting to take her out, she thinks he might be inviting her ‘into the ayre of Hideparke or Maribone’ (2.1.8–9). It is even a matter of surprise to a character in The Sparagus Garden, Gilbert, when he sees courtiers arriving with their own wives at the garden and he exclaims, ‘What a virtuous honest age this is!’ (3.5.4). However, it is indicative of the altered imperatives of Caroline drama that these recreation grounds are not represented so exclusively in terms of sexual exploits as they are in the Jacobean plays. The Sparagus Garden is described as ‘a palace of pleasure, and daily resorted and filled with lords and knights, and their ladies, gentlemen and gallants with their mistresses’ (2.2.103–5). It is rather the further flung places that tend to continue to have more salacious associations, while the pleasure grounds nearer to hand are beginning to take on the broader role of fashionable meeting places for town society. This may have some basis in fact, since the more distant localities afforded more anonymity, but it may equally be the case that their relative remoteness rendered this imaginative conception of their function theatrically more convenient. Another important location for the dramatic representation of London life in this period is the Exchange. The New Exchange can be positioned alongside places such as the pleasure gardens as a location for elite displays of manners. The fact both that the Exchange was seen in this light alongside the gardens and parks, and that the dramatic representation of all these locations reflected actual practice is suggested by a courtesy text entitled The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence published in 1658 by Edward Phillips and addressed to ‘the Youthful Gentry’. Subtitled The Arts of Wooing and Complementing As they are manag’d in the Spring Garden, Hide Park, the New Exchange, and other eminent places, it asserts, the Court and such eminent places as Hide Park, the Spring Garden, and the New Exchange and set Meetings at Balls, are esteemed the

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fittest Schools of Ceremony and Complement; where the most select, as also the newest fashions are alwayes in request; where if discretion is not wanting in the Courtier, he will not fail to conform himself to the mode and condition of the place that he is to exercise his Genius in. For Complements do not suit with all places, nor with all sorts of men; it ill beseems a Mechanick to play the Orator; that urbanity which becomes a Citizen would relish of too much curiosity in a Countrey-man; and that Complement which gives proper grace to a Courtier, would cause derision if presented by a Merchant or Factor. (fol. A3v–43) In the drama reference to the ‘Exchange’ was to either of two locations. The New Exchange had opened in 1609 in the Strand, supplementing Gresham’s sixteenth-century Royal Exchange in the provision of both a fashionable meeting space and opportunities for the acquisition of luxury goods.14 It was opened by the king, who named it ‘Britain’s Burse’ though it was usually called the ‘New Exchange’. It was not initially as successful as hoped, but with the increasing desirability of the Strand as a residential location it had become a fashionable place to meet and be seen, especially for women. In the drama it is usually women with which conspicuous consumption, especially that connected with the Exchange is associated. In earlier plays, both Elizabethan and Jacobean, the Exchange had been used or referred to as a place of business as well as for shopping and social encounter. In Caroline drama it is almost exclusively the latter purpose with which it is associated, probably mostly due to the changed social priorities of the theatre.15 In the drama it is not always indicated which Exchange is meant when it is mentioned. Any specificity in this regard is rendered less necessary by the fact that ‘the Exchange’ is often almost more conceptual than anything else as part of a recurrent pattern or formula of status that involves the visiting of key locations in the capital, the acquisition and consumption of particular types of food, clothing and other goods, conspicuous modes of transport and other trappings such as attendants. In Massinger’s The City Madam (Globe/Blacfriars, 1632), Shavem, the mistress of Young Goldwire, though he is a relatively free-spending apprentice, complains that he does not manage to maintain her in sufficient style: I know not what a coach is, To hurry me to the Burse, or Old Exchange, The Neathouse for musk-melons, and the gardens


Where we traffic for asparagus, are to me In the other world. (3.1.12–16) Later they set about using her charms to fleece a young heir and Goldwire promises Shavem that if they are successful: Thou shalt have thy proper and bald-headed coachman; Thy tailor, and embroiderer shall kneel To thee their idol. Cheapside and the Exchange Shall court thy custom (4.2.23–6) In Tottenham Court the courtier, Frank, promises the young woman, Cicely, whom he is pursuing, ‘Th’ Exchange shall be thy Wardrobe to supply / Thy will with choyce of dressings’ (2.6.p. 132) and the ‘fantastic gallant’ Lorece in Aston Cokayne’s The Obstinate Lady (1639) when wooing the rich widow, Vandona, offers, ‘I at any time will carry you to a play, either to the Blackfriars or Cockpit. And you shall go to the Exchange when you will, and have as much money as you please to lay out’ (3.2.98–101). Two different aspects of what the Exchange can supply are brought into play in Shirley’s The Witty Fair One (Cockpit, 1628) when a character called Worthy asks what news there is, and his friend Aimwell replies, ‘We hear none; you visit the Exchange, sir; pray furnish us’ (2.2.p. 304), and when a young woman, Violetta remarks, ‘I want some trifles, the Exchange will furnish me’ (4.2.p. 332). In Abraham Cowley’s The Guardian (acted at Trinity College in 1641), Aurelia, a young woman who is the daughter of the guardian of the title, announces that she wants to marry a gallant called Puny, who imagines himself a wit, and when the poetaster Dogrel, to whom she is talking is disparaging about him, she justifies her choice: But he’s rich, Dogrel, and will be wise enough; when I have got ’um knighted, then I shall be a Lady, Dogrel; have a dozen of French-Taylors, Doctors, Jewellers, Perfumers, Tyre-women, to sit in consultation every morning, how I shall be drest up to play at Gleek, or dance, or see a Comedy, or go to the Exchange i’ the afternoon . Then keep my close and open Coaches, my yellow sattin Pages, Monkies, and women or (as they call ’um) creatures. (3.1.fol. C2r)

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Curiously, especially in view of the fact that shops are more commonly featured in both Jacobean and Restoration drama, there are few scenes in Caroline drama actually set in the Exchange or in shops at all.16 One play that might include the Exchange (New or Old) as a setting is A Mad Couple Well Matched, in which one full and part of another scene are set in the Salewares’ shop (2.1 and 3.1). The first starts with the shopkeeper, Mistress Saleware, selling some fabric to her customer, Lady Thrivewell. Not only is the transaction enacted in full, including the serving of beer during it, but the luxuriousness of the product is described in detail. The shop is not explicitly identified in the play as being located in either Exchange, but Alicia Saleware distinguishes it from other mercantile locations in London when she tells Lady Thrivewell, ‘All Cheape-side, and Lombard-street, Madam, could not have furnish’d you with a more compleat bargaine’ (2.1.1–3). Later, Lady Thrivewell invites her nephew Careless to go with her to the Exchange to buy some goods to take to the country (2.2.277–9) and this may suggest that her earlier visit was to this locality as well. A stage direction denoting the same shop at 3.1.584, The Shop discover’d, Alicia, and Bellamy indicates that there was some visual realization of it on stage. The only fully explicit setting of dramatic action in the (New) Exchange is to be found in another of Brome’s plays, The New Academy, alternatively entitled The New Exchange in which Act 2 Scene 1 is set in the Camelions’ shop in the New Exchange, where an attempt at seduction but no commercial trade is depicted. In the social formulae of Caroline theatre, the Exchange becomes very much part of the pattern of places in London, like the pleasure gardens, defining a quality of life that is both leisured and sophisticated. It, perhaps more than any other urban locality, represents the way the topography of the metropolis intervenes in traditional patterns of social distinction. Like the pleasure gardens, it is a place where people may gather freely but nevertheless where economic barriers ensure a form of selectivity and exclusivity. Wealthy citizens (and even successful whores) have as much right there as courtiers or other gentry, and the increasing emphasis on personal display in the perceptions of rank endows it with considerable importance as a place both where the trappings of elite identity may be acquired, and where one’s very presence helps to define one as a member of a leisured class. As such it is an especially metropolitan phenomenon, the combination of luxury and the demands of the marketplace overriding any of the more traditional markers of status.


The consumption of luxury goods is part of an almost formulaic style of elite urban life that involves the frequenting of particular locations around London where such consumption can be enjoyed and displayed, such as the theatre and the Exchange. An additional theatrical frisson is achieved by the addition of the element of sexuality to such places, as with the pleasure gardens. The tradition theme of the sexual availability of city wives that had become something of a theatrical convention gives the Exchange a sexual dimension as well in this play. Like Mistress Saleware in A Mad Couple Well Matched, Hannah Camelion is seen not only as the purveyor of commodities, but a potential sexual commodity herself, to the extent that she exhorts her husband to be more, ‘watchful o’re my reputation’ so as to decline mens leud attempts And not throw me upon opportunities To draw them on; as if I were a thing Set out as in your shop, for common sale’ (2.1.p. 23) Though the pleasure grounds and to a lesser extent the Exchanges have some prominence in its representation of London, Caroline drama manifests a broader interest in the topography of the capital’s conurbation and makes considerable use of it in its narratives. One such play is Brome’s The City Wit (c. 1630), which is of interest for the fact of its being set not in the West End, but principally in the City, with one scene in the court. Hence it unites two socio-geographical extremities of London, while largely avoiding focus on the third such dimension – the West End gentry – who can be seen as having connections with both ends of this spectrum.17 The scene most clearly set at court is 3.4, in the presence chamber of a palace that, though not named, is likely to have been understood as Whitehall since Sneakup, the citizen who finds himself there, is not shown as having travelled any great distance from the City to have got there. There are no real interactions between court and City in this episode, however, since the supposed court official with whom he deals is a shopkeeper, Crasy, and the episode is just set up to trick the crooked Sneakup into parting with ill-gotten jewels. The ruse works particularly because of his geographical displacement. In Sneakup’s own milieu he is too wily to be gulled, but his removal from it and resultant discomfiture is what makes him vulnerable (3.2.p. 323). The interconnections between court and City that do exist include the

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fact that Sneakup’s son has office at court, purchased by his father. In the rest of the play, the City is strongly realized in allusions. For instance Josina, Crasy’s wife, at one point sends her maid to request help from neighbours: Go your wayes to Mistress Parmisan, the Cheesmongers Wife in old Fishstreet, and commend me to her; and intreat her to pray Mistresse Collifloore the Hearb-woman in the Old Change that she will desire Mistris Piccadell in Bow-lane, in any hand to beseech the good old dry Nurse mother, et cetera, shee knows where, to provide me an honest, handsome, secret young man; that can write, and read written hand. (1.1.pp. 288–9) This not only localizes her in terms of habitation and knowledge, but intimates a strong network of support in her locality. Geographical associations also form the basis of joking banter, as when the boy Crack tells of ‘a rich young Cornish Widdow [Crasy’s apprentice Jeremy in disguise]; though she was borne in Clearken-well; and was never halfe a dayes Journey from Bride well in her life’ (2.2.p. 304), and when Crasy says to the boy that he is ‘a brave Lad, and in the high way of preferment’, he replies, referring to the path to the gallows, ‘Not the high Holborne way I hope Sir’ (3.1.p. 319). A sense of allegiance to not just the social but also to the material environment of the capital is also evident in the drama, often used to express the urban credentials of characters. In Shirley’s The Ball (Cockpit, 1632), on the ‘return’ to London of the pretended traveller Jack Freshwater, the opportunity is taken to make several observations on aspects of the city with which he has supposedly lost familiarity, and two servants tell him what has happened there in his absence. One says, ‘We have little alteration since thou went’st, the same news are in fashion, only gentlemen are fain to ramble, and stumble for their flesh, since the breach on Bank-side’ (3.3.p. 44) probably referring to the shutting the brothel, Holland’s Leaguer on the south bank in 1631–1632, forcing the prostitutes to operate in the fields, or to the 1630 outbreak of the plague in Southwark that occasioned the closure of the theatres and other entertainments (Burford, 1976, pp. 177–8). He mentions problems with St Paul’s, ‘a little sick of the stone; she voids some every day, but she is now in physic, and may in time recover’ probably alluding to the second attempt by Archbishop Laud, first begun in 1628, to restore the fabric of the cathedral, and he says of the Exchange that it stands, ‘Longer than a church; there is no fear,


while the merchants have faith.’ If interest in London’s built structures is implied in these comments, pride in the city is expressed when a gentlewoman, Lady Honoria, asks Freshwater about his supposed travels: Honoria: Have you seen a fairer city than London? Freshwater: London is nothing. Honoria: How! nothing? Freshwater: To what it will be a hundred years hence. (5.1.p. 78) Brome’s The Jovial Crew (Cockpit, 1941) is set in the country and centred on a group of young people. When they are trying to decide on how to spend their time, one of the young gentlemen suggests, ‘Shall we make a fling to London, and see how the spring appears there in the Spring Garden; and in Hyde Park, to see the races, horse and foot; to hear the jockeys crack; and see the Adamites run naked afore the ladies?’ (2.1.69–73). When another member of the party replies, ‘We have seen all already there, as well as they, last year’ (2.1.74–5) he retorts, ‘But there ha’ been new plays since’ (2.1.76). Nonetheless, London appears to have lost its charms in this play, which has been regarded as something of a paean to country life. In the unsettled times leading to the Civil War, the play presents to Londoners a suggestion of disenchantment with the attractions of their city, as part of a generally troubled sense underlying the play. There is some historical irony that the one area of London’s activities that continues to offer novelty and attraction in this exchange is the theatre, given that the play was staged the year before the closure of the theatres. The ways in which characters are inserted into their urban environment, or interact with it, sometimes plays a significant part in defining them. Too close a familiarity with the urban terrain can be revealing of shiftiness and untrustworthiness, something particularly true of the sort of desperate or wheeler-dealing characters found more commonly in Jacobean drama. In Killigrew’s The Parson’s Wedding (Globe/Blackfriars, 1641) the Captain recounts first finding the Parson in poverty and begging on the streets, when he would ‘dive at Westminster like a Dabchick, and rise again at Templegate’ (1.1.p. 5). In Cowley’s The Guardian Captain Blade comments on Cutter’s itinerant lifestyle by way of suggesting his roguishness saying that he changed his name and lodging ‘as often as a whore’:

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Your last Gests were these: From a Water-mans house at the Banks side, (marry you stay’d there but a small while, because the fellow was jealous of his wife) passing o’er like great King Xerxes in a Sculler, you arriv’d at a Chandlers house in Thames-street, and there took up your lodging. The day before you should have paid, you walkt abroad; and were seen no more; for ever after the smell of the place offended you. Next, you appear’d at an Ale-house i’th’Covent-Garden, like a Duck that dives at one end of the pond, but rises unexpectedly at the other. He goes on to list lodgings at a Shoemaker’s, a basket-maker’s, the Counter and a barber’s (1.3.fol. A4r). The pond metaphor in both these cases evokes the idea of an urban fabric with unknowable murky depths, and also suggests the ways in which London dubiously makes available both visibility and invisibility. In Glapthorne’s The Hollander (Cockpit, 1636), Sconce, the Hollander, reads a ‘decree’ of Fortresse, a Knight of the Twibill, which styles him, ‘Count Freese, gray Felt, and mony-lacke, Duke of Turnbull, Bloomesbury, and Rotten Row, Lord paramount of all Garden-Alleyes, Gun Ally and Rosemary Lane’ (3.1.fol. E3v), associating him not only with inferior fabrics but a range of infamous haunts around London. Similarly, the rakish Slightall in Robert Davenport’s A New Trick to Cheat the Devil (Cockpit, c. 1625) gives an insight into his own character by betraying an extensive familiarity with the places where vice is on offer in London when instructing his man Roger to find him a wench for the night: Search all the Allyes, Spittle, or Pickt-hatch, Turnball, the Banke side, or the Minories, White Fryers, St Peters Street and Mutton Lane, So thou canst find one to disgrace her sexe (1.2.p. 204) In the association of disreputableness with a detailed knowledge of the byways of London on the part of characters, there is a curious persistence of the convention dating back to pre-commercial drama in which Vice figures are endowed with ready familiarity with geography by way of signalling their worldliness. Thus what appears to be a mimetic element recalling the recognizable geography of the city may have much more to do with a literary or theatricalized approach to envisioning London. This association is even used by characters themselves. In Brome’s The English Moor (Salisbury Court, 1637) people tormenting the old usurer


Quicksands about his supposedly runaway wife report to him that they have seen her at various taverns around London, ‘At Bridgfoot, Bear, the Tunnes, the Cats, the Squirels’ (4.2.p. 52), both suggesting her elusiveness and implying potential cuckoldry. Rather similarly in The Guardian, Lucia, the ward to Captain Blade, the guardian of the title, is bated by her rejected suitors Puny, Doggerel and Cutter about her prospective poverty on the loss of the dowry that was dependent on her acquiescing in her guardian’s choice of husband for her, and they imaginatively place her in various public or downmarket locations in London as having been forced to become either a whore or cake-seller: Doggerel: Where do you set up? Nay we are true strikers. What, is’t in Covent Garden? Cutter: Or do you renew the decay’d credit of Turnbal-street? Puny: Or honour the Mill-bank at Westminster. Doggerel: Or flee to Wapping, and engross the Sailors. Cutter: Or Moor-fields, and sell cakes. Cutter concludes, ‘we shall finde you at the Play house i’the six-peny room sometimes’ (4.2.fol. D2v). All these instances suggest a promiscuity in the variety of London’s topography that can be reconceived in moral or social terms as representing fragmentation and the loss of legitimacy. There is also an interplay between the way the drama draws on its audiences’ awareness of the implications of the geographical allusions, and conversely reinforces the associations it attaches to the places cited, thus in some measure contributing to the theatricalization of the actual urban environment. The Caroline drama’s representation of London’s geographical diversity is also sometimes present in language usage and modes of speech, with particular application to the speech of the City. An example is an exchange in The City Match between a former Inns of Court student Plotwell, forced by his father’s financial ruin to work for his merchant uncle, and two of his former fellow students at the Inns. They mockingly ask him about his new employment and he replies, Well my conceipted Orient friends, bright Offsprings Oth’female silk worme, and Taylor male I deny not But you look well in your unpaid for Glory. That in these colours you let out the Strand, And adorne Fleet-street. That you may laugh at me

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Poore Working-day oth’City, like two Festivals Escapt out of the Almanacke. One of them, Newcut, sneers, ‘Sirrah Bright, / Didst look to heare such language beyond Ludgate?’ and Bright replies, ‘I thought all with had ended at Fleet-bridge. / But wit that goes oth’the score, that may extend / If’t be a Courtiers wit into Cheapside’ (1.4.p. 7). Earlier in the play when Plotwell replies to a question by his uncle in a way he does not understand, Warehouse pulls him up: Nay tell me your minde plainely Ith’ City tongue. I’de have you speake like Cypher. [his factor] I doe not like queint figures, they doe smell Too much o’th’Innes of Court (1.3.pp. 3–4) This exemplifies again the territorialization of language noted by Deleuze and Guattari, and especially by Lefebvre.18 But whereas roaring or quarrelsome language in some Jacobean constitutes what is denoted as a London mode of speech, here speech is used to evoke the complexity and polymorphism of the culture within London, attached to its various localities.19 The territorial sectors of London thus have a dynamic role to play in the ways in which characters are constructed in Caroline drama. Alongside the more long-standing practice of defining some figures morally through association with places of particular reputation, the emergence of certain residential localities as fashionable areas and certain places of resort as elite was one obvious way in which the urban fabric could create social meaning. Another tradition dating back to the interludes, of allowing detailed geographical knowledge on the part of characters to imply a dubious worldliness, continues into this period. But it is now supplemented by the representation of characters actively seeking to acquire knowledge of and immersion in the urban environment for the purposes of social ascendancy. The frequentation of certain fashionable localities also becomes something of a social imperative. The degree to which geography and social identity are intertwined in the drama is, however, most telling in the instances of the association of forms of language and areas of London. It is possibly here in which the notion of the modern metropolis characterized by diversity within a limited physical space is most apparent.


