Abstract

The title page to the William Shakespeare's 1603 quarto edition of Hamlet (Q1) advertises that the play has been "acted in the Cittie of London." Scholars have long thought that City playing was forbidden around 1594, however; Shakespeare's Hamlet debuted in 1600/01. Therefore, Q1's "Cittie of London" has traditionally been read as a title page topos. Rather than conclude that the phrase cannot mean what it says, however, we might recognize that Hamlet—either Shakespeare's play or the earlier Chamberlain's Men's play of the same name—might well have appeared within the City walls, at Cross Keys Inn in Gracechurch Street or elsewhere. Furthermore, a City performance of Hamlet would represent a larger phenomenon: City playing evidently continued, despite repeated attempts to suppress it in the mid-1590s. To explore this possibility, this essay first examines contemporary dramatic title pages that advertise City performances, pursues the precise coordinates of the "Cittie of London" in early modern English usage, and finally challenges the position that City playing must have ceased in the mid-1590s.

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