Theatre, Court and City, 1595-1610: Drama and Social Space in London (review)

Theatre, Court and City, 1595-1610: Drama and Social Space in London. By Janette Dillon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. x + 187. Illus. $54.95 cloth.

Dillon argues here that city and court were closely intertwined in English drama between 1595 and 1610. Accordingly, she pursues a less-familiar set of themes and characters than one might expect from a book dealing with London and the drama; there are few wayward apprentices, jealous merchants, or foolish gulls in this study, and little cuckoldry or usury. Eschewing such plays as A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and Eastward Ho, Dillon offers readings of Edward IV, Love's Labor's Lost, various War of the Theaters plays, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Britain's Burse (the recently discovered Jonsonian entertainment), and Epicoene to illuminate the "mobility of relations between court and city, as influenced by the development of the market and as represented within the domain of theatre" (15). The result is that Theatre, Court and City, 1595-1610 gives us a set of concerns--the "town," fashion, commodities, and conspicuous consumption--next to which certain plays of the late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean eras look much like Restoration drama.

Of course, urban elements in Jonson's plays have led readers and audience members to consider him a Restoration dramatist avant la lettre. So it is not surprising that Dillon uses Poetaster, in addition to Epicoene and Britain's Burse, to outline a loose subgenre of plays that triangulate city and court through the market. Britain's Burse gives Dillon's book a weight it would otherwise lack. This entertainment was commissioned by Robert Cecil to celebrate the completion of the New Exchange in the Strand in 1609. Along with ancillary documents related to the entertainment, the text of Britain's Burse explicitly identifies the elite pressures that Dillon sees as shaping London's marketplace. Eventually converging in the New Exchange itself were the interests of aristocratic investors and consumers and merchants eager to retail luxury items to a monied clientele. The New Exchange stands as an important actor in Dillon's narrative of London's market between 1595 and 1610, and is joined by the Inns of Court and by the larger westward movement of money, power, and playhouses.

In tune with the "New Materialism" that arose in the 1990s, Dillon organizes each chapter around a material object, place, or practice. Thus she reads Edward IV in relation to civic ceremonies and processions, Love's Labor's Lost in relation to the commodity status of its strange words, Poetaster and various satirical works in relation to their framing of"dirt," The Knight of the Burning Pestle in relation not only to the New Exchange but to the luxurious new commodity of china, and Epicoene in relation to the bodily and retailed fragments of the town.

Oddly, none of the readings performed in these chapters is likely to change anyone's mind about the play or plays in question. What makes the book work, then, is partly the imaginative arrangement of these dramas alongside the historical narrative of court and city, and partly the approach that characterizes the New Materialism as a critical mode: what Jonathan Gil Harris has described as the collection of heterogeneous things (or essays upon things, that is) in one Wunderkammer-like volume. ¹

There is a fine line, though, between a book that marshals a variety of evidence in support of a thesis and a book that displays an assortment of interesting things in place of one. Dillon's study often appears to be the latter, in part because of the various topics (theater, court, city, market) that command her interest. To write well about the conjunction of these four topics requires the skills of a juggler; handling them was made all the more difficult here by this study's quick succession of readings. The book's attraction to...