Contrasting cultures: City, ‘town’ and country The Praeludium to Thomas Goffe’s The Careless Shepherdess (1638) is a brief inductive sequence set in the playhouse in which the play itself is to be performed, the Salisbury Court, and involves four audience members of diverse social provenance. The first is a citizen, Thrift, who haggles with the doorkeeper over the price of admission, and clearly perceives the play as a trade commodity. When a courtier, Spruce, next enters the satirical focus is shifted to his social group, the citizen remarking that ‘When you / Do buy of us, you of all Gentlemen / Have still the cheapest penyworths’ (fol. B1v). An Inns of Court man, Spark, then comes in and there is an immediate rapport between him and the courtier, Spark telling him: Faith Sir fasting night, and I did chuse Rather to spend my money at a Play, Then at the Ordnary: I now esteem My choice as policy, since ’tis my fortune To sit neer you: If the Play should prove dull Your company will satisfie my ears. (fol. B2r) Finally a country gentleman, Landlord, arrives and he clearly feels that he belongs with the courtier and Innsman, as he greets them: God save you Gentlemen, ’tis my ambition To occupy a place neer you: there are None that be worthy of my company In any room beneath the twelve peny. (fol. B2r) Spark, however, rounds on him and retorts witheringly: Dare you presume to censure Poetry? ’Tis the Prerogative of the wits in Town, ’Cause you have read perhaps a Statute-Book, And been High-Constable, do y’ think you know The Laws of Comedy and Tragedy? (fol. B2r–v)

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He continues by making disparaging reference to his association with rural activity: Prethee, what kinde of Beast is Helicon? You may have skill in Horse and Sheep, and yet Know neither Pegasus, nor Pastorals. Alas you’re ignorant of any stile But what stands in a hedge (fol. B2v) The courtier then turns to the citizen and addresses him in the same vein, ‘And you too would usurp Apollo’s Chair, / As if th’ Exchange did ever breed a wit’ (fol. B2v), going on to suggest that his involvement in trade makes him unsuitable as a critic and judge of theatre. The country gentleman and citizen both proceed to give an indication of their tastes in drama, effectively betraying their lack of sophistication in this regard. The passage discloses the considerable divergences that had developed between the fare of the amphitheatre playhouses and the private theatres, and the citizen finally resolves: I will hasten to the money Box, And take my shilling out again, for now I have considered that it is too much; I’le go to th’ Bull, or Fortune, and there see A Play for two pense, with a Jig to boot. (fol. B4v) But it also suggests that links are being forged by members of different elite groups on the basis of a shared urban culture, the lack of such sharing creating distinctions between members of similar strata who could otherwise be expected to have made common cause. Spark and Spruce decide to ‘Retire into some private room’ (fol. B4v) and Landlord who, though having been placed in the same category as Thrift by these two, cannot see himself in these terms and says desperately, ‘I’le follow them, though’t be into a Box’ (fol. B4v). Not only is the fact of the metropolis and the way in which it has created a particular culture of consumption a significant factor in the social relations here, but these are defined in terms of a response to an institution that had become predominantly associated with life in the capital by the seventeenth century.


The increased presence in the drama of fashionable localities signals the Caroline theatre’s shift towards a stronger interest in representing modish society, and the emergence of the notion of the ‘town’. Jonson had begun to engage with this satirically in Epicene, but it now becomes more fully developed and, as Martin Butler has argued, this was in response to particular historical circumstances: when the city comedies of the 1630s took the rise of the town for their subject they were addressing themselves to political issues and ones which were newly becoming controversial. The gentry’s acquirement of selfconsciousness as an autonomous group with its own values, distinct from the court and potentially in tension with it, implies a corresponding growth in political consciousness and confidence . The plays which specifically consider the problems raised by the growth of the town [Hyde Park to Constant Maid] all belong to the five years following Charles’s initiation of his campaign against the town; it would appear that the issues they are concerned with suddenly became pressing. (1984, p. 142) The ‘town’ thus had a specific social meaning: the established gentry who defined themselves somewhat in distinction to the court on the one hand, and to the wealthy merchant class of the City on the other. This complicates the idea of metropolitan identity, and certainly the urban gentry’s relationship to the country, which is not presented in terms of a straightforward contrast to and foil for urban life.20 Nonetheless, in the context of the flow of large numbers of gentry to London it is clear that the notion of the distinctness of the texture of London life was continuing to develop and, despite differences between them, made similar demands in various ways on all three elite groups, and even the non-elite population of the capital. These were products of the material and social circumstances of life in a large and diverse conurbation, both its challenges and opportunities, the principal dimensions of these being competition and individualism, consumption and knowledge. Jacobean plays are more inclined to deal with naked corruption, exploitation and downright dishonesty, often presenting the urban world fairly blatantly as a jungle. Caroline comic drama tends largely to confine its gaze to the sophisticated world of the privileged in the metropolis and the manners and values of the ‘town’.21 Though the shift of values attending this is not represented as unproblematic and there is some nostalgia for

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the more generous and less harshly competitive nature of country life, the demands of the metropolitan environment are not to be avoided. Though the world of London may be presented in the Caroline drama as having a more consistently genteel gloss, it is ultimately no less competitive and challenging, as is suggested in the account given Old Barnacle, a rich citizen in Shirley’s The Gamester (Cockpit, 1635), of the predatory relationship between citizens and courtiers in the capital: we that had Our breeding from a trade, cits, as you call us, Though we hate gentlemen ourselves, yet are Ambitious to make our children gentlemen: In three generations they return again. We for our children purchase land; they brave it I’ the country; beget children, and they sell, Grow poor, and send their sons up to be prentices. There is a whirl in fate: the courtiers make Us cuckolds; mark! we wriggle into their Estates; poverty makes their children citizens; Our sons cuckold them: a circular justice! (1.1.p. 201) Caroline drama continues themes that have their genesis in Jacobean plays, but develops them more fully in the context of the evolving elite culture of the metropolis. The pursuit or achievement of lucrative marriages on the part of young men in Jacobean drama (mostly set in the City), involves the primary goal of the enhancement of their financial position.22 In the altered social contexts of Caroline drama the theme of the pursuit of good marriages is not only more prominent, but involves also the establishment or confirmation of status appropriate to the level of wit and sophistication of the individuals concerned, thus satisfying a social imperative beyond the merely material. This subtle but important shift reflects, perhaps, the greater sway of elite audiences at this time, as well as a writing culture influenced by the increased presence of more socially elevated playwrights. Examples of the outcomes of competitive wooing resulting in the rewarding of witty suitors with suitable matches occur in a range of Shirley’s plays, with two in particular meriting mention. In The Witty Fair One two wealthy women are pursued by two suitors apiece and it is the witty gallants


who gain them in the end, rather than their more foolish but wealthier rivals. The women are also people of wit and so the pairings represent an equivalence of sophistication rather than straightforwardly of wealth. The gallants also earn their right to the benefits of wealth through their wit. One of the foolish suitors Sir Nicholas Treedle, ends up marrying a chambermaid by mistake, his lack of the wit appropriate to elite urban life finding a corollary in his wife’s demeaned social status. A few years after this Shirley presents another multiple wooing story in Changes or Love in a Maze (Salisbury Court, 1632) that involves the complications surrounding the courting of three young women with both beauty and social standing, all of whom are eventually matched to witty gentlemen. The failed suitors are two fools, a poetaster called Caperwit who remains unmatched and a country knight, Sir Gervase Simple, who is tricked into a false marriage. The same theme is present in Glapthorne’s Wit in a Constable, a play that deals in rather diverse ways with the issue of wit, manners and rank in the urban world. The wealthy Alderman Covet wants to marry off his niece and daughter, both spirited young women of wit and cultivation. Though socially aspiring, Covet is a very much a citizen in manners and values rather than a member of the beau monde, at one point revealing his tastes to be (rather like those of the grocer in Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle) somewhat crude and obsessed with the City, ‘I never lik’d a Song, unlesse the Ballad / Oth’ famous London Prentice, or the building / Of Britaines Burse’ (3.1.fol. E4r). Despite this, he places considerable value on social position and a form of sophistication, in that he favours as suitors to the young women the foolish country knight Sir Timothy Shallow-wit and the pretentious but inane scholar Jeremy Hold-fast. Glapthorne positions his favoured characters, the two young women, Clare and Grace and their own preferred suitors, the witty gentlemen Thorowgood and Valentine, at some distance from both Covet’s City obsessions and the country loyalties of Shallow-wit. Though recently come down from the university, Hold-fast is, however, endeared to Covet by his desire to embrace the preferments of the City. His man, Tristram, who had previously talked disparagingly about ‘country pedants’ and their poor earnings, advises his master that with the benefit of his education:

you may arrive to be the City Poet, And send the little moysture of your braine To grace a Lord Maiors festivall with showes,

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Alluding to his trade, or to the company Of which he’s free, these are the best preferments That can attend your learning. (1.1.fol. B1v) Thorowgood, despite not being favoured by Covet, manages to get access to Clare by pretending to be Hold-fast, and he manages both to impress Covet and mock his City pride through covert irony by claiming that by his learning he will convert the Standard in Cheapside to Hercules’s pillars, make the conduit run with wine, make Smithfield into a Roman circus or Greek hippodrome and provide all citizens with funeral elegies (2.fol. D1v). The young women themselves have a decidedly disparaging attitude to both the City and the country. When she suspects that Covet may be intending to match her to the erstwhile foreman of his shop and now his cash-keeper, his daughter Grace remarks that he is Fit onely for deare Nan, his schoole-fellow A Grocers daughter, borne in Bread-street, with Whom he has used to go to Pimblico, And spend ten groats in Cakes and Christian Ale (2.fol. C2r) Later Covet’s niece, Clare, when stipulating her own and Grace’s conditions for marriage to Hold-fast and Shallow-wit (who would take them to live in the country), demands that she and her cousin should, ‘When we please have our faire coach and horses / To carry us up to London to aske counsel of / Our mothers and our gossips how to abuse you’ (4.fol. F4r). Clare and Grace anticipate a wide range of Restoration female characters in their firm cleaving to London and rejection of the country, though they do not make as much about the freedom that London affords women as their Restoration counterparts. In their wit, self-possession and scorn of the alternatives on offer to them, they identify themselves as being very much part of the new gentry metropolitan world of London. As such they prove themselves to be far more suitable as matches for the urbane gentlemen Thorowgood and Valentine, in their exchanges with whom they even reveal early elements of the ‘gay couple’ trope found more fully in Restoration drama. Valentine teasingly alleges of Grace (whom he is wooing) and Clare, who have expressed scorn


about country pastimes, that they prefer the City pursuits of drinking wine in Islington and Green Goose Fair, that they dream of being in bed with tradesmen from London Stone, that they will marry tradesmen, drive them to Ludgate and end up in Bridewell themselves (2.fol. D2v–3r). Later, when wooing Grace, he demands that if they marry You here shall promise Mistris, to become A most obedient wife, and not according To th’ancient tricke inherent in the City, Raile till you be my Master (3.fol. E3r) The witty couples inevitably end up marrying, while the wily City constable, Busy, tricks Hold-fast and Sir Timothy into marrying his daughters instead. In Nabbes’s Covent Garden the idea of wit as naturally attached to the social milieu of London, not even perhaps being confined to the socially or economically elevated, is suggested by Ralph, when he tells Dobson, his fellow servant: Tut, man: I liv’d in London before now; was servant to one that converst much with the wits and kept an Academie of Musicke. I tell thee, Dobson, I have pickt up more learning among the crummes of a broken bisket, after one of their meetings at a Taverne, then would make twenty Ballad-makers commence Poetasters; and with the over-plus indoctrinate ten Iustices Clerks, and an under-Sheriffe. (4.4.p. 69)23 In The Wits Davenant offers a view of London as a place in which it is dangerous for inappropriately skilled country people to attempt to establish themselves or to try to make their mark, and it therefore contributes to the country–city dichotomy that was to become so strong in Restoration comedy.24 Two countrymen, the elder Pallatine and his friend Sir Morglay Thwack come up to town to try to live on their wits, but Pallatine is tricked by his wily younger sibling who is resident there, and ends up getting into trouble. It partly echoes the theme of Fletcher’s 1614 play Wit Without Money that also has a countryman coming to London to try to live on his wits, but Pallatine and Thwack are rather more ambitious and vaunting about their project, Sir Morglay asserting

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that, before they return to the country they wish, from the treasure amassed through their wit, to: Leave heere some Monument to speake our Fame. I have a strong mind to reedifie The decayes of Fleet-Ditch, from whence I heare The roaring Vestals late are fled, through heat Of persecution. (1.2.87–91) The elder Pallatine claims that they will, ‘So live, that Usurers / Shall call their Moneys in, remove their Banke / T’Ordinaries, Spring-garden and Hide-parke’ (2.1.93–5), while Thwack boasts, ‘I will match my Lord Maiors horse, make Iockeys / Of his Hench-boyes, and run ’em through Cheap-side’ (1.2.100–1). Curiously, it is to the commercial world of the City that their ambitions are addressed, rather than that of the gentry in the fashionable West End (possibly a measure of their foolishness). The younger Pallatine, who has lived in London for a while, warns his brother and Sir Morglay that ‘The Citty (take’t on my experiment) / Will not be gull’d!’ (1.2.158–9). As countrymen the elder Pallatine and Thwack also show a naïve lack of understanding about what the metropolis has to offer. When he greets them on their arrival, the younger Pallatine offers a fairly hard-headed view of what they might expect, as he expresses surprise to find them ‘’Mongst so much smoke, disease, Law, and noyse!’ (1.2.33). However, the elder Pallatine sees it as a paradise of sensuality: O to live here i’th faire Metropolis Of our great Isle, a free Inheritor Of ev’ry modest, or voluptuous wish, Thy young desires can breathe, and not oblieg’d To’th Plough-mans toyles, or lazie Reapers swet (4.1.85–9) Though the expectations of these two countrymen are presented as ridiculously exaggerated, the idea of life in London – especially that of the economic elite in all its sectors – as involving the consumption of a wide range of luxury goods and services, is something that they might have been able to glean from visits to the theatre, since it is so strongly a feature of its representation there. In The Sparagus Garden


the Londoners Moneylacks and his associates play upon this perception of London life in their fleecing of the countryman Hoyden, determined to become a London gallant, Moneylacks telling him, ‘I commend you that you seek reason. It must be done by meats and drinks of costly price: muscatel caudles, jellies, and cock-broths. You shall eat nothing but shrimp porridge for a fortnight, and now and then a pheasant’s egg souped with a peacock’s feather. Aye, that must be the diet’ (2.3.107–11). Later Hoyden remarks, ‘’Slid I dare be sworn, as I am almost a gentleman, that every bite and every spoonful that I have swallowed these ten days has cost me ten shillings at least’ (3.7.15–18). Consumption in Jacobean drama tends to be something for its own satisfaction. Now it goes beyond the gratification of the acquisition and enjoyment of material and sexual commodities, acquiring the function of display and becoming a matter of marking one’s social territory. In Shirley’s The Lady of Pleasure, one important dimension of the way the two central figures of the play, Aretina, an incomer to London from the country and Celestina, recently widowed and wealthy, seek to establish their social position in town is through conspicuous consumption. Celestina complains about the quality of the upholstery and exterior decoration of her coach, saying, The nails not double gilt! To market with’t! ’Twill hackney out to Mile-end, or convey Your city tumblers, to be drunk with cream And prunes at Islington. (1.2.p. 18) It is not primarily the quality of the article from the point of view of aesthetics or comfort of use that concerns her but what it says about her socially. The fact that its nails are not double gilt make it more appropriate in her eyes for a citizen, and therefore to be used in different localities of the city to that in which she lives, the Strand. Instances of such conspicuous consumption become more numerous in Caroline drama than in Jacobean, in which it is largely confined to extravagance of dress. With the much greater citizen presence in Jacobean plays the acquisitive drive tends to be directed at the commodity that generates wealth, especially land, far more than those that merely display it, while Caroline drama focuses more on the display of refined taste through consumption. The increasing availability of luxury goods in the London

