Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642 (review)

Jean Howard's Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642 offers an engaging and valuable service to early modern English theater historians, scholars of dramatic literature, and of urban and gender studies. The book studies the relationship between specific urban settings for Jacobean-Caroline plays and the London inhabitants who attend them. Stage settings provided spectators with mirrors of their world and of themselves; but they also helped Londoners define the significance of the actual spaces in their social topography. The London Comedies are in four settings: The Royal Exchange, debtors' prisons (or Counters), brothels, and ballrooms and academies.

The Royal Exchange was monument to the nation's role in the global economy, a center of discourse with foreigners, and an entrée for maidens into commerce. Howard cites examples from Jonson's and Middleton's plays, but concentrates on William Haughton's Englishmen for My Money (1598), Thomas Heywood's If You Know Now Me, You Know Nobody, Part II (1604/05), and (also possibly by Heywood) The Fair Maid of the Exchange (1607). These "Royal Exchange Plays" assigned characters to separate realms according to gender: men to the ground floor where business took place, women to the second floor pawn whose shops prefigured today's interior shopping malls. The activities on each floor reflected what was expected of each gender. The male floor offered opportunities for bustling encounters by amusing, admirable, or despicable types. Many involved Englishmen meeting aliens: Italian, Portuguese, but especially French intruders on English soil. Second floor pawn activities, though mainly about purchasing hats, buttons, and things, also raised serious issues concerning women, especially poorer women, entering the world of commerce. The Exchange plays present a bustling London with opportunities and dangers of entering a world market.

The Counters, or debtor's prisons, ranged from larger places like The Fleet and The Clink to smaller holding jails at traffic centers, such as Cripplegate, Newgate, Wood, and Poutry Counters and The Hole, where "those most destitute were held in squalid conditions, dependent on charity for their daily bread" (69). Howard details how otherwise respectable offenders, for a petty failure with creditors, could begin an abysmal descent to the deepest circle of darkness. Comedies appealed to an awareness of one's vulnerability, of desperation in a city burgeoning with riches and commerce. Ben Jonson established the template for these debtor plays quite early with Everyman Out of His Humor (1599). Prison plays are divided into three parts: ironic satires on the contradictions of commercial success and failure; "Hand of God" narratives that inspire benevolence and end in redemption, such as A Woman Never Vext (1625); and comedies which measure theatrical performance of a prisoner's wit, craft, and (sometimes) valor against the dismal injustice of the market system. In this last category (Howard's favorite) are Jonson's Eastward Ho (1605) and Davenant's Greene's Tu Quoque (1662). Theater played an exemplary role in a culture that promoted both use and abuse of money: "It is not a man's money that makes him valued, but his ability . . . to act the part of a penitent or a gentleman, or a clown, with skill and conviction" (113).

Howard puts punk plays under the parenthesized pun of (W)holesaling: Bawdy Houses and Whore Plots. Whorehouses were ubiquitous in London and the long list of brothel plays, from The Honest Whore (1605) to Holland's Leaguer (1631), dramatized the "penetration of the market economy into all areas of life" (115). Howard mentions the infinite variety of situations, from loss of innocence and high-price deals to riots between custom and constables and even comedic solutions by marriage. Many made foreigners humor's butt, especially for their inventions in the arts of love; but the social ills of prostitution were also satirized. Thomas Middleton's Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1611) skewered the logic of...