Practicing the City: Early Modern London on Stage by Nina Levine, and: Sensory Experience and the Metropolis on the Jacobean Stage (1603–1625) by Hristomir A. Stanev (review)

These two books share the premise that the rapid growth of London in the late sixteenth century created new forms of urban experience, but their views of city plays differ. Nina Levine shows us audiences learning from drama how to negotiate the challenges of their metropolis so as to engage more fully in civic life. For her, London is a laboratory for social and political experiments full of promise. By contrast, Hristomir Stanev shows us anxious playgoers grappling with metropolitan experiences of sensory overload and disorientation. His London is a noisy miasma where only tricksters thrive. This difference can be partly attributed to the plays each critic studies. Levine has chapters on modes of urban sociability in the Henry IV plays, Sir Thomas More, Englishmen for My Money, The Roaring Girl, and The Staple of News, while Stanev focuses on alienation in Epicene, Bartholomew Fair, The Puritan, The Honest Whore (Part One), The Pilgrim, Westward, Ho!, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens. But it is not only the choice of plays that accounts for the divergence in their appraisal of city life onstage. Levine and Stanev's methodologies also contribute to their dissimilar views.

While both critics attend to the material environment by contextualizing their arguments with a rich selection of early modern materials, ranging from economics and law to pedagogy and medicine, each takes the archive documenting London's ecology in distinct directions. Stanev examines the five senses, one at a time, in order to chart the "complex and provocative new trajectories" of the urban "sensorium" (3). Epicene, for example, transforms "hearing into a receptacle of articulated incoherence that reads not only as intolerance to noise, but also as a damaged capacity to communicate and to make sense of the progressively more heterogeneous and fragmented social space of early Stuart London" (11). Similarly, "the reek of the jail" in Middleton's Puritan creates a "toxic environment," contaminating city streets that retain "potent traces of intolerable stench" (96, 99).

Stanev's insight that "the experiential flux" (43) of the city overwhelmed Londoners, forcing them to adapt and develop new forms of "urban knowledge" (1), is illustrated in his analysis of taste in Bartholomew Fair. He argues that the play pits the urban core against the "predatory and cannibalistic" suburbs, which operate as an "alarming 'gluttonous' menace" in the person of Ursula, the pig woman (65). Stanev points out, however, that Ursula's "self-perception" does not jibe with "the common treatment" (68–69). She sees herself as nourishing and wholesome, her booth as a site of "gustatory plenty" (59). While Stanev concedes that the agon Jonson stages between city and suburbs "manage[s] to give birth to hybrid, more 'metropolitan' identities" (59)—a view that Nina Levine might endorse—he resists this optimistic conclusion in his chapter on sound in Bartholomew Fair. There "the festive suburban celebration of plenty" (73) in Ursula's brothel is canceled out by "sonic failure . . . a peculiar form of sensory deprivation and humiliation" marking "class antagonism and social polarization" (150). Stanev supports his exploration of sensory overstimulation and Galenic humors with a persuasive set of texts. I especially enjoyed his discussion of ocular uncertainty and deception in the Segovia madhouse scenes of John Fletcher's Pilgrim.

Like Stanev, Levine draws on an impressive array of early modern materials, but she also incorporates the work of recent theorists, a move that makes the concerns of early modern London seem urgent and contemporary. For example, her chapter on William Haughton's Englishmen for My Money weaves Étienne Balibar's work on citizenship and Pierre Bourdieu's idea of linguistic capital together with the...