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market helped to associate such consumption with London life, country gentry wishing to avail themselves of such goods usually having to send to London for them. Celestina’s anxiety with regard to the quality of her coach is perhaps motivated by an awareness that, even as she employs the consumption of luxury in her definition of herself and in her attempts at social ascendancy, in the free market of London it cannot be confined to one class. The availability of luxury to the citizen class and the wealthy style of life of the more successful among them are often alluded to in the drama. In Glapthorne’s The Hollander Mistress Artless, the wife of a successful bawd, says of her daughter, ‘marry ere I would make her a Lady, shee should be a new Exchange wench, your Citizens wives they are the goodest creatures, live the finest lives’ (2.1.fol. D1r). In Massinger’s The City Madam the citizen Luke Frugal, having temporarily taken over his brother’s estate, taxes his sister-in-law Lady Frugal, the wife of a prosperous London merchant, presumed to have died, about her extravagant dress: You were privileg’d, and no man envied it, It being for the city’s honour, that There should be a distinction between The wife of a patrician, and plebeian. (4.4.78–81) Her aspirations go beyond her citizen status: when the height And dignity of London’s blessings grew Contemptible, and the name lady mayoress Became a byword, and you scorn’d the means By which you were rais’d, my brother’s fond indulgence Giving the reins to’t , and no object pleas’d you But the glittering pomp, and bravery of the court (4.4.85–91) It is not just consumption but knowledge that is at issue in the representation of London life in the drama. In William Cartwright’s The Ordinary (1634–1635, possibly a university play) a crude analysis of the use of knowledge in the exercise of power in an urban context is given


by the intelligencer, Hearsay. Despite the generally greater emphasis on urban sophistication than trickery in Caroline drama, he portrays life in London as a minefield for the unwary: To cozen and be cozen’d, makes the age, The prey and feeder are that civil thing That sager heads call body politic. Here is the only difference; others cheat By statute, but we do’t upon no grounds. The fraud’s the same in both; there only wants Allowance to our way. The commonwealth Hath not declar’d herself as yet for us (1.5.p.190) Hearsay has a shrewd awareness of the political realities of life in the capital, at whatever level. He hopes in time to become famous through his work so that all will come to him, ‘as the barren wives / Of aged citizens do to St Antholin’s’ (1.5.p. 191). Another character in search of knowledge to turn to profit is an unnamed usurer in Davenport’s A New Trick to Cheat the Devil who asks his scrivener, ‘How goes newes o’ th’ Change’ and later ‘What newes in Holborne, Fleetstreet and the Strand? / In th’ Ordinaries among Gallants, no young Heires / There to be snapp’d?’ (1.2.p. 198).25 In one of his Caroline plays, The Staple of News (Globe/Blackfriars, 1626), Jonson focuses an aspect of the social life of the town, the retail of news or gossip especially as connected to certain locations of the conurbation.26 Early in the play one of the clerks of the ‘news’ office, Thomas Barber, cites the ‘four cardinal quarters’ (where gossip is retailed) as, ‘The Court, sir, Paul’s, Exchange, and Westminster Hall’ (1.2.60) and ‘Emissaries’ are sent by the ‘Staple’ to each of these locations to collect news. Later, in the intermean after the third act, further places for gossip are identified as the conduits in Westminster, Tuttle (now Tothill) St, Henry VII’s almshouses west of Westminster Abbey, the sanctuary precincts of Westminster Abbey, the Woolstaple, King Street, Cannon Row, Gardiner’s Lane and the Bowling Alley (20–7). In the prologue for the stage Jonson even imagines the gossip that might go on in the theatre where the play is being performed (the Blackfriars), proving a distraction to the performance: Alas, what is it to his scene to know How many coaches in Hyde Park did show

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Last spring, what fare today at Medley’s was If Dunstan, or the Phoenix best wine has?27 (13–16) Though the pursuit of it is presented in terms of idle gossip, the news theme in the play is indicative of the idea of knowledge and knowingness being an essential part of successful town life. This is a notion that would be further developed in Restoration drama, in which the relationship between country and the town is often depicted as involving dependence of the former upon the latter for knowledge – of fashions, manners and other areas of social life that reposed upon the spreading of information. In this play a countrywoman enters the Staple to purchase, ‘A groatsworth of any news – I care not what – / To carry down this Saturday to our vicar’ (1.4.11–12). In Epicene Jonson had earlier satirized the self-conscious attempts by the ‘collegiates’, members of the London elite to acquire a spurious veneer of cultural knowingness, and his play very much anticipates the gentry world of London as represented in the Caroline theatre. In 1635 his disciple, Richard Brome, introduced the idea again in The New Academy. The ‘academy’ of the title is a salon held by wealthy shopkeepers, the Camelions, described by the gallant, Erasmus, in the following terms: ‘It is but private lodgings kept by / Both men and women, as I am inform’d, after the French manner, / They professe Musick, Dancing, Fashion, Complement – ’.28 It has a sexual element too. When his interlocutor asks, ‘And no drabbing?’ Erasmus replies, ‘A little perhaps in private’ (3.1.p. 55). At the ‘academy’ there is an exchange of compliments between two of the participants, Joyce and Gabriella, as an exercise (4.2.p. 82) while a Frenchman with the pseudonym of ‘Galliard’ later demonstrates polite gestures and behaviour, and talks about appropriate clothing (4.2.p. 85). The strand of narrative involving this academy is fairly incidental to the main plot, its purpose being the depiction of the self-conscious inculcation of social graces and accomplishments in a French salon manner. Though this is done with satirical intent, it contributes to the idea of metropolitan life as involving substantial self-fashioning, including the acquisition of foreign manners and the mix of different strands of the elite, gentry, courtly and citizen into a common urban identity based on cultural skills and knowledge. In The Sparagus Garden, the countryman Tim Hoyden, who comes from Taunton, claims he has ‘a downright country wit, and was counted a pretty spark at home’ (2.3.35–6) but now wishes ‘to have a finical city


wit and a super-finical court wit’ (2.3.37–8). He wants to ‘be able to jest and jeer among men of judgement’ and ‘I will have a clubbing wit, and a drinking wit, and be able to hold a play with great poets’ (2.3.40–3). He resolves that, after having completed his education as a gentleman, he will style himself, ‘Timothy Hoyden of Taunton – no, of London – Gentleman. London is a common place for all gentlemen of my rank, is it not?’ (3.11.15–17). In Shirley’s The Constant Maid (c. 1636), a play firmly embedded in the capital by a large number of references to named London locations and especially the theatre, Startup, a foolish country gentleman says to the Londoner, Hartwell, ‘They say there are good wits in town; I have brought money o’ purpose with me for it; if any will sell me a pennyworth, I’ll give him a hundred pieces, ’cause I would carry a little down to the country’ (2.1.p. 466). The rival female protagonists in The Lady of Pleasure also consciously embrace sophistication of manners. In seeking to establish their households as the pinnacles of fashionability and social refinement, both take their obsessions to the extreme, in each case their stewards providing voices of reason and moderation. Aretina Bornwell’s steward describes to her nephew, newly arrived from the university, how their life has changed since their removal to London: We do not [now] invite the poor o’ the parish To dinner, keep a table for the tenants; Our kitchen does not smell of beef; the cellar Defies the price of malt and hops; the footmen And coach-drivers may be drunk like gentlemen, With wine; nor will three fiddlers upon holidays, With aid of bagpipes, that call’d in the country To dance, and plough the hall up with their hobnails, Now make my lady merry. (2.1.p. 28) The paternalistic role of the rural elite is here eschewed in favour of a more refined life, and this includes a shift away from moral obligations. Aretina Bornwell enlists to her aid, in trying to get the better of Celestina, the town fops Kickshaw and Littleworth, about whom she comments approvingly: You, gentlemen, are held Wits of the town, the consuls that do govern The senate here, whose jeers are all authentic.

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The taverns and ordinaries are Made academies, where you come, and all Your sins and surfeits made the time’s example. Your very nods can quell a theatre, No speech or poem good without your seal; You can protect scurrility, and publish, By your authority believed, no rapture Ought to have honest meaning. (3.2.p. 52) Truth, honesty and morality are of little consequence, even rejected, and her view of her new friends is entirely in terms of their perceived skills in dominating the social life of the town, based on an ability to manage their reputations and acquire authority in the judgement of the arts and other refinements.29 In rejecting the bonds of hospitality, Aretina Bornwell replaces a model of social intercourse based on co-operation with one based on assertion and competition.30 Shortly afterwards in the same scene when Aretina and Celestina meet, Celestina being the guest of the Bornwells, they both exercise their own social skills in a form of wit combat that involves an extended exchange of French compliments (3.2.pp. 53–4). The ‘compliments’ are far from being the extension of courtesies of welcome and greeting due of a host and guest, but rather the competition of rivals both attempting to assert their ascendancy, or at least parade their skills. The satire in these plays resides in the self-consciousness and excessiveness of the figures that strive for sophistication, but there is nonetheless considerable, if only adumbrated value placed on the quality itself. It is repeatedly identified as a feature of metropolitan life and there is some flattery of the urban private theatre audience implied in their being placed in a position to judge and be amused by characters who so consciously work to acquire it. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first use of the word ‘urbane’ as referring to ‘having the manners, refinement, or polish regarded as characteristic of a town; courteous; at ease in society’ as 1623, just before the advent of the Caroline period.31 This coincides with the growth of a strong gentry culture in London and in the drama the possession of land for the first time becomes of far less importance as measure of social status than an ability to negotiate the life of the town successfully.32 At this point, however, this is much less of an integral aspect of the representation of London society than it would become in the Restoration.


The open embrace of sexual libertinism as a feature of town life is not as developed in Caroline drama as it becomes in some of the sex comedies of the Restoration, but the idea is nonetheless taking root at this time. In Hyde Park Bonvile is a precursor to Etherege’s Dorimant in The Man of Mode, and Careless in A Mad Couple Well Matched is the most developed and unconscionable rake-hero before the Restoration. The attitudes to sexuality emerging in Caroline drama inevitably influence the representation of women and of life generally in the metropolis, involving a nexus of consumption, status, sexuality and cross-class transactions. The potential sexual availability of City wives, especially as an extension of their mercantile activity – a recurrent idea in Jacobean drama – continues to have a presence in Caroline plays, especially those of Richard Brome. The two city wives in his plays that come in for sexual attention are Alicia Saleware in A Mad Couple Well Matched, and Hannah Camelion in The New Academy whose resolutely unjealous husband remarks, I never heard Of woman that desir’d a loving husband To be a jealous Master over her. Especially a City-Shopkeeper. The best part of whose trade runs through the hands Of his faire wife too! (2.1.p. 22) In the antipodal London of The Antipodes (Salisbury Court, 1638), where everything is contrary to the real world, Brome has a judge commit a gentleman to prison for refusing sexual relations with a citizen’s wife, remarking, ‘Unpunish’d, may spread forth a dangerous / Example to the breach of city custom, / By gentlemen’s neglect of tradesmen’s wives’ (3.1.459–61). Earlier in this play the countrywoman Martha remarks to her London friend Barbara: ‘Our country folks will say you London wives / Do not lie every night with your own husbands’ (1.1.267–8). In The Northern Lass a strong opponent of marriage, Sir Paul Squelch, having suggested that City wives will always be unfaithful and court wives expensive to maintain, continues, ‘To traine vp an innocent countrey Girle, is like hatching a Cuckoe; as soone as shee is ripe, and sees the world afore her, shee flies at her aduantage, and leaues mee dead i’ the neast’ (3.2.240–3). Shirley also touches on the idea in The Gamester in which the gallant

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Hazard, mistakenly thinking the heroine Penelope is unchaste, rejects his friend Wilding’s encouragement for him to marry her. He suggests instead, ‘Let her make the best on’t; set up shop / I’the Strand, or Westminster; she may have custom, / And come to speak most learnedly i’ the nose’ (5.1.p. 263). In Honoria and Mammon Shirley has the citizen Fulbank observe, ‘These courtiers are another sort of fleshflies / That haunt our city dames; but we must wink / Or lose our charter’ (2.1.p. 23). Sexuality is thus significant dimension in how Caroline theatre represents transactions between the courtier or gentry and citizen classes in London, especially in relation to the market economy. Also involved is the question of the pursuit of status. Citizens are often seen as desiring to parade their wealth through the magnificence of their wives. In A Mad Couple Well Matched Rafe Saleware is less worried about cuckoldry than concerned that his wife should be kept in a courtly way, and encourages her to consort with a lord, saying he wants her to be ‘the Paragon of the Citie, the Flower-de-Luce of Cheapside’ (3.1.713–14). In Shirley’s The Wedding (Phoenix, 1626), Justice Landby asserts that City wives Are fortune’s darlings, govern all, their husbands Variety of pleasure and apparel, When some of higher titles are oft fain To pawn a ladyship (5.2.5–9) The combination of sexual freedom and economic power of City wives and the social power of gentlewomen such as those in The Lady of Pleasure place women in a relatively powerful position in metropolitan culture as represented in Caroline drama, giving a foretaste of the licence and freedom enjoyed by many female Londoners in Restoration plays.33 There is even some suggestion that such freedom is endemic to the life of London, as when the jealous old husband Joyless in The Antipodes complains of his wife as they are about to see a play: The air of London Hath tainted her obedience already; And should the play but touch the vices of it, She’d learn and practise ’em. (2.1.160–3)


Alongside this there is also discernible at least one early instance of the ‘gay couple’ trope so commonly found in the Restoration theatre, in the discussion between the romantic heroes of Hyde Park, Fairfield and Carol about the conditions on which she might agree to marry him, in which she asserts, I will play At gleek as often as I please, and see Plays when I have a mind to’t, and the races, Though men should run Adamites before me. I’ll not be Bound from the Spring-garden, and the ’Sparagus. (2.4.p. 490)34 Though there had been from the late Elizabethan commercial drama onwards a sense of the distinction between the town and the country, there appears to be an intensified perception of the cultural divergence between the two emerging in Caroline drama, starting in the late 1620s. To an extent this is part of a theatricalized conception of London in which country people are stereotypical foils to urban sophistication. However, the impulse to construct such an imaginative dichotomy may be the result of the increased relocation to London of the gentry, and royal prohibitions attempting to limit this may only have served to enhance the desirability of the capital.35 The convention of urban disparagement of the country, its pursuits and its culture, gained in currency over time and would be further developed in the Restoration theatre. Unlike the case during the Restoration period, it is not generally women who give voice most enthusiastically to these sentiments but the increasingly dominant position of women in Caroline drama over the social world of London sometimes leads them to an allegiance to the capital and a rejection of the country, as in Aretina Bornwell’s impassioned pronouncement in The Lady of Pleasure: I would not Endure again the country conversation, To be the lady of six shires! The men, So near the primitive making, they retain A sense of nothing but the earth; their brains,

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And barren heads standing as much in want Of ploughing as their ground. (1.1.p. 5) She continues her diatribe, emphasizing the closeness of country people to the earth, the foolishness of country revels – Maid Marians, morrises and Whitsun ales – and the second-rate quality of the material goods with which they surround themselves, such as pewter candlesticks. Though the play takes a satirical view of Lady Bornwell’s aspirations to urban sophistication, it nevertheless gives voice to a discourse that constructs the countryside as a barbaric place in comparison to the sophistication of the town, articulated in several other plays of the period as well. In Killigrew’s The Parson’s Wedding Jolly, ‘An humerous Gentleman and a Courtier’, expresses enthusiasm even for the built environment of the capital, remarking to his companions when returning from the country, ‘Gentlemen, you are all welcome to my Country-house; Charing-cross, I am glad to see thee, with all my heart’. When the dull-witted country gentlemen Constant and Sadd wonder why he is not more reconciled to the pleasure of the country (thus betraying their own attachment to it), he replies, ‘Pleasure! what is’t call’d? walking, or hawking, or shooting at Buts?’ (1.3.p. 20). Talking of a country knight’s son, Jolly says, ‘Who, Mr Jeoffry? Hobinol the second; by this life ’tis a very Veal, and he licks his Nose like one of them: by his discourse you’d guess he had eaten nothing but Hay: I wonder he doth not go on all four too, and hold up his leg when he stales: he talks of nothing but the stable’ (1.3.pp. 20–1). In Marmion’s Holland’s Leaguer (Salisbury Court, 1631) there is the suggestion of a pecking order of contempt based on experience of the town, the London rogue Autolicus talking of the ‘summer birds in town, that once a year / Come up to moulter, and then go down to th’ country / To jeer their neighbours, as they have been served’ (2.3.p. 37). The pattern of disparagement of the rural focuses conventionally on the attachment to the earth, the poverty of wit, the crudity of entertainments and the foolishness of country people, and is to be found in a range of plays.36 Caroline playwrights vary markedly in the amount of attention they give to London, either in terms of setting their narratives there or including meaningful reference to London localities in dialogue. Much of the comedy produced in the period manifests a London interest to some degree, but three playwrights stand out. Brome is the writer who


shows the greatest tendency to place realism as well as including reference in the speech of characters to known localities in the city. The overwhelming majority of his comedies – around ten – reveal such London interest. Shirley sets a dozen of his comedies in London but is less interested in exploiting identified localities as settings, Hyde Park being the only major example of this. Though Nabbes only writes three comedies, two are steeped in London life, involving substantial place realism, and the third, The Bride, also has some London interest. Other playwrights produce one or two plays each with some focus on the geography of the capital. Both Glapthorne’s and two of Marmion’s comedies are set there, one of each featuring some place realism. London settings occur in the sole comedies of Brewer, Cartwright, Cowley, Davenport, Davenant and Killigrew, and in one each of two or three Caroline comedies of Davenant, Jonson, Massinger and Mayne, none with any marked place realism, the topographical interest being contained in the dialogue. From a geographical point of view, what the Caroline dramatists do is shift the principal focus of the drama westwards, the City declining in interest as a locale, and introduce a much stronger presence of the places of leisure, especially of the elite, than had been the case in the Jacobean theatre. Their use of the physical setting of narratives in the capital to articulate social or political issues or to represent class relationships has been variously dealt with elsewhere. Martin Butler sees the city comedies of the 1630s as addressing themselves to political issues, arguing that in their Covent Garden plays Brome is attacking Charles I’s paternalism while Nabbes is defending the gentry’s moral behaviour in town, that Davenant in The Wits promotes a courtier’s view of the ‘town’ as a place ‘where younger brothers might gather, but from which men of real substance, the leading country gentry, are best excluded’, and that Killigrew offers similarly courtier-like perspectives on the town (1984, pp. 141–80). Richard Hodson discusses various versions of the ‘town’ in Shirley, Davenant and Killigrew, suggesting that Davenant’s conception of it has wider social and political landscape than that of Killigrew (2000, pp. 316–21), while Paul Miller sees variations in topographical plays by Shirley, Brome and Nabbes in terms of their representation of the relationships between various elite groups in London, especially the court and gentry (1990, pp. 345–74). Despite these variations in the representation of contemporary politics and society, Caroline drama is fairly consistent in isolating certain specific characteristics that typify urban life, whether held up as exemplary or satirized, and presenting them as determined by the challenges posed by the material circumstances that prevail in the metropolis. Some

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of these perspectives have their origins before the Caroline period while others continue into the Restoration, and a strong element of convention in both representation and thinking might be seen as present here.37 There is an enhanced self-consciousness about being urban and it is increasingly connected with cultural and social, though emphatically not moral superiority. Altered notions of sophistication and wit also refocus interest on different parts of the metropolis, create an emphasis on leisure, involve the emergence of the notion of the ‘town’, and promote a stronger sense of the country/city cultural divide – all defining features of Caroline drama. Though they render a geographically and socially somewhat different London to that found in the generality of Jacobean plays, they continue that drama’s celebration of the knowingness and vigour of metropolitan life, and give it an enhanced social gloss.

6 Conclusion

With the focus principally on the built environment, this study has sought to trace the substantial shifts in the representation of London in the drama over a period in which both the city and the theatre underwent considerable changes. It is clear that the pre–commercial era interlude drama presents a very partial view of London, in both senses of the word, since it selects certain elements of the metropolis’s geography to create paradigms of vice. But though topographical features are an essential part of this, it is less a matter of real geography than a mythical landscape. In Jack Juggler there are the first indications of interest in the presentation on stage of life in London, though this too participates in the tendency to see it in a transgressive light. With the advent of late Elizabethan commercial theatre, the notion of the ‘sinful’ city is tempered by both nationalist pride in the capital’s power and wealth, and an increasing evocation of its material geography. Jacobean theatre begins in turn to disavow this glorification of the metropolis in favour of a more complex view of it, in terms of geographical and social diversity. The greater use of the topographical features of London in the allusive language of the drama also suggests the extent to which it seeks to inhabit the city of its audience. It begins to promote the sense of the distinctness of life in England’s unique metropolis, produced by the urban landscape and the particular challenges to which it gives rise. This drama retains an attraction to the idea of criminality as infusing the life of London, but views it now in a way that is almost celebratory, part of a form of urban sophistication – knowingness or ‘wit’ – construed as an essential quality for successful life in the metropolis, while at the same time also being part of the satirical target of city comedy. In Caroline theatrical representations of London, the idea of ‘wit’ develops somewhat away from this preoccupation with a capacity 186

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for trickery, is presented in rather more socially circumscribed terms, and includes a self-conscious embrace of style and accomplishment. The element of satire is still present, though it focuses on affectation, artifice and the self-conscious learning of fashionable modes of life and self-presentation. Underlying the satire is nevertheless a strong current of urban self-congratulation. Contributing to this, and by way of constructing an implicit definition of the elite urbanite in particular, a stronger emphasis comes to be placed in this period on what, as Raymond Williams has pointed out, had long been a traditional distinction between country and city: On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre: of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. A contrast between country and city, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical times. (1973, p. 1) This extended to the idea of a discretely urban social class, the concept of the ‘town’ distinct from the elite groups of the court and City ends of the urban spectrum, and especially the country gentry, while recognizing immigration from all these quarters into that class. The continuing and even intensifying geographical interest of the plays set in London is very much part of this, the focus of the greater ‘place realism’ of this drama being principally on the fashionable new areas to the west of the City, and also on places of modish leisure activity. Various features of London’s development in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries both provided the conditions for the emergence of the theatre in the first place and had a decisive effect on the way that the material it staged represented the metropolis. One important aspect was the development of London as a larger social capital, centred increasingly in the infill of the land between Westminster and the City. This not only connected in one urban unit the different elite groups attached to those geographical locations, but the influx of gentry in the period added another layer that defined itself in essentially urban terms. The tension between geographical cohesion and competitive diversity was one source of potential dramatic interest, while the geographical circumscription of the society in the city state that was London provided a conveniently contained frame of reference as a context for


dramatic narratives. Added to this was the fact that institutional structures developed in London, providing identifiable localities for types of narrative action and characters. Examples of these were the commercial exchanges, St Paul’s as a place of judicial and other business, the leisure grounds and even the theatre itself. Another institution, the Inns of Court, though it featured less in the drama in a geographical sense, was nonetheless also part of the theatrical frame of reference, largely because of the awareness on the part of dramatists of the Innsmen as patrons of the theatre.1 The fact that the dramatic narratives set in London were played out in a geographical area that can reasonably be understood to have been within the lived experience of most of the audience would inevitably have contributed to their theatrical vigour. It also facilitated the deployment of urban geography in the allusive field of the drama, allowing the original audiences a more intimate experiential access to the meanings imported into the plays by this means. In this situation of growing intimacy with its audience the drama moved towards the embrace of sophistication as a value, and in doing so attached this firmly to the urban environment. The ways in which the theatre developed in the early modern period helped determine the terms in which it represented London. The theatre was in itself a pre-eminent example of the urbanization and centralization of English cultural production. On the one hand, pageant wagons – among the few permanent structures (albeit moveable) dedicated to the production of drama – decayed in storage in the final years of the sixteenth century as the provincial civic drama fell ever further into decline. On the other hand, more enduring structures were being constructed in London from the mid-1570s onwards to accommodate new forms of secular drama. The fact of being housed in dedicated buildings contributed to the theatre’s development of institutional status within the culture of the early modern period. As Stephen Orgel has pointed out, Before this moment, the concept of theatre had included no sense of place. A theatre was not a building, it was a group of actors and audience; the theatre was any place they chose to perform [Once] embodied in architecture theatre was an institution, a property, a corporation. For the first time in more than a thousand years it had the sort of reality that meant most to Renaissance society; it was real in the way that real estate is real; it was a location, a building, a possession – an established and visible part of society. (1975, p. 2)

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Theatre was peculiarly placed to occupy a central position in the social and cultural evolution of early modern English society, operating simultaneously in what appear to be very different capacities. On the one hand, it was an enterprise concerned with the bringing forth of a creative product with a literary basis and a recognizable generic heritage, involving both visual representations and performance. As such it was clearly embedded in the cultural production of the society that gave rise to it, albeit that its latter commercial status was a matter of uncertainty and dispute in the period. On the other hand, commercial theatres and acting companies were products of the emerging capitalist economy, in this capacity representing and even driving cultural change in a broader sense. The business arrangements of theatre were in some ways at the forefront of changing economic conditions, and clearly exemplified them. That these roles were often perceived in the period to be in conflict with one another only added to the theatre’s tendency to embody in its very existence some of the conflicts and contradictions of a changing society. The establishment of the theatres in London inevitably resulted in the development of a metropolitan audience and, in turn, the drama they offered became geared to addressing that audience. Few plays before the advent of the commercial theatre in the capital in the mid1570s were set in London, of those that had any identifiable setting at all. London is, however, repeatedly the setting of plays in the last quarter of the century, particularly comedies, but also several history plays and it is to this period that the few tragedies that are set there belong. What is more, comedy itself becomes more London-centred as the period progresses. While the representation of London in the pre–commercial interlude theatre remained almost entirely conceptual, with any elements of realism present being contained in descriptive or allusive detail, the advent of the Elizabethan commercial theatre introduced a much more concrete form of representation of the metropolis, including not only identified settings but such phenomena as incidental figures from certain types of named location. The Jacobean period saw the setting of certain plays in specific parts of the city, such as Bartholomew Fair and this practice was taken up in Caroline place realism drama such as Hyde Park and The Weeding of Covent Garden with the attempts by playwrights to render the atmospheres of known localities and provide hooks for audience recognition of them. London becomes an ever more natural setting for dramatic narrative and the ways that the drama represents the society in which it is set contribute useful perspectives on the history of developing urban consciousness


in the early modern period. John Gillies has pointed to the mythological idea in early geography of the ‘oikumene’ or home space, that lying beyond its borders being defined as barbarian (1994, pp. 7–8). The Pre–commercial theatre interlude drama, overwhelmingly of provincial provenance, does not construct an identifiable unified ‘home space’ in geographical terms, but the capital – the only non-scriptural locality represented with any degree of recurrence – is consistently seen in terms of a barbarian space, at least in moral terms. A significant shift becomes apparent when the commercial theatre establishes London as the home of English drama and the representation of London as a ‘home space’ that emerges at this time can be seen in terms of a residual form of the idea of ‘oikumene’, though to a considerably diluted extent. The rural, provincial world then increasingly takes on the role of the barbarian ‘other’. The varying perspectives on London emerge as a product of the theatre’s shift into different geographical, social and cultural spaces and its changes in constituency. Though both the interlude drama of the itinerant companies and the drama of the London commercial theatre played to a variety of audiences made up of people of different social ranks, a combination of factors ensured that there were always target audiences whose values and priorities were pre-eminent in determining the nature of the drama. This can at best be reckoned in very crude terms, but it is possible to discern some broad distinctions in theatrical focus over the various periods under consideration. The interlude drama, though it was also played in such contexts as the court, the Inns of Court and livery company halls, largely accommodates the preoccupations of the country house elite. Elizabethan and Jacobean commercial drama can be considered to have something of a double focus, one that is more elite in the private theatres and the other more popular in the amphitheatre houses, though this distinction can only be broadly rather than minutely sustained, but what is clearer is that there is in the latter period a shift away from the strongly popular tone of much Elizabethan drama. In the Caroline period in which private theatres and their elite writers predominated, this shift becomes more emphatic. The representation of London at various points reflects these shifts to some extent. It is a distant and dangerous place in the early drama, as far as it gets any representation at all, and it is only in Jack Juggler that Londoners get any significant representation. The London citizenry enjoy the most positive – even extending to heroic – representation in Elizabethan drama, the city comedies of the Jacobean theatre presenting a more hard-nosed view of urbanites and social relations in general. With

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a return to a predominantly elite focus in the Caroline drama it is not only the places frequented by a mixture of gentry and wealthy citizenry that are given greatest prominence, but the manners and values of these sectors of the urban society form the main focus. Its increasing preoccupation with urban sophistication was part of the theatre’s awareness of its own institutional role in the capital’s cultural life, something about which playwrights showed increasing confidence. With the advent of theatres in London, the particularity of the London audience began to emerge – a phenomenon of which Anne Barton has remarked, The components of this urban audience will be both changing and fundamentally continuous. This means that the actors, no longer wearisomely peripatetic, can settle down to the important task of training a body of spectators to interpret the increasingly complex shorthand of performance. (1978, p. 158) If its institutional position is one aspect of the theatre’s importance in the culture of the capital, its product – the drama itself – is an even greater one. Drama is the most inherently social form of the written media. The narratives of plays are naturally made up of a multiplicity of social interactions, requiring real bodies to enact them. There is also an interaction between players and audience and – in the undarkened playhouses of the period – potential for interactions between members of the audience themselves. All this promotes the intense engagement with the manifold aspects of social existence evident in the drama, which is less able to remain in the realms of the abstract or the aesthetic than other forms of written art, but is constantly pulled back to the interactive human experience in which it is grounded and that it represents. Thus the setting of many of its narratives in the only geographical environment shared by its audience seems a natural extension of this. Also relevant is the fact that the drama in the early modern period, despite its commercial nature, continues to have a considerable element of didacticism. Thomas Heywood, in defending the theatre, even argued that it had inculcated a more refined practice of the English language: our English tongue, which hath ben the most harsh, vneuen, and broken language of the world, part Dutch, part Irish, Saxon, Scotch, Welsh, and indeed a gallimaffry of many, but perfect in none, is now by this secondary meanes of playing, continually refined, every writer


striuing in himselfe to adde a new florish vnto it; so that in processe, from the most rude and vnpolisht tongue, it is growne to a most perfect and composed language, and many excellent workes, and elaborate Poems writ in the same, that many Nations grow inamored of our tongue (before despised.) Thus you see to what excellency our refined English is brought, that in these daies we are ashamed of that Euphony & eloquence which within these 60 yeares, the best tongues in the land were proud to pronounce. (1612, fol. F3r) The educative role of the theatre went beyond refining speech developing political awareness, however. It may have ceased to preach theologically based morality, but it continued throughout the periods of its activity in the seventeenth century to have some significance in the refinement of social comportment and the inculcation of civility. The theatre thus arguably has some role in shaping the cultural environment around it, and if London determines the nature of its theatre, its theatre determines aspects of London life. The effects of this relationship between the drama and its audience are suggested in 1638 by William Davenant in his prologue to The Unfortunate Lovers, his play for the King’s Men at the Blackfriars. He ruefully reflects on the critical demands of his Caroline audience as compared with Jacobean and Elizabethan theatregoers: you are grown excessive proud; Since ten times more of Wit then was allow’d Your silly Ancestors in twenty year, You think in two short hours to swallow here. For they to Theaters were pleas’d to come, E’re they had din’d, to take up the best Room. Good easie judging Souls, with what delight They would expect a Jigg or Target-Fight, A furious Tale of Troy, which they ne’r though Was weakly Writ, if it were strongly Fought: Laught at a Clinch, the shadow of a Jest, And cry’d, A passing good one I protest! Such dull and humble-witted People were Even your Forefathers, whom we govern’d here: And such had you been too had not The Poets taught you how to unweave a Plot,

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To trace the winding-Scenes, and to admit What was true Sense, not what did sound like Wit. They arm’d you thus, against themselves to fight. (Gibbs, 1972, pp. 141–2)

Davenant is fully aware that what had happened in the intervening years was the growth of a sophisticated culture of theatrical consumption in which the theatre itself had developed the critical faculties of its urban audience. The nature of the theatres in which the capital and its life were featured is also relevant here. In the late Elizabethan period it is principally in the popular amphitheatre that London has any great presence, while in the Jacobean period plays of both amphitheatre and private playhouses are engaged in the representation of the city. By the time Davenant was writing, the elite, whom he is addressing here in particular, were manifesting more self-consciousness about their own urbanity and the relationship of this to their lives as Londoners, something reflected in plays of the Caroline courtier dramatists in the private playhouses. If the theatre, as a popular and influential medium, was offering an imaginative conception of their own urban environment to Londoners, it was one which reconnected the idea of civilization to the classical notions of ‘civitas’ as meaning the collectivity of inhabitants of a city, and ‘civilitas’ as the behaviour associated with such a collectivity. It was also thereby articulating a modern consciousness in presenting a very secularized version of civilization, distanced from a rigid connection to religious ethical traditions. As a direct product of the urban setting of most comic drama, the idea of what it means to be civilized comes to have relatively less to do with morality and more to do with social strategy and skill. Life in the city is regularly presented as tolerant of less than morally scrupulous behaviour, especially in areas of sexuality and economics. Despite there being abundant satire of urban manners and formal nods in the direction of conventional morality, implicit in the theatre’s representation of London life is the definition of civilization rather more in terms of distance from the earthy realities of agricultural production than from morally questionable behaviour. It is inherent in the artifice of London life, entailing the almost overt construction of external appearances that the drama firmly ties to the place. The city encapsulates an impulse towards modernity involving moral relativism, cultural diversity, relative social fluidity, social dynamism (with social


relations constantly renegotiated) and an intense self-consciousness about identity and behaviour. If the theatre was significant in forging the contemporary conception of London, London as a setting and sometimes a preoccupation also had an effect on the drama. The emergence of the drama as probably this period’s most culturally significant and enduring form of literary writing, and the development of London in the same period into what was becoming Europe’s most populous and powerful metropolis is not a juxtaposition that can be ascribed to mere coincidence. The creation of geographically centralized market for theatre and one that could, because its customers were in one place, more easily form fashions of taste was a central factor in the generic development in the commercial theatre. It is undoubtedly true that the conditions of life in London, including topographical variety, social competition and diversity, criminality, challenges to survival at all levels and the necessity for ‘wit’ in all senses of the word, made its culture inherently theatrical and the drama that arose from it inevitably drew on this. In the case of some playwrights, the ways in which their work incorporates the specific geographical landscape of London allowed its original audiences an enhanced intimacy of experience. But in the longer term the reliance of such plays on localized understanding could prove a drawback, and it might even be suggested that those elements of early modern drama that were able to benefit from the theatrical energy of early modern London without evoking the detailed urban landscape, such as most tragedy or the sort of comedy that Shakespeare wrote, were ultimately better placed to survive in the repertoire since they depended less on this intimacy.

Notes

1

Introduction

1. Joseph Bryant proposes that Jonson’s reshaping of the play shifted the focus away from the preoccupation with poetry in the quarto version and made it more of a ‘humours’ play (1962, pp. 641–50). Richard Dutton has argued that ‘The London “colouring” is neither casual nor incidental but comes as it were in strategic bursts, where it is most telling, most notably in the opening scenes’ and suggests that there is an increased psychological and verbal realism in the revised play (1974, pp. 241–9). 2. Act 5, Scene 2 of Part I is set in ‘Bethlehem Monastery’, a lunatic asylum, while Act 5, Scene 2 of Part II is set in ‘Bridewell’, a prison beside the river, the history of which as described by the First Master (5–12) identifies it clearly as the London institution. 3. As early as 1582 Stephen Gosson complained in his Plays Confuted in Five Actions: ‘I may boldely say it, because I haue seene it, the Palace of pleasure, the Golden Asse, the Aethiopian historie, Amadis of Fraunce, the Rounde table, baudie Comedies, in Latine, French, Italian and Spanish haue beene throughly ransackt, to furnish the Playe houses in London’ (fol. D5v). This was a trend that continued through the Jacobean and Caroline periods too. 4. Details of these references, and to more sparsely represented ones, may be found in Sugden, 1925. 5. For an extensive examination of sites of transgression in London in early modern dramatic and other literature as an articulation of social anxiety, see Twyning, 1998. 6. Roger Finlay has given estimates of the population of London at half-century points as follows: 1500: 50,000; 1550: 70,000; 1600: 200,000; 1650: 400,000; 1700: 575,000 (1981, p. 51). 7. See also Archer, 2001, pp. 89–113. 8. As Henri Lefebvre has observed, ‘The problem is that any search for space in literary texts will find it everywhere, and in every guise: enclosed, described, projected, dreamt of, speculated about. What texts can be considered special enough to provide the basis for a “textual” analysis?’ (1991, p. 15). 9. Fernand Braudel has noted, ‘To speak of London is to speak of three of four cities at a time: the City was the economic capital; the king, Parliament and high society were all in Westminster; downstream was the Port of London and the poorer districts; and on the south bank was the suburb of Southwark, with its narrow streets and its theatres: the Swan, the Rose, the Globe, the Hope, the Red Bull’ (1981–1984, Vol. 3, p. 365). 10. James Howell reckoned in 1657 the length of London from ‘the utmost point of Westminster’ at one end to ‘the utmost point beyond the Tower’ at the other, adding that the suburbs were larger than the body of the City (p. 404). 195

196 Notes 11. See particularly James, 1986, pp. 16–47; Mervyn James points out that ‘In towns which had a self co-opting elite, the celebration of Corpus Christi never acquired a public and civic status and play cycles of the Corpus Christi type never developed’ (p. 41). Reflecting on the question of how far the apparent demonization of political hierarchy in the scriptural cycles represents a subversive take on authority structures within towns, Peter Womack has argued that structure and anti-structure are not competing options but systemic opposites – at once jointly comprehensive and mutually exclusive – the spectacle of Corpus Christi embodies community as both One and Many – body in its singleness and members in their diversity. Hierarchy has to accept the degree of challenge because the underlying unity that is so expressed is the deep source of its own validity. Precisely to maintain the coherence of its differentiating structures, the town passes periodically through a ritual in which it both parades those structures and at the same time recognizes itself as a ‘community’ or even communion of equal individuals (1992, p. 102). 12. Jean-Christophe Agnew observes that ‘From its pit to its heavenly canopy, the design of the London playhouse reproduced the structure of rank to which men, in Hobbes’s view, had freely submitted themselves’ (1986, p. 102). 13. For a satirical view of this phenomenon in the private theatres, see chapter 7 of Thomas Dekker’s The Gull’s Horn Book (‘How the Gallant should behave himself in a Playhouse’). Dekker emphasizes visual extravagance, excessive display of wit and judgement, and the imitation of social betters. 14. Rhonda Sanford has identified a distinction between those early modern representations of London (in both maps and literary accounts) that present a ‘closed’ view of the city – usually positive – and those that offer a more ‘open’ or balanced view, in which latter category she includes city comedies (2002, pp. 99–101). While it is difficult always to sustain this clear distinction, it does point to the increasing complexity of representation of the urban context in drama that inhabits that context. 15. Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein have noted that ‘Mapping, the inscriptive practice of the cartographer, has become a key theoretical term in current critical discourse, describing a particular cognitive mode of gaining control over the world, of synthesizing cultural and geographical information, and of successfully navigating both physical and mental space’ (2001, p. 3). On mental mapping and geography as discourse, see also Gillies, 1994, pp. 4–7, 58–9.

2

The Pre–commercial theatre interlude drama 1. The movements of early Tudor troupes have been recorded by Suzanne Westfall (1990, pp. 216–19). 2. For an overview of developments in geographical literature and thinking in the period, see Taylor, 1930, pp. 1–44. 3. For an extensive and useful discussion of the medieval conceptions of ‘curiositas’, see Zacher, 1976, esp. pp. 18–41. 4. In other plays there is a haphazard admixture of English and foreign place names. This primarily proceeds from the alliterative demands of the verse,

Notes

5.

6.

7. 8.

197

so that the sound of the names rather than the location of the places is what is significant, as was the number of places cited. However, given the relative lack of general mobility of population in the period, to most members of contemporary audiences English locations are likely to have been as remote and exotic as foreign ones. ‘The capital was distinguished from provincial cities and towns on three counts: it was at least five times the size of any other, almost ten times as rich, and possessed a vastly more complex social and occupational structure’ (Cornwall, 1988, p. 64). Anne Lancashire has given an account of livery company records to 1558 indicating regular payments by these companies for performances by itinerant players, but there is nothing in these to suggest commissioning of plays themselves, rather than an acceptance of those already in the repertory of the playing troupes (2002, pp. 69–117). For a history of the Lord Mayor’s Show, see Lancashire, 2002, pp. 52–4 and 171–84. Cf. Tenant in Enough Is as Good as a Feast: And especially strangers – yea a shameful zorte: Are placed now in England and that in every port – That we, our wives and children, no houses can get Wherein we may live, such price on them is zet. (985–8) And Hurtful Help in The Tide Tarrieth No Man: For if thou werte more straunge, and borne out of the land, Thou shouldest sooner haue it I dare take in hand, For among vs now, such is our countrey zeale, That we loue best with straungers to deale. To sell a lease deare, whosoeuer that will, At the french, or dutch Church let him set vp his bill. And he shall haue chapmen, I warrant you good store, Looke what an English man bids, they will giue as much more. We brokers of straungers, well know the gayne (494–502)

9. Edward Gieskes has pointed out that lawyers as objects of satire were, in the sixteenth century, ‘identified more and more firmly with the urban world of London’ (2006, p. 139). 10. The focus in drama on Westminster or St Paul’s to represent the practice of law is fairly understandable when it is realized that not only was Westminster the seat of the highest legal counsels in the land, but a large percentage of the country’s legal profession practised there. Joyce Youings has noted, ‘By the mid-1520s there were between one and two hundred practising barristers, of whom fifty worked only in the courts at Westminster’ (1984, p. 41). Westminster additionally had an association with vice and low life because of the large number of taverns that were to be found there.

198 Notes 11. Examples include: Albion Knight (139), Enough is as Good as a Feast (936), Hick Scorner (217), John the Evangelist (395), Nature (II.744), Patient and Meek Grissill (49), The Play of Love (l424), Respublica (1695), and Wisdom, Who is Christ (789). 12. The plays containing reference to these places (aside from the references in Youth quoted earlier) include Enough Is as Good as a Feast (307, 360–1), Gentleness and Nobility (463), Impatient Poverty ([1547–1558] 83, 497, 712, 869), King Darius (p. 69), King John (2535, 2579), Like Will to Like (383, 391), Magnificence (423, 909), Respublica (1634), The Tide Tarrieth No Man (1071, 1073), The World and the Child (791) and Youth (234, 481). 13. At lines 236, 244, 264, 422, 508, 512, 681, 684, 801, 829, 831, 897, 941 and 949. 14. See, for instance, Pearl, 1979, pp. 3–34 and Archer, 1991, pp. 1–17. 15. In Mankind, where the otherwise unlocalized dramatic action is given a more local flavour by the Vices’ references in lines 505–515 to named figures and their Cambridgeshire villages of residence, this is not a case of setting the action so much as introducing some possibly tongue in cheek satire. 16. Anne Lancashire suggests persuasively that it may have been played to London livery companies (2002, p. 114).

3

Late Elizabethan drama 1. In Edward II there is only one actual mention of London, when Gaveston expresses joy at re-entering it, though not for love of the city itself: The sight of London to my exil’d eyes Is as Elysium to a new-come soul: Not that I love the city or the men, But that it harbours him I hold so dear (1.1.10–13) 2. The modern editor of the play George Clugston makes a comparison with Edmund Howes’s later pamphlet In Praise of London (1611) which cites examples of disasters befalling other cities as an example to London (p. 77). 3. The play reflects real concerns in the period about the effects of the concentration of population in the capital, motivating the authorities’ attempts under Elizabeth and subsequently James to restrict building in London through proclamations issued between 1580 and 1618; see Larkin and Hughes, 1964–1969, nos 649 and 815, Larkin and Hughes, 1973–1983, nos 25, 87, 120, 121 and 175. One perceived problem was the practice of gentry drawing money down from their estates in the regions to fund their lives in London, and spending the money on imported luxury goods. 4. In The Famous Victories of Henry V a thief enters and asks the way to the old tavern in Eastcheap, at which his addressee Dericke, recognizing him as a thief, replies, ‘Whoope hollo, now Gads Hill, knowest thou me?’ (2.67). Cf. also the Gad’s Hill incidents in 1 Henry VI: 2.2, 2.3.

Notes

199

5. Another such character is the itinerant Black Will in Arden of Faversham, mostly set outside London. In Scene 14 he boasts about his bullying exploits in London, mentioning Thames Street (16) in particular and in the following scene describes how he has just murdered a widow in Southwark, saying he will toss her body into the Thames (10). 6. Eva Taylor has pointed out, ‘The flowering of English geographical literature coincided closely in date with the victory over the Spanish Armada – and the breaking of the sense of Spanish superiority’ (1934, p. 1). She is referring to such works as William Camden’s Britannia and Richard Hakluyt’s English Voyages, but the strong geographical interest manifest in settings of plays might be also be seen as consonant with this. 7. Finella Macfarlane argues that the play gives voice to the anti-monopolist sentiments of London tradesmen outside the circumscribed group of privileged large merchant adventurers, and is part of the emergent middle class’s appropriation of chivalry as an ideological strategy (2001, pp. 136–64). 8. Angela Stock (2004, pp. 133–4) goes further in arguing that the positioning of the Vices actually subverts the authority and validity of the pageants. But this suggests the audience necessarily went along with the self-consciously artificial and idealized images offered by civic pageantry, which is questionable. 9. The Device of the Pageant Borne Before Wolstan Dixi, in Horne, 1952, pp. 209–10. 10. To these might be added, apart from John Leland’s unpublished but influential mid-century scholarship, Sir Thomas More’s History of King Richard III (1557), as well as a number of works of national description or political theory with an historical interest: Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Governor (1531), Sir Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum (1583). Holinshed’s Chronicles include William Harrison’s three part work, ‘An Historicall description of the Iland of Britanie; with a briefe rehersall of the nature and qualities of the people of England, and such commodities as are to be found in the same.’ For a fuller account of Tudor historiography, see Levy, 1967 and Fussner, 1970, and for a discussion of the intellectual climate and material conditions that gave rise to the growth in the output of historical writing in the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, see Fussner, 1962, pp. 1–59. 11. Fussner comments further that Stow’s work reflected middle-class tastes and interests and was written to please a middle-class reading public, responding to the anxieties of particularly middle-class citizens about past upheavals, and their desire to maintain the stability brought by the Tudors (1962, pp. 211–15). 12. It was perhaps this phenomenon that prompted Heywood to include in his later defence of players, An Apology for Actors, the idea that playes haue made the ignorant more apprehensiue, taught the vnlearned the knowledge of many famous histories, instructed such as cannot reade in the discouery of all our English Chronicles: & what man haue you now of that weake capacity, that cannot discourse of any notable thing recorded euen from William the Conquerour, nay from the landings of Brute, vntill this day, beeing possest of their true vse. (1612, fol. F3r)

200 Notes 13. Plays from the final two decades of the sixteenth century dramatizing civil disorder in the realm, often with a strong element of citizen interest, include Thomas Hughes, Francis Bacon et al. The Misfortunes of Arthur (1588), Robert Greene George a Greene, Pinner of Wakefield (1590), anon. King Leir (c. 1590), anon. The Troublesome Reign of King John (1591), anon. The True Tragedy of Richard III (c. 1591), anon. Locrine (pr. 1595) and Shakespeare’s two tetralogies of history plays. 14. There is some disagreement among historians as to the threat to London’s stability in the period, but it is clear that it was at times significant. For an account of it and review of scholarship on the topic, see Archer, 1991, pp. 1–17. 15. For a discussion of the play’s representation to the rebellion in relation to the guild economy of London, see Sullivan, 1998, pp. 199–223. For an examination of the play’s portrayal of the political relationship between the City and the crown, see Dillon, 2000, pp. 43–58. 16. Laura Stevenson accredits Stow with the elevation of prominent London citizens to heroic status in his Chronicles of England of 1580, and remarks, ‘in his chronicles the pale figures from earlier London histories became the heroes of the 1590s’ (1984, p. 108). 17. Lawrence Manley observes that ‘In plays like The Book of Sir Thomas More, Dekker’s Shoemaker’s Holiday and Heywood’s Edward IV, there emerged a whole company of urban luminaries whose natural nobility, moral virtue and feudal loyalty rivalled those of any peer of the realm’ (1995, p. 129). 18. Plays with such a social intermixture include Heywood’s 1 Edward IV, The Four Prentices of London and Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, discussed below, and the king also moves among commoners in Shakespeare’s Henry V. 19. In fact Shallow’s preoccupation is not with a heroic, but a transgressive and squalid sort of bravado, and Falstaff remarks of him, ‘This same starved justice hath done nothing but prate to me of the wildness of his youth and the feats he hath done about Turnbull Street’ (2: 3.2.290–2) evoking a disreputable aspect of London, the notoriety of Turnbull Street being its association with criminality, whoring and roistering. 20. Hall, 1548, fol. xixv ; this was possibly one of Shakespeare’s sources for this episode. 21. This episode is also reported in Hall, fol. xxv . 22. Compare the description of another mayor, Sir John Crosby in 1 Edward IV, of his own rise to power and his early history as a foundling who was fostered at Christ’s Hospital and later apprenticed to the trade of grocer: I do not shame to say the Hospital Of London that was my chiefest fost’ring place The Masters at the Hospital at further years Bound me apprentice to the Grocers’ trade, Wherein God pleased to bless my poor endeavours, That, by his blessings, I am come to this (16.11–23)

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23. In fact popular attitudes to the lord mayors were often more ambivalent than is suggested by the representations in the drama of the late sixteenth century. Though there seems to have been respect for the office, aided by the fact that mayors often positioned themselves as mediators between discontented groups and the civic authorities, they also became the focus of discontent during periods of dearth. The stability of the city was seriously threatened by the deep personal unpopularity of one mayor, Sir John Spencer, in 1595; see Archer, 1991, pp. 5, 56, 201–2. 24. It may have been a popular narrative imported into the play. The story is found in a ballad, The lamentable fall of Queene Elinor, printed in 1720, but ascribed by the printer’s introduction to the time of Mary Tudor. The ballad and its introduction are reprinted in Prouty, 1961, Vol. 2, pp. 206–11; for a debate about the possible relationship between the ballad and the play, see Hook, 1956, pp. 3–5 and Nørgaard, 1964, pp. 165–8. 25. In a discussion of the play Emma Smith details anti-alien feeling in the capital, of which 3.5 per cent of the population was foreign, citing the Dutch Church Libel incident of 1593 as an example of this (2000, pp. 165–81). See also the earlier ‘Complaint of the Citizens of London against Aliens’ of 1571 (Tawney and Power, 1924, vol. 1, pp. 308–10) and Archer, 1991, pp. 131–40. 26. Stow’s Survey gives an account of the disturbances (Vol. I. pp. 99, 143, 152, Vol. II, p. 216) though the account was not written by Stow himself, but is drawn from Holinshed. 27. A cancelled passage at the lower half of fol. 5b of the MS (after the discussion of the earls of Shrewsbury and Sussex, Sir Thomas Palmer and Sir Roger Cholmley about the alien problem, and just before the insurrection is started by Lincoln), apart from establishing the association of the riots with Mayday, suggests the extent to which the writers sought to normalize the insurgents as everyday and identifiable citizens of London, particularly by grounding them in its familiar localities: Enter three or four Prentices of trades, with a pair of cudgels Harry: Come, lay down the cudgels – Ho, Robin, you met us well at Bunhill, to have you with us a-Maying this morning! Robin: Faith, Harry, the head-drawer at the Mitre by the Great Conduit called me up, and we went to breakfast into Saint Anne’s lane. But come, who begins? I am clean out of practice. When wast at Garrett’s school, Harry? Harry: Not this great while, never since I brake his usher’s head when he played his scholar’s prize at the Star in Bread Street; I use all to George Philpots at Dowgate, he’s the best back-sword man in England. (‘Garrett’s school’ and ‘George Philpots’ are fencing academies.) 28. ‘Lincoln was, London is, and York shall be’ (Dent, 1984, p. 575). 29. Examples include Mother Croote in Thomas Lupton’s All for Money, Hob, Lob and Marian in Cambises, Corin the shepherd in Clymon and Clamydes, Tenacity in Liberality and Prodigality and Cacurgus in Misogonus (who affects a rustic accent for comic effect). 30. For a fuller discussion of each of these factors, see Fisher, 1948, pp. 27–50.

202 Notes 31. See Archer, 2000, pp. 174–92; Archer quotes Sir Thomas Smith’s Discourse of the Commonweal of this Realm of England, of 1549: I have sene within these xxtie yeres, when there weare not of these haberdashers that sell french or millane capes, glasses, Daggers, swerdes, girdles and such thinges, not a dossen in all London. And now from the towere to westminster alonge, everie streat is full of them; and their shoppes glisters and shine of glasses, as well lookinge as drinckinge, yea all mannor vesselles of the same stuffe, painted cruses, gaye daggers, knives, swords, and girdles, that is able to make anie temporate man to gase on them and to bie sumwhat (p. 177) 32. For an account of this and a summary of scholarship on the issue, see Rappaport, 1989, pp. 1–6. 33. Paul Clark and Paul Slack point out that London in the sixteenth century ‘had a strong claim to be regarded as the nation’s educator’ (1972, p. 39). 34. Compare Marston’s satirical perspective on the effects of theatregoing in his Scourge of Villainy (1598): Now I haue him, that nere of ought did speake But when of playes or Plaiers he did treate. H’ath made a common-place booke out of plaies. And speakes in print, at least what ere he sayes Is warranted by Curtaine plaudeties, If ere you heard him courting Lesbia’s eyes; Say (Curteous Sir), speakes he not mouingly From out some new pathetique Tragedie? He writes, he railes, he iests, he courts, what not And all from out his huge long scraped stock Of well penn’d playes. (fol. H4r)

4

Jacobean drama 1. The wording here echoes the account in Stowe’s Survey, Vol. 1, p. 193, from which it is likely to have been drawn. 2. Heywood and Rowley appear to be the only playwrights continuing this acclamation of the capital in the period, though in Edward Sharpham’s The Fleire, the exiled Duke of Florence describes London in which he has arrived, ‘Its a good soile, a wholesome ayre, a pretty Towne, handsome sleight buildings, well proportioned people, verie faire women (1.3.226–7). 3. Examples include a character in Middleton’s Anything for a Quiet Life talking of his wife’s tantrums, ‘in / These fits Bow-bell is a still organ to her’ (1.1.141–2) or from Dekker’s Westward Ho!, men and women ‘come running into the world faster then coaches come into Cheap-side vppon Symon and Iudes day’ (2.1.171–2).

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203

4. This is more obviously true when those landmarks are no longer extant. In Heywood’s The Wise Woman of Hogsdon, Old Master Chartley, coming from the country remarks, ‘Good heauen! This London is a stranger growne, / And out of my acquaintance; this seauen yeares / I haue not seene Pauls steeple, or Cheape crosse’ (5.1.1939–41). As St Paul’s had lost its steeple in 1561, its mention in this play dating from the early years of the following century suggests a literary rather than real conception of the City. 5. When the New Exchange was opened by the king in 1609, it was given the name, ‘Britain’s Burse’. 6. Thomas Nashe complains of this in his address ‘To the Gentlemen Students of Both Universities’ that forms a preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphon (1589): I am not ignorant how eloquent our gowned age is grown of late; so that euery mechanicall mate abhorreth the English he was borne too, and plucks with a solemne periphrasis, his vt vales from the inke-horne: which I impute, not so much to the perfection of the Arts, as to the seruile imitation of vaine glorious Tragedians, who contend not so seriously to excell in action, as to embowell the cloudes in a speech of comparison, thinking themselues more then initiated in Poets immortality, if they but once get Boreas by the beard, and the heauenly bull by the deaw-lap (McKerrow III, p. 311)

Heywood views this phenomenon in a more positive light in The Apology for Actors (1612) in which he attributes to it the refinement of the English language (fol. F3r). See pp. 191–2. 7. A similar use of London as a measure of social and moral ascendancy occurs in William Rowley’s A New Wonder, A Woman Never Vexed (1611–1624) that presents the story of the counterpointed economic rise and fall of two brothers and the son of one of them caught in the antagonisms between his father and uncle. As in Eastward Ho! the City has an important presence in the play as a frame of status reference. The poor brother, Stephen, says to his wealthy sibling, Old Foster: ‘If e’r I live to see thee Shreiffe of London, I’l gild thy painted postes cum privilegio, and kick thy Serjeants’ (1.1.179–80). On his own rise to wealth, however, his ascent is crowned by his being made a Sheriff of London; he is invited by a representative of the civic authorities, Alderman Bruyne, to the Guildhall to assist with the City’s entertainment of the king, and to have his own appointment confirmed (4.1.137–41). The measure of standing and respectability of characters is also signalled by their contribution of public works to London. Alderman Bruyne sets up a hospital near Norton Folgate for the indigent as an act of charity (4.1.223–34) and it is to see this building that occasions the king’s presence in the City. Once he is wealthy, Stephen decides to have Ludgate demolished and rebuilt more spaciously and comfortably in memory of the time he earlier spent there as a debtor, and he also plans to have pipes laid from springs in Paddington to convey water to Ludgate (5.1.231–6).

204 Notes 8. Angela Stock suggests that the actor playing Quicksilver refers to the theatre audience when the character notes the crowds who have come to see his coming out of prison, thus transforming the Blackfriars theatre into a London street (2004, p. 137). 9. Brothels are, of course, also a form of shop. In Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan Cockledemoy compares a bawd’s business with those of other traders, ‘Her shop has the best ware, for where these sell but cloth, satins, and jewels, she sells divine virtues, as virginity, modesty, and such rare gems, and those not like petty chapmen, by retail, but like a great merchant, by wholesale’ (1.1.36–40). In Middleton’s Michaelmas Term the country wench who has come up to London is prepared to commodify herself, and advances a view which combines an awareness of the opportunities offered by the city for female emancipation from control, and the commercialism of metropolitan life that bypasses morality. She responds to the chastisement of her servant (her father in disguise) about her style of life, ‘Why, thou art an unreasonable fellow i’faith. Do not all trades live by their ware and yet called honest livers? Do they not thrive best when they utter [sell] most, and make it away by the great [in bulk]? Is not whole-sale the chiefest merchandise?’ (4.2.10–13). 10. These include Tomkis’s Albumazar in which Albumazar tells the thief Furbo to book a boat at night to Gravesend so that they can escape with stolen treasures (3.3.1295–9). In A Match at Midnight Jarvis says that he had planned to surprise a widow and, ‘carry her downe to the water side, pop her in at Puddle-dock, and carry her to Graves and in a payre of Oares’ (4.3.41–39). In Field’s A Woman is a Weathercock (Whitefriars, 1609) Captain Pouts sends his servant to order a boat to take flight to Gravesend (3.3.p. 388). The city wives and their gallants in Westward Ho! agree to meet and take a boat at Bridewell dock to their place of assignation out of town (2.3.107–8). 11. Foucault defines representations of the prison variously: as making available expressions of penitence, as an agency for the transformation of the individual, as the means for the isolation of the individual and as an instrument for the deprivation of liberty (1975, pp. 231–56). 12. It is mostly in prisons that housed debtors in which scenes are actually set, especially the Counter (the others being Ludgate, Wood Street, King’s Bench and Marshalsea), possibly because the prisoners in the plays are not usually hardened criminals, though there are many references in dialogue to Newgate and the Fleet, and fewer to the Clink, prisons where more serious offenders were held. 13. In Middleton’s The Phoenix (Paul’s, 1603–1604), not set in London, an officer comments, ‘in that notable city called London stand two most famous universities Poultry and Wood-street, where some are of twenty years’ standing, and have took all their degrees, from the Master’s side down to the Mistress’s side, the Hole, so in like manner’ (4.3.18–22). 14. Other instances of the gravity of the plight of prisoners being signalled by their situation within the prison hierarchy include the following: In a scene in a prison (later identified as the Counter) in Greene’s Tu Quoque the ruined shopkeeper Spendall asks, ‘What Ward should I remove in?’ and the warder Holdfast replies, ‘Why, to the Two-pennie Ward, / Is likeliest to hold out with your meanes: / Or, if you will, you may go into the Holl. / And there you may feed for nothing’ (15.2062–5); in Heywood’s A Woman Killed with

Notes

15.

16.

17.

18.

205

Kindness (Rose, 1603, not set in London) it is said of a character who has been arrested, ‘He is deny’d the freedom of the prison, / And in the hole is laid with men condemn’d’ (9.12–13) and in Webster’s Appius and Virginia (c. 1608), though also not set in London, the heroine’s imprisonment is reported in terms that refer to the London prison system and allow sexual double entendre, ‘The Lord Appius hath committed her to Ward, and it is thought she shall neither lye on the Knight side, nor in the Twopenny Ward, for if he may have his will of her, he means to put her in the Hole’ (3.5.37–40). Douglas Bruster connects this to the fact that the early modern commercial theatre is itself a notable part of the advent of the capitalist economy in England (1992, esp. pp. 1–28). In Middleton’s The Family of Love (c. 1604) there is reference to an apothecary’s shop, and its owner’s contentment with the adultery of his wife in the interests of trade (2.1.15–23). Greene produced A Notable Discovery of Cozenage, The Second Part of Cozenage, The Second Part of Cony-catching and The Third Part of Cony-catching in 1591 and the following year A Disputation between a He-cony-catcher and a Shecony-catcher and The Black Book’s Messenger. It is likely that Middleton wrote The Testament of Laurence Lucifer (1604), while in 1608 Dekker published The Bellman of London and Lantern and Candlelight, and is the probable author of O per se O (1612). These and other pamphlets are printed in Judges, 1930. A play that sets a contrasting rural ethos more clearly against the enjoyment of urban cynicism is Middleton’s A Mad World My Masters (Paul’s, 1606), its two strands of narrative attaching to each of the two worlds of the play, the city world of the Harebrains, the courtesan Frank Gullman and her mother, as against the country house of Sir Bounteous Progress. Sir Bounteous is a foolish old man, impressed by rank, and easily taken in by appearances. However, self-conscious about his own reputation as a host, he also represents something of the spirit of generous country hospitality that was by the early seventeenth century being considered a fast disappearing phenomenon. The urban strand presents a very different social face, where relationships are based more nakedly on self-interest and strategy, with a far more problematic moral basis. Helped by a courtesan the City wife, Mistress Harebrain, deceives her husband with impunity. The relationship between the Old Gentlewoman and Frank Gullman is not only mother–daughter but also pimp and whore, and the old woman takes a very hard-headed view of the potential of her daughter as a commodity. She asserts, ‘Fifteen times thou know’st I have sold thy maidenhead’ (1.1.145) and subsequently manages the marketing of her daughter to Follywit, Sir Bounteous’s grandson. Follywit is the principal connecting element between the two strands and illustrates the contrast. He manages to deceive his grandfather, albeit being found out by chance in the end, but he is himself gulled by the courtesan and her mother. The performances that he mounts in attempting to outwit his grandfather – with his companions masquerading as a noble guest and entourage, and later as a company of players, in order to rob him – are crude in comparison to that mounted by the courtesan and her mother when they present her as a

206 Notes

19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

5

shy virgin, their skills having been honed in the unyielding world of the metropolis. Hellgill goes on to identify the tirewomen and tailors as ‘parents’ of the country wench’s change of identity (3.1.5–6). The National Theatre’s 2006 production of The Alchemist transmuted the early modern mode of ‘quarrelling’ speech into rap-speak, thus invoking a modern version of the same relationship. For a consideration of the complexities and problems in Marston’s attempt here to ‘harmonise a serious philosophic theme within a comic form’ see Scott, 1978, pp. 38–47. Earlier Birdlime comments that Mistress Justiniano ‘hath a good Citty wit, I can tell you, shee hath red in the Italian Courtyer, that it is a speciall ornament to gentlewomen to haue skill in painting’ (1.1.12–14); like the aristocracy, citizens also look to courtesy texts like Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano for guidance on refinement of social behaviour. Sir Thomas Hoby’s 1561 translation of this text was reprinted several times. Statues of Peace and Charity adorning Aldgate, London’s principal eastern gate, reconstructed in 1609.

Caroline drama 1. The crown attempted by means of three proclamations, in 1626, 1627 and 1632, to stem this tide. See Larkin and Hughes, 1973–1983, Vol. 2, nos 56, 77 and 159. 2. Though the distinction between the fare of the amphitheatre and private playhouses does not appear to have been absolute, Andrew Gurr has commented, ‘What seems to have happened in the twilight of the Stuart Gods is that the amphitheatre playhouses soldiered on with an old repertory, while the hall playhouses recruited the new plays. In such circumstances the gulf would inevitably widen’ (1992, p. 231). 3. For a fuller consideration of the representation of the country in Caroline drama, see Butler, 1984, pp. 251–79. 4. Theodore Miles names six plays from 1631 to 1635 that demonstrate a considerable degree of place realism, taking issue with the idea advanced by Richard Perkinson (1936) that they are ‘topographical’ comedies. He argues that their close proximity in time suggests a vogue, something he contends is supported by indications that the plays were popular. He identifies Holland’s Leaguer, Hyde Park, The Weeding of Covent Garden, Covent Garden, Tottenham Court and The Sparagus Garden, going on to suggest that the first of these, Marmion’s Holland’s Leaguer, was an attempt to make literary capital of gossip rife in London about a brothel of the same name run by a Mrs Holland, that the authorities were trying to close (1942, pp. 428–40). See also Bentley, 1941–1968, Vol. 4, pp. 746–7 and, for a fuller account of Mrs Holland and her brothel, Burford, 1973. 5. Perkinson also connects the interest in topography in drama at this time to similar interests in contemporary poetry and painting (1936, p. 273). 6. As Martin Butler has pointed out, by the 1630s London in the drama implies the Strand, not Cheapside (1984, p. 158).

Notes

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7. The tenuous connection between locality and plot in this type of play has been commented on by Richard Perkinson, though in relation to Nabbes’s rather than Brome’s play, For the topographical genre creates a problem affecting material: a plot is made to grow out of the locale, like that of Bartholomew Fair, practically a unique example; or more generally a familiar theme is successfully coupled to the locality by capitalizing on the place’s frequently questionable reputation; or a plot is imposed upon the locale, like that of Nabbes’s Covent Garden, merely for the sake of topographical comedy (1936, p. 273) 8. Both also extend the argument for a subversive dimension to the architectural interests of several London-based Caroline plays, reactions to paternalistic royal opposition to building in the capital, and generally the opposition between ‘town’ and court (Sanders, 1999, pp. 50–5, Butler, 1984, pp. 161–80). 9. The surmised perils were not realized. A later prologue to The Weeding of Covent Garden, dating from a 1642 production of the play, also focuses attention on this: ’Tis not amiss ere we begin our play, T’entreat you, that you take the same survey Into your fancy as our poet took Of Covent Garden when he wrote his book Some ten years since, when it was grown with weeds – Not set, as now it is, with noble seeds, Which makes the garden glorious. (1–7) In Thomas Killigrew’s The Parson’s Wedding, a play that dates from just a year earlier – 1641 – a rich widow cites among the advantages of her nephew that he ‘dances well, and has a handsome house in the Piazza’ (1.2.p. 16). 10. Richard Levin sees the park as having something of a dynamic role in the plot, being a ‘special domain of chance’ in terms of both gambling and courtship (1967, p. 22). See also Wertheim, 1972, pp. 72–4. 11. The play takes its name from pleasure garden in Upper Ground St, Southwark, an area that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was used as gardening ground (Wheatley and Cunningham, 1891, Vol. 1, p. 76); it is also mentioned in Lady Alimony (anon., 1659) 4.2.fol. H2v, Massinger’s The City Madam 3.1.14–15, Hyde Park 2.4, p. 490 and in Pepys’s Diary for the 22nd April 1668 (Latham and Matthews, 1970–1983, Vol. 9, p. 172). 12. In a letter to Lord Strafford in 1634, Garrard reports measures taken against another leisure ground for overcharging and other offences. Bowling at the Spring Garden was prohibited for the reasons that ‘There was kept in it an Ordinary of six Shillings a Meal (when the King’s Proclamation allows but

208 Notes

13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

two elsewhere) continual bibbing and drinking Wine all Day long under the Trees, two or three Quarrels every Week’ (Knowler, 1739, I, p. 262). In Killigrew’s The Parson’s Wedding the gallant, Jolly, defines his status as a resolute urbanite with the remark, ‘You cannot easily seduce me again (to go to the country), unless you can perswade London to stand in the Country: to Hide-park, or so, I may venture upon your Lady-fair dayes’ (1.3.p. 23). For an account of the building of the New Exchange in 1608 and its early history, see Stone, 1957, pp. 106–21. The few brief references to the Exchange as a place of mercantile business in Caroline drama include Holland’s Leaguer 1.5.p.25, The City Match 3.3.pp.33, 35, The City Madam 4.1.115, and The Northern Lass 2.1.54–6. These include the induction of Jonson’s The Magnetic Lady (Globe/ Blackfriars, 1632) set in a notional ‘shop’ where the wares are plays, and Shirley’s The Gamester with scene set in ‘A Street, with Shops’ (4.1.p. 243). Steggle comments, ‘Court and city are perceived not as two distinct sets but as two interestingly intermiscible layers’ and goes on to point out that the relationship between courtiers and citizens is consistently mutually exploitative (2004, pp. 30–1). These connections between language and locality emerge from identifiable variations in social and economic life found in different parts of the metropolis, but they bear some relation to Lefebvre’s perceptions of a more profound relationship between language and space (1991, pp. 130–41); see also Lefebvre, 1966. In The Guardian the gentlewoman Aurelia says of her new maid (her cousin Lucia in disguise), ‘she has a little too much City breeding, I see, by Court’sies and forsooths’ (4.6.fol. E1r) and in The Weeding of Covent Garden the gull Clotpoll says ‘I protest’ is a City expression used when by those trying to cozen people (3.1.129). Compare also Middleton’s Jacobean play A Chaste Maid at Cheapside in which the goldsmith Yellowhammer remarks to his wife: ‘the City cannot hold you, wife, but you must needs fetch words from Westminster’ (1.1.20–1) or later when he says that Sir Walter’s Whorehound’s words are too elevated for the ‘daughters of the Freedom’ and more appropriate for the court at Whitehall or Greenwich (1.1.117). Butler points out that ‘in several Caroline plays the country is indeed ridiculed in a figure who has come to London and failed to reproduce society’s good manners. However, the social pretender is always satirized not for his rusticity but for his lowness and his attempt to clamber into a higher rank than he deserves’ and he cites as examples Simple in The Constant Maid, Hoyden in The Sparagus Garden and Simpleton in Cavendish’s The Variety (1984, p. 162). He goes on to observe that Shirley’s The Witty Fair One is permeated with the values and speech of a gentry class moving to London yet conscious of its traditional duties of courtesy and responsibility, and this feeling for ‘country’ values continually recurs in London plays of the 1630s (ibid., pp. 163–4). There is relatively little focus on the criminal side of London in Caroline plays and fewer of the tricksters and underworld types that populate Jacobean comedy. In The Weeding of Covent Garden there are concerns about the potential for undesirables to impair the fashionable nature of the new settlement, but the most prominent among these are the roisterers calling

Notes

22. 23.

24.

25.

209

themselves the ‘Philoblathici’ who reflect some of the reality of the behaviour of young gallants in London. Most trickery is practised against country gentlemen and the perpetrators are of no mean status themselves, such as the ‘friends’ of Tim Hoyden in The Sparagus Garden, or of the parson in The Parson’s Wedding. Plays based on this idea include Ram Alley, Eastward Ho! and A New Wonder, A Woman Never Vexed. Compare also the observation by wit-aspiring citizen Citwit in Brome’s The Court Beggar (1640) of the similarly affected Lady Strangelove that she is a ‘wit-sponge’ and, ‘Shee will make use of ours, or any courser wits; and search ’em out to sift ’em. Shee will collect from market-folkes; and hold conferences with the poore Trades-people that cry their wares about the streets, Shee will rake wit out of a dunghill Ragwoman’ (2.1.p. 204). Martin Butler argues that the play has the project of encouraging the gentry back to the country, and echoes Charles’s proclamation of 1632 that was intended to prod the gentry to take up their roles of country justices and reinforce his national paternalism with paternalism at a local level. He suggests that The Wits is not a town play at all, but embodies a courtier’s attitude to the town as a place for younger brothers rather than for men of substance, the leading country gentry (1984, p. 144). The perilousness of London for outsiders was an idea in contemporary currency, however; Henry Peacham in The Art of Living in London (1642) describes London as ‘like a vast sea, full of gusts, fearful-dangerous shelves and rocks, ready at every storm to sink and cast away the weak and unexperienced bark’ (Heltzel, 1962, p. 243). A fear of the knowingness of the town is expressed by a wealthy father, Sir George Richley, in The Witty Fair One as he comments on the fact that his daughter is sole heir to a fortune: Gallants, I fear, I’ the town hold too fruitful intelligence In these affairs; and if they be not watch’d, They’ll with their wit charm all the dragons guard These golden apples’ (1.1.p. 278)

26. The play may relate to a news syndicate formed in 1622 (see Parr’s edition, p. 258) but Martin Butler has noted that as early as 1623 London society was being described as a place of ‘a greate deale of vncertaine newes’ and goes on to examine the relationship of this to the troubled political climate of the time (1984, pp. 119–40). 27. Medley’s was a fashionable ordinary, Dunstan’s is an alternative name for The Devil tavern in Fleet St, referring to its sign of St Dunstan tweaking the Devil’s nose. In 1608 the innkeeper had to remove the devil from the sign, leaving only the saint’s image. 28. Such ‘schools of compliment’ – also found in such plays as Brome’s The Damoiselle (c. 1638) and Shirley’s Love Tricks – are routinely satirized by playwrights as making available spurious gentility, but their recurrent presence

210 Notes

29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

36.

37.

6

in the plays contributes to the anxious sense that the conditions created by metropolitan life – the close geographical juxtaposition of social groups of different levels, intense competition and above all a market economy – result inevitably in the sort of commodification of manners that these institutions exemplify. In the prologue to The Example (pp. 282–3), Shirley makes a scathing attack on gallants setting themselves up as ‘commissioners of wit’ who arrogate to themselves the right to exercise publicly the right to judgement about the arts. This might also be seen to reflect changing perceptions of hospitality in the period, which began to associate traditional hospitality with simplicity and country life; see Heal, 1990, pp. 114–22. In The Constant Maid a servant remarks that ‘hospitality / went out of fashion with crop-doublets / And codpieces (1.1.p. 449). In A Mad Couple Well Matched the term ‘urbanity’ is used in the sense of refinement (2.2.116). For a full discussion of the advent of an urbane style in the context of the ‘town’, especially with reference to literary writing, see Manley, 1995, pp. 481–530. Ira Clark points out, however, that though the independent wit of many of Shirley’s heroines might suggest their enhanced status, their free speech is restricted to the minor adaptations of rigid role norms (1992, p. 129). For a discussion of the issue of the freedom of women in early modern London, see Gowing, 2000, pp. 130–51. There is, however, an even earlier precedent for this trope in the relationship of Beatrice and Benedick in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing. Probably referring to the proclamation of 20th June, 1632, Mihil in The Weeding of Covent Garden says of his father, Crosswill: ‘He has had an aim these dozen years to live in town here, but never was fully bent on it until the Proclamation of Restraint spurred him on’ (2.1.40–2). These include Brome, The Northern Lass 2.1.81–8 and The Damoiselle 3.2.p. 430, Davenant The Wits 2.2.47–128, Marmion A Fine Companion (Salisbury Court, 1632–1633) 4.1.58–63, Shirley The Constant Maid (c. 1636) 2.1.p. 465 and Honoria and Mammon 1.1.p. 10, and John Tatham The Scots Figgaries (pr. 1652) 3.pp. 23–4 where country people enter in antemasque fashion. A good example of aspects of transitional nature of Caroline comedy is Killigrew’s The Parson’s Wedding, probably not staged until the Restoration. As Alfred Harbage has pointed out, this has strong reminiscences of a Jacobean play set firmly in the roistering world of London, Ram Alley (1930, pp. 179–90), but its element of self-conscious cynicism and embrace of sexual libertinism as a prominent feature of the life of the metropolis looks forward to the Restoration.

Conclusion 1. For further discussion of this, see Grantley, 2000, pp. 112–20.

Bibliography Abbreviations EEDS Early English Drama Society EETS Early English Text Society MSC Malone Society Collections MSR Malone Society Reprints

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220 Bibliography ——. The Lady of Pleasure in Gifford and Dyce, 1833, Vol. 4. ——. The Triumph of Peace in A Book of Masques in Honour of Allardyce Nicoll, ed. Rosenfeld, S. et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967. ——. The Wedding, ed. Flavin, M. New York: Garland, 1980. ——. The Witty Fair One in Gifford and Dyce, 1833, Vol. 1. Skelton, J. Magnificence, ed. Neuss, P. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980. Tatham, J. The Scots Figgaries. London: pr. by W. H. for John Tey, 1652. Terence in English, an Early Sixteenth-century Translation of the Andria. Lancaster: Medieval English Theatre Modern Spelling Texts, No. 6, 1987. Thersites in Axton, 1982. Tomkis, T. Albumazar, ed. Dick, H. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1944. Towneley Plays, ed. Stevens, M. and Cawley, A. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994 (EETS s.s. 15), 2 vols. The Troublesome Reign of King John, ed. Furnivall, F. and Munro, J. London: Chatto and Windus, 1913. The True Tragedy of Richard III. Oxford: Oxford University Press/MSR. Udall, N. Ralph Roister Doister in Tydeman, 1984. Wager, W. Enough Is as Good as a Feast in Benbow, 1967. ——. The Longer Thou Livest, the More Fool Thou Art in Benbow, 1967. Wapull, G. The Tide Tarrieth No Man, ed. Rühl, E. JDSG 43, 1907, 1–52. A Warning for Fair Women in The School of Shakespere, ed. Simpson, R. New York: Bouton, Vol. 2. Wealth and Health, ed. Greg, W. and Simpson, P. Oxford: MSR, 1907. Webster, John Appius and Virginia in The Works of John Webster, ed. Gunby, D. Carnegie, D. and Jackson, M. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, Vol. 2. Wilson, R. The Three Ladies of London in Mithal, 1988. ——. The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London in Mithal, 1988. Wisdom, Who is Christ in Eccles, 1969. The Worlde and the Chylde, ed. Davidson, C. and Happé, P. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999. Yarington, R. Two Lamentable Tragedies. London: Mathew Lawe, 1601. Youth in Lancashire, 1980.

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Index

Ackroyd, Peter, 1 Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 2, 196n.12 Albion Knight, 36, 198n.11 Aldersgate, 106 Aldgate, 8, 96, 106, 139, 206n.23 All for Money, 201n.29 Anne’s, St., Lane, 201n.27 Apius and Virginia, 34 Archer, Ian, 202n.31 Arches court, the, 10, 96 Arden of Faversham, 57, 199n.5 Armada, The, 19, 62, 199n.6 Artillery Ground, The, 11 Augustine, Saint, 30 Bale, John King John, 30, 36, 52, 198n.12 The Temptation of our Lord, 31 Bankside, 11, 15, 97, 101, 131, 163 Banqueting House, The, 100 Barber Surgeons’ Hall, 9 Barn Elms, 110 Barnet, 154 Barry, Lording Ram Alley, 98–100, 209n.22, 210n.37 Bartholomew, St fair, 5, 97–8, 119–20, 189, 207n.7 hospital, 92 lane, 106 ward, 11 Barton, Anne, 191 Baynard’s Castle, 9, 74 stairs, 60 Beaumont, Francis, 140 The Knight of the Burning Pestle, 94–6, 155, 170 Bedlam (Bethlehem Hospital), 5, 10, 195n.10 ‘Bermudas’, The, 107, 131 Bernard of Clairvaux, St., 30 Bevington, David, 2

Billingsgate, 8, 15, 58, 72, 94 Birchin Lane, 10, 68, 146 Bishopsgate, 8, 61, 79, 92, 106–7 Blackfriars stairs, 110 theatre, see theatres ward, 8, 100, 105, 109, 146 Blackheath, 33, 58 Bloomesbury, 163 Bow bell, 61, 103, 202n.3 lane, 161 ward, 8, 9 Bowling Alley, The, 176 Braudel, Fernand, 195n.9 Bread Street, 8, 9, 10, 106, 171, 201n.27 Brentford (‘Brainford’), 9, 16, 102 Brewer, Anthony, 184 Bridewell dock, 204n.10 prison, 5, 10, 161, 172, 195n.2 ward, 99 Brome, Richard, 17, 183–4 The Antipodes, 180, 181 The City Wit, 160–1 The Court Beggar, 209n.23 The Damoiselle, 209n.28, 210n.36 The English Moor, 163–4 The Jovial Crew, 162 A Mad Couple Well Matched, 156, 159, 160, 180, 181, 210n.31 The New Academy, 155, 159, 177, 180 The Northern Lass, 156, 180, 208n.15, 210n.36 The Sparagus Garden, 150, 152–3, 155, 156, 173–4, 177–8, 206n.4, 208n.20, 209n.21 222

Index The Weeding of Covent Garden, 148–9, 153, 184, 189, 206n.4, 207n.9, 208n.19, 208n.21, 210n.35 Bruster, Douglas, 2, 205n.15 Bryant, Joseph, 195n.1 Bucklersbury, 61 Bunhill fields, 11, 201n.27 Butler, Martin, 17–18, 141, 149, 168, 184, 206n.6, 208n. 20, 209n. 24, 209n. 26 Cade, Jack, 71 Camden, William Britannia, 66, 199n.6 Campion, Thomas, 51 Cannon (‘Canning / Canwicke’) Street, 60, 63 Cannon Row, 176 Cartwright, William, 184 The Ordinary, 175–6 Castiglione, Baldessare Il Cortegiano, 206n.22 Castle of Perseverance, The, 28 Cateaton St, 106 Cavendish, William The Variety, 208n.20 Chapman, George Eastward Ho (with Ben Jonson and John Marston), 102–4, 109, 111, 113–14, 130, 203n.7, 209n.22 Charing Cross, 9, 147, 183 Charles I, 150, 168, 184, 209n.24 Cheapside, 8, 9, 31, 41, 63, 67, 69, 70, 71, 79, 81, 92, 99, 103, 109, 139, 143, 154, 158, 159, 165, 171, 173, 181, 202n.3, 203n.4, 206n.6, 208n.19 cross, 61, 203n.4 Chelsea, 16, 81 Chick Lane, 101 Christ’s Hospital, 4, 10. 200n.22 Churches, 9 Antholin’s, St, 9 Bartholomew’s, St, 106 Dunstan’s, St., 58 Dutch, 197n.8, 201n.25 French, 197n.8 Giles in the Fields, St, 9, 44, 99

223

Martin’s-le-Grand, St, 9 Mary le-Bow, St, 9 Pancras, St, 10 City comedy, 2, 19, 90, 120, 126, 141, 168, 184, 186, 190, 196n.14 see also individual plays Civil and Uncivil Life, 86 Civil War, The, 162 Clark, Ira, 210n.33 Clark, Paul, 202n.33 Clements, St, ward, 122 Clerkenwell Green, 3 ward, 8, 9 Clifford’s Inn, 101 Clugston, George, 198n.2 Cokayne, Aston The Obstinate Lady, 158 Cold Harbour, 11 Coleman Street, 4 Complaint of the Citizens of London against Aliens, 201n.25 Conduit, Cheapside, 7, 9, 67, 71, 171, 201n.27 Conversion of St Paul (Digby), 25–6 Cony catching pamphlets, 121, 127, 205n.17 Cooke, John Greene’s Tu Quoque, 115, 124–6, 130, 204n.14 Cornhill, 8, 58, 60, 92, 106 Corpus Christi cycles, 17, 19, 23, 25, 27, 33, 46, 60, 66, 106, 196n.11 Ludus Coventriae, 31 Towneley, 28 Covent Garden square / piazza, 147, 149 ward, 16, 131, 141, 145, 146, 149–50, 153, 163, 164, 184, 189, 207n.9 Cowley, Abraham, 184 The Guardian, 158, 162–3, 164, 208n.19 Cripplegate, 154 Crosby, John, 200n.22 Croxton Play of the Sacrament, 29 Croydon, 34, 154 Crutched Friars, 61, 78

224

Index

Cuckold’s Haven, 11, 111 Custom House, 118 Quay, 4, 15 Davenant, William, 184 The Entertainment at Rutland House, 146, 148 The Unfortunate Lovers, 192–3 The Wits, 149–50, 172–3, 184, 209n.24, 210n.36 Davenport, Robert, 184 A New Trick to Cheat the Devil, 163, 176 Day, John The Blind Beggar of Bednall Green, 52 De Certeau, Michel, 37, 38 Dekker, Thomas, 17, 90, 140 The Bellman of London, 205n.17 The Gull’s Horn Book, 87, 196n.13 The Honest Whore, 5–6 Lantern and Candlelight, 205n.17 Northward Ho! (with John Webster), 112–13 O per se O, 205n.17 The Roaring Girl (with Thomas Middleton), 100–2, 110–11, 112–13, 114–15, 117 The Shoemaker’s Holiday, 7, 75–6, 88, 93, 200n.17, 200n.18 Westward Ho, 109, 116, 117–19, 135, 202n.3, 204n.10 Deleuze, Félix, 5, 108, 135–6, 165 Dillon, Janette, 2, 83 Dixie, Woolstone, 65 Drayton, Michael, 51 ‘Poly-Olbion’, 15 Drury Lane, 146, 147 Dutch Church Libel, 201n.25 Dutton, Richard, 195n.1 Eastcheap, 8, 41, 63, 72, 73, 198n.4 Edwards, Richard Damon and Pithias, 26, 34 Elizabeth I, 198n.3 Elyot, Sir Thomas The Governor, 199n.10 Etherege, George The Man of Mode, 180 ‘Evil May Day’ riots, 78–80

Exchanges, The, 4, 9, 55, 58, 61, 78, 84, 91–2, 101, 106, 107, 115, 143, 156–7, 158, 159, 160, 161, 167, 170, 175, 176, 203n.5, 208n.14, 208n.15 Eyre, Simon, 75–6, 88 Fabyan, Robert Chronicle, 65 Fair Maid of the Exchange, The, 52, 84, 89 Famous Victories of Henry V, The, 72–3, 76, 88, 111, 198n.4 Fenchurch Street, 61 Ferrers, George, 51 Field, Nathaniel Amends for Ladies, 107–8, 116–17 A Woman is a Weathercock, 204n.10 Finlay, Roger, 195n.6 Finsbury, 3, 11 Fleet bridge, 84, 99, 165 ditch, 10, 173 prison, 10, 72, 101, 113, 204n.12 river, 15 street, 8, 9, 58, 92, 99, 105, 133, 164, 176, 209n.27 Fletcher, John, 140, 141 Wit Without Money, 172–3 foreigners (in England), 39, 61, 66, 77–80, 201n.25, 201n.27 Foucault, Michel, 111, 113, 204n.11 Fulham, 9, 125, 130 Fulwell, Ulpian Like Will to Like, 30, 31, 39, 44, 198n.12 Fussner, F. Smith, 66, 199n.11 Gad’s Hill, 10, 58, 73, 198n.4 Gardiner’s Lane, 176 Garter, Thomas Virtuous and Godly Susanna, 32–3 Gascoigne, George, 51 Jocasta (with Francis Kinwelmershe), 26 The Siege of Antwerp, 53 Supposes, 26 Gentleness and Nobility, 198n.12 George’s, St, Fields, 9

Index Gieskes, Edward, 197n.9 Gillies, John, 2, 190 Glapthorne, Henry, 184 The Hollander, 163, 175 Wit in a Constable, 142, 170 Godly Queen Hester, 33 Goffe, Thomas The Careless Shepherdess, 166–7 Gordon, Andrew, 2, 196n.15 Gosson, Stephen, 51 Plays Confuted in Five Actions, 195n.3 Gracechurch (‘Gracious’, ‘Graces’) Street, 8, 106 Gravesend, 54, 204n.10 Gray’s Inn, 26, 102 fields, 15, 102 Greene, Robert, 51 The Black Book’s Messenger, 205n.17 A Disputation between a He-cony-catcher and a She-cony-catcher, 205n.17 George a Greene, Pinner of Wakefield, 200n.13 A Looking Glass for London and England (with Thomas Lodge), 52, 53 Menaphon, 203n.6 A Notable Discovery of Cozenage, 205n.17 The Second Part of Cony-catching, 205n.17 The Second Part of Cozenage, 205n.17 The Third Part of Cony-catching, 205n.17 Green Goose Fair, 172 Greenwich, 58, 208n.19 Gresham, Sir Thomas, 91–2, 157 Gresham College, 92 Greyfriars library, 92 Grim, the Collier of Croydon, 52 Grocers’ Hall, 95 Guattari, Gilles, 5, 108, 135–6, 165 Guildhall, The, 9, 74, 92, 126, 203n.7 Gun Ally, 163 Gurr, Andrew, 206n.2 Hackney, 34 Hakluyt, Richard English Voyages, 199n.6

225

Half Street, 31, 41 Hall, Edward, 75 The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies, 66 Harbage, Alfred, 210n.37 Hathway, Richard, 51 Haughton, William, 51 Englishmen for My Money, 60–1 Hebbert, Michael, 1 Henry VIII, 93 Heywood, Jasper, 51 Heywood, John, 51 The Four PP, 30 John John the Husband, 27, 30 The Play of Love, 198n.11 The Play of the Weather, 32 Heywood, Thomas, 17, 90, 140, 202n.2 Apology for Actors, 18–19, 191–2, 199n.12, 203n.6; Edward IV, 66–70, 71–2, 73, 76, 82–3, 88, 200n.17, 200n.18, 200n.22 Fortune By Land and Sea (with Samuel Rowley), 94 The Four Prentices of London, 52, 62–3, 68, 76, 200n.18 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, 91–3, 94 The Wise Woman of Hogsdon, 112, 115, 203n.4 A Woman Killed with Kindness, 57, 204–5n.14 Hick Scorner, 27, 29–30, 32, 40, 43, 44, 47, 48, 55, 82, 198n.11 Highgate, 9 Hoby, Thomas, 206n.22 Hodson, Richard, 184 Holborn, 8, 16, 42, 44, 74, 98, 99, 102, 133, 161, 176 quest of, 43 Holinshed, Raphael Chronicles, 66, 79, 199n.10, 201n.26 Holland, Henry Earl of, 150 Holland’s Leaguer (brothel), 161 Hosier Lane, 99 Houndsditch, 4, 10 Hounslow, 154

226

Index

Howe, John ‘Familiar and Frendely Discourse Dialogue Wise’, 38–9 Howell, James Londinopolis, 14, 195n.10 Howes, Edmund In Praise of London, 198n.2 Hoxton (Hogsden, Hogsdon), 3, 9, 16, 154 Hughes, Thomas et al The Misfortunes of Arthur, 200n.13 Hyde Park, 9, 145, 150–1, 156, 162, 173, 176, 208n.13 Impatient Poverty, 198n.12 Inglelend, Thomas The Disobedient Child, 26 Inner Temple, 36 Inns, see Taverns, inns and ordinaries Inns of Court, 11, 26, 36, 85, 98, 101, 105, 164, 165, 188, 190 Inwood, Stephen, 1 Isle of Dogs, 111 Islington, 3, 9, 16, 154, 156, 172, 174 Jack Juggler, 20, 27, 46–50, 186, 190 Jack Straw, 70, 76 James, Mervyn, 196n.11 James’s, St, ward, 146 James I and VI, 198n.3 Jeffere, John The Bugbears, 26 John’s, St, Street, 98 John the Evangelist, 32, 41, 198n.11 John’s, St, Priory, 70 Jonson, Ben, 6, 17, 51, 90, 126, 135, 184 The Alchemist, 7, 82, 109, 123–4, 132, 206n.19 Bartholomew Fair, 5, 97–8, 119–20, 189, 207n.7 The Devil is an Ass, 15, 112 Eastward Ho (with George Chapman and John Marston), 102–4, 109, 111, 113–14, 130, 203n.7, 209n.22 Epicene, 100, 136–9, 168, 177 Every Man in his Humour, 3–5, 195n.1

Every Man out of his Humour, 84–6, 111 The Magnetic Lady, 208n.16 The New Inn, 154–5 The Staple of News, 176–7 Volpone, 98 Jordan, Thomas The Walks of Islington and Hogsdon, 154 Katherine’s, St hospital, 10, 101 ward, 41, 111 Kensington, 155, 156 Killigrew, Thomas The Parson’s Wedding, 162–3, 183, 207n.9, 208n.13, 209n.21, 210n.37 King Darius, 33, 198n.12 King Leir, 200n.13 King Street, 176 Klein, Bernhard, 2, 196n.15 Kyd, Thomas, 51 Lady Alimony, 207n.11 Lambarde, William Perambulation of Kent, 66 Lambeth, 8, 110 Hill, 59 Lamentable fall of Queen Elinor, The, 201n.24 Lancashire, Anne, 2, 197n.6, 198n.16 Landry, Donna, 2 Larum for London, A, 52, 53–4, 63–5, 66 Laud, Archbishop, 161 Leadenhall, 9, 67, 76, 80, 93, 106, 144 street, 61, 106 Lefebvre, Henri, 21–2, 37, 38, 56, 71, 93, 132, 165, 195n.8, 208n.18 Leland, John, 199n.10 Levin, Richard, 207n.10 Liberality and Prodigality, 201n.29 Lime-streete, 106 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 146 Lindsay, David A Satire of the Three Estates, 31 Lion Quay, 58, 70 Little Wood Street, 154

Index Livery companies, 36, 65, 190, 197n.6, 198n.16 Locrine, 200n.13 Lodge, Thomas, 51 A Looking Glass for London and England (with Robert Greene), 52, 53 Lombard Street, 8, 58, 69, 70, 91, 159 ‘London chronicles’, 14 London Bridge, 15, 36, 41, 71, 95, 131 London Prodigal, The, 139 London Stone, 7, 61, 63, 71, 172 Long Acre, 146 Long Lane, 8 Ludgate, 8, 44, 96, 142, 165 prison, 113, 172, 203n.7, 204n.12 Lupton, Thomas All for Money, 201n.29 Lyly, John, 51 Macfarlane, Finella, 199n.7 Maclean, Gerald, 2 McLaren, Mary-Rose, 14 McLuskie, Kathleen, 23 Mankind, 31–2, 198n.7 Manley, Lawrence, 2, 16, 18, 200n.7 Marlowe, Christopher, 51 Edward II, 52, 66, 198n.1 Marmion, Shackerley, 184 A Fine Companion, 210n.36 Holland’s Leaguer, 183, 206n.4, 208n.15 Marston, John, 140, 206n.21 The Dutch Courtesan, 115–16, 134, 204n.8 Eastward Ho (with Ben Jonson and George Chapman), 102–4, 109, 111, 113–14, 130, 203n.7, 209n.22 The Scourge of Villainy, 202n.34 Martin’s in the Fields, St, ward, 80, 118, 122 Marylebone, 8, 9, 102, 151, 152, 156 Mary Magdalen (Digby), 26, 28, 30 Massinger, Philip, 140, 184 The City Madam, 157–8, 175, 207n.11, 208n.15 A New Way to Pay Old Debts, 130

227

Mayne, Jasper, 184 The City Match, 142–3, 164–5, 208n.15 Mayol, Pierre, 6, 11, 47, 61, 106, 108, 114, 145 Mayor Lord, 16, 44, 65–70, 71, 72, 74, 75–6, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82–3, 88, 91–2, 94, 100, 126, 173, 197n.7, 200n.22, 201n.23 Lord Mayor’s Procession, 36, 65, 70, 71, 143, 170–1, 197n.7 Medwall, Henry Fulgens and Lucres, 26, 34 Nature, 33, 41, 198n.11 Mehl, Dieter, 2 Merbury, Francis Marriage of Wit and Wisdom, 33 Merchant Taylors’ School, 96 Merritt, Julia, 2 Middlesex, 3 Middleton, Thomas, 17, 126, 135, 139–40, 141 Anything for a Quiet Life, 117, 202n.3 A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, 109–10, 114, 208n.19 A Fair Quarrel (with William Rowley), 131–2 The Family of Love, 205n.16 A Mad World My Masters, 205n.18 Michaelmas Term, 127–30, 204n.9 The Phoenix, 204n.13 The Puritan, 112 The Roaring Girl (with Thomas Dekker), 100–2, 110, 112–13, 114–15, 117 The Testament of Laurence Lucifer, 205n.17 A Trick to Catch the Old One, 132–3 Your Five Gallants, 121–3 Mile End, 4, 11, 16, 64, 174 Miles, Theodore, 206n.4 Milk Street, 95 Miller, Paul, 184 Minories, The, 163 Mint, The, 69 Misogonus, 34–5, 201n.29 Montaigne, Michel de, 134 Moorditch, 81 Moorfields, 9, 81, 95, 164

228

Index

More, Sir Thomas, 79, 80–1 History of King Richard III, 75, 199n.10 Mulcaster, Richard, 96 Mullaney, Steven, 2 Munday, Anthony, 51, 78 Mutton Lane, 163 Nabbes, Thomas, 17, 184 The Bride, 156, 184 Covent Garden, 147–8, 172, 184, 206n.4, 207n.7 Tottenham Court, 150, 151–2, 155, 158, 206n.4 Nashe, Thomas, 51, 206n.6 National Theatre, The, 206n.20 Newgate, 33 prison, 9–10, 43, 44, 52, 72, 92, 112, 204n.12 street, 4, 33, 48 Newington, 156 Nicholas’s, St, shambles, 41 Norden, John Speculum Britanniae, 66 Norton, Thomas and Thomas Sackville Gorboduc, 36 Norton Folgate, 203n.7 Old Fish Street, 8, 97, 148, 161 Old Jewry, 3, 4 Orgel, Stephen, 188 Paddington, 9, 155, 156, 203n.7 Pall Mall, 16, 146 Paris Garden, 9, 81 ditch, 60 Paternoster Row, 81 Paul’s, St cathedral, 7, 11, 27, 41, 43, 55, 69, 74, 121, 127, 144, 155, 161, 176, 188, 197n.10, 203n.4 churchyard, 10 cross, 60, 75 walk, 11 ward, 33, 35, 60 wharf, 110 Peacham, Henry The Art of Living in London, 209n.24

Pedlar’s Prophecy, The, 30, 39 Peele, George, 51 The Device of the Pageant Borne Before Wolstan Dixi, 65 Edward I, 76–7, 95 Pennell, Sara, 42 Pepys, Samuel Diary, 207n.11 Perkinson, Richard, 206n.4, 206n.5, 207n.7 Peter’s, St Street, 163 Petticoat Lane, 15 Phillip, John Patient and Meek Grissell, 35, 198n.11 Phillips, Edward The Mysteries of Love and Eloquence, 156–7 Piccadilly, 146 Pickering, John Horestes, 26 Pict-hatch, 3, 10, 107, 163 Pie Corner, 6, 7, 10, 107 Pissing-Conduit, The, see Conduit, Cheapside Plautus Amphitruo, 46 Playing companies, 1, 25, 51, 56, 66, 141, 187, 191–2 Play of Sir Thomas More, 66, 76, 78–81, 200n.17 Population growth, 6, 12, 38–9, 42, 48, 62, 85, 114, 121, 123, 146, 168, 195n.6, 198n.3, 201n.25 Porter, Henry, 51 Porter, Roy, 1 Poultry, 8, 9, 204n.13 Preston, John Cambises, 26, 201n.29 prisons, 43–4, 45, 96, 97, 101, 102, 104, 105n.2, 108, 111–14, 154, 180, 204n.8, 204n.11, 204n.12, 204–5n.14 Provincial drama, 1, 17, 19, 25, 27, 35, 188, 190 Pudding Lane, 72 Puddle Dock/Wharf, 8, 96, 97, 110, 204n.10

Index Queenhithe, 8 Ram Alley, 10, 98, 99 Ramsay, Thomas, 91 Rappaport, Stephen, 45 Rastell, John The Four Elements, 32 Ratcliff, 109 Redcross Street, 154 Respublica, 36, 198n.11, 198n.12 Restoration drama, 134–5, 142, 159, 171, 172, 177, 179, 180, 181, 182, 185, 210n.37 roaring Meg, 131 Romford, 9, 154 Rosemary Lane, 163 Rotten Row, 163 Rowley, Samuel, 94, 202n.2 When You, see Me You Know Me, 93–4, 111–12 Rowley, William A Fair Quarrel (with Thomas Middleton), 131–2 A Match at Midnight, 105, 204n.10 A New Wonder, A Woman Never Vexed, 113–14, 203n.7, 209n. 22 saint plays, 25–6, 27, 28, 30, 33 Sanders, Julie, 149 Sanford, Rhonda, 196n.14 Savoy Palace, 11, 70 Shakespeare, William, 51, 52, 66, 140, 194, 200n.13 Henry IV Part 1, 72–3, 74, 111 Henry IV Part 2, 6, 73–4 Henry V, 74, 198n.4 Henry VIII, 52 Henry VI Part 2, 71 King John, 52 Much Ado about Nothing, 210n.34 Richard III, 74–5 Sharpe, James, 42 Sharpham, Edward The Fleire, 115, 133–4, 202n.2 Sheppard, Francis, 1 Shirley, James, 136, 184, 210n.33 The Ball, 161–2 Changes, 170

229

The Constant Maid, 178, 208n.20, 210n.30, 210n.36 The Example, 210n.29 The Gamester, 169, 180–1, 208n.16 Honoria and Mammon, 143–4, 181, 210n.36 Hyde Park, 150–1, 152, 180, 182, 184, 189, 206n.4, 207n.11 The Lady of Pleasure, 147, 174–5, 178–9, 181, 182–3 Love Tricks, 209n.28 The Triumph of Peace, 150 The Wedding, 181 The Witty Fair One, 158, 169–70, 208n.20, 209n.25 Shoe Lane, 99, 102 Shooter’s Hill, 33, 58 Shoreditch, 4, 8, 15, 61 Silver Street, 100 Skelton, John Magnificence, 31–2, 36, 41, 198n.12 Slack, Paul, 202n.33 Smith, David, 2 Smith, Emma, 201n.25 Smith, Sir Thomas De Republica Anglorum, 199n.10 Discourse of the Commonweal, 202n.31 Smithfield, 11, 69, 70, 99, 102, 119, 120, 146, 154, 171 Soja, Edward, 13 Somerset House, 92 Southwark, 8, 9, 24, 41, 42, 96, 109, 112, 161, 195n.9, 199n.5, 207n.11 Sparagus Garden, The, 145, 152–3, 155, 156, 157–8, 182 Spencer, Sir John, 201n.23 Spital Cross, 79 Spring Garden, 9, 156, 162, 173, 182, 207n.12 Staines, 102 Standard, The (Cheapside), 128, 171 Steggle, Matthew, 145, 155, 208n.17 Stepney, 109 Stevenson, Laura, 200n.16 stews, The, 10, 41, 42, 45 Stillyard, The, 10, 118 Stock, Angela, 2, 199n.8, 204n.8

230

Index

Stow, John, 199n.11 A Summarie of English Chronicles, 65, 200n.16 A Survey of London, 14, 24, 66, 90, 201n.26, 202n.1 Strand, The, 8, 15, 18, 92, 95, 96, 100, 105, 125, 147, 157, 164, 174, 176, 181, 206n.6 Strier, Richard, 2 suburbs, the, 7. 9. 10, 14, 15, 42, 68, 99, 109, 117, 118, 146, 195n.9, 195n.10 Sullivan, Garrett, 2, 12–13 Tatham, John The Scots Figgaries, 210n.36 Taverns, inns and ordinaries, 4, 9, 21, 42, 45, 59, 72, 73, 74, 87, 89, 97, 101, 103, 106, 107, 108–9, 112, 125, 126, 138, 150, 152, 153, 154, 164, 172, 173, 176, 179, 197n.10, 198n.4, 207n.12 Bear at the Bridge Foot, 9, 164 Cats, 164 deaf John’s, 7 Devil (Dunstan’s), 9, 177, 209n.27 Feathers, 154 Fountain, 105 Greyhound, 99 King’s Head, 154 Medley’s, 177, 209n.27 Mermaid, 9, 122 Mitre (Fleet St., Bread St.), 9, 99, 106, 122, 201 Nags-head, 106 Phoenix, 177 Pimlico, 9 St John’s Head, 142 Saracens-head, 154 Squirels’, 164 Star, 201n.27 Swan, 48 Three Cranes, 9, 15, 60 Tunnes, 164 Windmill, 3 Taylor, Eva, 199n.6 Temple, the, 11, 101

Temple Bar, 92, 105, 147, 162 T erence in English, 26 Thames river, 9, 15, 44, 60, 94, 97, 108, 109, 110, 111, 155, 199n.5 street, 4, 8, 27, 59, 60, 163, 199n.5 theatres Blackfriars, 140, 141, 158, 176, 192, 204n.8 Bull Inn, 51 Cockpit, 11, 140, 141, 155, 158 Curtain, 3, 51, 202n.34 Fortune, 101, 136, 141, 154, 167 Globe, 11, 51, 141, 195n.9 Hope, 51, 195n.9 Red Bull, 11, 104, 126, 136, 140, 141, 167, 195n.9 Rose, 51, 104, 195n.9 Salisbury Court, 141, 166 Whitefriars, 140 Whitehall, 142 Thersites, 35 Thieving Lane, 105 Thomas-a-Waterings, St., 10, 31, 43 Tiltyard, the, 11 Tomkis, Thomas Albumazar, 119, 136, 138, 204n.10 Tothill (‘Tuttle’) Fields/ Street, 11, 146, 176 Tottenham, 136 court, 151, 152, 154, 156 Tower Hill, 11, 31, 60 Tower of London, 4, 11, 15, 61, 74, 106, 110, 195n.10, 202n.31 Trig Stairs, 97, 110 T roublesome Reign of King John, The, 200n.13 T rue Tragedy of Richard III, The, 200n.13 Turnmill (‘Turnbull’) Street, 3, 4, 10, 107–8, 120, 146, 154, 163, 164, 200n.19 Tyburn, 10, 31, 32, 33, 43, 44, 52, 102, 103, 131 Tyler, Wat, 69, 70 Udall, Nicholas Ralph Roister Doister, 27

Index Vergil, Polydore Anglica Historia, 65 Vintry, the, 15 Wager, William Enough is as Good as a Feast, 33, 39, 197n.8, 198n.11, 198n.12 The Longer Thou Livest, the More Fool Thou Art, 41 Waltham Forest, 95 Walworth, Sir William, 69, 70 Wapping, 10, 94, 111, 131, 164 Wapull, George The Tide Tarrieth No Man, 39, 197n.8, 198n.12 Ward, Joseph, 2 Ware, 52, 102, 155 Warning for Fair Woman, A, 57–8, 61 Watling Street, 9, 126 Wealth and Health, 39 Webster, John Appius and Virginia, 205n.14 Northward Ho! (with Thomas Dekker), 112–13 Wells, Susan, 97 West End, the, 142, 145, 146–50, 160, 173 Westfall, Suzanne, 196n.1 Westminster Abbey, 9, 76 city of, 10, 14, 15, 16, 18, 24, 34, 42, 43, 45, 67, 75, 76, 85, 141, 143, 145, 146, 151, 162, 164, 176, 181, 187, 195n.9, 195n.10, 197n.10, 202n.31, 208n.19 Hall, 10, 15, 42, 43, 52, 74, 106, 176

231

palace, 9 stairs, 131 Whitechapel, 4, 15, 95 Whitefriars, 10, 98, 137, 163 theatre, see theatres Whitehall palace, 160, 208n.19 theatre, see theatres Whittington College, 92 Whittington, Richard, 92, 104 Williams, Raymond, 187 Wilson, Robert The Three Ladies of London, 52, 54–5, 77–8, 83, 85 The Three Lords and Ladies of London, 52, 54, 63–5, 66–7, 78, 88 Wisdom, Who is Christ, 32, 41, 43, 47, 82, 198n.11 Womack, Peter, 196n.11 Wood Street, 8, 154 prison, 10, 112–13, 154, 204n.12, 204n.13 Woolstaple, the, 176 Woolwich, 58, 155 World and the Child, The (Mundus et Infans), 28, 40–1, 42–3, 82, 198n.12 Yarington, Robert Two Lamentable Tragedies, 57, 59–60, 61 Yorkshire Tragedy, The, 57 Youings, Joyce, 197n.10 youth, 33, 44, 55, 198n.12 Zwierlein, Anne-Julia, 2

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